The Best People I Know

by Charlie Scaturro

Oleg Lukin

A few years ago, I developed a sugar addiction. It started with bite-sized candy bars that were left over from Halloween. I ate them at all hours of the day and night. Between meals. Before meals. After meals. Right when I woke up. Right before I went to sleep.

Eventually, I graduated from bite-sized candy bars to full-sized candy bars. At one point I was eating ten a day. This went on for a while until my hands and feet started tingling and I decided I had to stop. Whenever I got sugar cravings, I picked up my phone and scrolled for as long as I needed to. I scrolled to the most sensational. The most hateful. The most exaggerated. The most deceiving. The most violent. As long as it took me away from sugar.

I managed to kick the sugar but then I had a phone addiction. At its worst, I was on my phone twelve hours a day.

To fix the phone addiction, I started sleeping with this woman I worked with. It didn’t take long before I got addicted to the sex. I needed her every night and she was no good for me because she was stealing money off my dresser when I fell asleep.

To stop with the sex, I’ve started drinking. Sometimes I drink for ten hours straight without any food. And after ten hours, the world is so blunted I can’t feel anything. I don’t want sugar. I don’t want my phone. I don’t want sex. I don’t want anyone. When I get to that point, I don’t even know my own name.

*****

Some drunk broke a pint glass on my brother’s face at a bar a decade ago. It was a case of mistaken identity. The guy thought my brother slept with his wife.

My brother’s eye bone was broken and now he’s got a metal plate in his face holding everything together. Some of the glass got in his left eye and he can’t really see out of it anymore.

The doctor didn’t say his life would never be the same, but my brother knew. We all knew.

In addition to the metal plate and the vision loss, he’s had migraine headaches ever since it happened. He tried to tough it out for a while, but now my brother takes pills for the pain. I was worried about him getting addicted like I’d heard on the news.

After a couple celebrities overdosed, I had to say something to him. My brother laughed and told me that you don’t get addicted to pain pills when you have chronic pain. The pills eat the pain and you don’t even get high.

“Well, that’s good,” I said to him.

“Yeah, I guess so,” he said back.

After that, I don’t worry about the pain pills with my brother. I worry about everything else.

*****

Dad’s rule when we went out to a restaurant was that all the food we ordered had to be eaten. We couldn’t even bring it home to eat later, it had to be eaten at the table. But my mom and my brother and I didn’t go along with his rule. Which meant that if there were leftovers, dad had to do it by himself.

Mom mentioned that dad grew up poor and there was never enough food so that was probably why. But I thought it was just him being macho. Maybe it was both.

Dad cheated on my mom with some woman at work a long time ago. It took a while to come out, but you can’t hide something like that forever. After my mom found out, she made reservations at the most expensive restaurant in town that served the biggest portions. She ordered half the menu that night. After my mom, my brother, and I had eaten, we watched as dad sat there in agony making sure every plate on the table was clean.

I remember my mom saying to him at the end of the meal that we suffer the most for what we believed in.

*****

My mother killed a man and she didn’t feel bad about it. It’s not what you think. The man was a judge and by all accounts he was a miserable guy. He sentenced first-time minor offenders to disproportionately long jail time. He separated children from their families. He came down hardest on people who just needed a break.

Before my brother and I were born, our mom was a cook at the diner in town. She said the diner wasn’t anything special, but it’s a small town and the diner stayed open late.

The judge always sat in the same booth and ordered the same meal. A double order of pork chops charred black, mashed potatoes, mac and cheese, extra crispy onion rings, and a vanilla milkshake. On the day he died, the judge had a heart attack after his second bite of the pork chop my mother prepared. His face fell into the mashed potatoes and he sat there until the waitress found him and called an ambulance.

People said my mother was a hero. She was indifferent, but the town was happy. Until they realized that the new judge who took his place was even worse.

*****

Most people who fall for those email scams where a prince from a foreign country asks you to send money and then promises he’ll send back even more money in return aren’t stupid or gullible. They’re lonely. Probably some widow whose husband passed away a long time ago. Or a man whose wife left him and took the kids to the next town over, and now he doesn’t talk to anyone besides the guy he buys his morning coffee from on the way to his job at the factory.

Some people want to believe they don’t need anyone. That they can get along all by themselves. I think the truth is that other people help us figure out who we really are. It’s just unfortunate when we don’t like what they help us to see.

*****

I heard a story about this town that had a really bad mouse problem. City Hall and the mayor’s mansion and the public library and the schools were overrun with mice so they brought in a bunch of snakes.

The snakes killed the mice but then the town was flooded with snakes. To deal with the snakes, the town got mongooses. The mongooses took care of the snakes but then there were a ton of mongooses going through people’s garbage and causing traffic jams because they wouldn’t get out of the street.

Eventually, the town got wolves. The wolves fixed the mongoose problem but then of course the town had wolves. The problem wasn’t what you would think actually. They were perfectly respectful wolves. They didn’t eat people’s children or kill their cats and dogs. The issue was the wolves howled at the moon all night and no one in the town could sleep. So finally, they gave the people guns to kill the wolves. But then, of course, the people had guns.

*****

My brother always said the fall was problematic. Not only because it signals the end of summer and that cold weather is coming. It was more than the temperature dropping.

The fall means the end of what might be, and the return of what actually is. Back to school. Back to the grind. Back to the sun disappearing in the afternoon. Back to who we are and away from who we could be.

“There’s at least some hope in the summer, even if you know you’re ending up with the fall,” he would say to me.

A week ago, I asked my brother what he would do if he saw the guy who smashed that glass on his face. Turns out the guy’s father was a bigshot lawyer who had connections with the DA’s office and the guy only got a slap on the wrist. He did a few hours of community service and it wasn’t even on his record.

My brother said he wouldn’t do anything.

I couldn’t understand and I asked him to explain.

“If we’re not careful, we end up becoming the things we hate,” he said.

I kept pressing him but he assured me he was fine, and that things were exactly the way they needed to be. I want to believe him, but now I make sure to check on my brother when the weather starts to turn and the sun goes down in the afternoon.

*****

I entered treatment for my drinking last month. Three times a week I sit in a room with a bunch of other people who have issues like mine. I don’t say anything during our meetings. Everyone else seems so comfortable pouring over the personal, embarrassing things that their addiction cost them.

One guy knew he needed help when he showed up to work drunk and pissed himself while sitting at his desk. Another woman would get blackout drunk and sleep with people she didn’t know. She ended up getting pregnant and had no idea who the father was. Someone in the group made a Virgin Mary joke but no one laughed. There were a lot of DUIs and drunk driving accidents and people who were lucky to be alive.

I talked more in the individual treatment sessions. There was no one else to talk so I didn’t have a choice. In my last session, the therapist asked me what I was running away from. I said I wasn’t running from anything. I just needed to kick the sugar habit and then the phone addiction and then the sex addiction. I was about to keep going but she stopped me. She said, you know, sometimes the solution has nothing to do with the problem.

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Charlie Scaturro was born and raised in Brooklyn and currently resides there today. His work has appeared in Star 82 Review, Into The Void Magazine, Bending Genres, Palooka Magazine, Cagibi, and was short listed for The Best New Writing Anthology 2017. Charlie is currently working on a collection of short stories in addition to a few other projects.