Free Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn

stay off the ladders, focusing his energies on the porch. By ten or so Jonathan says he’s making a run to the hardware store, doesn’t return until nightfall. Shattered. It doesn’t really matter—they’re keeping track of their own hours. Still, within a week Scotty begins quitting at noon. Then he starts skipping days.
    By mid-August Scotty’s vanished. My father circles the unpainted house. Three months and not even the scraping’s done. The porch has been primed, as high as he can reach, and now he must start in with the ladders. He doesn’t like ladders. That low-life , he mutters, leaving him in the lurch, after all he’d done. Sorry-assed kid . The owners are due back in three weeks. Yesterday Jonathan had to tell the husband, by phone, that it might not be done in time. This made the husband bullshit—he’d been wiring Jonathan five hundred every month, always heard glowing reports, fine fine , and now it’s still undone? Jonathan’s cut off from the money, if he wants the balance he’d better finish.
    At this point Jonathan realizes that he’s been too conscientious. All that scraping and priming was just so Scotty would feel needed. No one will notice the eaves anyway, no one will climb a ladder and look that close. As long as it gets a fresh once-over. Jonathan sets the ladder, brings a scraper for a quick scrape, just the big stuff. A paper bucket half full with the final coat. No time for primer, not anymore.
    A little hungover, maybe even still drunk from the night before, he climbs. Maybe a little hair of the dog, why not?—forty-four, son of near-aristocracy, father of three, soon-to-be-famous author, forced to creep around roofs in the sun, to work beside morons, for goons. As he falls he thinks, If you are hurt they will come with their ambulances, they will put you in bed and feed you, they will let you rest . Or maybe that’s just what I have thought, the times I’ve fallen.
    He’s found unconscious on the walkway. He was on the ladder above the back porch and instead of resetting it he leaned over too far, lost his balance, the ladder kicked out, dropped him. When he comes to in the hospital later that day he blames Scotty for everything—for abandoning him, for taking the money, for charging the scotch, for being a fuckup. There might be a head injury, impossible to tell, the extent of the damage unpredictable. The house is left unfinished, a blossom of white on the flagstone just inside the gate.

dreamwold
    (1972) I get drunk for the first time when I’m twelve, at a place called Dreamwold. This baptism in beer takes place outdoors, in daylight, at an Octoberfest. My preteen friends and I find unattended pitchers and we empty them. Then we find more. Dreamwold is the fantasy village built by Scituate’s most famous son, a man named Lawson, the “Copper King,” a turn-of-the-century robber baron, long dead, the estate broken up into private homes and institutions. I went to kindergarten in one of Dreamwold’s outbuildings. There still exists somewhere a photograph of me walking through Dreamwold with a book on my head for a class in “posture.”
     
    That December, just before Christmas, Travis tells me to go out and warm up the truck. It’s midnight, a school night. We drive down to the Harbor, coast to a stop beside the chain-link fence around St. Mary’s field, kill the headlights. Town’s asleep, snow falls. A dim light shines from within the trailer guarding the trees the Knights of Columbus sell. Travis tells me to wait, vaults the fence, leaves black footprints straight to the trees. A car slows, passes. Within minutes he’s bounding back, dragging two perfect spruces behind. He tosses them over the fence, I wrestle one into the back of the truck while he one-arms the other. Twenty bucks is too much for a tree , he mutters, then laughs as we pull away. As a kid we’d go into the woods with an ax, he snorts, take whatever we wanted. He cracks open a beer, and for