Page 143 of The Comedown

“I hate him.”

“Me, too,” he says like he’s in agony at the thought of this guy. “Barney would trade people for anything. Nothing was off-limits for him to trade. He’d buy someone food using my mom’s card, then trade cash for it, a lot less than he’d spent on the fucking food to begin with. I got pissed, and I got more pissed every fucking day I went home to a place with more beer in the fridge than there was food in the cupboards.”

Tears fall from my eyes, streaking down my temples. That’s not how children should be treated. That’s not how anyone should be treated. Neglected. Forgotten.

“What’d you do?”

“I tried not to be home as much. As soon as I’d wake up in the mornings, I’d leave, and just sit at the bus stop hours before I needed to. I was fucking starving all the time, and the only place I could get anything even close to a full meal was at school, so I counted down the seconds until I’d walk through those doors.”

“For breakfast and lunch only?”

He nods. “Yeah. No dinners. I went…” He blows out a breath. “Fuck, there was a time there that I don’t even know how long I went without eating an actual dinner.”

Now I understand why it’s so important to him that I eat. He knows what living with a growling, empty stomach does to a person after a prolonged period. I never thought about it that way. I was only ever concerned about the image of the outside of my body, not what I was doing to the inside of it. The truth is I can imagine plain as day how Julian felt all those years ago. I feel that way most days, except I can eat. I can eat whatever I want, whenever I want because I have the means to do so. He didn’t. And I’m choosing not to so I can look good, so I can keep up with impossible industry standards I know aren’t healthy or realistic in any way.

I make a promise to be better about eating regularly, if not for myself, then for that hungry little boy who couldn’t make the same vow.

“I’d still check on my mom though. It was our normal. I’d make sure she was okay before leaving, every day. And she was. She always fucking was.”

Louder, he says, “Being at the bus that early, I waited with the older kids. First the high schoolers, then the middle schoolers. There were these teen guys… They would get there earlier than the rest of the high schoolers, and they would battle each other. Every morning, like clockwork, they would show up, and jump right into whatever lyrics they’d just finished working on. Or they’d come up with them on the spot. They’d hold competitions where they’d pick a random topic and they all had to freestyle something about it. They were using words that sounded like lyrics but felt like confessions, confessions that could’ve come straight from my own life about my own shit, so I tried it when I was by myself, saying some of the things I was feeling. Doing it in the form of a song made the truth seem less fucked up than it actually was. It was the only thing that made my anger go away. It felt natural, like I was born to do it. So, I didn’t stop. I couldn’t. I rapped all the time. Every fucking minute of every fucking day, I had lyrics running through my head, giving me something else to focus on.”

I nod along, all too familiar with the feeling myself. Songwriting is therapeutic in the best and worst of ways. All art is really, but singing the actual words of your pain…there’s no hiding your meaning. A painting can be interpreted a thousand different ways but only the painter knows the truth. A songwriter slices open their veins and bleeds the truth into their lyrics.

“Did you ever rap with them?”

“Eventually I worked up the courage to try. There was a lot of shit-talking in the beginning because I was so much younger than them, but after a while, they got it. They understood that I needed it just like they did. I wasn’t trying to fit in; I’d actually found where I fit. All of us started going earlier then. It was like an unspoken thing, where we all just leaned on each other and the words of our shared problems.”

He grows quiet for a long time, but I don’t rush him. When he speaks again, it’s strained.

“And it was on one of those mornings when my mom died.”

“No, Julian.” I sit up, leaning over him, my tears falling from my face down on to Julian’s robe. “It wasn’t your fault. You weren’t responsible for your mom’s life or death. You were a child just trying to survive any way you could. Don’t you see? You needed music just as much as you needed food.”

“I needed music while my mom needed me. I chose rapping, and it killed her.”

I shake my head, drops of water flinging in all directions.

“I chose rapping, and it killed my grandma. Two weeks after I signed my record deal, she died, too.”

As much as Julian loves rapping, he also resents it. His disdain toward being labelled “just a rapper” makes more sense, especially given that he doesn’t even get to use the lyrics he wants. The lyrics about his real life, about his hardships, those are the words that’d resonate deeply with audiences just like those teen boys’ did for Julian during one of the hardest times of his life. Music changes lives, but it can also save lives, and I believe it saved Julian’s. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for his mother. Or grandmother. One thing I do know for certain is music isn’t responsible for killing either of them. And neither is Julian.

I cradle his own wet face in my palms, telling him, “Their deaths are not because of you, or your rapping, or your music. You found a way to express yourself. That’s it. It didn’t kill anyone. You didn’t kill anyone.”

“My mom’s drinking—”

“Was her choice. It had nothing to do with you. Isn’t that what you told me when I thought you were drinking to hurt me?”

His entire face winces.

“It felt like a punishment,” he rasps.

“I know.” It doesn’t matter what Julian told me, how much he ensured me that his drinking isn’t aimed at me, it does still feel like a personal slight when he does it, just like last night when I saw him ordering a shot at the bar. I immediately took offense, and I can see why he felt that way as a child…and possibly still feels that way as a man.

Julian wipes the tears on my cheeks using the knuckles marked with the MAMAS BOY letters. “I’m not just taking after her,” he whispers quietly. “I think I am her.”

“You’re not her.” I kiss him, the salty tears caught between our lips. “You’re protective. And you’re generous. You’re kind and thoughtful. You go without, so no one else around you has to. You’re loyal even though you try to act like you don’t want to be. You’re honest when it counts. You’re both funny and fun, one of the most fun people I’ve ever had the pleasure of being around. You steal all the attention from every room you walk into with that charming smile of yours. Even on your worst days, you’re fucking magnetic. I find myself wanting to run after you anytime you walk away, absolutely terrified I won’t get another chance to see you again, because if I didn’t, I’d feel cheated for the rest of my life.” The confession sounds foreign to my own ears. I haven’t said anything like this out loud to anyone. I never even felt like this with anyone to want to, not even Bodee and I was with Bodee for years.

Making sure I don’t blink, I tell him again, “You’re more. To me. To everybody.”