Bubbles had never had issues with his nickname. In a lot of ways, it fit him better than the one he started out with, implying a lighter time of life, like something you look forward to, or reminisce about after. Sometimes, he might have shared it with a few folks here and there, and gotten a strange look, like they couldn't get why a grown man would go by something you'd see on the labels of cleaning products and soda, but that never bothered him. Folks like that was always hampered down in making it to the end of the day, from nine to five or straight through to Friday. They didn't have time to see the joke in "bubbles".
Though he could admit, it was easier to get when he was younger. Back when he was a young man, and world was softer just about everywhere he turned.
Easier.
Most nights he didn't know what had happened to "easier." As he laid on the musty old couch his sister kept in her basement, hard as the concrete on the floor and nearly as cold, he couldn't help tracing back the memories—forgiving the black patches as he came to them—trying to find when things stopped being easy.
The way he saw it, life was all full of soft and hard, anywhere you cared to look. Somewhere along the line it had all gone hard, until he couldn't hardly move for how squeezed in he'd become. He'd always known, deep down, that he had lost his way, but Bubbles had taken it easy on himself, dressed up the situation in colorful clothes and said it was his choice—and true enough, it was. It was. . .
In the murkiness of that cramped basement room, where the quiet could just about ring in his ears, Bubbles heard a creak in the floor overhead that shattered the illusion of time having stopped. It might have been just the old house talking to itself, or it might have been his sister coming down to make sure she hadn't forgotten to lock the door leading up to her kitchen. He might hear the knob turn at any second. He couldn't blame her if it turned out so. He was pretty sure she'd done it before, checking up to make sure that she and her family were safe, nothing for the druggie black sheep to get at for his next fix but what they ought to throw out anyway.
Nah, he couldn't blame her.
Bubbles rolled over on the couch, put his back to the cushions that hadn't seen the living room in at least a few years. He breathed in the musty smell, and tried to keep his eyes closed.
It was easy to believe she didn't want to see him here anymore. Easy to think he should just get up and go, find a nook someplace, and settle in for the night. Easy to think the morning wouldn't be harder there than it was right where he was now. It could be real easy, knowing she never really locked the door leading out onto the street. . .But these days, Bubbles was coming to realize the thing about easy, and how it was a lie. Or, maybe, it wasn't so much a separate thing from hard as it was coming to understand hard, and how it worked. That, in the end, there was no way to escape hard. Step for step, everyone had to tend their share.
He could just see himself as he was in the beginning, when the days were still languid and bright. There was a time, which lasted for longer than he should have let it, when he couldn't understand why he ought to fit himself into that busy, complicated world. Why he should put so much effort into satisfying some overbearing system, when he could so much more easily see the beaconing charm of a lone park bench on a Tuesday afternoon, and answer it. In love with the easy, more alive for the buzz that was fencing him in, so far behind the game that he thought he was ahead. . . It was all so easy. Life was only an opinion, a joke, a smile n' a laugh, and not a thing in the world could burst his bubble. No, not his, not the school grades, the boss man, the naysayers, his girl, his parents, the cops, the teachers. . .
Like a flashback from a bad trip, Bubbles saw Sherrod's face in his head. Young and trusting an' green, in a way that was so screamingly clear to Bubbles, that it made him sick to remember it. Sherrod had just been a kid when Bubbles met him, innocent and looking for the softest side of life, no older than Bubbles had been when he'd done the same. With the vision came the familiar tangled strands of emotion, all edged, like a knot of razor wire. Anger, sorrow, guilt, shame, and envy, and then regret dense enough to kill.
Why'd it have to go the way it did? The questions fit together like the pieces of a puzzle. Why'd he have to be so stupid, leaving drugs lying around, like he didn't know what craving was? Why'd he have to get caught up with a chest pounding psycho, wanting to rely on people to keep him safe? Why'd he have to be on the streets, knowing how it was out there? Knowing where Johnny'd gone, and himself no better directed? Why'd his sister have to be so hard on him the last time he'd come here, as to push him out the door and toward that poor boy's death? Why—
With a spasm that set the decrepit springs in the sofa to screeching, Bubbles jerked himself up from the cushions. No one was coming, the kitchen door knob had never moved, because his sister had been down this road with him too many times to forget to lock that door leading into her home. He was alone in the basement, huddled under two thin, old blankets and able to see his own breath turning to fog in the air, and Sherrod had been dead for over three months. Bubbles himself no murderer in the eyes of the law, but his guilt still as plain and real as the withdrawal that clawed at him every day.
He couldn't help that his eyes were wet, and he couldn't help that he wanted to wail. He let himself fall back onto the couch and tried to let it out as best he could, into the ancient, hard fluff of the cushions, pulling himself away from those indulgent, poisonous thoughts.
His sister kept this couch for him, he sometimes suspected. It was battered and torn, not doing any use to anybody down here. She probably could have gotten rid of it a long time ago if it really was junk, like she said. But he was beginning to hope, had to believe, that somewhere under all that thick skin she had to develop because of him, she still held out some hope for him. He just had to do the work, face down all the hardness he'd made for himself by slacking off to that sunny park bench in an intoxicated haze for so long. Find the kind of easy that was reliable, because it came from him rather some chemical cocktail thrumming in his blood.
It was an uphill battle. But as he rolled onto his side and forced his breathes out, nice and slow, Bubbles picked up his precious faith, his meager resolve, and looked out into the desolate room. He was still here, and every day he resisted the door to the street, he was another closer to recovery. His bubble had taken a long time in bursting, like it was made of rubber cement rather than soap and daydreams, but life wouldn't get any less hard if he went back to where he'd been. The only way out now was to keep going home.