BY MAX DORFMAN
The tank was a quarter-full when I left upstate New York. I used all the money I had left to fill it. By the time I reached the exurbs the gauge said empty as the gas sign flashed, its light nearly dead. I was still over an hour away from home. A typical 2½-hour drive was already four hours underway and it was increasingly unclear whether I would finish the trip. I rolled down the window for a cigarette. A gust of icy wind made me retract my hand and most of the smoke remained inside the car, only escaping when the squall outside settled enough to let it.
Cars lurched to the side of the road—their hazard lights on, half-buried by the snowfall that continued unabated. Only trucks labored on, as if their sheer weight could prevent a miniscule abrasion of their tires, or a slip of the driver’s hands.
I was done with school, too. Not for me, I thought. I had just been expelled. Weeks had passed without me attending classes, spurred by a one-paragraph email from the school that noted my loans had yet to be processed and that I would soon be forcibly removed from the college if I did not pay. Panicked, I hurried around campus asking for money and making phone calls to lenders—a kind of premature crowdfunding—before I even called to ask my parents what the situation actually entailed. By the time they assured me the loans had gone through I had already missed a quarter of the semester, and there was little I could do to correct my absences.
Inside my dorm room, I isolated myself for days after finals ended, thinking I could survive on a few packets of ramen, suppressing my appetite with cigarettes, and hiding from campus safety in the nook of my room with the curtains drawn. I only packed my car and settled to leave when the blizzard would have left me at the mercy of incessant calls from my parents.
“There’s a big storm coming,” Dad said to me.
“I’ll be okay,” I responded absently. “It won’t be so bad.”
“Don’t you need to be out of there before Christmas?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah?” he said, almost laughing.
“I need more money,” I said. “I don’t have enough money to leave.”
“You mean for gas?” he said, his voice growing angry.
“Yeah, that and other stuff.”
“What happened to the last hundred dollars I sent you?” he said.
“It’s gone,” I uttered, and quickly said goodbye before he could ask any more questions.
Down through Dutchess County, the blizzard continued. Between bursts of snowfall, gusts whipped ice in ringlets against my windshield. Cars continued to slip—I maintained a steady thirty miles per hour—watching, though not too closely, as they slowly drifted off the barely visible plane of the road and into snow banks. There was no terrible crunching sound of crashing vehicles or feverous screams from their passengers. The air was dead.
I looked again at the depleted gas tank gauge, thinking about what I had done with those last hundred dollars. Money was always an issue with my parents, and though the tuition bill was paid, it was right for my other costs to be covered as well. Cigarettes were one outright expense; a new record player was another. And there were romantic interests—though not many of them—that needed to be attended to. This is all to say that those last hundred dollars went to good causes. Here’s how I spent them:
I gave forty dollars to a homeless man outside the coffee shop in Saratoga Springs.
“I was just released from prison,” he told me—introducing himself this way, his clothes dusty and his brown skin peeling. He looked at me curiously, expecting that would be enough information to hasten my exit.
“That’s okay,” I responded, handing him a cigarette and lighting up one myself. I gazed up at him—he was much larger than me, much older. “I’ve had my own struggles.”
“Yeah?” he said, not insisting on hearing them, perhaps not wanting to know.
“Yeah,” I said, flicking my lighter and shivering. “I figure all we can do is our best; we all fuck up, right?”
“I think that’s right,” he said, holding the cigarette between his thumb and index finger, smoking like it would be his last. “What happened to you?”
“I was homeless for a little while. My parents said I had a break with reality. They didn’t want me home. I thought I was God or something.” I smiled wryly.
“Oh,” he replied, his narrow eyes growing wider, his head lurching back.
“Listen. I think you should have this.” I handed him the forty dollars in two crisp bills; he tried waving me off.
“No, no,” he said, “I can’t.”
“Take it,” I said, my grin wide and insouciant.
He looked at me like he was going to sob. Then, he took the two bills with a nod, and walked off into the slight brushing of snow. His dusty jacket was creased in the exact spots he hunched. He had probably worn that jacket for longer than I had been alive.
2. I lost twenty dollars betting on a chess match in that same coffee shop with a guy who proudly admitted he was a meth head. Was he still on meth?—I couldn’t tell.
“You think you’re good at chess?” he said, smirking. I had just returned to the cafe after my interaction with the ex-inmate. My fingers were still chilled and unable to pick up my pawn without trembling.
“I used to play—somewhat competitively,” I returned, smiling. “I wouldn’t say I’m that good, though.”
“You think you’re good,” he said, hunching forward on the red sofa seat, creases in his forehead like textbook pages. “All the kids from the college think they’re good.”
“I don’t know,” I said, laughing, “I’m not like them.”
“Sure,” he said, his blue eyes surrounded by red veins. “I’ll bet you twenty on a game, how about that?”
“Well—”
“How about you get forty if you win?”
“Sure,” I said, figuring I would win. Meth doesn’t make you good at anything, not to my knowledge. But I lost. He smiled so broadly, so expectantly, when he checkmated me. He knew he was going to win. I wasn’t sure whether to be impressed with him or disappointed in myself.
3. I purchased one latte. Not a coffee; a latte. It was damn near five dollars. Uncommon Grounds was a great coffee shop, a space that stretched endlessly back, filled with lots of plush couches and old wood tables that were already detailed for checkers and chess. I figured I could sip that latte for an hour or so. It didn’t last quite that long.
4. I saw Monica in the coffee shop near the back and bought her something. I liked her. She was an extremely pretty and petite woman with a large scar down her left arm. I frequently thought someone had harmed her—arbitrarily giving her that mark. And that thought often revolved around the fact that she was adopted, though I never truly made the connection. I wanted to believe I was adopted, too—that my parents’ misgivings about me were derived from more than my unstable mental state. I thought about it so intensely I started to believe it. The thought cycled through my mind as I spoke with Monica.
Monica and I talked for a while about nothing. Then I told her I was being kicked out of school.
“That’s terrible,” she said, though her affect made me believe she was preoccupied, or didn’t care as much as I thought.
“I’ll be fine. It’s life,” I told her. She nodded solemnly. “It’s because my parents think I’m crazy.” Her eyes widened. “They say I’m psychotic,” I continued. “I don’t think I’m psychotic but they think I’ve really lost my shit.”
“Really?”
“I told you I had before?”
“Had what?” she said, her face tilting, her fingers tapping lightly on the chair where she laid out her schoolwork.
“Never mind,” I said, lowering my head.
“They think you’re crazy?” she said, both insistent and scared.
“I don’t know,” I shot back. “I had a couple experiences they said happened because I am. They said I told everybody I was God—stuff like that.”
“Did you?”
“I don’t think so. But if I go home, I’ll become a writer. I know that.”
“Okay…” she said, her voice trailing off.
“You want to be a writer, too, right?” I asked.
“Yes.” She smiled nervously.
“Hold on one second.”
I got up mid-conversation and walked across the street through the strengthening flurries to the bookstore, wandering through its aisles for twenty minutes, looking for my favorite novel, Man Gone Down. A plump, bookish saleswoman asked me a few times if I needed help.
“No,” I replied. “I know what I want.”
In line to buy the book, I also picked up a copy of The Economist. The total was about twenty dollars. I rushed across the street worried Monica had left, ruminating on our histories, unsure if I was simply imagining our shared waywardness. I found her in the exact same place.
“Here,” I said to Monica, handing her the book. She looked at me quizzically—I think she was as surprised I came back as she was by the gift. I told her I had to go in a minute. But I didn’t sit down and I didn’t wait a minute. I rushed out and drove to the gas station.
That was nearly eighty-five dollars. The last fifteen and change went to fuel. The gas station attendant gave me an obnoxious look as I handed him my last sixty-three cents to fill the tank, change spilling from my pocket.
By the time I hit lower Putnam County—near home—the ground was turning to ice. I wasn’t sure when the snow had time to melt and reform. The sense of impending doom, like the ice, became more apparent the closer I got to my parent’s house. Yet the thought of my parents confronting me didn’t frighten me. Instead, it was the expectant news—that I wouldn’t be allowed to return to school. That I found humiliating.
Driving into Westchester, I noticed the giant trucks and my old beige sedan were the only vehicles left on the road. My heart was pounding. I moved over to the right lane and prepped myself to drive off the exit. Mt. Kisco, the half-obscured green sign said: ½ Mile. There I was. But the trucks were becoming more aggressive and I was having a hard time maintaining focus.
I could hear my mother chiding me, the voice permeating my mind with such realism I thought she was sitting in the backseat, tapping my shoulder:
“How did you just stop showing up to class?”
“Don’t you know how hard we worked to get you there?”
“Do you appreciate anything?”
“Do you really think there are no consequences—that you’re God?”
Echoes of her voice rattled me, just as a truck barreled past and I swerved farther right to avoid obliteration—veering into a snowbank right in front of the exit sign. There was no crash. I lowered my head, near tears. Trucks continued to pass, unrestricted by the snow. I slammed my hand into the steering wheel.
“You need a push?” a portly, thirty-something man asked, knocking at my window. I turned my head, shocked.
“Yes,” I said, trembling, uncertain whether he was real. I lit a smoke as he maneuvered me out of the pit and towards the exit.
“I wish I could give you something for your help,” I said, as he pushed me out, my five-hour trip coming to a close.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, waving me off—moving into the large, flaking drifts and disappearing southbound.
Max Dorfman is a writer and visual artist living in New York City. He is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College with his BA in English and Columbia University with his MA in Clinical Psychology. He has also been published in The Bookends Review and Parhelion Literary Magazine.