Read Man Gone Down for Free Online

smart and cute to be single,” she’d said, looking at a commencement photo. When he returned to New York, she’d thought it would be a good idea for us to escort him back into the mainstream.
    It was this past spring and he looked well—tall, dark haired, blue eyed, strangely russet skinned, as though some of his many freckles had leaked; the Black Irish. He’d made the transition, despite a good decade of delirium tremens and shelters, from handsome boy to handsome man. His lined face and graying hair made him look rugged and weary, but his freckles and eyes still flashed innocent. He’d just had a poem rejected by some literary rag, but on arriving, he seemed fine. We sat around the table. My girl was in my lap playing with my food. There were three other couples besides us, a single writer friend of Claire’s, and Gavin. The woman, his alleged date, asked him what kind of poems he wrote.
    â€œSonnets.”
    â€œSonnets?”
    â€œPetrarchan sonnets.”
    She giggled. “How quaint.”
    â€œQuaint, hmm.”
    He emptied his water glass, refilled it with wine, and swallowed it in one gulp. Claire looked at me, concerned. He drank another glass, excused himself, and stood to leave. I caught him in the hallway.
    â€œWhere are you going with this?” I asked.
    â€œDown, I suppose.”
    Three days later he showed up, beat up and already detoxing. Claire used to try to swap stories with us, about drunken uncles and acquaintances that had hit it too hard. She’s never seen me drunk. I never had a fall as an adult. I never suffered Gavin’s blood pressure spikes, seizures, or bat-winged dive bombers—only some lost years, insomnia, and psychosomatic heart failure. But she watched Gavin convulse onher couch while her babies played in the next room. She realized that the stories we told had actually happened to us and not to someone we used to know. The damage was real and lasting. And more stories were just an ignorant dinner comment away.
    â€œHow are you, Gav?” I ask. It sounds empty.
    â€œI’m all right, I guess. My bell’s still a’ringing a bit.” He pauses for me to ask where he’s calling from, how the last jag went down, but I don’t. He covers for me. “You bustin’ out for the weekend, or are you staying around?”
    â€œI’m supposed to go.”
    â€œSo you’re going to be away Friday?”
    â€œI suppose.”
    â€œKids making you a cake?”
    â€œYeah. Probably.”
    â€œHey, man?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œYour kids start giving you Old Spice yet?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œWhat’s going to happen?”
    â€œC’s going to count to thirty-five, and even though he knows the answer, will then ask me how old I’ll be when he’s thirty-five.”
    He snorts a laugh. “Children—a paradox.” He shifts to Mid-Atlantic speak, the accent of one who hailed from an island between high-born Boston and London. “I have no wife. I have no children.”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œI’m calling from a pay phone in a detox.”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œI went on a twelve-week drunk because a girl didn’t like my poems.”
    I should say something to him—that I’ll come visit with a carton of cigarettes, or pick him up, like I always used to—but Claire’s list opens up in my head like a computer file and I stay silent.
    â€œMush.” He switches back. “Do something. Get your head out of your ass. Go get a coffee.” More silence. “Happy birthday.”
    I go downstairs. It’s dark. Out of respect for my host I leave the lights off. I go into the kitchen. It’s posh and industrial, clad in stainless steel, maple, and absolute black granite. I open the oversized refrigerator. There’s a Diet Coke and a doggie bag. Butter. Marco is a good bachelor. The house seems far too big for the three of them. I