Trazodone is Your Friend

Matthew Banash

Worked with a good guy, Dan, the other day, stripping a popcorn ceiling in a reno for cash under the table. I sat down to dinner with him tonight at the shelter. Chicken fingers, roasted potatoes and peas. Dan was all messed up. High. Or loaded. It’s tough to tell with some people.

Thanked me for working with him the other day, said he appreciated the good conversations at the job and on the walk there and back. We had talked about being unable to sleep in an unmade bed, how stubborn aged parents can be and meds. “Trazodone is your friend.” Talk long enough and the conversation always turns to meds.

After finishing his salad, Dan said his little brother would like me. Then corrected himself, his “bigger little brother” since his brother was a few years younger but twice his size. He laughed sadly and blinked slowly.

“A couple Thanksgivings ago I kicked the shit out of him to get him off drugs because I couldn’t go through all that again. Beat his ass all up. And it surprised the Hell out of him. He said, ‘Bro you kicked my ass …I couldn’t go into work for three whole days,’ and I just said yeah, told you…” but now there wasn’t any laughter. He looked into his peas.

“I hate peas,” he said, cleaning the last of them off his plate.

He asked me for a cigarette then said, “That’s right you don’t smoke, you told me that yesterday,” with a laugh that stretched from here to Tucson. Dan was born in Tucson but raised in Phoenix. Said thinking of going back. Then suddenly, it seemed, he thought better of it.

I felt bad. I had just opened a fresh pack of Gauloises before dinner and prized three 50mg hits of Trazodone sitting at the bottom of my book bag under a small bottle of hand sanitizer, a Swiss Army knife missing the toothpick and tweezers and the keys to a car I no longer owned. At least Trazodone doesn’t stick to you like cigarette smoke. I pushed myself away from the table thankful that at least one of us wouldn’t have any memory of this conversation.

(I lied about the Gauloises. They were Ararats. I did have the Trazodone though. Practicing on keeping my lies straight. Forgive me. You can’t be too sure of the lingua franca in places like this.)

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MATTHEW BANASH was born and raised in Pennsylvania, and has lived in the Carolinas for a long time. He writes poetry and short fiction and appreciates his family and friends deeply and hopes to live in Wyoming someday.