There is hope for everyone

He chuckled, rubbing his back with his fists to pop his back once more. “Nice guess… But I am only two years older than you are Kaiden…” Sighing, he stacked up his chips and slid them into one of the pockets on his pants. “I am about thirty-four years old, born in Moscow, raised here in New York City by my paternal grandmother and grandfather…”

Reaching into the pocket he just placed his chips in he fingered them around in their small confined cloth prison. “I do not mind…” This was true. He did not want to tell his band mates for fear of… well getting kicked out or something he guessed. He had been a ‘functioning’ addict-if there is such a thing- for about 20 years.

“I was probably about… thirty or thirty one at the time… A lifelong addict who had unfortunately started with the drinking when I was around ten, maybe eleven years old. It had escalated quickly from there, until I was about fifteen and had started hitting the hard stuff… You name it, I have more than likely tried it at some point in those twenty years… Anyway, I digress. As I said I was about 30 years old and I had to drive my grandfather back home from the grocery store. I was drunk-of course, and high on God only knows what, and driving WHILE texting one of my suppliers… I made a turn without fully looking at the road and a semi-truck hit us going 60 miles an hour, right on the drivers side of the car. We had rolled for a good chunk of time before the car finally stopped. My grandfather did not get too hurt-only a broken wrist with some cuts and bruises. The doctors called it miraculous. But I… I had a severe concussion, broke both of my legs, severely injured my spine, and I required brain surgery. When blood started flowing inside my spinal column they made an incision along the back of my neck to drain it… Needless to say, I fucked myself up pretty bad being that stupid…”

He sighed, breathing in the scent of the bitter liquid in front of him. Taking in a deep mouthful of the pure black coffee he sighed. “You do not have to apologize. I would know how much a person can change while they are under the influence of alcohol… And I got pretty beat up before the wreck too. Not so much for the groupies but for… Well you can figure that out for yourself.”

Taking the time to go off in a daze of some sorts he turned over a heavily tattooed arm to look at the underside of his right arm. It was ravaged by various cuts and scars and burns, some very small while others had the size of 3 inches longer and even more than that. His once oh so ‘beloved’ –if you can call it that- drug games had given him this. Feeling a burn he had given himself that was almost a perfect circle on his palm, he clenched that hand into a fist. No way was he going to go down that path while he was still in such a place as the bar his ‘friends’ had dragged him to involuntarily- they still were his friends but he had almost always without fail gotten rather irritated with them whenever they did so.

Actually looking at Kaiden’s bloody knuckles for the first time he dug around the plain black leather messenger bag he almost always brought with him and brought out some cloth bandages and gave them to Kaiden. Nodding at the bandages he said, “May want to get those wrapped up.”

“And as for the shock at how old I really am… Over twenty years of addiction can do that to a person…  It can age you more than you could ever believe.”

He could not believe what he had just heard. In his family-that he knew of anyway- everyone had always aged very well, often times looking years younger than their age. But he-he is different. He had chosen to get into the hard core drugs. Cocaine, heroin, prescription painkillers, narcotics-you name it and he . It had aged him, so much so that he sometimes looked 10 years over his true age.

But the fact that someone he was in all honesty rather much attracted to had complimented his face-it was a little awkward for him but he had shrugged it off-, and his accent. He is Russian yes-and has the accent to prove it, but he has been in America for over thirty years. The fact that he had managed to keep the accent-and so long after he had left his home that had been a larger apartment in a slum in downtown Moscow was a miracle by his beloved babushka’s standards, and he had taken in the habit to listen and stay true to form to what she had said-she had graciously allowed him to live with them.
His grandfather had not wanted to raise him. He had raised a son, his one and only child Piotr and for what? His beloved son had defied his wishes and married a rich heiress, heir to her father-a highly respected KGB spy- and when she had brought him to meet her father shortly after she had given birth to her two tins they had both died in a border skirmish, and his sister was never to be seen again, much less his maternal grandfather. He was not too sure if he wanted to meet him anyway.

“Well… Thank you? Here, let me help,” he said, nodding to Kaiden’s botched and fumbled attempt at wrapping up his bloodied appendages. Sliding into the booth across from Adam and Kaiden he slid down to where Kaiden was and took the bandages from him and took the small-small by his standards at the very least- hands in his own, as large and as scarred as they were and started wrapping them up-tightly but not so tight as to restrict their movement too much, moving with ease. He had done this same exact thing to himself far too many times. Forgetting he had taken off his jacket-which had revealed his full sleeves of tribal tattoos and the various cuts and burns that had also ravaged his arms and hands during the drug games he was so fond of.

Finally satisfied with the job he had done on Kaiden’s knuckles he leaned back, his back popping on the way, turning Kaiden’s hands over in his own calloused and scarred from who knows what to inspect his job. Putting his right palm face up on the table he grabbed his coffee and took a drink, unintentionally putting his worst arm on display for all to see.

Dragging his fingers across his knuckles he chuckled. “If you are not too careful it can scar. That, and every so often, sometimes it can become infected which in the end only makes the scarring worse. Yet another life lesson I learned in the last thirty four years. Some of the more rough and tough gangs in Moscow could be a royal pain in the ass for a child growing up in the slums…” Trailing off, he thought back to those times. As crazy and well, fucked up as it would seem he had actually really enjoyed those times. It had been hard of course, but they lived nice simple lives.

They did not have to have the newest, nicest, most shiny things to be happy. It was a small what most would call a studio apartment with a curtain leading into the bathroom that had a broken bathtub and drain, so you had to take a shower in freezing cold water-no joke, sometimes when you went in to take a bath it had ice crystals in it- while standing in a bucket. They used the handmade soap they sold in the market, and when they were done they brought that water in to the kitchen to use for cooking because they did not have running water anywhere except for the bathroom.

There were curtains that had closed off the eternally drafty windows that also had trash bags taped to them-several panes of dirty glass had been broken- and ratty old furniture had furnished the sparse apartment. The only thing that even remotely resembled a tiny shred of luxury was his babushka’s Steinwat & Sons grand piano. It was old, very old and it was what her husband had given to her on their first wedding anniversary and it had become her most beloved possession until she had been forced to leave it behind. But once the band had taken off-and he had gotten clean- he had tracked it down to a museum and had bought it back-for a rather steep price might he add, but it was worth it so see the look on his grandmothers face as she felt he beloved pianoforte.

Nodding in answer to Kaiden’s question, he spoke in assent as well. “Yes I am. I know how to play the pianoforte, but there is not much demand for a pianist in the genre we play in. My grandmother taught me before we immigrated on her beloved piano. She was incredibly upset that she had to leave it, but once I got clean I bought it back from the museum that had taken it for a rather steep price-too expensive in my opinion, but it was worth it when she came back to our house and saw her piano again.”