how did marco get so fucked up?
by Timothy Petkovic
The stability and privilege of his upbringing is perplexing and shameful. Ninety-nine percent of SLAA people recount traumatic childhoods. His parents aren’t even divorced. He grew up in a three-story vicarage and went to private schools, a music scholar, in a prestigious, picturesque university town whose ancient colleges and chapels were simultaneously magnificent and quaint.
They’d pass the usual eccentrics on the morning school-run—sights as familiar to him as the lawns, punts, tourists, and wobbly student-cyclists who never indicated or wore a helmet—characters who were either mental cases, brilliant academics, or both. Like the grey-haired man in the tweed jacket that unravelled over two decades into a shredded crop top, the non-existent lower half Hawaiian-skirt dangling threads. Or the lady only in black: black Victorian corset-dress and ludicrously wide-brimmed floppy hat and Dominatrix leather boots, which all struck him as endearingly try-hard, like it was her life-mission to be considered crazy, when really, when you actually were, just a jacket could advertise it. Marco wasn’t nervous for the interviews. If he didn’t get into the local university, and he sort of knew he would, you had to leave home sometime anyway.
His own unravelling began in Upper Sixth. The conditional offer letter confronted him with how much he wanted to get in. Generally, he didn’t consider himself a falsely humble person. He had no tolerance for Li Mei, who took two of his classes and always claimed she hadn’t revised. Never indulged her insincere self-deprecations; just shrugged when she claimed she was going to fail, or reminded her she’d live if she did, until she quickly stopped coming to him for support. How could someone be so needy with no discernible need; be so smart yet self-deceiving, unable to acknowledge their professed insecurity was just arrogance, this hunger for reassurance everyone knew her abilities? When you got down to it, all humility was false: it wasn’t about being un-conceited or realistic self-appraisals; it was about pretending you deserved to crawl along the ground. But he’d tricked himself, feigned indifference, which was really another kind of excess pride, like he was above rejection, above desire; as if he was that self-content. How different was pretending not to care from pretending not to try? He wanted it.
So he began avoiding homework. He read David Foster Wallace and debated cutting his arms with a razor blade and procrasturbated obsessively, cumming eight, nine, ten times a night until his dick was flayed raw or shrivelled into a Greek-statue acorn and he had a skin allergy to his sperm. He arrived comically late to classes, not insouciantly like Ruslan who was always on the brink of expulsion from skiving and worse; Ruslan who strutted into classes ten minutes before the end without a word, reeking of weed, and fucked one of the Lower Sixth in the biology labs, his girlfriend sat in Maths class two floors up, and maybe the Head of Philosophy too, but who received endless latitude, allegedly because his mother was a famous Putin critic and he was here in the UK by himself, but really because he looked thirty-five and overtly masculine despite the earrings and the world will always bend to people like that. By contrast, Marco arrived late onion-eyed from hyperventilating in the girls’ bathroom, or else frowning and smiling self-deprecatingly, sometimes carrying penitent gifts of chocolate. He got sent to the principal, but always apologised profusely and made sympathetic moans at the telling-offs, until the headmaster, who was German, smiled saying, “You know you can actually change? Fucking up isnt some unalterable medical condition,” and they both laughed at the truth of this psychological assessment; how it was oddly possible to shirk responsibility by maxing out on self-recrimination. Marco was such a strange mix of anti-authoritarian detachment and scrupulous guilt. He didn’t know why he was imploding. He was a mystery to himself.
It wasn’t just the paralysing anxiety of not getting into his first choice or some impulse to preemptively self-destruct, although both were there. Marco still had some perspective. He preferred his backup’s curriculum. It would feel kind of absurd and parochial if his College were on the same damn actual street as every school he’d attended, as if his whole life’s teleology had been paved towards—what?—Famous University Brand Recognition. The stress was bigger, vaguer, more existential than any simple reason or reasons. The stress didn’t have perspective, being oddly separate to himself. There was an abyss inside him.
At home, Marco lived alone with his mum now. His dad had relocated overseas at the end of his Lower Sixth, and so she’d stayed behind to smooth the leaving exams and finish her own PhD; make use of the University Library. They stocked up on Tesco Finest ready meals from the local Express, the sort of stuff you bought last-minute for dinner on date night, ignoring the surrounding shoppers glaring at their opulence, and WeightWatchers treats that made Marco’s hands tremor from a sugar rush if he had the whole packet at once. Both religiously watched an episode of Frasier before bed. Occasionally, Marco would pad down in the early hours, still and black outside, and find his mum in the living room listening to Niles’ sparring, her body illuminated by the screenlight, their birman contorted peacefully in the creamy waffle-weave blanket beside her.
“Our stress-levels have synchronised. We’ve gotten into very bad habits,” she’d say.
“I’ll sleep tomorrow.”
He curled himself around the corner of the sectional sofa, huddling under several mohair blankets, until the show became its abstractest self, not plot or performance, but the lulling rhythm between Kelsey Grammer’s mellifluous baritone and harsh canned laughter. At some point, he turned off the TV. He watched; waited for the contrasting silence to rouse her. Her depth of breathing didn’t change.
“Mum? There’s something I need to tell you.”
“Do we have to do this now?” she said, her voice unexpectedly clear, not opening her eyes.
Photo of Timothy Petkovic
BIO: Timothy Petkovic has been published in Gadabout, Ariana, and NBC News.