Call it Pain Station, too, I think, having just taken my Louis Kahn memorial pee at one of the urinals in here, can’t think of a bleaker place to die of a heart attack like the great architect did than this always-stinking filthy men’s room. I always picture his final collapse onto the floor like Nude Descending a Staircase, a paroxysmal grandeur but with a short, elderly Jewish man clutching his chest and falling, white shirt stained with airline salad dressing and coffee dribbles—he’d flown into JFK and come to the station to catch a train—his final breaths witnessed by drug addicts and the homeless psychotics who’d be in federal or state mental hospitals instead of sheltering in train station bathrooms if such hospitals still existed. Kahn was on his way home to Philadelphia from Bangladesh, where he’d just built his masterpiece, the Bangladeshi capital’s National Assembly Building, ancient sacred monumental grandeur reformulated into rigorous vanguard modernist design. After creating one of the most beautiful, spiritually stirring public spaces of modern times, Kahn came home to die in one of the ugliest and most demoralizing.
Here in Pain Station, passengers wait to board their trains in a grimy plastic-and-linoleum arena enclosed by numbered east and west gates while heavily armed soldiers in camouflaged combat fatigues and bulletproof vests stand guard or patrol the floor, bomb-sniffing dogs, too, all of us jammed together as if into a ravine. As our train’s scheduled departure time approaches, if we’re Pain Station veterans who know how it works, our eyes fix on the clacking departure board, waiting for our gate to be posted, white numerals and letters, 7W, 11E, 13E, west on the left side, east on the right. Because these are posted several crucial seconds before they’re announced over the station speakers, clued-in passengers get the jump and surge toward that gate; when it’s obvious the train is going to be crowded, it’s a stampede. There: 9W! In this split second my eyes drop from the departure board to the back of the hand that my mole is on and I start moving. In my dyslexia I rely on this mole to tell me which way is left. Trapped inside that instant of panic—turn left!—I only have to look for the directional mole in the dead center of the back of my left hand to know which way to go. That Francisco can’t tell his left from his right; oh, but he can, thanks to his directional mole.
“The 8:05 Northeastern Regional Amtrak train to Boston is now ready for boarding, please proceed to gate 9W and have your tickets out.” But I’m already at the gate, near the front of the line.
Coming off the escalator I walk quickly ahead, passing passengers proceeding single file alongside the train, clackclackclinkclacking all the way to the next to forwardmost train car. This cold March morning is probably not going to be a heavy travel day. Should have a seat to myself all the way to Boston.
So Marianne wrote to me because she heard me talking about Martí on the radio. But why, really? When I discovered her message on the computer screen, my first reaction was that it couldn’t really be from that Marianne or that it must be a hoax. Then I felt like I’d been waiting for a message from her practically forever. But we were only close for a few months back when we were fifteen. “It’s funny,” she wrote in her message, “what survives for more than thirty years.” So what survives? She didn’t say. What about those few months could still matter to her? Maybe I’m making too big a deal out of it, and this, my excited curiosity, is just phantom-limb nostalgia for the reciprocated first adolescent love I never experienced. Does Marianne still recognize herself in that long-ago girl, and does she think I am still anything like that boy? Sometimes I wonder if it would have made a difference in my life, to have had a high school love. Back in tenth grade, it was Ian Brown who provoked our not even speaking anymore. It was Ian, in middle school, who gave me the nickname Monkey Boy. Marianne is going to want to talk about Ian tonight, I know she saw him at the last reunion. “Same asshole as ever,” she wrote. Just remembering Ian makes anger flare through me. I rock back in my train seat. Whatever, man, that was all more than thirty years ago. Like if it weren’t for Ian Brown, you’d be happily married now, a dad even, instead of a man too ashamed to show up at a high school reunion because he doesn’t want them to know that at nearly fifty he’s a lonely grown-up Monkey Boy like they all would have predicted for Frankie Goldberg. A grown-up monkey on the cusp of fifty who hasn’t had a lover of any kind since his relationship with Gisela Palacios ended some five years ago in Mexico City. A stretch of loneliness that was starting to feel fucking eternal. But things have unexpectedly picked up since I moved back to New York. As if change might really be in the offing. We’ll see.
Out of the long tunnel, the train is passing through Queens, and the pale morning light gives the monotonous if jumbled sprawl here the look of something covered in grime being slowly hosed off, revealing a submerged radiance like a soft, youthful glow in a face where you wouldn’t expect to see it, an old or sick person’s face. I slowly finish my coffee. The sandwich rests in my backpack.
It wasn’t just Monkey Boy. I had another nickname before that one, Gols, pronounced gawls. I wonder if Marianne remembers Monkey Boy or Gols. Even though it was only inspired by a sixth-grade teacher talking about the Franks and the Gauls as he stood in front of a map of old Europe, it was a creepy-sounding name, it sounded like crawls or ghouls. Even now, it’s painful to consider why Gols struck kids as so apt for me, but it’s not really a mystery. When I was almost three, living with Mamita in my grandparents’ house in Guatemala City after she’d left my father for the first time when I was around six months old, I’d caught tuberculosis, and whether that was the cause, something grossly impeded my physical development. In photographs from elementary school, I’m an emaciated, sallow weakling, sunken eyes, wooly hair, mouth dumbly hanging open, huge ears, a feeble boy raised in a damp, dark cellar by spiders who feed him moths, a boy called Gols. Eventually my limbs began to fill out; slowly I got stronger. By eighth grade I’d even score a few match points for my middle school track team; a year after I’d transform into a boy who won 440 races; in tenth grade, which is when high school began in our town, I’d even try out for football. Yet Gols stuck to me. I had other nicknames, too: Sleepless because I so often looked sleepy, lost in a demoralized stupor, Chimp Face, Pablo, but Gols was the one I really hated.
That snowy morning after Grandpa died, walking with my father through the town square to the bakery that sold bagels, rye bread, and challah, a snowball hit the back of my father’s herringbone fedora in a burst of snow, the hat jumping up and landing almost jauntily tipped forward atop his head, gloved hands clapping falling eyeglasses to his chest. He shoved the glasses back onto his nose, pushed back his hat, and we turned and saw the boy who’d thrown the snowball, Ricky Rossi from my sixth-grade class, sneering baby face in a bomber hat with hanging earflaps. Pitching arm cocked as if about to hurl another as he lightly skipped backward on the snow-covered sidewalk, he shouted, Jew! The boy beside him, who I didn’t even recognize—long, waxy, potato-nosed face under a wool cap pulled low—loudly screeched Gols, and they turned to each other to laugh as if in triumph and spun and ran away. A Norman Rockwell painting, quaint New England town square in prettily falling snow, rascally boys being boys. My father, a half snarl on his face, looked at me, and I tensed, certain he was about to ask, Gols? They call you Gols? What in hell does that mean, Gols? But he turned back toward the bakery into his composed silent grief. With his fedora, thick-framed eyeglasses, and weighty angular nose, he did look pretty Jewish. I’d hardly known my grandpa. He was pretty out of it in his last years and lived in a crowded multistoried Jewish nursing home that I so hated to visit I was only occasionally forced to, though my father went nearly every weekend, often accompanied by Lexi. Grandpa, born in czarist Russia nearly a century before, in the Ukraine, had grown up among Cossacks and pogroms. What must my father have made that morning of having a snowball thrown at his head by a punk kid shouting Jew?
My father liked to make emphatic statements about character. Things like: You can’t hide not having any c
haracter, Sonny Boy. If you don’t have any, it always shows. Like a hypochondriac trying to check his own pulse but unable to find it, I anxiously dwelled on this mystery and problem of character. Standing there in that pretty snowfall, those boys having just thrown that snowball and shouted “Jew” and “Gols” and my father looking at me like that, I felt that it was me who’d been exposed as lacking this thing called character, who couldn’t even imagine, no matter how much I brooded afterward, what I could have said or done in that moment that would have demonstrated character, so that even remembering it now I feel frustrated by this sense of an insurmountable lack that seems to have a name; that name must be Gols.
“So why don’t you ever come to any of our high school reunions?” Marianne asked in one of her messages. How long would it take me to answer that. Longer than it will take to eat my sandwich.
That year of eighth grade especially, Ian Brown used to invite me to his house, hectoring me on the phone to come right over, and I’d get on my bicycle or walk. If I cut across that side of town by walking on the railroad tracks, I could make it in about forty-five minutes. The Browns lived out by Fuzzi Motors and the House of Pancakes and the synagogue, in the same kind of split-level house that we did, common in the newer neighborhoods, plasterboard walls and doors, no basements, skeletons of wooden beams resting atop concrete foundations. Ian never came over to my house on Wooded Hollow Road, painted a bright tropical blue with black wrought iron Spanish grillwork underneath the front windows, my mother’s touch. I was happy to have a friend who was as popular at school as Ian, it made me feel as if our destinies were auspiciously linked. That seemed even truer when our school system selected—or classified—both Ian and me as underachievers, meaning that if we didn’t want to be held back, we would have to attend a special summer program. Was there anything good about being an official underachiever? To my father, it was one more shaming of his son for his infuriatingly stubborn refusal to try to do better in school, one more signpost on the bad road he was always announcing in that lowing tone of doom and lament that I was ineluctably headed down: You’re going down a bad road, headed for an ineluctable bad end, Sonny Boy. That’s how I knew the word “ineluctable,” surely no other eighth grader used it as much as I did. But if being an underachiever actually meant you were somehow a superior person, which according to Ian it did, you shared a bond with a fellow underachiever, you were like members of a secret club who understood the workings of the world in a way people outside it didn’t. According to Ian, we didn’t really have to worry about the future, high scores on our SATs would get us into college no matter what. When we took the exams our natural underachievers’ intelligence would take over. I didn’t really buy that theory. I was sure my low grades were going to count against me no matter how I did on the SATs, but I kept it to myself; even when you disagreed with Ian about something minor, he’d ridicule you until you took it back. Ian’s elastic grin, the way it narrowed and stretched his greenish eyes, gave his face an ecstatically diabolical expression. But he was a handsome kid with a mop of sandy hair who could always create a circus around himself. On Halloween he came to school with his face dyed red with food coloring, carrying a jar of mayonnaise under his arm, and went around clapping his own cheeks to make the whitish goop squirt from his mouth into the paths of squealing girls and onto their clothes. Even the pretty young social studies teacher Miss Turowski came out into the hall to gape at Ian doing that, and I saw how she lifted her hands into her thick blonde hair and looked around appalled, then went back into her classroom shaking her head, sort of laughing. No one else but Ian could have come to school on Halloween as a perambulating phallus and gotten away with it like he did.
That’s some goddamned friend you picked, that Brown kid, I remember my father blurting as we drove somewhere in the Oldsmobile one day. His father’s in B’nai B’rith, I see him when he comes to meetings. He’s the one owns that toilet store out on Route 9, wears those pastel jackets and dyes his hair, a regular Liberace, that one. No wonder his kid’s a good-for-nothing, thinks it’s a joke to be forced to go to a summer program for lazy kids going goddamned nowhere, big joke that is, and you running after him every time he snaps his fingers.
And me, running after Ian Brown every time he snapped his fingers. It makes me feel sick to remember all this.
Ian’s father did own a bathroom fixtures store in a small shopping plaza on Route 9. Mrs. Brown worked as the personal secretary to the owner of a Boston liquor distillery called Old Yeoman. There’s one night that I especially remember, when Ian must have snapped his fingers and I’d gone running over, and Mrs. Brown came and sat with us at the kitchen table after they’d all had dinner. She was wearing pajamas and a thick quilted bathrobe, her hair a Phyllis Diller mess, cold cream spread like cake frosting over her face, her nose like the carrot on a snowman. She was smoking menthol cigarettes and sipping Old Yeoman mint-flavored vodka straight on the rocks.
Gleefully grinning Ian proclaimed: Ethel says you’re a sickly looking boy. He called his mother Ethel. A sickly little monkey boy. Come on Ethel, don’t deny it, and Ian rocked back in his chair as if propelled by his inhaled wheezy laughter, slapping the tabletop with his big basketball player’s hands.
Mrs. Brown wanly smirked at her son, thin eyebrow raised, opposite eye narrowed, and she exhaled a long plume of minty smoke. Her chin was trembling.
Ethel knows you got tuberculosis down in banana land when you were a baby, said Ian. And you don’t take the TB tests at school because they’re going to be positive. So you don’t even know for sure that you’re cured.
Mrs. Brown’s eyes fixed on me from inside her white mask in a way that suddenly sickened me. I should have heeded my mother’s advice and never told anybody about having tuberculosis, but to have told Ian! The TB tests took place behind a curtain. Nobody even had to know I didn’t take them because when the nurse looked at my medical record, it informed her that my skin would react with a positive.
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