I was the only one Bert ever hit. With my mother and sister, it was insults, bullying, berating, derision. But he did more harm to them than to me. Oh yes he did, I think.
One snowy evening almost exactly three years ago now, after one of those rushed trips to visit Mamita when I was up from Mexico for a few weeks, I splurged on the Acela back to New York, hoping to arrive in time for a book presentation at NYU. José Borgini, a Mexican writer I knew, had invited me, along with a couple of other writers, to talk about his novel, now out in English translation. It was right around here, not that far past Route 128, that snow started to fall pretty heavily, but that wasn’t why the train came to a halt. A teenage boy had committed suicide by throwing himself in front of the Acela’s sleek locomotive. Soon I saw rescue workers and police and overheard a conductor standing on the platform between cars, snow blowing in around his legs, say into his walkie-talkie that it was going to be a long delay because the boy’s jeans were stuck, or maybe he said frozen, to the iced-over nose of the locomotive. The police forensic unit had to get the jeans off in a way that preserved them as evidence, and a special fluid and applicator had been sent for. Flashing red lights suffused the snow and ice-laced window, turning it into a nearly translucent slice of intricately veined living tissue. An image from one of José Martí’s New York City crónicas came to me: Martí standing under the elevated tracks after a blizzard as blood drizzles and drips down through the cindery air onto the snow around him, some onto his bowler hat and the shoulders of his overcoat, and he realizes that a man has thrown himself in front of the train that just roared past overhead. I used it in The House of Pain, that incident. Martí is walking along, musing on his miserable marriage, blaming his wife, and it happens, blood like red rain on snow. Outside the stopped train, as afternoon turned to evening, the snow kept falling, darkly tumbling past the lit-up windows of houses with backyards abutting the railroad tracks. I resigned myself to missing Borgini’s book presentation. So many times when I was a boy I’d walked on the railroad tracks of my town, often long past nightfall, passing unnoticed behind the backyards of houses just like those. I could walk a long way on one rail, putting one foot in front of the other, without falling off. Had the boy who committed suicide lived in one of those houses, and when he heard the first still-far-off blast of the train’s horn, had he crossed his backyard to the tracks? I remembered the couple of boys in my high school class who’d committed suicide and the three who’d died of heroin overdoses, but I especially found myself thinking about Brian Cavanaugh, whom we’d called Space. During a snowball fight alongside the railroad tracks, Space’s little brother lost his footing and stumbled or slid into the path of an oncoming commuter train and was killed. Space, still in elementary school at St. Joe’s, was there and witnessed it. Everyone in high school who’d previously gone to school with Space at St. Joseph’s, including Marianne, used to say that he’d drastically changed after his brother’s death. That he went from being an A student altar boy to being the kind of kid who, like me, didn’t try in school at all. But Space also became much more of a caustic rebel than I ever was. Even Ian Brown used to steer clear of his fearless kamikaze sarcasm.
Stepping out of South Station onto Atlantic Avenue, I head over, like I almost always do after arriving in Boston by train, to the Congress Street Bridge. My footsteps always lead me there. A cold wind is blowing in off the harbor, but it’s only a couple blocks away. I’m thinking about Space and the friendship we had in the tenth grade. Space’s father, George Cavanaugh, was a banker in Boston and supposedly when he was drunk at night he’d even say, It should have been you, trying to save your little brother, who fell in front of the train, but all you did was watch. Notoriously mean fathers, meaner than anybody else’s, that’s what linked me to Space, like a pact between us whose terms didn’t need spelling out. Everyone knew about “George” and “Bert” and their distinct personalities, Space’s father’s clenched fury and disparaging, thin acid voice that his son was so good at imitating, mine with his snarling mockery, shouting, and violent rages. Our fathers hated us, and we publicly hated them back, flaunting our mix of martyrdom and heroism. Every day Space and I came to school with some new hilariously horrifying or just horrifying story to tell. On some school nights, in the a.m. hours, I used to get up from my bed, sneak out of the house, and run—how tirelessly and swiftly I could run!—through the silent dark streets to Space’s house. Space always let me in through the back door, and we’d hang out in his basement, drinking beer he’d snitched from his father and chilled in their meat freezer. Sometimes we’d sip straight gin, smoke pot, and blow the smoke out a window, and we’d stretch out on the old sofas down there, hardly talking to each other, listening in our introspective complicit stupors to records with the volume low. Father, Yes son, I want to kill you, mother … arrrrrRRRR! Space leaning forward to lift the stylus and play that song again, over and over we listened to it, silently or just above a whisper mouthing Jim Morrison’s words and anguished scream, grimacing and gesticulating. After two hours or so, I’d go home, sneak back into bed before my father woke for work.
The Congress Street Bridge looks out on the Boston Tea Party ship wharf where, in the spring of my senior year of high school and into that first Boston Bicentennial summer, I had an unlikely job as a tour guide. Unlikely because out of all the local boys who would have given anything for that job, why me? But no one else had a Mamita like mine, always exhorting: Don’t forget, you’re Guatemalan too. Maybe not the most helpful advice for growing up in a town like ours, but I’d responded by becoming an obsessed American Revolution nerd. It was the best thing my mother could have done, I know now, all her reminding that I was “Guatemalan too” embedding in me the map of an escape route into my own future. Even back then, in my attempt to counter it, look what it led to, an ineluctable bad fate turned evitable, because I doubt I would have gotten into a respectable college without my job on the Boston Tea Party ship. The summer after junior year of high school I’d worked as a counselor at the YMCA day camp in our town, where Scott O’Donnell was head counselor; what none of us knew was that our boss, Scott, was also the weekend tour guide at the recently opened Boston Tea Party Ship and Museum, with its restored brig, the Beaver II. We thought he’d grown those muttonchop sideburns to look like John Lennon or in memory of Duane Allman, not to play the historical part of Captain Hezekiah Coffin, master of the original Beaver. One rainy day, for a screening of the Disney version of Johnny Tremain, I got to introduce the film and explain the Sons of Liberty to the campers. Later that fall, Scott picked me up at home in his car and we went to Friendly’s for ice-cream sundaes. He told me the story of how some years before he’d befriended one of the Beaver II’s three businessman owners at a historical reenactment fair and been drafted into their enterprise as a Boston Tea Party expert, though he really wasn’t one. In college he’d majored in psychology, and so he’d put in a lot of time in libraries and talking to historians, cramming to turn himself into Captain Hezekiah Coffin II. Now, with the first official Boston Bicentennial summer looming and the number of visitors picking up, he explained, he was going to be the on-site manager of the ship and museum, and his bosses had decided that by spring they’d need a full-time tour guide too. An outgoing and enthusiastic kid like you, Johnny Tremain, that was the first time he ever called me that. It was a perfect spring term senior year work-study project. I was even written up in the town newspaper: local teen is bicentennial son of liberty on boston tea party ship. Mamita and I drove into town and bought a dozen copies so that we could mail clippings to the admissions offices of every college I’d applied to.
But I didn’t actually play a Son of Liberty tour guide. I wore the costume of one of Captain Coffin’s seamen, an eighteenth-century Jack Tar, red-striped jersey, white canvas pants that fluttered loudly around my legs in harbor winds, a little waistcoat like organ-grinders dress their monkeys in, a funny black hat, too, square crown and narrow brim, t
hat by the end of that summer I’d have to smoosh down hard over my wild bushy ’fro. Six days a week, I’d carry out my morning round of chores, mop the deck, set out the tea chests, shimmy out onto the bowsprit, and, holding on with legs clamped tight over the notoriously crappy harbor water, reach forward to undo the ties around the furled jib, then wriggle back down onto the foredeck to hoist the pointed sail. I’d climb the ship’s rigging, hold on to a rung, and lean out, hand cupped to my mouth to shout: Thar she blow-ow-ow-ows! Down below on deck, tourists from all over the world would raise their cameras; if only I could see one of those pictures now. I especially liked to sit up on the crow’s nest, gazing out past Fort Point Channel and the swing bridge. Deer Island was out there, where at the end of King Philip’s War the colonists had imprisoned hundreds of Wampanoag, most of whom perished during that winter of 1675–76. The notorious disaster of the Deer Island sewage station, overflowing with untreated crap, was a prime reason the harbor was so polluted, Chief Metacom’s revenge. From the Boston Harbor nautical map hanging in Captain Coffin’s office I knew about Wreck Rock, Hull Gut, and Hangman Island, cool names, I thought, for rock bands.
So at the end of that summer, I was leaving home for good to start my freshman year at Broener College. What was that going to change? I was desperate for it to change everything. That’s probably what I mostly thought and fantasized about, gazing out over the harbor.
Gentle, hulking Captain Hezekiah Coffin II, coming out on deck and seeing me up on the crow’s nest again, would call up: You come down from there, now, Johnny Tremain. From the way he’d train his pale grey eyes on my hair, that anxious glitter, I could tell he couldn’t bring himself to give me the order to cut it, that as much as he wanted to, he wanted also to respect his young employee’s individual right to grow an ever-expanding bush atop his head.
There was always a small pile of false teeth on top of my father’s bedroom bureau, loose nuggets in different ivory hues that he probably found in his pockets when he came home from work and that he’d take out and leave there. I’d never found a use for them until those weeks on the Beaver II, when I carried a handful of those teeth around in a pocket of my Jack Tar trousers, and some ketchup packets too. On his long Atlantic crossings, Jack Tar mostly ate hardtack, I’d inform the visitors jammed into the cramped area below deck during the shipboard tours I gave three, four, sometimes even more times a day. As much as Scott O’Donnell insisted on the ideal of historical authenticity, actual historical authenticity was in pretty short supply onboard the Beaver II. But I did always have tasteless hardtack to hand out to children. Crunch-crunch, they’d screw up their faces, going: Yuck! And I’d announce: History brought to life! Jack Tar sucked on lemons and limes to protect against the scurvy, but his shipboard supply—here, to bring a little drama to it, I’d pause and slowly look around before nearly shouting—always ran out! Describing the symptoms of scurvy, rotting bloody gums, falling teeth, I’d pantomime lifting my hands to my disintegrating mouth and with a gesture of tragic despair, hold out cupped handfuls of invisible oral gore. But what if I could find a way to furtively secrete some false teeth into my mouth along with some squirts of ketchup and at the climactic moment pretend to bloody-gummily exclaim, Shh-kahby! and spit the teeth and ketchup slurp into my hands? Just imagining it ignited mad giggling. Whenever I thought the moment had arrived for me to slip away, fists deep in my pockets clasping teeth and ketchup packets, to quickly prepare my performance, I could never bring myself to go through with it, I always chickened out. Through that hot, steamy bicentennial summer they came pouring down the ramp onto the Beaver II, for many tourists, especially patriotic pilgrims, the climactic stop of their forced Freedom Trail marches, the sacred site where the cadres of the American underground resistance had staged their destructive carnival riot, striking the revolution’s first blow. All those usually-so-nice-seeming heartland moms and dads with sore Freedom Trail feet, exhausted, sweaty, thirsty, fed up with their bored, restless children, glad to be out of the sun as they crowded below deck into the briny mugginess to gather in front of the fo’c’sle, rousing themselves to listen to their rather exotic-looking teenaged tour guide deliver his spiel. Except often there would be at least one person in the bunch, usually an ordinary-seeming Freedom Trail Dad, who even before I got started would launch into a full-throated speech about how what this country needs is another Tea Party, the tyranny of the federal government, unfair taxation, why should their own earnings pay for welfare mothers’ vacations in Las Vegas and the Bahamas, that’s not what the Sons of Liberty fought for, blah, blah, blah, at least some of the men and even women usually responding, boisterously even: Well said! Hear hear! Huzzah! in imitation of what they thought were colonial Boston accents. This seemed to happen more and more as the summer went on, as if this form of vehement, supposedly patriotic speech-giving was becoming a fad out there, like the “streaking” craze was among people my own age. Many had driven halfway across the continent or farther on long-awaited summer vacations to have a sweet spot moment like this aboard the Boston Tea Party ship. So it was hard to imagine them much appreciating a skinny, monkey-faced boy with a big wild ’fro shouting about scurvy and holding out his hands filled with teeth and red slime. That freak of a tour guide you have working, you know what he did, he … Even Scott O’Donnell, never mind the owners, would have considered that just too inexcusably weird and would have felt forced to fire me. The last thing I wanted was to be stuck at home the rest of the summer, waiting to leave for college. Instead, every day I dutifully chattered: Here’s the fo’c’sle, folks. In stormy, icy seas, this is where the crew slept, jammed into these narrow bunks shoulder to shoulder like unwashed stinky, hairy human popsicles in a freezer tray! I hadn’t found that description in any maritime history book, I’d made it up myself. The more alert children and teenage girls reliably responded: Ick, gross. I’d lead them back to the cushy, antique-furnished captain’s quarters. Although Captain Hezekiah Coffin was a Nantucket Quaker, went this memorized speech, like the Beaver’s owners, too, the Rotches, who illegally snuck African slaves into their ship’s crews to lower wage costs, Captain Coffin was most cool to the Sons of Liberty. Scott O’Donnell had taught me to derisively draw out those words: “most cool.” Then I’d indignantly shout: Captain Coffin actually sympathized with the British Crown!
About fifteen years ago now, when my first novel was published, I came to Boston to give my first-ever bookstore reading, and the next morning I received a phone call from my book’s publicist telling me that a reporter from the Globe wanted to talk to me, in person. The novel had been featured on the front page of the newspaper’s Sunday Arts section. And now, a newspaper profile, that was a first too. The publicist was excited and I was too. I suggested that the reporter and I meet right here where I’m standing now, on the Congress Street Bridge, that way I’d be able to gesture at the Tea Party ship and say, During my senior year in high school and on into that bicentennial summer, I worked here as a tour guide. I used to especially like to sit up on that crow’s nest. The publicist thought it was a good promotional idea to stress my local roots. It was a chilly, overcast April afternoon, and I walked over in my black jeans and leather jacket, listening, I remember, to Jane’s Addiction on my Walkman. Fred Tarrell was the reporter’s name. He arrived at the bridge before me and was standing by the rail overlooking the ship. He looked around sixty, about my height, and he was wearing a beige raincoat that accented the slump of his shoulders, short curly white hair, small gray mustache, wide-apart blue-gray eyes, large head, cetacean almost. Fred Tarrell said hello, spoke my name without smiling, shook hands with a quick squeeze. The overcast sky, the reporter’s unexpected lack of warmth, a premonition maybe, made me think of spies in Cold War movies who arrange a rendezvous on a bridge to exchange information after which they depart in opposite directions, except one spy walks a few blocks and is murdered.
The reporter didn’t congratulate me on my novel or attempt any ba
nter. He said, I’m sorry to put you on the spot like this, Francesco, but it’s best I get to the point. We received a fax at the newspaper that makes a serious allegation we feel obligated to follow up on. Do you know a woman named Lana Gatto?
Yes, we went to high school together, I answered, but I haven’t seen or heard from Lana in years. I felt apprehensive but also mystified. Fred Tarrell spoke the name of the high school, and I said, That’s right. But what did Lana Gatto, the faded memory of that teenage girl, mean to me? Here I was, having just published my first novel, reviewed on the cover of Sunday’s Arts section of Fred Tarrell’s newspaper, the large photo of my face on that page now serving as birdcage liner and laid over floors for puppies to pee on all over New England, and now here was Mr. Fred Tarrell of the Globe asking about Lana Gatto, who I hadn’t seen even once in seventeen years.
But the mention of Lana Gatto evoked what it always does, not primarily a memory of Lana herself but of an autumn Saturday afternoon of sophomore year when I found myself walking with Marianne Lucas and Lana across our high school football field after a varsity game toward the steep, grass-covered hill that our high school sat atop, looking out over the town. Marianne and Lana were singing “Come Together”—they knew all the words—in unison flipping their hands outward from the wrists and snapping their fingers to the abrupt beats. I felt incredibly happy to be there, included in their cool girlfriend intimacy as they sang that song, and I thought something like: This is what being a teenager is. Or: I can’t believe this is me, walking across the football field with these two girls.
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