“What’s wrong?”
“I think I’m going to be sick.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry.”
She covered her face, drew up her knees, and put her head down.
“It’s not you.”
She shrank, into the bedside, into the rug, into wherever she needed to go, and disappeared. For a moment the room seemed completely dark, like between the scenes on a stage, and I waited for something to limp or crawl out from an even darker place and take that space, draw attention to itself, call for light. I waited. Nothing came. Then out of the quasi void.
“Hey?”
“Yes.”
“Are you angry?”
“No, Sally.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. I love you, Sally.”
I saw a horse collar in my mind, and then I saw it in the dark room, descending in slow motion, spinning as it did. It dropped on her girl shoulders. I could hear its weight in her voice.
“I love you, too.”
She took one hand from her face and in the dark searched for mine. She found it, slipped hers in between it and the rug, not squeezing, but waiting for hers to be held. I did—her little hand in my already giant one. She squeezed back as best she could and sighed long, almost inaudibly, as though she wanted to dispel what little of me she’d inhaled, but discreetly, so as not to let me know.
“I’m Natalie.”
“Hello, Natalie.”
“Do you want to get to know me better?”
“Sure.”
“Here is twenty-five. Private is fifty.”
I couldn’t get a bead on her. She wore big hoop earrings and her hair was piled on top of her head. It ended in a ponytail tied off with a black bandanna. She’d just painted on a lot of blue mascara and black eyeliner. The makeup glowed wet. She wore a leather skirt, leather biker jacket. I don’t think she had anything on underneath them. Her body smelled like smoke and deodorant and Oreo cookies. Someone was working the Fresnels—opening and closing the shutters, toggling between the differently gelled lights.
“Hello, Natalie.”
“You already said that.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Are you baked?”
“No.”
“You look baked.”
“I’m detached.”
“That’s a good one. I’ll have to use that someday.” She popped the gum in her mouth, sending a blast of Juicy Fruit at me. I remember thinking that I liked Natalie and that I thought she was pretty.
“So what do you want to do?”
“I want to get you out of here.”
“I don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“I’m not a hooker.”
“I know that. That’s not what I meant.”
“Good. But I don’t date customers anyway. You’re cute, though. You seem sweet.”
“I’m not a customer.”
She scowled, drew back, then let it go. She smiled again, vacantly.
I pressed. “Don’t you want to stop?”
Natalie crushed her smile into a nasty little pucker and turned away from me.
“What’s wrong?”
“Don’t waste my time.”
“I’m not . . .”
She cocked her head to the side and barked, “You think you’re better than me?”
“No.”
“Then don’t waste my time.”
“I didn’t mean anything bad.”
“Go save someone else’s world, faggot.”
I must have missed the signal, but the two football rejects started over. I went to stand, but a third, surprisingly enough because he was enormous, had sneaked up behind me and dropped his hands on my shoulders and held me still until his partners got to us. I heard his voice, high pitched, come from way over my head.
“Is he bothering you?”
I raised an eyebrow to her in an appeal for her to remember what she’d just said to me.
“Yeah.”
They picked me up—one by the neck, the other two by each leg—lifted me over their heads and began the bum’s rush. The music continued, as did Diana, who was down to a terry cloth G-string. It was stuffed with bills. She was upside down, clinging to the steel pole in the center stage. Shake was walking hand in hand with the Egyptian princess toward the back. Gavin was engaged in a tug-of-war with the bartender over a can of smuggled beer.
They opened the door with my head and walked me down the street, toward the alley, still in the air. When we reached Shake’s car, they threw me into the swirl of wind and snow. I tried to right myself—catlike—but I landed headfirst on the windshield. Both cracked. Inside, Brian was having a bad trip. He was writhing in the back seat, covered in puke. It took a while for the sound of my impact to reach him. When he finally did hear, he looked up at me through the glass. A look of messianic terror spread across his face. Later, much later, he would tell me that I had appeared like some demon moth on the windshield—splattered—but now he pointed and screamed. It was muted to me outside the car, in the loud wind.
I slid off the hood, found my feet, and walked toward the bouncers. They were almost at the door. I called to them.
“Excuse me!”
The sneaky one turned. He shook his head and pointed back down the street.
“Excuse me,” I continued toward them. “I left my coat inside.”
They ignored me and went in. The hooker came out of the neighboring club with another guy—big, white, going to fat, and strangely sweaty. The snow had taken hold on the ground. He slipped a little and she caught him. Then they both saw me. He snickered.
“Season’s greetings, sucker.”
She slapped his arm as if to shame him. I kept heading to the Eye. They intercepted me in the street, ten yards from the door.
“Sss—baby, they fucked you up!”
She cringed as though she’d never seen blood before. He craned his neck, making his jowls collect against each other. He squinted and shook his head.
“Chief, you’d better get that taken care of.”
“Fuck you.” I stepped to them, closing the distance to an arm’s length. I saw my blood on the snow.
“Whoa, chief,” he leaned away. “You don’t know who you’re fucking with.”
When I hit him in the stomach, he gagged and crumpled. When I hit him in the head, he made no sound, not even his big body landing on the street. She screamed. It must have been all the snow muffling everything that kept most of the sound from me because even the collective roars of the V-8s in the Ford LTDs seemed quiet. Metro cops, the worst. I don’t think they turned on the sirens, but the rollers were flashing and their red and blue tainted the new snow. The high beams were flashing, too. They spotlit the fat man, who had made it to his knees. The hooker, now a good samaritan, was pointing at me, screaming, “Him! Him!” The cops got out of their cars, grasping their sticks. Their radios squawked and beeped and spat fuzzy nonsense. The door of the Eye remained closed. And like my mother had taught me, as it had been taught to her, I kept my head down. I walked toward the door with my head down, and so the blood from my brow dripped in front of me, and like a carrot on a stick led me on.
When I picture the Charles Street Jail, the image in my mind is always wrong. I see the bridge. If you look at it from the south, from the drugstore when you come out after buying cigarettes, or from one of the paths you can run on along the river, you see the train stop on the big metal and concrete bridge—the Red Line bound for Quincy, bound for Alewife. It obscures the hospital—Mass General—across the street. And Buzzy’s Roast Beef is below it, where you can park on the sidewalk and get a late-night sandwich when you’re high. I can’t see the jail—the outside, anyway—it’s set back, off the main drag. I don’t remember if you can see it from anywhere.
Pinky had one of those faces pocked by years of junk and old acne scars. He was jaundiced—yellow eyeballs, yellow skin, and dirty, nicotine-gray hair. He made
me think of a twisted old belt. He was shirtless, struggling on the toilet across from me. He’d been watching me. He had blue eyes. They were huge and unblinking as though he’d been on speed forever.
“Harder and harder to pinch one off.”
“Fuck, man,” barked someone I couldn’t see but who sounded very evil. “You been eatin’ poison?”
Pinky still stared at me.
“Ray’s shit don’t stink—you know, little brother.”
He stood, flushed, and slid his camouflage pants up. “I’ll get back to that later.” He zipped, doing a little jump at the end as though he’d torqued himself off the ground. “Rough night, little brother?”
“Tchh!” Ray sucked his teeth hard and walked into my view. He was old, too, but not nearly as worn as Pinky. He was squat, bald, and light skinned. He had washed-out hazel eyes, a hippolike nose, and an enormous gap between his upper bicuspids. He stuck his tongue through it and snapped off a louder “Tchh!”
He was above me, and I realized that I was on the floor, leaning against the cinder-block wall. It was cold, but it felt strangely soothing. I thought some ribs might be broken. He bent at the waist, looked me over, and turned away to Pinky.
“Fucked that nigger up right. Fucked him up good.”
Pinky shuffled over. “Cops do that to you?”
I nodded.
“You’re a good-lookin’ kid under all that mess.” He crunched up his face and hissed as though he was in pain. Everything but his eyes collapsed. I went to touch my head and saw my hand as it went past my eyes. The top segment of my ring finger was pointing the wrong way. It started to hurt. I touched my forehead. It felt like one scab.
“You’re a good-lookin’ kid,” he repeated. “You’ll do all right.” He shuffled over to Ray, who was now leaning against the bars. Ray lit a cigarette and offered one to Pinky, who took the smoke but refused the light. He looked across the hall at the blank, white cinder-block wall. He stared at it for a moment, then turned for a light. “Mornin’ soon.” He turned to me and exhaled. I wanted a cigarette. “Hang in there, kid—you’ll be okay.”
I kept looking around the cell—the bars, the toilet, the cinder blocks, Pinky and Ray. It wasn’t my first time in a tank, but that didn’t seem to matter. And I remembered my missing coat and wondered whether Gavin or Shake had gotten it. And then I remembered having worn a sweater, a black wool one—like a sailor’s—but it was gone. What I had left was my thermal shirt. It was bloody and nearly torn off. I went back to the bars and then the toilet and the wall and the men, scanning the scene again and again. And I tried to spin it—turn it over in my mind. Then for an instant I thought that the otherness of the objects and the men was a good thing, and that I hadn’t become inured. I shook that notion off and I kept on trying to spin it, flip the image over and over in my head, but it still kept coming up wrong.
Ray snapped his tongue through his teeth again. “Don’t bother talkin’ to him. He ain’t goin’ nowhere—shit—you just trying to butter him up and roll him over.” He pinched the cigarette and pointed it at me, then at the wall and perhaps the world outside.
“Headstrong niggers these days don’t know shit. He ain’t goin’ nowhere.” He took another deep drag. I watched him blow it out through his big nostrils.
“What, nigger, you want something?”
There was a bench next to me attached to the wall. I used it to press myself up, and I managed to sit on it. Ray shook his head and threw his butt in my direction.
“Nigger thinks he’s cute.”
I straightened myself on the bench, flattened my back against the cold stone, and, staring back at the squat yellow man, now scratching his thick knuckles, said, “I’m not a nigger.”
The F booms a few blocks away from the southeast as it comes up from underground. I scan the empty night. No audience up here, only me. There shouldn’t be any ironies when you narrate to yourself, no secret distances or disconnects, prophecies or deep levels of interiority: And I will be true to the boy who is me. . . I’m surprised I never realized that while we were being groomed to become leaders of the next great enlightenment—student-athletes, scholar-artists, and philosopher-kings—we were training ourselves to be Wino Henries, Hobo Bobs, and Boxcar Willies. No true idealist has a solid backup plan. A train, a train; to be on a train. To tramp about with a nation sack and guitar and the bitter bitter past on your ass. With rushing air and iron wheels to accompany your blues. Suicide or flight. Suicide and flight. Suicide in flight. I think, though, that it would be hard to be a twenty-first-century hobo, especially one who was badly injured. I should’ve been born somewhere else, sometime else, when I could walk and ride the rails in any direction. But the F only runs from Queens to Coney Island and perhaps not even the blues could sing of or heal the damage incurred in a failed escape, a botched suicide—broke limbed, frozen, and mute. And that would matter, being unable to sing but still remembering—riding the F inbound and out.
I get up and walk to the back of the building. There’s a three-foot length of electrical conduit and an Astroturf mat. Next to it is a bucket of golf balls and Marco’s newest driver. He’s set up to shoot out at the river, although it would take a drive of well over a thousand yards, carrying over blocks of brownstones, parked cars, and pedestrians to reach it. I pick up the club and set up on the mat. I like to stand tall at address and get my hands as far away from my body as I can at the top of my backswing. I let it go. The club head whistles down and around and over and up. I stand tall again in my follow-through and bring the club back down in front of me. I wonder if Marco keeps track of how many windows he’s shattered.
I put the club down, pick up the conduit, and rest it on my shoulder. Gavin got The Science of Hitting for his fourteenth birthday. I was just getting to know him and we’d meet in the park with only a bat and the book and take turns studying each other’s swings, making sure the other was doing exactly what Williams said. “He was a monster,” Gavin told me the first time, bat behind his left ear, uncoiled in his follow-through, watching the arc of his imaginary blast. “He was a monster of obsession, discipline, and knowledge.” I turn on an inside fastball and send it off into the night sky. In my mind I can’t stop it. I’ve knocked it clear off the planet, only to be caught by some ionospheric netting. I swing again—another blast. You blew it. You threw away a good one. I turn the bat into a guitar and start strumming. I try to make it a song—a blues song. I hum random notes, hoping something in the night sky will hear it, structure it, and sing it back. Nothing comes. I wave one hand in the air, fingers spread, trolling the night for a song: “Hmmm-hmmm, hmmm-hmmmm . . . Trains are gone . . . hmmm-hmmm, hmmm-hmmmm . . . Baseball is, too . . . hmmm-hmmm, hmmm-hmm-hmm . . . But it’s all right . . . hmm-hmmm, hmm-hmm . . . I ain’t blue . . .” Then, “You better come on, in my kitchen. It’s gonna be rainin’ outdoors.” It’s not my song. But it’s a song nonetheless—good enough for now. I’m sure Marco is passed out on the couch. I go back inside.
Thomas is awake and seems agitated. He’s near the surface, pivoting on an invisible vertical axis with aggressive fin flicks. I’ve seen him do this before, usually late at night when one of the boys has to be put back to sleep after a nightmare. I’d lie, depending on who it was, on the top or bottom bunk. The hallway light was always on for them, and Thomas would flick left and right in its glow. I’d watch that fish. I’d listen to the boys’ breaths. None of them possessed the language to describe what had made them shoot out of bed crying, or twitch, wide-eyed under water. C or X, panting, quieting, then wiping his eyes and lying back down, without determining whether it had been a noise or a shadow. Neither boy speaking words: Neither boy believing that words—anyone’s—could unburden him of his shapeless and seemingly nameless fears. And so I would stay until I heard his soft snores, wait for them to deepen, and imagine that the fish’s scales were reflective and luminous and spread light all around the dark little room.
5
It’s a stran
ge thing to go through life as a social experiment, especially when the ones who conceived the experiment, the visionaries with sight of the end, with an understanding of the means, are all gone. No more DuBois. No more Locke. No more Gandhi. No more King. No more groovy social theorists or hippies or activists or anthems.
For some reason I believed that when someone sang about love, that’s what they were singing about. I thought that I was a poet when I was younger—that I was deep. Perhaps I’d always been the one who’d been too fixed, too literal, and missed out on all the subtleties one could mine a work of art for—to get laid, to get paid. That if you quoted someone, or turned on the right song, with the lights just so, money could change hands or clothes could come off. Perhaps that’s why Sally balled the first guy she met after me. And Sally wasn’t a tart, wasn’t a denizen of casual sex. I’d watched her regard us, consider forever with me, and say to herself, “No.”
It’s a strange thing to go through life as a social experiment. If you were born of ideas, then all you have are ideas. Sitting on the floor of some dark room playing “Lay Lady Lay.” Strum-plucking my guitar, singing softly. Wondering when the world would begin. I could never get close enough. Not with his words, not with mine. I used to think that the failure was hers. Now, I think, perhaps it’s mine. There’s a world where young girls blush and sigh when they are touched, and it may be that it is good and quiet.
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