Funeral Platter

by Greg Ames

  Beeping the truck’s horn and yelling out the open window, he fishtailed into the parking lot. After they wheeled the man into the emergency room, James parked the truck on the street and killed the lights. We stared out the windshield, watching the snow fall and listening to each other breathe.

  “If it’s a choice between letting him die or moving him,” he said, “you move him.”

  It sounded like he was rehearsing his speech to McCloskey. We were not supposed to take the truck out of our jurisdiction—ever.

  “Right,” I said. “The guy stops breathing, us moving him is the least of his problems.”

  “You can’t hurt him worse than dead.”

  Later we heard that the man had pulled through his surgery, and we were famous for a day. Some of the homeless sneered when they saw us shoveling—“Look out, it’s the good Samaritans”—but James ignored them, and I followed his lead. We cleared a walkway and continued on, business as usual, and I thought about how James had acted the night before, with no concern for lawsuits or prevailing wisdom. He just hit the gas, ignored all traffic signals, and saved a man’s life.

  We all took abuse for doing a job that nobody in his right mind would want, but as one of the few Caucasians on foot patrol I took an extra dose of scorn.

  “White boy, why you here?

  Urban renewal? Naw, man:

  Negro removal.”

  Only James seemed unaffected by taunts and slurs. Day after day, I worked beside him and ate with him at Burger King and Pizza Hut, but he was one of the most private men I’d ever met. When the other guys talked about football, food, and women, James wouldn’t join in. I knew nothing about his life except that he had a daughter. I was just a coworker and this was just a job he did to keep the electricity on.

  walked five miles today

  trash swirling on street corners

  same as yesterday

  James’s other signature phrase was “Ain’t got nothing to do with me.” He said it so often, in all situations, that I sometimes tried to get him to say something else just for variety’s sake. Once, on a warm day in late March, when drops of rain were hitting the windshield, I said, “You think it’s gonna rain today, James?” thinking I’d get him to laugh and call me a fool.

  But he just shrugged and said, “Ain’t got nothing to do with me.”

  I pushed the issue. “But what are the chances of precipitation today, would you say? Fifty percent?”

  He stared dead ahead through the wet windshield. “Ain’t got nothing to do with me.”

  At the time I decided he was speaking philosophically, that in James’s view only God had dominion over the world. Made sense. Of course a man shouldn’t try to control what was not in his power to control. It occurs to me now, though, that he probably went home that night and said to his wife that rain was smacking the windshield clear as day and he’s stuck with some crazy-ass white boy asking if it’s going to rain.

  We never learned his wife’s name. He refused to speak it in front of us. None of us had earned that privilege.

  We spent a lot of time together in the truck. A rare smile sometimes curled at the corners of his lips, even when he tried to suppress it. Once, he burst out laughing when I frolicked across the street, carrying two trash bags in each gloved hand. Slyness burned beneath his silence, but the answer to most of my questions was always the same. “That ain’t got nothing to do with me.”

  I have since wondered if I could have gotten any closer to him—that is, if I didn’t have such a crap work ethic, or if I didn’t reek of beer in the morning. Befriending me wasn’t worth his while, and I’m sure he knew, long before I did, that I wouldn’t last longer than two years at that job. He had seen my type before. But it wasn’t just me. James refused to make friends with anyone there, even though he’d been on the job a decade or more. That independence made him seem more powerful than any of us, McCloskey included.

  On the day I wrote poems for Milana, I asked James to stop at the liquor store. “I’m having a little get-together at my place tonight,” I told him. “Nothing special. You should stop by. Milana would like to meet you.”

  “Go on in the store,” he said, taking off his sunglasses and rubbing his eyes.

  “Really, you’re invited,” I said. “We’d love to see you there.”

  James looked through the windshield.

  I ran into the store and bought two handles of vodka and a fifth of rum.

  Dolores cried out:

  Where have you gone, my sister?

  We’re in Chicago.

  “I was out on the street the other day, looking for you,” McCloskey said in the shop. “Did you go into the mall for something?” He stood by the time clock and manipulated his face into a smile. “You can tell me. A lot of them do it.”

  “I was in Friday’s,” I said, pretty sure he already knew the answer. “I drank a beer.”

  He nodded. “You’re an honest kid,” he said, displaying what passed for a smile, a toothy gash overruled by hostile eyes. “Who knows? Stick around here long enough, you might have my job when I become executive director.”

  “Hmpf,” I said.

  “And James drinks on the job too, right?” McCloskey said, nodding his head to invite agreement. “Hell, I don’t care. Who wouldn’t? He does, right?”

  “Nope,” I said. “Never.”

  “Hah. Loyal, too. Wouldn’t you like to get off the street, son? Get inside with a better class of people? I can put a word in for you.”

  “James doesn’t drink on the job. Ever.”

  “So much better to be inside where it’s warm.” Crew cut, muscular neck. A tyrant in a clearance rack suit. “Find you a desk and a comfortable chair.”

  “That ain’t got nothing to do with me.” I gave him a huge fake smile that matched his own. “And by the way, I quit.”

  “Excuse me?” he said.

  “I quit.”

  He laughed in my face. “You serious?”

  “Dead serious.”

  Both hands on his stomach, McCloskey let out the guffaw of a hammy thespian. “What a terrible loss to the company. How will we ever continue without you? Street sweepers are so hard to train.”

  Tareq passed behind me, a stealthy shadow moving along the wall. He couldn’t escape McCloskey’s gaze, however. “Hey! New haircut, new attitude, huh, Tareq? Is that a fade? Can’t wait to see you out there on the street today with that new fade. Bet you’ll work twice as hard, huh?”

  Before I punched out, I took one last ride to the dump with my partner. We had to dispose of a broken toilet from the shop. I told him I wouldn’t be riding shotgun anymore. Getting away from McCloskey would be a nice change, I said. He was such a racist asshole.

  James said nothing. Half an hour later, he parked outside the shop and left the engine running.

  “Hey, you should quit, too,” I said. “That’ll show him. Really, you could do so much better than this. You should be his boss.”

  James gave me a look that was different from his usual head shaking, a look that implied I really was incurably insane, that my decisions had nothing to do with him.

  “You going, or what?” he said.

  My shift was over.

  We shook hands. His utility gloves were on the dash, mine in my back pocket.

  “See you soon,” I said, believing it.

  That night Milana and a half dozen of her dancer friends congregated in the kitchen while my beer-gulping buddies watched the hockey playoffs in the living room. Bottom lips pooched out like apes, they spat tobacco juice into empty beer cans and shook their fists at the TV screen. Though I’d known it would be risky mixing Milana’s friends with mine, this was worse than I’d imagined. My buddies were beer-bloated ex-jocks. They were really intimidated by Milana’s artsy-fartsy friends. I wondered what James would have thought of this divided assemblage: men in one room watching ice hockey, women in the other room talking about the movement of their bodies. Really I knew what he’d have
thought, knew the exact three words he’d have used: White folks crazy. And I had to agree with him. There was something wrong with us.

  All night long I moved from kitchen to living room, an emissary bringing the news from one world to another. At some point in the evening Milana found the notepad with my haiku in it and showed it to her friends. I heard the girls read each poem aloud and laugh, and then they cheered when I entered the kitchen. I couldn’t tell if they were mocking me or not. Secretly I was proud of my work. I had never written a single poem before that day, and now I was the author of thirty-one. Maybe I would self-publish a chapbook and dedicate it to Milana. Or even to her ex-boyfriend Steven, who had done nothing to warrant my earlier disdain. I was just a jealous prick who envied and despised all Milana’s other lovers, past and future.

  It was a hot night. A dusty metal fan rattled on high speed in the open kitchen window. A stick of sandalwood incense burned a tear-shaped groove into the sill. The floor was sticky from spilled beer, but nobody cared. The dancers got drunker and drunker in the kitchen and discussed Rauschenberg and Merce Cunningham, “phrasing” and “partnering” and other dance topics alien to me, and I nodded my head and pretended to know what they were talking about. Then I joined the grunting apes in the other room and went wild for a bench-clearing brawl in the third period.

  When the doorbell rang, I hoped briefly that it was James. I had a vision of him hanging out in the kitchen, standing a foot taller than the girls, holding a rum-and-Coke in his hand and disarming them all with his smile. I answered the door, ready to welcome in the guest of honor, but it was a pizza-delivery guy looking for my neighbor’s apartment.

  After the hockey game ended, my buddies immediately herded down the stairs and drove drunk to Regan’s Backstreet Bar for the Tuesday night beer special: five-dollar pitchers. If it weren’t for Milana, I would’ve been at Regan’s with them, squinting at the dartboard and drinking Hamm’s from a plastic cup.

  The dancers relocated to the now-vacant living room. Milana cranked up my stereo, tied a red scarf over the ceiling light, and everybody danced. Nine months later she would leave Buffalo and move to New York City, but on this night in late May she danced toward me, rolling smoothly across the hardwood floor, languid and effortless, her joints like greased ball bearings, her hips doing things that I can’t even describe. As always, I wanted to hide and felt like I didn’t belong in this world with these people, but every time I tried to sneak away, embarrassed, Milana pulled me back into the center of everything.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” she said. “Dance with me.”

  And I did, even though my moves were stiff and the results were pretty comical. But the women weren’t watching me. They were immersed in the music, in their physical response to the music, and none of them bothered to register my insecurity. Milana smiled and danced, her joy coming from somewhere other than her mind.

  This ain’t got nothing to do with me, I thought. Just move, Slim.

  And it worked. On a blood-pink night in Buffalo, New York, surrounded by women whose names I no longer remember, I danced like a happy idiot for an hour, grinning and flapping my arms, blessed as any human being could be.

  THE ECSTASY OF BIOGRAPHY

  1.

  The biographer must be a sort of bifurcated animal, digger and dreamer; for biography is an impossible amalgam: half rainbow, half stone.

  —PAUL MURRAY KENDALL, The Art of Biography

  She was born in Akron, New York, in 1971. As a child she played alone in a dirt lot behind her family’s wooden farmhouse, hacking the synthetic hair off her dolls with left-handed scissors. “Naughty,” she said, shaking a new doll in her fist. “You are bad bad bad.” She drenched the doll in kerosene and set it on fire, her narrow face glowing in the flames. Standing behind the wooden fence, picking our noses, we watched her.

  We called her the Artist. We were not much older than she was—Clive was the elder statesman at eleven—but we recognized genius when we saw it. Judging by the confident way she leaned against that fence, picking her scabs and spitting into the dust, we knew that someday she’d be famous. And each one of us wanted to be first to write her unauthorized biography.

  When she was nine, metal braces were clamped on her teeth to correct a slight overbite. She did not open her mouth in public for an entire month. I attempted to write a chapter about this pain and alienation, entitled “Her Angry Silence,” but there really wasn’t enough to hold a potential reader’s interest.

  In 1981, she broke her left leg in an accident. We were immensely encouraged. She crashed her cousin Darryl’s go-kart into a tree. That evening I scrawled in my journal: “Her tibia snapped like a breadstick.” I was thirteen and had just invented similes. I liked them a whole lot.

  But many years passed without any further notable incidents. The Artist attended Akron Middle School, played a passable clarinet in the band, even auditioned for the lead in Anything Goes, losing a close battle to Traci Lynn Baxter, a spirited soprano.

  Her collected homeworks from this period (1982–1984) revealed little originality or depth of thought. The letters she wrote to her grandmother in Sarasota, letters we intercepted every year, were marred by careless repetition, as though she had merely plagiarized earlier efforts. “I miss you so much, Grandma. I hope to see you soon.” It was disappointing stuff.

  “After such a promising beginning,” Celia sighed. “Have to admit I’m disheartened.” Her acne-speckled face flared with indignation.

  In 1987, the Artist’s father was relocated to Buffalo, forty miles away. The Boon Years is how we like to think of them. To our parents we explained that we, too, had to move to Buffalo. At first, they were skeptical and understandably combative, but they came to recognize the truth: We had been called to a vocation.

  We packed our bags and rejoiced. “It’s a new beginning,” Celia said, filling her suitcase with stuffed giraffes. Even Clive cracked a thin grin. In short time, just as we’d hoped, the Artist—alienated, lonely, and eager for acceptance—fell in with “the wrong crowd” in the densely populated Buffalo public school system. Boozing, pot smoking, unprotected sex, etc. We sharpened our pencils. We prayed for an unplanned pregnancy or venereal disease.

  “The clinic looms like a citadel over our dreams,” I wrote one chilly November morning, still delighted by similes. “Dark days barrel towards us like a DeLorean at dusk.” Alliteration came into fashion in late 1987. I applied it pathologically to every punchy paragraph in my journal.

  We snapped covert photos of the Artist walking through the city of Buffalo, admiring her spiky red hair, ripped jeans and combat boots, that delightful bullring through her septum.

  “We’re on the precipice,” I said, and scribbled possible chapter titles in my journal: Wilderness Years. The Rise of the Phoenix. Stand Back!

  Unfortunately for us, her rebellion manifested itself only in her attire. In every other way, she was levelheaded and conventional, alas, a B+ student who volunteered at a tutoring center after school.

  We waited.

  Wet snow clumped down on our heads like spitballs from God, winter after unrelenting Buffalo winter. We huddled outside her favorite coffeehouse. She never read any poetry, only listened and clapped politely. Each morning we trudged out of our small apartment on Niagara Street; and every evening we returned, empty-handed and demoralized.

  Our families recognized the supreme importance of biography, of course, but it would be inaccurate to say they never worried about us. I worried about us. The apartment we squatted in had no phone, no electricity. We began to resent the Artist. It was misleading to appear rebellious and creative, and yet be bland as skim milk. The more we dug into her vanilla personal life, the more we worried about our future sales. Couldn’t she at least break something or, better yet, get arrested? For months we followed her to punk shows in VFW halls and musty basements. We saw a great deal in these places. Dyed hair. Piercings. Tattoos. But it was all so much cosmetic angst, the
lowest form of defiance.

  When a man bumped Clive in the men’s room, Clive turned a critical eye on him. “Sorry, hoss, but your little tattoos don’t make you an outlaw,” Clive told him. “You simply paid to sit in a chair for twelve hours while somebody painted on you. Congrats! Good use of your chump change.”

  The man had to be restrained.

  We left the VFW hall shortly after we realized that nobody at this show was going to make art, including the musicians onstage.

  “Dammit, I’m going to find a new artist,” I threatened one night at the Old Pink Flamingo. “One who produces.”

  The others ignored me. We were in too deep to turn back—of course I knew that!—and it was too late to choose another artist. We were stuck with her, as she was stuck with us. I went home and stared at my stacks of notebooks, filled with nothingness.

  But then one morning, when all seemed lost and my existence an utter waste and ruin, the Artist and I exchanged words for the first time. In my journal I refer to this as The Turning Point.

  “Hey man, that’s my bike,” she said, bursting out of the Lexington Co-op with two recycled plastic bags swinging from her fists.

  “Oh, sorry.” I dismounted. I had simply wanted to feel what it was like to sit where she sat. She glared at me as she pedaled away. “Next time I’ll call the cops,” she said over her shoulder.

  The experience transformed me. I burned my journals and everything else, the half-finished chapters, the immaculate Prologue, the eye-catching opening lines, everything. I called the other biographers to an emergency meeting. “Guys, I have a radical idea. You ready for this?”

  “Spit it out, Brendan,” Clive said.

  “Why don’t we make our own art?”

  The others fell silent. Benoit whistled low and turned his head. He had obtained a one-year work visa, which he kept referring to as a carte de séjour. He didn’t understand what I meant. Neither did Don, who grumbled into his beer.