by Ronald Malfi
I spend the next twenty-four hours licking my wounds and refusing to leave the sanctity of my apartment. In the streets, the snow melts to slush, black and gritty. The sky adopts a Creamsicle hue and there are many well-defined clouds of blended pastels hovering above the city.
There is a bloody gash at my left temple and a swollen bruise in the center of my forehead. I clean the wound as best I can and sit up in bed all afternoon, listening to the traffic outside while skimming The Odyssey. Out in the hallway, every creaking floorboard rouses in me a fear that Barry the ceramic tile salesman has returned, this time determined to drive a bullet through my shaven head.
Because the drug store around the corner delivers, I cultivate a stockpile of aspirin. The headache fights the good fight, though, and by midnight I wave the white flag.
This cannot go on much longer.
And yet, the following day, I keep going. It takes me a good twenty minutes to walk to the next bus stop. And close to a half hour to walk to the one after that. I have drawn a rough sketch of the Green Line and have practically memorized the route. However, as I approach each stop, my anxiety grows more palpable. None of this refreshes my memory. The goddamn teenage fortune-teller is a fraud. I meander around Mount Vernon, watching as contract workers drape the Washington Monument in Christmas lights.
The next day I nearly complete the circuit—all but the last two stops. Or, I suppose, the first two, depending on which direction you are headed. It is still daylight by the time I decide to quit, but I am already worried that I will arrive at these final two stops and nothing will change. That I will still be ignorant to my own life, blind to my past.
Clarence Wilcox makes a surprise visit to my apartment one afternoon. He’s flashing his toothy smile and tugging on the scruff of beard when I answer the door. Wordlessly, he jabs something small and plastic at my chest.
“Hey,” I say. It is my picture on a Maryland driver’s license. My address is 1400 St. Paul Street and my name is Moe Zart.
“I used the picture Lady Madonna took of you at the party,” he says. “Dig it—you’re a real person again, man.”
“You made this?”
“Shit,” says Clarence, still grinning. “I’m a talented mother, didn’t you know?”
“Moe Zart,” I say. “I sound Jewish.”
“Maybe you are.” He frowns. “The hell happened to your head?”
“Forget it.”
Clarence says, “Let’s go for a ride.”
He whisks me away in his red pickup truck with the terrible rust spots and the unsmiling front grille. We trek across the city to Fell’s Point as the sky turns a sickly yellow color. Out over the water, the distant clouds look like smeared blotches of iodine. The air smells of rain.
The pickup strikes a cobblestone street and we trundle along as if in a mining cart miles beneath the earth. The steel-shined harbor rises up to one side, oil-spotted against the bulwark, and I can see water taxis sliding in and out of port. Flapping Irish flags align the street, all the way down to the water’s edge where construction barges seem to huddle together as if for warmth.
Clarence parks the pickup along Thames Street and we empty out onto the cobblestones. Across the street runs a wall of black wood bars and restaurants. This section of the city does not rely on neon-heavy lights in the windows; they are more subtle, with nylon flags and candelabras outside the doors, above which hang hand-carved signs and epigrams of welcome.
I follow Clarence into a seedy little pub called The Neighborhood. Its walls look about ready to surrender and the floor is warped and bulges in places. The acoustic ceiling tiles are gangrenous with the brown Alaska-shaped splotches of water damage and there is a raised bandstand that looks out on a smattering of circular tables; it seems to sag beneath the weight of a moldy upright piano and a drum kit whose cymbals give off no shine.
Clarence introduces me to the proprietor. His name is Timmy Donlon, a tall Irish fellow with a ruddy complexion and squinty, oil-spot eyes. He pumps my hand vigorously but seems bored with the introduction. At the bar, he serves Clarence and me a couple pints of Guinness and smokes cigarette after cigarette like he’s getting paid to do so. “Look here, mate,” Timmy Donlon says as he slams a stack of Polaroid pictures on the bar top. “This was just last week,” he informs me as I pick up the stack of photographs. “Just so you know what you’re getting into.”
I rifle through the pictures like a dealer shuffling cards. They are taken here, at The Neighborhood, and are of many young women, quite visibly inebriated, in various stages of undress. Some blow drunken kisses at the camera; others look about ready to pass out, one hand propped against a wall for support while their other hand yanks up the front of their blouse.
Leaning over to Clarence, I say, “What exactly am I getting myself into?”
Clarence winks and slurps his beer.
“Good stuff, eh?” Timmy Donlon wants to know, nodding toward the stack of photos I’ve set back down on the bar. “Course, that’s the weekends. You’ll be here during the week to start. If, you know, the guys dig you.”
“They’ll dig him,” Clarence promises.
Again I ask Clarence what the hell is going on.
“You got no patience, Mozart.”
As if on cue, two black men in trench coats and corduroys drip through a bowing doorframe toward the rear of the bar and saddle up behind Clarence Wilcox like a pair of bodyguards. Their faces are emotionless, their demeanor equally unenthused. Clarence, however, acts excited to see them. As they embrace, I get the feeling they are old friends.
“This is Dougie and Maxwell Devine,” Clarence introduces.
I say, “Hello.”
Both Dougie and Maxwell execute a synchronized jerk of their chin in my direction.
Clarence says, “He’s the bad mother I told you ’bout.”
“Yeah?” Maxwell Devine utters.
“Let’s put you underwater,” says Dougie Devine, looking straight at me with bored, tired eyes. “See how long you hold your breath.”
They’re two members of the Devine Trio. I learn this as they usher me onto the sagging bandstand and situate me behind the piano. Maxwell slinks behind the sad-looking drum kit while Dougie seems to summon an acoustic upright bass from the air. Without anything more than a slight nod in my direction, Maxwell counts off a beat and both he and Dougie break into a cool jazz run. It’s immediately recognizable as “Pedal Point Blues,” with Dougie Devine’s bass descending the staccato notes, his face as expressionless as his brother’s. I listen to only a single measure before I pick up the bass-line with the deep keys of the moldy piano. And despite the condition of the instrument (and despite the fact it sits at a slouch, its left side sunk a few inches into the floorboards), it sounds crisp and alive. A few bars in and my right hand hammers out the melody while my left continues the downward walk of the bass-line. The Devine brothers play like a single instrument, almost machinelike in their efficiency, taking each turn as sharp as a sports car but with the luxury and style of a limousine. A drum-roll signals a spontaneous dive into an off-signature beat, something brand new, but I hang with them. I do not recognize the number but I improvise, my fingers knowing where to fall, my right foot beating out the four/three time signature on the sustain pedal.
After we finish, the Devine brothers drip off the stage without saying a word. Still seated behind the piano, I try to formulate a reason behind all this. I catch Clarence’s eyes across the bar. He smiles and gives me two enthusiastic thumbs up. Behind the bar, Timmy Donlon watches me like someone waiting for his horse to come in, all expectant and somewhat inebriated.
“The hell was that?” I say to Clarence on the ride home.
“You’re a slink, my man. You’re a devil-dog.”
“The hell are you talking about?”
“You’re a wind chime, baby. A wind chime.”
But he doesn’t have to say anything more: I’ve got a job.
* * *
I continue my odyssey w
ell into the next week—the trek through the city following a serpentine bus route. This path of paths. This way of grief. Nothing jars my memory. Water and electric bills show up at my door. They are addressed to resident and they are all marked overdue. Despite being hired as the pianist for the Devine Trio, where we play Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays at The Neighborhood in Fell’s Point, I still don’t have the money to pay these bills.
“Welcome to The Neighborhood,” says Maxwell Devine, clapping me on the shoulder the next night at the bar.
My addition to the Devine Trio allows them to maintain their moniker. I am Johnny Devine’s replacement, Maxwell and Dougie’s youngest brother who died last month in an automobile accident, and the remaining brothers eerily refer to me as Johnny Two, or J.T. for short, much to my discomfort. The brothers are difficult to relate to and even harder to befriend. They remain stoic and unimpressed, even during performances, and it is typical of them to slink off with young women after a set where, in one of the upstairs apartments, they do what they do. I envision lush carpets and disco balls hanging from the ceiling, clouds of incense hovering over the writhing black bodies of the brothers as they wrestle each conquest to complete undress.
Our third performance together—that Thursday—Dougie Devine, somewhat intrigued by the breadth of my repertoire, makes the comment, “Ain’t a tune our boy J.T. don’t know, apparently. He’s like a fucking Wurlitzer.”
“Nice set, Wurlitzer,” intones Maxwell from behind the drums, and just like that I am no longer Johnny Two.
I become part of The Neighborhood in seemingly no time. There is a familial atmosphere about the place, however dysfunctional (or possibly because of the dysfunction), and it is something I am lacking in real life, so I adhere to it. Timmy Donlon is the quintessential father figure, a looming figurehead behind the stretch of pitted bar, arms folded, broad, smiling face appreciative but critical at the same time. He is generous with dispersing drinks, even to paying customers who have ceased being paying customers, and he is only a bad influence—a poor father figure—after he’s had one too many himself. There is Tate Jennings, a bird-chested, slender-faced man in his early thirties who buses the tables and washes the dishes and, despite his glaring homosexuality, is determined to sleep with the attractive young waitress, Olivia Sorenson, who pays him little mind. Olivia has something of an old-time movie star quality about her, like someone born in the wrong century, and her beauty—from what I am able to comprehend of beauty—seems universal. And, of course, there are the brothers, the trio—Dougie, Maxwell, and myself. Out of nowhere, it is good to be a part of such a thing.
Amazingly enough, the apartment upstairs is exactly as I’d imagined it—sans the disco balls. Red shag carpeting, mismatched sofas, countless harem pillows, black-light posters and a hookah pipe on a wooden table that is not a table but a spool of industrial wire set on its side. I am rarely invited to the apartment—the brothers live here and it is spoken of by the other employees at The Neighborhood with the sort of reverence typically reserved for the discussion of terminal illnesses—and much of my survey of the apartment is the result of quick glances stolen when the door is opened and shut. I am conscious of blue light bulbs, guitar amplifiers, holiday garland, and low music on an invisible record player. And although I have never feasted my eyes on such a display, I am told, by an animated Timmy Donlon, of the shrine to their dead brother: framed photos set atop a stolen construction barrel behind which, along the wall, hangs Johnny Devine’s clothes. I do not believe this when Timmy Donlon first relays it to me—he is someone I am quick to appraise as a teller of tall tales—but when Tate Jennings, the homosexual busboy, confirms the story one evening, I instantly know it to be true.
“It’s true,” he insists. “I’ve seen it.”
We’re in one of the many strip clubs along Baltimore Street, drinking in the tight, ball-and-socket asses of sequined strippers, doused in blackness interspersed with neon. We drink flat beers that cost five bucks a can and have cashed in a wad of twenties for singles. I have accompanied Tate to the club after a weekend of corrosive confusion has claimed his soul and spirit. A blatant homosexual, he is just as confounded as everyone else at The Neighborhood by his unwavering lust for the female waitress, Olivia Sorenson, with whom he shares a shift. He has asked me to chaperone an evening of strip clubs and prostitutes—both activities accessible along the area known as the Block—in hopes that he will be able to either turn himself off from his lust of Olivia or, if that fails, he’ll at least prepare himself for how to approach her. Because he plans to make love to her. He is set on this from the beginning of the night. He can’t explain it to himself so he is at a loss trying to explain it to me. However, I have little interest in understanding the sexual fancies of Tate Jennings. So we sit at the bar, drinking expensive beer and shelling out singles to the strippers on stage, and when a supple young blonde in a neon green bikini saunters over, decidedly underage, Tate looks at me for encouragement. Despite the sprinkle of herpes so obvious on her lips and the coked out emptiness in her eyes, I bid him good luck; a moment later and the girl leads him over to a small cubicle at the back of the bar where she grinds her hips into his lap. I watch the display in the length of mirror above the bar, feigning ignorance to the whole ordeal. At one point Tate looks like he wants to vomit—in fact, I am almost certain he will—but in the break between songs and after a brief dialogue with the underage stripper (who now has her pendulous breasts flopping out over the cups of her neon bikini), I see Tate begin to unbuckle his belt and unzip his fly while the stripper hocks phlegm into the palm of her right hand.
Afterward, he climbs beside me onto his stool, his face nearly green.
“I don’t know,” he practically wheezes, sounding like a balloon that’s rapidly losing air. “I just don’t know.”
“I don’t know if it’s something you can learn,” I tell him.
He groans and shouts too loudly to the bartender for another expensive beer. “I don’t know,” he repeats after a moment. Then he rushes to the restroom where, presumably, he throws up.
Then, in the cab ride home, Tate says, “Maybe you can get to know her.” He is talking about Olivia, the waitress whom he has a crush on. “Maybe you can feel her out for me.”
I have no qualms about spending time with Olivia Sorenson. She’s energetic and full of life and being around her makes me feel warm and well thought of. We drink together and she is comfortable talking to me about a variety of things, some of them rather sexual in nature, and I am embarrassed into silence at some of her bolder comments. She is a different person away from The Neighborhood, a different woman here alone with me. She drinks heavily at bars and likes hard liquor. Her mouth curves down just slightly, almost in a vague snarl, and I find this to be a curious if not somewhat endearing idiosyncrasy. We’re at Hal’s, her favorite place, where the floors slope to a frown and the street is polluted by loud men in neon clothes who patronize, with much fanfare, the dank-looking strip joint across the street.
A few times I attempt to bring up Tate’s schoolboy crush on her. This goes nowhere. In fact, the first time I mention it I don’t think she even hears me. Like how a mother of many children may grow deaf to their crying. So the next time I mention Tate, I do so more directly, pinning her to a corner so to speak, prepared to not readily let her slide away.
“Tate,” she says, “is gay. He doesn’t love me and he doesn’t want to make love to me. He’s just confused.”
And just like that I agree with her. As if she’s just stated the simplest thing in the world, I agree with her. And of course it makes sense. Of course.
Besides, she is much more interested in me. Not in a romantic way and certainly, as far as I’m aware, not in a sexual way. What interests her is my lack of history—“You have no history, no soul”—and all the tendrils of emptiness that come together to form the empty void that is my past. She is infatuated by my lack of knowledge, though confounded—as am I, to some exte
nt—that I am able to name many of the U.S. presidents, that I know history and math and music and books and movies. She wants to know how I can remember the plot and characters of The Sun Also Rises but cannot ever remember reading it.
“If it’s any consolation,” I tell her, “I don’t know if I liked it or not.”
She says she wants to take me to see her friend Lucy. She says Lucy works for a doctor, a radiologist, and Lucy can help figure out why I’ve got the deep divot at the base of my skull, and the scar that winds halfway up the back of my head.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I have no medical insurance.”
She tells me it doesn’t matter.
“I don’t know,” I say again. “It’s just going to be another dead end.”
“No.” I watch her eyes. They are poignant, history-filled eyes. “You’re just afraid to learn who you are.”
So there.
And Lucy, as it turns out, is a man. His name is James Lucy. What the history is between this man and Olivia I do not know, but while they are polite with each other, I sense an underlying mutual discomfort. James Lucy, who is a tall, gawky fellow with sagebrush hair, glasses, a voice like a warm overcoat, and a black goatee, sets me up in a chair in a darkened room and covers my chest and lap with a lead vest. Olivia waits outside the room, watching through a panel of glass.
“Liv wasn’t clear on the phone. You’re having pains in your head?” James Lucy asks as he prepares the equipment in the dark room.
“Some, yes.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know,” I tell him.
“How’d you get this scar, is what I meant.”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m here.”
James Lucy looks uncomfortable and unsure of himself. “So,” he says after a lengthy pause, “you’re a close friend of Olivia’s?” He tries to sound casual but I can tell he is curious just how close a friend I am. The whole mystery of my head injury is suddenly less interesting than my relationship with Olivia.