“Heather, this—”
“No,” she said. “I’m sick of you, black-hole man. I won’t talk to you. No matter what you say, it’ll only be a matter of time before you’re saying something awful again.”
“No, it—”
“Black-hole man. You black fucking hole. Just leave me alone.”
So I did. Even though it was late, after midnight, I went for a walk among the latte shops and antique stores and boutiques that have quickly made this neighborhood “charming” in the real-estate-development sense. But this charmingness was capricious in zoning-law-free Houston, and just a few blocks from my house, I could be in exactly the kind of neighborhood I wanted, a neighborhood where people lived among one another, and smashed into one another, and did things to one another, instead of my own neighborhood, around which a hermetic seal of silence, the kind of silence that can only be bought dear, fell with the sunset every night.
As I said, it was late, which meant, unlike in most other cities Houston’s size, that it was pitch-black dark by the time I made my way down Shepherd near the church on Westheimer. Texans would rather have their private parts smashed with a sledgehammer than pay state income tax, so we’re relatively free from such modern conveniences as streetlights and properly paved roads.
As I passed the old Alabama Theater to my right (it’s been made into a strip mall, Houston’s architectural raison d’être), in the dimness across the street, I could just make out Chinky Chicken, Darque Tan, and more block-long strip malls, but unlike the Alabama Theater, which housed Whole Foods, Urban Outfitters, and Barnes & Noble (“Barnes & Ignoble,” I call it; Heather used to chortle at this), these dim piles of cinder block held washaterias, tattoo parlors, pawnshops, and a rent-to-own furniture store. It was as though Shepherd was a dividing line between real life and whatever was lived to the west, although it was clear that before long, this line would be pushed farther east toward downtown, which itself was pushing its own big-money Renaissance farther and farther west, planning, it seemed, to eventually squeeze the total area of land available to the lower-middle class into a plot the size of the average lawn in River Oaks. As for the poor, well, no one in Houston really considers the poor. It’s their fault, after all, punishment for their moral failures and low cunning. And for not learning to speak English.
As I got to the corner of Shepherd and Alabama Street, I turned east to cross over into the dark side, the good side. Now don’t get me wrong: I think no more of these people qua people than I do of those in my neighborhood, or of you. It’s just that I admire their however diffident lack of artifice, their defiance of the basic rules of America, whether it’s conscious or not. I respect their filth, their anger, their inability to grasp the reasons why a local-boy president, the war-on-terror boom, and the housing bubble have left them eating Hungry-Man dinners and driving the same terrible cars they always have. Inarticulate they may be, but they instinctively know the truth about us as a nation—that we are the ugliest race ever belched forth upon this planet, that the Mongol Hordes had nothing on us for rapacity, that only the weapons have changed, and that there’s a special place in hell for all of us, where we will sit counting money all day long but won’t be allowed to buy anything.
I crossed Shepherd on Alabama, made my way behind the Thai restaurant and the washateria, approaching the Alabama Ice House, when there in the alley behind the smoke shop, I saw them. Three men standing over another, beating him senseless with fists and a stick and a garbage-can lid. The men doing the beating were young, fit, and surprisingly well-dressed for this neighborhood, like slumming overaged frat boys or small-town golf pros (my blood boiled). The man on the ground was obviously not one of them, was not one of anyone, merely some poor homeless guy these schmucks decided was fair game.
I am not a violent man, never have been. But I am a large man, with a certain amount of frame and presence, and not a small amount of experience in the pugilistic arena. One cannot go around talking to perfect strangers in the manner I talk to them and not get into a fistfight on occasion.
Despite my normal proclivities to let things go as they go, the sight of these scratch-handicappers beating this poor man was more than I could live with. Aside from which, I can only say that, standing there in the darkness of the alleyway, remembering my fight with Heather, remembering that in our neighborhood disputes are settled with writs and attorneys, I felt some sort of kindred spirit with the beaten man, some sense of us in this (whatever “this” ended up being) together. So I went in, deciding, if it came to it, to hit the one with the stick first and see if I could wrest it from his grasp in the process.
“What’s going on?” I said in my most forceful voice.
“This sick fuck was jerking off in the ice house,” said one of the sick fuck’s attackers.
“No shit,” said the guy with the garbage-can lid, before letting the sick fuck have another shot with it. “Right in the fucking ice house.”
“Here,” said the third guy, the guy with the stick. “We’re about done. You wanna take a whack at him?”
The man on the ground looked as horrible as you’d expect, smelled worse, and now, as he tried to roll away in the interim between blows, I could see that his pants were indeed pulled down some, that the grayish gnarled nub of a penis was indeed poking out. I took the stick and immediately split the skin between one guy’s eyes, then used the butt end on another guy’s solar plexus. I turned to menace the guy with the garbage-can lid, when he took a few steps back, threw the lid at me in a mimsy sort of way, and ran. I started after the first guy again, but he had risen to his feet and begun to stagger off. The man who had handed me the stick lay a few feet away, trying to get his breath.
“You want another one?” I said, feeling quite powerful with my stick and my righteousness as he rolled away. I wished Heather had been here to see it. Nothing restores a woman’s faith in her man like seeing him defend the weak, and with such vigor. I had to figure the golfers would be back with help before too long, so I went to my fallen chum and said, ridiculously, “Are you okay?”
It was quite clear that he was not in fact okay, and possibly never would be, or never had been. He slowly looked up at me, bloody and toothless and old, and I saw him smile. It was an oddly unsettling experience, that smile. It created a feeling in me I couldn’t place, until I realized I actually felt good. I had gone out of my way, and put myself at risk, to help a fellow human being, and what’s more, a fellow human being who even the best of us would cross the street to avoid. Would a black-hole man do that?
And then the old man said, “Fuck off.”
At first I wasn’t sure I heard him right, through the haze of blood and the reek of booze and the difficulty in forming Fs with no teeth. I reached down to him, tentatively, and said, “You’d better clear out. They’ll probably be back with more than I can handle.”
“I said, fuck off.”
“What’s the matter with you, old man? I came over here and risked my neck to help you.”
“You did that for me?” he said. He was clearly unable to grasp the situation. Concussion, I suspected.
“Yes,” I said. “But like I say, I’m not sure how long they’ll be gone. And if you really were masturbating in the ice house—”
“You did that for yourself,” he said, sitting up now and pulling at his pants.
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“You some kinda angel of mercy, huh?”
“No,” I said. “And it’ll be the last damn time I ever help anybody.”
“Shouldn’t be. You here to help or get a pat on the back?”
“You fuck off.”
“No wait,” the old man said, putting his hand out to me. I helped him to his feet. From around the corner, I could hear new rumblings. They were coming, no doubt about it. “So you’ll be staying with me from now on, right?”
“Look, old man. They’re coming back here, more of them, and they’re going to work us over good.”
“What do you care? You’re here to help people, right?”
“What more do you want?”
“Stay here and fight some more. I like you with that stick.”
“Forget it.”
“Give me money.”
“I haven’t got any money.”
“Take me home.”
“We’re walking here, pal. I can’t get you home any faster than you can walk there.”
“No, your home.”
For a split second, I have to tell you, it sounded like an idea. That would fix her. That would flat-out fix her. You want to be good, my dear? Well, be good to this. We’ll house him in the spare bedroom, and he can smell it up, and you can feed him for a few weeks until he gets back on his feet. Or better yet, we’ll just keep him forever. That’s what a good person would do, right? You can’t very well give him luxury and then turn him back out on the street, can you? He’ll be part of our family now, just like the dog, and he won’t behave any better. He’ll drink all day and jerk off on the couch every time you walk by. Would you do it, Heather? How much can you take? Just how strong is your love?
And then the headlights appeared, three cars and the thugs from the ice house packed in like so many angry clowns. I turned to get between the old man and his doom for a second more, to try to tell him once again to do something, run, anything. He smiled at me again, but gentler now, as if he was sorry he’d given me a bad time, as if he understood. He reached out to me, and I could see he wanted the stick. Of course. It was too late to run, and he couldn’t run anyway, so he was better off having something to fight with. I nodded to him, put the stick in his hands, said good luck, and turned to run away.
Just as I did, I felt the stick across the back of my neck, and then my face was on the concrete. I turned to look up, to ask why, to ask something, when the old man brought the stick down again, and again, and then the rest of them were on me with fists and boots.
When I came to later—my watch was gone, I had no idea what time it was—I slowly tried to stand and was surprised that I could. My head reeled in an easterly direction, away from my house, and I saw those famous rosy fingers trying to poke me in my swollen eyes. I stood as still as possible and took stock. Obviously my legs were intact, but my ribs were hurting with every breath I forced through the blood in my mouth and throat. As I moved my arms, the skin pulled tight from the bruises and abrasions there. My head felt swollen, but I could move my jaw with some difficulty, and if I held my eyes just right, I could see out of the left one. So all in all—though it was my worst beating ever—it wasn’t substantially worse than others I’ve received over the years. Holding my head very still, I turned and slowly began the walk home to Heather, who was bound to come around once she’d heard my story and salved my wounds.
After all, I’d tried her approach, not in the soft and gooey world of grocery store tomatoes and horn-honking abstraction, but out here in the real world, the world of fist and bone and blood, and look what had happened. I’d been beaten and robbed and—as the fingers of dawn became Houston’s sweaty morning palms, I could smell it, even through my broken nose, I could smell it—urinated upon by bums and drunks and golfers, left there for dead, and what did I have to show for it but scars? No more, I’d say, presenting her the evidence. If yelling at other drivers got my blood pressure up, so be it. If I have to sneer at everything, at least I won’t get fooled again. If I’m a grump, I’m a grump, or worse, and if she couldn’t live with that, as badly as I’d hate it, she’d have to take her dog and go.
After what seemed like hours, I finally made it to my corner and turned toward the house. Heather was sitting on the front porch steps when I came stiffly shuffling up the walkway like Frankenstein, still holding my head at the least painful angle, arms motionless at my sides.
“What does the other guy look like?” she said.
“Guys,” I said, choking on the word and trying again. “It was many guys.”
She picked up her cell phone and called the police, telling them I was home, that all was well, and thanks. Then she said, “The dog ran off. I went out to look for you, and I must have left the door cracked some. So I’ve been up all night looking for both of you, and in an hour I have to go to work.”
“Well, I didn’t have a great night myself, exactly.”
“What happened?”
I told her, told it all, the beating and the old bum and the way he turned on me, my stolen watch and, as I reached slowly around to my hip, yes, . . . a stolen wallet as well, how it wasn’t worth it, how in the old days this would have never happened to me, how the world was an evil pit and everyone in it a son of a bitch, including me, but the thing is, I know that, and I’ve always known it, and I will forever know it, about them and me, and that if she wanted to be good and happy and love anyone but me, if she wanted optimism as a way of life, then she could have it, but she wouldn’t have it and me, because I was done with anything that even remotely smacked of the milk of human kindness, and that, to continue the allusion, we’d need to stick our courage to the post and never let this happen, to either of us, ever again, and that, in fact, it was a good thing that it happened to me and not to her, the way she’s been carrying on lately with the smile and the good word and the unguarded nature. She sat there on the steps, listening quietly as I said it all, looking intently at my eyes, understanding, it seemed to me. When I got done she nodded, and we sat there without speaking for a moment.
“So,” I asked her. “Anything to say?”
“I’m pregnant,” she said. She stood from the porch step then, moved around me and down to the sidewalk, and began to call for the dog.
CHARLIE’S PAGODA
First there’d be the drinking, then all the talk about Jesus, then around midnight the crying and repenting. I finally got enough of it and threw her out.
Her brother, Ray, and a couple of his goons came by the next morning to move all of her stuff out of the apartment. Ray was a linebacker—he’d done a hitch with the Rams, then stayed on in St. Louis to capitalize on his local celebrity by opening up a Christian fitness center, Bible verses painted on the mirrored walls, exaltation of man in God’s image, that sort of thing. He has six of them now, all across the bistate region. After they were done packing, the three of them beat me up something awful, left me bleeding on the floor of my empty apartment.
I got out of the hospital the afternoon of my twenty-seventh birthday, still wearing my bloody and torn clothes. I was too depressed to go home, so I took a cab to the Grand Duck, the pub where I go for beer and shuffleboard, and where nine months ago, I’d met the beautiful, the hard-drinking, the theologically vigorous Molly.
We’d met the way a thousand couples in a thousand bars meet every night in a thousand towns, and with most of those couples it all turns out to be gibberish, much like that produced by those thousand monkeys at those famous thousand typewriters. But theoretically, of course, one of those monkeys will one day type out Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers, and there you have our story, Molly’s and mine, after a fashion. Doomed from the start, so wrong for each other that, in a less muddleheaded age, our parents would have certainly intervened, even if it meant blood in the streets to keep us apart.
And our monkey script, of course, had Fate written in—the night we met, I’d just been fired from a low-level marketing job at Ralston Purina. I’d never liked the job anyway—it was just the patch I’d landed in after college, and I figured I could take a little time to find another job just as bad. When she took me back to her apartment that night, Molly said, “We have to pray very hard about this.”
She sat on a hooked rug on the floor, legs crossed Indian-style beneath her in a gingham skirt I wanted to take off with my teeth. The room smelled of jasmine candles and the lights were low.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Is this something—”
“Shush,” Molly said, eyes closed, holding out her hand to me. “Just pray.”
After about
ten minutes of watching this beautiful girl sit absolutely still with her eyes closed, I moved down from the sofa to sit next to her on the floor. I put my hand to the hair on her neck and gently pushed it away, and I moved in to kiss her there. She let me but didn’t respond, didn’t speak for a moment, until she said, “Charlie.”
I stopped kissing but kept my face in her neck.
“Okay, Charlie,” she said. “We can do that now, but afterward we have to pray some more.”
So we did. Then we drank some and prayed some more and made love again, and I spent the night, and that next night we went back to the Duck, and then we came back to her place and drank some more and prayed and made love again, and I woke the next morning feeling great, even with my two-day hangover. It was a clean, buoyant hangover, a hopeful one, rather than the grungy, bottomless, desperate ones I’d had for so long. So this girl wanted to pray. So what? It didn’t seem bad or weird, just different from my way of doing things. And Molly’s piety was certainly not orthodox. She didn’t make me wait till we got married or anything—and she did things in bed I’d never even thought of before. As we kept seeing each other, we kept praying, but she didn’t drag me to church, rarely went herself, in fact. And she was beautiful, and she liked a drink as much as I did. Who knows, I thought, maybe the praying was good for me. We had communed in word and in deed, in ritual and in act, in spirit and in flesh. And there was a way to look at Molly that didn’t make her seem bat-shit crazy: most of the people my age were still clubbing, playing video games all night, and Tweeting till their fingers bled, paying no attention whatsoever to the deeper crevices and spiritual swells of human life on the planet. With Molly I saw there was this whole other side of things I’d left dumbly unexplored. I still didn’t have a job, but I did have her. About a month after we started dating, the lease was up on her apartment, so we moved her into mine. She immediately put all of my furniture out on the street because of its bad feng shui.
Inappropriate Behavior: Stories Page 11