by Gary Indiana
“You feel okay?” Ferd asked.
We had stopped on the way for chicken kebabs and beers at a roadside stand. Minutes after driving away we had to pull over. I felt my guts trying to spray through my nose. I scrambled out in time to redecorate the road instead of the Lexus upholstery. Now I felt the beach path spinning slightly.
“I’m fine, I think so. It feels like it all came up.”
A horse’s muzzle snorted beside my head.
Abdul was peering down from the saddle of a pure white quarterhorse gelding. When it registered that it was Abdul, and that the expensively-bred animal he was on was rented to anybody at the beach, twinges of nausea pinched my stomach. I felt sorry for the gelding. Abdul didn’t belong on him. Abdul in a jockstrap riding a white horse was a pretty astounding visual, though. He looked like Mellors in a telenovela adaptation of Lady Chatterley.
Would I care to meet his mother, he wanted to know. I envisioned a crumbly old slut striking Hollywood poses on a moth-eaten blanket, slathering wrinkled bosoms with tanning oil. I was finished with Abdul. A flicker of curiosity ran through me, but I fought it. I said I’d prefer not.
Six months earlier, I had brought him two pairs of ridiculously pricey Barker Black shoes from the Melrose Avenue Fred Segal’s in West Hollywood. One pair pinched his toes when he tried them on. His instant petulance was too brutal a reminder of the cold equation underlying our supposed romance. I only travel with one suitcase and a shoulder bag, ever. Even if I’m going to be gone for months. In most cities of the world, if you need socks or a burner phone you can buy them anywhere. Cuba isn’t a consumer society, though, and even in Havana there are shortages of what little there is: you bring what you’ll need with you, right down to disposable razors and pencils. Half my luggage consists of things my friends want: sunglasses, shirts, computer batteries, all kinds of provender that’s insanely expensive or else nonexistent on the island. Abdul’s shoes had taken up a lot of premium space in the suitcase. As I saw it, he should have been pleased to get one set of elegant footwear, and I’d given him two. He could sell them if they didn’t fit, for more than he made peddling his pinga in a month. I saw that this icy, churlish indignation over the normal tightness of new shoes was going to be his stock reaction to any expensive gift, as if he were some sought-after courtesan from a Balzac novel.
I avoided him after that. When he showed up at Principe Street I didn’t let him in. Abdul has his pride. He went away, and stayed away. At Playa Mi Cayito, he stared at me for an uncomfortable minute, then tapped his stirrups on the horse’s ribs and cantered off.
I collapsed as Ferd and I strolled back to the cabins hours later. The doctor on call at the park infirmary described it as the worst case of dysentery he’d seen in twenty years. He quickly injected me with three different antibiotics followed by a stiff dose of morphine. A blanket of gelatin sucked me into squishy oblivion until the next day.
This afternoon, Abdul said he opened a paladar with his brother in 2008, in Barrio Chino. He lives over the dining room in a flat. It’s somewhere on Dragones Street behind the Capitolio. Hard work doesn’t get you anywhere in Cuba, but in his case it apparently has.
But not far enough, evidently, since he expected cash after we finished the rum and briefly squirmed through a strictly aerobic fuck—a segue I stupidly didn’t see coming and basically resented. Abdul is indifferent to other people’s moods and feelings. I thought of the ill-fitting shoes while he pounded away.
“It’s a lot more expensive now for me to come here, you know, with the CUC,” I told him, washing his sperm off my face as he lathered his balls in the shower.
The CUC, a convertible peso, is a recent tweak of the island’s sad fortunes. Based on nothing but wishes, it’s worthless anywhere besides here. When I left in 2001, the standard currency was the US dollar, the sugar economy having collapsed along with the Soviet Union. That was what’s called the Special Period, which everyone remembers as utterly, horribly special. There has always been the national peso as well as real money—currently twenty-four Cuban pesos to one CUC, I think—which Cubans freely accept from Cubans but rarely from outsiders. The national peso has magically ample buying power for things like vegetables, chicken, Santeria spells, and Cuban taxis (as opposed to licensed ones). It’s useless for buying luxury goods, hotel rooms, anything imported. I’m sure you could counterfeit it with a color Xerox.
“Yes, too bad for you,” Abdul said, swiping his still-godlike, visibly older form with a green towel.
“Too bad for you too,” I said. “At least if you had any real money, you could leave the country.”
A cruel remark, but it flew past him. I resented in advance the time I’d now have to waste deflecting his attentions whenever we ran into each other on the Malecón.
“Those kids at Bim Bom,” I said. “It’s not like years ago, they’re all …”
I couldn’t think of a Spanish word for méchant. Abdul knew what I meant anyway. He isn’t stupid.
“There is no other place,” he said, “so all kinds go to Bim Bom—viciosos, mala hierba, good ones, criminales. The boys you like cannot pay to go into Las Vegas Club.”
Las Vegas Club is a tiny disco on Infante that features antediluvian drag acts and thirty-year-old music videos, dreary, mirror-ball lighting effects, and an A/C that turns it all into the Patagonian Ice Sheet.
“I didn’t come here for that,” I said. “I’m old, Abdul. An old man with a boy who is twenty, that is disgusting.”
I was lying, but it sounded all right.
Abdul shrugged: whatever.
Cesare Pavese: “The only reason why we are always thinking of our own ego is that we have to live with it more continuously than with anyone else’s.” At some bend in the river, you suddenly realize that questions that have pressed against your skull since the age of reason don’t have any answers. None you’re ever going to know, anyway. My mother told me more than once that after the incident at the lake I was never the same person as before, but when she said things in the ponderously grave voice she assumed, in very unusual situations, to “really talk” about something, I recognized, in an apathetic way, the family habit of blaming our emotional traumas and deep disappointments on external forces and people we weren’t related to.
Our private psychological mess (incessantly churned up not only by my parents, my brother Kev, and me, but also by my mother’s numerous siblings, my father’s parents, and surprise guest appearances by relatives residing elsewhere) was never acknowledged for what it was: a swamp of human wreckage heavily tainted by alcohol. Reality was never discussed in the open, but brooded over endlessly in our separate mental jail cells. It was an unwritten law that any ugly circumstance was other people’s fault; we weren’t perfect, and didn’t claim to be, but we were a hell of a lot better than other people. Absolutely nothing supported this delusion, aside from a strict observance of three or four of the Ten Commandments that happened to coincide with felony statutes. But there it was.
The incident at the lake happened like this: An instructor at the Derry Park and Recreation Area, Shirley Casey, gave me daily swimming lessons for a few months. She took a keen interest in my progress, held me afloat with maternal firmness in the lake as I learned the various strokes, and treated me for weeks as her special friend out of the twelve or thirteen kids taking lessons from her.
One day, out of the blue, Shirley had the bright idea to attack me, with the help of Bruce Anteyer, the other swimming teacher, a six-foot dude with no personality and a whiffle haircut who strutted up and down the beach with the vigilant expression of Sheriff Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke, his turquoise nylon trunks sporting a perpetual boner Shirley had been sucking off all summer behind the arts-and-crafts cottage.
The teen aqua instructors grabbed me from behind while I was watching Kev knock balls around on the badminton court. They dragged me to the lake. Shirley jammed a towel in my mouth while Bruce fastened a blindfold over my eyes, then they helped each other
hogtie me with some clothesline.
Next, they carried me to the parks and recreation department’s aluminum skiff, dumped me in, rowed to the middle of the lake, and hoisted me onto a raft, where they left me trussed up for several hours. I heard the sporadic creaking of oarlocks, faint splashes of paddles shirring water, as if they were circling the raft at an alarming distance, keeping an eye on my reactions. I also heard unintelligible murmuring, possibly Bruce and Shirley debating what story to tell if I rolled into the water and drowned.
I was eight or nine. Eventually they came back and got me, rowed to the beach, untied me, and removed the gag and blindfold. I ran home in a panic, as if running for the bomb shelter my father kept refusing to build in our basement. My parents were at work. I shook for hours, curled up in a fetal clump under my bed. By the time P and M got home I’d managed to stop shaking and was breathing normally. I didn’t say a word. It was too insane to talk about. My brother spilled it when he showed up, in his account pretending he’d gone into town before it started and only got back to the lake after they let me go. He knew he’d be sorry if he didn’t tell before they heard about it some other way.
Maybe that flipped me over to the dark side, as per Mumma’s preferred narrative. I tend to think I was pushed in that direction by things a lot closer to home.
Plenty of kids witnessed the whole episode, including Kev, of course, who didn’t lift a finger to rescue me. The whole town knew about it before Walter Cronkite and the news hour came on. Mumma knew who to call and what to tell them. Bruce and Shirley found themselves instantly unemployed, banned forever from the recreation area.
If it had been the custom, my mother would have pressed charges, and sued the town for a million dollars. She was fiercely protective. What Bruce and Shirley had done was so creepy that even people who couldn’t stand my family called to say how sympathetic and upset they were. In the 1950s, though, where I came from, if something awful happened to you, you sucked it up, regardless of what “it” was. Gross medical malpractice, head-on highway collision, termination of employment without cause.
Violent bullying was an ordinary feature of school. I was what bigger kids called a shrimp, threateningly brainy, and a bit of a sissy too, so I came in for a lot. This assault was only a topic because nobody could figure out why it happened. Shirley Casey’s sister married Mumma’s cousin Billy Peyton years later. She said their family never got to the bottom of it either. Apparently Shirley herself couldn’t come up with any reason. It had just sort of happened.
I have no idea how Shirley Casey’s life turned out. As far as the place where I grew up is concerned, Janis Joplin said it as well as I could, when somebody asked her about being laughed out of Port Arthur, Texas: “They’re all back there, plumbers just like they were.” Except by now, I suppose, most of them are dead.
I can’t recall that faraway period in any fine detail, much less what I thought about what happened to me. When people refer to “the benefit of hindsight” they forget that hindsight is the back end of a firearm, not some elevated wisdom they’ve acquired from their childhood nightmares.
I’ve never felt like writing about childhood. Memoirs invariably open in some bygone era. I’m old enough to justify writing about my history, but too old to remember much of it. It’s one thing to make things up, but painting specifics that are only guesses feels like fraud. My memory is a viscid, opaque continuum of fragments: horses, adventures on my bicycle, bloody scrapes from skating mishaps, skiing into a tree under the lift at Mount Sunapee, digging clams at Orchard Beach. There isn’t a hope of answering any questions I have about anything. The few survivors from that place and period don’t remember the same things I do, or remember them all differently.
What else was happening in the frame while Robert, my cousin-godmother Ellen’s brother, taught me to play chess in their mother’s living room in Augusta, Maine in 1959? And why did Ellen live with their father in Derry, when Robert lived in Augusta with their mother? Why were two sons from my father’s first marriage parceled out the same way? What elements of the day in Augusta enabled me to learn chess rapidly, play it with an idiot savant’s expertise, and why couldn’t I even tell how the pieces moved when I saw a chess set again? Why were we watching the Army-McCarthy Hearings on my grandmother’s black-and-white Motorola in the daytime, in the spring of 1954? Why does a four-year-old retain, sixty years afterward, the mental picture of Roy Cohn whispering in Joe McCarthy’s ear in the Senate hearing room? Was it Edward R. Murrow who advised “the viewing audience” to remove any children from the room, which they didn’t, before showing ten-year-old footage of the extermination camps in Poland?
Winters: five, six, ten feet of snow on the ground until April, packed enough to carve out igloos and tunnels we rummaged in all day, unfazed by the cold. Summers: the raw geography on the edge of town, primordial forests, streams, meadows; places where miles of tarmac roll up and down pinewood hills, suddenly becoming level where a spooky row of pastel houses appears, occupied by people nobody knows anything about.
A dirt road near the Londonderry line ran straight through a forest like a tunnel of leaves, ending in a jungle of weeds and tangled vegetation. A lone frame-house and a wrecked Oldsmobile rusting on cinder blocks suddenly visible across a narrow gully. That became a drinking spot in high school, a road at the end of the world that vanished like everything else as the town got raped by developers.
The road started below an overpass of Interstate 93, some of which occupies a thousand acres the state of New Hampshire expropriated from my family by eminent domain. My Aunt Jane ran her horses there. After the road went through she sold them, since there was nowhere left to ride. I had never noticed the road, which my family had probably owned in the sweet by-and-by, before the interstate made it hard to pick it out of the landscape. I discovered it while driving around with Joyce, an obese, slow-witted girl who owned a white Chevy convertible. She had flunked out of high school and drove aimlessly all day, or sat for hours parked in the lot behind St. Thomas Aquinas Church.
Joyce is obsessed with a young priest who lives in the rectory. She lusts after him with the grinning obtusity of a Macy’s blimp on Thanksgiving, even claims they’ve “been together,” though she often gives whatever did or more likely didn’t happen a taint of molestation, hinting that this nondescript liturgical frock took advantage of a very special fat girl’s piety and thirst for scriptural revelation. She’s wet for this nobody in a Roman collar, but it’s weirdly jumbled up with an obsessive fervor that springs, somehow, from obscure antagonisms in Joyce’s family. She constructs a four-foot replica of the cathedral in Manchester out of wooden matchsticks.
Joyce gets sent to juvie after she breaks into the parish rectory and menaces the young Father Hannigan as well as the older priest in residence there. Whatever it was she actually did, it was bound to happen—Joyce is crazy for Jesus, or possibly just crazy. After being released from juvie she vanishes, briefly reappearing after several years to reveal that she’s become a Franciscan nun. She even wears a wimple to prove it.
My black-and-white dog Lassie, whom Kev traps in a blanket and pushes down the stairs. The forbidding crawl space behind a little latched door in the kitchen of the old house. The equally strange crawl space created when my father doesn’t finish the underside wall supporting the porch of the new house. Time stands still, as if the world has died a quiet death.
Grampa’s vegetable garden, his potting shed full of acrid-smelling fertilizer bags, wheelbarrow, spades, hoes, rakes, saws. Gramma’s zinnias, petunias, white and purple lilac bushes. Mumma: It’s their house, until we move it’s their rules. Gramma adores my brother. Me she loathes, the saucy runt who shouldn’t have happened. My mother isn’t Kev’s mother. Kev’s mother, Flo, is in the Maine state asylum. Aunt Bettie: Flo tried to stab your father with scissors. Mumma: Flo came to visit once when they let her out for a while, you wanted her to take you back on the train with her. Uncle Buck: He likes a nut case bet
ter than he likes his uncle, what did you expect, spoiling him like that?
Whistle while you work, Stevenson’s a jerk, Eisenhower’s got the power, whistle while you work. Dealing blackjack at age seven in the V.F.W. Drunk Daddy: Gary has the gift. Look how he shoots those cards. Drunk Daddy is not a veteran of any foreign wars, only one interminable domestic one, but he’s welcome there for his disreputable skill set. Drunk Daddy runs a floating poker game upstate on week nights and supervises a roulette wheel and a blackjack table at the Elks in Hooksett on the weekends. He won the lumber mill off Ben Adams in an all-night craps game a month before V-J Day, then sold half of it back, Drunk Daddy the Ever Generous and Taken Advantage Of. He drives a forklift, unloading the boxcars and hauling the lumber to a shed, and tallies the receipts during the day, sinking his winnings as well as his self-written paycheck back into the company, which sinks faster than he can bail it out.
This is what I learned from my father: how to drive a stick shift, how to saddle a skittish horse, the proper method of waxing skis, what to use for bait when deep-sea fishing, the humane way to kill a timber rattler with a shovel. Also how to win and lose a fortune in a blackjack game in less than thirty minutes. Uncle Buck: When’s he gonna grow some hair on his chest so we can tell if he’s a boy or a girl? Uncle Dilly: Pick on someone your own size, why don’t you. Uncle Buck: If any of you was my own size, maybe I would. He knows I’m only teasing him, don’t you, kid?
Mumma: You can go to Bettie’s house after school and I’ll come get you after work, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? Gramma has pushed my mother too far and can’t be trusted taking care of me. Gramma gives my belongings to Kev whenever he lies and claims something’s his. He grabs whatever I treasure, even things he doesn’t want, broken toys, old TV Guides, the bottle caps Bill Sharits, the old grouch at the store down on Crystal Avenue, lets me scoop out of the catcher bin under the opener on his soda cooler.