Hurry Down Sunshine

by Michael Greenberg

  Half an hour passes and Steve still hasn’t shown up. He canceled our last meeting, phoning to inform me that he wasn’t feeling well, and refusing my offer to bring the food to his apartment. This was surprising. He has always been bitterly dependent on our meetings, arriving urgently with a list of new things he wants me to buy. I have come to take for granted a certain consistency from Steve, though this may be nothing more than my impatient determination not to be sucked too deeply into his world. This is who he is, I’ve told myself. He can’t be changed. And look, his solitary life is not without its pleasures: fried eggs and tea when he wakes up at half past noon; the Woody Allen and Humphrey Bogart movies that he watches over and over again with undiminished absorption; his weekly tins of tobacco and his Barcalounger with its tilting foot rest…

  I call him from a pay phone and a strange voice answers. I don’t recollect Steve ever entertaining a visitor in his apartment.

  I ask if he is there.

  “Who wants to know?”

  “His brother Michael.”

  “I heard all about you, Mister Brother.”

  “Are you a friend?” I ask, and immediately the word throws me: as far as I am aware, Steve has not had a “friend” since he was twelve.

  “Would I be here if I was his fucking enemy?”

  Possibly, I think. And in a rankled, guilty flash I see Steve as he was when we last met: with lighter burns on the tips of his fingers and his jeans stiff with grime, convinced that supermarket employees had hidden their stock of Lipton’s tea for no reason other than their spiteful wish to deprive him of what he desired.

  The owner of the voice hands Steve the phone, and I hear my brother’s glum, belligerent “Yeah?”

  “I have good news,” I say. “The shelves are filled with jumbo boxes of Lipton’s. I’m looking at them right now. We’ll pick up an extra one so you won’t be caught short. Now tell me something. Why aren’t you here? I’ve been waiting since eight-thirty.”

  “Don’t fuck with me, Mikey. I’m under a lot of pressure right now.”

  “What kind of pressure?”

  “You got to get something through your skull, little brother. I don’t need you anymore.”

  He sounds lit up on something, dry-tongued and rattled. Hearing him, I go numb with fatigue—and resentment. That this precipitous downward slide has come at the same time as Sally’s crack-up seems absurdly operatic—a comic assault plotted by a perverse librettist.

  “Who answered the phone, Steve?” I ask.

  “That was Junior. He works at the Greeks with me.”

  The “Greeks” are the owners of the florist shop for which Steve occasionally delivers flowers.

  “Have you been showing up for work?”

  “Fuck you, little brother! Leave me alone!”

  And then the slap-in-the-face sound of the receiver being slammed into its cradle at full force.

  Such explosions from Steve are relatively recent. They began after our father died, prior to which Steve’s excruciating social discomfort was mostly expressed with a withdrawn, apologetic stammer. It’s still startling to hear him swear. He had always seemed too tentative for words like “fuck” and “cocksucker” and, for the most part, had spent his life strategically concentrated on not drawing attention to himself. With Bernie’s death, however, something inside him seemed to shift. Static for decades, his “condition,” as we discreetly referred to it, entered a less predictable phase. Of Bernie’s five sons, Steve was the only one who did not visit him in the hospital toward the end of his life. He seemed strangely indifferent to Bernie’s failing health, and I wondered if he was incapable of grief—to open the floodgates of his staunched emotional life even an inch might drown him. Bernie had been Steve’s feared and dependable source of material support—and of love. He would bark at him at the slightest provocation—“You’re no damn good! You can’t do anything right!”—to which Steve would lower his head as if he agreed with this dim assessment of his character and was grateful to Bernie for pointing it out to him. Behind Bernie’s irascibility, however, was a saving, paternal warmth. Often he would follow his disparagements with some lordly act of largesse: a luxurious gravy-soaked meal at Bernie’s favorite greasy spoon or a trip to the store for a new pair of sneakers.

  “Are you planning to let me starve?” Steve asked our mother, Helen, after Bernie was buried. He phoned her at all hours to remind her of his wants: garbage bags, soap, lightbulbs, sugar. What began as a test soon turned into a form of punishment. “I need chewing gum, an ice bucket, pipe cleaners, a hair clipper.” And then: “I need a comforter, an answering machine, a lamp, a fan.” He became reckless and enflamed, given to blasts of verbal inhumanity that made us realize how much he had held himself in check during all his years of timid recoil.

  Their interactions threw Helen into an agony of panic. Seeing their mutual despair, I volunteered to take over the job of caring for him. Both Helen and Steve embraced the suggestion.

  After hanging up the phone, I head uptown to Steve’s apartment at Twenty-second Street and Ninth Avenue. The building is a twenty-story white brick pile that seems unsure whether it wants to look like a Holiday Inn or subsidized public housing. The sitting area in the glass lobby is inviting, but in the hallways upstairs the carpets are frayed and the walls smudged with hand prints and other less identifiable stains. At Bernie’s behest, I moved Steve into the building back in 1975, with a rented truck and the help of one of our brothers. Although Steve was the second-eldest son, he had been the only one still living at home; at twenty-seven he had given no indication that he ever intended to leave. He had taken to wandering into our parents’ room in the middle of the night, standing stiffly at the foot of their bed, peering at them as they slept. “Like a figure in a wax museum,” said Helen. “I couldn’t bear it.” Bernie would order him back to his room, Steve obeying like a dismissed servant. But the next night he would be there again. “I swear to God, I was waiting for him to kill me,” said Helen. Finally, Bernie gave in to her insistence that he rent Steve an apartment, something Bernie had been putting off as a financial burden “with no end in sight.”

  What Steve got was a one-room “studio” apartment, with light pouring through side-by-side windows on the south wall. The parquet floors had been polyurethaned to a high honey gloss, a clarion announcement of Steve’s fresh start. He seemed to feel both repudiated by his forced exile from home and beguiled by the brand new pad that had been bestowed on him as—call it what it was—a payoff. It was the sheer spanking newness of the place that won Steve over. It defied resistance, like a new car. He had been kitted out with everything he would need, including the pleather Barcalounger that Bernie had presciently gone out of his way to acquire. As soon as we set it in place, Steve sat down in it like a man lowering himself into a warm bath. Every time I visited him he sat in that lounger, sucking on his pipe and drinking Lipton’s tea from the pickle jar that today, twenty years later, he continues to use.

  Now, I ride up to the fourth floor and knock on his door. He opens it a crack and sidles out into the hall, closing the door behind him in an obvious attempt to block my entry.

  “What’s the matter, Mikey? You look like you’ve been worked over by the Israeli army.” A preemptive insult, meant to deflect attention from his own alarming appearance. I have never seen him this ravaged, yellow and rail-thin, with the exception of his chest, which juts out like a barrel whose quarter hoop is about to burst, an early symptom of emphysema. His hair is the length of a four-day beard, buzz-cut with the battery-operated clipper that after weeks of his wearying imprecations I’d bought for him. His small dry eyes dart about like he’s just fled the scene of a crime and expects to be collared at any moment. On the left side of his temple is a dried brownish gash.

  “Did you do your laundry?” I ask lamely.

  “My laundry! Why are you so interested in my laundry? My fucking underwear! My skivvies!”

  “You’re filthy, Steve. Look a
t yourself. I gave you twenty bucks to wash your clothes.”

  He thrusts out his head to within inches of mine, as if daring me to sock him.

  “Who are you to tell me I should wash my fucking clothes? You’re nobody. Do you hear me? Nobody. My little cocksucking motherfucking brother, trying to be like Dad. You’re not Dad. You’re nothing like Dad. So fuck you! Did you hear what I said? Fuck you! I don’t need my little brother to take care of me.”

  Behind me I hear a brisk metallic snap: the neighbor across the hall double-locking her door.

  “It’s disgusting the way you talk, Steve. The entire floor can hear you.”

  He is breathing loudly with a sickly wheeze, drawing on his unlit corncob pipe, furiously scratching his head, and telling me he has “a lot of problems, Mikey, more than you know, now fuck off!” He tries to duck into the apartment, but I push myself through the door after him, staggered by an onslaught of thick hot sour odors that bring tears to my eyes. Three bodies are sprawled out on woolen blankets on the floor. One, a bony woman of indeterminate age, appears to be sound asleep, as does the crumpled man beside her wearing a New York City Parks Department cap, from under which push a few sprays of white hair. On a neighboring blanket lies a large-bodied man with a lit Newport in one hand and a quart of Crazy Horse malt liquor in the other.

  “I’d like you to meet my friends, Mikey. Good people. Solid people. I made some friends.” And Steve proudly presents me to Junior, who, he claims, once played varsity football at Lincoln High School. “Offensive lineman, a heavy hitter, a star, Mikey. All-city.”

  “Yo,” says Junior, offering me a swig of his Crazy Horse which I decline.

  Steve seizes it, taking a loud exaggerated gulp. He is beaming: the perfect host.

  “It looks like your friends are living here, Steve.”

  “They’re visiting. Visiting! Visiting! I can guess what you’re thinking, little brother, but you’re dead wrong. They’re not out to hurt me. I’m not their fucking moral obligation, their burden, like I am to you. I’m their friend. Their friend. Ever hear of voluntary emotion, little brother? I didn’t think so. It makes you nervous.” He laughs his coarse mirthless laugh, and continues in a stammerless rush. “I’m not saying you’re mentally ill, Mikey. But you’ve always been so lonely, and when you’re lonely you’re liable to let any terrible thing climb into your head. You got to learn to trust people. They don’t always stand in your way. They don’t always try to keep things from you and fuck you over. Sometimes they share. Oh yes they do.”

  Between the belongings of Steve’s “visitors” and his own accumulation of paperbacks, dirty laundry, tobacco tins, pennies, and boxes of buttons from forgotten political campaigns (“Beame’s the One!”), it is almost impossible for me to venture farther into the apartment. The Barcalounger is worn down to its metal and fibrous innards. Steve has finally broken the lounger’s spell, he has joined the action. He has traded his sole source of social status—this single secure room that has stood between him and the mole people, the heating grates, the park benches and midnight subway cars—for the companionship of this crowd. Stacked five feet high in the bathroom, the kitchenette, around the bed, and in just about every unused inch of the place are what appear to be the salvaged carcasses of obsolete electronic equipment: turntables, stereos, tape decks, amps, microwave ovens, answering machines…Some of them, however, are still in their original boxes, and I wonder if Steve’s apartment is being employed to stash stolen goods.

  Steve explains the clutter as “merchandise” for a “commercial enterprise” in which he is a “full and active” partner. “We haul it down to St. Marks Place. At midnight. Everybody does it. You just lay out your merchandise on the street and you’re open for business. When you have inventory, Mikey, people know who you are. The cops, they look the other way after midnight.”

  “You should check it out,” says Junior.

  “You really should!” says Steve. “Stick around. It’s a bazaar. We’ll be heading over in a couple of hours. Garbage is money. Dad knew that, with his scrap metal yard. Scrap is garbage too. The afterlife of what has been thrown away.”

  He tucks a huge speaker under one arm and a monstrous amp under the other, his face growing blue from the effort, his small wrinkled muscles bulging. “I can carry this stuff all the way across town. I’m a powerhouse, Mikey.”

  He puts the merchandise down and stands stoop-shouldered, with his head pushed forward and his lower lip slumped out and trembling. The only light in the room is cast by Junior’s cigarette and a low-wattage bulb in the bathroom, a darkness that reminds me of Steve’s attraction to unilluminated rooms as a young boy. I see him as he was in those days, five years older than me, with his timid inaudible stammer. I was drawn to him then in a way that my other brothers were not—his endurance for solitude, his stillness. He seemed always to be slipping away to some unfrequented corner of our home, where, at age five or seven I would spy on him, captivated by his hunted look and his fairness: he was the only one of us with golden hair.

  “I know you think I never tried to make friends. That was my disease, I brought it on myself. I know that you and Dad believed this. But look at me, Mikey. I’m trying to hack it. And you just want to take it away and fuck me. You expect me to sit alone in this fucking room, with nobody, with nothing, until I fucking die. Dad used to tell me, ‘You’ll never have friends. You can’t be a normal person without friends.’ If he was alive, he wouldn’t be able to say that anymore. Would he, Mikey?”

  I try to appeal to his sense of self-preservation, invoking the term “supervised living,” which I know he dreads.

  “If you continue like this you’ll lose your independence, everything you’ve managed to hold on to all these years. Steve, are you listening to me?”

  I wait for some indication that I have gotten through. But nothing is getting through. Junior takes another swig of his Crazy Horse, bored apparently with my impotent entreaties. I feel peculiarly distant and uninvolved. I know I should take some action, but what constitutes “action” in the case of a chronically rattled forty-eight-year-old man? I have no way to dislodge Junior or the two sleepers on the floor. I certainly can’t call the police without running the risk of harming Steve, especially if some of this “merchandise” is stolen.

  I manage to squeeze further into the room past a heap of teetering wire-sprouting stereo tuners, to where Junior—a large, powerful man gone mostly to fat—is enjoying his cocktail.

  I pick up the gym bag that I assume contains his belongings and throw it at him, hunkering down close to him and lowering my voice to the fiercest register I can conjure. “You’re not fooling me,” I tell him. “I can see exactly what you and your cohorts are doing, fucking my brother over, using his place as a crash pad where you can stash your hot goods and get stoned. It’s like taking advantage of a child. You hear me, Junior? I want you to clear out this instant, and drag these sorry-ass dope fiends with you. Maybe you don’t know how sick my brother is. He’s on medication, heavy medication, life support—drugs, alcohol, they can kill him, and if they do you’ll be liable for manslaughter. I want to make sure you understand that. Manslaughter. Mandatory five to ten years.”

  “Steven is sick?” he asks. “You saying he’s sick? I know he’s sick. We’re all sick. That’s why we’re here.” He laughs. “I appreciate your concern for him. He’s family, you’re doing right by him, but you don’t need to worry. Because Junior’s watching out for him now. You got my word on that. Just ask your brother.”

  At Bank Street Pat is absorbed in a book of Piranesi etchings of “prisons”: vaulted imaginary spaces that suggest ruined basilicas, majestically cruel with their pulleys and drawbridges and iron posts with chains. Her notebook is open, filled with choreographic notations and phrase fragments that can be understood from inside Pat’s train of thought but not mine.

  She gives me the clipped obligatory “Hi” of one who doesn’t wish to be interrupted.

 
The phone rings. It’s Robin.

  “There’s a full moon tonight, Michael. I wish you could see it. Hanging right over the chicken coop. Like in a painting by Chagall.”

  “What a nice picture.”

  “A haunting picture. I’ve been trying to write down my memories. I want to collect them, to get in touch with happier times. Please tell me how our girl is doing.”

  As best I can, I describe Sally’s recent forays into the dayroom. “She’s leaving her bed more than before. And Aaron’s visit seemed to cheer her. All positive signs, one would think. Maybe she’s getting better in ways I’m incapable of seeing.”

  “Better is such a relative term. She’s turned herself inside out, Michael. She’s cast off all restraints.”

  “She certainly has.”

  “Well, if you’re going to be sarcastic.” She pauses. “Look, you’re on the scene with her. I can only imagine what you’re going through.”

  “It can’t be any easier for you.”

  “Thank you, Michael.” She makes me listen to her breath for a moment, gazing, I imagine, at the Chagallian moon. “Do you remember the year Sally was born and we rented that wonderful house in Maine? Sally was a month old. She was a terrible sleeper, I was beside myself, nothing I did to put her down for the night seemed to work. The other mothers I knew told me to let her cry, she would fall asleep on her own. It was the party line. ‘You have to protect yourself or there will be no end to it. You can’t let the child set the agenda. You’ll lose your identity. You’ll resent your baby. It’ll be a disaster for both of you.’ They were very convincing. So I gave it a try, and after half an hour that poor baby was shaking like a wet puppy, and shrieking too, in a way I’ve never heard anyone shriek, not before or after. It frightened me, Michael. ‘I don’t know this girl,’ I thought. ‘I’ll never know her.’ This may sound crazy, but do you think this could have been what did it to Sally? My leaving her alone that night, I mean, my letting her cry.”