Home Free

by Dan Wakefield

  It didn’t help.

  It gave him something to do, but it didn’t make things any different with him and Lou.

  “How come you’re acting funny?” Lou asked.

  “Acting funny how?”

  “It seems like you keep staring at me.”

  “No,” he said. “I wasn’t.”

  But he was. It was after he’d been making it with Mitzi for about a week and he wondered if it was making any difference. With him and Lou. He had no desire to tell her about it, no wish for an excuse to go “Nah nah nah, I can do it too!” He just wondered if there was any change for the better in how things were between them. That’s why he’d been staring at her. Looking for something, some sign, some emotional barometer that might show their private weather was improving.

  But it seemed monotonously the same. Just like the weather outside. Humid. Uncomfortable.

  He and Lou had fucked the night she told him about Steven Alexander and to his surprise it had been especially good. Then afterward it seemed like it hadn’t happened. They had another good one the night after he’d first made Mitzi, but then it was the same again. There didn’t seem to be any carry-over from their sex to the rest of their lives. There used to be but there wasn’t now.

  Gene bought a little hash and decided he’d suggest they get high on it and make love, thinking maybe something profound would happen behind the hash, some insight or mutual feeing that would carry over after the sex, after the high.

  He brought home the hash and a quart of deli potato salad and the beer. They used to have that sometimes for hot weather dinners, just potato salad and beer. He did not get Pabst. He got Schlitz. That’s what they used to drink all the time.

  He even put on Abbey Road. Shit, it couldn’t hurt anything. Maybe it would help create the right mood. Gene took a shower and put on some jeans and a clean sport shirt.

  Around nine o’clock he decided he’d better have some of the potato salad. She hadn’t said anything about coming home any special time that evening, and sometimes she didn’t get home till ten or so. If Gene had wanted her to get there early he should have said something. It was his own fault.

  Around ten thirty he went out and bought a jug of the Rhine Garten. He left a note saying he’d be right back. When he got back the note was still there. At midnight when he took his glass to the kitchen he filled it with gin instead of wine. He put an ice cube in it. A little before three he decided he might as well smoke the hash. There wasn’t a hell of a lot anyway. It wasn’t the best he ever had. It was probably because of his not being in the right mood. His fault, not the hash. His fault, not Lou. Every fuckin thing was his fault. By four he knew she wasn’t coming back for the night. Once he’d have been scared shitless because they always came home no matter what and even after the thing with Steven Alexander it was like an unspoken agreement that they not spend the night away. Spending the night away was like flaunting it. Lou had never done it before. Even though she may have made it before she met Steven Alexander, with other guys, she always came home, she always made it look good. Maybe she had made it with a lot of other guys. Maybe even guys Gene knew. That night when she and Flash went for cigarettes. Times she met Barnes for drinks someplace. His place maybe. Who knew?

  Gene liked the gin better than the dope. Nothing subtle. Just blasting right through ya. By dawn he had finished the fifth and was back into the Rhine Garten, which was all that was left. He had drunk the beer much earlier. The only thing he hadn’t polished off was the goddam potato salad. He didn’t feel like it. He had wanted to have it with Lou. Tough shit. Wasn’t that nice and cute of him, thinkin up the little hot weather meal for him and Lou? Shit. He took the carton of potato salad and put it in the middle of the rug and stepped on it. It oozed out over the rug and his foot. To hell with it. He got out a couple of eggs from the fridge and threw them against the wall in the kitchen. That made him laugh. “Scrambled,” he said.

  The key turned in the lock around eight. Gene was lying on the couch. He had thrown all the stacks of papers and books and magazines off it and they were scattered over the rug. A few papers were stuck in potato salad. Gene had taken off his sport shirt. He was just in his Levi’s. He was hugging the jug of Rhine Garten to him, smiling.

  “What … happened?” Lou said.

  Gene laughed.

  At least he’d got a rise out of her, a reaction, some kind of surprise, something.

  “Have a good time?” he said. “Night on the town?”

  “I didn’t mean—” Lou said. “I fell asleep. I thought I’d just take a nap. I was tired. I—”

  “Course ya were. Who wouldn’t be tired after fuckin old crisp, efficient Steven Alexander all night? Tell me, is he crisp and efficient in bed? Methodical?”

  “Shut up, Gene.”

  “Tell me, does he wear the bow tie? When he’s fucking you?”

  “Stop.”

  “Is it a turn-on? The bow tie.”

  “You drunken shit.”

  He jumped up, reeling, ran and grabbed her before she could move away and slapped her full force across the face. Her mouth opened. She dropped her purse.

  As soon as he did it he was scared. Sorry.

  He moved back, stumbling.

  “Shit,” he said. “I’m sorry. Please—”

  “Get out,” she whispered with terrible force. “Get out of here. You—you get your ass out. We’re through.”

  He started crying. He bawled. He fell down on the floor and crawled. He pleaded, begged forgiveness, begged to stay, start again.

  “It’s done,” she said.

  She got some books and left.

  And he knew she was gone. From him. Like she said. It was done.

  He finished off the Rhine Garten, then he put on his new summer suit. He didn’t shower or shave, he just put the suit on. He got some buttons scrambled but basically got the shirt on, and the tie. The coat was easy. He decided he should have a big breakfast to prepare him for the duties of the day ahead. He went to the Statler and had the “Hungry Pilgrim Breakfast,” featuring cranberry juice, codfish cakes, scrambled eggs, and baked beans. He topped that off with a hot cup of coffee, paid the check, and made it to the men’s room barely in time to heave up the whole thing. Well, he’d had a hearty breakfast at least for a little while.

  He sat in the Public Garden till a little after ten and then went to Adams House. Just for old-times sake he took Marcia a cup of coffee.

  “What happened?” she asked him with a look of uncustomary alertness.

  “I must resign my position,” he said. “But you tell em. OK? Or don’t tell em. They’ll figure out. It’ll just be our secret, you and me. Or I?”

  Marcia helped him out of the office quietly, carefully, gave him two dollars and told him to promise her he’d take a cab and go home and sleep.

  “Can’t,” he said. “Go home. No home. Can’t go home to no home.”

  “Well—will you take the key to my apartment? Go there and sleep? I’ll come at lunchtime and check on how you are.”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “You’re fine, too. Don worry bout a thing.”

  He waved, looking back over his shoulder.

  “Be careful!” she called after him.

  Suddenly he really was tired. He couldn’t go home, no home, he didn’t want to see friends, he didn’t want to sleep on a park bench because some cop might mess with him, then he remembered how the winos used to sleep in the hallways of the buildings by their old apartment on Carver Street. It sounded like a terrific idea. He crashed in the hallway of the building they used to live in. Sentimental to the last. Tenants stepped over him. It seemed poetic justice.

  He slept till around three in the afternoon, then got up and brushed himself off and went to the bar with the hillbilly music jukebox. He drank beer there till six, then went to Mitzi’s place. Call upon his lover.

  “Ohshit,” she said when she saw him.

  He collapsed in a chair, smiling.

&nbs
p; “What do you want?” she asked. She didn’t sit down.

  “Drink,” he said. “Martini maybe?”

  “You’ve had too many.”

  “One more.”

  “Get out,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because you stink.”

  He sniffed and grimaced, wiped his hand across his face and straightened up a little.

  “Yeh,” he said. “Guess you’re right.”

  He swallowed, blinked, and stood up.

  “Bye,” he said.

  “Do me a favor,” Mitzi said.

  “Sure, baby. Anything.”

  “Don’t come back.”

  He nodded.

  He didn’t know how he got to The Crossroads. He didn’t know the new bartender there, but some of the regulars recognized him, said Hi. He had four stingers before he felt the world tilt without warning and he fell off his stool. Two of the regulars were above him, and the bartender was wiping his face with a wet rag.

  “You’re givin a bad name to an honorable profession,” the bartender said. But not like he was mad.

  “Sorry,” Gene said.

  “These gentlemen say they will take you home. You live around here, don’t you?”

  “No. Used to.”

  “Where do you live now? What’s the address?”

  “Isn’t one. I don’t live anywhere.”

  The bartender sighed. One of the regulars said, “Call that guy Flash …”

  That’s the last thing Gene remembered.

  He woke up and there they all were, floating above him. All but Lou.

  There was Barnes and Nell, Thomas and Flash and a honey-blonde who must be Flash’s latest stewardess.

  Gene wondered, with faint curiosity, whether he had died. That would mean his friends had died, too. Everyone but Lou. She was still fucking that crisp-looking sonofabitch with the bow tie, back down on earth. But everyone else had died and gone to—Barnes’s place? It looked like it. The high ceilings. Books still in the boxes. So that’s what happened. You died and went to Barnes’s place. Gene started to smile, but it hurt.

  “He’s alive,” said Flash.

  Gene winced and whispered, “No.”

  “You’ll make it,” Barnes said.

  “Why?” Gene asked.

  “Cause you’re comin up to Maine with us.”

  “Home?”

  “No. We didn’t find it. This is just a trip.”

  “A trip,” Gene repeated. “What kind?”

  “Vacation,” Flash said. “You’re goin on vacation.”

  “Who?”

  “You and Barnes and Nell. Me and Francie here got business in town.”

  “It’s gonna be a good trip, man,” Nell said. “We all need one.”

  “Yeh,” Gene said. “Trip.”

  He closed his eyes, remember the music, the “Helplessly Hoping”:

  Did you trip at the sound of goodbye-eye-yi?

  “Tripped,” he said.

  III

  Linda Ronstadt was singing “Long Long Time.” Not in person of course. A new album. Volume turned up to the peak.

  Gene was glad it was Linda Ronstadt, not someone soppy or sickly sweet. Strong. Gutsy. Belting it out.

  Her voice didn’t seem just to come from the house but out of the earth, over the water into the rickety little town and the scrubland and forest beyond it.

  Something was cold against his hand and he opened it and fitted his fingers around another beer.

  “Thanks,” he said, not knowing to whom, and kept his eyes closed.

  Everyone there seemed to know what he needed right now and didn’t need.

  He didn’t need to talk.

  Not yet.

  The wind felt clean and the lapping sound of the water was reassuring. At high tide the water came right under the porch, and at low it faded way back out into the main body of itself, leaving a stretch of brilliant green sea grass and stones. It was a tidal river, fed by the sea. He hadn’t known they had them.

  He was lying in a hammock on the porch of this house perched over the tidal river and people were putting cold cans of beer in his hands. The sun was warm on his face, on his closed eyes.

  He was in Maine.

  His friends had brought him.

  Yeh. Suited him fine.

  Every so often he thought of Lou—not thought of exactly, but a picture of her, bright Kodachrome, would flash in his mind, a shot of her caught while walking or smoking or laughing or asleep, frozen in the frame at some familiar angle, and the sight of each such shot caused a sudden pain, like a sharp little dental pic hitting a nerve.

  He concentrated on keeping his mind blank, a clean piece of slate. He focused on sipping the beer and hearing the record where it talked about planting seeds and chopping down trees and making your own island.

  Yeh.

  You and me, Linda.

  Gently rocking.

  He fell in and out of sleep, letting things happen around him. Footsteps. Voices. Barnes and Nell. Others. None. No one. Nothing.

  The next day he was ambulatory.

  The house belonged—at least for the summer—to some friends of Nell named Jerry and Monica who graduated from Northeastern and after a year doing straight career-type jobs in Boston decided they’d rather move to Maine and take whatever work they could find and save up to buy themselves some land. They knew they could never afford anything here around Damariscotta, it was on the coast and only a couple hours from Boston, but in terms of summer work it was swell. For managing a sandwich and soft drink concession up the beach they got a percentage of profits and this cabin-like sort of shack with the porch out over the tidal river rent free. Monica looked intense behind her granny glasses, brown hair pulled back tight and neat from a fair, nontannable face without makeup. She was sort of like the strategist. Jerry had curly blond hair and a big smile all the time and liked to putter around and fix things.

  Monica was saying to Barnes that when they started looking in earnest for land they’d go up north and inland, that’s where you still could find the good values.

  “You can,” Barnes said forlornly, “I couldn’t. I’m the only guy in the country couldn’t find some damn land bargain in Maine.”

  “Forget it, man,” Nell said, giving him a solace squeeze.

  It did seem kind of funny when you thought about it, though, not that Barnes couldn’t find his land but that a guy like him had even looked for it. Suddenly it seemed like that’s what everyone wanted, land, especially younger people like Jerry and Monica. It seemed like everyone suddenly discovered we were running out of it and wanted to get their own little piece before none was left, get their own parcel and put their name on a stick and plant it in the ground and then dig a hole you could hide in or put up a house you could live in or just stand there on it, knowing it was yours, your land, you were making your stand.

  Monica offered to scramble Gene some eggs for breakfast but he thanked her no and had a glass of milk and said he sure did appreciate the hospitality and now that he’d had his breakfast if nobody minded he’d just get a can of beer and go back to the hammock.

  Nobody bothered him till late in the day when Nell brought him a mug of some kind of soup and said he had to eat it.

  He winced.

  “C’mon, buddy, I can’t.”

  “You gotta,” Nell said in a fake-urgent whisper, her eyes mischievous. “Monica made it for ya. It’s got all kinds of herbs and all. You know, like some kind of hippie soup. It’s real special.”

  Gene even grinned, and drank the stuff down. It tasted like moldy figs. Maybe it was.

  Everyone was gone awhile and then they all came back and said Gene had to join them for a feast. They had a tub of steamers and a couple dozen ears of corn and a couple gallon jugs of Cribari rosé. Gene ate an ear of corn and five or six steamers in order to satisfy Nell and then settled down with a nice big kitchen glass full of rosé.

  Other people came. A couple cute chicks who
ran a natural food store. Two jock-looking guys wearing those sweat shirts that say “Property of—” some-fucking-thing-or-other, and a small, pretty girl with bangs they called Pal. The two guys called each other Coach. Maybe they were. Coaches.

  The coaches brought some really dynamite grass that even got Barnes high and started Gene giggling in spite of his condition.

  Nell put an arm around his shoulder, smiling at seeing him smile, and said, “Hi, man.”

  “You’re not kiddin, kid.”

  “About what?”

  “Being high. Int that what you said? High?”

  “Like ‘hello,’ I meant.”

  “Oh, that kind,” Gene said and giggled again.

  Barnes tilted toward them, grinning.

  “What’s goin on?” he said.

  “Hello,” said Gene. “Get it?”

  “He means ‘High,’” said Nell.

  “Who isn’t?” said Barnes, slumping to a seat on the floor.

  One of the coaches had rolled another fat joint of the dynamite stuff—it looked like a sloppy white cigar—and it was going around.

  “Here come de sun,” said Gene.

  They got stoned so good that Barnes said what a crime it was everyone couldn’t get any damn drug they wanted right from the drugstore that’s what a drugstore should be a store for drugs, like it used to be. He said in the good old days a hunnerd years ago that’s the way it was, they had the coke in Coca-Cola and the cough syrups were loaded with all kinds of goodies, you could just go down to your friendly neighborhood drugstore and get you something to get you high.

  Gene said maybe there still was dope in stuff you bought at the drugstore, stuff you never thought about because it just looked ordinary.

  They raided the bathroom medicine cabinet and soon were spraying gums with some kind of throat spray they swore made you numb like coke and trying to snort Ben Gay, passing it around to all the others recommending it highly, by now they were all so high anyway it was hard to tell if anything else got em up even more but it was easy to think so and everyone was up for the scenic moonlight sail that Jerry suggested but when they all piled in his rowboat it tipped and spilled them out but luckily though all the people were high the tide was low so there were no fatalities. Just wet clothes, sore backs, bruised elbows and knees, heads beginning to swell and stomachs turned with all that had been inhaled and eaten and drunk and snorted, and somebody’s lungs hooting at the moon in the time he was convinced of being a coyote. Back in the house the bodies draped out to dry themselves and after a few gulps and random giggles the mood turned quiet, contemplative, solemn, and the bigger of the two coaches, the one who rolled the joints, said “Sleep,” and one by one without more talk, they laid down their heads and did.