by J. G Hayes
So Sean went back to dealing coke to make his and his sister’s rent—just a little, not too much, and he always made sure kids never got it—but word was getting out and the cops were cracking down now that the new people were moving in, and I guess now the streets were worth cleaning up. Plus, one of the social workers had really gotten to him down at the Community House and he’d been clean for a month now, attending meetings for a month now. But people were starting to find out about me. I’d been seen once or twice cruising down Carson Beach and the L Street Bathhouse and whatnot, and sooner or later somebody would’ve killed me. The priest in confession told me to think of it as a blessing, and Dad before he died said We love you no matter what, but nobody ever said that out on the streets.
The truth of it is me and Sean had been fooling around since we were sixteen (we were twenty-one now) even though Sean had tons of girlfriends. It all started when a bunch of us were hanging out one night and drinking and so forth, and we were talking about girls and then we decided to go down to the beach and watch the sun come up. And then a few guys went home, and then Fitzy passed out, and when the cops drove by the beach and sliced their headlights at us we bolted, and we all kinda got separated except for me and Sean. And then it started getting cold and we went way way down the beach behind the old pumping station and started falling asleep huddled next to each other, though my heart was going wild with Sean so close. And then Sean’s hand wandered Down There even though he was pretending to be asleep. Then he kind of shifted so my hand was on top of him Down There, and that’s how it was the first few times; he’d always pretend to be asleep. But then one time I got sick of his pretending so I told him this wicked funny joke while he was faking that he was asleep, and he started laughing and then wrestled the shit out of me because he was mad that I knew he was never sleeping.
“It’s just these girls won’t put out,” he said. That was the next thing he’d always say. “I just close my eyes and pretend it’s a girl.”
I wanted to say, “Yeah, but girls don’t have this, and you do things to it,” but I didn’t want to push it or stop what was going on. I was waiting for the right moment. Still waiting now, I guess.
I guess in my heart of hearts I was afraid Sean wasn’t really like me—you know, like … like queer or whatever—and instead he was just shell-shocked or always horny or whatever, postmodern straight, which is why I was very surprised when I told him a month ago that people were starting to talk about me, and sooner or later someone would get me and beat the shit outta me or kill me, even, and so I had to leave Southie, and he said he’d go with me too as long as we went to Florida.
I still wasn’t sure at all until this morning, when he picked me up in this white convertible a little after 11:00, Ma denouncing Sean and my plans as I threw everything into one big Ames plastic bag I found tucked on the downstairs railing. When I asked him whose ride this was, Sean said someone owed him a pile of money for coke and they gave him this car instead, which I really didn’t believe, but I hadn’t had the chance yet to rifle through the glove department (as Sean always called the glove compartment) to take a peek at the registration and see whose car this really was. I figured it must be somebody else’s; Sean wouldn’t be doing the speed limit otherwise, which he had been since we started this morning. I felt bad that it was probably someone else’s car, probably some nice old lady’s, based on the daisy ornament on top of the antenna, but, see, we just had this one chance, and I knew Sean would ditch it once we got to Florida. Plus, he’d been careful all the way down, even having the guy check the oil when we stopped for gas somewhere, maybe Delaware, I think. And then how he wiped up the ketchup that got smeared across my seat from the french fries. I mean, how many people would do that with a stolen car?
“They’ll all know about you too now, now that you’ve left with me,” I said to him in Quincy ten minutes after we left the old neighborhood. I was trying to draw him out. It was the ballsiest thing I’d ever said to him. “You sure you don’t wanna go back?” I just wanted to be sure of him.
Sean looked in the rearview mirror and you could still see a wobbly Southie there in the reflection and he mumbled, “It’s already too late, Richie.” He sounded scared. Most Valuable Player that one year in Little League, and now this.
I should’ve kept going and asked what I wanted to know more than anything: “Are we gonna try to make it together, me and you?” but I was afraid. See, Sean still tried to pick up girls. He was always chatting them up and flirting but I suspected sometimes he did it just cuz I was there, cuz he’d always look at me with those big blue eyes and a little smirk on his face after he’d do this. Girls really went for Sean.
Sean’s license said he was 5′8″ but I think that was exaggerating it a little, and his hands were small and white and his feet were small and white, but he was built like a brick shithouse, and when he opened his small round mouth this huge big bass voice came out. And he had a angel’s face and a hairy white chest and other things besides, which was private between us. He was the runt of his family; all his brothers and even his sisters were bigger than him but they were all dead now except for his sisters Donna and Maureen, and his older brother Jimmy, who was a big-time cokehead even though he taught tai chi or jujitsu or something down at The West Broadway Academy of Martial Arts. Sometimes I get a little dyslexic and I always used to think that was a place where troubled couples went for counseling, and when I’d walk by I’d see people dressed in white bathrobes kicking the shit outta each other and I figured they were just encouraging these couples to fight it out and get it outta their systems like.
I’d known Sean since kindergarten when he waved me over to sit next to him, first day and the smell of sharpening pencils I still remember. The smile he had then, before that crowbar got him in the mouth after Debbie Morrison’s post-prom party. He had character, I knew it when the circus came to town April vacation in sixth grade and their red and purple posters plastered all over town said they had a unicorn. Merlin, the World’s Last Unicorn. But it got loose the day before the last show, and Sean found him half-starved a week later down behind Abernathy Textiles on the West Side. If you can believe it, it wasn’t a unicorn at all but a goat with a rubber horn cemented to its head and the horn was half hanging off. Merlin was bloody from battering the chain link fence, trying to get the horn off. The goat just wanted to be himself. Sean ran into Amrhein’s Restaurant round the corner and the hostess there called the police for him. But really she should’ve called Animal Rescue instead, cuz when the Boys in Blue came they shot the goat; they said they had to put it out of its misery. Sean said it went backward when they shot it, like a rope was yanking it from behind. Sean said one of the cops was laughing afterward when they put it in an orange plastic bag.
Sean was quiet for like two straight weeks then. Before I’d always assumed he was a tough kid and didn’t care about anything, even though he was my best friend.
But ever since then I’d known better. Now that we were old, Sean liked dogs and hated cats except for the two he had, Prince and One-Eye, two alley cats he’d adopted two years ago, which we’d taken with us. They were in the backseat when Sean picked me up, the two of them sitting upright, wide-eyed as tourists, their bodies still but their heads swiveling like dashboard dolls. The adoption process had taken six months. It’d taken Sean six months to lure those cats inside from the trashy alley behind his house. They’d been skeletal, hissy-wild, but untold cracked saucers of milk and catnip mouses from Woolworth’s had finally lured them inside Sean’s apartment the first cold night of November two years back. That first night, every night after, they slept on either side of Sean, snuggled each side of his tight white waist. Sean told me later he’d stayed awake that whole first night, singing “Rocky Raccoon” to them, listening to their purr-snoring, watching their occasional ecstatic stretches and how their tails would just like jump up outta nowhere. “Happy Cat Boners.” Sean called them, “because before this their lives had been
a shit sandwich and now finally …” He said it was like winning something.
But now they were gone; they’d gotten free in Connecticut seven hours earlier when we stopped to pee.
That bothered me a little cuz I knew Sean loved those cats. I kinda couldn’t believe it.
They sprang out of the backseat when we stopped to pee like this was the plan the whole time. They dashed into this spooky-quiet field of tall grass by the side of the highway, their green city eyes blazing out delight.
Sean had been peeing and called over his shoulder, “Shit! Jesus, Richie, where they going?”
“Maybe they gotta pee too,” I said.
Sean stared into the grass but they’d already vanished. “Well …” he said. He scratched the back of his calf, then plucked a feather of grass and shoved it in his mouth. Then with a burst he went after them into the woods. But he came back five minutes later alone.
“It’s like a fuckin’ jungle in there,” he said. Neither one of us had never really been in woods before. He booted at an empty squished twenty-ounce Mountain Dew Big Gulp. There were bramble scratches on his bare, hairy legs. “It’s like fuckin’ Alaska or something in there. We’ll wait for five minutes and if they don’t come back, they were meant to be free.”
We waited forty-five minutes and Sean kept whistling and calling.
But they didn’t come back.
“We’re leaving now,” Sean yelled out. The bushy field climbed a long, low hill and then went into these woods at the top that looked like they went on forever. The spaces between the trees seemed especially dark and huge, like each one was a passage to its own different world.
We got back into the car and Sean started her up. He raced the engine and put his little hands up to the sides of his little mouth. “Last call for Florida. I really mean it this time. Prince! One-Eye! Princey! …
Princey!”
But they didn’t come.
So we left.
Sean was quiet for a long time after and I think he was almost sniffling a little but he tried to hide it.
He didn’t say nothing ’til we drove through New York City an hour later and he blurted, “I hate the fuckin’ Yankees.’
Then finally after a while later he mumbled, “Did you see their eyes, Richie, when they jumped outta the car? The cats’ eyes?
“I did. Yeah.”
“They were shinin’ like tigers,” Sean said. He sighed. “Well … they never liked the heat anyways. The heat murdered them. They prob’ly would’a hated Florida.”
“Prob’ly, yeah.”
I felt kinda bad, but it was already late March and not too too cold, and I figgered if they could survive Southie they could make it in Connecticut, or anywhere else for that matter.
The next morning, saggy-eyed, twitchy, we slammed just like that into eight-lane, rush-hour traffic outside Atlanta. It seemed weird, us with hardly any sleep and drive-all-night BO, and everybody else crisp and glaring in their air-conditioned SUVs. I secretly wished for Sean to put the top up so they couldn’t stare at us. But he didn’t, he put his shades on instead.
I got the feeling everybody around us could tell we were Jobless, like they all worked for Homeland Security and had a new device that read Yankees on the Port Side. Faggots. Stolen Car. Bush Haters on a LCD display on their Command Consoles.
But screw them I thought. It didn’t matter. Later that night if all went well we’d be in Florida. We weren’t afraid of hard work. We had enough to put down a first and a last on a little place. I had this particular picture somewhere in my bag and I could just see it hanging in the front hall when you first came home like. We might be okay.
“So fuckin’ smooth,” Sean said, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. He always hated the bumper-to-bumper thing. “All these highway, Richie. The filter at the Curley Pool broke last year and they haven’t fixed the fuckin’ thing yet, but they’d never let a highway break down or get blocked. Not for a fuckin’ minute.”
“I know it,” I agreed, looking away from a woman next to me peering down at us from a vast vehicle. At first I thought the model name of her car said ESCALATE, but when I looked closer the T was actually a D.
It must have been ten minutes later when we heard the sirens behind us. The radio was playing an ad for Peachtree West Dental Associates and the lady, who sounded like she was smiling like an idiot, was saying, Your smile is the first thing people see. Don’t take chances in today’s competitive world—schedule a bleaching today!
I waited for that moment of relief when you realize the sirens aren’t coming for you. I kept waiting.
“Shit!” Sean hissed, his eyes jumbly in the rear view mirror. A voice coming over some kind of loudspeaker, trying to sound like God, boomed, Massachusetts vehicle—pull your vehicle over now.
I guess our car was stolen after all.
The staring really got going then as we slid over into the breakdown lane, smears of stares as the good people of the world inched by behind their frosted glass.
“Like a yo-yo,” Sean said, throwing the car into park and shoving his right pinky into his mouth. “Like a fuckin’ yo-yo, Richie. Yanked back again. I knew we should’ve got the fuckin’ flag.”
His eyes were animal-frantic. I think the world would’ve flooded if what I felt for him then burst out.
The Georgia State Police parked some distance behind us. Two of them got out and started trotting toward our car, one hand on their sides where their guns waited broodingly. I flipped my visor mirror up and away so I wouldn’t see them. The speaker-voice sounded again. Massachusetts vehicle, turn your vehicle offf. Put the keys on the dashboard. Get out of the vehicle. Step away from the vehicle.
“Please, what a bunch of assholes,” Sean mumbled, still watching them in his rearview. “Look at ’em, Richie. They think they’re a fuckin’ swat team on TV. What’d they just get a new Mister Microphone or something?”
He closed his eyes and leaned his head on the steering wheel. He looked like he was about to freak.
I didn’t care to look. But I could hear the padding of boots, the click and jiggle of their things as they get closer.
“Richie tell ’em you’re a hitchhiker and you don’t really know me, Sean murmured, his eyes still closed. “Promise me.”
My heart ached for Sean, for the unloveliness that was about to come down. I felt like freaking too. But instead I straightened my hat, then turned to Sean and started telling him that wicked funny joke, the one I told him the night he was pretending to be asleep.
Terry-Love: One Good Thing
They got Sully right in front of Jolly Doughnuts when he was only like a hundred feet from his friggin’ apartment. Probably less. Everybody said later, “What was it Sull, a black cop? Or some hard-ass? Or one o’ them tough woman cops who always think they got somethin’ to prove?”
As it turned out, it was none of them. See, Sully never told them that was his apartment two doors up. Duh. Because he hadn’t changed the address on his license yet, it still said he was living in Cambridge. (’Member when he had that nasty apartment for two months with that Latino girl in Cambridge?) He thought he’d get into trouble for not updating his license, so he didn’t say nothing. So they handcuffed him and busted his ass for DUI instead. When, if he had told them he was two driveways away from home, they probably would’ve let him go. Duh.
Sully could give you a headache when he went all philosophical and deep on you, picking at a plaster splotch on his dry walling pants while those baby blues got all faraway and dreamy. Earth to Sully. But when you got right down to it, he wasn’t the brightest bulb in the circuit when it came to just plain two-and-two-makes-four common sense.
Fitzy they snagged in Brockton. He was coming home from a party and ended up in Brockton, though how you get from Hyde Park to Brockton when you’re trying to get back to Southie is a mystery. The cops were laughing, watching him from a parking lot with their lights out. Fitzy sat through three green lights trying to light
a cigarette and then they went over and grabbed him. When they asked him where he was going, Fitzy said “Home.” They asked him where home was and he pointed up ahead and said, “Just up on West Seventh Street, where the fuck do you think?” Fitzy knew all the cops in Southie; his Uncle Eddie was one, so he could be franker with them than most people would. Fitzy said later “No wonder they didn’t look familiar.”
Paul—now, we never did find out where and how they got Paul. One of the rules of this place is that you can’t talk about other people, or speculate on how they got here, if they haven’t volunteered the info themselves. “Taking inventory,” they call it. We don’t take inventory on others up here. Ever. That was one of the first things they told us.
That being said, there were four of us in our little room, and three of us—me and Sully and Fitzy—were from Southie. So of course we’re gonna talk just a little bit, not in a bad way or nothing, just speculating. And we kind of came to the conclusion that maybe Paul had killed somebody when it happened to him. See once or twice during “Open Discussion,” which we had every Sunday night—there would be about twenty of us gathered in a circle in these metal card-table chairs that squeaked whenever you moved—someone said something that seemed to spark something in Paul. He straightened up quick and raised his hand and said, “I know it, when I was in Bil—” and then he’d clam up real quick and kind of stutter his way back to silence. So we figured he must have meant Billerica House of Correction. That’s where they sent you when your DUI conviction also included manslaughter. And he never said nothing about, like, last year’s World Series, or where he worked right before or anything like that, so we figured he’d been on ice for a couple of years. “A guest of the state,” we called it back home. Paul wasn’t from Southie but he was the fourth in our room: half-Irish, half-Italian, dark Irish or light Italian depending on which way the light was hitting him and what his mood was, and when each one of us first got here he stayed close by our side. He’d never say much but he stayed close by our side. See, when you first get here you’re freaking out and wondering how the hell has my life devolved to the point where I’m in this place. You gotta face some mighty nasty music, and Paul would always stay close by our side, because he knew, he could smell it, I think, that when you’re alone in this place during the first couple of weeks, one of the first things you think about is how to kill yourself maybe. Paul was a good-looking guy, darkish, about six foot, and he always wore long-sleeve shirts, I noticed, but once in the shower—they never wanted none of us to be alone for a minute, even after we’d been here for a while—I seen this jagged jumble of red and purple lines on his wrists, both of them, and I figured Huh.