by Mike Roberts
This was enough to make me want to gamble, too. I picked out a horse called Helter Skelter and Don showed me how to fill it out on the slip. I gave my money to the sexless woman behind the counter and promptly lost. I felt like a sucker. That five dollars was supposed to buy my lunch.
Races kept going, one after another across the bay of televisions, to decidedly little fanfare. I had no idea what distinguished one race from another, a good one from a bad one. I was looking for patterns in the men, but they were giving off something else, something worse. Lucklessness, I thought.
We’d slowed to a perceptible lull since Alimony first paid out, well over an hour ago. The OTB held the sad air of a waiting room, or a holding cell, maybe. Everybody carried a ticket, but no one’s name was called. I couldn’t help imagining some of the more stalwart characters coming here as a proxy to real employment. Telling the wife some lie about day labor or construction, before working banker’s hours at the OTB, desperately trying to reanimate luck.
Don was still going strong, however. Betting and losing, though I could tell he had some system underneath it. Don was not casting into the current haphazardly. He knew exactly where he wanted to drop his line. It was all a matter of time, he said. Losing didn’t seem to faze him as he sat there, stiller than a Buddha, sipping from his Stroh’s like it was hot coffee. He mooned at the televisions expectantly. Waiting.
I tried to keep following the races in earnest, but the whole thing had lost its appeal. I wanted to tell him to play it double-or-nothing already so we could get the hell out of here. Just that quickly, though, Don stood up with a ticket in hand. “See that?” he said, and I tried to find his winning horse on one of the screens.
Don took his money back to the counter and started winning compulsively then. This feeling was contagious, and he was suddenly a sage among the men. Explaining his bets and doling out racetrack maxims. I was surprised to find how much time could pass in the winning. Don made a big show of peeling off a twenty and asking me to go buy lunch down the street.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“Anything but peanuts.”
“What?” The guys all laughed like this was funny.
“It’s an old superstition,” one of them said.
“No peanuts in the barn,” Don added with a grin.
“Uh-huh,” I said, without comprehension.
“Just some chicken wings or something. Whatever you want.”
Don was playing the Big Man now, showing off for his friends, but I didn’t care. I was happy to run this errand just to go outside. The low ceiling and the still air had begun to wear on me. The OTB smelled of cigarettes and sweat and aftershave.
I drank down the warm bottom of my beer and walked out the door.
* * *
I actually thought about ditching Don then. Not to screw him over, but just because I had a couple beers in me. What the hell were we doing at the OTB anyway? I might as well have stayed home in bed.
The sad part was that no one was ever going to catch us blowing off the day, either. We did have a boss—this schlubby middle manager down in an off-wing of City Hall. He had red hair and pink skin and yellow teeth, and he was always calling Don and me guy or fella, no idea what our real names might be. He also had no idea how long it actually took to count a lamppost. He was just thrilled to see we’d made it through another week together. It was a good situation for everyone, really.
Don and I would show up in his office, every other Friday, with a 3.5-inch floppy disk filled with everything you’d ever want to know about a lamppost. Don loved being down in City Hall, and he’d try anything he could to prolong these visits with our faithful bureaucrat. Unfolding our maps and trying to talk inside baseball with the poor guy. It was pretty clear to me that this man did not give a shit about lampposts. We were just one more thing that landed on his desk.
I did wonder what happened to our disks after we left, though. Who’s to say they weren’t just putting them into a drawer, or a garbage can? I’d had a job once, in elementary school, helping the janitors collect recycling. I imagined a big truck that took our old tests and book reports to a processing plant, where they were cooked down and rolled out into wide, clean sheets of new paper. What I ended up finding out instead was that the janitors were just throwing it all into the dumpster behind the school with the rest of the trash. There was no truck, and I didn’t know how to feel about that.
* * *
When I came back with the food I was surprised to find that most of the men were gone. It was darker and warmer than I’d remembered, too. But Don was still there, sitting in the same seat, going through discarded slips and checking for a stray winner. I invited him to come outside and eat, thinking he could use the sunshine, hoping I could get him back into the car. But Don declined my invitation.
I sat outside alone, at a graying picnic table, throwing chicken bones at a menace of seagulls sunning themselves in the parking lot. It felt strange to watch these birds fighting over their own meat. Or close enough anyway. The warm beer and greasy wings weren’t helping me any, either. I sat there, feeling bloated and lethargic, unsure what to do.
“Don’t eat those,” I said tersely, scattering the birds.
Back inside, several of the sets had been switched off, and Plain Jane behind the Plexiglas window had been replaced by a man who could’ve been her brother. Don was still hunkered over his slips, but his face was blank and chalky now. I could see him crossing and uncrossing his fingers under the table, which was a thing I’d never seen a grown man do before, except as a joke. The Stroh’s was gone, too, and I decided this would be my last try.
“How’s it going, huh? Almost done? I’m thinking we should make a move soon. Go count some lampposts, maybe.”
But Don wasn’t listening. Something had gone wrong here today, and I wondered the extent to which he thought of me as a jinx. He grumbled without looking up, and mumbled something about holding my horses. I smiled and waited for the wink. But Don hadn’t meant it that way.
* * *
I went back out to the Civic and got the laptop and the GPS (which they tell you never to leave in an unlocked car), and I decided to work. Fuck it. There were lampposts out here, so why not just count them.
I walked around the lot and grabbed three or four quickly: thirty-foot posts; ten-foot trusses; cobra-head fixtures, all of them. I tried to use my body to shade the sun off of the computer, but the whole thing was demoralizing. Some kids on skateboards had stopped to stare at me, and I was already losing the point of my protestation.
I sat down in a bus shelter and gave all four lampposts a single GPS location. And then I didn’t move. I didn’t know where to go, really. I stared out across the buzzing traffic, feeling shipwrecked. I didn’t care about Don’s suffering. I was thinking about myself, which is the only thing you know how to do when you’re young.
All of a sudden the back door opened and my bolt-necked partner came limping out to the car, like he’d forgotten all about me. Forgotten everything. I grabbed my things and hurried back to the Civic, worried I was watching him leave me here.
“Ho, Don, wait up, man. What’re you doing?”
But Don didn’t answer, opening the door and closing it behind him. I let myself in, expecting him to fire it right up. But he didn’t. He just sat there with his hands on the wheel, not moving.
“What’s going on?” I asked defensively.
But Don didn’t look at me. He started to speak, but I couldn’t hear him. Something about his inner voice shouting at him, he said. Something telling him it was all shit and meaningless. The fallacy of doing good. The impossibility of trying to see God in the world. Everything was temporary. People don’t care. Everything we do goes for naught in the end.
“The less you expect of the world, the less it lights you on fire and consumes you whole,” he said in one scary, lucid beat.
I nodded blankly, trying to measure this. “I think a lot of people probably feel that wa
y sometimes…” But I stopped myself, knowing I was way over my head. I wasn’t even sure that he could hear me.
And without wanting to, I saw Don as some hackneyed drunk, falling off the wagon today. Letting it all go at once and hitting the concrete ground like a brick. One last act of futility after years of piety and sobriety and love. But that was all so stupidly easy for me to swallow, and I was sure it had to be much, much worse. Don’s real life had come wailing to the surface now and I couldn’t understand a goddamn thing. I was suffering a profound inability to actually imagine being Don in this moment. To really be this sixty-year-old man with this life and these problems. I was struck dumb by my total and utter lack of imagination. It scared me. I wanted to shut him up, to stop him. I wanted to shout in his face, Hey! Don’t look at me, old man. I’m just a kid.
Bang! He hit the steering wheel with his fist, and the tears finally dropped. It jarred me back to the present. Trapped in this car, with its religious icons hanging so limply. I knew I had to go. I knew I had to leave Don here, abandoned. We were just strangers, after all. What do you owe a man you hardly know? How do you stop yourself from fleeing another man’s suffering?
“I won’t tell anyone about today,” I said. “No one will even know we didn’t work.” I immediately regretted saying this, but I couldn’t stop. “We can make it up tomorrow. I’ll be ready in the morning like always, if you wanna pick me up.”
But Don didn’t answer. He didn’t do anything. He just stared out the windshield for a thousand empty yards. And when I saw he really wasn’t going to start the car, I finally let myself out. Leaving Don there, exactly that way.
I walked away from the Civic and crossed the busy street at a jag, not willing to wait for the light. I hurried across the open parking lot to a block of pay phones outside the Tops. I needed the space between. I needed to move away from the OTB. I didn’t want to have to say that I was there. I didn’t want to have to talk about Don. I didn’t want to make up a story about these things yet.
THE SUMMIT
It was the limbo week between Christmas and the New Year, and the Sabres had just lost. They really should’ve won, too, but they didn’t. Up two goals in the third period, with ten minutes to go, but they lost. And now the whole night was fucked.
Louis stood up and booed at the television in a horsey, exaggerated way until Cullen told him to stop. Louis sat back down and I could see that he was actually angry about this: one midseason hockey loss.
“Bad teams lose these games,” Cullen announced, almost smirkingly.
“Bad teams? Be serious. We were one game away from winning the Cup two years ago.”
“Two years! Time to flip your calendar, little guy. Those days are done.”
Cullen was enjoying himself, taking it out on Louis, pretending he didn’t care just as much. For the last three days I’d felt this strange thing happening here. We’d always acted this way, but suddenly I was on the outside of it. It wasn’t that I was made to feel unwelcome so much as they just weren’t interested in crucifying me anymore. I was just a guest.
“You gotta be fisting me,” Louis grumbled to no one. “Every goddamn year. How does this shit keep happening to us?”
I couldn’t help smiling. I’d barely been gone four months, yet somehow they’d invented a whole new way of speaking. Filthier, funnier, more oblivious.
“You see,” Cullen said to me drunkenly the night before. “Because instead of saying kidding me he’s saying—”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” I said, and Cullen smiled.
* * *
To be honest, I was still a little shaky from flying. I’d told my mother not to count on me for Christmas. They’d only just started rerouting flights over my house, in Washington, D.C., and the sound alone made my chest tight. I told her I was looking into bus tickets, or train schedules, or a ride share, maybe, but I wasn’t really planning on anything. I couldn’t care less about the school’s winter break. My idea was to just stay put: to remain in my own city; in my own neighborhood; inside my house.
Then she sent me a plane ticket, and that was that.
I took some comfort in the long lines at the airport. I’d never really seen that before. But when the line stopped for me, I was shocked. Shocked when they found a bike wrench in my backpack. Shocked by the way the TSA lady held it up. Even the man behind me turned away in embarrassment. I raised my hands and tried to accept the crowd’s guilt. I had forgotten it was there; I really didn’t know. I was very, very sorry.
I barely protested when she moved to throw the wrench away. I stood still as she waved her magnetic wand over me one more time. And finally, when she was satisfied, she nodded, and I thanked her for letting me fly in spite of my crimes against National Security. I bowed and I genuflected, and I tried to reorient myself on the other side of the metal detector. I sort of expected not to understand what was going on here.
* * *
We stood in Cullen’s driveway, kicking ice and passing our last two cans of beer. A snowplow went by in a cloud of silted exhaust that stained the snowbanks brown. We watched its orange and yellow lights flicker as it dropped the blade with a harsh metal scrape, before gathering, and running cleanly along the snow again.
The stinging cold was sobering in small doses, and not entirely unpleasant. I always found myself more sensitive to the weather coming back to it. The low-watt sunshine and the sharp, leafless trees. The frozen, invisible smells of cordite and gasoline in the air. And the cool, continuous quiet of nighttime. These long, gray, birdless winters. Buffalo, a girl once told me, was where clouds went to die. I always liked that.
We’d decided to go out to a bar and someone said something about a taxi. Louis and Cullen were bickering about dooeys, which was a term I didn’t know. Louis was saying who had what dooeys and when.
“Dooeys?” I asked. “Do both of you have DUIs?”
“Just one,” Louis said with a scowl, and I nodded dumbly.
The taxi was an old yellow minivan with a peeling checkered stripe. Cullen pulled back the door and held it, like a gentleman, as I slid across the bench seat next to Louis. I could feel the heater on blast, buffeting us with the smell of sweat and smoke and Febreze. Our driver turned his head toward the dome light as he waited: an impossibly fat young man in a Santa hat.
“Ho, ho, ho. Where to?”
“We wanna get drunk at the Summit Street Saloon, Santa,” Louis said.
“Right-o.”
He popped the minivan into gear and began eyeballing me in the rearview. I held my face down in a frown, which was a plea not to speak. Santa had big clay ears and tiny marble eyes, and greasy skin that duffled around the neck. He wore a pencil sketch of a mustache that was marred, in all directions, by violent constellations of acne, running off his cheeks and into his collar.
This was the guy I pictured when someone said the word lardass.
“I was just thinking,” he finally said. “You boys look like you could use a little ganja tonight. Am I right? Santa’s running a special New Year’s deal.”
None of us said anything, not a word. We just left the poor kid hanging there, which seemed to depress and demoralize him all out of proportion. Santa was not much of a pusher, which was too bad for him.
“Nobody?” he said.
I was actually sort of relieved that Louis and Cullen weren’t interested, but it was too late. Santa gave up, right there on the spot, and offered to smoke us out for free. No one was strong enough to say no to free drugs, and this made Santa fat and jolly again.
I watched as he let his belly out into the wheel and took both hands away. A lighter flickered in the dark and he inhaled asthmatically, slowing the car down with him. I took the glass bowl over his shoulder, and I passed it away to Louis. Everything about this made me anxious, and I reached behind me for my seat belt then. Santa struck me as a guy with a couple dooeys at least.
That first hit seemed to liven him up, too, and he started telling us racist jokes about
ragheads and sand niggers. I was inhaling deeply and not following how this began. But Cullen was hee-hawing in a way meant to mimic Louis’s laughter. Leaning across me with a big, shit-eating smile. But Louis wouldn’t bite.
“No, dude, that’s not funny,” Louis said to Santa, in total seriousness. “You’re telling it wrong. You’re stepping all over the joke.”
And suddenly Louis was telling his own racist joke.
Out the window the taxi dollied through illuminated cones of static as my body flushed with heat. My fingers tingled and the capillaries in my head locked. I didn’t like this at all. This was all really happening where I lived. Terrorism was not some abstraction on the television. It was the promise of endless war. It was the fear of people and buildings. It was the suspicion of strangers and foreigners. It was the avoidance of crowds and public transportation. It was the brand-new paranoid connections that bloomed inside our heads with no clues for how they got there, or what to do next.
After a full month of waiting on death, I went back down into the Metro, where a Muslim man got onto my train and began reciting loudly from the Koran. This deep, impenetrable monotone issuing down the long car. Incanting life, incanting death, I didn’t know. I watched as people found him in the rabble—this wraith in white cloth—and the tidal way that they backed up and emptied out at each next stop. Looking for a new train. Looking for the stairs. Looking for a police officer, perhaps.
But I decided to stay. I would not be scared off by this boogeyman in his ghutra and his robes, because I wanted to know what he was saying. I wanted him to see me watching, too. I wanted him to know that I was paying witness. One more stop, I thought, exhilarated; and one more, I thought, terrified. What was this that was happening now? And could it be a thing that was happening to me?
When the man finished his prayer, he sat and closed his book. Staring down the empty aisle, utterly expressionless. But as we pulled through the dark tunnel into the high-ceilinged station, he turned to watch the crowds on the platform. The car stopped and the doors opened, and a crush of new bodies pressed in all around. I stood up to keep watching the man. Thumbing his pages right to left, preparing himself again. The bell chimed, and the hydraulics released, and I suddenly found myself reaching out to catch the closing doors.