by Tom Wilson
"Alright, look," I said, spinning to face him on top of a subway grate blowing clouds of steam into the cold air. He stood in front of me, the Lone Ranger, glowing in reflected neon and billowing smoke, waiting for me to finish the sentence, waiting for me to tell him to get lost, to drill home the icy point that there are ways to approach people to get their attention and this wasn't one of them. He took a step forward under a streetlight and looked human enough in the yellow glare to give it a try.
"Who are you" I asked quietly, "What's the deal?"
"I'm a friend, Tom, a fr—"
"Look, cut the crap. Are you trying to—"
"I wish you wouldn't use that language," he said.
"Will you knock it off?"
"I can see where some of the fellows over there aren't the best influence."
I groaned, sitting on the edge of my guitar case, looking at him.
"One question," I sighed, "Are you the Lone Ranger, or what?"
"No," he said.
"Then who are you?"
He smiled at me patiently. "I'm Clayton Moore."
"Clayton Moore is the Lone Ranger."
"No, I'm not," he said.
He walked slowly across the pavement to the steel grates covering a storefront and leaned against it, looking at the stars and tipping the white hat back on his head. "I know what you're trying to say, and I appreciate it," he said, "but I'm not. I'm an actor like you. I mean, I'm not an actor now, but I was one."
I stood up and walked toward him, certain that the guns were as fake as he was.
"You're not Clayton Moore."
He pulled himself up to full height, chattering the metal grate behind him, and stared me right in the eye. "Look at me, friend," he said, "Am I?"
He was. I watched the show. He really was.
"What is this? Okay, I mean…what is this?" I asked, nearly spinning in place. He stared like a sharpshooter through the cold air. "Tom, I just thought I would enjoy talking to you," he said, as a dented pick up truck pulled up next to us. "Hey, Tom!" the driver called out through the window he was cranking open, "You need a ride or something?"
It was Nicky, one of the doormen from the club, driving home and going my way.
"Great!" I said, swinging my guitar case over the curb and into the rusted truck bed, "That's be great, Nick. Thanks."
The Ranger tipped his hat to Nick and looked at me.
"Looks like I've got a ride," I said.
He looked down the long sidewalk and shrugged.
"Do you think you could drop me somewhere?" he said.
"Uh, I'd better get back to the hotel, and Nick is…" I looked into the truck cab, stalling for Nick to come up with an excuse, "Nick…are you…uhhhhhh." The Ranger leaned toward Nick and smiled.
"Nick, I would be much obliged if you could drop me off somewhere." The kid looked around his tiny crew cab and said "Sure. If it's close enough and you can fit."
"I'm much obliged," he said, taking off his hat and handing it to me before folding himself behind the passenger seat of the truck, ready to go.
"Where are you going?" I asked.
"Very close," he said, curled into a ball and sitting on several heavy metal CDs, "Unless it's a bother."
We drove west from center city and the Ranger directed Nick with a screwdriver he'd been sitting on, until we got to the brick duplexes and cement apartment complexes of Overbrook.
"You can drop me off here, Nick," the Ranger said, returning the screwdriver and gesturing me to hand him his hat.
"Here?" I said, "You want us to drop you off here?"
"Yes, if it's not too much tr—"
"This is my old neighborhood," I said.
"It is?" he said, "Right on this corner will be fine, Nick."
"You live here?"
"This will be fine," he grunted, as I opened the door to lean my seat forward.
"I think I need a bit more room than that," he said, so we took the slippery CDs he handed us, and finally yanked him out by the arm. "You live at 64th Street?" "Pardon?" he said, brushing off his pants. "64th and Jefferson?" He stared at me silently.
"I lived here," I said. "You did?"
"This is where I used to live. Where I grew up."
"It is?"
"Do you live here?"
He leaned into the truck to shake Nick's hand and thank him, as I looked down the block at the little stone house toward Lebanon Avenue.
"That's it right there," I said.
The Ranger pulled my guitar out of the truck bed and handed it to me.
"Want to get some coffee?" he said.
I didn't say anything for a while, until Nick was getting antsy and I waved at him to go ahead and leave me there.
"You're okay from here?" Nick called through the closed window.
I shrugged at him and waved, crossing the street at the very spot where I learned to cross the street.
When the Ranger asked for a simple "cup of coffee," the gaping mouthed kid at the counter couldn't muster the bean, blend, or cup size questions, and he definitely didn't ask him whether or not he wanted whipped cream. He looked hard at the cowboy hat, the red neckerchief and the gun belt, and the best response the tattooed, nose-ringed kid could come up with was "What?"
"I'd like a cup of hot coffee, please," the Ranger said, his voice filling the shop with simple authenticity. Without hesitating, the kid handed him an American, straight out of the pot, hot cup of coffee. We walked over to the sugar and creamers and I showed him the plastic top for the cup, demonstrating the tiny hole to sip through, as he demonstrated back to me that he knew where the trashcan was. He chucked the top into the can and took a sip of hot, black coffee, walking outside past the crowd of people in comfy chairs pretending to read Sartre, holding their lattes and gaping at him in confusion.
He walked a half block until there was a rock big enough to sit on, in the center of a landscaped sliver of grass in front of a Mobil station and settled on the rock, set between two young trees tied to growth stakes. I sat on a curb next to him, surrounded by a circle of advertising flags poked into the dirt, eight of them advertising cartons of cigarettes and credit cards, and one American flag. The fluorescent lights of the gas pump island caught the soft folds of his white hat as he tipped it back to swig the coffee. I sipped my own through the hole in its cover and waited silently. An actor has come to me for some reason, and I prepared myself for whatever he had to say. Some bit of show business wisdom that might allow me to careen through the roiling rapids of my life's work, or even better, a word of peace and restoration in a life pummeled by hospital bills and guys in down vests with model DeLoreans.
He looked up at the few stars we could see and sighed.
"That's good coffee," he said. That was it. Just "That's good coffee" and back to staring at the sky. He wasn't going crazy with insight, or advice, or anything. He just kept looking into the cup and smiling.
"Coffee is so good. Hot and so good," he said.
"Do you want to tell me something?" I asked, grabbing a few blades of grass with my fingers.
He looked up at the stars. "Amazing, isn't it? Hot coffee under the stars." I tossed the grass in the air, watching it spin toward him in the breeze. "Is there some message you've got or something?" I asked.
He warmed his hands with the steaming cup, looking into the dark liquid as if he were reading tea leaves. "Not really," he said.
"Not really? What do you mean?"
"Tell me something about yourself, friend."
"My name is Tom, not friend," I said, "It's Tom, okay?"
"Fair enough. Tom it is," he said.
I flattened a patch of dead grass with my hand and put my coffee down on it. It was him, the real actor, which left only one possible option. "There must be something you have to say to me, right?" I said.
"No, I don't think so," he said, sipping his coffee.
"There must be, though."
"I don't think there is. Boy, this is good coffee."
/> "You don't think there is. You're not even sure if there is?"
"I'm pretty sure there isn't," he said, smiling.
I stared up at the mute stars, and looked back for one more try. "No message?"
"Tell me something about yourself, Tom," he said, his blue eyes staring into mine.
I stood up, brushing dead leaves from my pants. "You know, if I could say something here," I said
"Shoot, Tom."
"There should be a message or something."
"Why is that?"
"Because you're an actor and you've been following me around, and you came to my show."
"So you think there should be a message for you?"
I stared at him, sitting under the stars holding his steaming coffee, and couldn't help it.
"Yes," I said, "There should be one."
"Come on, tell me something about yourself," he said.
And, for some reason, staring into his mask, I did. I sat back down and told him something about myself.
FIVE
I never met my grandfather, my father's father, a universally loathed louse who left his wife and five children in the middle of the great depression thirty years before I was born, and I never heard much about him, catching the "I don't have a grandfather from my Dad" vibe early, and never asking about it. My father's childhood was spent with hundreds of orphan boys at St. John's Home for Boys in Philadelphia, where he was left by his mother, and separated from his three brothers and one sister when he was five. His memories of that time included the screaming of anguished children torn from the only families they knew, and the cold heist of his only possession as soon as he got there, a favorite book snatched away by the first nun he met, a crime that he glowered about well into his sixties. Being raised - literally - in an orphanage during the depression actually gave him a bottomless well of gritty stories of hunger and hardship that most of my friends' parents improvised but couldn't quite back up. While we opened our Hot Wheels cars and electric football games on Christmas morning, my father could easily wander into a reverie about his best Christmas ever.
"I thought that the new washcloth was all I was getting that Christmas," he said, looking out our front window toward the wood paneled station wagon in the driveway, "And Sister Joseph Mary came to me and handed me …an apple!"
"That's great, Dad. Can you help me set up the Hot Wheels track?"
"And we had mush for breakfast," he would add.
"Cool! Hot Wheels track! Look! Where do the batteries go?"
"Four boys on one mattress on the floor."
"Let's tape G.I. Joe's feet to the Hot Wheel cars! Cool!"
His childhood burned only a few commandments into the stone tablet of his spirit, but he made sure that my brothers and sisters and I got the message. Don't waste food, don't ever take sides against a member of your family, and seriously, don't ask Dad about his father or anything, because that's a mystery enveloped in black clouds and should probably be left alone.
My early childhood happened between the storms of his life, when he was a young lawyer in the center of the bustling city, with a leather briefcase and membership at the Union League Club, where my brothers and I got to play billiards and meet football players at father-son dinners. His letters were addressed to "Mr. Wilson, Esq." and he sent his sons, while a glint of sunlight still caught the corners of his life, to Waldron Academy for Boys, where I was called "Master Wilson" and wore a grey woolen suit to my first day of Kindergarten,
Then his life went all Irish on him, and the weather got violent again.
My father's legs were crushed in a car accident in 1973, and those hospital stays and surgeries, financial ruin and despair began an endless tornado of illness and calamity that is known in my family's folklore as "The Fall Of Saigon," since it happened at the same time as the American withdrawal from Viet Nam, and reverberated in our lives so strongly that a bunch of helicopters might as well have dropped napalm on the house. The window in his life where I was raised, with dinners in my tiny businessman's suit and folded handkerchief was blown shut by the stiff hurricane of bitter luck, and a new window opened, a broken one, smeared with grime and desperation, jimmied open and shut only by crafty friends with new sets of useful skills to help the family.
After months of unpaid bills, the electric company shut off the power to our house, full of five kids and a reeling patriarch, so it quickly became much more important to put off a visit from a pitying old lawyer friend and his glittering wife talking about golf and the Ivy League, than an emergency visit from a crazy friend of my brother's who heroically climbed a power pole with a yellow extension cord to illegally return "jumper cable" electricity to a house with five kids in it. A group of phony lawyers drinking highballs and grimacing at your bad luck pales in comparison to a guy who can steal juice from a power pole when your electricity's been shut off for a long time. The thick, yellow cord snaked across the backyard and through the dining room all the way to Dad's chair, where he deputized himself power commissioner, deciding which appliances should be plugged into the two outlets. His lawyerly judgment was quick, and there were no rights of appeal. The appliances we could not survive without ended up to be a coffee maker and a television, until it got dark and we needed a lamp, but that was only if the coffee was hot enough. The fireplace was used for warmth, candles filled the house with golden light after sunset, and a cooler with ice kept the bologna fresh for the next day's lunches. We lived like colonial pioneers in the tangled woods of a Pennsylvania hillside, huddled next to a roaring fire, watching episodes of "Starsky and Hutch" on a color T.V. so broken that for years we thought that Starsky's Ford Gran Torino was green.
"Thomas, would you be kind enough to get us some firewood?" my Dad would say, "And bring that extension cord over, would you? I need to plug in the lamp." The amazing thing about him was the regal air he could keep, bathed in candlelight and surrounded by a wife and five children eating out of a cooler as he chain-smoked in an armchair, worrying and planning our survival, burning acid holes through his heart and stomach and sending him back to the hospital again and again. He was the undisputed gold medalist of the hospital visit, going there more often than some of its own employees, and I was the reluctant silver medalist, rushed to the emergency room with asthma attacks so often that we could call my father's room upstairs to tell him we were there.
"Dad," I panted, "I'm downstairs."
"Wonderful," he said, "Are you bringing me cigarettes?"
"No," I squeezed out between tortured breaths, "I'm in the emergency room downstairs."
"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph," he said. My father had a form of Irish Tourette's Syndrome, at any time screaming "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!" as thundering Catholic punctuation in honor of the Holy Family.
People called me "Dead Man" in high school because I was absent from class for about half of the four years and they thought I'd died. I returned from the hospital every time, hunched over, quivering from the pills, inhalers, injections, and derision, carrying pockets full of absence excuse notes from doctors, nurses, faith healers and parents, hoping to blend in and get back into class without a lot of attention.
"Hey! Dead man's back! We thought you were dead!"
"I'm not dead."
"Dead man! Whoo! The dead man lives!"
"Knock it off."
"Dead man!" they'd yell, knocking my books to the ground and dancing boot prints onto the maroon cover of "The Catcher In The Rye" that I hadn't returned to the English department yet, because I was absent when they collected them and the class was already reading "Animal Farm."
"How is school going, Thomas?" my Dad asked from his hospital bed.I wasn't all that verbal back then. I didn't answer. "Well, just remember, they can't take your mind, and they can't take your spirit," he said, staring at me intently while turning up the sound on a "Hawaii Five-O" episode on the tiny black and white T.V.
Soon after that I decided that the school, the teachers, the system, and the world could kiss
my inhaler, and I was going to be an actor. This decision came to me while standing in a parking lot in a warm, hugging knot of Christian teenagers in various states of religious ecstasy while praying in tongues.
I grew up in the hillsides swept with long grasses and thick stands of trees that hid George Washington and his troops during the long winter at Valley Forge, and though I camped there with the Boy Scouts and climbed the very mounds of earth that the frozen soldiers of the Colonial Army built to protect themselves from a British sneak attack, by the early seventies, the rolling hills were dotted with a few commemorative plaques, one of the largest shopping malls in North America, and the Valley Forge Music Fair, a theater in the round that featured acts from the Tonight Show like Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, and sometimes a touring Broadway show like the one we'd come to see that night, "Godspell."
The single question that my parents had when Godspell began attracting the attention of dramatic teenaged hippies was – does He rise from the dead? Yes, "He" does rise from the dead. Jesus Christ Superstar ended with a dead Jesus and we can't have a dead Jesus at the end of a show about Jesus. Like any good Catholic boy, not only do I capitalize Jesus, I bow my head when His name is said and I capitalize any reference to Him at all. Get over it.
I had to check and make sure in late night phone calls to the church's youth group members older and hipper than me, for fear of making the case to my parents for permission to see the show only to discover that He stays dead in Godspell, too.
"So you saw it yourself or what?" I said.
"No, my cousin seen it on a class trip. She said it was cool."
"Does he rise from the dead?"
"Well, he dresses up like a clown."
"That doesn't sound too good."
"But it's cool. They crucify Him on a chain link fence!"
"A fence?! That doesn't sound good-"