by Keith Rosson
“Genre?” Adam said, having moved over to the Dead Punks section. (A bonus of owning your own record store: you could file them any goddamned way you wanted to.)
“All kinds. The gamut. Good, bad. Mediocre.”
“Collectible?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“I don’t know.”
I said, “Mostly mediocre, actually.”
I was fishing, trying to gauge Adam’s interest. I’d made up my will six months before and had left Adam the shop, and now I was having second thoughts about it. He was my only friend, it was true, but he was also twenty years old. A kid. Julia didn’t really count as a friend, since there was that troublesome issue of her doubting my sanity, as well as the fact I paid her, even if it was in store inventory. So, Adam. But the more I’d thought about it, the more I’d begun doubting myself. What college sophomore would want to be saddled with a business like this? With thousands of dusty albums and a monthly lease? Was that even fair of me? The kid couldn’t even drink yet.
Still, Adam was majoring in philosophy; I might have been doing him a favor. The age-old quandary: it wasn’t like I could come right out and say, “Adam, I will be dying a violent death within the next week. And I have no other friends. Shall I leave the record store to you, good chap?”
Adam said, “I’d probably go for the bigger one, the hundred piece lot.”
“Okay. Why?”
He squinted at a record. “Because an album that seems mediocre today may be incredible a year later. People change.” Spoken, I thought, with all the certainty of youth. Where a year can seem another lifetime.
The bell above the door chimed and Randy Noonan squeezed his wheezing girth through the doorway. Now my landlord, I’d known Randy since he was a teenager, when he’d been sullen and quiet. Now in his forties, he exuded impatience and a kind of jolly menace that hung like dank potpourri around him. He coughed and ran a handkerchief down his face. “Hotter than a pyromaniac’s snatch out there.”
He wore cargo shorts and a turquoise Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned low enough to show damp whorls of chest hair.
He had moved to Boston not long after I had leased the space from his mother all those years ago, and then moved back to town when his mom died. Since then I’d listened to his thinly-disguised tales of Bostonian gunrunning and strong-arming every time he came in to collect his rent. Always with the insinuation of mob connections. The way he made it sound, it was as if he and Whitey Bulger had scratched each other’s lottery tickets, tucked each other in at night.
Personally, I believed very little of it; Randy drove a thirty-year-old Nissan hatchback and wore sandals and socks. He carried a key ring the size of a tennis ball. I found it difficult to be afraid of him. But I’d also begun wondering just how it was I’d be meeting my demise over the next week. It had to happen sometime, so why not at Randy’s hands? You never knew; that was the thing about the Curse.
“The fuck is this?” he said, pointing at the speakers. I’d heard punk for the first time in 1977. This exact record, actually: the Dead Boys Young, Loud and Snotty LP. Before that I’d been a disciple of Coltrane and Miles, but I’d given it up as soon as I heard those chords. Jazz had been for my previous life as Bill Creswell and all of Bill’s trappings. Nowadays punk rattled me, propped the me-as-Marvin up on two legs like nothing else did. It was sneering and ugly and vacillated between not giving a shit and caring so much it hurt.
I put the computer to sleep and smiled over the monitor. “What can I do for you, Randy?”
He fixed a thumb at the door and said to Adam, “Hey, kid. Beat it. I got to talk to this guy about something.” That affected accent, so Boston it made your teeth ache.
Adam turned and looked at me, his eyes big and worried behind his glasses.
“He’s fine,” I said.
Randy looked from me to Adam and back, smirking. “I don’t think you’re gonna want him to hear this, Deitz.”
Adam had been a regular at the store for years, since he was in junior high. He didn’t know the particulars of my situation—unless Julia had told him, which hadn’t happened as far as I could tell—but we’d managed any number of conversations about guilt, regret, the concepts of sin and redemption. He was a philosophy major, remember? That and music was the backbone of our relationship. Adam, without knowing the particulars, had listened to me prattle on and been perceptive enough to suggest that I arrange some sessions with his mother. He’d even gone so far as to help us work out our particular payment arrangement. (I was grateful; while Bill Creswell had managed to insure that inventory, records stacked upon records, would never be a problem, money itself was usually tight.) There are some people you meet, regardless of age, and an earnestness shines through. Adam was like that. It didn’t happen often, but when it did, you latched on. Like I said, he was my friend.
I said, “He’s staying, Randy.”
Randy shrugged, and a reddened tube of skin wobbled around his neck. He was one of those guys who seemed almost pitiable until his mouth started moving. “No skin off these balls,” he said.
He pulled a sheaf of papers out of his back pocket and slapped them onto the counter. “Here’s the deal. I got some investors flying in here from Southie in three days, bud.” He held up one finger and twirled it in a circle. “We’re razing the building, putting up condos. All you people are out of here.” He pointed at the papers curled on the counter. “You in particular? You’re being evicted due to a blatant disregard of noise ordinances, complaints spanning a period of over three years.”
“What? What noise complaints?”
Randy shook his head ruefully, holding his hands up. “It’s out of my hands, Deitz. I tried to work with you. The cops are sick of you refusing to turn the goddamned music down. All hours of the day and night. Look in the papers there. Turns out the city’s kept extensive records of your infractions.”
“This is total bullshit,” Adam said. “There’s rules about no-cause evictions.”
Randy grinned, wiped his face again. “Noise complaints. Three years’ worth. This is cause, little fella.” He slowly turned back to me. “You’ve got seventy-two hours to get all your shit packed, Deitz. All this wonderful music you’re listening to.”
Adam said, “Call the cops, Marvin.”
Randy laughed. “The cops signed those papers, you dumb shit.” He hooked a thumb toward Adam. “This kid. You got a mouth on you, you know that? You want to be careful with that mouth of yours.”
I stood there at the counter. I shouldn’t have cared about any of it, I knew that. In less than a week I’d be gone anyway, thrown headlong into some other life. And yet. You wake up and the world keeps insisting you move in it.
I said, “So that’s it? You and your mob buddies are just edging everyone in the building out? You’ve seen Portland in the last couple years, right, Randy? The whole city’s becoming just one big condo at this point. There’s legal ways you can do this.”
Randy ran his handkerchief around his neck as he stood in the doorway. It was a tight fit; he was limned in sunlight, a dark shape blocking the brightly lit world beyond. When he spoke, he sounded sad, bereft. “There’s no time for that, bud. You’ve got seventy-two hours. You’re a nice enough guy, Deitz. But you’re dead weight. You got to go.”
5
Vale bled into a towel wrapped around a handful of frozen Where Have You Bean? Mini-Bites while Mario filled out paperwork. The manager’s office was a cinder block supply closet with just enough room for a desk, two chairs, and a few company-issued inspirational posters gummed onto the pocked walls. Vale’s last check sat on the desk between them.
Mario muttered to himself while he worked through the report. Vale had taken the guy to the ground, but after that, the guy had simply pinned him with one meaty arm and punched him with the other. Vale’s body thrummed with that post-adrenaline sickness that always came after an ass-kicking. Mario, ever the peacemaker, had managed to calm things only after frantically wavin
g gift cards in the guy’s face. Eventually—amid a chorus of crying, frightened children and old men risen to their feet, yelling with newly rediscovered bloodlust—the guy had been talked out of the restaurant and Vale had stood, joyous and blood-spattered, his shirt ripped like a gladiator. He had followed Mario into his office without another word, both of them knowing what was coming next.
Mario signed his incident report and leaned back in his chair. He looked at the rips at the armpits, the blood dotting Mike’s shirt—which was actually Mario’s shirt—and his expression was parked somewhere between contempt and pity. The fluorescents in the ceiling quietly hummed and popped. Mario looked sallow and ghoulish under the light, and Vale assumed he himself looked much, much worse.
“Dude, how old are you?”
Vale rolled his eyes. “Fuck you, Mario.”
Mario, Vale could just tell, would own his own franchise within ten years and retire at forty a millionaire. He was that guy. He’d raise a family. Shyly put dollar bills into the hands of homeless men at stoplights. He wore a safety strap on his glasses and spoke machine-gun Spanish to employees and customers alike. There was a delicate, nearly invisible crucifix on a chain around his neck. Vale could not remember a time that Mario had not smiled like he was honestly happy to be there. He couldn’t understand it.
“No, seriously,” Mario said. “Picking fights with customers? You could have gone to jail, boom, just like that. You don’t want to be here? Just quit. Why the big show?”
Vale, enjoying himself now, held his hands open as if imploring the ceiling. “It’s the drama, Mario. I’m addicted to the drama.”
Mario shook his head. “You’re an asshole, dude.”
Vale nodded solemnly. “That is the truth.”
Mario picked up Vale's check, tapped it against the edge of his desk. “I looked you up on the internet a while back. I couldn’t figure out why my brother-in-law would want me to hire this old, tattoo-covered dude, you know? Then I looked you up and couldn’t figure out why you’d want to work here.”
“I don’t want to work here, Mario. I mean, I thought we just established that.”
Mario shook his head again. “I saw online, one of your paintings went for over half a million dollars, man. Like six months ago that happened.”
“I don’t get any of that money.”
“I read about that, too.”
“My agent got me on a three-day blackout and I signed everything over to him. All my rights.”
Quietly, not unkindly, Mario looked away and said, “Maybe you shouldn’t drink so much then.”
And oh the anger came so fast these days, didn’t it? He went from a kind of lighthearted joviality to just . . . rage. He suddenly wanted to hit Mario, sweet little Mario, in the mouth so badly that the back of his hands itched. He pulled the towel away from his mouth and said flatly, “And maybe you should give me my check and shut your mouth.”
Mario shrugged and pushed the check across the desk. “That’s what I mean. It’s like you want to burn all your bridges up so you can never come back to them. You’re too old to do that, man. You won’t have anything left.”
Vale leaned forward grinning, anger sparking off him like static. He could feel it barreling into Mario, their eyes locked, this snapping, unwavering line of contempt that connected them together.
He said, “Hey, Mario. Guess what? I’ve got pieces in the MOMA. Okay? I made millions. I was in Time, Rolling Stone, Spin. From painting. What are you, a level ten burrito master? Lord of the Tater Tots? Huh? Sucking on that Bean There teat. Who the fuck do you think you are, talking to me like that?”
Mario shrugged one last time and looked down, pushing Vale’s check across the desk. When he looked back up, Vale could see the hurt and anger in his face, the kid’s eyes starting to go wet and misty. He said, “I’m the guy that’s firing you, Mike.”
6
From the journals of Marvin Deitz:
The Five Rules:
1) I must always honor Joan.
2) I must confess my sins.
3) I must expect little.
4) I must refute violence whenever possible.
5) I must be aware of portents and signs.
Additionally, the Three Parameters of the Curse:
1) I will die sometime between infancy and my fifty-sixth birthday. I have never, ever lived to my fifty-seventh birthday, in any of my lives.
2) I will always suffer some significant disfigurement or physiognomic alteration sometime between infancy and my first two decades of life. Generally pretty early on. The disfigurement will be something that, to some degree, alters and dictates the pathway of my existence. Loss of limb, birth defect, etc. Losing an eye, as I did in this life, is actually somewhat mundane.
3) When I die, I will without fail die a violent death. No going peacefully in my sleep for this guy.
Sometimes, it’s just good to remind myself. Like I said, writing it down makes me feel better sometimes.
• • •
I volunteered once a week in the pediatric oncology ward at Seward’s Children’s Hospital.
I couldn’t fault Julia’s idea that being of service to others would be valuable. It’s the cornerstone of thousands of years of experience in both civics and religion. Alcoholics Anonymous is adamant that service to others is a gigantic part of keeping alcoholics sober. Buddhists talk about expecting less, and charities bank on the good feelings that arise from making donations. Julia hoped volunteering would get me outside of myself, put things in perspective. And it had.
My seething contempt toward God was much more finely tuned now.
Seward’s Children’s Hospital was in Northeast Portland. Eight stories tall, a box of glass that beautifully reflected the setting sun against its face. I got off the bus ten minutes early for my shift and stopped in the cafeteria for a cup of coffee.
I got my lanyard from the woman at the reception desk. My shoes squeaked on the marbled floor. I stepped into the elevator. The oncology unit was on the fourth floor.
I stepped out of the elevator and waved at Velma, the grizzled septuagenarian of a receptionist. In spite of the fact that I had been volunteering for a year now, Velma made a great show of inspecting my visitor’s badge. I loved Velma and her wrinkled scowl, her crisp gray mustache. Her dour stolidity, and how she brooked no shit from staff and yet remained resolutely gentle with patients and their families. Sometimes, I daydreamed about Velma being present at Joan’s trial—fantasized that she would’ve planted her gnarled hands on her hips and said to Cauchon in that gravelly, no-nonsense growl, “Are you an idiot? Are you trying to get this girl killed?”
The fourth floor was painted in warm pastels, bracketed with big panes of glass. A mural of animals danced on a far wall. I sat down behind the horseshoe of the reception desk and Velma pointed to a stack of envelopes and a sheaf of papers. The monthly newsletter that went out to donors and board members. She handed me one of those little water tubes with the swab at the end.
“Stuff, swab and stamp.”
I bowed my head. “Yes, m’lord.”
I stuffed, swabbed and stamped. I fell evenly into the rhythm of it as I always did, grateful this time for the distraction from Randy, from time’s inevitability.
I’d done it all at Seward’s. There was a garden on the roof, and a greenhouse, and those children well enough to go would tend and care for the plants up there. Smiling, pale, green-veined children, their hands dusted with earth. I had tilled soil with them, helped them repot those plants grown too large for their containers. Helped them hoist water cans. I had run the beverage cart up and down the halls, escorted dazed, grief-blasted grandparents to the appropriate wing, filed papers. Read stories to the brothers and sisters of sick children. Cold-called previous donors. Stuffed envelopes.
Once a week, four hours a day.
I was intimately familiar with death and its equations. I had long been intimate with the stilled architecture of the corpse. The decay, the
sugary-sweet stink of it all, the odor like a mixture of shit and rotten fruit. The primacy of rotted meat. The simple subtraction of animation pulled from a body, a face. Doing all I had done throughout the centuries, I knew death. I wanted it. I sought it, courted it. And yet none of that mattered when I stepped onto the fourth floor. There, I raged against death, I leaned snarling against it.
I was stuffing envelopes and Velma was on the phone when a woman walked up to our counter holding a little girl’s hand. You could tell a parent: they carried a kind of psychic weight, like an invisible hand seizing the throat, that aunts or uncles or grandparents usually did not; there was no distance afforded parents. The looks on their faces were beyond knowing. I have seen my own children die before, and it is a kind of flat murder of the soul. It’s beyond words. With cancer and its incremental diminishments, where death is afforded the luxury of small bites, parents invariably come to look hollowed out, as if it’s happening to them as well. Heart and lungs are all that is propelling them, these parents—everything else is reserved for ache and worry and terror.
The mother offered me a tired smile and began speaking to Velma. She was most likely pretty once, and attuned to the world, reaching for its possibilities. But now, with bruised gray rings beneath her eyes, her grief was turning her skeletal. Exhausted. She looked at us without really seeing us, and I couldn’t blame her for that. The little girl peered at me from around the corner of the counter. I smiled. Her shirt was yellow, with an embroidered cat on it. She put her chin on the countertop.
“What’s your name?” she whispered.
I ducked my head down a little. “My name’s Marvin,” I whispered back. “What’s your name?”
“Mellie. It’s short for Amelia.”
“Hi, Mellie.”
She looked at her mother for a moment and then turned back to me. “My little brother’s really sick,” she said.