by Joshua Furst
“We’re gonna miss it,” I told her. I was hopped up. Anxious.
“Naw. These things always start late. And the cool kids know it’s unhip to be on time. We’re gonna get there right when we’re supposed to, in the sweet spot when we’ll look like we don’t really care.”
“But we do care!”
She leaned across the table and placed a finger to her lips. “Shh,” she said. “That’s a secret. No one’s s’posed to know that.” Teasing me. Happy. Joking around. She dabbed a napkin in her water glass and wiped the grease from my cheek.
When we finally arrived, the show had already started, maybe not on time, but more on time than us. People lurked in the dark just past the entrance, their backs to the door. Somewhere on the other side of their chatter Phil was strumming his guitar and muttering into a mic, but all we could hear from the door was the tenor of his voice, the rumble of sound when he dug rapid-fire into the strings for emphasis. The dude taking the money wouldn’t let us in. “We’re sold out. It’s too crowded in there already,” he said.
“We’re on the list,” said my mother.
“There is no list.”
“Bullshit. There’s always a list.”
The guy shot her a look, two parts pity, one part fear, and we should’ve known right then how fraught things were inside. “Not tonight,” he said. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. The kid’s too young.”
“We’re friends of Phil.”
He gazed at her, unimpressed, waiting for the point.
Phil was singing now, an old union song. His voice grated against the melody, more bark than tune.
“We’re missing it,” I said.
And my mother seized her advantage. “Look,” she told the dude. “You’re gonna make the kid cry.”
He let us pass.
And there—once we got past the bodies crammed into the back of the club—was Phil. He was balanced unsteadily on a stool, holding himself upright with a stiff leg. Even fatter than when I’d seen him months earlier, in clothes a touch too tight, his work shirt unbuttoned out of necessity, his work boots untied out of neglect. He’d abandoned the union song. His head hung low, his chin tucked into his chest, his oily hair stabbing over his bloated face. Like he was too tired to play the role all these people expected of him.
He looked up at the ceiling and ran his hand through his hair, held it off his forehead the way I’d seen him do a hundred times before, and for a moment, the man I’d known came flickering through. The same, but sadder.
“Where’s that drink, bub?” he said, peering out toward the bar. He strummed his guitar. “I can’t do another song until I get that drink.”
My mother and I had wedged ourselves between the standing-room crowd and the tables. Pressed in on both sides, we worked sideways toward the brick wall where there was slightly more space to breathe. We hadn’t adjusted yet to the mood in the air. We sensed disturbance but didn’t have enough information to comprehend its cause. All we knew was that people were riveted by something other than the music. And that Phil looked lonely up there, waiting for his drink.
Eventually a pint glass of clear liquid made it to the stage. Phil raised it like an offering and said, “Finally. The service here is for shit.” He downed half the drink and dropped the glass onto a second, empty stool that had been placed beside him.
“Here’s another one you’re gonna hate.” He picked out a few chords. “Straight from the prophet’s lips.” And he launched into a Dylan song. Groans and protests rose from the crowd. He ignored them, watched his fingers and rambled on until he stumbled over the lyrics and gave up. “Too many verses,” he said, mumbling into the mic. “That man never knew when to quit.” He slammed the rest of his drink and shot a look at the bar. “Another round for the troubadour?” he said. He strummed. He croaked out a few random lyrics. False starts. Aborted gestures. “There’s no success like failure and failure’s no success at all.” A thought struck him and he paused to catch it. “He’s a genius, though. No question. Always was better than Phil Ochs.”
The crowd tensed. A call went out. “Play your own songs.”
“Phil knew it the first time he saw him. ‘Well then. I’m finished.’ That’s what he thought. I should’ve killed him right then and there.”
More protests from the crowd. People pleading, shouting out titles.
“Those songs are shit,” Phil said. “Phil made me promise never to play them again. He begged me. While I had my gun to his head. ‘They’re an embarrassment.’ That’s what he said. ‘They’re all lies. I’ll let you kill me, Traine. I understand why you have to kill me. But once I’m dead, you have to start telling the truth. So, no more songs. No more false hopes.’ ” He went on and on like this, making no sense, not even pretending he planned to do anything more than chatter for the rest of the night. Sometimes he lost the thread and gazed off into the abyss. Then he’d grab hold of some new thought and chatter some more. A parable. A screed. A demand for more drinks. I didn’t understand what was going on. He wasn’t himself. I kept wishing he’d at least stutter. Something. That a crack would appear—a flash of light—and this dark creature who’d taken over his body would flinch and reveal the decent, sad, forgiving man I loved. I kept wishing this was a pose. But Phil had never learned how to separate himself from the illusion he presented to others. He was fatally, impractically sincere. This had been his gift. Relentless good intentions.
He was on to a new story now about some sort of bet he claimed to have made with Arthur Rimbaud. Something about Chinese checkers and whores and the profane secrets of the universe. And, of course, Dylan. Dylan and Rimbaud playing a series of games—best of five? Best of seven? If Rimbaud won, Phil Ochs would be plied with whores who would reveal cosmic mysteries to him. If Dylan won, Phil would be put to death. Or some shit like that. I couldn’t follow the logic. I’m not sure he could either. He kept backing up to clarify and change the story.
I asked my mother, “What’s wrong with him?”
She gave me a look, weary, worried, fully of pity. “We should go,” she said.
“But what’s wrong with him?”
“He’s—I don’t know.”
“We need to help him.”
“No,” she said, “we should go. We shouldn’t have come to begin with.”
“But he helped us,” I said, “so we have to help him.”
There was that pity in her eyes again. “That’s not how it works.” She squeezed my shoulder and tried to steer me back through the crush of people around the door.
And all I could think was, Phil hadn’t seen me yet. And I had to say goodbye. It was important. Even if—especially if—goodbye meant forever. He was going on and on—the whores with their big tits taunting Dylan, hovering around him, pawing at his chest, trying to distract him so Rimbaud could win—and my mother was pushing me to leave and I was running out of time so I shouted, “Phil! Hey, Phil! Look! We made it!”
And he heard me. He squinted out past the lights into the crowd. “Who let a kid in here?” he mumbled.
“It’s me! It’s Freedom! We made it! We’re here!”
“Freedom…” Holding the hair off his forehead, he tried to orient himself, to locate me in the darkness and remember who he was.
“Play that song,” I said. “The one about Lenny.” Who knows what I was thinking. I must’ve thought I was helping.
“Freedom…” A spark. “Right. Freedom. Lenny Snyder’s kid. That guy’s a secret agent. I have classified knowledge—documentation—that Lenny was personally involved in the murder of Che Guevara…” He gazed into the lights and seemed confused for a second. When he recovered, he said, “And he owes me ten thousand bucks.” He chuckled. “A thief and a scoundrel, that’s Lenny Synder, folks. But I got him back. I took my revenge. I cuckolded him. Fucked his wife. It was easy. Left her begging for more.” Maybe
he continued. Some new diatribe. I wouldn’t know. My mother had me out of there just like that.
She didn’t say a word to me the whole way home.
We never talked about that night. What was there to say? Next we heard, Phil was dead. He hung himself in the doorway of his sister’s kitchen.
And one more thing about Rosalita:
I had to say goodbye to her. There’d been times, over the past few months, when we missed each other. The snow was too deep, the air too frigid. One or the other of us flaked for whatever reason. There’d been weeks when, to appease my mother, I’d gone to school every single day, weeks when the chaos Rosalita never talked about in her life took her away to a heavy place that I knew not to ask about when I saw her again. It was no big thing. The thrill of waiting, not knowing if she might pop, scowling, around the corner, her hands balled in fists like she was off to kick someone’s ass, the possibility, the fluttering chance of it, was enough to sustain me through the times when she wasn’t there.
I’d flip through comic books. Daydream about the contents of the Wacky Packies she and I’d been sticking on the dash of the Pinto as reinforcements for my army of protective totems. I’d nap in the backseat.
One day she’d be there blowing bubbles, waiting for me with a whole mess of Bazooka comics.
“Where’ve you been,” she’d say. “I thought you died.”
And I’d say, “You’re the one who went missing.”
“Whatever. Look at this. And this one. And this one’s the best.” Feeding the little wax paper panels to me like they explained everything I’d ever need to know.
But lately I’d been waiting and waiting for her. A month—maybe more—had gone by. And sure, on some of those days I’d been in school, or at Sister’s with my mother or just busy, but spring had blown in since the last time I’d seen her. The sun had come out of its hibernation, weeds had begun sprouting in the nooks and crannies of the car. Everybody else was out and about again. And still, I hadn’t seen any evidence of her: no Tootsie Pop wrappers, no new Wacky Packies. Worry buzzed in my gut. The extravagant, hard-to-believe things she’d told me, they swarmed in my stomach. Maybe they’d all been true. I should have listened differently.
And now that the weather had begun to change, we were going away, my mother and me. We’d been plucked for selection. We might never return.
I waited in the Pinto for longer stretches. Whole days.
No sign.
I wandered the streets, searched under the bridge.
Unable to find her in any of the usual places, and worried that I’d never see her again, I started to construct a story in my head involving Lumps and Stinger and the other kids in her squat. Maybe they’d tied her up. They were doing things to her. What, I didn’t know. The details were dark. But it was very bad and nobody, not even the adults in the squat, cared enough to do anything to stop it. She’d been right about her fatalistic vision of the future, but the hole in her heart was the least of her problems. Those kids would kill her before she had the chance to die on her own.
Our friendship existed in public places, semisecret pockets of the Great-Out-There where we could pretend to be whoever we wanted. I had no idea if anything she’d ever said to me was true. But the scars on her rib cage, those had been real. Someone had really burned her with a cigarette. They were doing it again. No one cared. Only me.
I had to save her. To try, anyway, so I strapped my AK-47 to my back and set off toward 13th Street.
I’d never been inside the squat. The closest I’d come was when I’d lurked outside—it seemed like lifetimes ago—while Lenny brokered some deal or other with the cannibals barricaded next door. The place had loomed there, frightening. The kids, maybe Rosalita herself, scurrying around in the shadows. Playing chicken. Violent, it had seemed. Capable of anything. Coming up on it now, those same trepidations surged in me. Those same old insecurities. I was too weak, too afraid. Doomed to fail. But somehow I managed to go up the three steps to the reinforced steel door pierced by two bullet holes, tagged so many times that it was now almost entirely coated in black. I pulled hard on the industrial handle screwed to the door and it flew open on its hinges. The lock—like every other one in the neighborhood—was broken.
Inside, the place virtually sparkled. It was so clean. So unlike what I’d expected. In its bones it was a tenement, just like the one I lived in, but instead of the rotting banister and wracked steps and brittle linoleum in clashing colors and styles pasted over holes in the floor, the squat had style, intention, an aesthetic sense that had been carefully considered and then executed to conform to a precise vision.
The floors were made of thick broad boards of wood, sanded and painted a slick black. The walls crawled with murals. Not the jittery dying flowers of my mother’s walls but mythological creatures, giant sea squid and anglerfish, incandescent in dark water. Christmas lights snaked up the handrails. Work lights hung overhead. Extension cords, bundled into thick ropes, rode the edges of the corridor, neat, out of the way.
I listened. The first floor seemed abandoned. No sound or light. I took the stairs slowly. Wincing at each inadvertent sound I made.
Up out of the ocean, Viking ships rode the waves, their great sails straining against the wind. On the second floor, none of the apartments had doors. They just opened onto the hallway like a single maze-like dungeon. A continuous string of corridors and rooms.
Listening again, I still heard nothing. Or no, I did hear something. Faintly. A scurrying, like rats in the wall, but which wall? It all seemed very far away. I slung my gun around and held it with both hands and I crept like a grunt in the jungles of Vietnam through one doorway after another. Clear. Clear. Was that music? Someone picking at a guitar? But where? And how to get from here to there?
I slipped from room to room. My heart felt like it was being squeezed by an iron fist, which clenched more tightly with each corner I turned.
It was eerie how cozy, how warm these warrens were. Instead of squalor, I was confronted by comfort. Beds piled with blankets. Shelves filled with crates and boxes, each labeled and fitted and exactingly organized. Everything handmade. These people lived better than my mother and me. The place reeked of overwhelming attentive care. It upset me. Where was the rot? It had to be here somewhere. Rosalita’s twisted way of confronting the world hadn’t come from nowhere.
I kept moving.
I found the source of the guitar picking. A skinny white dude, maybe twenty-five, thirty, shirtless in a windowsill facing the air shaft. His hair hung flat and unwashed in his face as he watched his hands. He looked up when I entered. Pulled the hair from his face and smiled. “Howdy.” Like some random kid skulking around with an AK-47 was completely normal.
I backed away.
Later, I caught sight of a ropey Asian woman with hair almost as long as her African-print dress. I watched her from two or three rooms away. She was standing over a chopping block in what must have been a kitchen. Open canning jars spread around her on the counter. The radio quietly playing NPR. I didn’t come closer. I chose a different route.
Up the stairs to the third floor. Past more elaborate creatures on the walls. Phoenixes, dragons, griffons, unicorns.
There were more signs of life up here. A TV was on. Or a record player. Richard Pryor’s voice cracking as he whimpered, in character. A rustling of life around the first doorway. Flattened against the wall, I strained to hear. The milky pop of an inveterate mouth-breather. Lumps. It could be no one else. I listened harder. A tinny clang and then a voice pleading. “Give it back.” Was that Paulie? Someone else was in there too. I was pretty sure.
Before I bum-rushed the place I had to prepare myself. I fell back on the hundreds of cop shows I’d seen. The way Kojak or Rockford or the Hawaii Five-O guys would flex in the shadows. The exact stance of their bodies. Their spread legs. Their cocked arms. How they leap
t into action and surprised the villains. That’s what I had to do. Now was the time.
Maybe Rosalita was in there, maybe not. If she was, I’d run to her. Shield her with my body. Otherwise, Paulie and Lumps, Stinger, whoever I found, they’d know where they’d stashed her. I’d force it out of them. They’d pay. Oh, how they’d pay.
I flipped around the corner and there they all were. Lumps and Stinger and Paulie and others whose names I didn’t know. Maybe eight in all. Boys of various ages and races. They barely glanced at me. One of them, sitting on a Big Wheel missing its pedals, tipped his head quizzically and plopped an M&M on his tongue.
“Where’s Rosalita?” I demanded.
Stinger looked up long enough to hiss, “Shhh.”
Richard Pryor said, “I was lookin’ at this one titty lookin’ at me an’ looked like it winked at me.”
They were, most of them, sprawled on the floor around the record player, listening. I didn’t know what to do next. They were supposed to be shocked and disoriented by my arrival, to be sent into a frenzy of chaotic scrambling, covering their tracks, hiding their crimes. They were at least supposed to do something more than nothing. I waved my gun around, took a few steps into the room. Richard Pryor said, “I don’t want to offend this bitch with this monkey foot, see?”
I was losing my nerve.
Someone had taken out the walls on this floor, broken down the barriers between the old apartments and turned the space into one massive loft. There were toys everywhere. Toys and picture books and art supplies. Anything a kid could want. Plop in the middle of the room someone had erected a modular swing set. I felt my anger turn, and not for the productive reasons I’d come here to fume about. No, I was angry at all this stuff. At the calm, attentive way they were entertaining themselves. I was angry at what they had and what I did not.
Even Lumps. Look at him there. He was barely sentient. A stunted troll. Stupid as a stone. Even he had more going for him than me. And he’d hurt Rosalita. And none of these fuckers cared.