Boys of Life

by Paul Russell

  Mr. Nolan was this pudgy man, completely bald. Monica’d got her looks from her mom, who was thin and had those same high Indian cheekbones I liked in Monica so much. Only her mom wore these prissy-looking glasses that completely ruined her looks—at least I thought so, and I always got the feeling Monica’s dad thought so too.

  “Donald Nolan,” he introduced himself that first time. He shook my hand. “You can call me Don,” he said.

  I wanted to say, “Well you can call me Tony,” but I didn’t.

  “Billboards,” he told me when we’d settled into those big white armchairs and Monica’s mom had served both of us mugs of beer on a tray. Don was in the middle of this big fight—in fact, the whole five years I knew him he was in the middle of this fight to keep his billboards.

  “They don’t know it, but we’re doing this city a service,” he explained to me. I was trying hard to be polite, but I also kept yawning away in spite of myself. I’m sure he noticed, but I think he was used to people yawning when he talked to them. “We’re getting products out there so people can see them. That’s what you’ve got to do. People don’t know about it, it don’t sell. It’s simple as that. You got to tell ’em about it if you’re gonna distribute the merchandise.”

  For an instant I thought about what Carlos would’ve said if he’d been sitting there in that white living room. But it’d only have been something rude. He’d have started talking about dildoes or race riots or something. I put Carlos out of my head. Anyway, he’d arranged his whole life so he’d never have to sit in a white living room and talk to somebody’s parents.

  Then I thought—that’s where he’s wrong, that’s where he’s missing out. Sometimes Carlos seemed like the most depressingly selfish person in the world, not to be able to sit in a living room and listen to somebody’s parents talk about whatever they wanted to talk about.

  I could do a pretty good job of pushing him out of my head in those days—it was a skill I’d developed.

  “Now Memphis,” Mr. Nolan told me, “Memphis is the distribution capital of America. Lots of products go through here on their way to somewhere else. Did you know that?”

  I didn’t know anything.

  “And so it goes hand in hand, see? Distribution, advertising. You can’t tell me a few signs are going to ruin this city. This is America, this is free enterprise.”

  It was true when you drove down the interstate you could hardly see anything for all the billboards.

  “Anyway,” he said, “I’m not just out for profit. You can make those signs speak to the community. This last Christmas, for example, I put up four billboards at my own cost to remind people of the holidays. Put people in the holiday mood while they’re going out shopping.

  “Bring back memories of old-time Christmases. Now who’s going to complain about that? And for Fourth of July I put up this beautiful sign with a flag, to make people proud about being Americans. I’d say you’ve got to be pretty much of a spoilsport not to like a billboard with a flag.”

  There was a picture of Monica’s brother, Gary, on the little table next to my armchair. He had those same high cheekbones like Monica, but his hair was darker and his lips fuller—they were almost pouty they were so full. He was sort of a great-looking kid, in his way, and now he was dead. I tried to fathom all that, while Monica’s dad talked on about billboards, but I couldn’t.

  I could hear Monica and her mother talking away in the kitchen, and I wondered what they were talking about. I had this fantasy Monica was asking her mother about sex, whether there was more to it than what she and I managed to do. I had this fantasy her mother was telling her to get me to put it up her butt sometime for a change.

  “There’s lots of future to this business,” Don was saying. “We could get you in at the bottom. Work yourself up.”

  “I appreciate that,” I told him. “I’ll think about it. Let me take some time to think.”

  I knew immediately there was no way I was going to work for Monica’s dad.

  “Well,” Don said when Monica and her mother had finished their little talk in the kitchen. I think he was pretty relieved for our conversation to be over. They never liked me all that much, Monica’s parents. They were just glad to have their little girl back in Memphis, and if I was what it took to get her back there, then they were going to be grateful to me.

  “You think about it,” Don told me. “Son, it was awfully nice to meet you.” He shook my hand like I’d passed some kind of test.

  “Nice to meet you too, Don,” I told him. I guess I emphasized the “Don” a little more than I should have, because Monica gave me this little warning glance. Even though she wasn’t crazy about her parents, she always thought I was making fun of her if I made fun of them, so I pretty much had to toe the line. I dearly wanted to have called him “Mr. Nolan” just to see what kind of distance that would’ve put between us. But Monica had said if they liked me, they’d probably help us out. I guess I’ve always wanted people to like me, which is probably my downfall.

  Actually, I have to say this about Monica. Even though she didn’t think she liked her parents very much, really she liked them a lot. She spent all her time trying to make them happy, which I guess is a good thing to do if you don’t have anything else. They’d had a hard time of it. Monica told me her dad was never the same since Gary died. He got the skitters, was what she said—meaning everything had been going along just fine, and then his life had hit this patch of ice and went into a tailspin. He’d never gotten over that. He kept waiting for another patch, and no matter how long he went without hitting another, or how many billboards he put up, you could see he wasn’t ever going to get his confidence back.

  Monica’s mom had her problems too. She was one of those teetotalers who’d have been a better person if she drank, but she wouldn’t because she was terrified of becoming an alcoholic. She was forever telling Monica how, if you were a latent alcoholic, even one sip of liquor would have you hooked, so you’d better not risk it. Beer she thought was okay—she didn’t drink it herself, but Don did, and she’d serve it to him without making a fuss. Anything stronger, though, she completely disapproved of. Which I always thought was something of a hoot, since Monica once told me her mom couldn’t sleep at night without her dose of this stuff called NyQuil. I don’t know whether you know about NyQuil—it was something I was acquainted with in Owen, when I’d buy it at the drugstore if I couldn’t get anything else to drink. If you look at the label, you’ll see it’s basically straight alcohol with a little cough medicine mixed in. I can tell you, it’s pretty potent stuff—it even comes with this plastic top that’s like a shotglass, which I guess shows somebody somewhere has a sense of humor.

  Maybe I should’ve gotten a job in billboards and been some sort of second son to that family, but I didn’t. Instead I got this job working at a lumber company called Mad Joe’s. You might’ve thought its name meant to say Joe was crazy, but it just meant he was mad as in angry—not angry the deep way Seth was angry, just bad mood angry. But that was okay, I could live around Mad Joe’s being mad. I’ve always been able to sort of go to sleep on my feet, automatic pilot—and anyway, there’s not much to selling wood. It’s not like hustling kids at Port Authority.

  It was amazing how quickly I put that whole Port Authority thing behind me. My whole life’s been walking in and out of different situations like that—and then once they’re over, I’ve always just put them behind me. It’s my great talent. Though every once in a while some kid would come into the store in these dirty jeans and work shirt, a baseball cap cocked back on his head, and I’d catch myself sizing him up, thinking how Carlos would really go for that one. But I felt ashamed when I did that. I told myself, you’ve put all that behind you now. You’ve closed that door.

  Monica always called sex “the wild thing,’’ and I think for her it really was the wild thing. That depressed me. If only she knew about the really wild things. But I never told her about any of the wild things I’d done
. Maybe I hinted I’d had to do a little hustling when I first got to the city, but she wasn’t too shocked by that. She knew how guys could get taken advantage of—it was one of the things she had against New York, all those queers out hustling kids who didn’t know any better. She had her own set of standards, and I’m positive she never got involved in any stuff like that. She told me Matt from Valve Lash was the only guy she was involved with in New York, and all they did was fool around. Whatever that means. I think whatever I might’ve told her about myself—it was way back when we were first getting to know each other—she just totally put out of her head and forgot. Which was something she was always good at, especially when it didn’t fit into her story of things.

  I don’t think we were ever very good at the wild thing together—I’d feel sorry for anybody who thought we were. Though Monica never seemed to notice how bad it was; or if she did, she never let on. “You’re a great driver,’’ she used to say to me all the time, which I always thought was meant to be some kind of compliment.

  The only nights it was ever any good between us was when I’d take a bottle out to Tom Lee Park after work, and sit on the bluffs and think about stuff. I mentioned this earlier. I never wanted to be with anybody when I drank, I just wanted to be alone to practice that old exercise Carlos told me about the very first day we ever met: “Try to think back farther and farther and see if you can follow one single thought all the way back to its beginning.” He was right, too—I could learn all sorts of things just by doing that one thing. I’d stay out there a long time, sometimes till two or three in the morning.

  I was always honest with Monica and told her about the river bluff—that I went out there to think—but I don’t think she ever quite believed me. I think part of her would’ve almost preferred me to be cheating on her with some other woman—at least that’d be something she could understand. But sitting with a bottle of whisky and just thinking about things was frightening to her. She just didn’t know where that sort of thing might end up taking me. I think somewhere deep down she knew that even though to everybody else it looked like she had me, she really didn’t have me at all. She could never put her finger on what it was—and I never gave her any clues, because whether she had me or not didn’t really seem to me to make much difference, since I was there with her anyway.

  Gradually we fell into this joke about an imaginary woman I was having this affair with. It was less scary than thinking about the river bluff—maybe for both of us. My woman was a waitress at a barbeque joint, she was forty-five years old and chain-smoked—Monica claimed she could smell it on me when I came in. She had three children, and a husband who was a truck driver, and we’d check into the Alamo Plaza motel to do our version of the wild thing. When I think about it, the whole thing was a little weird. We’d go on and on about this woman—Monica had decided her name was Velma, and I think in some way we both knew exactly what we were doing, and how we could get in some kind of high spirits making things up about her but underneath all that there was something else, some kind of fright.

  Monica didn’t play her guitar much anymore—only when she was waiting up for me. That night at CBGB’s was the high point of her music career, and once we were back in Memphis she gave up on her ambitions—I guess those songs she wrote me back in New York did her in, and once the music was used up inside her, that was it. It wasn’t something we ever talked about. When I think about it now, I realize we never talked about much of anything. We just kept falling into one pattern after another, sort of like the way we fell in with each other from the start. She’d spend Thursday evenings and all day Sundays at her parents’ house, or she’d go out to the malls with this mousey high school friend of hers, Lisa, who I couldn’t stand to be around. I’d get home from work and, especially if Lisa was there, which she was a lot, I’d go out to the shed to try my hand at a little carpentry, or if I was really depressed I’d sit on my workbench and jerk off and watch how my come spattered the sawdust on the floor. And then there were the days I’d detour by a liquor store and find myself in Tom Lee Park watching the river roll by.

  Usually Monica had fallen asleep on the floor, propped up against the seat of the sofa. Her guitar would be in her lap, and four or five beer cans beside her. My shutting the door would wake her. She could come awake instantly—not like most people, who have to swim a ways up from sleep before they surface. She’d smile and say in this bright voice, “So, you were out with your girl again.”

  “Yeah,” I’d play along. “Velma was pretty hot tonight. There was no resisting her. We broke one of the motel beds and had to pick ourselves up and move over to the other one.”

  She’d shake her head. “Men,” she’d say.

  “Women,” I’d tell her.

  I guess it was some way of reminding ourselves of something. She’d grab my leg and wrestle me down to the floor, which I always kind of liked—I’d let myself go down without much of a fight, and we’d tussle there on the rug in front of the sofa, giggling like little kids because we were both drunk—we’d both gotten drunk in our own separate ways so this sort of thing could have a chance to happen, and she knew that as much as I did. We’d wrestle each other out of our clothes, and by that time I’d have a walloping hard-on—which was something I had a little trouble some of the time finding my way to with Monica. Those were about the only nights the wild thing got halfway wild, and I guess for Monica it was often enough to keep her going.

  I have to admit I used to feel this tremendous relief when I got back home those nights, like there was something I’d just barely escaped. I’d cling to Monica for dear life, this totally crazy fear that I was being swept down the Mississippi River and hanging on tight to one of those tree trunks I’d sometimes see slamming along out in the current, their roots looking like they’d been torn right up from the ground in some terrible flood somewhere.

  OUR WEDDING TOOK PLACE IN THE SPRING OF 1985, this cool gray May afternoon, the kind that always made me remember when I was a kid. I used to love those days—everything looking shaggy with new leaves, and you knew it was going to rain later in the afternoon. The whole day was just waiting for it to happen. I used to get drunk on afternoons like that, and then fall asleep on the sofa and when I’d wake up it’d be raining outside the windows, this gentle rain falling down. That was a great way to wake up. An hour later I’d usually have a headache—but right when I woke up, it was great.

  I guess I got talked into it, or I should say I let myself get talked into it. Getting married, I mean—though I could mean most of the things I’ve ever done in my life, and definitely everything I did with Monica. Everybody’s got some special talent, I guess, and Monica’s was talking me into things. I don’t think she even knew she was doing it—it was just the way she was. And it wasn’t a bad thing, really. In fact, I’ve always liked being talked into things, it always made me feel like I was worth something to somebody.

  We’d rented this little apartment in midtown for cheap, I guess because there were some welfare apartments across the street and nobody wanted to live near those. It was an okay place—we didn’t have much furniture, which didn’t bother me because I’d been living in a place without much furniture for years, but it made Monica nervous. “I want to feel like somebody lives here,” she said. So we spent Saturdays going to yard sales. Personally, I can’t think of anything more depressing—I hated seeing all some family’s junk piled up for sale in their front yard. If you don’t want it, just throw it away, I always thought. There was something indecent about going and selling it.

  Maybe that sounds strange for somebody like me to say, but it’s what I always felt. I’d take one look at those old books and records, and clothes, and toys, and a lamp or a bookcase—and I’d feel like I knew way too much about the people who owned them. I didn’t like knowing so much about total strangers. And I didn’t like bringing their lives into our apartment, which is what I felt like was happening every time we bought another coffee table off of somebody
’s front lawn.

  I remembered Carlos’s apartment, that tent bedroom we had there—how with just a mattress and some good fucking we managed to fill the place up with ourselves, and that was enough. Sometimes I’d hear Carlos saying one single word to me: baggage. And I knew what he meant.

  I said something like that to Monica once—not about Carlos, because she never heard that name pass my lips, but about the furniture. “I sort of liked it better empty,” I think is what I said. We’d spent two hours lugging this ugly green second-hand sofa up two flights of stairs. Monica looked at me and said, “Sometimes you’re just weird, Tony. Do you know that?” It was her theory that New York was what had made me weird, but now that we were back home, as she called it, things were going to get better.

  The one thing I was excited to get was a big color TV. I think I told you how, the whole time I was growing up, we didn’t have a TV. And Carlos never did either, for different reasons. So when we got a TV I thought, This is it. I’ve arrived. I’d spent my whole life thinking about how ordinary people came home from work at night and watched TV, about all the great shows they could watch, all the channels there were to choose from.

  It was the way everybody else could live except me, up till the day I bought that Zenith.

  I have to say this—TV’s the most disappointing thing that ever happened to me. Maybe when I was younger it would’ve been perfect, but by the time I was twenty-three and got my first TV I was no good for it anymore. The waiting for it had worn it out.