by Max Winter
“G-U-N-P-O-W-D-E-R spells tobacco . . . and B-A-T, Rhode Island!”
And:
“It’s a terribly . . . tiny little country. Rhode Island could beat the crap out of it in a war.”
Encyclopædia Britannica: This is sure enough what happens to Rhode Islanders fixing to split and/or reinvent themselves. On your way out the door, your childhood home—the place where your cherry got popped or you chopped down your old man’s cherry tree or shot your first load or goose—becomes a local landmark. We all feel like museum pieces round these parts.
Drank from the fountain: Built in 1873, the carved marble and granite drinking fountain sits at the foot of the front steps of the Providence Athenaeum. The water—rich in cadmium, mercury, and sundry pathogens—flows straight from the Pawtuxet River. The inscription carved above its spigot reads “Come Hither Whoever Thirsteth.”* According to local legend, whoever follows this advice will be doomed to return to and eventually die in Providence. Anecdotal evidence seems to bear this out, at least among members of my and my parents’ generation. I’ve managed to avoid the fountain’s lure, though Eli—who would fill his thermos at it on his way to work—declared the water oddly cool and clean and sweet. Many of Providence’s finest succumbed. Over and over, again and again, they’ll try to pull up their roots, but every other fall or spring or summer will find themselves moving back. To make a little cash, maybe, or to sublet something cheap from an undergrad, or to house- and cat-sit for a restless professor until they get over a breakup, or kill a little time with an old flame, or finally finish that book they’ve been working on or reading. The fountain often takes the blame. The hapless prefer to think of themselves as helpless.
*None other than Howard Phillips Lovecraft wet his whistle here, despite an inborn fear of germs and the outdoors. But the local horror writer and racist was afraid of everyone and everything you’d care to name: people unlike himself, himself, the sea. What else? Women, it almost goes without saying. New York. Genitals. “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear,” our boy once wrote. “And the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”
She told me that her ex had just OD’d: Alix, Eli’s favorite student and last ex, was also the last ex of his former cellmate, sometime coworker, and maybe even friend, Rob Nolan (see my notes to Twinrock Caretaker’s Log), whose corpse she here describes.
I am sorry: During his commencement week Eli stopped by my office* to tell me that he had just the night before apologized to a blonde with kind, close-set eyes whom he’d never even met, let alone fucked in the reeds outside Swan Point the weekend prior like he’d thought. And yet, a mere twenty minutes later he was fingering this wrong girl in a dormitory rec room while they watched that show where an unglamorous man leaps from one historic site to the next. He’d already gotten the apology out of the way upfront, so after she came she happily quid-pro-quo’d him off into a slop sink in the custodial closet just off the rec room. “That was fun,” she said afterward, smiling a Cornhusker or Sooner smile. “You’re really interesting. I don’t usually meet interesting guys like you.” Then she told him that as a freshman she had accidentally pricked herself with a needle full of DNA degerminator and that it was erasing her code as they spoke. No one knew exactly what would happen to her, but she would almost certainly die young. Eli watched her swallow and heard the loudest nothing. Then she took him up to her room to show him a realistic acrylic of return pipes she had painted the previous semester. Or was it Victorian tampon packaging? Either way, Eli pretended to have something in his eye—Dryer lint? Asbestos? They had been in a basement—and told her he was leaving for Turkey in the morning. Afterward, he huffed tape head cleaner from his roommate’s Cookie Monster. It was, he assured me, a dark high.
“Christ, just how many women have you been with?” I asked him.
He leaned back in his chair and banged his head against the wall three times. “You suck the life out of me,” he said.
“But you wind up with the goddamnedest-looking girls,” I said. “Do you have any pictures?”
He said, “I’m changing my name to Hafkin,”** and left.
*My short-lived public notary business. That there was no money to be made in simply witnessing things was beside the point. I figured if I played my cards right—starchy meals in, and apartments in neighborhoods where children had no bedtimes—I could make a go of it. And failing that, I could call my office home, which is exactly what I did once the state revoked my license.
**City Hall was right down the street—take a left at the plaque indicating the high-water mark from the Hurricane of ’38.
Home: Our shared fetish. Look at the gingerbread house upon which I now nibble, for example. The Jew in me can’t abide sitting and watching food harden into tchochkes. At the same time my WASP half, well accustomed to diminishing generational returns, can’t quite bring itself to defile this symbol of bygone festivity, home/hearth, and seasonable weather. Hence my guilty little strikes with a Swiss Army knife purchased countless Januaries ago with three Hanukkahs’ worth of gelt. It’s almost denuded of edible bits—the house. Even the front door, a graham cracker, is gone. A stale Kiss or two is all that’s left. But I can always just lick the windows, which appear to have been made from melted-down Life Savers. I’m peering in right now.
Twinrock Caretaker’s Log
Jamestown, Rhode Island
Rob Nolan
Winter 2000–2001
11/6/00
Flushed and scrubbed cistern.
Replaced escutcheon plate on master bedroom door.
Recaulked kitchen sink.
Stacked and sorted firewood.
Snuck some rainwater. Tastes fine to me.
Will dry and split punked logs for kindling.
11/7/00
Stained lee-facing wainscoting. I’m not sure how many more winters it has left in it. Should probably get replaced this fall or next.
Bulgur sack full of moth larvae. But the rainwater stayed down.
11/8/00
Sanded deck.
11/9/00
Reset interior cladding beneath SE bay window.
Went ashore to get a fresh sack of grain and make a call.
11/12/00
Replaced brass doorknobs with black porcelain ones as requested.
Ended up using only twenty of them. Some were too cracked or bent. Where’d you get these? I’m guessing an abandoned Fall River Victorian. New Bedford? Nice find. I spent a lot of time in burnt houses as a kid. Vacant lots, too. Central Falls had its share of both.
11/15/00
Cleared dead gulls and gull parts from roof turbine. Bleached doorknobs.
If you had any idea what goes on in vacant houses in places like New Bedford, you might rethink the scavenger approach. It doesn’t bother me, but rich folks spook easy.
11/17/00
Replaced basement sewage line.
Water rats in the cellar. Will club and drown them tomorrow.
11/18/00
Clubbed and drowned rats.
Used a burlap sack from the root cellar. Will replace it when I go ashore to try and call X again. She’s home. She just won’t pick up. I know her hours. Might take tomorrow off to drive up to Providence. Stop by her work. Can’t stand loose ends. I mean, I’ll peel labels off beers and unravel rope, but I try to leave things looking better than when I found them.
Weighed down the sack with rusted peach cans. Figured they wouldn’t be missed.
11/19/00
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11/20/00
Shit, I can write what I want. You won’t read this, Fud. X used to always say I was paranoid. I�
�ll show her. There’s all kinds of things you don’t care about, I bet. Least of all me. Besides, I can always just burn it.
And now here I am, talking to you, thinking of her. Neither of you are here. You could be, though. You could pour yourself a drink, watch the sun set past the bridge, and spend a late fall night by the fire, with all that water beating against this rock and the shore and rocking all the empty boats anchored side by each and falling and rising with the tide, and there’s a bell and some far-off human noise I can’t name or shake that might be traffic or just my ears ringing, and all these empty rooms. The sea smells more like itself the darker the sky gets, and it makes me think how some people close their eyes when they eat what they love. I used to make fun of people like that. Look at you, I’d say or think, with your chocolate or your cheese. Just like in ads. Like it’s heroin. Oh what bliss. It almost hurts. But we don’t smell the sea, we smell what it’s washed up. I close my eyes, turn off the lights. You should be here.
11/21/00
Cleaned all 65 windows. Spent the evening clearing the dried-out quick from my nails with the last razor blade. The blood doesn’t come no matter how deep I dig, like I’m all skin. I keep digging.
11/22/00
Will replace the windows I broke—six in all, counting the attic portholes. Those will be a bitch. Means another trip to Providence, but that’s my fault. Luckily I still know some glass guys. Painters drink beer and smoke grass, like to hang out. Glaziers like the harder stuff and run in tighter circles. They were okay after work. I used to know this one guy, Mikey, at Brown Plant Ops. Dude had a face like a smoke-shop Indian but wore rolled-up clamdiggers and little white espadrilles. He also called men by their hair colors. “Check out this brunette,” he’d say. We called Mikey the manly faggot. Whenever he was on a jag, he liked to melt his coke in warmed-up whiskey and swig at it from an ass pocket all shift long. I used to think he was a little rough with the glass, but it turned out that gritty sound was just him grinding his teeth. At least once a year Mikey takes what he calls “vacations” at a local nuthouse, and Brown picks up the tab.
I’d try to get a job like his, but I work alone. Besides, they’d probably feed me some bullshit about preexisting conditions, when my whole life is a preexisting condition. Or just not hire me. There are some gaps in my history that are hard to explain without bringing up all kinds of crap that won’t help. That’s why I like working for old guys like you. You wouldn’t even know what to ask. Institutions and HR folks are on top of that shit, though. Unlike most people, I have no desire to be where I’m not wanted. You need to ask me in.
Will call to arrange the glass before heading up. Maybe I’ll try X again while I’m at it.
11/23/00
Replaced and reglazed all six windows.
Will clean putty residue off glass tomorrow. Need Windex, newspaper, razor blades. This olden-days rag and vinegar crap from the handbook just won’t cut it. Look, I’ve stolen drugs from homeless women and used works off stiffs. Set fields on fire. Poked a kid’s eye out with a stick. The French have a word that means someone missing an eye. When I asked a French girl I used to shack with why they even need the word, she said, “But how else would you know how to call them?” and looked at me like I was crazy or stupid. Sometimes I think I should’ve been born European.
11/24/00
I don’t understand why X won’t just give it to me straight. I know she fucked that line cook who acts like he never knows my name. I can see it when I close my eyes and try to sleep. Fucking dreadlock prick—don’t you point your chin at me. That’s not how to say hey. But I want her to admit it to my face. I want to see her mouth when she owns up to all of it. She winced when she said we were through, and that hurt. Like I would ever hit her. Jesus. Even if I could see nothing but my own face in her eyes, I wouldn’t so much as raise a hand. When you grow up like I did, you either hit your woman all the fucking time or not at all. Maybe once. So I just looked at her, then looked away and slowly pressed my fist into the wall until it cracked, then quick threw some things into a hockey bag—a clean set of shirts, a fistful of pens, a couple blank books X couldn’t sell due to bloodstains. Meanwhile, I lost count at nine of how many times out on the curb Georgie Carwash said fuck per minute.
11/25/00
Pumped out and mopped cellar.
It occurs to me that you can’t know who Georgie Carwash is. That’s something rich girls do that drives me nuts—mention strangers in passing like you must know who the fuck they’re talking about. Like they’re four years old and you couldn’t possibly not know the name of their new best friend or pretend horsey or monster in the closet. So, just so you know, Georgie Carwash is this two-bit gangster with dickholes for eyes that spends the day leaning on a mop in front of the club across Carpenter Street from our apartment. (Just like me to use our, now that I can’t. Man, those your’s and my’s sure caused some fights. My place, your place—either way was trouble.)
But club makes it sound nice: this place is a grim little shack for tracksuit goons to enjoy loose talk and poker and whatever they drink. No windows. And out front, Georgie paces the sidewalk, yelling at hookers, chatting up what few cute girls walk by unescorted, and washing bottom-rung hoods’ Lincolns—which is how he got the name. His shits and fucks and motherfuckers were the first thing we heard in the morning and the last we heard at night. The Tourette’s rooster, X calls him. Cocksucker-Motherfucker-Doodle-Doo! The cursing got under X’s skin from the start, but I got a kick out of it, at least at first. It got old quick.
Anyway, I had always meant to add up a minute’s worth of Georgie’s fucks, and last Tuesday morning looked like my last chance, even though I had other things on my mind at the time, like X telling me if I so much as looked her up when I got back, she’d call the cops, which is no joke for an ex-con, and she knows it. So sure enough, I lost count of Georgie’s curses somewhere around the forty-second mark and was too wound up to give it another shot.
It’s not that I think I’m any better than anyone else, because I’m not: we’re all pieces of shit in one way or another—just fucking pick a reason. No, it’s just that maybe if I set my mind to it, I might be able to straighten a few things out and maybe even save somebody from someone other than myself for a change.
12/01/00
Three weeks into our breakup and you can see the right-hand L-O-V-E tattoo again through all the scars. That’s the hand I used to run through her hair. Her hair smelled like the wind. Like lightning. Like something most people don’t even know has a smell but does.
Varnished deck.
12/24/00
Oiled screen doors, weather vane. Took down fucking chimes.
1/2/01
Went to pick up Naval Jelly at the Quaker Lane Lowe’s and just kept driving north. Caught some traffic in Cranston, so it was dark by the time I hit the city. Went to the bar down the street from our apartment, grabbed a stool by the window, drank six club sodas with lime, gnawed at the rinds like an alcoholic, and waited for our kitchen light to come on, on the lookout for two shadows behind the curtains I bought from an antique dealer for her twenty-ninth birthday. But the lights never came on, which could mean any number of things. In the end, I’m betting none of us got any sleep.
1/5/01
Oiled cabinets.
Sometimes I want to eat myself.
1/6/01
Our breakup fight was over neither of us being able to make a right fist: her from hand-stitching blank books I knew no one would buy, and me from punching walls, mirrors, my own skull. She didn’t want to hear about her choices, and before long we had both said some things and I made it a point to leave it at that. Like I said: I won’t hit a girl no matter what. But they’ve hit me plenty. At least the ones with balls. I still have scars from Viv. She would claw me like a cat when she was pissed, which was often. Poor Yvette would just ball her tiny fists under my chin and burst into tears. My jaw still clicks when I yawn from the one
time X coldcocked me. I almost always have it coming. But she shouldn’t work with her hands and have two and a half jobs. She could go out and get one perfectly normal desk job anytime she wanted. That was my whole fucking point. My mom had no choice in life, and it killed her. It makes me want to punch something.
Our fight went like this: “So who are you now?”
“I only want . . .” she started.
“What!” I got close. “What do you want?”
“People to love me. I want people to love me.”
I waited for her to cry, and when she didn’t, I said, “There you go.”
“You don’t know. When I was a girl . . .” She stopped herself.
I tried to smirk, but couldn’t. She could probably tell I didn’t know what to do with my face.
“You’re still a girl,” I said finally, and closed the door behind me as quietly as I could.
1/7/01
X’s hair’s still black, but she doesn’t plait it into two braids anymore. Now she wears it up, with stray strands hanging here and there, down and around her neck. I used to hold that neck. She looks rested, though, so good for her. I miss those braids. I won’t call them pigtails—that’s an ugly name for something beautiful. Like cunt. Or bird. Gorge. You can tell a lot by the names we give things. This world is wasted on us. I’ve never owned much, but I’ve lost things same as anyone. We’ve broken up more times than I can count. But she tells me this is it.
I sleep in the turret and can hear the turbine spinning this way, then pausing, ticking twice, then a longer pause and back that way. Last night I picked up the cot and brought it downstairs. The creaks are fine, it’s the tick-tick that gets to me. Will rig up some kind of lock in the morning.
1/11/01
Made turbine brake out of coat hanger hooks and sisal.
You know X, but I’m not going to tell who she is, even though it would hurt you if I did. I want to hurt you. But X—I’ve done enough.
1/23/01
Went ashore to buy bread and hot dogs. I think my mom was a good mom even though I turned nine before ever eating a hot hot dog and twice a week had to help her up the front steps and into bed and even more than that near the end. I thought the name was ironic, like a fat guy called Slim, or calling the mayor Your Honor, because I only ate them cold out of my fist, like breadsticks, and used to lick the salt off my fingers until my mom’s old man smacked me. He made me call him Pop. I could tell you exactly what Pop said when he smacked me, but I won’t. Sometimes it feels like not repeating him is the only power I have.