Exes

by Max Winter

  When I got out there, I walked into a couple places and they all told me I’d need some kind of parental permission because of my age, plus I’d have to do something about my hair, so I said fuck it, put my stuff in a locker, and stole an unlocked five-speed to bike out to the bluffs, where I figured there’d be some good swimming and not too many people.

  When I got to the southernmost point, I ditched the bike in a roadside stand of rosehips and hiked my way through a quarter mile of poison ivy and prickers. I had thought the salt water would wash away all the ivy oil, but I was wrong. Two days later I was puffed up like a street junkie and scratching myself bloody in my sleep. But before then, I got to the bluff and scampered down it. Because of the difficult access, there was no one on the beach apart from a couple flabby nudists and a squat wolfman-looking dude with a walking stick. I swam in the surf, lay in the sun, drew things in the sand. After about an hour or so, I started thinking about ferries home. And that’s when she showed up with her big purple towel and a backpack full of still-cold Bud.

  She was tall and blond and twenty-two-ish, and she took off her striped suit and offered me a beer. We drank and talked, and the whole time she stood right next to me. Her tits looked heavy, and she brushed me with them when she turned to point out the lighthouse. Twice. Both into and out of the point. They were surprisingly cool. She said she was a waitress and it was her day off. She lay down on her towel and offered me a spot beside her. She had the kind of little gold watch you had to squint at to read and a tattoo of a moon sliver on her hip that she covered up with a stone. I lay down beside her, pretending she was mine until that wasn’t enough. It’s never enough. “Cut it out, okay?” she said. “What are you trying to do to me?” I asked her. “What are you doing to me,” she corrected. But I still couldn’t keep my hands off her. “Oh, all right,” she said at some point—I had lost track of time—“it’s my day off.” So I climbed on top of her, and it was over pretty quick. After that we went for a swim and shared the last of her beers and watched the sun go down, and I finally started to feel the tight heat of my sunburn, but not all the ivy I’d cut through to get there. I wanted another shot, but she snorted and said, “You’re just a kid. And it’s my day off.” So I put my head in her lap and looked up at the bottoms of her golden tits, and she scratched the sand out of my hair and looked out at the sea and drank the last of her now-warm beer.

  Of course none of my friends believed me when I told them about it at the beginning of the school year. I should’ve never mentioned that she was a rich girl. That was one turn of the key too many. But she was. You could tell by the watch, and most of all by the notion that nothing bad would come from getting completely naked next to a strange teenage boy with bad teeth who swam in cutoffs and a belt. “Why didn’t you stab her?” was all my buddy Justin McGuff had said. “I did,” I said. “With my dick.” Last I heard, McGuff had backslid pretty hard and was living underneath the old Fall River exit off 95. Camp Runamuck, they call it. I hope they never tear it down. He once sent me a postcard from a New Hampshire sober house:

  Hey Nolan

  Still fucking made up rich cunts on the beach you jerk?

  Ate a chicken omlet for lunch and feel like shit.

  No drugs. No nothing. More things should come in cans.

  And not just chicken you fucking chicken.

  You’re pal McGuff

  Thinking back, I’m not sure how he got it to me, the card, because while he very well might’ve been sober at the time, I sure wasn’t. Must have sent it care of my mom. She used to leave things for me in the milk box—breakfast bars, smokes, mail, I guess, although I’ve never gotten all that much mail—because in those days Pop said he would shoot me if I ever came around, and he would’ve. But unless he heard loud cars, Pop never really got out of his chair, let alone stuck his head through the blinds to see who was on the porch.

  4/19/01

  My mom used to let me manhandle her a little. When Pop was at the doctor or maybe a bar, we would share the sofa and watch something on the tube—maybe an old movie or a talk show. The game. A cartoon, even. It didn’t matter. My mom was usually so zonked that she would sort of fall asleep no matter what it was or what time it was. And she would snap off her work bra and pull me closer and I would touch her breasts, feel the weight of them through her shirt. Once or twice I got in bed with her and hassled her there. Until one day they were gone. I assumed that it was my fault. Now I know a little better.

  4/23/01

  Since you’re likely curious, and since this will likely be my last entry, a few words on prison. It’s probably all you ever wanted to hear about. You want it all to be so simple and so dirty, so you can say, “See?” Believe me, I know all about people like you and what you want.

  But anyway, prison.

  After three more or less sleepless weeks in Medium, I got sent down to Minimum, where I could breathe a little and where I met Teach, who was once a real teacher—in case you hadn’t figured that out—then a bookstore clerk, then a yard worker, and, when I met him, a prison librarian. And after that, an ex-con. You could tell he had lost some of his smarts—it was like he was always looking for his keys inside his head—and it only got worse. But even so, Teach got me to read all kinds of things that got me thinking—the god-is-dead guy, the visible-invisible-man guy, the man-on-the-train guy. I owe him a lot. Thanks, Teach. The books helped.

  5/11/01

  Ed St. Germain is one of two barber-pole barbers left on the East Side, the other being his brother Fred. They both keep their shops on the same Wayland Avenue block even though they haven’t talked since they put a man on the moon. I go to Ed’s because he takes his time and can either bust balls or not bust balls. Fred’s I’ve never liked: bright lighting and three or four guidance counselors waiting their turn, reading the sports section or police report. Fred’s is strictly for bald guys.

  I usually just get the boy’s summer regular—a no. 7 clipper job with straight razor and warm foam finish—every couple months all year long. But today I wanted something special.

  “The usual,” Ed said after I climbed into the chair and he fitted me with the apron.

  “Actually, this time I think I’d like something different.”

  “Oh yeah,” he said, clipping the collar over the tissue paper.

  “I was thinking maybe a real short cut, but with scissors and no clippers.”

  “Short? Short how?”

  “You know, short all around, all the same length.” I pulled my hand from under the apron and drew a halo around my head.

  “Like with clippers,” Ed said, wrinkling his nose at a scissor blade and selecting a different set of shears from a jar of Barbicide.

  “Yeah, but no clippers. Longer than that, but still short. You know, like Steve McQueen.”

  “Steve McQueen.”

  “Yeah. Short like that.”

  “I can do that, but then you’re not gonna like it. So I’ll have to do it all over again with the clippers. Then who’s the asshole?”

  “No. I’m gonna like it.”

  “No you’re not.”

  “Sure I will.”

  “Look. If I use scissors, it’s gonna take too long and you’re gonna look like goddamn Plum Mary. And then I’m gonna have to do it all over. You’ll get a clipper cut like always.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t—”

  “Give it time. It’ll grow out just like Spartacus, I promise.”

  “Steve McQueen,” I mumbled, looking straight ahead.

  “Same difference,” Ed said, and pumped the chair to hair-cutting height. I leaned back and let him start in on the same cut he’s always given me and always will give me if he ever gets another chance: a boy’s summer regular. The clippers whined, and I rested my shoulders against the worn vinyl chair.

  5/12/02

  Got back from Providence at dawn. Showered off the smoke and the haircut hairs. Still feel itchy, hollow, raw. Will r
eplace rags and kerosene tomorrow.

  Have to figure this will be my last chance to get some measure of peace, to be truly alone. Till then I’ll just sit here on this rock in the middle of the water and think of people who aren’t here and watch the falling sun bruise the sky like a fist. Maybe once or twice I’ll catch it rising.

  5/13/02

  Put away bedding.

  Cleared downspouts.

  Primed soffits.

  Will stain tomorrow if weather holds.

  (. . . . . .)

  Caretaker: Back when the Mays family was closer and wealthier, they spent their white pants months at Twinrock, drinking bay-cooled gimlets and puttering away at any number of “projects.” (The Mayses are tool-using WASPs from way back.) But given the high cost of upkeep and gin’s tendency to loosen tongues and boil blood, since the mid-’70s the family has instead rented out their birthright to richer families. It’s listed in Yankee magazine’s most recent real estate section at eight grand a week. Nevertheless, every Memorial Day weekend the Mays family still throw their so-called Whitewash Party, whereat all the youngest family members and their school chums* are invited to spend three days and two nights out on the ’Rock, fixing shutters and drinks, staining the deck and the sheets, painting and getting some trim. All for the cost of thirty cases of Rolling Rock, six handles of Gordon’s and twelve of Mount Gay. To augment this yearly upkeep, they also, until very recently, employed—to the tune of a hundred bucks a week plus whatever passes for room and board on a water-locked, weather-beaten, and by some accounts haunted rock—a winter caretaker. Now they rely on volunteers and uninvited guests like myself. Seems Rob was the last straw. Providing marginal types with second chances was one thing, harboring known fugitives quite another.

  *And teachers. Eli attended only one Whitewasher. It was the spring of ’89, and some guy whose face was shades redder than his faded red cap put his loafer up on a bolt of mothy sailcloth and raised his glass to the greenish setting sun. “Friends!” he said, beaming, “the first sunset of the season! Look!” Eli looked instead at all the people clapping and, his heart in his skull, climbed onto the roof. “It’s not yours!” he shouted into the night, over all the cheers and ice and jokes. He steadied himself with the weather vane. “You can’t own everything!” He paced and paced and at some point before dawn rowed ashore.

  Carpenter Street: Carpenter is a crooked nine-block street just off Broadway on the West Side. The “goon’s club” and a small bakery with no sign and strange hours—5:00 a.m. till whenever the pizza strips sell out—are all that’s left of Carpenter Street’s Italian roots. At the west end there’s some kind of home—AIDS and drugs or just plain nuts; at the east a string of battery and muffler shops; and in between a neighborhood bar friendly to dogs and pairs of dog moms alike—with X on the juke, Sox on the tube, microbrews on tap, and ’Gansett* in cans: the kind of place where at one table you can talk redistricting with freelance photographers or adjuncts and at the next score Mob coke cut with Similac.

  *Short for Narragansett Lager, New England’s premier cookout beer* (“Hi, Neighbor! Have a ’Gansett,” went the jingle) until Falstaff bought them out and started brewing it with Rust Belt tap. Beer-cap rebuses were the one good thing to come from this brief merger. I mean, who doesn’t enjoy a good puzzle?

  *Eli thought beer was for putting out fires, but his students liked it, so he always kept some on hand. When we cleaned out his last place, the fridge contained half a Halloween-themed six-pack of something they had stopped making a long time ago. SAVE FOR JAKE OR WHOMEVER read an index card taped to the carton. This would’ve hit me even harder if it weren’t for the circle of at least a year’s worth of butts and ashes an arm’s length from his creaky nun’s chair. I swept them into a pile the size of the cat I now wished I’d bought him. A Siamese, maybe. Or a Manx. She would have torn around the place first thing and knocked mugs off counters. She would have been curious, demanding, wary as hell.

  Fox Point: The “wrong,” or eastern, end of Providence’s Fox Point is a neighborhood that, despite bordering both old and middle-aged money, has stayed just run-down enough for all kinds of down-on-their-luckers to call it home: single moms, day-job-holding night-school students paying their own way, too-old-for-rock-but-too-drunk-for-work rockers, Eli. And despite all odds, you’ll still find more than a few Madonnas in bathtubs and a handful of old-for-Portuguese men* drinking the green wine they make themselves out of the thick-skinned Concords that hang from their carport grape arbors. The tenements are mostly vinyl-sided and have windowless hollow-core front doors with knob locks. A few blocks in any direction but due east into the Seekonk River, and things get swank quick.

  *Fifty. Sixty tops. All that chourice does a number on a man’s heart and guts. I went to grade school with a from-India Indian kid who called them Pork-and-Cheese, which is mean but accurate.

  Brown Plant Ops: Eager to spend the summer of my junior year outside of my increasingly crotchety grandfather’s employ (see subsequent note re: “Ike Hafkin[’s] . . . kid”), I, too, scored a job at Plant Ops. I took service calls, filled out repair requests, and radioed them to the appropriate on-duty tradespeople. Determining the exact nature of even the most mundane service problem was harder than it looked. On two separate occasions, and at opposite ends of the campus, two accentless undergrads referred to their torn window screens as “nets.” You can imagine the knots they tied themselves into trying to describe things like jambs and muntins. In between calls I passed the time by browsing a decade’s worth of logged service requests and redacting those I myself had made. In response to my next-to-last report of an oft-clogged suite toilet, one Manny Gomes had written the following note:

  STUDENT PRODUCES EXCEPTIONALLY HARD TURDS. PROBLEM WILL FIX ITSELF UPON GRADUATION.

  All this sitting and looking back didn’t exactly help matters. So instead of calling in Critter Control on an otherwise sleepy Monday holiday afternoon—VJ Day*—I forwarded the phones to the heat plant and strode over to Woolley Hall to see about a “huge, spitting spider” a couple girls had called in, screaming. When the sixteen-year-old summer sessioners found me, grinning, gripping a tow sack and a can of Black Flag, they screamed even louder, slammed the door, and dialed Campus Security, who squealed up and escorted me to the Brown jail cell I hadn’t even known existed. I spat on the floor and demanded to speak to my dead parents’ lawyer till they finally let me go, suddenly unsure of their right to hold a student against his will for knocking on a dorm room door. The following day, I reminded my superiors that they would’ve had to pay Critter Control double time and half, given the holiday—and that the two girls might well have been poisoned by the time they had actually shown up. They told me that noting, let alone acting upon, such contingencies was most decidedly not in my job description. I told them that I was trying my best, and they mentioned that they had security footage of me taking things from the break room fridge and also of secreting the Freshman Crush Book into the men’s growler at least twice a shift. I asked them if I could clear out my locker after supper, as I had ordered a large Hawaiian and a side of crazy bread, and they said I should just box that up, too.

  *Victory over Japan Day. An odious former national holiday ahistorically commemorating Japan’s surrender in World War II. Currently celebrated only in Rhode Island—hell, even Arizona dumped it at some point—and not because we’re a bunch of jingoistic yahoos, but because we would never abide the loss of a three-day weekend in August.

  Hank LaChance: A schoolboy hockey legend in the early ’60s, the former Central Falls High center and team captain, in the final sixteen seconds of by far the biggest game of his young career (the state finals against archrival Mount St. Charles), accidentally shot and scored on his own net, breaking a zed-zed tie. He promptly dropped out, put on weight, and began demolishing turkey coops in nearby Cumberland. After a full decade of drifting, a twenty-nine-year-old LaChance returned to CFH and all but begged his former coa
ch, Clive Nolan, to hire him as an assistant, which he did as he did everything: begrudgingly. A mere two months into his homecoming, Hank began “dating” Clive’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Louise—a senior—in the equipment room mostly, but also under the bleachers and at least once in the backseat of his late-model Maverick, which starry-eyed Louise mistook for the GT Fastback Steve McQueen drove in Bullitt. Hank is deuxième génération poubelle blanche from Woonsocket, which means part Maliseet Indian, so his folks spoke mainly English but with French phrasing, as in throw me down the stairs, my hat; drive slow your car, you; and what is it now, this shit?

  . . . forgot to hose down the side we had just heat-stripped: I can only imagine what their premiums must be. In the past fifteen years, there have been three break-ins; the two car crashes, of course;* and, as Rob explains here, a fire. One would think it is cursed. And it very well may be. This is, after all, the same house in which Edgar Allen Poe failed not to drink, thus ending his engagement to a local poetess he had met while recovering from a recent suicide attempt. That view of a brick wall couldn’t have helped poor Poe any.

  *After the first such crash, on November 14, 1992, Eli was sentenced to twenty-seven months at the Cranston-based Adult Correctional Institution for aggravated vehicular assault. According to court transcripts, just prior to the attack Eli brewed himself a pot of stronger-than-recommended-on-the-side-of-the-can coffee and poured it into a vase along with seven crushed nutmegs, six tablespoons of blackstrap, some milk, a couple glugs of rum, and a little sherry “to jazz it up.” A pint or so of the admixture sloshing in his guts, he climbed into the company pickup and sped over to, then down, College Hill. At the last second, Eli hit the brakes, jerked the wheel, and so wound up not in the targeted parlor, but in the mudroom of her next-door neighbor.* When asked by the sentencing judge why he—an educated man with no criminal record, and one formerly entrusted with the minds and bodies of children, no less—would pull a stunt like that, Eli replied that Maile Weinsberg, whose house he had meant to crash into, hadn’t let him use the john when, earlier that same day, he’d been hard at work in her backyard. “We can’t have these people using our toilet,” Ms. Weinsberg supposedly shouted downstairs to her husband and door-getter. “This is not a truck stop!”