by Tom Macher
A rusted crowbar, splotched with blood or red or brown paint, rested between her legs.
Jesus, I said, noticing it, half question, really.
She turned in her seat, her knees to its back, and reached behind her head, pulling free whatever had been tying her hair up. It was a small, short-handled stabbing knife or dagger, and she held it now as if to stick me.
The crowbar, she said, is for you.
Hey, the driver said. Then she said something else, but I couldn’t hear it. They both watched me in the rearview but inched closer together, their mouths almost touching as they whispered and shook their heads. I strained to listen but only heard hissing. Just hissing. Their lips peeled back, tongues darting in and out, the driver hissing and nodding and the passenger shaking her head. Then I heard the words “plan” and “talked” and “about” and “do” and “him.” I heard “him” quite a few times.
* * *
CAPE COD IS A THIN STRIP OF LAND jutting first east and then north into the Atlantic. On a map, it looks like a bent arm and a hand making a fist. It’s a summer place. Homes here are built for the summer. Some don’t have much in the way of insulation, lack heaters—a lot of them don’t even have full baths, just shower stalls. There are many towns, all of them small enclaves of summer cottages, summer churches, ice cream and hot dog stands. In the summer, their populations might reach fifty or sixty thousand but, in the winter, dwindle to just a few hundred people; motels and cafés and restaurants get boarded up, and there is nothing but wind, sand, and coyotes. The eastern coyote is very different from a western coyote. They’re larger, more aggressive—a result of hybrid DNA. Somewhere along the way, they bred with wolves.
We were driving down a highway bordered by woods. I knew on either side of these woods would be frontage roads and cottages and then the ocean to the south and Massachusetts Bay to the north. I know when I talk about this place, it’s hard not to see privilege: I imagine a Kennedy finger-blasting a caterer in the shadows of a party tent, a splotch of cum on white linen pants, lipstick on the rim of a champagne flute, but it isn’t like that for everyone. Like the caterer. Some people have to keep moving. Even after all the decisions they’ve made are wrong, they still have to keep going, even after summer ends.
Listen, I told these girls, wait. I’m not holding.
Los Angeles
NO telling how all I got around. In truck beds and backseats, on buses and trains, ferries and planes. There were commuter lines and light rails, locals and expresses, all of it lobbied for or arranged by a friend of a friend. I’m quite sure I tobogganed across western Colorado. Here is the truth, and hold on to your asses, people, because it’s always the truth: back in California, I met a girl I loved so much I knew I’d have to leave town or start drinking again.
I was young. And even before we got together, I’d drive thirty and forty minutes out of my way to places I thought she might be, hoping to catch sight of her automobile. I worked across the street from her high school at a grocery store, and sometimes she’d come in with her mother and I’d take my time bagging their few items, hoping to say something, always so runny-feeling and jumpy, and after they’d leave, I’d go to the loading dock with a coworker and we’d climb onto the roof and talk about our feelings. One day, I convinced her to get in a car with me. We drove to Reno. After that, we began exploring California, and we drove into the San Joaquin and Mojave and all up and down the PCH, stopping at roadside fruit stands or wandering out into a patch of strawberries or up a mountainside; once I lost her in Grass Valley for a few days but found her in a patch of woods east of Nevada City.
Her name was Sally Kaplan and she was nineteen years old. She had layered and straight, long blonde hair, a tight ass, the most incredible legs. We were so sweet together it was senseless. She wore this bright red trench coat and I’d hold her by its belt. It’s not even worth explaining.
Eventually, she got a scholarship to study dance at a university in Los Angeles. I still recall the promises we made the night we cashed her college money and rolled it into socks we tucked away in a drawer at our small apartment. This money would last until we ran away together and had kids.
But things began changing for me. I stopped eating, stopped sleeping. I stopped exercising. I stopped talking about my dark thoughts. You can believe anything you want when you don’t seek outside counsel. Fears became stories verified by further stories leading to resentments leading to more of the same. Put another way: I stopped making amends and instead went looking for apologies.
* * *
WE RENTED A fifteen-by-fifteen-foot room in a ten-story co-op on top of a hill. We had no kitchen or faucet, no microwave or hot pot; we shared a bathroom down the hall with several other rooms. Sally was gone all day at class and all evening in rehearsal, and by the time she got home, I made it a point to be gone myself.
Some days I’d drive as far as Palm Springs, where I’d sit with my dad for a while with our cigarettes and coffee and what I thought was a mutual curiosity but wasn’t mutual at all. He liked talking about himself. And he was lonely. He told fanciful tales involving off-color humor and wild mystery—they always offered the same hero and often forgot themselves. He no longer claimed a murder investigation had prevented him from contacting me after he survived hospice but much worse: he’d been on the lam, he said, many, many years. He wasn’t a criminal, no. Someone was chasing him. There was a lot of talk about the many times he’d disappeared, all of it from him. He’d moved someone into his home, he suggested, but that someone had drowned in a swimming pool.
When was that? I asked.
Oh, he said. That summer. Six months or so after the hospice.
He had no idea how long he had now.
I was barely holding on, myself. In every situation, I looked for something different and new to feel in the midst of shit again. Odd things excited me. A neighbor lady used to whisk past my apartment in zebra-patterned leggings. I’d hear her whispering thighs from my desk and quit my game of solitaire, get up, follow that wonderfully erotic whooshing down the stairs, through the lobby, and onto the hill, where, cloak-and-dagger, I’d trail her into town. And where was she going? What sort of feelings did she possess? Did we speak? Did she notice me creeping? Did she care? I lacked direction, perspective, motivation, friendship, protein, calories, etc. In Rite Aid or some liquor store, I’d linger by the magazine rack for hours. My sleep suffered. Awake two, three days straight, I slowed physically, my pace stalled, my brain, my speech, the way I processed information; I had visions, saw tracers, glowing lights, people falling from buildings—hallucinations, all. I’d get home and go to the roof, stand at its edge, and consider the ten-flight drop to the courtyard below where Sally parked her bike—Would she be the one to find my body if I jumped? The eastern sky a strange white-cherry din, I knew she’d be showering now, washing and conditioning her long blonde hair. Soon she’d wrap that hair in a towel, wrap her body in another towel, gather her shower supplies, and head back to our room, where she’d sit on our bed, a foot up, rubbing lotion into her skin. She had a beautiful voice and liked to sing, and I imagined her in these moments humming a tune she always hummed about migrant workers in central California, men and women who’d always wanted something else but knew the road was long, dreary, and full of things you’d never expect. She’d dress slowly—socks, then chonies and bra, taking her time, applying eyeliner, lipstick, in case I came home. The whole idea of her purposefully taking her time so she could be there for me made me crazier and crazier, and I’d sit at the roof’s edge, dangling my legs, hoping the wind might pick up or someone would come from behind and pat me too hard on the back. Sometimes I’d sleep, and when I slept I’d sleep for days on end and maybe I would’ve disappeared completely, as a directionless young man will disappear sometimes, literally he’ll drop off the face of the earth, only to be rediscovered under an overpass or at a city shelter, except early that November, after the rains came, a serial rapist arrived on campus.
Well, hello, I told Sally, folding the paper neatly. How interesting.
She wore some kind of crotchless lace—I don’t know what it’s called—and, prancing about in front of me, she practiced a few of her dance moves, prodding me with the usual Do you like? and then Is there something wrong?
It seems, I said, there’s some douchebag running around.
She began sashaying toward me but, Hold on, I told her, be right back, and I slid from bed and into some jeans, shoed my sneakers. It was ten, maybe eleven p.m., and I walked down the hallway and then the stairwell and into the lobby and through the double doors and down the steep hill to the main college drag. Every hundred yards or so, stapled to a telephone pole or light post, I found another sketch of the rapist’s face. The man had a familiar look, okay, the kind a lot of guys wore that year: bold eyes, a goatee, long-ass sideburns. In most he wore a skullcap or baseball hat. The flyers listed him six-three or so, 180 pounds, more or less what I was carrying in those days.
I looked in shadows and alleys, behind grocery stores and SUVs, loitered about bus stops and under eaves. I found myself eyeballing every man who waited outside the various fast-food eateries and bars on the main drag. I walked the entirety of the campus, cased every floor of every building, every nook, aisle, and private study area in the library, popped into and out of several bathroom stalls, lingered around research facilities, pressed my face to the glass of math and science labs. Finally, I saw a tall, thin man emerging from trees on a quiet road housing the sororities, but he eluded me, and then, after I was all walked out, I saw him again, standing in the shrubbery outside our building.
What’s this? I said. Who the hell are you?
Oh, thank God, he replied. Have you got a match?
He was my height, at least, or maybe shorter, and wore a mechanic’s coat; wet jeans clung to his bony legs.
I pulled out my lighter. Do you live here?
I’ve seen you many, many times. He pointed to the rainy sky and roof. Up there.
Yes, I admitted. You can find me up there a lot these days.
You’re with that girl, he said, his long eyelashes blinking under his skullcap. He had a light blond beard that hadn’t grown in all the way around his mouth, and eyes dulled and darkened by Percocet. She’s pretty.
I started to respond, but he cut me off, explaining he drove a taxi, which seemed dubious, and then he said he used to live in the desert near Joshua Tree, but I didn’t believe that, either. His truth was as apparent as my own—we both lived in this co-op and both viewed the world through a certain scope: when we saw red flags, instead of running away, we moved forward.
So, he said, as you can see, I know most everything that goes on around here. My name’s Brian.
What are you doing in L.A.? I asked.
Just living the dream.
I nodded. I, too, was living a sort of dream.
Come here, he said. Come in out of that rain. What do they call you?
Close in among the shrubs, I saw where his wet fingers had pulled his cigarette apart. This was not my guy, I thought, but maybe.
And then something unspoken occurred between us. It was the kind of thing that will make the hairs on your neck tingle and your whole body tremble, and the next thing you know, you’re somewhere else. I’ve heard these barroom prophets bragging on various philosophies, how things happen in threes and so forth, but this has never been the case for me. For me, shit always happens in twos or never at all.
You’re looking for something, he said. Or someone. I’ll take you there.
Here I was, armed with all the self-knowledge in the world, prepared by Program and the others for just this sort of thing, but, like when I got in the car with the pilled-up Thelma and Louise, or this guy here, how I knew what he meant not by his words, but his eyes, his slight facial tics, and didn’t care, I was still that moth who tries to land on a flame.
We went to all the places where the guys who tweaked on speed stayed awake all night. This wasn’t the world of Sally and me anymore. It was not warm or soft. There were no songs hummed gently in the background, there was no violin, no massaging the insteps of anyone’s feet. They were dangerous places, full of dangerous people, not idyllic, not safe, not harmonious at all, and I felt right at home. These guys could not and would not come down. They stayed up for days, wandering around dark rooms, bumping into each other. They spoke in languages only they understood, conversing in subtle grunts and slight waves of a hand. They possessed open sores, pinpoint pupils, skin taut at the bones, their veins protruding. They shared living spaces—an apartment or a motel room or a cellar underneath a building—or were banging shits with some squaw whose grandmother had a vacant in whatever low-rent building she owned.
I was clean still, dry, really, and the things I wanted—to fuck and kill and be alone—all seemed possible here.
People huddled about couches and coffee tables or disappeared into corners rarely lighted by anything more than the flick of a Zippo or a glowing pipe. I’d be standing alone, feeling quite solitary, and then a gust of breath would warm my face and I’d realize someone had been next to me all along.
This was my first time in L.A., and on subsequent tours, I’d come to know these people more. They lived on ingenuity and guile, never knowing where the next shot was coming from, let alone how they’d stay roofed and fed. They didn’t eat so much as subsisted, half a burrito here, a handful of corn nuts there, refilling their roommates’ Big Gulps and so forth. They traveled in packs, picking up various hangers-on, none of them with plans beyond now. They’d disappear for weeks, if not years, only to show up suddenly and in nearly the same condition all this time later. They lived in cars and wedged between rocks and under the bridges and windbreaks along Arroyo Seco, collected recyclables and copper, pushed shopping carts all the way down the dusty boulevards until they washed out in Venice or found sustainable barter in the tent towns of San Pedro Street or Slab City, all of them post-hippie, post-grunge and -techno, living on the razor’s edge with their nitrous lips and crystal teeth, believing always in the coming end, afraid of everyone.
I always thought Sally possessed an immunity to all this—she was good, different, wholesome, even, but honestly, I have no idea what life was like for her that year. I’d wake up to old coffee and bagels she’d pulled from a dumpster in town. Or a couple bucks. She was thoughtful, romantic. One of her friends had persimmon trees, and they’d bake bread, which she knew I loved, and she’d bring it back to me. We lived an entire fall on this bread. She wanted kids, my kids, wanted to marry me. At one point, I gave her a ring and promised things, and it was my intention we’d be together forever, but life for me has not gone that way. It hasn’t gone that way for Sally, either.
Somehow, despite her education, things would soon change for her, and after numerous stops barefoot and halter-topped at one truck stop or another on her way home from music festivals and gatherings and whatnot, Sally eventually became one of these names you’ll see written on a slip of paper tacked to a message board outside natural-food stores or on the side of the road between Nyland and Slab City, with a note like “Come home, dear, we miss you” and a phone number.
One evening, I ended up in the cellar but Brian wasn’t there, so I went to his room. He cracked his door and stuck his neck out, peering down the hallway before letting me in. A guy was sleeping on the floor who looked a lot like the serial rapist. I whispered to Brian, asking who this guy was, and Brian said just a guy, but his eyelashes fluttered, and I didn’t believe him. I’m going to use the bathroom, he said, and turned to leave, but stopped before walking out. He glanced at the guy, then at me. If a thought lingered in his mouth he did not offer it. Just left. And was this code? Was he telling me something? Was it complicity? After he left, I examined his apartment, but other than this guy on the ground, nothing seemed off. It was just one of those sparsely decorated crash pads with very few extras: no couch, no TV, no stereo, no clock, no lamp, no phone. Th
e few clothes Brian owned were piled in a corner. A single mattress—no bedframe—had been pulled up and rested against a wall. Next to a window was a table with an ashtray on top of it, a chair beside it, some burnt tinfoil on the carpeted floor. The guy was still sleeping. I got a closer look. He seemed long enough, lying on the ground. He had that mid-nineties goatee, the sideburns, Caucasian features. I crouched by his head, inspecting his hair. How would the rapist look without a skullcap? It was hard to say.
His eyes opened. They were dark, penetrating, angry.
Violence surged through my body: Had they been right about me? Was I a psychopath?
Who are you? the guy asked.
* * *
LATER THAT NIGHT, I did something awful. While Sally tossed and turned and mumbled in her sleep, I stuffed some clothes in my hiking backpack and emptied her socks of all her scholarship money. Then I took a bus downtown, bought a Greyhound ticket, and left. It felt like the worst. I went to Atlanta, saw the people I’d grown up with, all of them toothy, beautiful, and in college now. I was not the kid they remembered. Shame clung to me. I was watery, vague. I smelled bad, looked funny. I have not gone home since.
From Atlanta I went to Tennessee, I think, though maybe that was another time, then Alabama, though that, too, may have been a different year. I’m not sure. My memory of these bus rides all runs together as one long stretch of road and town and the waiting between the two, and why would it not? I knew as long as I kept to the road, I’d be okay. Just keep going, don’t stop. That year, you might have found me slouching outside a Walmart, or scratching my balls in front of a rest stop vending machine. I ended up in Baton Rouge, where some of the brothers had moved after leaving the House. They went to meetings, drank Diet Coke, played dominoes, Trivial Pursuit. Bowling was popular entertainment, as was the coffeehouse. For a while, I lounged about their apartments, filling their butt cans and clogging their toilets.
One morning, E-Dog woke me by standing over me and saying my name. Tom, Tommy. Tom motherfucking Macher. Wake up, man, wake up.