Halfway

by Tom Macher

  I, he said. I barely touched her.

  He was so sad and regretful that we just sat in silence awhile before Wood said, If you’re awake, don’t say anything, if you’re asleep, say something?

  She was in a trance, Hair-pie said again, but so softly you could barely hear him, and he wasn’t speaking, after all, to any of us. He was talking to himself. He was telling himself things only he knew.

  * * *

  HERE’S WHAT I DIDN’T SAY at the dinner party: No. I’ll tell you what happened. The runaway moved in with Tammy Z. and a girl named P, who I will explain. Nob left town. Hair-pie moved out. Hymen and Wood moved to Baton Rouge near LSU. For a while I drifted, staying first with G-Dub off Chimes and then with P, who I was banging now, and Tammy and the runaway off Siegen in South Baton Rouge. Hymen banged Tammy. Hair-pie moved into an apartment in the same apartment complex off Siegen in South Baton Rouge and came over sometimes and had quiet alone moments with Tammy. There was something friendly in their exchanges. They played with each other as if they were brother and sister, wrestling on the floor or under blankets—never sexual or angry—and I didn’t understand it. I still don’t—had we lost ourselves over some pawing around? Wood banged Tammy. Hymen began banging the runaway. Me and P moved out, got a town house off Jefferson, still the nicest place I’ve ever rented. G-Dub began banging Tammy. He moved in with Hymen and Wood. Hair-pie moved a boy into his apartment who stole from him and ran up a five-hundred-dollar phone bill and moved out. He moved another boy into his apartment who stole from him and ran up a five-hundred-dollar phone bill and vandalized his car and moved out. Hymen moved into a place with Hair-pie. The runaway moved in with them. G-Dub moved into an apartment with Tammy. Wood moved into an apartment with an unaffiliated girl. Then it turned out maybe she was affiliated.

  We were never together all at once again.

  The Eldorado

  A few years later, I went to San Francisco to buy a car. On my way back, I visited my dad in Los Angeles. While he was at the doctor, I took a long walk from Beverly Hills to East Hollywood along Sunset Boulevard. This is a part of Los Angeles we think about when we think about the interior parts of the city, though in truth these neighborhoods are very far from the city itself and instead exist only in a showbiz sort of way—stocked with clubs and music venues and ritzy hotels where celebrities stay, it is very much an area where people go to see people and be seen, though I wasn’t thinking about any of this on my walk, just running my teeth over the dream a little bit. At some point, I came across a used-car dealership full of classic cars. One of them was a 1970 Cadillac Eldorado, black on black with the knife-edge styling. Something about this car reminded me of being here before, how crazy I’d gotten, how completely insane I’d been, and what it stirred inside me was this feeling of wanting. I had failed before, and I didn’t want failure to be the last I knew of this town. I knew what I had to do. Once I returned to Louisiana, I would save up enough money to move out here, and no matter what, I would buy this damn Cadillac.

  When I got back to Baton Rouge, I told P I was leaving. She banged some dude from the House. He started calling our apartment. Hello, he’d say, P there?

  You should say my name, I’d tell him.

  Hey, Tom, he’d say. P there?

  Yeah, P is here. Hold on.

  I wanted redemption and moved on.

  * * *

  I HAVE MOVED a lot in the years since. Occasionally, like in the winter of 2002 and the summer of 2003, it was because I needed a break from things, some downtime, a chance to clear my head, but for the most part, there was always a better reason. My oldest brother, Aidan, was teaching at a community college in the desert east of L.A., and I moved in with him and his wife so I could attend college. In 2005 Lee moved to San Francisco with his wife and small child, and then Aidan and his wife moved to San Francisco. So I moved to San Francisco, where I finished college. In 2007 I went to grad school in Iowa City. Like I said, there was always a better reason.

  In each place I went, I would see these men everywhere. Outside a church or in the park, always clumped, all of them miscast, haggard, paper-thin, struggling to keep a lit match to a snipe, weirdly clean-shaven yet hardscrabble, roughshod but with their shirts tucked in, holes in their faces from piercings and stabbings, they settle on a basketball court even though most have no idea what to do with a ball in their hand, and gather about the one junkie who can actually hoop and try to stop him by any means necessary, yanking his forearm or grabbing his jeans, clotheslining him even as he takes that shit strong to the cup, all the while verbally abusing one another in this perfunctory, loving kind of way. It is always the same bullshit, same slap and tickle, same fuckaround-fuckaround, always the same way they eye me when they catch me listening. Who the fuck are you? Always. Who. The fuck. Are you?

  I keep going.

  * * *

  MISS A DIED. The Silver Fox died. P died. Even Program is dead.

  We have all moved on.

  * * *

  IF NOTHING ELSE, what I’ll say for my dad, after all these years, is that he became one of the world’s oldest, longest survivors of AIDS. He keeps going. He doesn’t give up. At times, we had a relationship. At times, we were close. At times, he showed me remarkable kindness, and I have had occasion, from time to time, to be there for him. For a while, I carried keys to his apartment, and yet over time, those keys graduated to the glove compartment and then a shoe box and then someone’s garage.

  Here is the thing about my father: I know all his moves, his indecisions and questions, the doubts he has, his abilities, his confidence within those abilities. I know his knee gets cranky after long drives. A knot bulges from his lower back some days. He gets headaches if he doesn’t sleep well. And I know about his relationships—his initial hopes, the indignities he feels, his eventual impatience, rigidity; everything is beautiful, when new. I know him. And he knows me. Not much I could say or do would surprise him. We have the same feet, same hands, same tension in our neck and temples. We are both tall, funny at times, and not bad looking. We are paranoid, private, guarded. Both of us employ candor as a shield, or stories. We are competitive. We eat a lot. We both feel alone, and enjoy being alone, and yet we both need people. I love him. I always want to reach out and hug him. But he has not been my dad all these years. And that’s okay. At some point, I gave up all my expectations for who and what he’d be in my life. But years passed, a decade or two, and I came to understand I could not stop expecting. Another way of saying it: forgiveness doesn’t always happen just because you want to forgive. It doesn’t occur in one sitting. There’s always another hill, another hole. It’s a continual process. There have been many highs and lows, a lot of awful. Many times, I’ve looked at him and wondered, truly wondered, why I want him in my life at all.

  I’ve ridden out most of these years looking for someone else with whom I could never fully own the awful. I’ve engaged in some risky behavior. I’ve gone to some unfamiliar yet familiar place, a part of town or a house, each one of them dangerous, avoidable, a place I shouldn’t have been, each time believing what I’d find would be important somehow.

  Have I wanted to die? I don’t know. If yes, then my question is why haven’t I, and if I say no, then my question is why behave this way?

  I went from Iowa City to Los Angeles to San Francisco—women, different—but then got offered an apartment on Cape Cod and a sum of money to write whatever the hell I wanted to write, and so I moved out there. From Cape Cod I went to Baltimore. I was broke. It seemed like a good place. Then I met a girl who was moving to San Francisco and tagged along, but we broke up as well. To sum it up—in the years since I left the House, it has gone something like this: Louisiana, Los Angeles, Louisiana, Los Angeles, Riverside, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Francisco, Iowa City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Provincetown, Baltimore, San Francisco, and so on. In other words, let’s bang each other and go, bang each other and go, bang and go, until we are all gone from each other.<
br />
  I never bought the Eldorado.

  * * *

  AND YET THIS: years and years later, I moved back to Los Angeles again. This was going to be it, I promised myself. No more moving, no more bullshit. I was thirty-eight, my dad was still alive—he’ll probably outlive me—though we’d grown distant, and I didn’t tell him that I’d moved back, nor that I lived a few blocks from his apartment, and I didn’t plan to. He wasn’t the reason I’d come back, at least that’s what I told myself. I just wanted to be somewhere warm when I died. I’d had some cancer scares of late.

  All the same, I thought about him, and many, many nights, I found myself taking lonely childhood-haunted strolls in the vicinity of his building. Always furtive, encased in shadows, I’d creep down his block, peek inside his garage, and, if his car was gone, climb the trellis to his balcony, where I could peer inside his living room and kitchen. The dust of Los Angeles coated his balcony, a flaking of desert and smog and skin. Bachelor droppings littered his place: dirty dishes towered from the sink, coffee grounds coated the floor, trash cans overflowed, on the floor were dirty socks, old receipts, balled paper towels, and crumpled pants.

  It looked a lot like my own place.

  One day, I was walking to the doctor feeling shitty about things, morose, even, sentimental, thinking it would all be over soon, that I’d die, poor me, and was passing this middle school in the afternoon, watching children scream across the playground, my mind unraveling, remembering my mom’s warm eyes, Abba running his hands through my hair, Lee smiling, Lee’s kid, Aidan’s kids, how I had no kids and no hope of them, really, and in that lack of hope, no place of my own to come back to, and no home—it had been thirteen years since I’d been to Louisiana, two decades since I’d been to Georgia, and who would have wanted to have kids with me in these years?

  I began that pre-cry thing, a heaviness behind my eyes, blubbering a little, then sobbing, sobbing like I hadn’t in years, and in this sobbing I squinted—I can’t make this up—at the playground and saw beyond the kids, next to a bench, two grown men talking, one of them very old and with his hands in his pockets, and I didn’t think anything other than Huh, that’s familiar somehow, and kept walking, but then—and here’s where it gets weird—from the corner of my eye, I noticed the old man gesturing with his fingers as he made one point after another: it was my dad.

  I kept walking.

  And was it that night or later that week or months later when I saw a girl standing on the corner of Figueroa and Eighth, holding her purse in both hands, offering a slight redistribution of weight from one hip to the other as I approached?

  Her mouth spread, her eyes lit up. Even my shortcomings were charming. You’ve failed a little, her smile said, so what?

  Her name was Kristen, and in short order we went to Palm Springs, Petaluma, Santa Barbara, Joshua Tree, and the Salton Sea. Here was a place I’d been many times before, though never long enough to stay the night and look at the defunct hole in the middle of another hole, a very big hole, so deep and far and wide, and see it for it was. We could barely make out the train on the opposite side of the water, even as it began to spread, its tail emerging from rocks, this sudden swath of dust getting wider and wider until it was something else completely. And I told her things. But for the first time, I believed them. I could see slight changes in the smallest things: I wore collared shirts even when she said I didn’t have to. It didn’t matter whether I was clean or dirty—I had to wear my collared shirt as long as possible, so she’d see it and know what I meant in wearing it. I wore a tie some days. Same thing. Kept it on long after my intention was known. Act as if, was what they’d said. Such was the force of my feelings for her that I needed her to meet my dad, needed her to know where I’d come from, and I needed him to meet her; I wanted him in my life. For his part, he has obliged—I still get a little shot of self-worth every time he calls.

  As for my mom and Abba and me, we laugh about a lot of these things now.

  It didn’t surprise me when I got offered another residency, three thousand–plus miles away. For a few days, I imagined being alone, old habits, that terminal velocity, staggering dumb, helter-skelter, rinse-repeat, rinse-repeat, over and over until all my hair has come out and my teeth are gone, before realizing something about Kristen was different and, more important, something in me with her.

  So we packed our places. Of course, hers took way, way longer than mine. She’d lived in her apartment a long time. Her calendars had yellowed, her pantry was full, even her mice had grown old and passed on. This was a place of spiders who’d lived out their natural lives watching their offspring carry on. Families of raccoons lived here. Flocks of parrots. Late at night, coyotes would come from the hills or arroyo and stalk the backyards and cul-de-sacs, always searching for water or some small animal to eat, and yet there can be a decency to even the coldest of predators, and many of the squirrels were old. She’d lived here so long she’d seen them all, generation after generation, knew each of their offspring’s names.

  On our way, she said, I want you to show me where you come from.

  It took me all the way to Abilene, roughly two thousand miles into what stretched to a four-thousand-mile trip, before I made the phone call.

  * * *

  HAIR-PIE SAYS, Sure, we’d love to have y’all. He’s married now. He and his husband have just built a large home near the river. They are successful but, more important, happy. They have a wonderful home. His husband makes up a welcome basket. They cook dinner for us, a glorious dinner.

  We plan to visit the House, and I call the few numbers left in my phone, get bad news. The House has been destroyed in the recent flood, and all the brothers have been moved out. We drive up and down West Road. I am looking for the crack houses and crack whores, but there are just houses now, regular houses, piled on top of one another, one house after another. The fields are gone, replaced by subdivisions. The old tin-sided liquor store is gone. Even the gully we used to clean has changed—culverts have been dropped in and covered in concrete.

  All that’s left of the group room is the Big Board.

  That night, sitting on Hair-pie’s screened-in porch, Kristen listens to us go over some of the stories. Some of them I’ve told already. Others I’ve forgotten. Like that time what’s-his-face peed on the group room floor. Or when I tried to jump a bayou in my El Camino. What a dumbass, I say. Like it was the goddamn General Lee. I’m smoking, we are all laughing. We go over most of them. Hair-pie reminds me of a guy who came to our trailer looking for me. He was a debt collector, but instead of a suit and tie, he wore a .38 tucked into his jeans and a skinning knife in his boot. He knocked on the door and, when Hair-pie opened it, asked if Tom was around. Hair-pie didn’t even hesitate. Sure, he said. Come right in.

  I get it, I say. It’s funny.

  Hair-pie laughs. Fuck you.

  Kristen looks from him to me and then back to him. I hadn’t heard that one.

  No? Hair-pie says. There are others.

  I’ve heard a lot, she says.

  I’m sure you have.

  I thought he was lying, she says.

  Naw, Hair-pie says, they’re all true.

  All of them? she asks, though there’s no point she’s making here other than an illumination of her surprise.

  All of them, he says.

  He is not menacing. Neither am I. We are both just old.

  You boys are so disgusting, she says, though I know she loves me.

  Later, after she excuses herself for the night, Hair-pie and I remain on the porch.

  For a long while we sit there. So long the ashtray overflows. So long I stand and stretch. So long I pull my chair to the door, where I flick my cigarette butts onto his manicured lawn. One by one, as the night wears on, I watch lights go out in neighboring windows up and down the road. We are telling each other stories. The same ones we’ve told again and again. On porches. After a meal. Or in phone calls. Or on fishing trips. On long rides in the days whe
n we still rode together. They aren’t all good stories, nor do they highlight the goodness in me, or in the men like him whom I once called my brothers, for we each possess this thing inside us at once horrible and beautiful, shocking yet predictable, known and familiar, unavoidable, tragic, easily explainable, infinite, finite, ridiculous, absurd, all-pervading, redundant, garden-variety and unusual, the same, dissimilar, surprising, smart, terrifying, and dumb, each one of us lucky, unlucky, blessed, bewitched, and doomed. Each begins the same and each one ends the same. We are rabid and hell-bent, maniacal, desperate.

  Somewhere in the night, I feel a breeze come up over the delta off the Gulf; soft and barely lifting my shirt, it cools the sweat upon my nape—I hear crickets, bullfrogs, and we keep telling each other these stories.

  It’s the one place I’ve ever felt at home.

  Acknowledgments

  Too many people have helped me with this book to thank here. You have offered me time, a room, a roof, money, food, a phone or computer, a tie, a razor, an ear, support, hope, kindness, and love. You have given me rides, bought me a bus pass, or lent me your car. And you have believed in me when I was unbelievable and no one else would. Or you have offered only indifference. I am grateful for all.

  About the Author

  © ERIC RAINE

  Tom Macher grew up mostly in Georgia and spent his teenage years bouncing between California and New York, Montana and Louisiana, living in boys’ homes, halfway houses, and communes. He is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a former fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Halfway is his first book.

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