by Amy Bloom
“Of course you are, Cal. I promise. It’s my fault you—”
“It might be your fault, but you can’t promise anything. Once they separate us down at the station, anything can happen. To me, not to you.” He shook his head. “You don’t know.”
“I know I fixed that leak, Cal. I know I—”
“You think that matters? When a few months ago I’m working and a guy calls the cops and says there’s a black man impersonating a plumber breaking into his neighbor’s house? Lucky for me the customer was home to explain to the cops I was her actual fucking plumber, but you understand what I’m saying? Anything can happen, Nicky, to me. And right now I’m sitting here in cuffs for trying to save a lady I never saw before in my life. Am I gonna get out of this? Alive? That’s on you.”
I couldn’t answer.
We sat there on the vinyl seats of the cop car, staring out the window, watching the paramedics load Helene Lancaster onto a stretcher. I saw again her blond hair smeared with blood as they covered her up.
We sat on the vinyl seats and I wanted to believe the cops would realize there was no way I could have left gas pouring out like that. And that Cal had nothing to do with it. And that the person who should really be arrested wasn’t sitting in the back of the police car. I wanted to believe that Cal would be safe, that I would be safe. I like certainty. I wanted to look at the back of Milner’s neck as he drove us downtown and feel certain that like me, he wanted to do a job he could be proud of, and that once he’d done it, if something wasn’t right he would go back and fix it.
But I didn’t feel certain at all.
Some things you can tell just by looking at a person.
Some things you can’t.
A Woe for Every Season
by Hirsh Sawhney
Dwight
I used to want to be a writer. But then life happened. Now I just teach. I’m a plain old high school English teacher. Nothing fancy, like Jenny and her academic friends—if you can call them friends, with all their backstabbing and five-syllable words. I sleep easy at night knowing I work at a real-deal public high school. Wilbur Cross on Cold Spring. I sleep easy despite the yes-men administrators and all that George W. Obama testing. But something happened the other day, a conversation with my old friend Josh Kagan. It worked me up and pissed me off. Jenny said, Talk it out, baby; I’m here if you wanna talk. I told her there was nothing to say, and she said, What a shocker. I said, Who’s being passive-aggressive now? and then took off with Ralphie. When I got home, she’d already left for the library. The next morning, she’s snoring when I roll out of bed. I go down to the kitchen and there’s a brand-new leather notebook in a red bow on the counter—a granite countertop, mind you, yet another amenity made possible by Jenny’s perfect job. A note on top says, A little something to get it all flowing. I shake my head and grin. Maybe she still cares. Maybe there’s still hope for us. But this story isn’t about me and Jenny. It’s about Josh Kagan and James Farrell. It’s about the three of us and a kid named Ink.
Me and Josh and James grew up a few miles away in the burbs. Lots of Catholics and Jews; Italians, Poles, and Irish. And then there was my sore-thumb family, half-Muslim, half-Hindu, all curry. (Yes, Jenny, self-loathing trickles through my veins.) Now I live in the Westville section of New Haven, in a sweet little Cape Cod. A $240K mortgage with $60,000 down, mostly paid for by Stale University, the imperialist overlords of Elm City, thanks to Jenny’s assistant professorship. We’ve got a hammock and a gas-powered grill, something my dad would have blown up if he’d pawed it with his immigrant hands. We’ve got a nice little patch of lawn that I cut with a hand-powered mower. And even though little Ralphie could easily do all his shitting and pissing at home, I take him for a long walk every morning. Ralphie’s our little mutt—part corgi, part dachshund, all monster. Our miscarriage dog, I call him. Like so many of the couples around us—straight, in their thirties—we got him after Jenny lost a fetus.
So it’s a Saturday, my least favorite day to walk the dog. All the doctors and lawyers and corporate warriors are out with their perfect pooches, all smiley and self-contented about living in such a beautiful area and having worked hard all week to make the world a better place. And they’re starving for small talk. But I’m walking Ralphie anyway, because Jenny’s presenting a paper at some coma-inducing conference. And who comes hulking toward me with his dopey, sweaty beast of a dog? Josh Kagan. Josh was one of my best friends between the ages of fourteen and eighteen. Despite his unabating addiction to Xanax and whiskey, he has recently come into a fair amount of cash working as a foreman at a company that installs solar panels on the roofs of gullible elderly suburbanites. Ralphie goes berserk on Josh’s dumb-ass English mastiff, and Josh says something like, Guess you never ended up calling that dog trainer. I’m like, Josh, maybe if my dog cost five thousand dollars he wouldn’t bark as much, and by the way, I still can’t figure out how you managed to turn into such a fucking asshole. But of course I don’t say that. What I really say, is, My Ralphie, he’s still a bit traumatized from his shelter days. And guess what comes out of my mouth next: I say, Yo, if you got any training tips, I’m all ears. As soon as I utter those words, I want to barf my eggs and masala chai all over Josh and his dog, and Jenny’s voice starts buzzing in my head. Maybe she’s right. Maybe being the child of immigrants has me choking on my own shame. Nah, fuck her victimizing bullshit. All humans suffer, even the 1 percent.
Josh gets talking the usual sleepwalker middle-age crap. He’ll move to Canada if Trump gets elected. He tells me I should have bought a two-family house; the rental market’s gonna boom because middle-class people can no longer afford homes. And then he gets started on the topic, the one that lately leaves a lump in my throat, though I’d never say so to Jenny. He talks about his two chubby brats and how fast they’re growing up. Next comes the state of the schools, as if he’s a Noble Prize–winning educationalist. He says he hates to be that guy, but he’s gonna switch his kids to private schools. He gets that it’s wrong, but his hands are tied. I lie, tell him I get it, and this is a green light for him to putter down Racist White Guy Boulevard.
The thing is, Josh tells me, the New Haven public schools aren’t like the ones we went to; the students in these schools are different. It’s not their fault, he clarifies. It’s their families. These families, they’re not like ours. They don’t care about their kids. They don’t know how to support them. So the kids around here, they grow up like a bunch of animals.
I’m standing there staring at Ralphie, who has condescended to let Josh Kagan’s dunce of a dog sniff his asshole. And I’m absolutely livid. I’m thinking, Josh, what you’re really saying is that you think you’re better than black people, but you don’t even have the balls to say your ugly feelings out loud. I’m thinking, Do you remember how we grew up? Do you remember the things that we did? The tanks of nitrous oxide? The quarter-pounds of BC bud? What about what we got up to right here in New Haven, just a short walk away? Do you remember Ink? Do you ever think about him when you drive by the corner of Gilbert and Sherman in your tank-sized pickup? I must have started smirking or something, because Josh says, What’s so funny? I keep this all to myself though and tell him I gotta run—wifey’s waiting, or some sexist tidbit like that. As I walk away, he says, Yo, you talk to James lately?
James Farrell was the third member of our little posse, in and out of rehab for as long as I can remember. I didn’t take his last couple of calls as I no longer have the stomach for quotations from the AA handbook or pipe-dream plans. Josh tells me that James is clean. Again. That he has a good job selling insurance. He even has a girlfriend. She’s Thai and actually went to college. Ralphie’s pissing on some freshly planted petunias. I yank the leash and shake my head. The thought of James Farrell in a dress shirt and slacks makes me wanna hurl for a second time. If one of my students did what he’s done, you know what would happen to him? Kid would be rotting in a prison cell alongside ten thousand other black kids, s
tuck inside the slammer until he’s too old to do any good or harm. I feel like punching Josh. I’d punch James, but then I’d actually have to see him.
* * *
I knew pint-size James Farrell well before I met gigantic Josh Kagan. His dad was an old-school New Haven Italian whose grandparents had worked the gun factories way back when. James’s father made his money selling Cold War widgets for some forgettable corporation—the kind of deadening white-collar job that doesn’t really exist anymore, which rewards talentless upper-middle-class white people for being just that. His mother was a dental hygienist who smiled all the time, ever since she found a Protestant Jesus. James and I coughed on our first Camel Lights together back in elementary school, lifted our first Playboys from the bookshop in the Post Mall when we were twelve or thirteen. Why did we fall head over heels for ganja, that five-fingered green goddess? I dunno. Pot was easier than booze. It was easier to get your hands on, and easier to transport with our parents driving us around. It was a hobby, an extracurricular activity—a sport for two kids who were scrawny, shy, and not especially good-looking.
Me and James Farrell, we liked each other’s company because together we could embrace the goofiness and apathy that came so naturally to us both. And if I’m being totally honest with myself, it was easy to be around him because he was so passive. He was such a shy, quiet kid. He did have his talents—he could fix anything with his hands, from the carburetor on my rusty old Civic to his grouchy old Italian grandfather’s hearing aid—but various undiagnosed learning disabilities condemned him to a high school career of Cs and Ds in level 3 classes. Let me come out and just say it then: being around Josh made me feel smart. Smart and in control.
James and I met Josh Kagan during the first couple weeks of tenth grade, when we were sparking up a shitty metal bowl full of seeds and stems underneath the bleachers at a high school football game. Josh said, Yo, you shrimps better share that shit, unless you want a beating. Or something along those lines. He was flashing his irresistible Judas Biden smile, so we hoped that he was joking.
Josh was my first Jewish friend, or my first good one at least. His ancestors had ended up in New Haven via Stalin’s gulags and then London, or at least that’s what he told us. Josh’s father was an optometrist and his mother a realtor, and yet they were always broker than a junkie on payday. We’re talking six credit cards perpetually maxed out and the power being shut off on more than one occasion. They squandered their dough on leather interiors for their luxury sedans, and saunas and hot tubs that Josh and us weren’t even allowed to breathe on—things my good immigrant parents would never have dreamed of getting.
During Josh’s ninth-grade year, before we’d even met him, he’d already tongued more than a hundred tabs of acid, and then he dropped out of school. When he returned for tenth grade, they placed him in the alternative high school, for kids who were less bright and more fucked up than he was. But he still read more than anyone else I knew, except possibly my own father. He got me hooked on Kesey and Kerouac. He got me thinking about what Brave New World had to say about capitalist America and its retarded culture of media. And the fact that he could talk so smoothly about books had a way of legitimizing all the illegal and immoral shit we got up to back then. James and books, though, were like oil and water. Yes, James might have been able to grow out his dirty white-boy dreads when my parents would have shit bricks if I’d have tried the same thing. He might have been game to try Special K when I was too scared. But James hadn’t read a book since Dr. Seuss on the knee of his Jesus-loving mother.
Josh was 6’3’’ and handsome, and the girls, they really liked him. Even though he was crude and rude. Even though he’d deflowered several young women without ever speaking to them again. Yeah, Josh, he got lots of sex. Jenny insists his stories are boyish exaggerations. But they’re not, and I know that for a fact. I used to wake up drunk in the middle of the night, on the floor of some kid’s basement next to a Ping-Pong table, or the sofa of some kid’s older sibling’s apartment in the Taft Building—don’t get me started on that racist bastard of a Supreme Court justice—and I’d see Josh sitting there getting a blowjob, or doing some girl from behind, and he’d give me that Biden grin. I’d smile back and shake my head, and for a few moments it was as if I were the one who was getting the girl. I, of course, never got the girl. Josh got girls, and even little James got laid by the second month of eleventh grade. But not me. The girls would be my friends, but they didn’t want my body. Jenny used to say it’s because I signified so differently from their pasty-ass fathers and brothers. That she would have wanted to jump my bones had she known me in high school. These days, she doesn’t come close to jumping my bones. She says there’s too much distance. That I oscillate between three modes of repugnant behavior: shutdown, passive-aggressive, and just plain mean. Unlike her, who has only one mode: ass-kissing schmoozer.
Forgive me for rambling. Old wounds run deep. The one thing you do need to know about Josh—Josh back then, at least—was that when he was around, you felt safe. You always felt like you were a part of something bigger, part of a weird newfangled family or something. (Or maybe it was more like a cult?) With Josh Kagan in our lives, James and I got to walk around our suburban school with a don’t-even-think-about-fucking-with-us swagger. So when Josh suggested the three of us start selling a little pot to fund our weekends of beer and bong hits, neither one of us said, Really, Josh, do you think that’s wise? No, in fact, I got a notebook from my L.L. Bean backpack and started crunching numbers, like the good subcontinental that I am. I figured that if we got an ounce of pot and sold half that ounce as eighths, and a few stray grams at ridiculously high prices, we could smoke the other half for free and still have some money to spend on ales and stouts, on cheeseburgers at Paulie’s Lunch, where we ended most of our weekend nights. How’s that for immigrant ingenuity?
We had a nice system going by the middle of eleventh grade. Before we met Ink down on Gilbert, there was this dealer, Nick DeLuca, who Josh called DeMookfuck. James’s older sister Beverly used to date him, and now he was selling weight so that he could live large while taking classes at UNH, where my father taught civil engineering. DeMookfuck rented an old colonial on Fountain Street, near Dayton Street Apizza, which used to serve decent pie. Speaking of pie, let me be clear about something: I’m a Sally’s man all the way, no corporate or soggy pie for me. The Stalies may put up with those two other spots, but not someone who knows their ass from their elbow when it comes to New Haven pizza.
Anyhow, our trio would stop by DeMookfuck’s apartment on most Fridays. He’d smoke a bowl with us out of one of his many handblown glass pipes, which we found both impressive and cheesy. Then he’d front us an ounce of midgrade seedless greens. We’d sell the stuff cheap to a few friends, and rip off a few athletes or girls. The following week we’d bring DeMookfuck back his money, and he’d hand us over another fat satchel of pot. Once he’d gotten to know us, he’d always throw in a bonus. A small bag of mushrooms or little yellow pills that were allegedly made of THC. The funny thing about the whole situation was that after a while DeMookfuck only wanted to deal with me. He only made eye contact with me, and he would only accept cash from my hands. No wonder I got so deep in that world. It was the only club that wanted me, that didn’t make me feel like some Jungle Book pariah.
Shit. That’s Jenny’s voice again. I wish I could get it to stop. The point is, our little business came to a standstill when DeMookfuck got busted. All he got was ten thousand hours of community service, probably because he was white. Back then the rumor was that he had ratted out some big dealers above him in exchange for a light sentence. All we were sure of that summer was that we couldn’t even get our hands on a single nickel bag of Mexican schwag. We couldn’t get stoned, and neither could our friends. We had no funds for our weekend antics. This got old after a couple of weeks, and eventually Josh says, Yo, Ray—that’s me, it’s short for Rehan—we should drive down to Gilbert Street to score som
e weed.
This was one of the worst I ideas I’d ever heard, but I just shrugged and said, Sure. Why not?
* * *
Gilbert Avenue is in West River section of Dwight, but for some reason, in the drug-addled suburbs where we grew up, the dumb-ass dope-smoking kids called it Gilbert Street. The other kids—the straight ones—didn’t call it anything, because they didn’t know it even existed. When they drove down Congress Avenue through that part of New Haven, they locked their car doors to avoid one of the mythic carjackings their parents had warned them about; their parents had learned about the carjackings from trashy movies like Grand Canyon. When I walk Ralphie around this neighborhood now, on one my forget-about-miscarriages-and-failing-school-systems walks, I can’t help but gawk at its hundred-year-old homes, most of them Victorians, most decaying or in a state of total disrepair. You stare at these elegant monsters, and you think, What a utopia this all must have been. Where did it all go? Why did it all vanish? America’s best days have passed, but we all just showed up to the dance. And you wonder why Trump has gotten them so fired up.
Don’t get me wrong, Dwight’s a bit cleaner these days, thanks to a local mosque, which has slowly but surely spruced up the neighborhood. (What do you Trump fascists think about that?) You can tell that some bureaucrats have been holding meetings about beautification and development. I notice an attempt to rebrand parts of the neighborhood West of Chapel, or some Waspy shit like that. And there are also big posters of allegedly local celebrities hanging from neighborhood buildings. There’s this one of Paul Giamatti, whose father was some bigwig at Stale. I can’t help but roll my eyes when I see Giamatti’s ugly mug grinning down upon the streets of Dwight. If I was a kid from the ghetto, I’d throw a bucket of paint on that face. I’d throw a bucket of the paint on the dumb bureaucrats who used taxpayer money to put up those bloody posters.