Townie

by Andre Dubus III

  IN MINUTES the street was quiet and empty again. Jeb’s teacher and my mother had walked him into the house, and I stood there on the sidewalk where Tommy J. had beaten up my brother and called my mother a whore.

  And what had I done?

  I’d pleaded with him. I’d called him Tommy and pleaded.

  I stood there a long time. If there were sounds, I didn’t hear them. If there was something to see, I didn’t see it. There was the non-feeling that I had no body, that I had no name, no past and no future, that I simply was not. I was not here.

  Then I was walking. Up the stairs and into the house. Through the dark foyer and into the dining room we never used. Across the back hallway and its curled linoleum into the downstairs bathroom where I shut the door behind me, though I could not be sure of that, the me. Was there a me?

  I stood in front of the sink and the mirror. I was almost surprised to see someone standing there. This kid with a smooth face and not one whisker, this kid with long brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, this kid with narrow shoulders and soft arm and chest muscles and no balls. This kid had no balls. I looked into his eyes: I don’t care if you get your face beat in, I don’t care if you get kicked in the head or stabbed or even shot, I will never allow you not to fight back ever again. You hear me?

  Ever. Not once, ever, again.

  I left the bathroom and walked through the kitchen where my mother and Jeb’s teacher were tending to him at the sink. They didn’t look at me, and I couldn’t look at them.

  I ran up the back stairs and closed the door to my room. I got down on my hands and knees, straightened my back and legs, lowered my chest to the floor, and pushed back up. I did this as many times as I could, the dusty rug rising to my face, Jeb’s head snapping back, his hair flying.

  I may have done seven or eight push-ups. I turned over on my back and began doing sit-ups. My stomach muscles burned right away. I hooked my hands behind my head and jerked myself up for two or three more. I was sweating and breathing hard. Then I remembered the weight set in the basement.

  When I was twelve and we were still living in the old doctor’s office, I’d asked for it for my birthday. It seemed expensive, and I was surprised I’d gotten it, but I’d set up the bench at the foot of the bed. There was an instructional sheet of exercises for the whole body and I’d taped that to the wall and tried doing the exercises for half an hour two or three days a week. I didn’t know if this was how Billy Jack had gotten started or not, but it seemed like the right place to begin except that exercises were uncomfortable and a little painful, and I wasn’t sure I was doing them right anyway, and it was so much easier to stay on the floor in front of the TV.

  Now, two years later, I rushed down the back stairs and through the empty kitchen into the basement. In the darkness under the stairwell I found the bench and hollow metal bar and plastic-covered concrete plates. I carried them into the paneled room on the other side of the furnace. I knew how to do bench presses, and I slid a 25-pound plate on each end of the bar, lay down, gripped the cool metal, pushed it off the forks, then lowered it to my chest till it touched and I pushed back up. But it was heavy, and I could only do five or six repetitions and barely got it back into the forks over my face.

  I’d heard of guys at school who could bench-press 200 pounds, even 250. I’d heard that one of the football players could do 275, and I was struggling with 60? Was I really this weak?

  Yes, I was. And small. And afraid. And a coward.

  These words about myself were not new, but today they felt less like the end and more like a beginning.

  5

  AT PLEASANT SPA, just under the rack of Playboy, Hustler, and Swank was a row of wrestling and muscle magazines. One was called Muscle Builder. On the cover was a man staring into the camera like we’d just interrupted his privacy and he didn’t like it. His massive arms were crossed over his bare chest, and it was so muscled you could hide coins between his pectorals, a new word I was learning, others too: deltoids and trapezius, latissimus dorsi, biceps, triceps, quadriceps, and erector spinae, the muscles of a man’s body that, when fully developed, made him powerful and powerful-looking.

  I borrowed money from my sister and bought that magazine, rolled it up, carried it home, and studied every page. In it were men with sixty-inch chests and twenty-two-inch arms. They could bench-press 400 to 500 pounds for repetitions. They were curling more weight than my body. They looked like shaved and massive rage to me, so muscled from feet to neck that their faces and heads appeared small and out of place on top of their shoulders.

  Three days later I’d already worked out three times. Every muscle I had ached. At the bus stop in the morning, I didn’t talk to anyone at the corner. I didn’t even look at Glenn P. When the bus pulled up, I sat in the middle and avoided the bottle getting passed around in the back. At the high school, I walked by the grate and went directly to my homeroom and waited for the bell. After school I walked home and into the basement where I started doing bench presses for my chest, overhead presses for my shoulders, bent-over rows for my back. Sometime that week, Mom had called Pop and told him about Jeb getting beat up by a grown man, and later that same night, not long after we’d eaten something in front of the TV, Pop walked in with a friend of his from the college, a poet or artist. He was tall and quiet and wore an overcoat like men who owned suits had to wear. Standing next to him, Pop looked short, and he was smiling like he was out on an adventure of some kind. He was wearing corduroys and a sweatshirt. Maybe he saw me looking at it because he said, “I wore this to hide my wrists. I don’t want this guy to see my small wrists.” He laughed and went up to Jeb’s room to check his face.

  Mom and Pop’s friend chatted like they’d known each other a long time ago. Soon Pop came back downstairs and said, “Okay, let’s go talk to this guy. I just hope he doesn’t see my fucking wrists.”

  Then they were gone. I stood in the dark front room and watched him drive down Columbia Park to Main, my father who’d told me once that he’d never been in a fight, that he’d joined the Marines to prove to his own father he was a man, and I began to sense again that there were some things Pop just did not know, that not everybody can be reasoned with or talked to.

  I don’t remember if they ever found the J.s’ house, but it didn’t matter anyway. The only way to fight was not to have small wrists in the first place. To build so much muscle, your enemy would feel only fear before you killed him.

  I turned and walked fast back down to the basement.

  A FEW months later, the summer of 1975, I was working out six days a week, two hours at a time, on a split system, breaking my body parts down the way competitive bodybuilders did. I was overtraining and only ate tuna fish and eggs and the occasional steak if Mom could afford it, but by my sixteenth birthday that September, I could bench press my weight of 150 pounds; I could do fifteen straight pull-ups with a wide grip; I could curl 80 pounds for reps; and one Friday night alone in my room in the attic, I did one thousand sit-ups without stopping. It took over an hour, and when I was finished, my lower back was chafed and bleeding from the floor beneath me.

  It seemed no punishment was enough. In every exercise, if my muscles began to ache and burn on the seventh or eighth rep, then I’d do ten, twelve, fifteen, twenty. More than once my vision would narrow and get black at the edges, and I’d stop and breathe deeply till it passed, then I’d go right back to the barbell or dumbbells or chinning bar.

  By that fall, any fat I’d had was gone. For the first time there were blue veins in my forearms and one running up my biceps. My shoulders were broader and my waist was smaller. I was getting what magazines called a V-shape, and I tried to accentuate it by always keeping my hair tied back in a tight ponytail. One afternoon, Suzanne said to me, “Girls are starting to notice you, you know.”

  It was an encouraging and flattering thought but oddly beside the point.

  That August I ran those accidental eleven miles at Kenoza Lake with my father, and i
n September I went out for the high school’s cross-country track team. After the last bell every day, instead of getting on the bus with Suzanne and the others from the avenues, I went to the gym and locker room with jocks, guys from Bradford who wore sweaters and boat shoes, guys who had short hair and braces on their teeth, guys who didn’t swear or smoke dope or walk around the school stoned or tripping or half drunk. We changed into T-shirts and shorts and sneakers and went running.

  The coach was over six feet and heavy, his mustache as blond as his hair. He had a bad limp I figured was from a motorcycle accident or maybe he was a vet, but one afternoon in the locker room as we were all changing, he changed with us, his right leg only ten or twelve inches in diameter from his groin to his ankle.

  “Polio,” one of the other junior varsity kids whispered to me. Coach T. could barely walk, never mind run, but still, five days a week he pulled on a jock strap and a blue nylon sweatsuit, a red stripe running down his good and bad legs, and he’d take his whistle and clipboard and we’d follow him outside to where he’d make us hurt.

  Easy days would be 6-to-12-mile runs all over town. Hard days were sprints on the track, half laps, full laps, then double laps. Over and over again. On Saturday mornings I’d dress in my track uniform and walk to the high school or get a ride from my mother. I’d tie my ponytail back as tightly as I could, then run a 3.2-mile race with my team, my time mediocre, though I thought I was running hard. Once, as I ran across the finish line behind a dark-haired kid from Revere, Coach T. shouted, “Too much left at the end, Dubus!”

  He was right, and I knew it, but part of me was so surprised I was actually on a sports team of some kind, wearing a uniform like everyone else, sweating toward a common goal, that I began to watch myself run, happy just being there. Meanwhile, the varsity runners sprinted the entire course, coming in three to four minutes ahead of us, many of them dropping to their knees at the Finish Line and throwing up.

  Most had cars, and I usually got a ride home with one of them. There weren’t as many day parties at our house now. But once or twice a week, there’d still be five or six heads from the avenues sitting around in their leather jackets, smoking cigarettes and dope, our stereo cranked too loud, and I’d go straight upstairs and change, then take the back stairwell down through the kitchen to the basement where I’d lift weights for one to two hours. It was harder to build muscle running as much as I was, but I liked the nonstop pain of running; I liked how I almost felt high afterward.

  I’d take my second shower of the afternoon, then go back up to my room in the attic and do homework. My grades were getting better. Teachers called on me in class more often. For the first time, they seemed to know I was there. And that’s how I felt, too. Like I was here. Like I was somehow more on the planet with everybody else.

  WITH MY new habits came new friends. Cleary still came around, but all he wanted to do was find a day party where we could get high, or else he wanted to drift downtown to steal something, or pinch a five from his mother’s grocery money for a six-pack we’d ask a stranger to buy us. I’d be getting a ride home from one of the varsity runners, my hair still wet from the shower after practice, my leg muscles warm and tired, and I’d see him sitting on the steps of Pleasant Spa in his denim jacket, his scraggly hair hanging in front of his face, a distracted glaze in his eyes. If he walked into the house and up to my room, I’d tell him I had homework to do.

  “Homework?” He’d stare at me as if I’d just told him I was gay. Then he’d shrug and head down the stairs to look for Jeb, but my brother preferred to stay in his room every afternoon now, practicing his guitar, or else painting, drawing, carving images into leather with tools his teacher had bought him. She’d be in there, too. Lying back on his bed with her shoes off, encouraging him, laughing often, this thirty-five-year-old woman my mother seemed to have handed her youngest son to as if she were drowning and was simply grateful he’d be on dry land.

  Sam Dolan had dark curly hair and deep-set eyes and didn’t talk much. At the high school where he was the goalie for the hockey team, he walked the halls in a sweater, tight corduroys, and leather boat shoes, his pec muscles straining against the wool, his upper arms so big they couldn’t possibly be real. In the spring he wore T-shirts, but he had to cut a notch in the sleeves for his arms to fit. Other guys said he could bench over 300 pounds. Years later he would push 425 pounds off his chest, but back then I learned he wasn’t even lifting because the hockey coach believed weight training slowed your reflexes. Instead, Sam was doing 666 push-ups every other day in his small bedroom down on Eighteenth Avenue. He was doing isometric curls and press-downs for his upper arms. He did sit-ups and leg raises. He knew I’d been on the track team and asked if I would run with him, help him get in shape for hockey.

  I told him about Kenoza Lake, and three or four days a week my new friend Sam Dolan picked me up in his black Duster, and we drove north of town and went running together. We talked as we ran. I found out he was an only child and adopted, that he loved the band Jethro Tull and books by Edgar Cayce, that every night, like me, he laid out the next day’s clothes on a chair beside his bed, even his belt and socks. I told him about my weight workouts. He asked if he could come down to the basement and see what I had there.

  It was after dark on a cool night in October. Mom was still working in Boston, or heading home on the highway in her faded red Toyota, the gasoline smell inside it finally gone. Suzanne may have been in her room, Nicole locked in hers, Jeb practicing in his. Every light in the house seemed to be on, the floors dusty, and Sam and I were still sweating from our run, walking through the house and down into the basement. I flicked on the overhead fluorescent light.

  On my last workout I’d loaded the bar with as much weight as it could hold, about 160 pounds, and I’d just barely gotten a single rep with it. Now, seeing the bar fully loaded on the forks of the bench like that, I felt a little proud of myself.

  “Small bench, huh?” Sam lay down on it. He reached up, gripped the bar, popped it off the forks, and lowered it to his chest. I knew he’d be able to handle this without a problem, but I didn’t think he would push it up as easily as if it were a broomstick in his hands. He could have done twenty, twenty-five repetitions with that, but after only one rep he lowered it back to the forks, sat up, and said, “Andre, that’s really light.”

  Sometimes I forgot how far I had to go. I’d turned my body into something hard, but I still only weighed 147 pounds. I wasn’t even close to being able to scare somebody away just by how I looked.

  Once hockey season began, Sam and I stopped running together, but every Friday and Saturday night we’d walk from his small house on Eighteenth Avenue down Primrose Street past the Am Vets hall, its parking lot half full, music from a jukebox thumping behind the cinderblock walls. In front of the side door, four or five Harleys would be leaning on their kickstands, a black helmet hanging off a sissy bar, the red light from a neon Miller sign glinting off its surface. Beyond the Am Vets was a strip of weeds, then the parking lot for Pilgrim Lanes, a long white clapboard building where inside men and women bowled down on the floor. There’d be laughter and cigarette smoke and the clatter of candle pins, and we’d be over by the bathrooms where the pool tables were, taking turns playing eight ball with four or five others: there was Jimmy Quinn, who was six feet and could bench-press over 200 pounds for reps. One of his front eyeteeth was chipped, but he was handsome and already had a name. There were stories about him decking grown men who’d crashed house parties or some patch of woods where kids from the high school were drinking and getting high. They said he had the killer instinct, that even after a guy was down and hurt, Jimmy would keep whaling on his face and head till somebody pulled him off or the cops came and everybody started running.

  There was fast-talking Kevin Daley, who played hockey with Sam and bragged often about their practice drills. “Man, we sweated bullets, didn’t we, Sam? We sweated fucking bullets.” There was gentle Jeff Chabot, who was
tall and weighed over 250 pounds and was always smiling and cracking a joke; Greg Kelly whose cousin was the one they named the bridge after, the first kid from our town to get killed in Vietnam; and there were girls: the two April’s—slim, blonde, hip-swaying April S., who was Jimmy’s steady all through high school, and April C., Sam’s girl, short and blonde with thick muscular legs and a cute face, and if she didn’t like something you’d just said she’d smile and say, “Fuck you, you little faggot.” And somehow you didn’t feel less because of it. There were the twins Gina and Marie, pretty Greek girls who didn’t come from down in the avenues and never seemed happy standing in the lot of brush and high weeds across from the lanes, drinking a beer and passing around a bottle of Kappy’s screwdriver mix.

  It’s where the night always went, into the high brush across the street where we’d drink and maybe pass a joint around. Sometimes, when the weather was bad and if no one else was home, we’d end up at somebody’s house, usually Sam’s. His parents adopted him when they were older, and they were already in their late fifties. His father, a short, small-boned Irishman with a gravelly voice and a face like John Wayne, was the town’s health inspector. Sam’s mother was from a big Irish family up the river in Lowell. She was a waitress, and if she had a Saturday night off, Mr. and Mrs. Dolan usually went out with friends and didn’t get home till late. We had their small two-story house to ourselves.

  It was on a hill street with other small houses. The man next door drove a truck for the city. Another across the street was some kind of businessman. One July day he paid Sam and me to ride downtown in a pickup to an abandoned mill where we loaded two cigarette vending machines into the back of the truck, then rode to the man’s house on Eighteenth. We carried them into his garage, and when he handed us each a twenty-dollar bill, he told us, “Don’t say nothin’ to nobody, all right?”