by Kris Bertin
At the same time I’d learned about Tan, I learned about Jason. That he’d had a family up at that house, years ago. It was a story I’d heard before, but hadn’t meant anything to me because I didn’t know who it was about. Because before this, it was like I was underwater—with Tan—while all the adult stuff went on above the surface. And now I had come up for air for the first time and could suddenly hear everything.
Jason’s fiancée had left him because he was fucking around on her with some nineteen-year-old girl. Then he tried to commit suicide by driving off a bridge, except he fucked it up and someone managed to rescue him. Tan’s sister told me all this, at the search-party meeting. All the different chairs in Tan’s house had been taken from their spots at desks and the kitchen table and breakfast nook and the workroom in the garage, and put together in the living room, like we were having a makeshift wedding. Tan’s sister was wearing a black dress and drinking wine, but everyone else was in hunter’s orange and hiking boots, drinking tea or coffee or pop.
I ended up back at the Esso eventually. Jason was watching a car fill up, and I joined him across the counter, not knowing what else to do. I felt like I didn’t have anyone else to see, or anywhere else to go. Right away, when I saw him, I knew I didn’t like him anymore, and that I probably never had.
When he put his hand on me and asked how I was doing I told him that Tanya and I had broken into his house.
It’s like some mental case lives up there, I said to him.
He cleared his throat and blinked and tried to say something.
After a moment, all he managed to say was bad things happen. It meant nothing to me, but he seemed to be satisfied with it, like that explained everything, his problems and Tan’s problems and mine.
She didn’t leave because of you, I said.
I think she did.
Well not in the way you think. She wanted to leave.
A bit later the police were there and had to talk to all of us. I told them the same thing—that she had wanted to leave. They wrote it down and moved on. Talked to everyone. Even questioned the ring of girls smoking in their green uniforms, no longer scowling at me, but instead stealing glances, like they didn’t want to miss me falling to my knees or going into hysterics.
Instead, I waved at them. A few waved back. They were shivering and trying to keep their bare legs warm as the sun went down, and I realized I was doing the exact same thing.
MAKE YOUR MOVE
Let’s say you’re a tough guy.
And by that I mean you’re confident, self-assured. You don’t take shit from people but you don’t go around starting anything either. You don’t have a code, or at least you wouldn’t put it that way. You’d call it manners, but that wouldn’t be it exactly. You’d call it minding your own business, but that isn’t it either. Mostly you don’t want to end up like the guys you know. Your father, doing twenty years in Dorchester. Your brother, all screwy on booze and schizophrenia drugs, walking around Barrington Street, yelling and in a panic and puffing his chest out like he owns the place.
Let’s say you’re in the bad part of town. You don’t want to be, but you have to be because of your job. You’re a driver, a limousine driver, but you’re on foot. Another guy has your limo all day and at 11 p.m. you switch over and he gives it to you. Normally he comes to your house and then you drive to his, but tonight he says he’s in trouble with his girl, and he doesn’t have time to go all the way to your house. Normally you’d say too bad, come and get me if you don’t want your lights punched out. But Alex has done right by you lately, and he looked the other way when your unlicensed cousin drove your shifts when you had the flu so you could keep your sick days. So you say sure, and you take the bus way uptown to the north end and start walking with your fists all balled up, not wanting to listen to your Walkman because you need all your senses in these parts, your coat zipped up all the way so that nobody sees your tie and thinks it means you have money.
When you get to his house you have to wait, so you lean on a fence surrounding his ten square feet of dead grass. You’d like to have a cigarette but aren’t sure if you have enough time for one. There’s nothing worse than lighting one and having to save it for later.
So let’s say you have your Player’s Light anyway, and it’s good. You get a headrush because you only smoke once in a while, but that makes you feel weak. Noodly arms make you feel nervous, make you feel like you can’t fight, even though you can, even though you were a top-tier middleweight on the circuit years ago (robbed of the title because of judges’ decision). Thinking about this sours you, and when a couple of kids ask you for smokes, you tell them to take a walk, and you even point ahead to where they oughta go. Right away they start with the name-calling, and the allegations are ludicrous: that you’re a cocksucker, that you suck your father’s pecker. You just stand there and take it, have a few more puffs ‘til they’re done, and there’s silence. That’s when you lunge at them.
You’re careful not to actually hurt them, because you like kids, but one of them doesn’t react quickly enough and his face bounces off your chest and you almost run him over. The other one runs off in a straight line, as fast as the other kid was slow, until he pops out of existence.
The slow kid gets a bloody nose and starts crying right there on the sidewalk. It reminds you of when your brother’s friends busted your nose and laughed at you, left you in their front yard while they went to the store to snag some Whoppers and Twizzlers and whatever else. So let’s say you take pity on the kid, and you take him with you in your limo, up front with you, behind the glass divider so that clients don’t see him. After a while, you take him for a frosty at Wendy’s and drive him home.
You meet his mother, Dawn, and she’s a real knockout. You get the idea to tell her you saved the kid from a mugging, and he doesn’t contradict you, but he doesn’t go along with it either. It’s three weeks later that he pipes up, because he’s sick of you banging his mother five nights a week, but mostly because he hates having dinners with you, hates your boxing stories and your crude attempts at parenting him.
You and her break up and you walk home in the dark, in the rain, and you leave the city the next day, not because you’re distraught but because this episode has signalled the need for a change, a clean break. You grow a moustache and get work bouncing at a bar that’s straight all week and gay on the weekends. You get paid well but it’s hard to find anybody who wants to be around you in this other city because the people are too modern and trendy for your sensibilities.
THE END
But let’s say you don’t light that smoke. You just twiddle your thumbs and wait for Alex, taking in the scenery. A couple kids walk by you, a bag lady stops and asks you for money and you don’t give her anything because she actually looks like she could be working—you work, so why can’t she? You don’t tell her this, you don’t say anything to her because people probably say that shit to her all the time, she’s probably got a great comeback and you’d hate for her to get the upper hand on you. Alex comes and gives you the limo and on a whim you drive around with the divider down, something you almost never do.
A client named Lou appreciates the company and gives you a crisp $100 bill. His phone number is written on the money, but he doesn’t strike you as a queer so you thank him and put it in your coat. It occurs to you that he looks more like an old-school gangster, real calm and cool with one of those haircuts that’s slicked back so severely it’s pulling his face upwards. You wonder if the number is an opportunity to become some kind of mob goon. Maybe he liked the look of you—you have a kind of pompadour, not quite like his, but close—like at least you’re on the same page hair-wise. Maybe he liked your boxing stories, that line about how winning isn’t winning, just like the law ain’t the law, if he knows-what-you-mean.
After you drop him off you hit Wendy’s for a frosty. The teens working there really dig a limo coming thro
ugh the drive-thru, and for some reason you get the urge to pay with the big bill, to really knock their socks off.
Let’s say you don’t break the $100 bill though, because you want the number on it. You just pay with pocket change but you leave a five-dollar tip because those kids work damn hard and the girl in the window is cute enough. She looks a bit like your aunt, the one that always made you feel weird, made you blush when she’d kiss you or make prolonged eye contact. You try to put her out of your mind, but the frosty is right there in the cup-holder, reminding you of her all night and you end up squirming around in your seat with a big erection for the rest of your shift. When you finally get rid of it the next morning your brain starts working again and you remember the number on the bill and decide to call it.
A lady picks up and you say that this number was written on one of your bills. She says she’s glad you called and tells you to come see her tonight. Turns out you got it all wrong, she wrote her number on Lou’s bill, and you ended up with it by mistake. But you like the sound of her voice so you ask where you should come see her and she says the bar, stupid. Ron’s. And it’s Loretta, in case you already forgot.
You say how could I forget because you’re feeling desperate and aren’t sure if you can go another month without being touched by another person.
You go there before work and hold up the money until someone comes over and you ask if she’s Loretta. She says no, she’s Dawn, but she’s so beautiful you don’t even care about Loretta anymore. You ask for a club soda because you’ve been clean for eight months now and while she’s gone you get your Maritime Limo pen and cross out Loretta’s number and put yours on it because it’s actually a pretty cool thing to do. She seems annoyed that you’re paying for a one-dollar drink with a hundred-dollar bill, but you leave her twenty bucks on top of that and start bothering her about dating you. She gives up or gives in, partially because of your charms, partially because she’s drawn to thuggish kinds of guys, partially because you’re genuinely interested in her.
You have your first date that night, sort of. She drives around with you with the divider up, and you talk all night about the city, about where you grew up, about your hopes and dreams. Dawn’s nervous but excited, sometimes talks too fast, sometimes not at all. In the morning, you have to take the limo to Alex’s and it turns out she lives nearby, right around the corner. Instead of going home, she invites you in, and you sleep together—actually sleep because you’re so tired.
It’s when you wake up that you fuck, and it’s so nice you tell her you love her by accident. It’s a thing you do sometimes when you’re having sex, sometimes when you’re being served food; once you said it to your corner when a big Newfoundlander gave you one right on the jaw and you went down.
When you see Dawn next, you and her and her son go for a day-trip to the beach out by the campgrounds and you ask her to marry you then and there. But you ask so quietly and it’s so windy and the gulls keep screaming so loud that she doesn’t hear you. You think she’s ignoring you and you’re so embarrassed you don’t even stay for the sandwiches she packed. You don’t return her calls and you never see her again, though you go to that beach to think about your life whenever you’re feeling blue. You throw rocks at the birds. You write shit in the sand. Sometimes you swim, sometimes you don’t.
THE END
Let’s say, though, that you don’t hang onto that hundred-dollar bill. You get caught up in the moment and want to be a big shot, so you give it to the drive-thru girl who looks like your aunt, slip the money to her like it’s no big deal. You don’t really think it through, and you momentarily forget that you’re the guy driving the limo, not the guy in the back of it, not the guy with money and class and complimentary champagne. The look she gives you is so sexy that something misfires in your brain and you forget that you need this money, you really do, and instead you say keep the change.
She asks if you’re serious, and for a moment you nearly tell her you aren’t, you nearly grab it from her hand and tear out of there, but you don’t. You just keep your mouth shut and give her a look like it ain’t no thing, not to a guy like you. You’re caught off guard when she tells you she’s off in fifteen minutes, and her and some friends are going camping and do you want to come?
You really shouldn’t, you need this job, and you’ll get fired for sure, but the kind of mood you’re in, you say fuck it. You won’t just come, you’ll do her one better and drive her there.
Before long, her and six other kids in Wendy’s uniforms are in the back with towels and coolers full of snacks, bopping around a beach ball and drinking beers. You turn off your radio and just go with the flow, burn up company gas until you get to the campgrounds, and start drinking with the kids, drinking as fast and as hard as you can so that awkwardness, that divide between your age and theirs, can’t be felt. Actually, most of them are college-aged, but it’s little Jessie, the one who looks like your aunt who’s the youngest, over fifteen years younger than you. Despite your best efforts you start feeling the years after you make reference to Midnight Express and she doesn’t know what you’re talking about.
You get a horrible feeling in the pit of your stomach and you wonder if there’s some way you can come up with an excuse for the three-and-a-half hours you just threw away acting like an idiot. Someone passes you a joint and you take a deep hoot, then a few more even though you shouldn’t—you’ve had a fifty-fifty chance of a bad trip with the stuff since high school, and it did nothing but damage to your brother. Still, it takes the edge off and you’re able to just chill out and make your move.
Jessie and you are on a picnic table on the beach, alone, away from the all the others, when she starts talking about her sister, a single mother with a son from a deadbeat dad. A real piece of shit that used to slap her around. You want to say big deal, you were slapped around, and your mother was too, and her mother before that, and there are worse fucking things than that all around us. You don’t say this, and instead you say fuck it and start kissing her, and she’s into it, making little sounds like she’s in heaven. She starts moving her body around in a weird little dance and it seems like this is so easy it’s not even interesting anymore.
But let’s say you stay the night. You go back to her tent. The sex isn’t very good, and after she says it was amazing even though time seemed to slow down and you had real bad cottonmouth and kept smacking your tongue when you were on top of her.
You and her join the rest of her friends around the camp-fire and one of the guys is playing the guitar, singing Oasis songs while another guy plays one of those stupid little bongos that fits in your lap, and he can’t keep the beat whatsoever. You take it from him and start doing it. They start laughing, half because you’re so good at it, half because you’re the limo driver they met at the drive-thru, now out here with your pants rolled up, a blanket around your shoulders with your tie still on. They’re laughing but you don’t care, you’re so into it that you’re on fire. You tell them it’s because you used to box, you got rhythm, you got skills.
You start telling them about your fight with Johnny-Cakes Turner, where you cleaned his clock because of your footwork alone. Rhythm. Halfway through your story, something catches your eye in the background, and you swear, you swear it’s a ghost. A chubby, glowing one, just like in the Ghostbusters movie. It’s going back and forth from the picnic table and the treeline again and again and it’s so fucked up you say oh my god as many times and in as many ways as you’re able to before you trip and fall forward and begin a whole new kind of existence on your hands and knees.
THE END
Let’s say, on the other hand, that you don’t stay with Jessie. You tell her you gotta take a dump and ask where the toilets are. You make a break for your limo through the darkness, your shoes crunching on the gravel path, a chill going through you.
One of the kids catches you getting behind the wheel and says you can’t drive. Y
ou tell him you’re just going to get some chips at the canteen. He tells you you’re drunk and they already have lots of chips, plus there is no canteen. But he’s trying to do you a favour, trying to keep you from getting a DUI or smashing up your limo. He isn’t aware you’re trying to strand them all out here, roll onto the highway and never come back, so when he opens the door to get the keys away, he’s being gentle, almost brotherly about the whole thing.
He is totally unprepared for the way you twist his wrist all up and start driving with the door open. He makes this sound somewhere between laughter and screams because he doesn’t know you well enough to know if you’re kidding. Once you start driving, really driving, and he has to run to keep up, he realizes you aren’t kidding. That you’re willing to take this all the way up from misdemeanor to felony, and that he has to do something before you get there. He tries to get a hold of the wheel and for a minute he almost does before you punch him in the back of the head so that he just disappears into the dark.
Hours later you’re sobering up at an all-night diner, and between sips of black coffee you notice in the shining silver napkin holder that the kid scratched your face bad, three diagonal lines right across your cheek like someone attacked you with a camping spork. Suddenly you’re inspired—you realize you could call into work and say that you were carjacked, but you got the limo back. You could even make like you took care of the jacker—not actually say it, but kind of imply it. You hold the napkin holder up and have a good look at yourself. Would it be a believable story?
You decide that yeah, if some piece-of-shit-minority guy tried to steal your ride, that’s exactly what you’d do. He’d be in your trunk right now, bound and gagged, all his facebones broken. You start drawing pictures of the imaginary man’s face on a stack of napkins, start to practice how you’re going to tell the story. Three more refills and a whole breakfast plate later, you’ve basically drawn a thirty-panel comic book about it, six-napkins long.