Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

by Nick Flynn

  Twelve years now my father has been inside, housed, sure glad that’s behind us, though I realize he’s still lost, adrift in his own wrong ocean. But at least he isn’t sleeping under a bush, at least I know that if I choose to I can drive into Boston and find him. I know if I wait until after the fifteenth of the month he most likely won’t be completely hammered. But now I’ve been tracked down by Dawn from the management company, and she’s told me what he’s done, and that he has to go. I ask about the procedure, how long it takes. A month to serve the papers, she says, then another month in court, and then he’s out. It must be a burden, I say, to be the one to put people on the street, and I really mean it, but she says it’s no burden at all. I offer to go up there and tell him about his impending eviction, because I don’t know what else to say. I also tell her that I’ll take away his weapon, which I’m familiar with, as he has brandished it at my head once or twice in the past (bammo) in case I forgot he was a tough guy. I offer to go simply because I’d hate for him to do any actual damage. Dawn implies that if I can disarm him then perhaps she’ll reconsider the eviction, though she makes no promises, and I don’t ask for any. After I hang up I lay on the floor for a while as if rabbit-punched.

  But I arrive too soon—the vodka still in abundance, he doesn’t remember police or music or attacking anything. When a dim flicker does cross his face he goes into a familiar harangue, about how dangerous the neighborhood is, how just yesterday he got on the elevator and there was a loaded .38 magnum on the floor, which he, of course, didn’t put a finger on, he’s not stupid. When I tell him that I’ve come for his weapon, that if he gives it up there’s an outside chance he won’t be evicted, he begins to scream about being left defenseless in this murderous city, that he will never leave his apartment, showing his resolve by fishing the club out and brandishing it, once again, a foot from my head.

  I ask him to put the club down.

  What do you think I am, he screams, a homicidal maniac?

  I ask him to put it down.

  He lowers the club to his side, begins telling me about a twelve-year-old white kid who knocked on his door the other day, asked him where the rental office was. What the fuck was that about? he asks. Out of all the apartments in this building, he comes to my door? Tell me it’s not harassment, pure and simple. His door is papered on the outside with letters sent to him, from Ted Kennedy, from Patty Hearst, to show the other tenants that he’s someone, that he’s known. A twelve-year-old might mistake it for an office, the letters for official notices. I’ll tell you something, though, that boy will never knock on my door again. I tell him that if I leave today without the weapon I’ll have to tell Dawn that he refused, and she will begin eviction proceedings, and I won’t blame her or be able to do anything to help him. He screams some more, about the Supreme Court case he’ll initiate, about them not knowing who they’re up against. At one point he offers to hand it over, if I promise to give it back. As I turn to leave, he follows me into the hallway, calls me back, whispers, Hey, I’ve got a hammer, as if I could give this to Dawn and everything would be hunky-dory. As I start down the stairs he screams, FATHER MURDERER, FATHER MURDERER, at my retreating back.

  Bitter cold walking down Boylston, the cold feels good in my head. I pass the piece of sidewalk where I first encountered Ida, a black southerner in her sixties, who ended up in Boston one winter, broke with no place to live. Ida had a shopping cart and, No, thank you, she didn’t want to come on the Van with us to the shelter. All she wanted, once we’d established a rapport, was a grill so she could cook the rutabagas she’d acquired and now took up a good bit of her cart. She just wanted to start a little fire right there on the sidewalk and cook her rutabagas. Farther on I pass a man in the bus kiosk beside the library, hands deep in his pockets, his hood pulled tight over his face, three notes carefully safety-pinned to his yellow parka, pencil scrawl across each page. I don’t know what the notes say because I don’t stop to read them. In an hour I’m on a train to New York, and on the way back to Boston a few days later, I decide to give my father one more chance. I still haven’t called Dawn. He buzzes me in, thanks me for trying to help him out, hands over the club, says he’d appreciate whatever I can do.

  my tree

  (2003) My father answers the door with a huge gash above his eye—swollen, bruised. Here we go. I mention the gash, unsure I want to know the details. This? he barks, pointing to his eye. I got nailed. But you should see those two cocksuckers, tried to rob me, I’m stepping on their motherfuckin’ heads. Off to Charles Street jail, they’re in for twenty years. I nod, look at the last of the day’s sunlight coming through the ivy that fills his three windows with green. Cartoons on tv, coffee gone cold. How does he keep those plants so healthy? You don’t want any vodka? he asks, hoisting the jug. Fine, it’s evil shit. A room without corners, without a place to sit. After a few minutes of listening to this latest installment in his endless unraveling his room begins to feel especially suffocating, cramped. A seventy-three-year-old man in trouble with the law for the umpteenth time. I suggest a stroll, offer to buy him a sandwich. He mentions my book, the poems in it that deal with him, says he’s impressed. I wonder if he’s thinking of the one where I say I want to “bend / each finger back, until the bottle / falls, until the bone snaps, save him / by destroying his hands.”

  On the sidewalk I notice how gnomelike he’s become—cross-eyed, stiff gait, smaller and smaller, as is the way with all parents, perhaps, though my father is smaller yet cocky still, cocky and paranoid at once. Not a formidable presence, except in that madman way that drunks wield, that does-it-look-like-I-give-a-fuck-about-anything? look. First we walk to the 7-Eleven to replenish his stash of orange juice, where he introduces me to the guy behind the counter as his son. The cashier smiles, a bit reservedly, says only, Your son? Along with the o.j. he buys two bunches of cut flowers, one for his room, one for Jasmine, the seven-year-old girl who lives next door to him. A note from Jasmine is taped to his door—“Dear man that lives in 21, I love you.” Once he knocked on their door while I was there, insisted I meet Jasmine and her mother. The mother gave me a look much like the one this cashier is giving me, of weary exasperation. Jasmine hid behind her mother’s leg, waved hola. As we leave the cashier tells me my father is a good customer. Damn right I am, my father says, as he ambles back out. Next door is a junk store, a CLOSED sign hanging in the window. My father bangs on the sign with his fist. A man opens the door and is introduced as Sharkey. Nice to meet you, I say, and take his offered hand. This is my son, my father says. Sharkey squints into my face, confused. He teaches at Columbia University, my father says, do you believe that? Sharkey leans in to me, squints. That’s a fuckin’ miracle, he says. This block of Boston is mostly students, and they all seem to have somewhere to go. The kid’s got a book out, my father tells Sharkey, then turns to me—I don’t understand how you did that. What promoted you? When my mother was seventeen my father sent her a flurry of letters, just days before he would get her pregnant—My future depends on my talent to write—I have periods of doubt and fear. I do not want to fail. Sharkey tells me to keep an eye on him, that he gets in trouble sometimes, as my father staggers away from us down the sidewalk. I catch up, stop briefly to glance at an outdoor table covered with used CDs, but he orders me to keep walking. Suck city, he explains, full of fuckers, the two bouquets of flowers tucked under his arm. We pass the bank, where he cashes his government check, one of the banks he claims to have robbed many years before. He takes out his bank card, See that? I know, I tell him, you showed me. We’re in front of a pizza joint now. I’m hungry, I say, you hungry?

  He orders the steak bomb, I get a slice. He seems to know the woman at the register, or at least he acts like he does, giving her a demented stare. I drift away. She asks him if he needs anything else, if he’s all right, and my father replies, loudly, My name is Flynn, of course I’m doing all right, here in Boston. I’m Irish, he sneers, not African, or Spanish, or Chinese, who I love.
The woman smiles wanly, That’s good you love them, passing the bag of food into his hands.

  We sit on his stoop in the fading sun, his sandwich difficult for him to negotiate, bits of fatty steak dropping to the concrete. I ask him about his father again, about the life raft. He tells the same story, nearly word for word—how he watched his father test it, dropping it over and over from a crane into Scituate Harbor until he got it right. I am now the age my father was when he entered his first bank, which is the same age my mother was when she killed herself. The sun is setting on us now. My father tells me that he has the original blueprints for the life raft. I know, I say, I gave them to you. You did? I was wondering where I got them. You’re Thaddeus, right, named after my grandfather? No, I say, I’m Nicholas, named after the Czar.

  After half an hour I tell him I have to shove off, I’m parked illegally, no sense pushing my luck.

  Don’t worry, he insists, just give the ticket to me, I’ll tell them you were visiting.

  Great, I say, I’ll remember that next time.

  As I stand to go he stands with me, points to a tree growing from a hole in the sidewalk—

  See that tree? I’m responsible for that. I made a call, got the city to plant it. My tree.

  Beautiful tree, I say.

  And these steps, he says, pointing to where we were sitting, I had them replaced. My steps.

  Nice steps, I say.

  He walks me to my car, points to the tree beside it—That tree too—he’s leaning into my window now, if I were to pull away I would drag him with me—even though it’s not in front of my door. I was feeling generous.

  some notes

  “Look! here comes a walking fire!”—King Lear. “A map the size of the world”—Jorge Luis Borges. “Trigger-hippie”—Morcheeba. Lines in italics—King Lear (approximately—original is “that wants the means to lead it”). “pruno”—usually made by fermenting ketchup in a plastic bag (the kick is formidable, but the taste, they say, is wretched). “Who is it that can tell me…”—King Lear. “It wasn’t any woman…”—William Faulkner, Light in August. “I have plenty of places to go…”—Mike Leigh, Naked (approximately). “…a box imagined into a house”—an idea lifted from Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space. “We arouse pity…”—Jean Genet, The Thief’s Journal. “same again”—a collage of many voices, including friends, Homer Simpson & the band Acrophobe. The form is adapted from a Kato Indian Genesis myth (found in Technicians of the Sacred, Jerome Rothenberg, editor). Many lines lifted from King Lear. “Accursed fornicator!…,” & “Grain upon grain…”—Samuel Beckett, Endgame. Flawless (how to rob a bank)—title of a documentary video written & directed by NF, produced by the Kitchen, edited by David Anzarch (1997). “What is word made of but breath…”—Hamlet. Excerpts from Jonathan Flynn, The Button Man (unpublished). “the boy stood on the burning deck”—Elizabeth Bishop, Casabianca. —“bend / each finger back…”—NF, Father Outside.

  [debts]

  impossible without tom draper, bill clegg, jill bialosky, frances richard, lee brackstone, oscar van gelderen, jessica craig, mark adams, dorothy antczak, sarah messer, thich nhat hahn, jacqueline woodson, johnny cash, maggie nelson, mark conway, dana goodyear, doug montgomery, hubert sauper, eli gottlieb, danella carter, dave cole, martin moran, debra gitterman, arlo crawford, suzanne bach, robbie cunningham, sarah moriarty, rodney phillips, deirdre o’dwyer, padgett-marbens, marisa pagano, anna oler, josh neufeld, the macdowell colony, michael carroll, the schoolhouse center, sylvia sichel, the corporation of yaddo, peggy gould, pat oleszko, daniele bollea, nicola bollea, jen liese, alex blumberg, shane dubow, billy loos, everyone I worked beside & with at the pine street palace, all my friends who have become fathers, tad flynn, talaya delaney impossible without

  [bragging rights]

  Nick Flynn is the author of Blind Huber, A Note Slipped Under the Door, and Some Ether, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award. In another life he worked as an electrician, as a ship’s captain, and as an educator in New York City public schools. Some venues where, over the years, his words have appeared include The New Yorker, The Nation, Fence, the New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, Provincetown Arts, and National Public Radio’s This American Life. His awards include fellowships from the Library of Congress, the Fine Arts Work Center, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. One semester a year he teaches at the University of Houston, and then he spends the rest of the year elsewhere.