My boss, Henry, was a runty boyish-looking man who could be friendly, even fatherly, or, more often, lewd. Once he helped me analyze “Howl” for my English class, and another time he explained paganism. “See, I’m pretty smart,” he said. “Surprised you, didn’t I?” He did surprise me the first time he grabbed my ass or reached for my breast, then chuckled like he’d won a game of naughty tag, though only he was playing. I learned to skirt him, to slink by, never to place myself between Henry and a wall.
One Sunday afternoon when the tow-truck driver was out on a call, Henry called me into the repair bay. “Mo,” he said.
I appeared in the threshold of the garage, about twenty feet from him.
“What?” I thought he was finally going to show me how to use the tire-mounting machine so I could fix flats.
“Come closer,” he said, a weird grin on his face. When I was six feet away I noticed his penis pushed over the top of his gray Dickie work pants. “That’s just the tip of the iceberg,” he said, smiling. Henry had a beautiful smile, straight teeth that glowed white against his tanned skin. I turned and walked outside to the pumps, where I kept busy sweeping up trash, wiping down the glass over the meters, until the wrecker driver returned and Henry left. For a while after this, Henry acted odd around me. He wasn’t apologetic but aloof, maybe even a little hurt, or at least annoyed. He had not elicited the response he wanted, which was what? Appreciation? Laughter? Running away screaming like a little girl? After that, Henry tempered his lascivious impulses, at least around me.
Walpole cops pulled in daily, as did state troopers from the nearby barracks, wearing immaculate creased jodhpurs and black boots. Henry fixed their cars, maybe for free, some quid pro quo for which Henry, and by extension his employees, received immunity, a veil of protection. One night in the alley behind Mimi’s Variety, Paula and I were grabbed by a cop with a flashlight who’d caught us with beer. He marched us one block to the police station, where I was prepared to spend the night in jail for illegal possession of alcohol, but then the chief of police walked into the receiving area, recognized me from the gas station, and said, “She’s a good kid. Let them go.”
Another night I was pulled over driving my mother’s car filled with six girls drinking and smoking pot. The cop asked for my license, shined his flashlight in my face. “You’re the girl who works at Henry’s,” he said, then let me off with a warning, saved from DUI charges, possession of marijuana. Another night I was pulled over on Main Street not ten minutes after finding someone to buy us a case of beer. The cop—a different one from before—recognized me from Henry’s. He confiscated the beer and waved us on. A day later the cop pulled into the gas station, and he and Henry stood by his cruiser talking loudly about the beer he’d enjoyed, smirking at me.
Sundays at the gas station were slow, except for people on their way to Walpole Prison, driving older-model low-riding sedans with rust or patches of Bondo, Cadillacs and Thunderbirds, dented and dinged, with holes in their mufflers coughing exhaust. The visitors, usually from Boston, were sometimes white, with a patina of toughness—bleached-blond hair, tattoos in an era when ink was not chic or middle-class—but most often they were African American, a stark indication of who lived behind the walls in Walpole. In Walpole Prison in the 1950s and ’60s, the majority of prisoners were white, but the demographic began to shift in the 1970s as the war on drugs brought mandatory and harsher sentences, a crackdown that disproportionately targeted minorities. In the 1970s the “new” Walpole inmate was younger (under twenty-five) and black (35 percent), even though only 3 percent of Massachusetts residents were African American.
In the town of Walpole there was one black family. A couple of dozen black kids were bused from Boston to Walpole through the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (Metco), to attend the supposedly better suburban high school, as people in Boston battled over forced school integration. I glimpsed the busing riots on the news, kids my age hurling rocks at a school bus, someone’s mother shouting, her face a rictus of rage. At Walpole High School, I never saw the Metco kids in the parking lot smoking or down the path getting high. They were athletes, club presidents, honor-roll students.
The Sunday drivers would buy gas, then ask, “How do you get to Walpole Prison?” I’d stoop to the window, point to the road ahead. “Go straight until you come to Route 1A in downtown Walpole, then take a left. In a couple miles when you see only trees, start looking for the prison on your right. You can’t miss it.”
One day a beat-up station wagon nosed up to the pumps with two large women filling the front seat, their thick pale arms dangling out the windows. They asked for directions to the prison and then wanted a few dollars’ worth of gas. We were between shifts, and my coworker, Denise, was recording numbers on the gauges that tracked the volume of gas pumped. Denise, who wore her hair in a thick braid to her waist, was four years older than me, sloe-eyed, short like me, but with a commanding presence that made her seem taller. She chatted with me as she jotted down the figures, using the plastic price sign from atop the pump as a clipboard. The driver stuck her head out the window: “Hurry up!”
Denise muttered, “I’ll take my sweet time” and then “asshole.” The woman stepped out of the car. She was a head taller than Denise and seventy-five pounds heavier. She looked like a weight lifter or Roller Derby skater. “What’d you say, bitch?” I heard a car door creak and the woman’s companion climbed out, and she was just as large—perhaps they were sisters, or a wrestling tag team. The driver swung at Denise and they fell to the ground. I stood frozen as Denise clutched a fistful of the woman’s hair and bashed her on the head with the plastic price sign. Henry and the mechanics ran out of the station and pulled them apart, and the two women piled into their car and peeled away.
Henry took Denise into his office to comfort her, which may have been the moment they began their affair. They’d disappear into Henry’s office for twenty minutes or so, leaving me to take care of the customers, Henry emerging with a Cheshire Cat grin. One day he said to me, “With her talent, she could be in the White House.” He mimed a blow job, tongue in cheek literally. I’d read The Washington Fringe Benefit, by Elizabeth Ray, a thinly disguised roman à clef published that year about a congressman’s secretary—named Elizabeth Ray in the “novel”—who sexually serviced men for favors. I shook my head at Henry’s comment and walked away. It was ridiculous, I knew, even as some part of me wondered what secret power Denise had.
Denise needed a place to live, so Henry and his wife took her in, but a few weeks later they kicked her out. Henry said his wife found pot on Denise, but Denise told me the truth. Late one night when Denise and Henry were playing Monopoly, Henry reached across the table to fondle Denise’s breast and his wife saw. Denise began to sleep at Fast Freddie’s house, or his parents’ house, a one-story ranch, which enabled Denise to climb through the window into Freddie’s bedroom each night and out in the morning. Freddie was visibly ecstatic, as happy as a slow-moving, lethargic man could show. Now a woman entered his bedroom every night and fucked him, like a dream come true, a wet dream. Soon Freddie’s parents found out and Denise was homeless again, but by then she’d quit the gas station and I lost track of her forever.
The whole strange world passed through the gas station: teenagers crammed into cars, townies driving beat-up shitboxes, businessmen late driving home from their commute along Route 128, bikers filling their tanks for three bucks, mothers with kids loose in the backseat. Nights were surreal, especially in summer. Cars were filled with people going places—lovers on dates, girls slid over close to boys behind the wheel, kids partying in full-sized club vans, the smell of pot drifting from the windows, the dull thump of bass muffling into the humid air. One night a man in a manual wheelchair rolled himself down the shoulder of Route 1, wheeled across four lanes into the gas station, filled his tires with air, then rolled himself onto the shoulder of the highway and disappeared into the night as if he were escaping from something or
somewhere.
There was a sense of expectancy, of waiting for an accident to happen, knowing that someone somewhere would crash, that the phone would ring, the startling jangle amplified into the parking lot. Every so often at the busy intersection I heard the sickening crunch of clashing metal. I registered the impact in my body like shock waves, an almost physical reverberation. I never grew accustomed to the jarring collision sounds, which signified more than an accident; it was the sound of fate, the sound of someone’s life being abruptly altered, something ruined. One night a car hit a Winnebago, and bathing suits and float toys and lawn chairs were strewn all over the highway, the image of a halcyon lakeside vacation mingled with glass shards and twisted chrome. Hourly—sometimes more often—the wrecker pulled into the lot hauling a dented or smashed car or one that had broken down, the station a repository for mechanical failure, for the consequences of human error.
My job kept me from smoking angel dust from 3 p.m. to 10 p.m. on weekdays, but it also gave me money to buy it. Sometimes I spent most of my $80 weekly paycheck on dust. Still, there was a net gain—I had less idle time to fill with the nothingness of a dust high.
A few months after I started work, Paula stopped dealing dust, at least temporarily, after her supplier, her brother Duane, totaled his car. Attempting to round a curve at two in the morning, probably high on dust or drunk, Duane slammed head-on into a giant oak tree in someone’s front yard. The impact pushed the engine three feet into the body of the car, and Duane was rushed to the hospital. The day after the accident, Paula and I drove to the junkyard to see Duane’s car, the car in which I’d first smoked angel dust a year and a half earlier, when the floor of Friendly’s had turned spongy—the illusion of a soft landing.
As we walked among the dented cars, we saw ahead of us the rear of Duane’s sedan. Closer, we saw the top nearly sheared off, peeled back like a scalp, and then we saw the engine thrust into the front seat, where Duane had been sitting, the half-moon indent in the grille, the shape of the tree. It was a horrific wreck, the accordioned metal testimony to the miracle that Paula’s brother had survived. Paula cried, and I felt my throat close. Seeing the car was more visceral than hearing about the accident, knowing that Duane was lying unconscious in intensive care, bandaged up, big strong powerful Duane, who seemed so cool, so invincible, like a superhero of some kind—Dust Man. But now we saw two tons of steel crumpled like tissue. Bones broken, teeth knocked out, organs pierced, a body left nearly dead.
After Paula stopped dealing, something began to shift between us, and between me and Alison, or maybe something shifted in me. Affection for the drug became greater than our affection for each other. The drugs became so valuable, like gold, like money, and we suspected each other of cheating. “Me and Paula split a gram of dust with Alison,” I wrote in my diary. “Hers looked twice the size of ours.” I felt the shift, like ice breaking up on a pond and I was drifting on my own floe. Maybe I was not as cool as Paula or Alison. Maybe I was too serious, too morose. I started to feel that my friends included me because I had a car, or because they could party and crash at my house when my mother was away. Outside of getting high, we had little conversation anymore.
After being out with my friends one night, I felt desperately sad. I knocked on the door of Sally’s bedroom, a partially refinished room in the basement that she’d taken over in her senior year. I could hear the television and knew she was in there with her boyfriend, Kevin, a happy-go-lucky boy who adored her. I sat on a chair in her room and broke down crying. “I hate my life,” I said. “I hate my friends.”
“You don’t need them,” Sally said. I was grateful that Kevin didn’t look at me like I was an idiot, weeping in an embarrassingly sloppy way. I didn’t really hate Paula and Alison, but I didn’t like who I was when I was with them, who we’d become together. This was the first time that I had admitted to anyone that I felt bad, spoke aloud that truth. I still hung around with Paula and Alison, even though I suspected that they didn’t like me, because it was preferable, somehow, to staying home alone. I’d lost the ability to keep myself company, or I was afraid that alone I would find myself in poor company.
One night as we drove around smoking angel dust—I was driving, Alison sitting shotgun, Paula and Nicky in the backseat—I looked in the rearview mirror and saw Paula and Nicky kissing. I was dusted so I couldn’t make sense of it, how incongruous it was. Is that what I saw? After I dropped off my friends, downstairs in the Orange Room, Nicky said he wanted to break up. He still loved me, he said. “It’s not that.” We’d been together for a year and a half, but only five months had passed since he’d given me the diamond-chip pre-engagement ring.
Nicky slept over that night, as if nothing had changed. In the morning I drove him to his friend Tony’s house, and perhaps out of guilt he invited me inside. In the basement a half-dozen boys from his neighborhood sat in a circle passing a joint—Tony, with his rippled lopsided hair, Mickey Flynn, whom I never heard speak a single word. I took a hit off the joint and passed it, but suddenly I felt too high. I stood abruptly. “I gotta go.”
I slid behind the wheel of my car, which felt like a hovercraft, a boat floating on rolling seas, the car body rising and falling on swells. I concentrated on staying between the lines, gripping the steering wheel, driving slowly. I had to focus, figure out which turn to take, how to find my way home. I came to a jolting stop in my driveway, relieved, and I walked upstairs and crawled into bed, feeling stoned and dusted at once. Everything was distorted and strange and I felt far away from myself and sadder than I’d ever felt, as if I’d never not feel sad again, as if I’d never get out of bed, like Janis Joplin said, tomorrow never happens, it’s all the same fucking day, man.
I stayed in bed all day, crying or staring without speaking, immobile, curled like a pill bug under the blanket. One by one people came into my room to talk to me, try to shake me loose from this near-catatonic state. Sally sat in the chair in the dormer nook, and as she spoke her face seemed to distort, then return to normal. I couldn’t concentrate on what she was saying. Later that afternoon my father stood near my bed and spoke to me about college. I’d never felt so disconnected from him. I wished my father would stop talking about college, which I never thought about, which no one had ever mentioned before. Not knowing what to say, he reached so far into the future that I couldn’t follow. He seemed as lost as I was.
I don’t recall my mother talking to me that day when she returned from New York; she didn’t have patience for a kid lying about, feeling sorry for herself. When Patrick failed to get out of bed for school, she’d dump a pitcher of cold water on his head. My mother and I rarely had mother-daughter “chats.” She was too busy, worked full-time, had six other kids. Mostly she yelled, threatened to “lay you out in lavender,” occasionally threw something and then moved on, the action-figure mother. I know she cared—everything she did was for us—but she left me alone, or trusted me, perhaps, to sort this out myself.
When I didn’t come down for dinner, someone called Sue in her dorm, or maybe Sue called home and someone told her that Nicky had broken up with me. Someone carried the phone to me and Sue asked me if I wanted her to come home, and I said yes—the only word I’d spoken all day. Knowing that she was coming home helped somehow, because by the time she arrived two hours later I didn’t feel so profoundly despairing. I was rising in my bathysphere from the depths into ordinary sadness. Sue didn’t stay long, just an hour or so, and then she drove two hours back to her dorm, but somehow she’d broken the spell.
I have a Polaroid of Nicky and me in my living room, sitting on the scratchy floral couch, Nicky wearing his ever-present ski cap, plaid flannel shirt, hair to his shoulders. He looks straight into the camera, his face perfectly balanced, his skin porcelain, like in a Renaissance portrait, but he’s not smiling. I lean into him, my head resting on his shoulder, my arm looped through his, as if he’ll float away if I don’t clutch on to him, or I will, like he is ballast.
&
nbsp; At the prom that spring, our junior year, he’d sat sullen at our table, stoned on something, maybe cocaine, maybe dust, possibly both, me in my candy-apple-red gown with white confetti-sized polka dots, Nicky in a white jacket and pants, black cummerbund and red bow tie, a scarlet boutonnière. In a snapshot I took, he looks woozy and unhappy, and afterward when a bunch of kids crashed in the Orange Room, Nicky sat on the cellar stairs for hours talking to Maggie Brenner. I suppose our breakup was like my parents’ divorce, which I didn’t see coming either, since there were no fights between us, no trouble, just a slow drifting away from each other.
Nicky was a beautiful boy who loved me at a time when I didn’t think anyone else did, not even myself. The sorrow of losing him tapped into a larger reservoir of sadness, but from that well some semblance of sense rose up, or perhaps just desperation. I asked my mother if I could see a counselor, and she arranged for me to see Jim, who’d been my parents’ marriage counselor. On Thursday nights I left work for my appointment at 7 p.m. Henry found someone to cover my hours at the gas station. That first session, I parked in front of Jim’s split-level ranch, walked up the flagstone path, up the brick steps with the wrought iron railing, and knocked on the door. Jim, a short, balding man with dark hair and a Grecian nose, answered. His house was pin-drop quiet. I followed Jim to a small room and sat in an armchair in front of his desk, as if I’d been summoned to the principal’s office.
After we exchanged pleasantries, he paused, then said, “How do you feel about your parents’ divorce?” The question caught me off-guard. I thought I was there to talk about me. But my response surprised me, too. I couldn’t speak, and I began to cry, and then to sob. Jim waited, said nothing, waited longer. He nudged a box of tissue to the edge of his desk, then sat silently as I cried. He waited and waited, patiently. That night in Jim’s office was the first time since the family meeting four years earlier when my parents announced they were separating that anyone had asked me how I felt about it. I hadn’t known that my parents splitting up had hurt, that our broken family—broken home, as Mr. Gurkin called it—had broken my heart. Or I must have known intuitively, because my response was to throw up barriers to feelings, suppress pain, numb myself to it. “I don’t care,” I’d told my friends in seventh grade, and then spent the next four years making myself unable to care, or feel.
Body Leaping Backward Page 18