Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (12 page)

I drop out that spring, return to Scituate to get the Trojan ready for the water. As soon as it’s afloat, though, it begins to feel small. On a boat that size the tables lower to become bunks, the cushions become mattresses. Phil’s mother had died a few months after mine. Cancer. He’d gotten to say goodbye but he also had to watch as she vanished. As a teenager I’d spent days on end with his family, and his mother had been one of my personal saints, always made it known I was welcome, even after I totaled their family car one drunken night.

Phil and I try to have fun that summer but it’s strained. Nothing means anything—we can’t drink enough or get high enough, not anymore. By July we decide, in an uncharacteristically American impulse, that a bigger boat’s the answer, one we can live on through the winter. We’ll tie it to a dock Phil found in Boston. This way we can keep living together.

The boat we find is a vintage Chris-Craft—forty-two feet stem to stern, twelve-foot beam, double-planked mahogany. Twin-screw. Yacht. Originally owned by a judge. Christened
Catherine
. Asking three thousand dollars. Out of the water eight years when we find her, a faded jewel, nearly forgotten in a boatyard in Scituate, on the North River, the boatyard itself tucked away, not visible from the street, its sign overgrown with brambles.

That August we sell the Trojan, buy the bigger Chris-Craft. Within a month, realizing how much work has to get done before the weather turns, I quit my job building greenhouses with the carpenter, both of us refugees from the gangster roundup, and begin working full-time to pull the Chris-Craft back into shape. The boat was built in 1939, the same year my mother was born, and if I stand on the deck and look north I can almost see the spot off Third Cliff where we’d scattered her ashes.

Every waking hour from September until December I spend in the boatyard, scrambling up and down ladders, punctuated by runs to the hardware store, to marine supply stores, to stores that specialize in fasteners. Before we came along the previous owner had begun fiberglassing the cabin, and it makes sense to finish the work. We need a string of clear days in order for the wood to be dry enough to take the resin, and October’s weather along the North River doesn’t always cooperate. As we poke at the wood we realize that in certain key places much of it’s punky, needing to be replaced. The entire hull wants refastening, especially below the waterline. Buying the screws to do this is akin to buying drugs—we drive into Boston’s South End, to Allied Nut and Bolt, and pass a hundred or two hundred dollars to a man behind bulletproof plexiglas in exchange for a couple tiny packages of silicone bronze screws, things of beauty that promise to last longer than all of us. As the days grow shorter we discover a gap in the hull you can put your fist through, along the chine, that line where the freeboard meets the hull. Somehow in going over the boat we’d missed it. The owner of the boatyard tell us, without great optimism, what we might try. He lends us four hydraulic jacks and we line them up along the chine, using a plank to distribute the pressure, then slowly crank them up until we can eyeball the line of the hull back into shape. Most days I find myself working alone, as Phil held on to his job, perhaps not as desperate to see her float again, perhaps not feeling quite so homeless. Eating oatmeal for breakfast, skipping lunch, smoking more and more dope, I’m determined to get her in the water before mid-December, the one-year anniversary of my mother’s death.

Many friends come down for a day or two to help. Emily puts in hour upon heroic hour. We find some wooden letters from an old fruit stand and spell out the word
EVOL
on the stern—the title of a Sonic Youth album and “love” spelled backward. By early December she’s ready. We put rollers under the cradle, inch the cradle onto a train track, the track leading down an incline to the lip of the river, a steel cable connecting the cradle to a pulley. Once at the water’s edge we have an hour to wait for the tide to float her free. We know that after eight years the seams will weep for days, that she will have to be closely watched until the planks swell tight. As soon as river water touches the dry wood it finds its way into the bilge, weighing her down. At flood high tide there isn’t enough water to lift her, and tomorrow the flood tide will be a foot lower. We stand on the cradle trying to rock her, but she’s already too full of water. A nail is sticking up from the cradle, I press my sneaker into it, to bend it over, to make it safe, and instead drive it deep into my heel. The steel cable’s holding us tight, and as the tide begins to recede the owner of the boatyard gets an axe and cuts it. My sock fills with blood as
EVOL
drifts free.

We land in Boston just before the ice comes, near the anniversary of my mother’s death. We dock at a marina in Fort Point Channel, home to a small community of live-aboards. That first winter we invent ways to keep warm—plastic on the windows, styrofoam insulation under the floors, three to a bed. Our water comes from a hose, and the hose often freezes. A small woodstove overheats the cabin by sucking all the oxygen out, forcing us to open the doors, to lay flat on the floor, lightheaded and gasping, tormented by suffocation dreams, desperate to be closer to the last pockets of air, until the fire goes out and the cold pours in and we awake shivering. We hang old tires over the sides to keep the ice in the channel from lifting the boat into the air and crushing the hull. Eventually we take to wandering around with electric blankets draped over our shoulders, the extension cord dragging absurdly behind.

That first winter Ray and Clare will now and then ask Emily to invite me up to their house in Ipswich for a family dinner.
Sure
, I say,
I’ll be there
, and then not show. Emily tells me after the first time that it was better I hadn’t gone, that Jonathan had come, that her parents had wanted us to meet, that it hadn’t been pretty. I find it best to arrive unannounced, to be erratic, to keep them guessing. I’ve had enough surprises, it’s better if I’m the one doing the surprising.

I’m driving a 1963 Chevy pickup, a behemoth, the paint a faded green patina, the color copper turns, duct tape around the wheel wells, the nose already stove in by an eighteen-wheeler when I bought it. A few tons of steel, my armor, a do-I-look-like-I-give-a-fuck-about-the-paint-job? type of truck, a do-I-look-like-I-have-enough-insurance? type of truck. Given a wide berth, if I want to change lanes I put on my blinker and ease into the lane, whether the BMW makes room for me or not. A truck that demands politeness. If I’m going somewhere I don’t really want to go, like dinner at Ray and Clare’s, the truck will invariably die on me, quit moving, stubborn mule. Nothing can hurt me in that truck.

Not that anything’s wrong with these dinners—the food invariably high-end, the town gentile, lily-white. One could see it as a respite from living in downtown Boston. But I always feel on display. Each glass of wine I throw back feels measured. Here, for the first time in my life, I’m Jonathan’s son. That they want the reunion to take place under their eyes, around their dinner table, with Emily by my side, feels wrong. Perverse. Their intentions may be nothing but generous but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like a freak show, and I choose not to be one of the freaks. Ray asks,
Have you heard from Jonathan? He asks about you all the time.
I say,
I got a few letters. You should get in touch with him,
Ray says,
he’s getting old, he’s harmless now. I will,
I say,
I’ll stop by and see him
. Ray tells me that my father lives in a rooming house on Beacon Hill, I take the address, fold it into my pocket, and on the drive back to Boston toss it out the window. Years later Clare will tell me that Jonathan would never mention my brother or me at all, that it seemed to her that we just weren’t that important to him. She tells me this with a mixture of revulsion and respect—
At least he wasn’t a maudlin drunk
, she will say,
the type who solicits your pity with talk of
O my lost sons….

Phil has a job with an architectural firm a ten-minute walk from the dock. I work doing carpentry, carving a town-house on Commonwealth Avenue into condos, replacing six-inch molding with drywall, which leaves a nasty taste in my throat. By the end of February I’m laid off (
hallelujah
), so I drift down to Nicaragua for a couple months to meet up with Emily, who’s studying Spanish. We want to be near the Sandinistas, their revolution a glimmer of hope in the world, just as a few years later the fall of the Berlin Wall will be another glimmer. We come back to Boston and the boat as summer begins.

Just aft of us tourists pose hour upon hour to be photographed on the deck of the Boston Tea Party Ship, holding aloft a styrofoam bale wrapped in burlap,
TEA
stenciled on the outside, ready to toss it into the filthy water. At sunset we hang out on our aft deck drinking bottle after bottle of red wine as a thousand revolutions get played out behind us. The bale is tied to a rope so it can be hauled back on deck, to await the next camera, but it often breaks free and drifts over to us. A punked-out girl named Giselle lives on a boat next to ours and works at a homeless shelter. The Pine Street Inn. It sounds at least as worthwhile as how I’m spending my time. Real estate in Boston is moving from an overheated phase into a long rancid boil, and more and more homeless people are appearing on the streets daily. It’s impossible for them not to tug at one’s consciousness. You say you want a revolution? Giselle says I can probably fill in at the shelter if I’m interested.

(1984)
August. A year and a half after my mother dies I’m sitting in a change of shift meeting at the Pine Street Inn. Three in the afternoon, ten, twelve workers straggle into the empty Yellow Lobby to sit on benches in a loose circle and listen to the reading of the Main Log. In two hours these same benches will be filled with homeless men. Most of the workers sip coffee, many smoke, all seem to be only half listening. Each afternoon the 3-to-11 shift will show up in time to hear the 7-to-3 read the log. Ritualistic, those going off to those coming on. Now I know that my father lives in a room on Beacon Hill, maybe twenty blocks west, Ray keeps telling me to visit. My father’s on my radar, but most of the time I shut it off.

Chronicle of the lost, chronicle of disaster and the absurd, a near-forgotten document of American history—the Main Log of the Pine Street Inn Men’s Unit. What’s written in the log is nearly always the same, variations on a few themes—someone falls, further down or further apart, a new guest arrives, someone moves on. The reading lasts anywhere from five minutes to half an hour, depending on the kind of day it’s been. There are barrings to be voted on, notes about a guest decompensating, another who’s talking about checking into detox. The men, still outside for the day, are just starting to line up in the yard for their beds. A few are inside, waiting to get into the clinic, or to talk with a counselor. One seems frozen sitting upright, his forehead glued to the table.

Everyone’s acting out continually, in one way or another, whether sitting in a corner with a coat pulled over his head or giddily lit one night after weeks of calm. A guest does have to go the extra mile in order to get noticed above the din. He has to make a significant scene in the midst of an unending scene. Jack is described as “b/m, 6’0”, brown skinned, very active libido.” The vote goes against barring him. Bobo, for some reason, is not even considered for barring, merely put out for the night (OFN). Maybe to be on the receiving end of a blow job is seen akin to being on the receiving end of a punch, though it never seemed that way to me.

Timers for lights fail, locks jam, radios refuse to transmit. All this is written up,
ATTENTION MAINTENANCE
, theoretically to be attended to the next day, soon.

In a few days the Department of Mental Health will give us a way to “pink paper” psychotic guests on weekends. This means that if someone goes berserk we can sign a form which will commit him to a locked ward until Monday morning, when a doctor can evaluate. The police, theoretically, will transport. Then Solomon Carter Fuller, the psych hospital, decides to admit no more patients. A woman died after being left in seclusion unattended for twenty-three hours straight and it’s all over the papers.

Another quiet night on the 3-to-11 shift, Lucero writes at nine. At ten Ben Craig, another new guest, comes to the door, spacey and disoriented. Later, as we direct him to a bed, he insists we give him his “real bed.”