Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (2 page)

His father, my father claims, invented both the life raft and the power window, though sometimes it is the life raft and the push-button locks on car doors. Or some sort of
four-gig carburetor that saves gas
. In this story my father’s family is rich, with gardeners and chauffeurs during the Depression. His grandfather owned a roofing company that had the contracts for Faneuil Hall and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts—big public works projects that kept them flush while the country struggled. Look inside the grasshopper weathervane on the roof of Faneuil Hall and you will see my great-grandfather’s name, Thaddeus, which is also my brother’s name. My father tells me this, but how to get inside this grasshopper he doesn’t say.

If you asked me about my father then—the years he lived in a doorway, in a shelter, in an ATM—I’d say,
Dead
, I’d say,
Missing
, I’d say,
I don’t know where he is
. I’d say whatever I felt like saying, and it would all be true. I don’t know him, I’d say, my mother left him shortly after I was born, or just before. But this story did not hold still for long. It wavered.

Even before he became homeless I’d heard whispers, sensed he was circling close, that we were circling each other, like planets unmoored. I knew he drove a cab, maybe my mother told me that, though she said almost nothing about him, except that it was better he wasn’t around. I even knew what kind, a Town Taxi, a black and white. In my early twenties, after I dropped out of college and moved to Boston, I would involuntarily check the driver of each that passed, uncertain what it would mean, what I would do, if it was my father behind the wheel. I knew he lived in a rooming house on Beacon Hill, I’d heard about it a couple years before they evicted him, before he moved into his cab, leasing it twenty-four hours at a stretch, before he blacked out on a vodka jag, hit
someone or something
, before they took his license away. The day he was evicted was the first face-to-face I had with him as an adult, the second time in my life I can remember meeting him—he’d called on the phone, told me to get over to his room with my truck. It was the first time I’d heard his voice on the phone. Two months later he appeared at the shelter where I worked and demanded a bed.

The Pine Street Inn was and still is the largest homeless shelter in Boston. State-of-the-art. When my father arrived I’d already been working there for three years, first as a counselor, then as a caseworker. He wasn’t homeless when I first started—marginal, sure, but not homeless. I remember the day he arrived the nights could still be cold. He raised his arms to enter, because every “guest” has to be frisked—no bottles, no weapons. This is the first rule.

Ask me about him now and I’ll say,
Housed
. Twelve years. Subsidized. A Section 8. A disability. I’ll thank you for paying his rent, unless you’re also a Section 8. Unless by the time you read this he’s been evicted again. Ask now and I’ll say he’s a goddamned tree stump, it’ll take dynamite to get rid of that motherfucker.

Before he lost his room I could have met him, if I’d chosen to, at any time. He was never difficult to find. No one is, really. Even the months he was barred from the shelter I knew the three or four spots outside where he slept, each one burned into my internal map of the city. Nowadays I can look at a calendar and roughly pinpoint his location. I’ve seen the inside of his apartment, I know his routine. The first of the month he gets his check, and from this he (hopefully) pays his rent, then buys a gallon or three of vodka. If it is near the first he will be in his room drinking. Easy to find near the first. If it is later in the month he will have to venture out, to soup kitchens for meals, and then he will be harder to track down, at least at midday. He has no phone. If I want to see him I have to go to his apartment building and ring his bell, the bell with my last name taped to it. It will take about a minute for him to buzz me in, his finger stuttering on the button. Or else his apartment will be empty and I will not be buzzed inside. I will then either wander down Commonwealth Avenue looking for him or sit in the local Dunkin’ Donuts and wait for him to appear.

If I could distill those years into a television game show I’d call it
The Apologist.
Today’s show: “Fathers Left Outside to Rot.” And there I’d sit in an ill-fitting suit, one of three or four contestants, looking contrite or defiant or inscrutable under the life-draining lights. At some point, after I tell an abridged version of my story, the host will parade my father out, and we will have a reunion of sorts, on national tv, as the camera pans the reactions of the studio audience. Before we go to a commercial break a caption will appear under my face—
He wished his father dead
.

The abridged story
:

Sometimes I’d see my father, walking past my building on his way to another nowhere. I could have given him a key, offered a piece of my floor. A futon. A bed. But I never did. If I let him inside I would become him, the line between us would blur, my own slow-motion car wreck would speed up. The slogan on the side of a moving company truck read
TOGETHER WE ARE GOING PLACES
—modified by a vandal or a disgruntled employee to read
TOGETHER WE ARE GOING DOWN
. If I went to the drowning man the drowning man would pull me under. I couldn’t be his life raft.

(1956)
Jonathan, years before he will become my father, is back north for another summer. For the past few winters, since he dropped out of college, he’s been working on charter fishing boats out of Palm Beach. When back in Massachusetts he ranges from his parents’ house in Scituate to friends’ couches in Boston. A vapor. Everywhere. Nowhere. Scituate (
sit-tchoo-it
, from the Native American
satuit
, meaning “cold brook”), a fishing village about thirty miles south of Boston, is the summer home to a few of the city’s politicians, who’ve dubbed it “The Irish Riviera.” During the week Jonathan lives at home, working for a local construction mogul. On weekends he skips north to Boston, crashes on Beacon Hill with Ray, his best friend. Ray is from working-class French Canadian Catholic stock—he pays his bills on time and is generous with his friends, which is becoming more and more important for someone like Jonathan. Steady Ray.
You didn’t need much money in your pocket, not a whole lot was expected of you. You could live well as a struggling artist, you could rise up or you could drift along
. Cocky, his dark hair slicked back, Jonathan’s rising, making a name for himself—
The Next Great American Poet
—saying it and then moving toward being it, possessing what passes for ambition in those beatnik days. He often wanders Harvard Square dressed in tennis whites, a racket tucked under his arm, though he doesn’t play tennis.
Trawling for Radcliffe girls
, he calls it. He’d always been slight, and he’d overcompensate with his swagger. Ray’s making jewelry, bending forks into rings, moonstones in spider settings. In later years Ray will open his own factory and make a fair bit of money manufacturing plastics used in missiles—“Daddy Warbucks,” his family will call him.

One afternoon on Charles Street Jonathan nudges Ray, nods into the crowded sidewalk—
You watch
, he says,
there’s going to be a girl walking down that street, and she’ll be from a wealthy family. She’ll have artistic aspirations but not much talent. She’s coming to Beacon Hill to be part of the scene, looking for someone with talent that she can latch on to, looking to be the power behind a diamond in the rough, even if she still believes that she is the one with talent
. Jonathan squints into his sun-drenched future.
She doesn’t know it yet, but she’s looking for me
.

Jody, seventeen, home for the summer, works in a coffee shop in Scituate Harbor. A photograph from that time shows a girl with a dark brown ponytail, deep green eyes, a difficult smile. Jonathan orders coffee, chats her up. As he recalls it,
I think we went on a date the first night I met her. Your mother was beautiful, for chrissakes. I had a car, some shitbox I’d borrowed or finessed. We went on a date in it that first night
. His charm, less tattered than it would later become, before several liquid tons of alcohol crush it out of him, appeals to Jody on some level. Rebellious and adrift, bounced from one boarding school to another (now between Dana Hall and House in the Pines), she comes from money. Her father was running his father’s wool business, and during the war—uniforms, blankets, felt—wool had made money. Jonathan tells Jody he’s back in town for the summer, doing construction, though in fact he’s a laborer, digging ditches. In Palm Beach he’s known as “Barracuda Buck, Native Guide.”
Native to what
? Jody asks. He tells her about the novel he has yet to write, his faith in it. Barracuda. Half hot air, but Scituate’s a small town—she tells him what time she gets off. After her shift he’s waiting. They drive to Peggotty Beach, park facing the water as the sun sets behind their heads. He knows her family, knows their summer house on First Cliff, the biggest house in town. He’d seen her at the beach before, but she’d been just a child then. He uncorks a pint of whiskey, offers her some. They talk about their families, he tells her how he had to get away from his father
(that bald-headed fuck, playing his violin)
, away from this small town, in order to become his own man.
If I’d’ve stayed here I’d be dead
. She struggles with her father also, feels he doesn’t know her, has never tried. For the past year he’s been sleeping with his secretary, Jody found a letter (“Not long now, dearest, before we’re in Reno and all this is behind us”). They’re both reading Salinger—
Catcher in the Rye
in her bag. She reads aloud her favorite passage so far:

Jonathan puts his hand under his jacket and doubles over in pain.
No
, she says,
he’s con
ceal
ing
it. His face goes stoic. They laugh. Jonathan sees his novel like that, breaking the world open, and Jody’s willing to believe him, at least this night, and for many nights to follow. For the rest of the summer they’ll meet on the beach that connects the two cliffs, lean against the seawall, out of the wind, out of sight, compare the size of their feet, press their palms together. He’ll tell her more about his book, about Florida, about life on the docks.
To be a poet digging ditches is very different from being a mere ditch digger
. His family had thrived through the Depression, and he will also, but on his own terms. For a writer the place to be is Beacon Hill, he has friends there, he is known—he promises to take her.

Jonathan makes a couple trips back north from Palm Beach over the winter, to carouse Beacon Hill, to see Jody. A trolley connects House in the Pines with Boston—Jody meets him for parties, then for weekends. She’s forbidden to stay out all night but she does anyway, sneaks back into her dorm the next afternoon, takes her punishment. By then her father has moved out, flown to Reno for six months to finalize his divorce, and her mother has stopped answering the phone. Years later she will tell me that when teachers yelled at her she simply blurred her eyes until they ceased to matter. She even shows me how, looking straight at me, narrowing her eyes slightly, heavy-lidded. She tells me this when I am having trouble at school. I try it but it never seems to work.

That winter Ray meets Clare, a student at Radcliffe. Jonathan will always claim to have introduced the two of them, as he likes to imagine his influence far-reaching, but this is not how they remember it. Clare describes Jody as “the most beautiful woman she had ever seen.”
But not too bright
, she will quickly add,
after all, she was just a child. We’d have these big parties, and she’d always help out, get very concerned that everyone had enough to eat. In the kitchen at one of the parties I remember she asked, “Is China a country or a continent?” Can you imagine?

In May Jonathan leaves Palm Beach for Boston and moves into Ray’s apartment. Jody has let him know that she’s three months pregnant. Already she’s been spirited out of House in the Pines to the Florence Crittenton House, a home for unwed mothers. At this point no one knows what will happen. Anything could happen. Adoption is a possibility. Abortion, though illegal, is a possibility. There are places to go, back-alley doctors, a girl could take a bus to Providence. It’s up to Jody, of course, but there is a lot of pressure for her to make a decision, soon. Her father by now is back in Scituate with his new wife, back in the big house on First Cliff, having set his first wife, my mother’s mother, up in a new, smaller house across town. He arranges a meeting with Jonathan at Locke-Ober, a restaurant in Boston, demands to know what he intends.
Don’t worry,
Jonathan assures him,
I’m not going down to Florida anymore. I’ll marry the poor girl
. A proposition made, a deal struck, whereby Jody’s father will set Jonathan up in business, a car dealership, the details to be ironed out later.

My mother, though, already has second thoughts about Barracuda. In a letter she never sends to my father, or perhaps the draft of a letter she does send, she writes,

That August Ray drives Jonathan to the home for unwed mothers, and is the one witness to my parents’ shotgun wedding. My brother is born a few months later. Ray drives my mother to the hospital, Jonathan shows up just after the birth—car trouble. That winter they all live together in Ray’s apartment on the Hill. Clare remembers changing my brother’s diapers.

Years later, when asked about his two marriages, first to my mother and then to his second wife, both young women from money, my father will say—
I never even asked them, they both asked me so I jumped on it
. We are alone in his apartment when he tells me this, years after the divorces, the jail time, the homelessness.
I’ve known a lot of poor women, and they were very nice, but not marriage material
. He glances at a photograph of my brother as an infant in my mother’s arms, propped beside a photo of his second wife helping their daughter to walk.
I was thinking of the children we would have together—it was important what their background was, that they came from culture.
He looks me in the eye.
It was all for the children
, my father insists.