Backward-Facing Man (14 page)

It was a sunny Saturday morning. A sooty mixture of car exhaust and litter fossilized against the curb of Memorial Drive, and the trees along the stone retaining wall stretched toward the sky like starving prisoners. On a thin sliver of lawn between MIT and the river, dozens of students walked or sat, in singles, pairs, and clusters—freaks in turtlenecks and bell-bottoms, engineers in tight Farah slacks, young Republicans in white, buttoned-down oxfords—smoking cigarettes, sipping from plastic cups, moving their hands in conversation. A long-haired kid made a strumming motion across a guitar. Music wafted across the quadrangle from speakers propped in windows.

Chuck leaned against the cinder block wall in the hallway of his dormitory, the pay telephone pressed to his ear; in the background, Tony Bennett, the sound of slippers shuffling across linoleum, and the achingly familiar rat-a-tat cadence of his mother's raspy cough. Even though she could hardly afford a lengthy long-distance call, Regina Puckman wanted her son to know she was offended by his being away, even though he was in college, learning a profession, avoiding a certain fate in the draft lottery. After a minute or two, he heard footsteps, fumbling, and then his mother's voice. “Do you know where your brother is?”

Arthur Puckman was a problem child almost from birth. In Chuck's earliest memories, his brother's face was swollen and red from holding his breath, or wiggling to get out from under furniture, getting stung, burned, pinched, or squished, having hurt himself for the sympathy it evoked from their mother, who ran after him with a towel or Band-Aid in her hand and a look of concern across her face. She dressed the boy in heavy fabrics, even in summer—wool pants, tentlike shirts, heavy sweaters—that accentuated his girth and inhibited his clumsy movements. He wore thick-framed glasses in a failed attempt to correct a lazy eye and breathed heavily from his mouth, which he held open in a kind of stupor, or half pout. It seemed to Chuck that his mother ran her mouth at Arthur nonstop, cautioning or admonishing him for everything he did, while praising him excessively for ordinary things like eating dinner and taking a crap. To Chuck, his mother's entire existence seemed committed to reinforcing Arthur's incompetence and dependence.

In the years the boys lived together, there was perpetual trouble. In third grade, Artie started a fire in a trash can in the plaza outside school. The following year, he made up variants of Bible stories with deviant acts and twisted outcomes and told them emphatically to his younger brother, who repeated them in school. Arthur wasn't just ostracized, he was ridiculed—at home by his father, at school, and in the neighborhood, where he was like a pin cushion, a magnet for derision, a receptacle for trash talk. His last name became an insult heaped by one kid on another. And the worse it was for Artie, the more he antagonized Chuck. When the brothers were nine and twelve, Pasquale De Vita heard screams behind a shed at Southport Metal. De Vita found Chuck facedown on the ground, with Artie sitting on him, cutting into the younger boy's butt cheek with a nine-inch piece of angle iron. In a move that surprised no one, Charlie Puckman came by one afternoon and spirited his younger son away.

Unlike many fathers, who soften at the sight of their firstborn, Charlie Puckman bristled with enmity toward Arthur from the very beginning, even before the little boy manifested his grossness and his emotional dependence on his mother. The old man mimicked him when he whined. He teased and yelled at Artie when he cried, and he hit his son, hard, every chance he got. The more Charlie humiliated Artie, the more Artie tortured Chuck. Nobody understood why Charlie Puckman took even a momentary break from philandering to marry Regina Puckman, much less sire a son. They were of two different worlds: Regina, long-suffering and bitter, even at twenty-one, resigned to a life of disappointment, and fast-talking Charlie Puckman, the opportunist always looking for a scam. To their friends and family in South Philly, Charlie's disdain for his oldest boy seemed inversely proportional to Regina's love for him; everything about the boy was an example of Regina's damaged bloodline. Before they separated, the neighbors heard Charlie screaming every night. The next day, Regina would emerge, her eyes red-rimmed, a handkerchief in her fist, casting about for sympathy. Three years later, in a move that mystified everyone, Charlie and Regina reunited to produce a second son.

 

On this particular Saturday morning in 1968, Regina Puckman was upset, not only because she'd been robbed, but because her house, her only asset, the single repository of her life's dreams and an extension of her psychological being, had been thoroughly ransacked. “Animals,” she told Chuck on the phone, coughing. “They took my cash, my silver, my jewelry. They emptied the cupboards and ruined the furniture. They defecated on my photo albums!” Chuck rolled his eyes. He knew what was coming next. “If they didn't kill Arthur, they probably scared him to death. You must help me find him, Charles. Please.”

Theirs was a volatile family, even by South Philly standards, and the consensus was that given his temperament, his father, and the way he was treated by everyone, Arthur would someday explode. That he would rip off his mother and deface his own home was, in some ways, mild compared to expectation. Still, Regina Puckman was in a bind. If she called the cops, they'd announce to the world what everyone but she acknowledged.

After the incident behind Southport Metal, Charlie converted the offices above his factory into an apartment and enrolled Chuck in private school, where he thrived. Chuck Puckman was a sturdy little kid, hardened by his brother's provocations and indifferent to his mother's histrionics. In this industrial neighborhood, a curious kid could explore the barren lots between factories and the abandoned railroad spurs as long as he kept a low profile or curried favor with the neighborhood toughs. Chuck spent his weekends downstairs in his father's shop, wiring buzzers and alarm systems and putting together stereo systems. Weeknights, he did his homework in the little apartment and steered clear of his father and his girlfriends. In junior high, Chuck did well in school, particularly in math and science. He won second prize in a statewide science competition by building a radio that operated on a cell that stored static electricity. When he was fifteen, he got a job taking inventory in a pharmacy, where he learned the concept of shrinkage by siphoning pharmaceutical cocaine, quaaludes, and Benadryl for making speed. Chuck finished Central with high enough grades to earn automatic admission to MIT. With the war in Vietnam escalating, the summer of 1967 seemed a particularly good time to go to college. It was also an especially good year for the security business, and Chuck Puckman was one of the few students to pay tuition in cash.

That Saturday morning, the phone conversation between Chuck Puckman and his mother was brief. Chuck was fuzzy from having smoked a particularly strong chunk of hashish the night before, and he had no interest in or idea where his brother was. Like he'd seen his father do many times before, he held the receiver a foot away from his ear and waited for his mother to exhaust herself, then told her he was busy with exams and hung up. Regina Puckman savored her suffering, he told himself as he put the phone back in its cradle; she compressed it into its purest form, crushing it like a diamond. “ 'Bye, Mom,” he said into the air.

 

Along the path, buds were still tight on the bushes and traffic along Memorial Drive was sparse. Sharp sunlight cast strange shadows of the Latin letters carved along the tops and sides of old classrooms and bounced off the brand-new office buildings across the Charles River on the Boston side. Chuck was walking north along a row of bushes when he first saw her bare arms reaching up like someone climbing an imaginary rope. They were white and fleshy and they swayed from side to side like a belly dancer's. He pulled aside the branches and leaned in, admiring the nape of her neck from behind, blonde hair, soft shoulders, bare back. When she turned, the sun was in her eyes, which picked up specks of sky and ambient light. Her lips pressed together in a combination of concentration and pleasure. Without planning or forethought, Chuck Puckman pushed aside the bushes and entered the clearing. As he did, the young woman burst into laughter and collapsed onto a blanket beside a scruffy-looking guy who, until then, had been obscured by foliage. The young man touched the neck of his beer that rested against his belly.

“You're not gonna bust me for drinking in public, are you?” He was stretched out on his side, his shaggy head propped up on his hand, his face full of freckles, wire-frame glasses, mustache, a tiny tuft of reddish hair growing under his lower lip.

“I was on my way…I mean, I didn't see you….”

“It's okay,” the woman said, smoothing the blanket. Her ankles jutted out from underneath her dress so that he could see the inside of her calf, pale and smooth. There was a stack of books between them. “Have a seat.”

“Really, I oughta just keep going….”

“Hey, you're here,” the man on the blanket said. He had a thick Boston accent. “What are you studying?”

“Uh, pre-med,” Chuck said. It was a strange thing to say. He had no interest in medicine, or in any of his freshman courses for that matter. “How about you?”

“Lorraine is studying God,” the young man said. “Her mission is to find a man who rides a motorcycle, reads scripture, and doesn't worship his mother. She wants to become enlightened through fucking. Satori. Religious ecstacy. Spiritual orgasm.”

Lorraine made a motion like objecting.

“Maybe this here's your guy,” the man said. “What's your name, sailor?”

“Chuck.”

“Maybe Chuck's your God-fearing man, Lorraine, your saint in denim vestments. That is, if he's a believer. Are you a believer, Charles?” he said in a southern preacher's voice. Chuck looked at the books. Sylvia Plath. Richard Brautigan. Herbert Marcuse. He felt as if he'd walked into a scripted drama.

“Maybe Chuck's relationship to God is none of your business.”

“Religion is a crutch. And Chuck here's probably no different from the rest of humanity.” The guy on the blanket took a swig of beer and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Afraid of freedom, afraid of death, ready to devote himself to anyone with a beard in priestly robes who promises salvation!”

“And you,” Lorraine shot back, “Mr. Independent—”

“Atheism is the only true expression of inner freedom. When it's chaos inside, we seek order; we pledge allegiance to the flags of corporations, the military, the university.” His lip curled into a sneer.

“So, what're you studying?” Chuck asked. A squirrel scurried across the lawn. Chuck had a feeling something akin to fear, as if these people were bored with civility and would have enjoyed any distraction.

“Frederick let his scholarship lapse,” Lorraine answered. “He's gonna help spread atheism to the rice paddies of Vietnam….”

“Chemistry, until recently,” Frederick said. Chuck felt a point of contact—vials of pills and powder from the pharmacy he'd worked in, the periodic table, symbols and abbreviations, combining atoms into globs—structure and predictability that had always appealed to him about science.

“He was here at MIT,” Lorraine said, “but he quit.” Her voice was flat, uninflected. She arched her eyebrows.

“I got tired of repeating experiments people have been doing for a hundred years, and I refuse to help people in the military-industrial complex, the trustees and the corporate sponsors, get richer. The world is fucked-up enough….”

“You could be effective working from the inside,” Lorraine said in what sounded like a long-running feud.

“Only if I was looking for spoils,” he said. “When the revolution's over, you're not going to find me making napalm for Dow Chemical or developing germ strains for Pfizer.”

“What about the draft?” Chuck asked. If you were of age in 1968 and you dropped out of college, either you had connections or you went to Vietnam.

Frederick pointed to himself with his thumbs. “You're looking at the future commander in chief of the People's Army. In the meantime, I'm gonna stay fucked-up.” He tilted his beer toward her like he was making a toast. With this gesture, Frederick released them from the requirement for serious discourse.

Chuck withdrew a stone pipe from his knapsack. Lorraine stood up and began stretching again, facing the river. Back then, getting stoned in public was a way of bonding with someone, an act of daring, an expression of solidarity and of civil disobedience. In certain circles in Cambridge, taking the right drugs in the right quantities was like having school spirit. Frederick and Chuck took turns inhaling and holding their breath. Lorraine watched a sailboat motor toward open water. The wind picked up a little, and it was starting to get cold. For Chuck, the world narrowed to a small piece of land slightly larger than the blanket. Clouds moved across the sky like a time-lapse photograph, and a cold breeze came in off the river. After a little while, Lorraine started loading books into her pouch. Sensing their imminent departure, Chuck asked where they lived, hoping for two different answers.

“In the country,” Frederick said, rolling off the blanket.

“Near BC,” Lorraine answered, motioning across the river.

Chuck followed them through the quadrangle, past the stone buildings. Frederick talked nonstop about the movement and Abbie Hoffman, a kid from Worcester who'd graduated from Brandeis a few years earlier. Hoffman founded his own political party, the Yippies, which had become famous for its subversive goofiness, organizing freaks to levitate the Pentagon, sticking flowers in National Guardsmen's bayonets, and hosting large gatherings of pot-smoking hippies called be-ins that attracted widespread media attention. For this and for being from Frederick's hometown, Hoffman had earned the former chemistry student's deep and abiding respect.