Boys of Life (37 page)

In one of the rows behind me, this woman was crying. The man she was with, the man with the pretentious voice, kept hugging her and saving, "It's only a movie. It's not real, it's only a movie."

One of the ushers peeked in the door—I guess he heard my veil.

"Hvervthing okay in here.'" he asked me. He was wearing this stupid uniform— blue pants, red jacket— and carrying 8 flashlight.

"What did th.u say on the screen?' 1 1 asked him.

"What did what -

"There at the end," I told him.

But he just shrugged. He hadn't seen it. "Personally," he said, "I

don't think people have any business watching stuff like that, is what I think."

□ PAUL RUSSELL

"Well tuck you," I told him. It was some last bit of loyalty to Carlos.

"You can't talk like that in here," he warned me.

Out in the lobby, a few brave people had made it in for the next show. I could hear the crowd outside shouting "Shame! Shame!" but it was dark by now, so I couldn't see them. It felt like there were thousands of them, though.

I didn't know what to do. I could see the usher keeping his eye on me. For a minute I thought, Maybe this is what having a heart attack feels like—I was all out of breath, my chest was throbbing like somebody was sitting on it. I climbed the stairs up to the projection booth.

A girl who looked like a college student was in there. She was rewinding the movie.

I think I startled her—the way I tore into the booth without knocking or anything.

"This is private up here," she said. "Employees only."

"Look," I told her, "Can you play back just the last minute ot that movie? Just the very end. It's very very important to inc."

Even though they had the ait conditioning on full blast in that theater, I was sweating like crazy— which m fact is what she probably thought I was.

"It's already rewinding," she said. She was \<.-r\ edg> with me, I

think she was trying to figure out bow to make a dash tor it it 1 tried

thing. "Nothing I can do," she told me. "You can sta\ and watch

mi. Ytui don't have tO buy a new ticket."

I could hear the usher coming up the stain behind me. "Ol I told hei d i b fthei you."

I Ik usl me this hard look. He was holding his flashlight

like .1 club. I think 1 was making everybody extremely nervous which I di»: to do, they were already nervous enough with thai crowd

i ins? thai I i iin head thi fen minutes

"I'll wati h tl l told 'Ik- usher "She just told me

lid " 1 It . bun and betted his flashl

in line I he ie< i md time, li

i the thii [tired out

4 it. whk h I guess was a r iilmei I got I knen what 'Ik m

D M)

B O Y S O F L I F E D

was going to bo—there couldn't be any surprises this tune around. It was like I was already starting to grieve.

Ted, I w.^ crying, Ted, Ted. Because there was my brother, there

he was, and he was dead.

I should put in here, tor the record, what Carlos wrote at the beginning, that poem he made out oi his own blood and then passed out from.

Maybe a was silly how I hugged that tree

the uintcr I drove out oj HcrmiiloM bunk I could barely see

& laughed where I nailed him down nailed his diek down because they called yesterday from the hospital where he died

a week after I nailed him & I hugged that tree

& cried I held on tight to m\

wanted to make him live u anted to love him again

see his face like all God's face light up

Drunk crying 50 years old I went down in the dirt

where his blood spilled I got the dirt in my eyes

in my nose my mouth into cockhole

& asshole I burroucd into my boy's blood crying

where I nailed his dick to a tree.

I think I mentioned somewhere earlier how Carlos wrote three books ot poems before he ever made his hrst movie, and nobody ever paid any attention to those poems. I guess you could say it took Ted Blair to finally make Carlos into a poet anybody'd ever heard of.

B O Y S O F L I F E □

"I'm tine," I cold him,

"That's good," said the policeman. He >r111 seemed embarrassed. "Thi> lot is, uh. closed right now. We had a little ruckus here this afternoon, so it you wouldn't mind parking somewhere else that'd be just fine."

"I know," I told him. "I was just going."

He sort of nodded, like he didn't really believe me and was won-

deling what he was supposed to do next. Off in the distance there was a siren, hut we both realized after a second that it didn't have anything to do with us. I started the truck's engine up. He nodded again, and I eased the truck away trom him. It must've been midnight. The streets were empty, and I telt like I was about to explode.

I kept trying to remember Ted, but I couldn't. Ted the way he'd been when he was my brother. But all I could see was that movie, and who he was in that movie—the bad angel dressed all in white who tortures and kills pretty-looking Mexican boys. No Ted I could recognize, but it was Ted, it was Ted playing his part in the movie, it was Ted who was somehow dead now, I didn't know how. It was the Ted I'd recognized even before the movie came to an end. I tried to think about things we did together when we were kids, and what he looked like then—but everything was a blank. That movie took it right away trom me.

The only thing I knew was, when I was a kid and Ted was a kid I was crazy about him. I was in love with him. I never knew it, but I was in love with him and of course you can't be in love with your brother, not the way I was in love with him when we used to swim ■round together in the pool outside the Paradise Grotto.

Everything else, Carlos and New York and the bars and Monica-it all just followed from me loving Ted when we were kids. That started it, because it I hadn't loved Ted I wouldn't've felt so shut out and sad hearing him dry-humping the mattress all alone in th.it trailer ot ours, and with Carlos I wasn't alone th.it wav. It was the natural thing tor me to take off with Carlos the way I did and be in his movies or any he other scenes he ever sprung on me down through all those years, and however Carlos came to find Ted wouldn't've happened if I hadn't known Carlos in the first place, and Ted wouldn't be dead now.

I didn't have any idea where I was driving—I was just driving around aimlessly, though where I ended up lorn Lee Park on

the river bluff.

It was after midnight, and nobody was around except this one car

D PAULRUSSELL

with its lights off—and you could tell by the way it was rocking what was going on in there. In front of me I could see the monument to Tom Lee: a worthy negro. I don't know why I did what I did next, but suddenly I was out of the truck and scrambling down the steep bank to the river. Before I knew it I was in the water, up to my knees, to my waist—and then the river current took hold of me like a fist taking me up. It knocked me under and when I came bobbing up I could see the lights in the skyscrapers up on the bluff, and I knew the river was shooting me downstream.

I hadn't swum in years. I guess maybe I was hoping if I drowned then that would solve everything and I wouldn't have to do anything. Actually, I don't think I was thinking much of anything. I was just doing something because I didn't have any idea what else to do.

I kept managing to come up for air, though I kept getting those mouthfuls of ugly-tasting water too—and I tried to swim toward shore. But the river kept pushing me on—I could see the bank sliding past, incredibly fast—and the river went on tugging me out into the current no matter how hard I kept trying to swim against it. I thought about just letting go and having it carry me. I used to watch all that river running past and think how it went to New Orleans and then out into the ocean, and it used to comfort me somehow to think that—but 1 never thought I'd be in the middle of it.

I tfuess I wanted something I thought the rivet was going to give

me, but then when it didn't I starred h^htin^ it. I must've gotten ried about a mile downstream, because I remember going past the piers oi the Interstate 55 bridge, Slid when the current pressed around those piers it let me get some momentum and 1 drove on in toward ihoi

I was trembling all over, coughing up big ipewi oi muddy water,

and m\ wallet was gone. Hut I'd been down in the riser and come back

laughing r<"., 1 think and maybe crying some. And just

■ all those lun^s tull oi night air. 1 lay on m\ back

there on the muddv sand It was a ha:\ night, and the llty was all

ge wirh the glow oi the city. I tc-1 r like it I was supposed to've died

riuhf then, I WOuld have. Hut I wasn't supposed to, and so 1 was still

aliv< 11, l ut here I was Kill alh

And m imewhere ( ark i was aln t r

I knew I had '«■ find him. Whethei he knew it ot not. he wanted

it

I piess I telt al! tl) |USt amared. it that

Ices any sense Am tunned K it, tin- way you

BOYSOFLIFE □

might be stunned to look up at some night sky way out in the country and see all those clear stars pressing down on you, and their light that's coming from so far away that some of those stars are completely burned out before their light ever gets to you. Which is all something 1 know because Carlos once told it to me, I think on the root of that apartment in New York—how the stars are like ghosts, and people can be the same way, their light can come to you from a long way off and reach you only after they've already gone and burned themselves out completely .

I had this terrific headache, and a long scratch down my left arm that was bleeding. I took off my T-shirt and tried to wrap it into some kind oi tourniquet—but the cloth was so wet it didn't really work, so I decided it wasn't bleeding that bad and I'd let it alone. I guess making that tourniquet was just something to do while my head finished clearing up.

I didn't quite know where I was—south oi the bridge, but that was all I was sure about. I picked myself up and the first thing I saw in the dark in front of me was some woods, and when I walked toward them I saw that in the middle o( trees was this boat, an old steamboat. It didn't make any sense. The boards had all split apart, trees were growing up through it and it was covered in vines. For a minute it seemed completely impossible. I thought maybe I really was dead after all, with dead being just some place where nothing made sense, where there were boats sitting high and dry in the woods with trees growing up through their hulls.

But I wasn't dead. I went on past that boat which turned out to be real—at least I think it was real. Somebody should maybe go below the bluffs south o( the Interstate 55 bridge in Memphis and see it there really is an old steamboat in the woods. The bluff turned out not to be as steep as I thought, and I was able to scramble on up to the top. Then the river was down below me again—this dark flat plain I couldn't believe I'd almost lost my life in just a few minutes ago.

It took me about an hour to walk back to where the truck was. I didn't pass a soul—there was that eerie latc-at-mght feeling when you think it's completely possible everybody else has died, and you're the only one left. The t.nK sign oi lite was rh.tr cat m the parking l( '

Tom Lee Park, just where if was when I letr .md still rocking back and forth on its springs. I wondered it the whole rime 1 was drowning rl two people had kept on tucking, not knowing tor an instant anything else was happening in the world. I liked those two in that car—I didn't

□ PAUL RUSSELL

know anything about them, I never would, but somehow I thought maybe it was their living it up like they did that'd saved me in the river, and they'd never know it.

I was pretty much dried off, though there was this film of mud on me, and when I ran my hand through my hair it was all stiff and tangled. When I got in the truck and looked in the mirror, I was shocked—it was still me, still my face—but it also didn't have a thing to do with me. I don't know whether being in the river added something, or took something away, but I think I'd have to say that ever since that moment there's been something different about me that's never quite gotten back straight.

Which if you think I'm trying to get out oi something here, I'm not.

What happened next was, I passed out. Maybe it was the shock of everything finally settling in, or maybe just sheer exhaustion from inv fight with the river—but the next thing I knew, it was dawn and I was slumped over the steering wheel like some dead man. For a minute, in that hazy gray light, I was disoriented—but then something in me snapped to. I hooked into this pure sharp electricity that everybody must have stored away somewhere deep in them, but thev never stumble on it.

What it did most of all was focus. I know some people will s. ( \, Tony, everything's a muddle from here on OUt—but I didn't teel that way, and I Still don't. For me it was like looking through the sharpest

•here is.

The first tiling I had to do, before anything else, was arid a library ti.it I mean h\ focus: the night before, I'd just been reeling, hut no* it u.is completely clear to me that 1 \\.\A to find oui exactly

1, and some newspaper somewhere was be able to tell me.

I'll i the details onl) to mm. thai li was tin- first time I'd

been in .« hbr.irs mihc the- OTIC m New York white I used to studs tl

flu- ghetto, So I didn't have am idea how to go about

i But I ended u| ill the help I needed

rhi> nice lad) named M> ss Ku-lm^ who had ■« big birthmark thai t hit t.u e, whi< h I guest is maybe why

She must've figured I wa

mud m m\ hail and ill, but li

aid

B O Y S O F L I F E D

there'd been a lor In the papers about it a few months back. Once she'd set me up in front oi the microfilm machine, with the Wu York Times tor the year 1987, it wasn't all that hard to find what I needed. I