Man Gone Down (6 page)

“Sure you don't want a real drink now?” she asks. Her first, on top of the wine before, has gotten to her. She has boozy confidence. It enables her to slouch, speak in low tones, and stare.

“I'm sure.”

“A bohemian who doesn't drink—what's that?”

“Why am I a bohemian?”

“Well, you sure ain't a lawyer. I know them. I've got one.”

I wonder if she leaves her paintings out to torture him, the assistant DA. I only shared selected paragraphs with Claire, complete with contextual introductions, and I always read them to her. I picture her husband in the coffee shop, beaky, dark bearded, and thin, ashamed when seeing me, shocked when I say hello. I see her paintings hanging in their house, her sketches and doodles beside the telephone and on the fridge along with their son's. I wonder how he exhales in the galleries of her depicted flesh.

The video is ending. The panzer drives off into the sunset with the dancers. Now a blonde tart on a jet ski zips along the coast of the Riviera. She's wearing a Stetson hat and wielding a boomerang.

“Oh, that bitch is so dry,” she hisses. My mother used to call white
girls tarts and hussies. If I were in the video, and if she were drunk, I'd walk the jet-ski tart home. Jane or Judy closes her eyes and leans back. She opens her mouth in the shape of a small circle and exhales. Black girls, as I remember being told, were fast. She will have to be walked home, too.

“That was harder than I thought.”

“What was?”

“Finishing the work for that show.” She leans forward, exhaling heavily. She puts her elbows on the table and her head in her hands. Her radii and ulnae are mantislike, longer than her humeri. No bone in her arm can be thicker than a chopstick. With all the soft, bright colors on and around her she almost looks like a child except her face is showing signs of age. She has two deep creases running alongside her nose and another across her forehead. Her age and her fatigue against the creamsicle backdrop make her look out of place, and because of this, I imagine her to be lonely. She smiles at me again, broadly, and her eyelids droop.

I had always put girls to sleep. It was a gift. Whenever I was broke and hungry, I would go to a bar or a party, meet a girl, and listen to her talk about her parents, her job, her last or current boyfriend, about her dissatisfaction with her life, and her theories on how life could be different. I'd listen and that alone would be enough—a great enough act of heroism—to be invited home with them, where I would then talk about pretty much anything until they couldn't listen anymore. They'd drift off. In the morning I'd make breakfast and they'd look at me strangely, no longer a hero, just a symbol of their great dissatisfaction. I'd leave them wherever it was they believed themselves stranded—hero-less—two eggs and a slice of toast short. They all fell asleep. All except Claire. I'd lain beside her, hand in the air, not touching her. I talked and talked until she told me to put my hand down on her hip. I did.

“How's writing going?”

“Fine.”

“What are you working on?”

“A book.”

“Who's your agent?”

“I don't have one now.”

She finds the energy to raise her eyebrows. My last agent had told me that I needed to do some serious editing, that it didn't seem
urban
enough, but that mostly, somewhere in the philosophy, I'd lost the story and, therefore, the emotional core. It had reminded me of what William Lloyd Garrison said to Frederick Douglass, that Douglass should tell the story and leave the philosophy to him. Which would mean, if Garrison was correct, then there was nothing beyond the simple narrative—no context. Or that everyone understood the context, that the context was available for all to decipher and that they all had the scope and the willingness to do so. Perhaps it was me. Perhaps I had only disconnected thoughts and anecdotes flaring up in me like bouts of gastritis.
“By the rivers of Babylon
. . .” Perhaps I have no narrative. Perhaps I have no song.

“Tell me a story.”

“Why?”

“You're a storyteller.”

“About what?”

“You're a storyteller.”

She smiles—too sexually for her to be interested in art or arcs. She seems to have a great deal invested in my story, as though if it was good enough she could get naked for me without guilt or reservation. That was what a good narrative was supposed to do, be naked and make naked.

The tart's boomerang flies at the camera and the screen goes white. There's an aerial shot of a dusty road. Someone strikes a chord on an acoustic guitar. The camera moves and pushes in on a crossroads tableau. The camera levels out, parallel with the ground. Someone's sitting on a tree stump. It's a white kid wearing a porkpie hat. He's strumming an old Cherry Sunburst jumbo. It's too big for him. He plays awkwardly on the clichéd Rubenesque form. He looks like he's
trying to choke a chicken-necked fat girl with one hand and caress her with the other.

A pedal steel slides in, but it sounds more Hawaii than Mississippi. In the music track he's already singing, but in the video I'm watching the camera pan across a field and into the sky. Now he's singing, walking along a railroad line. The following frames are filled by sorrowful images: black and white faces; toothless, broken men; hardened women; and filthy children. A drum program marks the beat. If the sound and image were in sync, it would tap out his cadence in the gravel along the tracks. He opens his mouth and sings. His voice is somewhere between tenor and baritone and sounds like he's in some adolescent purgatory bemoaning his stasis.

“White boy blues.” She shakes her head. “Greg likes this shit. Do you?”

“I haven't heard this.”

“But do you like it?” She's fully alert now.

“I had this friend in high school . . .”

“Yeah?”

“Well, I went to school just west of Boston—Newton.”

“I knew you came from money.”

“No, I wasn't wealthy. Sometime before then Massachusetts passed legislation that made it mandatory for all cities and towns to have public housing.”

“Suburban projects? Ridiculous.”

“Well, kind of. Anyway, my mother got on the waiting list and moved us in.”

“Single mom?”

“Yeah.”

“She must be something.”

“Yes, well, she's dead. Anyway, Gavin and me are seniors and we're at a party. Do you know Boston?”

“A little bit.”

“Do you know Commonwealth Avenue?”

“No.”

“It runs west out of downtown. Anyway, Gavin and I are at a party at one of the mansions, in the side yard, sitting up high on the crossbar of a swing set. We are beer-less and broke. He's got a black eye, a quick jab from his old man earlier. He's been telling me about the marathon. How at this point, near where we were sitting, on the other side of the hedge in '72, the pack had caught his dad. He finished as the fifth American and missed qualifying for Munich.”

I look up. She's still awake—involved even.

“
'Heartbreak Hill. Oh, well.'
He kind of sings it with a quavering voice. He wipes his nose with his hand. His right pupil is red with hemorrhaged blood. His sinus looks swollen. Inside the big house our classmates are talking about their college choices. Some are celebrating; others have already begun the process of burnishing the reputation of their safety school. My ex-girlfriend Sally is inside as well. I can see her.”

“She white?”

“Yeah. I can see her in the window—moon face, freckles, and blue pie-eyes—a concoction of German Berger and hardscrabble Irish. I can see her, the sensible part of her acquiescing to the moment's demands. Gavin points at her.
‘That's your true love. Hah.'
He elbows me.
‘I'm kidding, man. I'd love her, too.'
Gavin always wore an old corduroy coat as his top layer. He opens it, reaches into the torn lining and produces two tall boys. He's like,
‘After a hard day's work.'
He hands me a can. I give him a cigarette. He's like,
‘Symbiosis. Good show.'
So we open the beers and toast.

“To oblivion.”

“Godspeed.”

“We hear someone on the back porch.
‘Quick,'
he says.
‘No evidence.'
We chug the beers and throw the empty cans into the bushes. Two girls we don't know walk toward us. They stop, confer with each other, then continue. They're cute, but they look awkward, ridiculous, you know, like girls who haven't had sex trying to be sexy in front of
boys who refuse to recognize their libidos. I light our cigarettes. They're there under us.
‘Hey,'
says one.
‘Do you have anymore?'
So I toss the pack down and the lighter. ‘I thought you guys were athletes,' says the other. And she's really pretty, you know, like some wood nymph. But she's got a whiny voice and she watches her friend light up with all her teen disdain. I take a deep drag and exhale a thick formless cloud.”

“How do they know?”

“How do they know what?”

“Who you are.”

“Everybody knew who we were.”

She's stunned by the perceived arrogance.

“It's not like that,” I say. “We were pretty good athletes. We did pretty well in school. You know, the poor kids usually mowed the rich kids' lawns. It wasn't that we were popular. We just stood out in groups like that.”

She laughs. She seems to have only one, but it serves as many. It's context dependent, but she won't give the context. I can't tell if the laugh is born of amusement, irony, condescension. It's a yip-laugh, a hyena laugh—but cut short. I look up. The blues-boy is leading a mule down a dusty road. He approaches a chain gang.

“Then what?” She beckons with both hands.

“So the smoker crosses her arms and holds the cigarette poised for another drag between her rigid index and middle fingers.
‘You know,'
says Gavin, pointing over the hedges into the street,
‘my dad ran this marathon smoking two packs a day.'

“‘Yeah,'
whines whiny in a sanctimonious tone,
‘but did he finish?'
They snicker at him. Girls were always snickering at him after he said something.”

“Oh, they probably loved you. And you probably loved it.”

“No. No, we didn't. We were just having some drinks and talking—like we always did.”

Suddenly, I'm angry. And I'm angrier still that she's made me angry—made me anything. And then I want to talk more, but I stop. I can't tell if she's even interested in the story, let alone anything more.
She smiles again, this time wide and close-mouthed. Then her lips part slightly. She must have had braces and caps and regular cleanings. She takes the olive out of her glass, pulls it off the stick, and pops it into her mouth.

Still chewing, she says, “You stopped.”

I remember times in my life when I stopped talking. A camp counselor had found me in a stall in the boy's room, fetal and battered. I'd managed to pull my briefs up, and I remember the look on his face when he realized they were soaked with my blood—a bug-eyed gasping fish—
“What happened? What happened?”
he'd finally gagged out, knowing on some level full well what had. I couldn't answer him. I couldn't answer the guidance counselors in junior and senior high who were convinced (but asked anyway) that my drinking and my silence could be traced to the fact that I was a troubled adolescent—
but why?
They never asked, “
What happened?”
Claire had wanted to know, too, the first time she was naked in front of me and I couldn't touch her. I wanted to. I remember that. I wanted to tell her what had happened, but I didn't know what to say, where to start. I opened my mouth and only a dry rasp, a death rattle, came. She wrapped me in a blanket and whispered over and over, “It's okay. I'm here.”

And then I finally did speak.
“You must have something to say.”
She coaxed my voice out into the light of her and hers, and then the people beyond. And I sat in classrooms and workshops and when I wanted to stop talking again, I couldn't. It was like the inverse of what I had done as a boy—I spat out hoping to glue everything back together that seemed to have fallen apart.

“You're funny,” she says. “You just get lost. I like that.” She reaches for my hand, stops, and rubs the Formica. “I'll stop butting in. I really like it.”

“So Gavin points eastward, to Boston and an imagined finish line.
‘He set the American record
—
twice.'
He finishes his smoke, throws it hard at the ground, and cocks his head to one side.
‘Look it up.'

“They look up to me to get confirmation, but I look out to Commonwealth Avenue—Heartbreak Hill—following its meandering
twist downtown. It has a grass-lined median running down the center. The houses are enormous.
‘What are you guys doing next year?'
Gavin thumbs my shoulder.
‘He's going Crimson.'
They both crane their necks as though it will help them process the information. Gavin shakes his head and mumbles to me,
‘Gotta walk around armed with documents these days—fucking junior cynics.'
Then he points at them,
‘This is the last American hero, ladies, the only true noble left. He's good to his ma
—
good to my ma, too.'
They act like he hadn't said anything. They just ask,
‘What about you?'
He doesn't answer. He pulls out another stolen beer.
‘Where'd you get that?'
they ask, and he snaps,
‘What are you, pigs?'
They turn to each other. Some unspoken code sends them away.
‘Fuck,'
whispers Gavin. He hands me two beers. He guzzles his and breaks out a pint of rum, which he begins drinking like a beer.
‘I should make a map of where I hid the stash before I get too wasted.'
He looks around the yard. Then back out to the avenue, like he's already forgotten that idea.
‘Maybe we should take a few and git?'
I say.