So Shelly (7 page)

One evening that summer, after spotting Caroline’s Tracker parked outside the gates of Acedia for a third consecutive night, Shelly approached Caroline and introduced herself. They sat for hours drinking Red Bulls and eating pork rinds while they traded stories of their mutual object of addiction, including the story I just shared. In commiseration, they enjoyed one another’s company well enough, but, ultimately, each was a poor substitute for Gordon.

I know this all sounds crazy. Don’t believe it if you don’t want to. I didn’t believe it myself until I had my first Caroline sighting on the day of Shelly’s wake. But be careful not to judge. There was just something about Gordon. He was the drug you hated yourself for using, but you smoked, snorted, or injected it anyway, because you loved his magic circle even more. Ultimately, he was the drug that killed Shelly, but he was also the drug that had allowed her to live—at least for a while.

We drove eastward through the half-light of the early summer evening and through the failing heart of Ogontz. At every turn, I half-expected a roadblock.

“You have the disc?” Gordon asked.

I performed one of those lame self-pat-downs people do when they’ve been caught empty-handed and know it but want to delay the admission of their screwup.

“Shelly said she gave it to you,” Gordon insisted.

“I know she gave it to me,” I said. I could feel a panic attack mustering in my chest. “I must have left it at home.”

“Where do you live?”

There it was. The real source of my mounting terror. Gordon Byron of literary, athletic, and erotic greatness was about to journey inside my miserable excuse for a life. This wasn’t part of the plan.

*    *    *

Ogontz, Ohio, is a worn-out notch on the rust belt that stretches beneath the bloated-from-economic-famine belly of the Great Lakes, from Detroit in the northwest to Buffalo in the northeast. It’s a onetime blue-collar city—too large to be quaint and too small to be worthy of note—full of American dream–believing suckers, the middle-class beneficiaries of the post–World War II manufacturing boom, especially in the auto industry. The past few decades, however, have seen that golden teat dry to a trickle. In desperation, Ogontz has chosen to prostitute its lakefront and transform itself into a resort town that caters to tourists, fishermen, boaters, and especially condo dwellers—who are willing to mortgage their futures for a killer view and are willing to drop an occasional dollar on the community nightstand.

Before he died, my dad would sometimes recall the “old days” growing up in our east end neighborhood. “It was a fine part of town then, John. Working people [think white people]. Everybody knew everybody else and looked out for each other. Not like it is today. Hell, half these people don’t even own these homes around here anymore; they’re renters [think African Americans]. Renters don’t give a damn about their property or neighbors. It ain’t theirs and they don’t plan to stay. They invest nothing but want everything, like the world owes them a living.”

It’s a good thing our home
was
bought and paid for, or I don’t know where Tom and I would live. It’s the one good turn the folks did us before dying.

*    *    *

“Fifth Street and Elm,” I answered Gordon, seeing no escape.

Ogontz is laid out in an almost perfect grid. East to west streets are numbered, and north to south streets are named. West side streets are named for the array of Native American tribes who once occupied the area, downtown streets in the central city are named for presidents, and east side streets are named for indigenous trees. Gordon’s deceleration as we entered my neighborhood suggested what I assumed to be his unfamiliarity with my side of town. Or perhaps, I thought, it was a genuine sociological curiosity with how the other 95 percent lived. Or maybe it was concern for the attention his BMW was attracting as we passed porches and front yards crowded with “renters” driven from their non–air-conditioned homes into the still tropical night air.

“The next corner,” I said. “The last driveway. You wait in the car. I’ll run in and get it. It’ll only take a minute.” It felt odd to be giving Gordon orders, but there was no way I was letting him inside that house of death.

I handed Shelly to Gordon, then ducked hurriedly from under the automatically retracting shoulder belt. Climbing the cracked concrete steps two at a time, I bounded onto the porch in two strides. As I removed from my pants pocket the three keys necessary to unbolt all of the locks, I saw Gordon climbing out of the BMW.

“Fuck,” I muttered. “Just perfect.”

The disc that we were so desperate to retrieve was an R.E.M. mix that Shelly had burned; she called it the sound track of her life and had assigned a song from the R.E.M.
catalog to every important person and significant event she’d experienced. She had entrusted it to me at the end—which I know pissed off Gordon—and we couldn’t go forward without it because it was central to fulfilling her final wish, which she had imparted to Gordon and placed him in charge of planning—which, trust me, pissed me off.

My bedroom was upstairs, overlooking the street, and now overlooking Gordon, below. Tom’s was to the left of mine, but soon he would be too weak to climb the stairs, and, like Dad before him, he’d require a rented wheelchair and hospital bed placed in the first-floor living room. His world would rapidly shrink: first to the wheelchair, that room, the kitchen, and the bathroom; next, to those four walls of peeling wallpaper, worn carpet, and the stench of bedpans and atrophying flesh; finally, just to the decreasingly burdened mattress. For now, at least, when I peeked in, he was fast asleep, still in his own bed and recognizable skin.

The disc, inside the clear plastic lid of its dust-covered case, lay on top of my dresser. I had set it there a little more than a week ago, a few days before her body washed up on the shore of North Bass Island. Seeing the letters “R.E.M.” scrawled in Shelly’s handwriting in black Sharpie across the silver face of the disc stopped me cold. More than the wake, more than actually holding the urn in my own hands, I felt the reality of her absence, and, for the first time, I felt its permanence.

I was summoned from my private pity party by the sound of a multitude of voices filtering up through the screens in the bedroom windows. The cacophony itself wasn’t unusual. In my neighborhood, cars constantly cruised with stereos
cranked, and legitimate east-siders regularly gathered in groups and always moved in numbers, and at all hours. So it wasn’t the noise itself that had caught my attention. It was the incongruous sound of Gordon’s refined pronunciations intermingled with the street talk.

Unsure of how long I had left him abandoned, I tore from my room and down the interior steps at a breakneck speed. If it was trouble brewing, I had no idea what my scrawny ass could do to end it, but I actually felt that Gordon was in need of my protection.

As I burst onto the porch, Gordon’s expansive back was to me. He was surrounded by a half-dozen shirtless and ripped black dudes. T-shirts were slung over shoulders, wrapped around heads as makeshift do-rags, or half-stuffed into the waistbands of their shorts that sagged halfway down their butts. The largest one, whom the others called T and who had a body that looked like a photographic negative of Gordon’s, was clearly wearing nothing under his shorts. The rounded top of the two loaves of his muscled ass, where it met the small of his back, showed itself proudly.

There were also two girls, one on either side of Gordon, who stood slightly bent at the waist with his cupped hands to his mouth. Each of the girls leaned heavily on an arm, as if they were holding him up, preventing his escape, or engaging in a tug-of-war for his attention.

“Hey!” I yelled. “Get away from him!”

All eyes, with the exception of Gordon’s, turned immediately and menacingly in my direction. I’d never felt so exposed, or white, in my life.

“Leave him alone,” I said with diminishing conviction.

They exchanged looks with one another, then stared at me and back to the circle before they broke out in laughter.

“Relax, White.” That’s what T called me. “White.” Not whitey, not white boy, just “White.”

Finally, Gordon turned around with a face that looked like an imitation of a constipated Sean Penn sucking the juice out of the most tart lemon in the history of citrus. I wasn’t sure if he was in pain or angry until he let go a cough, and a tiny cloud of smoke passed his previously pursed lips.

Pot. He was smoking pot with these guys! I didn’t know—still don’t—if Gordon somehow had known them previously or if he had just met them that day, but they were calling him G. There he was, already more a part of the neighborhood than I was, and I had lived there my entire life. That’s just Gordon. Most people fell in love with him right away. There’d be a glorious honeymoon period, and then, given any length of opportunity, he would wear his welcome out.

“S’up, Keats?” Gordon turned to me before turning back to his circle.

Soon they were inspecting his car. The girls crawled inside and began fidgeting with the radio station, until one slid out of the driver’s side, holding Shelly.

“What’s this?” she said.

“That’s our friend,” Gordon answered with a smirk and a quick glance in my direction.

“Whatchu mean your
friend
?” The others stopped making their imaginary upgrades to Gordon’s car and began to gather
around the girl holding the urn. The whole thing was making me increasingly uncomfortable, but Gordon didn’t seem a bit bothered. Actually, he looked amused.

“Those are her ashes,” he said.

“Ashes? What ashes? She dead?” Her voice rose at least an octave as she reached the end of her verbless questions, and once again Shelly was airborne. It was as if a creepy bomb were about to explode. Bodies catapulted in all directions among the sound of half-terrified, half-hysterical laughter and cries of horror, except for Gordon, who effortlessly caught Shelly before she mixed her dust with the dirt. That would have been an abomination; Shelly hated dirt. She’d been a complete slob, but that had been an organizational issue, not an elemental one.

My spell of incredulity and Gordon’s amusement were broken when, still standing on the porch, I saw in my peripheral vision the familiar navy blue of an Ogontz Police car turn onto my street from Maple, one block west.

“Cops,” I warned matter-of-factly. The presence of the police was certainly no oddity on my street. My neighbors’ ears had been finely conditioned to that word; it commanded their attention and put an immediate end to the levity. The Ogontz PD patrolled my end of town with near-obsessive diligence, so I had no need for unnecessary concern regarding my and Gordon’s outlaw status; although, Gordon’s face showed a small degree of unfamiliar alarm.

It’s hard to say who’s the greater cause of the high crime rate on the east end. Are the omnipresent cops a justifiable and necessary response to criminal behavior, or is the criminal
behavior simply a spiteful and equally justifiable “fuck you” to the cops and their assumed necessity, a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy?

By the cop car’s leisurely speed, I knew Gordon and I had yet to be targeted; there was no APB out on us. It was a cruising pace, not a pursuit; however, a well-dressed white kid with a BMW surrounded by neighborhood kids would most certainly raise the hackles of even the most novice of officers.

Gordon nonchalantly dropped the joint he cupped in his hand and ground it into my scraggly lawn.

“Marks,” T spit the name out.

Patrolman Marks had been the bane of my neighbors’ existence since the moment they’d been born, and he would go on in his sheriff of Nottingham way until the day he finally started collecting on his patrolman’s pension, a day that couldn’t come soon enough as far as my incessantly hassled neighbors were concerned. Sadly, they also knew that another Officer Marks would be coming up the ranks to fill his racist shoes.

Marks pulled to the curb, shifted into park, and turned on his overhead flashers just to be a dick. He leaned toward and spoke through the open passenger-side window. “There a problem here, boys? You know there’s a loitering law.”

He referred to a law that limited the number and length of time that juveniles, unattended by adults, could gather in public places. The law had been passed in the fifties, long before the mall to the south of town had been built, when downtown Ogontz had still been a thriving business and shopping district. The law had been passed by the urging of
merchants, whose storefronts had been being inundated by penniless teenagers just hanging out but supposedly scaring away potential paying customers. Today, that law was used primarily by cops pulling a shift on the east end. There wasn’t a store in the sixteen-block area. The police claimed to be disrupting drug deals and gang activity, but all they were really doing was harassing people and furthering the alienation of the black community.

“I live here, Officer. These are my friends,” I called from the porch.

“Uh-huh,” he said, nearly choking on his skepticism before dismissing me. “How about you?” He was talking to Gordon.

“Me?” Gordon touched his chest with both hands.

“Yeah, you and your Beamer. Don’t see your kind around here unless your party planning came up a little short and you need to make an immediate”—he hesitated, then said—“purchase” as he took a long toke from an imaginary joint.

“Purchase, Officer? Why, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m just visiting a few friends, soaking up a little of the local color, if you know what I mean.” He gave Marks a quick wink and made a subtle nod toward the girls.

I stared in disbelief. In an instant, Marks believed that he and Gordon were on the same team. The interrogation was over. He waved Gordon to the squad car.

“You know what they say,” Marks began in a hushed voice. “Once you go black, you never go back.” He laughed at his own cleverness.

“Yeah, but it’s all pink inside,” Gordon said, tapping the roof of the Crown Victoria, signaling it was time for Marks
to move on, which he did, but not before doing that dorky thing of pointing to his own eyes and then at T and his friends in my yard.