Townie (25 page)

But then my cheeks began to burn, this voice in my head:
You did that for you.
And I saw Cody Perkins back on the streets of the South End, how he walked with his chest out and his head up, how he was always looking for a fight. At eleven and twelve years old, I could only fear and admire him; how could anyone
look
for a fight? How could anyone
want
that? But lying there on my mattress in Texas nine years later, my knuckles swelling up, the alley clear and quiet because I had cleared it, I knew why he wanted to find those fights; they were his only chance to get out what was inside him. Like pus from a wound, it was how he expressed what had to be expressed. It gave him the chance to do something for him and him only, and my shame now came from someplace I hadn’t considered before, that maybe inside me there were other ways to get this pus out, other ways to express a wound.

I began to meditate. I skimmed a book on it at the campus bookstore on Guadalupe, and each night after studying at the library, I’d sit cross-legged on the floor in my room with the lights off and my eyes closed. I’d concentrate on my breathing. Every few exhalations I’d think,
Om, peace, peace, peace.

I liked having that word in my head. It made me feel I was heading some place higher and more evolved. I’d think of Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, even Jesus, someone I’d rarely thought of; I’d breathe and begin to imagine loving all these people I’d come to hate, these wealthy white kids I was convinced would one day hold the reins of oppressive power.

But then I saw the body of Jesus Christ hanging on the cross, his chest collapsed, those spikes driven through his feet and palms. I saw the bullets shot into Gandhi’s torso, his outsretched hands that could do nothing for him, and I saw Martin Luther King lying dead on that concrete motel balcony in Memphis. Now my heart was beating faster, my breathing more shallow. I thought
peace, peace, peace.
But I saw my brother’s arms at his sides as Tommy J. punched him in the face, I saw my sister raped by two men who were never caught, and when I was nine and we still lived together in that house in the woods, I lay on the living room floor under the coffee table while my mother and father watched the black-and-white news, a close-up on the X-ray of Robert Kennedy’s brain and the .22 caliber bullet shot into it. And now I knew by whom and why, a young Palestinian angry over Kennedy’s support of Israel, and when would any of this ever end? Would we ever stop doing this to one another?

GRADUATION DAY
was hot and cloudless, the Texas sky a deep blue above the terracotta-tiled roofs of campus. The steps of the South Mall were taken up with fathers in ties and mothers in dresses, and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins watching thousands of us in our robes and tasseled mortarboards as we sat in the shade of the main building listening to a speech given by a man in a linen three-piece suit. Somewhere in the crowd were my mother and her mother and sister, both of whom had driven to Austin from central Louisiana where my grandmother lived. My mother had flown in from St. Maarten, the island where she’d been living with Bruce for two years helping him to run a small airfreight company that flew in supplies for hotels and restaurants. My brother and sisters were up North: Suzanne had dropped out of Bradford and gotten a job tending bar at the beach. She’d met a roofer there named Keith, and they planned to get married late in the summer; Nicole was in her last year of high school and living with our father and his third wife, Peggy; and Jeb had gotten a girl pregnant. He was working construction and sharing a small rented house with her in Salem, Massachusetts. She was due to have the baby soon. He was nineteen.

Some administrator was speaking now, a tall handsome man I’d never seen before. He smiled and leaned into the microphone and declared us official graduates of the university. There were whoops of joy. Mortarboards got tossed into the air, and I turned and made my way through the crowd to look for my mother, aunt, and grandmother. I felt oddly blue. I had just begun to learn all I needed to learn. There were so many more books to read, so many more lectures to attend. How would I be completely free until I’d learned all those truths? But there was my family too; I kept feeling them inside me, an itch that could only be scratched by going North for a while: And would Jeb get married? How was he going to be a classical guitarist while working construction? Wasn’t that bad for his hands? Didn’t he tell me that before? That a musician has to take care of his hands?

But I wasn’t just going back for my brother and two sisters. As much as I’d loved all that reading and essay-writing and test-taking, there was the instinct to walk away from it for a while, to do some kind of physical work. I could take a year before I went back to school for that Ph.D., then maybe I’d become someone with the credentials to do good, the kind of person to whom people really listened.

BY LATE
fall, Jeb and I were building things together again. Our boss was Trevor D., a lanky British man who wanted to be a millionaire before he turned thirty. He had long dark hair and expected punctuality and efficiency and the consistent execution of our tasks. These were words he used regularly. He also said “excellence” a lot, and once or twice a week he had to unhitch his leather carpenter’s apron and lie down on the ground, his eyes closed tight as one of his migraines passed through his head like a silent storm.

There was the lead carpenter, Doug, and Jeb, the carpenter’s helper, and Randy the laborer, and me, who’d been demoted from carpenter to laborer once Trevor D. saw I knew very little and could do less. I’d lied to get the job, told him I had all kinds of experience when all I’d done was build forts with Jeb when we were kids.

We were renovating a three-story house Trevor D. had bought down by the water. It was in a neighborhood of two-hundred-year-old houses, paint flaking off their clapboards, rot in their sills and doors and window frames. There was a barroom a block away called the Hole in the Wall, a few boarded-up shops, but from the roof of Trevor D.’s house you could see the ocean, a gray sliver of it beyond utility poles and shingled gables. His plan was to gut the entire structure down to its frame then rebuild it as three condominiums, the top one a luxury unit because of the “water-view.” He said he hoped to triple or quadruple his investment.

I saw him as a tawdry capitalist.

The five of us ripped off all the clapboards, pulled out the windows and any sheathing that may have rotted, wide pine boards nailed to studs by men decades and decades before any of us was born. A lot of the sheathing had to go, the roof too, including the rafters because Trevor D. needed a flat roof for the deck we were going to build up there. It took over a week to strip the house down to its naked frame, a week when we all worked together doing the same thing, but now the long steel dumpster we’d filled was gone and stacks of new lumber sat in the lot, lumber Randy and I constantly hauled to Trevor and Doug and Jeb, the men who knew what they were doing and spoke about it in a language I did not know.

I kept thinking Jeb shouldn’t know it either. He’d spent his teenage years in his room, practicing guitar and fucking a grown woman and making art; then he found himself at Bradford College, drunk at a party with a cute girl and now he was a father, and the teacher was finally gone and how did he understand what these men were talking about? What did he know about building walls and floors and stairs to rooms with windows that worked? But somehow he did. And if he wasn’t sure, he’d pretend he knew, then go learn on his own what seemed to be already there inside him, an innate knowledge of how things worked.

So many times during the day, Trevor D. and Doug and Jeb would pause to work out a problem: a support wall is needed here, but that makes the hallway on the other side too narrow; the stairs end here, but now the header’s too low above the last step; if the kitchen window is framed here, there’s no room for a fridge there; and on and on. I’d hear pieces of their conversation while Randy and I hauled new two-by-fours for the walls, sheets of plywood for sheathing, fifty-pound boxes of nails. Randy and I spent days pulling old ones from every stud in the house so that each one was clean and ready for twentieth-century insulation, strapping, and Sheetrock. While new construction started on the first floor, he and I continued demo work on the second and third. We knocked down partition walls. We ripped up old flooring from joists we’d then have to balance ourselves on to keep from falling through. We filled barrels with chunks of plaster and broken lathe, each one weighing well over a hundred pounds, and we’d heave them down steps and outside to the new dumpster where we’d squat on either side of the barrel, then lift it over our heads and dump it in, the plaster dust clouding back into our faces, our hair white, our eyes red-rimmed.

Randy didn’t talk much, but I knew he’d dropped out of high school, that he was married and had a two-year-old son. I knew his wife had a drinking problem and was in rehab, and that Randy’s mother took care of his son all day while he worked. I knew he liked cars and took pride in the black SS Chevelle he drove to the job site every morning. He kept it clean inside and out and parked it on the far side of the parking lot. Any tools he owned—a framing hammer, a sledge, a few pry bars, and a reciprocating saw—he’d lay on a blanket in the trunk. At coffee break, he and I would sit against the foundation apart from Trevor D., Doug, and Jeb, who usually stood in the middle of the lot looking up at the house, pointing things out to each other. Trevor and Doug were dressed for the weather, heavy jeans and work boots, a fleece vest and wool sweater over more wool over long underwear, the white cotton sleeves you could see at the wrists. But Jeb, his hair shorter now, his stubble catching the morning light, he stood there in jeans with a hole in one knee, his bare leg showing. He wore a T-shirt under a button-down cotton shirt that may have belonged to Bruce once. The shirttails hung out. But he didn’t look cold or unhappy as he stood there and tapped a Marlboro from his pack and lit up, nodding his head at whatever Trevor D. was saying, learning his trade.

At night, alone in my apartment, I’d heat a can of soup and read Marx or Engels or Weber. The radiator hissed, and I’d read the same sentence over and over, wouldn’t even see it. Later, lying on my mat in the back room, I’d thumb through catalogues for graduate schools, think about all the knowledge that would come with earning a Ph.D. in political thought, how much I would know then.

But the world didn’t seem so big now, and where were the people who wanted to change it anyway? Somehow in Texas, studying all I’d studied, I’d felt like more than just one. My reading had joined my mind to the thinkers before me, to the millions of people whose lives they indirectly wrote about, these scholars who sat in a tower so high they could see everyone and I could too. But after eight to ten hours of working with my body, I was too tired to look, a capitalist plot, I thought, to keep the prole in his place. But this assumption floated away like steam; if I was a proletarian, who was Trevor D.? He had plans to be a rich bourgeois, but I saw how hard he worked every day, how two or three times a shift, he’d sit somewhere with his calculator and paper and pencil to figure out how much all this was costing, how much was left in the budget, how much would his return be? And what did I care if he made a hundred thousand dollars on this job? As long as what he built was solid and its price was fair, what was wrong with that? Did that make him an oppressor?

I didn’t know. So I’d brew tea and open one of my books and keep reading, hoping one of these dead intellectuals could tell me.

FOR THE
first time since I was fifteen and began to change my body with weights, I had no place to train. If there was a barbell gym in Lynn I couldn’t find it, and even though I was working with my body all day long all week long, sweating and breathing hard for so much of each shift, it wasn’t enough. My chest muscles felt smaller, my shoulders and arms too, and when I flexed my upper back, it didn’t flare as much as it used to. Despite all my training, I had never become big, just hard and fit, but now whatever muscle I’d built was atrophying. I felt vulnerable, like a knight who has slipped off his steel-plated armor and gone back into the world without it. I was no longer the small, soft boy Clay Whelan and the others had beat up, but a cool irrational fear welled in my gut that if I didn’t find a gym, I would slide back into being that boy all over again, and as soon as I did, that’s when they’d come for me.

EVERY SATURDAY
I’d drive forty minutes northeast to Haverhill. I’d meet Sam Dolan at the Y and he and I would work out together with rusting black iron in a dank concrete room. He was still so much stronger than I was, bench-pressing well over 300 pounds now, but I’d missed my friend, and it was good to be with him again, and for over two hours we’d push and pull and press and curl.

Sam had graduated from Merrimack College and was working as a reporter for the Lawrence
Eagle-Tribune,
something he saw himself doing for years. He’d always liked reading and writing, and now he got paid to do both. He still had his old room at his parents’ house on Eighteenth Avenue, but he was engaged to marry Theresa the following August, and sometimes he’d stay over at her apartment just off Lafayette Square. Theresa worked at AT&T, which used to be Western Electric. She was kind and quiet, and she had long brown hair and a lovely face and when Sam met her at a house party, he was drawn to her right away and knew early on where they were headed together. They already had plans to one day own a house and have kids.

After our workouts and a shower, Sam and I would drive across the river on the Basilere Bridge to Ronnie D’s. The winter sun would be down, the sky casting a purple light over the brick mill buildings up the Merrimack, broken ice floes wedged hard against the granite piers beneath us. Upriver was the iron trestle the Boston & Maine would take into Railroad Square, and beyond that the bridge Jeb and I had run across three years ago. My muscles had that pleasantly flushed and tired feeling, and I was looking forward to some cold beer and two or three bar hot dogs, but as we drove into Bradford past its neon-lit fast food shops—Mister Donut, then McDonald’s, the car dealership across the street—there was an emptiness somewhere behind my ribs and sternum, an airless quiet that told me I was standing still when before, in Texas, I’d been running forward.