Townie (4 page)

Once more we were the new kids in school. Jeb and I had long hair and sat in the back of the bus singing Beatles songs to the girls next to us. They began to like us, which was a sweet surprise, and then a few of the boys did too. Every day after school and that summer Jeb and I played war with Craig and Danny D. and Scotty K.; it’s what we knew from the TV every night. It’s what grown-ups argued about and lost friendships over. And we killed all day long.

Danny D.’s father had a barn full of junk. We found a box of brass light sockets which we turned into hand grenades because you could yank the chain and hurl the socket and if one landed close to you, you were gone. We knew about the Viet Cong stabbing our soldiers’ bodies after they were dead just to make sure they were dead, so when some of us were down, the others went around poking sticks into their back or ribs.

Danny D.’s big brothers, Gary and Sean, would light firecrackers and toss them at us. They’d let us come to their room and listen to the Doors and watch them smoke dope. One rainy afternoon, Sean, who was big with dull brown eyes, tied me to a utility pole out back of the barn and stacked twigs at my feet. He covered them with gas from the lawn mower and tried to light me up. But the gas was mixed with oil, and his matches were damp from his pocket, and when he ran back into the house for more I wrenched my wrists from the rope and ran for home.

In the summer, we’d catch frogs down on the muddy banks and haul them back in a coffee can. We’d stack bricks into a square prison yard and drop the frogs in, then Sean would douse them with gasoline, light a cherry bomb or M-80, and jump back for the bang and flame and smoke. Danny’s brother Gary, sixteen maybe, with long brown hair and a cross around his neck, he’d tie the blackened frogs’ bodies together with string, then run it to the back of his three-speed and drag them up and down the street. I’d be laughing with the rest, but that queasiness would come again.

Years later Gary would die running from the cops.

It was after midnight and it’d been a long, dangerous chase along the back roads and the police had radioed ahead for the drawbridge over the Merrimack to be raised. I don’t know what Gary was driving, but he must’ve thought it was light and fast because when he got to the bridge it was already rising past 40 degrees and he gave the engine all it had and flew up into the air, then down into the swirling black water where he drowned.

Once I was sleeping over and Big Sean squeezed my neck in a headlock, digging his knuckles hard into my skull. I screamed, and Gary came out of his room. Jim Morrison was singing. Gary wore only underwear and a T-shirt, and he punched Sean in the back and slapped him twice in the face.

“Fuckin’ leave him alone, all
right
? He’s a nice kid, Sean. He’s a good
kid.
”

“I didn’t do nothin’.” Sean let go. Gary looked down at me, his dark eyes fiery and sad and kind, and he turned and walked back into his room and shut the door.

THE SUMMER
of 1970 was hot and dry, and we moved to Newburyport where Mom had gotten a job working for Head Start helping poor kids. Newburyport was at the mouth of the river, the Atlantic Ocean three miles away on the other side of the salt marshes. The town was called “Clipper City” because of all the sailing ships built here in the 1800s, but when we came along the place looked abandoned. The streets of downtown were lined with empty mill buildings, their windows boarded up, some of the plywood rotted and hanging by one corner so you could walk in and step over loose papers, dusty machine parts, dog and bird shit, maybe human too. The only businesses still open were three barrooms, a diner, and a newsstand. In Market Square, two or three battered cars were left on the curb, their tires gone, a windshield caved in.

We lived three streets east of downtown on Fair in a half-house we were renting. On the other side lived another single mother. Her kids were small and dirty and she would leave her windows open and you could hear her TV all day and night, even when she was sitting on the stoop drinking a can of beer and smoking. Across the street was an empty lot with weeds, dry and yellow and high as our chests. Jeb and I thought we’d build something deep in there where no one could see you, but some drunks had gotten there first, their camp a steel barrel they sat around on broken lawn chairs and a naked mattress covered with stains so brown I was convinced they had to be blood.

Kids roamed the neighborhood like dogs. The first week I was sitting in the sun on our steps, I made the mistake of watching them go by as they walked up the middle of the street, three or four boys with no shirts, a couple of girls in shorts and halter tops. The tallest one, his short hair so blond it looked white, said, “What’re you lookin’ at, fuck face?”

“Nothing.”

Then he was on our bottom step. He pushed me hard in the chest and kicked my shin. “You want your face rearranged, faggot?”

“No.”

Maybe he walked off after that, maybe he punched me in the head, I’m not sure, but of all the places we’d lived so far it was clear this was going to be the meanest.

From our open windows, the inside of the house hot as a box, there was the day-and-night swearing and shouting of men and women fighting; we could hear the lowriders revving their engines out front of the Hog Penny Head Shop down the block; there was the constant rumble of motorcycles two streets over. On the hottest days you could smell the wood from the lumberyard on the other side of Water Street, the piss and shit of the drunks in the weeds, the engine exhaust, the sweet lead of the paint flaking off our clapboards.

Food was scarce now. Even with our father’s child support payments, only a few hundred a month, my mother just didn’t make enough to keep the fridge and cabinets stocked. It was hard enough keeping the rent paid on time, the electricity on, the phone. It was hard enough just to keep all four of us growing kids in at least one pair of pants, shirts, and underwear, and a pair of shoes that might last a year. It was hard enough to keep her succession of used cars gassed up and running, though I don’t believe she ever filled a tank; so many times she’d pull up to the pumps, dig through her purse for change, smile at the attendant, and say something like, “A dollar and fourteen cents’ worth, please.”

What money she did have budgeted for food went to meals she could cook quickly after she got home from work: canned soup or stew, macaroni and cheese, or the one we had most often, Frito Pie. Standing there in her earrings and work clothes—ironed pants and a blouse, maybe a bracelet around her wrist—she’d open a bag of Fritos, spread some out on the bottom of a casserole dish, then dump in two cans of Hormel chili, cover it with a layer of raw onions, more Fritos, and grated cheese. She’d bake this for thirty or forty minutes, the smell filling the downstairs like home cooking used to, and then we’d all grab a bowlful and eat on the floor in front of
The Waltons
or
All in the Family
. Many nights she’d come home with grease-stained bags from McDonald’s or Burger King, convenient meals she couldn’t afford.

Once a week, usually a Sunday, Pop would pick us up in his old Lancer and take the four of us to an air-conditioned movie. We’d sit in the cool dark of the theater eating hot buttery popcorn, sipping a cold sweet Coke, the movie stars so handsome and beautiful, and it was like being on furlough from a penal colony, the hug from Pop as he dropped us back off, the smell of Old Spice on his cheek above his beard, his hand patting my back.

AFTER A
few months, we moved to Arlington Street on the North End. It was a street with trees on it and houses that seemed looked after, and there were no more roaming kids or fighting sounds, and we settled in for a year in a whole house with a fenced backyard and grass. Across the street was the hospital, and we could hear the ambulances come and go, their sirens starting up or winding down. Sometimes they’d come back quiet, and I was sure whoever they’d picked up was dead inside.

The North End was districted to a different school where I was new and the first morning a tall kid asked me what I was looking at and I said nothing and he and his two friends pushed me down and kicked me once or twice and after that I stayed in the dark corners and kept my head down and my mouth shut.

Maybe we’d moved so much we didn’t know how to make friends, maybe we’d just gotten too used to keeping to ourselves, but on Arlington Street the four of us, no matter the weather, still spent afternoons in front of the TV. Mom would get home after dark and more and more now, her boyfriends were coming over too. One looked like an outlaw; he had long blond hair and a handlebar mustache, and he wore tight jeans and pretended he was interested in us. There was Maurice, a big and kind black man who, when they broke up, gave Mom a 45 record of Charley Pride’s rendition of “For the Good Times.” He asked her to please play it again and again. There was Dick from the South End whom she never liked but who came around all the time anyway. He was tall and had big arm muscles and short hair. Once we all had the flu and he showed up at the door with a bottle of penicillin.

“
Penicillin?”
my mother said. “Are you
crazy
? You don’t just give kids
penicillin.
”

He insisted she take it from him, this nearly quart-size brown bottle of antibiotic. It looked stolen from some warehouse.

He went away, but I think he sat in his car outside a lot, waiting, hoping she’d change her mind and love him. He must’ve been there on a Sunday when Pop came by to get us; for a month we didn’t see Dick. Then late on a weeknight, all five of us in front of the TV, a bearded man knocked on the door. He was tall with Dick’s arm muscles. My mother opened the door partway.

“It’s me, Patty. It’s
Dickie,
” and he laughed and ran his fingers through his whiskers. “See? I got a beard, hippie style! Just like your ex. I seen you like that so I grew it. See? Hippie style.”

I don’t know what she said to that, but she went out to the porch and stood under the light talking to him for a long time and we didn’t see him anymore after that.

THE FOLLOWING
summer the landlord raised the rent and we had to move back to the South End, to Lime Street, a place many people from town called “Slime Street.” It was where Suzanne and I would go to school at the Jackman, three stories of crumbling brick I would learn years later had been condemned by the city but still stayed open for the kids of the South End. We now lived in an old clapboard house so close to the street you had to be careful not to step out too quickly onto the sidewalk or you’d fall into traffic. There was a small dirt yard in back I liked because it had a solid plank fence around it and nobody could see me there. I could be outside but invisible. I was hiding all the time.

Across the street lived the Whelans. There were always three or four cars and trucks in their side yard, some on blocks, the hoods open or gone, and the father, Larry, worked on the engines every afternoon. He was short and had no front teeth and he drank from cans of Pabst he’d rest on the chassis. I don’t remember how many kids lived there, but a few years later his oldest son would go to prison for raping his twenty-seven-month old niece. Another would go for some other crime. And I assume that’s what happened to Clay.

At fourteen or fifteen Clay Whelan was over six feet and slope-shouldered and sullen and mean. When he first saw me—flabby, weak, and quiet—he saw a target, and for the next year he’d corner me at school and squeeze my throat till I couldn’t breathe, he’d chase me the two blocks home and punch and kick me to the ground. He’d call Jeb a faggot and Suzanne and Nicole fuckin’ sluts, and I did nothing but run into the house and hide.

More than ever now, the four of us stayed in every day after school and watched that one-eyed machine that would take us to other worlds. Hours and hours of it. Mom would get home between six and seven and fix us something quick and cheap, usually frozen or from a can, then the five of us would sit in the dark living room only feet from the street and watch more TV. If she looked over and asked me where I’d gotten a bruise or a cut, I’d tell her recess, playing. But recess at the Jackman was a forty-five-minute break on a square of asphalt out back where there were no balls and half the kids stood around taking drags off Marlboros then turning their heads to blow smoke away should one of the teachers see, though I don’t remember many teachers being out there. And these boys were even tougher than Clay Whelan.

There was Cody Perkins, as short as I was but lean and loud. One morning in the middle of history, Mrs. Hamilton was talking about the Louisiana Purchase and he walked into the class and shouted to the back of the room, “Say it to my face, Sullivan. Say it to my fuckin’
face!
”

Sullivan was the biggest kid in school. In the sixth grade he was as tall as Clay but weighed close to 200 pounds. A month before, a wiry boy in the hallway said something to Sully he didn’t like and he whirled around and punched him in the face and knocked him out. Now he was back from his suspension and Cody Perkins, half his size, was waiting for him in front of class. Mrs. Hamilton started yelling at Perkins to leave, but Perkins was breathing hard like he just ran here, his eyes on Sullivan who was up and coming for him.

I was sitting close to this. I knew Sullivan would kill Perkins and I couldn’t understand how such a small kid could be so crazy, so brave.

Somebody called out, “Kill him, Sully. Beat his head in.”

Cody threw himself in the air and punched Sully in the chest. It was like watching a building crumble, the way Sullivan’s head dropped and his shoulders slumped and he curled forward into the air he couldn’t breathe anymore, his mouth open, his face gray, and Cody Perkins was punching him in the side of the head, in both eyes, in his nose and still-open mouth. Now there were more teachers in the room, two men who pulled Perkins off and he was kicking and trying to jerk himself away and only when he was gone did I remember he’d been screaming the whole time, not words but an anguished, unrelenting sound that could only come from some raging beast.