“Son, I did not just call you,” he insisted. And I would have believed him, fully, had I not just spoken to him moments before. For one brief, dark instant I questioned myself.
An officer came back on the line. “We even checked under the bed,” he said. “We didn’t find anything, not so much as an empty bottle. What kind of game are you playing here?”
He waited for my answer.
And when I didn’t give him one he continued, “Don’t you ever do that again. Calling the police like this? Wasting everybody’s time? Don’t you ever.” Finally, he said, “This is a lousy thing to do to your own father, kid.”
Then he hung up on me.
I STOOD EXACTLY where I was beside the wall phone and my chest convulsed as the sobs came out of me in rolling waves. Tears dripped from my eyes and a long strand of mucus hung from the tip of my nose and I felt something washing out of me.
My mother came home and found me sitting in the dark kitchen, dried blood and glass still on the floor at my feet. When she saw me, she froze. “My God,” she whimpered. “Oh my God, what has happened?” Her breath smelled like coffee and this trace of normalcy restored my ability to blink and breathe and exit my stupor.
As I recounted the details of what happened, I never once took my eyes off hers because I needed her to hear every word I said and I needed her to believe me.
And because this was the man that she married, the father of her children, the one she knew so well, she did.
THE FURNITURE FROM our home in Shutesbury was now crammed into a much smaller rental house in Amherst. It was strange to see the black metal bookcases that had once lined the expansive rear wall of my parents’ bedroom now assembled in the living room, blocking the two windows. The long floral sofa, which at home had floated on a white rug in front of the sliding glass doors, now ran the length of the living room wall. Everything I’d grown up with was here, mashed into these few rooms.
The divorce itself was just a piece of paper signed by a judge and yet it had a profound impact on my mother. It was as if her entire personality changed. There was something wild in her eyes, fierce and furious. She paced the apartment like a caged animal and struggled for weeks with the same seventy-line poem. She called it, “my masterpiece.”
She was under the care of her psychiatrist, a white-haired Svengali who had a group of loyal patients, or followers, many of whom tithed ten percent of their incomes to him. The doctor had a large biological family and a number of extended family members—a “spiritual brother,” additional “wives,” and “adopted” children, many of whom were his psychiatric patients.
I began spending time at the doctor’s run-down, rambling house in Northampton. There was always somebody there, something going on. And it was better than being cooped up in the small Amherst home with my mother.
In time, I would move into the doctor’s home with his family. I would be given my own room, which I would paint white with bright red trim. The doctor would become my legal guardian.
And my mother would struggle through multiple psychotic episodes, tended to by the doctor and her new girlfriend, at eighteen just a few years older than me. She was also one of his patients.
These years living with the doctor and his family would come to be the defining years of my life.
And when I finally broke free, it would be many years before I fully comprehended just what had happened.
SEVENTEEN
ONCE, HOLYOKE, MASSACHUSETTS, was a thriving industrial city on the banks of the Connecticut River. Settled originally in the early seventeenth century by Englishmen, Holyoke’s very bones are British. Stand beside one of the old brick paper factories—its tapered, elegant smokestack reaching high into the sky—and squint, and you’d swear you were looking back in time at a factory along the River Thames. In the residential areas, wide boulevards are lined with old-growth oak and elm trees and the mansions are set back from the street—Greek revival, Victorian, Tudor. These were the homes of the paper factory owners and managers. Glorious, stately structures decidedly European in their design and construction.
In 1919, even Rolls-Royce opened a manufacturing plant in Springfield, the city next to Holyoke. The plant was a brilliant success, producing over three thousand Rolls-Royce motor cars. But in 1929, the Great Depression forced the plant to close forever. Yet, Springfield remains the only location outside of the United Kingdom where Rolls-Royce cars were ever made.
Dr. Seuss was born in Springfield and was a teenager when Rolls-Royce opened its doors there.
Holyoke could have become another Boston, or even a New York City, but instead, it stopped following the bread crumbs and lost its way. After the war, when the American economy moved away from manufacturing, Holyoke failed to reinvent itself. It just sat there and wondered where everybody went. And then it began to smell bad and its wounds became infected and it stopped bathing.
The city plunged into failure. It became the grimmest, poorest city in Massachusetts. A splotch of cancer in the center of the state. An entire brick factory, weeds sprouting from between the mortar, could be bought for tens of thousands of dollars. You could buy yourself a Craftsman home right near the river for under ten grand. But then, you’d have to live in it.
The crumbling brownstones that lined the downtown area, once so elegant they could’ve been in London’s Hyde Park or Boston’s Beacon Hill, were now in shambles. Some were occupied by check-cashing stands, the clerk seated behind a thick piece of bulletproof glass. Others were repurposed into low-income housing. Slumlords bought entire city blocks and carved up the buildings, cramming in as many families as possible.
The citizens of Holyoke no longer packed tin lunchboxes and went to work at the paper mills or the glamorous Rolls-Royce factory, where only one hide in five hundred was fine enough to become a car’s upholstery; many didn’t work anywhere. Holyoke was now just another depressed former mill town in a sorry state of decay. The city’s greatest resource was its rich Puerto Rican community, with the largest percentage of Puerto Ricans found in any city in America—second only to Puerto Rico itself. But like the empty factories and the intricate canal system, the rich heritage of its people was neglected. Poverty had infected Holyoke like a virus immune to treatment.
In 1983, at the age of seventeen, I moved into my first apartment on Appleton Street in downtown Holyoke. By lying about my age and adding a year, I was able to find work as a waiter. And I was able to afford this, my first apartment. My building had most of its windows, unlike the surrounding structures, where the blown-out windows were either boarded up or left as gaping black holes. My street looked like a mouth that had been punched, knocking out its teeth.
A car, stripped of all its saleable parts, sat outside my apartment building, its charred remains like the bones of a long-dead animal abandoned on the plains. Graffiti adorned nearly every building and the murder rate was high enough that you really had to think carefully before you walked outside to buy a soda, even in the afternoon.
I had left my mother’s psychiatrist’s house and was now truly on my own. After paying my security deposit along with first and last months’ rent, I had seven dollars to last me the week. I was home now.
The trouble was, I couldn’t afford food. At the restaurant, we were allowed only one small meal from a limited menu. But at seventeen, I was constantly hungry. It seemed to me I hadn’t felt full since I was twelve, before my parents split apart. Even my teeth were chipped and cracked. I wasn’t getting enough nutrition to build a whole, complete human body, so my system did the best it could. Teeth, bones, skin—these, on me, were improvised.
Shortly after moving in, I realized I had to call my father and ask him to bring me some food. My brother, I knew, wouldn’t do it. He was unreliable and I could never get him to agree to anything. My mother was too crazy to call. That left my father. I paced my apartment and tried to think of what I would say. Dad? It’s me. I have my own apartment now, but I’m out of money. No, that would only g
enerate a lecture about fiscal responsibility. I thought I could just tell him, I’m out of food, and leave it at that. The more I thought about it, the more that seemed to be the thing to say. But could we have a normal conversation? Could I call him and ask him for food and would he bring it? Could anything be that simple?
At last, I picked up my telephone and dialed his number. While the phone rang, I steadied my breathing and cleared my throat. When he answered, I said simply, “Can you bring me some food? Just to last until I get my next paycheck, in four or five days.”
There was silence on the line. He was considering my request. Because he hadn’t refused automatically, I felt buoyed. I didn’t dare breathe. I could allow nothing to spoil the moment, ruin the outcome. I stared up at the plaster peeling away from the light fixture mounted in the center of the ceiling and said a superstitious prayer, Please say yes, please just say yes. I weighed only 120 pounds, the thinnest I had been since reaching my adult height of six one.
My fingernails were soft.
Oh, please say yes, you old bastard.
I could almost taste the peanut butter. What would I make first? A ham sandwich? Or maybe, I could boil water and make pasta, right on my own stove. With tomato sauce and garlic bread and . . .
“All right,” he said finally. Two words and I would eat. I was so flooded with gratitude that I couldn’t speak. I coughed to clear my throat. “Thanks,” I said, simply. “This is going to help a lot. And I promise I won’t call you all the time and ask for food. It’s just hard right now, until I can find a second job or arrange for some more hours at work. He said he might be able to do it,” I added, referring to my boss, who had blithely replied that he might be able to “scrounge up a few extra hours a week” for me. Even just ten extra dollars a week would make a huge difference.
My father didn’t want to hear my gratitude. “Okay, son. That’s all right, that’s fine now. I have to go. But I’ll bring you some food.”
I hung up and looked around at the apartment. How would it appear to his eyes? I saw the dingy, yellowed walls, the filthy, nearly opaque window. The floorboards could use a refinishing but there was nothing to be done about that. I had a broom and I used it to sweep up any dust and fallen paint chips that had gathered. I did not have a dustpan, so I swept the debris onto an envelope and dropped it into the trash. I made my bed. And there wasn’t much else I could do. I wished I had some flowers or a plant. I wished I had some curtains.
I sat at the chair in front of my typewriter, but I was too anxious to sit still. So I paced some more.
Three hours later, there was a knock on my door. When I opened it, my father handed me a surprisingly small bag, which I brought into my kitchen, set on top of the stove, and began to unpack.
“Well, so,” my father said, scanning the surroundings. “Your first apartment, how about that,” he chuckled. “Yes sir, your very first apartment. Well, that’s very exciting.”
I stood motionless, looking at the contents of the bag, which I had now placed on the counter before me.
A half-size loaf of Wonder Bread with a red sticker on the wrapper that read, day old ½ price.
One package of Oscar Mayer bologna containing five slices.
One can of orange-flavored Hi-C fruit punch with a dent on the side so large that the can was, mathematically, no longer a cylinder.
And that was it.
My heart was pounding in my chest and my eyes stung with tears but I refused to cry in front of him. I would not do that. I said instead, “Thanks for bringing these things,” and I smiled.
“Well,” he said, “I don’t know what you’re going to do if you can’t afford food. You better not lose this job of yours. I don’t—” He stopped speaking and gave up, so discouraged by my pitiful life. He shook his head in disappointment. And at last, he looked me in the eyes. “I don’t know what to say to you.”
I wanted to spit in his face. I wanted to pour gas on him and light a match. I said, “I’ll see you later, then.”
He left. I listened to his footfalls on the steps, slow, somber, pained.
I watched from my window as he opened the door, climbed behind the wheel, and drove away in his blue Oldsmobile.
My hatred, the boiling oil rage I felt, had a color: white.
There is anger so powerful that the fist must go through the wall. It is not humanly possible to contain or manage this kind of anger.
Yet there is a kind of anger that goes beyond even this. Where you are lifted so high by your fury that for an instant you hover, suspended; the fist does not go through the wall. You hold your breath and wait, you hang, you float. This is where I found myself and I laughed.
And I continued to laugh.
Standing near my window overlooking the street, I doubled over, my abdominal muscles contracted in hilarity.
Newton’s Third Law engaged. Newton’s Third Law states: Forces always occur in pairs. If object A exerts a force F on object B, then object B exerts an equal and opposite force –F on object A. Phrased another way: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
Tears nearly blinded me, liquefying the world outside my window. My cheeks were wet, my nose was running. I was gasping for air, laughter now exploding out of me.
It wasn’t food my father brought me.
It was rocket fuel.
I was going to make something of myself. Something big.
My laughter was merely the eruption that occurs directly after ignition, as liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen are converted into directed kinetic energy.
Five, four, three, two, one.
Blast off.
EIGHTEEN
THE WAY I woke from sleep, suddenly, thickly, my dream was still stuck to me. Like a dry tongue, pasted to the roof of a mouth. I was thirty but felt fifty. Even with the blinds closed, as they always were, sunlight bled through the slats and washed the contents of my tiny Manhattan studio apartment. The protective, concealing layer of darkness had been peeled away by the sun and everything looked raw, exposed, like the skin that is revealed when a scab is pulled away. Hundreds of magazines, crumpled and stepped on, pasted to the floor through years of trampling, along with mounds of clothes on the sofa, half-empty Chinese food containers, Evian bottles stuffed with cigarette butts, and empty green Tsingtao beer bottles, many filled with urine. There was a path through the debris from the front door to my desk; from the desk to the bed; from the bed to the bathroom. At night when I drank, the room melted away, became a kind of nest. But in the daylight the room was madness and as I looked around at where I lived, I wondered if what I saw around me was a reflection, the externalization, of what was in my head.
I’d had another one of the dreams.
My left shoulder was numb and I couldn’t feel my fingers—I hadn’t changed position once all night. I sat up in bed, fully drained, as exhausted as if I’d been running. The sheet and comforter were twisted together into a sort of rope and my legs were intertwined with it. I’d never changed these sheets and had wet the bed again. I knew that by evening, they would be dry once again, but I could not stand to sit in the wet, terrible bed.
I swung my legs over the side and sat, feeling dizzy.
In this dream, I don’t know how I killed the person, but I was keeping their body beneath the floorboards. I was living in a different apartment, an old room with wide wood floorboards. I’d peeled up two of the boards and rested the body inside. What was so terrible was that in the dream I was aware that I had been having reccurring dreams where I killed people and had to dispose of the bodies, but this time, I’d really done it. In the dream, I’d woken up hungover and seen the pried-open floorboards. I’d approached the body and felt squeamish, repulsed. I’d wrapped the body in plastic wrap and tape and then a sheet. So in the dream, I was aware that I was having these dreams, and this made it especially real.
I walked from the bed and went into the bathroom. My urine was deep, deep yellow and as I pissed, I tried to aim the stream at the c
rusty, beige film of scum that encircled the inside of the bowl, to clean it. I’d never scrubbed the toilet.
The dreams were upsetting me. More and more, I was having the same dream. The circumstances were always different but in each, I killed somebody and then had to hide the body or find a way to get rid of it. When I woke up from one of these dreams, I was flooded with relief. I thanked God it was just a dream.
I was concerned, though I mentioned it to no one.
I climbed into the shower and as the hot water sprayed me, I felt the relief of distance from the dream. It was no longer clinging to me, the details so vivid and true. It was beginning to curl up and whither; soon it would evaporate away entirely.
But even then, I would still be left with my problem.
I dried myself by using my hand as a squeegee, sliding it quickly down my arm, legs, chest. I walked through to the main room of the apartment and picked through my laundry bag, the paper receipt still pinned to the side, to search for clean clothes. Jeans, a vintage T-shirt from a tackle shop in New Orleans, clean white socks.
I slung my backpack over my shoulder and left the apartment. Outside, I hailed a taxi and went to my office uptown.
I WAS AN associate creative director at an ad agency in Manhattan. At the office, I was funny and people seemed to like me. I’d worked with the same art director for many years and we traveled together from agency to agency as a creative team, so she assumed she knew me well. A few times a day I would go into the men’s room, close myself inside a stall, sit on the toilet, and block my ears with my hands. I would stay that way for a few minutes, trying to calm myself. I had the feeling that my home life, my real life, my dirty life, was leaking out, showing through. I had the feeling that people at the office could see something rotten and disturbing and insane poking through me.