My Other Life

I sat there in the booth, clinging to the edge of the seat where Bun-Bun had been squatting, feeling like a hitchhiker in an already full car of people who knew one another, knowing that there was not quite enough room for me, yet not wanting to get out and be left on an empty road so late without the prospect of another ride. I needed the ride.

  "Did you see Caddyshack?" Weechie asked me.

  "No," I said. "I was probably traveling when it came out. Maybe it didn't show in England. I used to live there. I'm a writer. I write books. I write movies, too."

  "That's like stupid, isn't it? I mean, no one writes movies. It's all like photography and acting. Explosions and car chases. What's the writing?"

  "Scripts," I said.

  Mundo was breathing deeply, gargling beer at the same time, drunk and deaf. Bun-Bun had still not returned from the toilet, and the other two looked so dull I had the feeling again that I was speaking to people who did not know English. But it was I who was the alien.

  "Screenplays...." I said, aware that in divulging this I was telling them the truth about myself, and that in wanting them to hear me and to understand I had to be very particular, perhaps tell them much more than I had told anyone else. Already, after just a few minutes, I had told them more than I had told Dr. Mylchreest. But they were still dull, and more people had come into the bar, music blared from the jukebox, the television over the bar was showing a hockey game and, attempting to be heard above the din, I sounded as though I were pleading.

  "...for movies."

  "You make movies?" Weechie said.

  "Yes," I said, to keep it simple.

  "Hey, maybe I've seen some of them."

  "That one," I said, tapping Half Moon Street. "But the first one I did was with Peter Bogdanovich. Saint Jack. Ben Gazzara was in it. They actually made it in Singapore, where the book is set, in 1978."

  "I was six years old," Weechie said.

  "I lived in Singapore," I said. "Three years. Teaching, doing some journalism. Even smoked a bone occasionally."

  Blaine looked at me as though he had suddenly heard something intelligible, and said, "You got any dope on you, man?"

  "Half Moon Street was made in London. The book's got some life in it, but the movie's flat and it's not too accurate. Listen, I should know. I lived there eighteen years. I left there when I left my wife. I left my writing too. What was it? Something about leaving the house, leaving my routines—leaving people who cared. Who wants to sit there and bleed every day if no one cares about what you write?"

  Weechie squinted at this, then said, "What we mainly do is we mainly rent videos, and I get a special deal on them for working in the mall, which I do at the pet shop, like I was telling you."

  "The Mosquito Coast —ever see it? It's supposed to be Honduras but they made it in Belize. I traveled there—all over Latin America, actually. It was the trip I wrote about in The Old Patagonian Express. Then I got the idea for the novel. A guy, an inventor, who wants to take his family and get away from it all. But he finds out that you take your problems with you—all your flaws are portable. Ironic, isn't it? Like I have to discover that again, firsthand."

  Blaine was gnawing his finger, Mundo pursing his lips over the top of the beer bottle. And Weechie said, "I wonder what's taking Bunny so long?"

  "Harrison Ford was in it."

  "I don't get him at all," Weechie said.

  "And River Phoenix."

  They stared at me and at that moment, having said so much, I stood up and said that I had to go to the toilet, although I didn't—I just needed to turn away from them for a little while. I passed Bun-Bun on the way, and said hello, and in the men's room I looked in the mirror and wondered whether I was drunk. I had told them more than I had told my therapist. They knew everything, even my name. They did not care, they had hardly heard me, they did not know. I was an alien, a different life form, and gabbling, imploring them to understand, I did not even speak their language well. I wanted to be with them, to know them better, because I felt that they were the simplest people on earth, and that I could resume with them, like the Martians in those sci-fi movies who insinuate themselves in the life of the earth by taking the form of workmen. But I had failed, even telling these people everything, ingratiating myself; and so I decided to drive back to the Cape.

  Passing the booth, I lifted my hand to say goodbye and was surprised by Bun-Bun's smile of welcome and approval and the friendly way she patted the seat for me to sit down.

  "Hey, so you know River Phoenix?"

  On our way up Mystic Avenue shortly after that, Blaine was talkative. "I scored some speed in the shitter using my stamps," he said, and when I asked if they were food stamps he said, "You know any other kind?" At the take-out pizza place Mundo was drunkenly seated with his head down while Blaine gabbled, "River Phoenix is one of the greats," and, as though offering proof of it, he added, "You can see that he does drugs. If only he didn't have that dorky name."

  "Like maybe he was born there," Weechie said, and Bun-Bun agreed.

  They stood at the counter helping me choose the pizza but continually glancing back at the two young men, one mute and drunk, the other stoned and garrulous; and I was reminded of mothers I had seen in stores with their children, nervously tending them, looking weary and overworked, afraid that they will break something or annoy other customers.

  And then we left and turned towards the Medford end of the avenue, Weechie and I in front with one pizza in a box, Bun-Bun behind with the other pizza, and Blaine working his arms and bouncing, and Mundo stumbling at the rear. I was glad to be with them. I did not want to go home alone. I needed their company, and their sense of anarchy and general acceptance—they were outlaws and misfits, I needed that. I also needed them as a ragged little family that was disorderly enough to make room for me.

  "I've never seen Die Hard," I said.

  "I've seen it about ten times," Weechie said. "Have you seen the other one, Half Moon Street?"

  Already she had forgotten what I had told her. And the others clearly did not care that I had written it. But what did it matter? It only meant that I could not impress them by boasting of my feeble celebrity. But also, perversely, it had the effect of making me feel strong, like an exercise in humility; and telling my secrets to people who did not understand was a way of my keeping my secrets while at the same time proving my strength.

  We crossed Mystic Avenue and walked under the glary street lamps, through the low walls of blackened crusty snow that had been plowed from the road and dumped here. A slanting chain-link fence ran along the perimeter of some brick apartment houses.

  "Where are we?"

  "You come from Medford and you don't know the projects?"

  There was a hole in the fence, triangular, bristling with metal strands, an icy path under it. We cut through and followed the casts of dark footsteps through the snow to a broken door, and a vandalized hallway; up some stairs to an apartment barricaded with three padlocks fastened against hasps that had the look of tarnished belt buckles. Just before we passed under the portico I had looked up and seen a woman staring out an upper window at me, and I felt a thrill.

  "It's my mother's place," Weechie said. "But she's in Cambridge, currently living with her boyfriend."

  The word "currently" stopped me.

  "He's a cop," Bun-Bun said. "But he's OK."

  A baby screamed behind one door, a man howled behind another, a woman talked monotonously behind a third; they might have been television programs, but it was impossible to know for sure, and anyway it did not matter. This was where everything came together, overlapping, indistinguishable—life and TV, petty criminals and the police, custody battles and child abuse, welfare, food stamps, theft and generosity, the smell of smoke and oil, frying pans, spaghetti sauce, burned meat, onions, in the sour, boiled air of the tenement hallway.

  There was something raw about the projects, especially this particular one. It was a place with no innocence, and because of that it excited and disgust
ed me, the way brothels had done in other countries, and this was just like a brothel. It was so easy to enter and leave, and it had some of the same odors, seedy and sexual, the sound of violence in the shouts and the sight of danger on the scrawled doorjambs and walls. Voices mounting in an argument on another floor, the nakedness of it, the aggression, the unembarrassed squawks. A young, pretty woman squeezing past us on her way down the broken stairs. That was it: that she was so pretty and sweet-smelling, and the place so wrecked, and in a horrible slumming hunch I could imagine her boredom and her toughness.

  I had been roused by merely kicking past the gutter and entering the building. There was no pretense here, and if there was a risk it was one that might be rewarded. You could go down Forest Street or Lawrence Road and never get nearer any house than the front gate, the houses were dark, silent, enigmatic. But here there was light and noise and smells. This brick tenement full of people was unlovely in a way that was viciously attractive to me.

  Weechie undid the padlocks and pushed the door open. The apartment seemed neat compared to the vandalized hallway, and its warmth—the radiators pinging—made it seem homey. A big worn sofa and some armchairs faced the television set, and this room, with posters on the walls, opened on to a dining area, a kitchen, a chipped table. It was bare and so it seemed tidy even though it was not clean. A small dog skittered out of a back room and yapped at me and then began humping my leg while I tried to pluck him away.

  "Bingo, get away," Bun-Bun said, almost gently, but the dog hung on, his hairy hindquarters warming my leg. "Bingo doesn't get the big picture."

  "I got him at the shop, where I also got them posters," Weechie said.

  Now I looked at them: bright blown-up photographs of puppies, of kitchens, one of parrots.

  "My mother wants them sconces for her place."

  Sconces? Such an elegant and precise word, and I was not even sure what it meant until I saw the light fixtures on the wall, and realized that Weechie, this simple woman in this poor room in the projects, had taught me the meaning of an old English word I should have known.

  Bun-Bun put out some paper plates and napkins while Weechie opened the boxes of pizza. Mundo stumbled to one of the chairs, like a dog to a box, and curled up and hugged himself. Bingo climbed onto him and went to sleep. Blaine tore off two pizza slices and ate them, walking up and down, murmuring as he chewed.

  I sat at the kitchen table with Weechie and Bun-Bun, trying to decide which of them was the more physically attractive—Weechie with her sallowness and the tattoos on her thin arms, or Bun-Bun's hearty plumpness and the stud through her tongue. I felt I would go for Weechie—her look of ill health, which might have been merely the bad light in the apartment, made her appear submissive and undemanding.

  I said to Weechie, "So where do you sleep?"

  "We're in there," Bun-Bun said, with more authority than seemed necessary, and as though dismissing any further questions.

  "I'm on the couch," Blaine said, snatching more pizza.

  "Don't drip!" Bun-Bun said as Blaine bobbled a slice and got sauce on the carpet. It seemed pathetic and foolishly brave, her howling at this nasty young man over a spill of goop on the frayed and faded carpet.

  "My mother was like, 'Where have you been?'"

  They all had that way of suddenly starting stories without any prologue, in the middle, plunging in with no other reference, losing you immediately until you listened hard.

  "All that shit about how late it was," Weechie went on. "But she was really asking me about boys. Was I fooling around with them and stuff. She didn't say sex, but that's what she wanted to know. She didn't realize that I was doing like two or three pipes of crack. I comes back wasted and she's like, 'So who's this boy you're dating?' And I'm like, 'Dating? You mean getting me stoned?' She'd make me play cards with her, whist and shit like that, to figure out if I was drunk, which I wasn't, but she was only worried about one thing, like, was anyone doing me."

  Bun-Bun let out an unholy laugh that called attention to itself, not as mirth but a reminder.

  "I had a heavy crack habit."

  Blaine said, "I don't want to hear about it."

  "I just stopped going home. And after my mother moved in with Lenny I came back, which was kind of ironic, him being a cop."

  I felt comfortable, seated at this kitchen table with these people who had accepted me without any questions. I said, "It amazes me to think that I grew up in this city, and then I left—and I don't know a soul. So a few hours ago I was skiing through the Fells, and here I am eating pizza, feeling strangely as though I'm home."

  Blaine grunted. Bun-Bun blew her nose in a paper napkin.

  Weechie said, "So what about the videos? I got to return them both tomorrow whether we watch them or not."

  I sat in one of the armchairs, my legs stretched out, feeling a chill and a weariness—the fatigue of skiing, and beer and the pizza and the small warm room, Mundo moaning in the other chair and Blaine looking agitated and Bun-Bun and Weechie on the sofa, side by side, like parents among their big clumsy kids.

  My eyes were heavy, and I was too tired to shut my hanging-open mouth. I knew it was open because somehow the violence of the video, its vibrations and explosions, even its voices, registered on my tongue. The ceiling light warmed the skin on my face.

  "He's asleep," I heard someone say, and after a moment I realized they meant me. The unconcerned way they said it reassured me that they would do me no harm.

  2

  Waking after a night's sleep was always a shock for me—not just being jarred from the other life of my dreams, but also having to get up and face the day. How odd that this had been going on for fifty years and I still had not gotten used to it. Today it was worse than usual, and somehow I knew that this morning was one of the lowest points of my life.

  It was dark when I woke—the darkness stinking of stale food and dust—and where was I? The old mildewed carpet seemed to purr with tobacco smoke and sent an itch into the air. Even in the dark you knew this place was dirty. I lay very still, with an animal's anxious and unblinking alertness, until the cold gray light gave the window a definite shape. I had no idea where I was, and then saw a torn comic book on a battered coffee table and became frightened again. Outside, what I could see of the world was being wrapped and inconvenienced by the thick white bandage of a blizzard.

  Sometimes a snowfall can make you feel you are being buried alive. But this snow, this silence, this twilight atmosphere of the storm, helped me by softening the shock of waking, which was intense here. I lay folded awkwardly in an armchair, in a room I did not recognize, under pictures of tetchy cats and sorrowful dogs, one person collapsed on the sofa and another in the chair opposite me, his arm over his head. The muffled sound of traffic moving through the snow in the street told me there was something happening outside in spite of the storm, wheels sending an up-and-down hum through the room, making a loose windowpane tremble in its crumbly putty.

  So I was alone, having woken among strangers in a poky apartment in the projects, unknown among these ignorant people. The snow improved it a little by putting it all in black and white, giving it drama. The cloudy light soothed me. It was a poor place, where no one knew me or cared whether I lived or died. I had never entered here before. I thought: I am back home. I remembered a line from Black Spring in which Henry Miller had urged me to leave Medford, saying, "O glab and glairy, O glabrous world now chewed to a frazzle, under what dead moon do you lie cold and gleaming?"

  I cringed at the thought of what I had said last night, but I played it all back and I saw their faces and I realized that they had not even heard me. Even deaf people would have had a reaction to what I said, would have looked at me closely and read my lips and tried to understand. But these people were utterly indifferent, selfish, obtuse. I was grateful to them for not caring, for having no memory of anything I had told them.

  It was seven-fifteen. I had been in the apartment for nine hours and twenty minutes
. I had eaten two and a half slices of pizza and drunk three beers. I had spent twenty-two dollars on them. There were eighteen ornamental brass tacks on the long side of the old coffee table in front of the sofa, where the comic book Awful Dwarfs lay; ten on the end, probably fifty-six brass tacks altogether.

  I heard water running and then someone muttering, oddly similar sounds drizzling in the next room, and then, "I'm going to be late for work."

  It was Weechie, yawning, rummaging in the kitchen, opening and closing the refrigerator door, gathering the videocassettes into a plastic bag.

  "See you later," Bun-Bun said. "I just have to find my keys."

  At the door between them there was a kiss, a beautiful murmur, a moment of the most casual intimacy, a sweetness that made me envious.

  "Love ya," one of them said, and I lay there in the shadows with my back to them, regretting my lost love.

  As soon as Bun-Bun had gone too, I got up and put on my shoes and stretched and wondered what to do. The two men—the children in this little family—were still asleep.

  I looked in the refrigerator, not for something to eat but just to see what was there. A box of crackers, another of Cocoa Puffs breakfast cereal, a jar of peanut butter, a bottle of pickles, another of ketchup, some jam, an uncovered bowl of leftover beans, and what looked like a large bar of soap with teeth marks on it and a bite out of one end. There were dishes in the sink. I used the bathroom, which smelled of herbal shampoo and a perfumed powder that stung my eyes. The bathroom was the only place in the apartment where I saw any books. They were paperbacks: The Raven Master, thick with dampness, and Rubyfruit Jungle, with a nail file serving as a bookmark.

  Uncomfortable in the apartment, feeling like an intruder, I left by the front door, my eyes numbed by the strange light of the snowstorm. The snow was not deep but it covered everything, and the cold day, the knowledge that the snow would not melt, seemed to give it a solemnity. Below me, on Mystic Avenue, I saw Weechie standing at a bus stop. I walked over to her.