Townie

I kissed both cheeks of each member of Marjan’s family I’d come to love, and I held her last, could smell the shampoo in her hair, could feel how completely she let me hold her.

  She whispered, “I still can’t believe you’re leaving,” and her voice broke and how could I have missed that she loved me? How could I have missed that they all did?

  PART II

  RIVER, FIST, AND BONE

  10

  TWO YEARS LATER, I was back from Texas living in a third-floor walk-up in Lynn, Massachusetts. It was a town southeast of Haverhill, a town of welfare projects and brick tenements, Cambodian and Latino street gangs, the smell of the ocean blowing in over the barrooms and alleyways and strip malls. There was a saying, “Lynn, Lynn, the city of sin, you don’t come out the way you went in,” but I lived contentedly alone in two rooms with no furniture and nothing on the walls, the front room echoing my footsteps each time I walked over its cracked linoleum floor to the kitchen where there was a gas stove and a small table and chair. In the back was the bedroom, and I slept there on a yoga mat my mother had made and upholstered for me years earlier. It was foam an inch thick and I laid it on the floor and put two work boots into a pillowcase for a pillow, covered up each night with a sleeping bag.

  I did not own a telephone or TV, a radio or record player, and each night after working construction with my brother Jeb, I lay on my foam pad or sat at the small table in the kitchen and read Max Weber, E. F. Schumacher, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin. I was twenty-two years old, and I’d become a Marxist. That’s what Texas did to me, took my hatred of bullies and bullying and institutionalized it. In Austin, I’d drifted into the social sciences where you could learn a little about a lot, but all I seemed to find was story after story of U.S. imperialism, how we had a long history of supporting dictators and Big Business at the expense of men, women, and children just trying to eat and live and be free.

  I listened to lectures on Third World politics and economic policy and the fight against communism. But it looked to me like a simple fight against the poor by the rich, the strong against the weak, and I walked the campus in a constant state of outrage and grief, so much of the world’s history the story of cruelty and injustice and very few people doing anything about it.

  This was a campus of fifty-five thousand students, half of whom were business majors, and they went to classes in spacious, air-conditioned buildings, their roofs terracotta, their open foyers sporting exotic plants and stone fountains on cool Mexican or Italian tile. Palm trees offered shade wherever you needed it, and from the stone steps of the main building, you could stand and look over the terraced steps of the South Mall to the gold dome of the state capitol shining so bright under the Texas sun you couldn’t look directly at it.

  There was the tower that’d been closed since August 1966 when Charles Whitman climbed up there and calmly aimed and shot and killed fourteen people. I could see it clearly from the steps of Arrakis House on Pearl Street, the co-op I lived in with five other men and six women. It was a small two-story in the shade of oak and pecan trees. We had a fenced-in yard and a garage that had been turned into a bedroom and bathroom, and I bunked there with Dan, a tall skinny Ph.D. candidate in political science. He had a beard and long hair and wore round rimless glasses like John Lennon, and on Friday or Saturday nights he’d play his guitar on the front porch and sing how a working-class hero was something to be.

  But there were other songs in the air. Across the alley from our garage apartment was a sorority house that held young women who drove brightly colored coupes and put their blonde hair in curlers at night and studied at the business school. Some nights, the tower usually glowing orange a few blocks east, new pickup trucks would pull up to the sorority, their beds full of fraternity boys in jackets and ties, their boots shining, and they’d hop out and line up on the lawn and sing some anthem to the girls who were now out on the second-story balcony, their smiling faces made up, their blue and white dresses billowing. The young men below would stand shoulder to shoulder singing of Texas and past glory and friendly señoritas, and the girls would toss single roses down to the fraternity boys, this ritual I assumed went back generations. The next morning I’d watch a Latina woman in a white cleaning uniform on the front lawn stooping to pick up the roses left behind, their red petals falling to the ground.

  I’d walk the hot streets and its smells of barbecue smoke and baking asphalt, frying tortillas and eucalyptus leaves and the dried pecan shells I crushed under my feet, but I’d become brooding and reclusive and studious. When I wasn’t studying, I worked out hard at the Texas Athletic Club, riding my bicycle across town to a squat cinderblock building of mainly powerlifters, some of them pushing over 400 pounds off their chests, squatting with over 600, dead-lifting even more. These were very large men, and I still strived to be one of them, but there was the growing feeling inside me that a strong body was not enough, that that kind of power was only the beginning of what you’d need to confront those who wanted to take something away from you.

  ARRAKIS OWNED a rusted-out yellow Pinto wagon. It was left to us by the parents of a boy who’d killed himself the year before I arrived, and it was the model that in those days exploded into flames on rear-end collisions. We used it to go grocery shopping or take someone to the airport, or sometimes to go cool off somewhere outside of town.

  It was a hot Saturday afternoon, the air still and heavy, and I was driving the Pinto into the lot of a 7-Eleven. Kourosh was sitting beside me. He was a new resident of the house, a twenty-nine-year-old Iranian who’d just moved here from London to study computer science. When I learned he was from Iran, I said hello in Persian and he smiled brightly and said hello back and soon we were studying together in the library, drinking beer together on the weekends, and every other Friday night we would sit down somewhere, and I would teach him English and he would reciprocate the following week by teaching me Persian. Because he was good with his hands, he’d become the house mechanic and he made the Pinto run smoother, and now in the back sat Molly, a large, kind woman with wide burn scars on her arms and legs. She had a problem with her hair falling out too, from stress, she said, and trauma, so she had no eyebrows or eyelashes, and half her head was bald while the other half held thin black hair from which her ears protruded.

  Beside her sat Jen. She was a year younger than I was. She skipped a lot of classes and stayed in her room writing poetry and painting with watercolors or spray cans, anything she could find. She had blonde hair and wore faded cotton dresses from St. Vincent de Paul’s and she’d been her high school valedictorian, though she had to explain to me what that was. Her room was next to mine on the second floor. Sometimes I’d crawl into her bed or she’d crawl into mine, and now she sat in her bathing suit next to Wei Ling, a bright and cheerful premedical student from China who laughed a lot and studied hard, smoking cigarettes in her bedroom till late at night.

  The five of us were heading to Barton Creek, a spring-fed swimming hole on the other side of Austin. All we needed was beer and ice, and just as I pulled into the lot, two frat boys climbed out of their powder blue Monte Carlo. They were both tall and well-built, their button-down shirts tucked snugly into their ironed jeans, and as we pulled up in our rusted Pinto wagon, the muffler throaty, just a bit too much exhaust seeping out the back, the driver glanced over at us like we were bugs somebody should’ve stepped on, and that’s when I noticed how he’d parked his Monte Carlo across two parking spaces, that’s when I noticed the stickers on his rear bumper: Anti-Irania Mania, and No Camel Jockeys.

  They weren’t the first I’d seen. A month before, close to midnight, I’d walked home from the campus library to see a Cadillac parked in front of our house. Like so many of the cars in that neighborhood of fraternities and sororities, it was new, its silver hubcaps catching the dim light from our front porch. I saw the No Camel Jockeys sticker on the rear bumper, and I stood there looking down at it a long while.

  Because of my ties to Mar
jan and her family, I’d studied more about Iran and its secret police, Savak, trained and supported by the United States. There were stories of men forced to watch the repeated rape of their wives, forced to watch their own children held down while fingers were broken, a hand was sawn off, or an arm. Then, on September 8, 1978, what they call Black Friday, a protesting and unarmed crowd was gunned down in Jaleh Square, and what killed them were American bullets.

  In November, students climbed over the walls of the American Embassy and took control of what they called “the nest of spies for the Great Satan.” I didn’t see us all as being the Great Satan, but I thought it very reasonable that they did.

  Back in Austin, Texas, fraternity boys got liquored up and cruised the streets looking for anyone with dark skin and eyes and hair, anyone who looked like a “camel jockey” or “sand nigger.” They found Ethiopians, Mexicans, a few Egyptians and Sudanese, and they beat them up, usually three or four on one. I’d hear of these attacks, and each day I walked to and from campus hoping to see one, hoping to do what I’d learned to do.

  Now in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven, my pulse was thrashing between my ears and I edged the Pinto up to the rear passenger side of the powder blue Monte Carlo and stepped on the gas and scraped metal off metal the length of both cars, Wei Ling screaming, the Monte Carlo rocking in the rear view mirror as I pulled ahead, a strip of chrome hanging from it like a broken limb.

  Molly was yelling, “You have no right! You have absolutely no right to do that with us in the car. Andre. Take us home right this minute!”

  “Not till they come out.” My mouth was dry. I’d slipped off my seat belt so I could jump out of the car when they came back outside, those two racist, entitled pieces of shit I was going to go after. But Kourosh’s hand was on my arm.

  “Andre-jahn, no. No.”

  And it was like the man next to me in that wedding reception in East Boston, a calm voice telling me this is not the way.

  FOR THE most part I was able to control myself. Every night after dinner, Kourosh and I would load our backpacks with books and notebooks and walk to the main library on campus where we’d study from seven till just after midnight. I was reading a lot of labor history now, which kept me in a dark mood, especially stories like the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado when the governor sent in the National Guard to break up a strike and they shot and burned to death twenty men, women, and children. Karl Marx said that human history is the history of class conflict, and how, I thought, could he have been anything but right. And I was tired of walking around carrying this new knowledge that only the writers of little-read books seemed to have, that only my professors had.

  It was early spring in Austin and all day it had rained. You could smell the ozone, the magnolias and eucalyptus and pine. Across the alley at suppertime, the sorority’s kitchen door had been open and they’d been served brisket and beans, but now it was after midnight, a Tuesday or Wednesday, and my window was open, and I lay on my mattress in the dark listening to drops of rain ticking from leaf to leaf. The house was quiet. Down the hall behind a closed door came the tapping of keys from a manual typewriter. I’d always loved that sound, was drawn to it for reasons I couldn’t explain. A block or two north a college boy let out a rebel yell, some lone drunk wandering home from an outdoor bar. But then there were more voices, two or three talking loud and laughing, another one hollering, and didn’t they know the whole neighborhood was asleep? Did they even think about that?

  I closed my eyes and tried to ignore them. The voices got louder. I could hear boot steps on Pearl. A male voice was talking about a woman, how everybody knew she was a whore. “How come you don’t know that, J.B? She’s a fuckin’ whore.” And J.B. let out a boozy yell right there under my window. I sat up and looked down at three of them standing in the alley, the light from the sorority’s stoop shining across the wet asphalt. They were tall, the way so many Texans seemed to be, and they wore pointed Tony Lamas and expensive cotton shirts, one of them swaying slightly as he lit a cigarette, the other two talking in loud, half-drunk voices about Dolly, the same woman they were calling a whore. The window screen was pressing against my nose. A whisper inside me said, Ignore them. They’ll wander off. Go to sleep.

  But then one of them started laughing and he let out that rebel yell again, and I said, “You want to keep it down out there, please? People are sleeping.”

  “Yeah? You want your ass kicked?”

  I pulled on my jeans and T-shirt and was soon walking barefoot over the kitchen’s linoleum floor, then damp ground, then the cool wet asphalt of the alley.

  LATER, BACK in my bed in the dark, the boy in me kept replaying how I’d walked up to three tall men and waited for one of them to get it started, and when the tallest one asked me if I’d come out there for an ass-kicking, I dropped him with a right cross to the face, then pivoted and dropped the one next to him, then I went after the third but he was the drunkest one and he tripped and fell, then the second one was on me and we both knelt in a puddle swinging at each other till I got in more than he did and he fell back and crawled into the shadows of the dumpster.

  I stood and yelled at them to get the fuck out of my alley. But the first one I’d hit wasn’t moving. He lay on his back with his arms spread wide, his mouth open and bleeding, and I watched as his two friends mumbled revenge and picked him up and carried him farther down the alley to their car. They lay him in the backseat. The engine revved once, then the driver, the second one I’d punched, backed up and drove slowly away from our house.

  For a while I couldn’t stop replaying how well those first two punches had gone, the first a knockout, the second a knockdown. And it had happened so fast, the way it always did, so that my friends in the house I lived in didn’t even know about it. That I’d protected them. For a few moments I lay in the glow of the hurt I’d caused, and I felt completely virtuous, as brave and selfless as a good father.

  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 f
ather 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?