Jeb and I laughed and Cleary didn’t know why, then he inhaled resin on his next hit and said, “Shit, man, the screem’s broken.”
“The what?”
“The screem. You know, the screem. Like a screem door?”
By the time we reached the avenues the snow had blanketed the streets. On Cedar, cars spun out snow as they drove from the curb or the corner store. Cleary let out a yelp and a holler and went running after a Chevy that had just pulled away, skidding slightly as it went. Cleary ran low, bent over so the driver wouldn’t see him, and when he reached the back bumper he grabbed it and squatted on his sneakers, his butt an inch or two from the road. And he skied away, just like that, the snow shooting out from under the wheels of the car, out from under his Zayre Department Store sneakers, blue exhaust coughing out its pipe beside him.
IN OUR living room stood tall pine bookshelves loaded with hardcover novels and short story collections. They were the sole objects our mother and father had ever owned, and our house seemed to be the only one in the neighborhood that had them. In Cleary’s living room, there was the TV, a few glass knickknacks on the shelf beneath it. On the walls were department store prints of daisies in a vase, a kitten with sad, round eyes. Once I saw a slim hardcover lying on the coffee table, The Illustrated Bible.
The first time Cleary was in our house, he walked up to the shelves and ran his fingers along the spines of Faulkner, Chekhov, and Balzac, books I’d never quite noticed myself.
“Are these all real?”
“What?”
“I thought they were for looks, you know, like in a store.”
“Nope.”
“You read ’em all?”
I shrugged. I hadn’t read any of them. “My old man has. And my mother.”
Cleary kept running his fingers along all those books, shaking his head.
ON WEEKENDS at parties down on Seventh, or out in a weed lot, or up in the woods of Round Pond, we’d try whatever drugs were going around; we’d eat tabs of brown mescaline, or a quarter of LSD 25, or half a tab of four-way purple blotter acid, chemically treated paper you dissolved under the tongue. It tasted like earwax and the rush came on in twenty or thirty minutes, the feeling the world was a strange and fascinating place really, a special place. That life was special.
But it made your heart pound hard and fast in your rib cage and sometimes we just had to get up and run, Jeb and Cleary and I flying down the dark avenues in our sneakers or boots, which seemed to be moving us, making our legs lift and our knees bend, and we could go on forever. It was long after midnight, and one of us was screaming, the wind in our faces that smelled like green leaves and motor oil and rotting wood and tin siding cooling off. We ran past a brick church, dark and locked up, like God’s house was closed for business, had always been closed for business, and we ran past a packy and its lighted beer signs, bright blue and red neon slashing into my brain, bad to look at, and a car tore by us, some angry machine driven by no one, and we kept running and running, past the auto parts yard, all the angry machines quiet in there, a rusted hulking darkness behind a plank fence Cleary kicked himself onto sideways for a stride, the German shepherd behind there barking, straining against his chain which sounded like jangling treasure, bad men and gold and now there were golden lights ahead, Jeb already there, his hair flapping like a small child barely connected to his head, and the gold was Christmas glowing, lighted strings of bulbs hanging over used cars with hot pink price decals on their windshields, numbers I couldn’t decipher, then, without sound, the lights exploded, six or seven of them going dark, broken glass falling like snow onto the cars. Cleary was whooping and yelling, and a bottle broke against a post, brown glass spraying, and he ran up and down the gutter looking for something else to throw.
A cruiser pulled up, its spotlight on us brighter than the sun, but it was night and now we ran blind through the used car lot and over a chain-link fence, running through yards and side streets, a door opening and slamming, a woman yelling, her voice hoarse so maybe it was another dog yelling at us, and the cop was too slow, his cruiser shooting up all the wrong side streets, its engine angry like the others.
It was better not to go anywhere.
Sometime that year, I’d moved my room up into the attic. Our rented house had that three-story turret, and the third story was part of the attic, but it had a finished floor and light blue wallpaper and trim around the windows. It was unheated, but there were electrical outlets that worked, and there was even an old bed with a headboard. I moved my things up there, hung my blacklight posters of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. Tacked to the wall my blacklight, a birthday or Christmas present, and I got hold of some glow-in-the dark paints and painted a space galaxy on the ceiling. At night, when only the blacklight was on, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix pulsing light from the walls like insistent spirits, I lay on the bed and stared at the moon and stars and distant worlds.
It was a better place to trip. No cops or dogs or angry machines. Just Bob Dylan on my record player, the expanding cosmos over our heads. But one night in winter we ate a batch of blotter cut with strychnine. Every ninety seconds or so a hot knife seemed to push through my heart, and I had to stand and hold my breath as it passed, my shoulders rounded, my chest sunken, this feeling I’d been yanked through all the decades of my life and now I was old and dying and it was my fault.
ON THE other side of the river was Bradford. It’s where a lot of Jocks at the high school lived, the kids who wore corduroys and sweaters and looked clean. It’s where houses had big green lawns. It’s where the college was where Pop taught. It’s where he lived in an apartment building with Theo Metrakos and his friend Dave Supple, a writer too.
Since leaving our mother, Pop had lived in a few places, but we rarely saw them and never slept there. Years later I would hear my father say the divorce had left him dating his children. That still meant picking us up every Sunday for a matinee and, if he had the money, an early dinner somewhere. For a few years now he was taking us to church too. He’d pull up in his rusted-out Lancer and drive us to Mass at Sacred Hearts in Bradford Square. The five of us would walk down the aisle between the crowded pews, Jeb and I with our long hair, Suzanne in her tight hip-huggers, Nicole in her brace she now wore for scoliosis, Pop one of the only men in church not wearing a jacket or tie. He refused to put money in the collection basket, too. Many times I’d hear him say, “You think Jesus ever wore a fucking tie? Did Jesus spend money on buildings?”
One night, when we were still living at the doctor’s house, I heard Mom on the phone trying to convince Pop that he should start taking out each of us one at a time, that he was never going to know us as individual people if he didn’t.
I don’t know if I cared then about that or not, but a cool sweat broke out on my forehead just thinking about being alone with Pop. I’d never been alone with him. What would I say? What would we talk about? What would we do?
When Mom got off the phone, she said, “I can’t believe it. Your father says he’ll be too shy with each of you. He’s scared of his own kids!”
This made me feel better and worse, but every Wednesday night he’d drive up to the house and take one of us back to his apartment across the river. It was on the third floor of an old brick building covered with ivy. Across the street was the Bradford Green, a lawn and trees and a gazebo, and you could see it from his bedroom where his bed was always made and there were shelves of books and his black wooden desk I remembered from when he used to live with us, its surface clean and organized, notebooks stacked neatly beside his typewriter beside his humidor and pipe stand, six or eight of them each with a white pipe cleaner sticking out of the mouthpiece.
In his small kitchen we’d cook something, pasta and a quick tomato sauce and garlic bread we warmed in the oven. Maybe a bacon and cheese omelet. This was something I looked forward to the most; it seemed I was hungry all the time. At home across the river, unless Bruce had given our mother a new check, something he wa
s able to do less and less now, there just wasn’t much food in the house. Breakfast was usually a Coke from Pleasant Spa bought with change we’d found in our mother’s purse or under the cushions of our wicker couch. When other kids filed into the cafeteria, we didn’t have the money so drifted out back where the pot heads stood on the grates, too cool to sit with the others, passing a pipe around, a bag of potato chips, too.
Suzanne was selling dope. One afternoon I stuck my head in her bedroom doorway, and she was sitting on her mattress with Glenn P. rolling dozens of joints from a garbage bag full of Mexican gold. Edgar Winter was playing on her record player. Kids at school walked up to her with a hungry look in their eyes, and my sister had cash and after school she’d sometimes buy us subs, potato chips and Cokes and candy bars, our first real meal of the day. When Mom got home from work at close to eight o’clock, she’d open a can of Spaghettios or stew for us and heat it up on the stove. Sometimes she’d fry us Spam, or make that Frito Pie, too tired to do much else, too broke to buy much else. And Bruce didn’t cook. He’d drink bourbon in the kitchen with her and talk about the new job he had in Boston doing the same thing she was, getting slumlords to rid their buildings of lead paint. She’d nod her head, moving quickly in her work clothes, a far-off look in her eyes, as if she was trying to put back together how her life had taken her here to this: this milltown, this canned food she never would have used when she was first married, these four hungry, depressed teenagers, this hovering man who wasn’t their father.
Those Wednesday nights at Pop’s apartment waiting to eat, he probably asked me questions about my life—school, homework, friends—but what I remember is feeling like a liar and a fake. I’d be in a T-shirt and jeans I’d washed earlier so they wouldn’t smell like dope. I probably told him I was getting good grades, mostly B’s, which, miraculously, I was, but I left out that I regularly skipped half my classes, slept late, and didn’t go to school several days a month, that I was flunking algebra because it was the first class of the morning when I was most high, that Jeb and I and our friend Cleary spent our afternoons looking for a house party where we could get a free buzz, or we’d be downtown in one of the shops, usually the Army and Navy store distracting the man behind the register so Cleary could stuff a T-shirt or a pair of socks or wool cap down his pants. Sometimes we called the cops on ourselves. One of us would lower his voice and report kids throwing eggs at houses and we’d give them the street, then run there with eggs in our pockets and as soon as we saw the cruiser we’d pelt it and run. One time a cop stuck his head out the window and shouted, “I’ll shoot you fuckin’ assholes!”
We’d end up down by the river and stand on the railroad trestle over the swirling brown water below, betting who had the balls to stay on the longest before the train came, and what would be worse? Getting hit by the Boston & Maine? Or having to jump into the Merrimack River where you’d probably be poisoned to death before you drowned anyway?
There were girls in these neighborhoods who just gave it away. One was Janice Woods, who at fifteen had cropped blonde hair and breasts and hips and liked to walk up to guys and stick her fingers down their pants just so she could feel them get hard in her hand. Lately she’d been coming around, spending afternoons with Jeb in his room.
I could have told my father about her, or her father, Daryl Woods, whom our mother got to know from her work somehow. He was short and wore tight jeans and motorcycle boots, his mustache thick and blond. One night he and my mother went out for a drink at the VFW off Monument Square. They were sitting on stools at the bar when a muscular kid with a long ponytail walked in and asked Daryl for a light. Woods looked him over and told him to get lost. The kid pushed him and Daryl Woods threw a short right into his face and dropped him.
It was winter, and when I got up for school the next morning, the house still dark, the hallway lit up Daryl Woods sleeping on the wicker couch in the living room. He was snoring, his arm over his eyes, and I could see the dried blood and stitches in his forearm from his wrist to his elbow. After their drink, my mother and Daryl had gotten back into our car, a used red Toyota. Mom said she’d just started it up when that same muscled kid with the ponytail ran up to her side of the car and yelled, “Duck, lady.” Then he threw a Molotov cocktail past her face at Woods in the passenger side, the bottle smashing against his raised forearm, glass and gasoline spraying over them both. But the fuse had gone out and my mother was flooring it, downshifting and swearing, the kid in the street behind them swearing back.
The inside of the car smelled like gas for weeks.
One March afternoon, at a day party down on Seventh, Cleary and I taking the joint passed to us in the loud smoking noise, a couple of rent collectors told us to beat it and before we could stand and go, they yanked us up and pushed us down the stairs. They kicked open the door and shoved us onto the plywood porch, then off it into the mud. I remember Cleary saying, “C’mon, Ricky, we didn’t do nothin’. C’mon.”
And Ricky J., who months later would get stabbed in the same apartment he was kicking us out of, punched Cleary in the face, his head snapping back, a whimper coming out of him as Kenny V. shouldered me up against the porch, then, without a word, started throwing punches into my chest and ribs and arms. I covered up and he smacked me in the forehead and the temple and I raised my hands and then he went to work on my body. But he wasn’t hitting as hard as Clay Whelan had, and a voice in my head said, This is it? This is all? I nearly clenched my fist and started punching back. But they both carried Buck knives and the one whaling on Cleary, Ricky J., was on top of him now, punching him over and over in the head.
Then it was done. They were on the porch breathing hard, looking down at us. Cleary was just getting to his feet, blood dripping from one eye and between his teeth.
Ricky J. lit up a cigarette and flicked the match over our heads. “No more fucking moochers. Now screw.”
Before we were even to the street Cleary started laughing. He turned and yelled, “Fuckin’ losers!,” and we ran up the hill and across Main Street and down the alley to his house and mother.
There were the Murphy brothers, four of them. They’d drive up to house parties where they didn’t know anyone. Walk in, drink what they wanted, smoke what they wanted, eat what they wanted, grab the butt or breasts of any girl or woman nearby, and if anybody ever said anything to them about it or even looked at them wrong, they’d jump him right there, four of them on one.
Dennis was the youngest. He was tall and had dirty blond curly hair and a cracked front tooth. It was a warm afternoon in April or May, and Jeb and Cleary and I were walking back from Round Pond, a reservoir where there were woods and you could find kids smoking dope there in the trees, or passing Tall Boys around in front of a fire till somebody called the cops or the fire department and you’d run and not look back. That afternoon Cleary taught us how to get high just by breathing deep and fast for a full minute, then have someone put you in a bear hug and squeeze till you felt your brain float up and fizz out the top of your head. I was afraid to do it, it seemed dangerous to me. Bad for your heart. But I watched Jeb squeeze Cleary and dump him in the pine needles where he lay a long time, his eyes closed, his mouth open. When he came to he was pale, but he smiled and said, “That was boss. That was so friggin’ boss.”
We were on the sidewalk close to Monument Square. There was a sub shop there between a drugstore and convenience store. Sometimes the owners tossed out a pizza or a sub nobody ever picked up for takeout, and we’d find them in the dumpster out back, still warm and in the box or wrapped tightly in white deli paper.
“Hey, faggots!” It was Dennis Murphy. He ran across the street, then fell in step with us as if we knew him, as if we were friends. “How’s it hangin’? Suckin’ any hog?”
We never stopped walking and he walked with us. He had a light pine branch in his hand a foot and a half long, and he was slapping it against his palm as he walked. My heart was beating fast, and my mouth had gone gummy. We we
re getting close to the square, the gas stations and shops, cars driving around the statue of the Union soldier in the middle of the asphalt. An old woman was walking in our direction on the sidewalk ahead of us. She was short and small. Her hair was white. Even though the air was warm she wore a thin coat buttoned to the top, and she carried two full grocery bags, one in each arm. I started to move to the side. I remember hoping Murphy wouldn’t say anything about sucking hog as we passed her. Her eyes had been on the concrete, on where it was cracked and where it was heaved and buckled, but now she looked up at us and she seemed to pull her groceries in tighter. None of us moved to the side and she had to nearly step in the street as we passed and that’s when Murphy flicked his branch out and slapped her face, her eyes blinking and tearing up, and he kept walking. We all kept walking. Cleary laughed like he thought it was funny when I knew he didn’t. I don’t remember what Jeb said or did, but I did nothing. The old woman was yelling something at us. I could hear the shock in her voice, the outrage. She said something about the police and her dead husband. She yelled, “I hope you’re proud of yourselves,” her voice tremulous. And to walk beside Dennis Murphy for even another heartbeat felt like poison to my own blood, but I kept walking.
In my visits with Pop once a month, I could have told him that story, or the others, but why would I?
4
ONE WEDNESDAY IN late spring, Pop set up a hibachi grill outside on the half-wall alongside his apartment building. The air was cool and I could smell the lighter fluid he’d just lit up, the mud in the street drains. There was about an hour of daylight left and my father was throwing a ball to me on the sidewalk.
It was a baseball that belonged to one of his roommates. For a while Pop looked in his buddy’s bedroom for a couple of gloves too, and I was relieved he didn’t find them. I was fourteen but wouldn’t know what to do with a baseball glove. What hand do you put it on? How do you catch a ball in it?