A Song for Carmine (7 page)
When Ma came home
that afternoon, she nearly fainted when I told her the ambulance had just left with him, that he’d turned white from lack of oxygen and couldn’t speak. I watched the red ambulance lights leave the house and travel through town from the end of the street.
“He’s fine, Ma, he’s fine.”
She falls into me, and I hear her rattled breathing on my chest.
“We had a little talk and I called 911.” I pull away from her and look at her as I speak.
She sits down on the sofa and sighs deeply. I go to the kitchen to get her a cup of coffee; the old percolator is lukewarm.
“Was he afraid, Carmine? I only left for just an hour.” She searches my face.
“He was,” I tell her, and I think about the terror he must have felt as I paced the room as he gasped for air.
“He shouldn’t be alone. I have to go to him.” Ma fidgets, twists her hands, and shakes as she drinks her coffee.
“You should,” I say.
“Won’t you come with me?”
* * *
There is nothing original about the Crazy Horse Bar or the fact that we’ve stumbled in there. I am beginning to think that life is not as chaotic as we think, that there may be real order to things. A series of ins and out, yeses and nos; is it possible that life is just what we pay attention to? Or is it the same scene run over and over again, back-to-back, like a reel from a black-and-white movie that has malfunctioned and keeps circling and circling.
The reputation of this place precedes it. People talk. Around town, people call it the Shack. It is a hole-in-the-wall, a dive, but inside, there are the most beautiful women in Atlanta, pretty and soft; they don’t know what they could do. It is a sad sort of irony, makes me think of the way bunnies are eaten by coyotes and newborn babies are born with their mothers’ habits, before they have a chance to become themselves.
The building has a lean to it; it nearly dips down to the ground and back up again. The metal siding gleams in the moonlight, threatening, piercing. The night is chilly and again it is wet. When we get out of the car—me, Mark, and Griff—I shake my head, think about Ma alone at the hospital. Why have I come back here and with them?
I’ve been so many places lately: on window ledges, in my old bed, at the church, by Pa’s side. The phone still never rings and I still can’t see any shapes in my future, don’t know where I’ll go, what I’ll do; I grasp at images hoping to find the outline of something solid.
Mark and Griff had shown up at my door, loud, obnoxious; they think they know me, and I am not sure if they do or don’t. They said we should drive to Buckhead, throw a few back, talk about old times, remember how things used to be, cut up, they said. I told them Pa’s just been taken to the hospital, that he’s dying for real, that Ma’s on the way there. I said, “Let’s jump in the car and get out of here.”
We walk up the sidewalk. It is ten o’clock. Nothing is happening, but people are flowing into the building; and when the door opens, the music pours out and I can feel it in my legs. The lights above the dance floor bounce on and off the walls. There are women with trays walking around, young people. I try to remember myself here as a teenager, sneaking in with fake IDs and big plans; I always knew what I wanted to take from life.
The place is packed: southern belles trying to look otherwise, college kids, a flow of women swarming back and forth in tight clothes and ideas, tall guys waiting for a chance to move in, to be someone.
I remember the women in Dallas, the ones I canvassed here in my youth. My tongue wanders the walls of my mouth; it’s a reflex, but I wouldn’t mind doing it all over again.
There were a few places I frequented in Dallas, places where my drink and name were known, places where my reputation preceded me and I felt welcome, at least as the Carmine that I was, predictable, rotten at the edges, but charming and light on his feet; it was always such an easy dance. The Opium Den was one of them. It comes alive in my mind, even while sitting in the Shack, the memories of its dark and elegant corridors and private party rooms, the dark shade of lighting, the way you could disappear within it.
The club sounds like an adult wonderland, rides and tonics, sex and drugs, a roller coaster I’ve been on too many times to count. There are lines of people waiting to get on, and they are sweaty and hot and irritated; and instead of limp paper tickets in their hands, they hold sweaty dollar bills, the cover charge, the price they’ll pay to be someone else for the night.
The Saturday-night crowd is full of energy. I watch them as though for the first time. Who are they?
There are bodies lined along the wall like slabs of meat, bloody and cold. I feel as anesthetized as a butcher; I am in the same room for the same reasons, but we are not the same.
It’s the perfect environment for forgetfulness. Separation fills the room; everyone is absent. Then—the dance. Back and forth, swaying, waiting to touch, to become bigger than what we are. I know it, but do they?
The three of us sit around a table, and I order a shot of whiskey. It burns going down my throat but feels good, familiar, first the shock and then the burn; finally the glow comes, soft and gentle.
“You ain’t been out in weeks, bro. What’s up?” Griff is wearing a baseball cap and a Pink Floyd T-shirt. He drinks a draft beer in two gulps.
“You know how it is,” I say, smiling; don’t know what else to say. I eat from the bowl of peanuts on the table, down another shot; the nuts feel salty in my mouth, the whiskey hot.
“Well, it ain’t never as bad as it seems,” Mark says, taking a drink of his Coke.
“Is your old man at home dying?” I ask him, scanning the room, then resting my eyes heavily on him.
“Aw, come on, let’s loosen up and have some fun.” Griff laughs and stands up, comes around and starts rubbing my shoulders. “Just look at all these opportunities.”
I look around, can’t make out anything specific anymore, just blurred images, swatches of color, forms moving up and down. Mark and Griff start making animal sounds, slapping their bellies, pointing at people in the crowd. I push my chair back from the table to get a good look at them. So little has changed about them; minds and bodies are the same, they tread all the same dirt. We cannot be from the same past, I think.
There’s a center stage in the bar, wood, raised above the dance floor by half a foot, scuff marks all over it; it’s been there a while. A waitress has just completed a number, and the music fades behind her. I feel like I’ve been here, in this moment before. I think I hear running water somewhere, an odd echo; something is passing above me.
The crowd cheers but I stay silent, taste the salt still left in my mouth, feel the whiskey in my veins, the blood starting to go to my cock, I bite my lip.
I pick up a menu to order food, but it only has songs in it. I put it down. I feel hot, sweaty. Mark and Griff continue to talk loudly, the room buzzing louder. I consider what else I could be doing.
“What’s this?” The menu is full of songs, old ones, CCR, new ones too, others.
“You get to pick a song, and for ten bucks they’ll send one of the girls to do the number,” Mark says as he scans the room.
“Get a fast song. I want to see everything move.” Griff laughs as I decide on Melissa Ethridge’s “Bring Me Some Water.” I don’t know why I’ve chosen this one or if I’ve heard it before, but I like how the title sounds. I raise the menu into the air to get someone’s attention.
A tall black woman walks to the table so quietly she’s barely noticed by anyone. She’s beautiful in a way that puts you in awe of the human race, just like newborn babies and giant oak trees and talking cars. Who knew it was possible? She’s in her late twenties, tall and eloquent. Her face has that grown-up look, the small lines around her eyes like sculpture, the fullness in her cheeks; her body is round and soft everywhere. Her hair is braided, and her eyes stare out in the shape of almonds, perfectly oval. I have never looked at anything so closely.
“Which one of you boys picked the hardest song on the menu?” she asks, not even looking at me as I point to the song on the menu.
“If you don’t know the song, then have them send someone who does.” Griff takes a big drink of his draft beer, looks around the room again, and scratches himself.
“I know the song.” She looks at him intently as she says it, as though she has something to prove, her hip sticking out slightly, her eyes barely glance at me.
“Look! Here’s $10; we’ll pay you, and you don’t have to sing.” I watch them talk, but I don’t say anything. I can hear glass clink on tables and platform shoes slide across the dance floor; there’s a DJ in the corner of the room.
“I work for my money. I’ll do the song. See those girls over there,” she says, and points to a group of rowdy bleached-hair, big-bosomed women on the dance floor. “They like fun guys. I know them well; they’re here all the time. If you guys holler and act like I’m the best thing you’ve seen in a long time, they’ll be all over you before this song is done. So don’t do it for me; do it for mankind.”
She picks up the mic on the tray and looks around the room sadly. This is not where she wants to be either.
“What’s your name, baby?” she asks, finally looking at me.
I am intimidated by her, her black skin, the unfamiliarity of her voice; I don’t know what these new feelings mean. I am simultaneously repulsed and turned on. I feel the old sourness that has been at the bottom of my gut for years. My groin reacts, and I shift my weight to try to move the blood.
She begins to sing and leans over me, her long braids touching the sides of my face; my insides tremble, I am a shell of a man these days. I feel her sing from inside, know she’s known great sorrow in her life, that her insides twist and turn, too, that she knows the bloody fight for forgiveness.
When
will
this
aching
pass
When
will
this
night
be
through
I
want
to
hear
the
breaking
glass
I
only
feel
the
steel
of
the
red
hot
truth
.
.
.
In the periphery, I see the guys and hear her sing; she floats around the room and I’m somewhere above it.
“Carmine? Carmine? Are you with us, bro?” Mark laughs.
“You see me sitting here, don’t you?” I push my empty shot glass away from me.
“Why do you keep looking at that black broad?” he yells over the music.
“Shut the fuck up, Griffin. Just shut up.”
She continues to sing. When she’s done, she laughs as she collects all the money that’s been thrown on her tray, stuffs it into her apron pocket, and puts her empty tray on the bar.
When she’s done talking to someone and leaning up against the bar, I walk up to her, stretch out my hand as if at a business meeting; it hangs in the air, and I feel stupid. I am fifteen again and she is a senior. I put my hands in my pockets.
“Hey—that was amazing,” I say to her back as she’s walking away.
She hurries away through the side door of the bar, an emergency exit with no alarm. I stand there, follow the curves in her back, wait, somehow expect her to turn around and come back—they always do.
I sit down again. The song stays in my head for a long time. I get a bottle of water from the bar, sit back down, look at Griff and Mark and the black boy in the back of my head. My ears begin to ring.
I tell them I’m ready to go, and I begin to walk toward the front of the bar, looking for the entrance; the room spins and my eyes are blurred. Someone is up on the stage singing, but it’s not her. The lights circle in rainbows, and the sensations land in various places within my body, but none of it feels right. I feel sick.
“Carmine, wait up. I’ve got some business to handle here before I go.”
I turn around. Griff is holding a round girl on his lap, and his face is buried in her chest; she laughs with one hand in the air moving to the music and takes long and slow drags off a cigarette with the other. Mark is whispering in the ear of another girl. They both have wives at home.
I sit at an empty stool at the end of the bar to gain my balance and wait. I watch the crowd some more, but don’t see a sign of her—or any other black person, I now notice. I feel hot and cold at the same time, remember Pa gasping for air, feel moments away from screams of my own.
I look for her one last time before I pull my body from the stool and walk outside into the night air, find the bumper of Griff’s old car.
Later, when we are driving back home to Eton, I let whatever’s been knocking take me over completely.
I come out of
my room in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and hear Ma in the living room. Pa is still at the hospital. The house is eerily quiet.
“Carmine, baby, sit down.” She hasn’t called me baby in a long time; the memory of her using it at all is so distant, I think it must be the memory of someone else’s mother I am remembering, not my own.
“I’m real tired, Mom, real tired.” I sit down on the corner of the brown couch and wait while my eyes try to find focus.
It is three in the morning and I’m still buzzed. She is drinking cold coffee from that old brown mug; she always liked it that way. Her breathing is so shallow I wonder how it supports any thoughts at all, emotions; any second she’ll spill right out of there.
“You know, Carmine, I loved you as best I could; your pa too. We ain’t perfect, we never was, but that don’t matter as much as you think.”
I can see her now. Her arms and legs are bony-thin; her voice is soft. Parts of her hair are still golden like a little girl’s. I twist and turn at my end of the couch, think about how she used to be. Supple, happy. It was back when she’d first started drinking, back when it’d been fun, when we’d sometimes go fishing at nine o’clock on a school night late into the night.
I remember the fullness of her lovely arms around my small neck, tucking the overgrown hair behind my ears, lifting me up and tucking me in and swallowing me whole.
“We’ll be burying that old man soon, and some things need to be said around here before that happens. You’ve been gone so long, boy, so long, and I’ve been wanting to make it right for a long time. The only right I know, the only right I got.” She pulls another menthol from the side pocket of her house jacket, but she waits to light it.
I study her face; I try not to, but I can’t help it. Her skin sags; the bones in her cheeks are so prominent, and her eyes so blue—the bluest I’ve ever seen—and so wet. Her skin is pale, so white; she never had a lot of color. Her hair hangs soft and light, and even the gray can’t compete with its golden color. Has she always looked like this?
My mouth is dry; I bleed into the couch. I try so hard to remember another woman I’ve loved. There is no one.
“What do you want from me, Ma?” My voice is cracked at the edges, but not rough. I turn my face toward her, lean to one side, then straighten and rest my elbows on my knees.
I hear her blow the smoke out of her lungs and see her cross her ankles.
“I want my peace, boy, peace, the same as everyone else.”
“Peace? What is that?” I say it snidely, as though she won’t know the answer to it. I cross my leg over my knee, make a number four, lean my head back.
“It’s when you ain’t mad no more.” She holds me to each word, her eyes never looking away. Outside an owl hoots as if in support.
I look at her for a long time, and a bunch of images pass behind my eyes. Old girlfriends, the time I got mugged in the street, the lunch line in middle school—what does one thing have to do with another?
For the first time in years, I recognize a feeling: I am hungry, famished. The feeling is so strong.
“Ma, let’s eat. Do you want to eat something with me?” I stand up; I feel frantic.
She stubs her cigarette out in the ashtray on the end table, stands up beside me. “Yes, son, I’d like that. I’d like that a lot.”
An hour later, we sit in front of a feast. We drink thick chocolate milk and eat cheesy grits and bologna, some leftover potato salad, big dill pickles, Ritz crackers. The kitchen light is dull, and the house seems strange without Pa’s labored coughing.
We sit at that old Formica table and gorge ourselves for close to an hour without talking. I eat until my stomach is bulging, my throat wet, my body so tired and full. When we’re done we lean back in our chairs and look at each other across the table, over the scraps of what’s left—a half roll of crackers, the crusty bottom of the grits pan, the empty yellow bologna package. The brown Formica is chipped but still shines in the night light.
“Thanks, Ma,” I tell her as I shuffle out of the room. I walk slowly to my room and fall back into bed, feeling like my mother’s son, a swaying, salty sleep, the smell of water all around me. I suppose men, even myself, are perpetually boys. The sons of parents who provide the staples of what makes up a life—a home, an example of what it means to be human, however fucked up that may be. We are molded by impressions and an example, single days that stick out, and wounds that split us open and never close. We take on other people’s pain and sometimes make them ours.
* * *
The day the hospital tells us Pa is better off at home, that there’s not much to be done at this point, that the machine will help him breathe and we should make things as easy as possible for him, we sign a pink piece of paper and take him home. It takes more to sign a marketing deal, I think, than it does to deliver news like this.
My mind drifts to other things late that night. I can’t get that girl off my mind, the Buckhead T-shirt she was wearing and the smart smile, her long legs, the energy circulating around her, even the way she walked away from me.
I toss and turn in the twin bed and think of her again. The left side of my brain tries to remind me of blondes and blue eyes, but the right, the soft and tender cerebellum of mine, remembers every detail about her, the mixture of lust and confusion I felt.
I can hear Ma out in the kitchen, smell the cigarette smoke lingering in the morning, feel the living room light pushing in under my door. It’s a weird feeling, preparing for death, an ending. The hospice nurse tells Ma and me it’s our job to keep him comfortable, but I am not sure what exactly that means.
I pull on some clothes and step out of my room. I pass Pa’s room and hear him cough, feel the vibration of his oxygen machine, keep going, head toward the coffeepot in the kitchen.
“How he’s doing, Ma?”
She’s sitting at the table sewing some buttons on one of Pa’s pajama shirts; she runs her hand up and down its crease as she goes.
I pull up a chair beside her and sip my coffee slowly. It’s barely past six in the morning; I’ve only been asleep a few hours.
“I don’t know. I don’t know. Your pa, he’s a fighter and he ain’t done fighting yet, but I don’t think it will be much longer. He knows he can’t win this one. He don’t even really want to.” She cuts the thread and ties the final knot before folding the shirt up and moving on to another, a baby blue one, thin from laundry; it’s been pressed and starched.
“He always did like a good fight, didn’t he?” I take another sip of my coffee and look at her softly, my eyes turned in. “You know what I mean, Ma.”
She stops sewing for a minute and looks at me, like she’s looking directly at my bones, past me, deeper and at something she doesn’t know much about anymore but is familiar still, pulling, like a tree knows its own branches.
“Yeah, I know what you mean.” She gets up and refills both our cups and tells me that hospice has put him on morphine and that he’ll probably sleep more and more and that there are other things to expect, like confusion and dementia and emotional effects; it might be different every day.
“If you’ve got anything to say to your old pa, you’d better say it soon, son.” She folds the last shirt and gets up from the table.
I’m listening, trying to connect with her words, but they all seem to be disconnected, just things people say at times like this.
“I’m real glad you’re here, Carmine; we need to be together. We need to remember the good.” She pushes her thick hand across the table to me and rests it on top of my own. I feel the calluses on her fingertips, remember them on my back as she washed me in the tub, the way she used to pull my tube socks up way high and hold my hand as we crossed the street.
“Yeah,” I say, leaning my head to one side, squinting my eyes but meeting hers. I rinse my cup and then head out the front door again.
* * *
I walk and walk, end up in corners of town I’ve never seen, stare in shop windows full of antiques, a bakery selling nothing but cupcakes, a kids’ dance school. My legs feel hot and I try not to think much, but something about the morning air, the golden sun peeking through the sky, makes me remember being in the fifth grade, gangly and hot, gentle and kind. It’s the special thing all kids have—until life squashes it.
The end of the year had come around, and the school was holding its annual science fair. I had built a volcano out of hobby-store clay and inside had mixed together something lethal enough to get smoke to rise up its crooked sides. I spent hours on it in the kitchen each night, and I could feel Ma’s and Pa’s soft eyes on me, gentle and approving, quiet for once.
I remember that on this day, I thought of nothing but that brown clay in my hands, the anticipation of getting that smoke to billow out for me, the thought that Pa might want to help, that life could be something other than Jesus and guilt and fighting for redemption.
That volcano, as I birthed it, sat on the kitchen table for weeks. We ate dinner around it, our plates hitting the outside edges of the cardboard it sat on. I thought of it when I went to sleep at night; it was the first thing I went to in the morning, it was my creation, something completely within my control, and I felt connected to it. I finally had some power in the world.
My mind will only allow me to remember bits and pieces of the rest, mostly because I don’t want to: Pa drunk, me falling asleep at the kitchen table, Ma crying in the living room, a hump of clay on the floor, so many nights ending up in rotten fights.
When my eyes opened the next morning, I thought of the hump of clay on the floor and about how Pa never loved anything or cared about anything but Jesus and how I never knew how he was gonna get us to heaven that way.
When I got to the kitchen that morning, my volcano sat almost exactly as I’d molded it, except at the edges, along its slopes, were Pa’s fingerprints, crooked but smooth and wide. Ma was in the living room chair smoking, quiet, but I could see her looking my way out of the corner of her eye.
“Ma, Pa fixed my volcano, do you see it? Ma, my volcano is right there. I get to go to the fair.”
She nodded to me from the dark living room and smiled.
I carried that volcano, on its precarious cardboard foundation, all the way to school that day. The morning was cool and damp, and the sun squeezed itself through the tall pines in Eton and I felt proud, the mountains in the distance hovering over me protectively. My chest swelled and my pride knocked the chill out of the air, and it was enough to have this one thing.
Later that afternoon, the science fair opened, and awards were announced; my belly was full, I didn’t want anything more. But here’s the thing: I won that science fair—the whole big thing. When they announced my name, hands began to clap loudly from the group of parents standing in the corner of my school’s gymnasium. I wasn’t expecting it, but I recognized those hands.
When I stood up, I caught my first glimpse of Pa, his hands stretched above him, clapping, watching my volcano as it was wheeled to the front of the room. He looked around the room for me, but I stayed still, looking down at the tops of my shoes. I was so afraid of moving, of jolting the moment out of its place in time. He came up, stood next to me, behind that volcano, his hand on my shoulder, and while the cameras flashed and the applause continued, he looked at me and said, “You did good, Carmine, real good.”
We stood in front of the volcano while the ribbon was placed on me, and I can still remember the heat of Pa’s hand on my shoulder, the sound of the applause, even the feel of that cold clay.
* * *
When I make it to good old Preacher Stanley again, I can’t help but smile like I’m that good boy again. I take a Styrofoam cup from the lobby, fill it up with coffee, head down the hall to his office, and sit down and wait. I’ve got a lot of work to do.