Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (3 page)

Renault is the only spot open for them in the foreign car market, and they don’t sell especially well.
Who the hell wants a Renault?
My father is set up as president, though my grandfather maintains ownership himself. They dub this doomed enterprise European Engineering, its world headquarters in Belmont, Massachusetts, one in a row of other dealerships. My father gets to wear a suit to work each morning and drives a new car and his pretty young wife is at home with their newborn and a few people work under him and it all seems to be unfolding nicely. Except my father has no talent for selling cars. And his father-in-law, his backer, his silent partner, is a businessman, and expects a return on his investment. The new son-in-law is expected to show his worth. But soon there is a cash-flow problem. My father has hired several of his old drinking buddies to work alongside, including Ray, and none of them know the first thing about selling cars. Nothing much moves for the first few months, until my father hires an acquaintance named Duffy. Duffy, my grandfather will claim to this day, could sell sand to a beach. The cars start moving, and things look bright, until the folks that bought the cars began returning, to redeem the new radios, or the custom paint jobs, or the whitewall tires Duffy had promised them.

(1960)
After two years of diminishing returns, after they had sold perhaps the only Renaults they would ever sell, my grandfather cans Jonathan as president of European Engineering, cuts his losses, folds up shop. My mother, though wary of her ne’er-do-well husband, is relieved to be no longer beholden to her father. My father decides to take in used foreign cars and sell them on commission, full-time, after having done it on the side, piecemeal, for a while. He leases another garage next door and christens himself “Trader Jon.” His clients are rich, away in Europe for the summer, and these cars—BMWs and Mercedes, Fiats and MGs—sell themselves. But come fall there’s another cash-flow problem. My father takes his time notifying his clients that their cars have sold, waiting instead for them to contact him. And when they do, often the money isn’t there, already spent, and my father can’t say on what. He assumed they were so rich that they wouldn’t miss the money, not right away, but he was wrong. In another version he claims not to have kept track of the books, that he was born to be a president, not a treasurer, and it was the treasurer who set him up. But in the next breath he will claim, gleefully, that the entire “caper” made front-page news. A search through microfilm records of newspapers from that time reveals not a word.

In January I am born. Again Ray drives my mother to the hospital, just as he did when my brother was born. That June my mother, twenty years old, packs us up and leaves my father. She will never receive any child-support from him, nor will she ever take any money from her father. Or perhaps none will be offered, at least not in a way that she will feel comfortable accepting. Perhaps she wanted to make it on her own. Perhaps she saw that money hadn’t really ever made anything right. Perhaps her father did not want to confuse money with love, not again, and so he withheld the money, confusing them even more.
I lost a lot in that car business,
is all my grandfather will say now.

Many fathers are gone. Some leave, some are left. Some return, unknown and hungry. Only the dog remembers. Even if around, most disappear all day, to jobs their children only slightly understand. Gone to office, gone to shop, men in suits hiding behind closed doors, yelling into phones, men in coveralls, reading pornography in pickup trucks. The carpenter. The electrician. They drive to strangers’ houses, a woman in a robe answers the door, they sit at the table with her, she offers coffee and cake, they talk about the day ahead. By nightfall you won’t recognize the bathroom, he promises. Monday we start in on the roof. Many end up sitting around the house all day, sneaking sips in the woodshed. Many drive to other towns, make love to a woman they’ve been making love to for years. Some continue to yell at their sons from the grave, some are less than a tattered photograph. Some sons need to exhume the body, some need to see a name written in a ledger. Some drive past a house the father once lived in as a child, park across from it, some swear that if they could gaze into his face just once their hearts would settle. One friend inherited some money and hired a private investigator to track down his lost father, paid a thousand dollars to find out his father was dead. All my life my father had been manifest as an absence, a nonpresence, a name without a body. The three of us sat around the table, my mother, brother and I, all carrying his name.
Flynn
?

Some part of me knew he would show up, that if I stood in one place long enough he would find me, like you’re taught to do when you’re lost. But they never taught us what to do if both of you are lost, and you both end up in the same place, waiting.

(1989)
My father wraps himself in newspaper some nights, stuffs his coat with newspaper, the headlines finally about him, though he isn’t named. Just more heartstring pieces about “the homeless.”
Get it straight, I’ve never flung a knife or shot a bullet at anyone. I’ve only been locked up for two of my fifty-nine years. I’m no jailbird
. The nights drop below freezing and still he sleeps outside. “My toes,” he writes me, “are being cut off.” On wet nights he wraps himself in plastic, a Hefty trashbag sealed with duct tape, he weaves himself a cocoon, lies on the ground, puts his feet into the bag and pushes until they reach the bottom. Leaning forward, he tightens the plastic around his ankles and tapes them, and then he tapes the bag around his waist. This way, in the night, the bag won’t slide down his body.

If you had been raised in a village two hundred years ago, somewhere in Eastern Europe, say, or even on the coast of Massachusetts, and your father was a drunk, or a little off, or both, then everyone in the village, those you grew up with and those who knew you only from a distance, they would all know that the town drunk or the village idiot was your father. It couldn’t be hidden or denied. Everything he did, as long as you stayed in the village, whether shouting obscenities at passing children or sleeping in the cemetery, all would be remembered when they looked at you, they would say to themselves or to whomever they were with,
It’s his father, you know, the crazy one, the drunk,
and they couldn’t help but wonder what part of his madness had passed on to you, which part you had escaped. They would look into your eyes to see if they were his eyes, they would notice if you were to stumble slightly as you stepped into a shop, they would remember that your father too had started with promise, like you. They would know he was a burden, they could read the struggle in your face, they would watch as you passed and nod, knowing that around the next corner your father had fallen and pissed himself. And they would watch you watch him, note the days you simply kept walking, as if you didn’t see, note the days you knelt beside him, tried to get him to rise, to prop him up. If they were friends and they came by your house they couldn’t help but notice whether you had an extra room, or whether your own situation seemed precarious, marginal. And they might not say anything but they would take it in and wonder, either way it meant something. If this was two hundred years ago you left the village maybe once a month, to bring whatever it was you grew or fabricated—onions or oil, wine or cloth—to a distant market to sell, only to return in a day or two to the village, and you might get the sense, perhaps rightly, that there was nowhere else on earth for you to be, that to leave the village would be akin to banishment, to enter into a lifetime of wandering, to become open to speculation that you’d abandoned your father to his fate, turned your back, left him to die. Taken and not given back. For if you are not responsible for your own father, who is? Who is going to pick him up off the ground if not you?

(1984)
I’m twenty-four when I start at Pine Street, full of nonspecific, scattershot longing. “Dissatisfied” is an emotion. When my shift gets off at eleven I go out with my co-workers and drink to the eventual collapse of the capitalist system, to the hollowness of the go-go eighties. Working with the homeless we can hear the buildings crumble. Yet each night we close Foley’s and step out, faintly disappointed, into the still-standing city.

As a newcomer I often work the Cage, where the bed tickets are given out, and the valuables, if any, are stored. Controlled, in terms of contact with the guests—four hours a night, one-on-one, easy. It is also the busiest time in the shelter, when the lobbies are at their most chaotic, the building just reopened after being shut all day. Three hundred to six hundred men will swell through the doors in the next few hours. This is when dinner is served, when the clinic is open, when the men are shepherded upstairs and into beds, those who managed to score a bed. Slowly I am getting to know them by name, trying to be responsible, to count their money out where they can see my hands.

Ah yes, the ever-satisfied Jamal Dexter. Smokes dope in the park all day, they say, sells loose joints to the youngbloods. Followed in line by the nearly unintelligible Randy Phillips, who cannot utter his own name, who cannot look me in the eye, who unfolds yesterday’s bed ticket and slides it through the slot, both hands on it, precious.

Carlos, a co-worker, shows me the ropes. Make sure they sign for everything, make sure the number on the envelope matches their bed number, call a counselor if something isn’t right. During a lull one night he tells the story of how he shot a guy under the tracks of the old Dudley Station, how he’d been looking for this guy to avenge a wrong done to his little brother, how the guy pulled a gun when Carlos found him, shot once but Carlos knew to turn sideways, take the bullet in his biceps. He even turns sideways as he tells the story,
Like this, flex, your arm can take it, better than making your whole body a target
. After he took the bullet he knocked the gun from the guy’s hand, leveled him with a punch, picked up the gun and unloaded the rest into the guy’s head. In telling the story he holds two fingers like a gun to show how he kept pulling the trigger,
click click, click click
, long after the gun was empty. He went into hiding for a year, disappeared upstate, came back, began working the shelter.

Inside the shelter the tension is inescapable—the walls exude cigarette smoke and anxiety. The air is thick, stale, dreamy, though barely masking the overpowering smell of stale sweat. When open the lobbies fill with a constant nameless din, the murmur of hundreds of men, the narcotic drone of a television, punctuated by the occasional freak-out—an altercation here, someone shouting down a private demon there. All heads turn toward the sound, register it, turn away. When blows are being exchanged, if a staff member is there to intervene, he or she will intervene. A balance between escalating and defusing, stepping in and backing the fuck off. The ground floor is divided into the Brown Lobby and the Yellow Lobby, each lobby its own city, cities within the city, each with its own rules, its own physics. Brown is mostly oldtimers—drunks, mellow, regular; Yellow is the youngbloods—psych, addicts, wilder. From my perch behind the steel-mesh screen, when there is a lull in giving out bed tickets, in putting pennies into envelopes, the rhythm of these cities can slowly enter my bloodstream.

I work the Cage for a few months through that first fall, until the cycle of life within the shelter begins to make some sense to me. Patterns emerge. On Fridays, payday, there’s more money to check in, more drunken men pushing it at me through the slot. The drunks show up later and are, depending on the man, either more boisterous or more sullen. Jimmy’s got the shakes again, after a month of doing so well. He’s perfected the trick of stashing a fifth in his sleeve, of raising his arms with a flourish above his head for the frisk. Eddie is carried in by the cops again—not only did he lose his leg beneath a bus a few winters before, but now he’s lost his fake leg. More than likely he took it off himself and brandished it at a passerby, some “punk-assed bitch.” Some get government checks, either for a physical disability or a mental one. They call the mental ones “nut checks.” These checks come on the first of the month, a time when the predators, usually the young addicts, show up at the shelter, lurking, waiting for a mark. Staff that have worked the shelter longer know the thieves, know their targets. But the old guys are easily lured away by a bottle, down the alley, only to limp back, sheepish, a pocket torn, a bloodied ear, broke again.

Joy works the front desk. She’d been a cokehead and a prostitute and is now an oversized redheaded mother to the guys. Years later she will end up in a room with a shotgun across her lap, back to dealing and smoking crack 24/7. When I first land at Pine Street she is benign and ravaged, a failed queen who seldom leaves her throne at the front door.
We catch them on the way down,
Joy says.
Next stop, the morgue
. Each year we count a hundred, a hundred and fifty, dead from the year before. These are just the ones we can name, the ones we know. In a few years we will begin holding a memorial service for them, reading off the names of those we can remember, mostly as a way to stave off our own sense of desperation, of hopelessness. We will build two hundred crosses in my loft, paint them white, paint the name of someone who had died on each one, hammer them into the Common one night, an instant graveyard.

(1963)
Sunglasses in the visor, wallet in the glove compartment, satchel in the back. A sports coat on a hanger so it doesn’t wrinkle. Look the cop in the eye, nod, don’t look at the cop at all, adjust the mirror, the ashtray empty, the window down. Drive with both hands so as not to draw heat—respectable citizen, upright. The red light turns green but no one’s behind, no one honks.

My father drives back to Scituate one day and everything’s been replaced. Houses have changed color and there are more of them—the bookstore’s now a knick-knack shop, the bookie’s a barber, the package store’s a bank. He digs his heel in below the gas pedal as he steers, his heel wears a hole in the carpet, beneath the carpet is steel. Sweat drips from his ankle in summer, collects in the hole, eats away at the steel. Without thinking he will end up outside the house he grew up in, he will look at the front door but he will not enter. His legs will not carry him, his hand will not work the latch, as in the dream when you come to the threshold you know you must pass but cannot. Open your mouth to scream but nothing comes out.

My mother by now has a warrant out on him for nonpayment of child support. “Nonsupport” we call it around my house. I’m three, and cannot remember my father, who is thirty-three. After my mother left him he drifted, south again, eventually ending up back in Palm Beach. There he’s found the title for his book—
The Little World of Pier 5.
It’s all mapped out in his head, he just has to write it down.

Idling outside his family home my father sits in his car, a wood-grained Ford station wagon, a “Woodie,” a car the Beach Boys sing about. The springs buried in the seat dig into his back. This is the house he lived in, off and on, until he married my mother. He looks up to his mother’s bedroom window, the shade pulled half down, how he left it when he left, his mother bedridden then. If he opens the car door the inside light will click on and he will be illuminated, he will turn from shadow to object, become solid, something you could attach handcuffs to. Two brothers he went to school with have become town cops, the Breen boys,
those ignorant fucks
. They know my father’s face, know about the warrant, one even stops by my grandmother’s for coffee, promises to keep a sharp eye out. If my father’s foot comes off the clutch, touches down on the tar, the sirens will sound, the Breen boys will appear with their warrant, their clubs, say, “Aha,” say, “Gotcha,” carry him away, the car left at the stoplight, the door sprung open, the interior light lighting the now-empty seat, the seat shaped like his body, the radio playing Top 40.

Did he know he would never return, never walk up the front steps, never enter the kitchen again? A woman he almost recognizes carries a platter up to the door, sandwiches maybe, but what is her name? Inside there will be plenty of liquor, a sea of booze, but not enough. If he steps into the house again not even the walls will stand where he remembers. Each room will be smaller, rooms he’d forgotten will appear between them. The paint will be wrong and he will not find the hole where he kicked his foot through the plaster the night of the storm when he knew his boat was badly anchored. If he pushes open the door his mother will be dead inside and if he doesn’t, well, what will that mean? If he pushes open the door he can say goodbye to her body but what is the body? If he crosses the threshold the police will be waiting in one of two small rooms,
ignorant fucks
, waiting for his return, they have waited all these years. Blood from a stone. Once he could outrun them but he no longer knows the way through his own house.