Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (8 page)

(1975)
A helicopter lifts out of the embassy, people cling to the landing struts, we see some fall. This is how the undeclared war ends. Travis moves out as we watch the helicopters on the evening news. Shortly thereafter my mother, brother and I begin a summer of watching baseball on television. That we hadn’t given a damn about the Red Sox until then, not really, doesn’t matter. We need to toughen up.

All in all it’s good Travis is leaving. After building the master bedroom his second act had been the cultivation of marijuana in our very public backyard. The marijuana plants towered ridiculous and gangly above the lesser tomatoes in our tiny garden, and I was sure the neighbors would turn us in. One afternoon I pulled up all the plants, shaved off their roots with an x-acto knife, stuck them back into the ground. Years later my brother admitted to having poured poison on each one, perhaps on the same afternoon, a hundredth-monkey kind of afternoon. Either way, they withered and were gone. Within a year, though, I was rummaging through Travis’s roach stash, cleaning his pipe with a straightened paper clip, searching out anything to smoke. By the time Saigon falls I’m drinking whatever liquor I can get my hands on, believing, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, that it will get me laid. I cling to this sodden belief as my mother’s marriage to Travis collapses in on itself, grinding to its necessary halt.

That summer she cuts off all her hair, becomes a vegetarian, and drops way too much weight, to hover in the ghostly realm, the realm of vapor and shade. Hollow-eyed, spooked. My brother sits down to dinner with her, shovels in the offered vegetables and grains, but I’m annoyed I have to buy my own meat. By now she’s taking pills for her migraines, pills to wake up. Thirty-five and her second marriage has ended as badly as the first. To me Travis had been a reckless older buddy, scary-fun. As a husband he’d been a nightmare. After two years in Vietnam he’d barely fit into our mickey mouse cottage, our badly converted summer shack. They were together from the time I was eleven until I was fifteen, and each year he lived with us our house felt smaller and smaller, in spite of the additions. They slept together for the first couple years in the room he’d built, then he began sleeping on a cot set up in that same room, then he began sleeping at a house he was renovating, unrolling his Marine sleeping bag on the floor of the job site. Then he was gone.

The Red Sox started out that spring bristling with promise, but everyone knew they would break our hearts.
Don’t get too excited, it’s not going to last
—this is the mantra of the Red Sox fan, the mantra of our Irish Catholic town. Don’t hope for much in this life and you won’t be disappointed. Save hope for the afterlife.

That spring into summer Travis would return, unannounced, take something he’d left behind—his primer-coated MG from the driveway; a photograph of a mountain from their bedroom, laminated onto a board he’d “distressed” with a blowtorch and a hammer. Slowly he emptied the garage of broken Skilsaws and pornography, leaving behind half-filled cans of paint. Unnerving, his presence still thick around us, my mother would look up from dinner and ask,
Where’re the wine glasses?
and we’d know he’d been standing in that spot by the shelf just hours before, when the house was empty for the day. Since he’d done the renovations it was useless to try to lock him out—the windows all salvaged, lockless.

Part of watching the Red Sox together was to hunker down, circle the wagons, show a unified front. Travis kept coming back and we needed to fortify against him. But the greater (if unspoken) part for my brother and me was to be close to our mother, to keep an eye on her. It was clear she was slipping away from us, from this world. My brother understood this first, I think, or I just didn’t want to understand it. We’d huddle in her bedroom, transfixed, as men who had a clear sense of purpose strode up to the plate to face down our newfound heroes. Bill “Spaceman” Lee—who advocated the reform of marijuana laws and had spoken out against the war in Vietnam. Luis Tiant—the overweight Cuban exile—whose tics and gestures were weirder than those of any human being we’d ever seen. His mid-windup pivot could last so long that it was impossible to hold your breath while he stared into the infield. He waggled and ducked and twisted and toppled and sneered and menaced and paused and, as one commentator noticed, looked like he was trying to kick off his left shoe. There was something about his body, how all of this struggle led to so many perfect throws, that gave us hope. He didn’t make it look easy.

I’m fifteen, an age when most kids are breaking from their parents, spending more time with their friends, developing a secret language only they can understand. But now my mother, brother and I are developing our own common language, talking about Fred Lynn and Bernie Carbo over dinner, over our newfound couscous and curries. We know the strengths and weaknesses of each player, how they’d done against the A’s last time around, who to watch out for, who was a hitter, who’d made what incredible catch. I’d been raised to be independent, cooked for myself since I could reach the stove, never had an allowance, left to my own bad devices for as long as memory. My mother had made it clear that she wouldn’t be around forever—
If something happens to me…,
she’d say. To look into her face for too long only brought up dread. To stare as one into the television on a hot Saturday afternoon, to glimpse the world outside still going on, unfolding with or without us, to feel part of something larger, something that made it to the newspapers every day, that people seemed excited about, something to get caught up in and carried along by—Tiant would be pitching next Saturday, maybe reason enough to stick around, if just to see how it turned out, if just to see him smoke the bastards.

Then the improbable happened—the Red Sox kept winning. Carlton Fisk stood at the plate and the entire Eastern Seaboard held its breath. A big man, “Pudge” leaned into his swing, effortlessly he could knock it out of the park, we’d seen it before, it was in him. We didn’t breathe.

In the end they broke our hearts, but not before getting us almost to Thanksgiving. Sprawled in her bedroom, my mother propped up with pillows, I’m on my belly beside her, my brother in the la-z-boy. It’s all history now, something about the sixth game of the Series against the Reds, how Pudge hammers one at the last possible moment, bottom of the twelfth, how it hangs over the foul line for an eternity, how he stops halfway to first and jumps in the air, swinging his arms to the right to force it fair. I remember perfectly, the way his body moved, jumping up on his toes, a series of little bunny-hops, his big hands pushing the air like a desperate Zeus, how everyone at the game or watching on tv does the same, damn near screams,
Come on
, it’s that important, to win this one game, to let us all move to the next.

(1976)
My father claims he didn’t understand about cameras, didn’t realize he was filmed at every window, that after a while they knew him, had his picture from every angle, knew his height, his eye color, his clothes. They had his name, it was just a matter of time. On a desolate back highway outside of Miami, hitchhiking his way back north to do another job, he is stopped by a young policeman. The cop takes his ID, calls it in, returns with his gun drawn.
Put your hands behind your back
, the young policeman says, and once again my father feels time closing off, his hands now behind him, now everything’s behind him. Before this was chance, possibility, limitless. But that was the second before the teeth of the handcuffs bit into his given minutes. The policeman can now be more friendly, can hold him gently by the arm, guide him into the cruiser,
Come with me
, though it isn’t a request. Into a cell, a holding tank, the bars slide shut, the cycle complete. My father now belongs solely to the world of time, time inside against time outside.

Years later he will say,
My name came up on the computer. I didn’t even know about computers, and the cop came back all rattled and nervous and whimpers, “Can you please put your hands behind your back.” It was up to me to calm him down, that’s how rattled he was to have captured me
. Penniless again when he’s caught, but pleased to learn he made it to a wanted poster, pleased that even my mother has once again been forced to consider his grainy face, smiling down upon her. Yet, sadly, he doesn’t make headlines. Not like Patty.

At Patty’s trial there are conflicting diagnoses. One is “Chronic Bafflement Disorder”—“She was simulating behavior, but was later convinced that she was not lying but acting reactively in fear for her life. She had no mental disease or defect and did it because she was rebellious, extremely independent, intelligent and well-educated; she was not mentally competent and her part in the bank robbery was due to the fact she was upset by her relationship with her boyfriend and she had a subtle hostility toward her parents and the establishment….”

The Symbionese Liberation Army, which claimed to be a cell of a worldwide revolutionary movement, turns out to be a handful of radicals, now all dead or imprisoned. Only after my father is apprehended and sentenced will my mother tell me what he has done.

Interstate transportation of stolen securities—I imagine an eighteen-wheeler, but I can’t picture “securities.” I don’t ask her to elaborate. I never express any interest in my father, mostly because it seems to hurt my mother to even utter his name.

In school they take a survey about drug and alcohol use—

Do you drink:

Without hesitation I answer
d
: I drink to get drunk. I like being drunk, feel more myself when outside myself. By the time I’m seventeen my mother and I drink together sometimes, and sometimes she shows me the quote she keeps in her wallet—“Never trust anyone who doesn’t drink.” Those who don’t drink have something to hide, an awful secret that will slip out if they were ever to get drunk. By drinking together we prove we have nothing to hide.

Once my friends and I get our driver’s licenses, we drive our parents’ cars to an abandoned sand pit every night and drink. “The Pits” we call it, a bit of wasteland formerly used by the Concrete Pipe Corporation, now ghostly and apocalyptic, especially after a six-pack. The Monday morning ritual in Scituate becomes learning who had totaled their car over the weekend—wrapped it around what tree, driven off which pier. At one bash a local hoodlum handcuffs me to the door of my mother’s car, fishing in my pockets for her keys, threatening to take me for a little drag, before giving up and drifting back into the shadows. My friends wander over, examine the cuffs, shrug, reel back to the center of the party, a stump set ablaze with gasoline.

One of these friends learned to drive by lifting his passed-out father from the driveway and into the family car to take him to detox. A long circular driveway, his house one of Lawson’s mansions, by then in disrepair. When he got off the school bus he could see his father sprawled out. His mother said,
I give up
, handed my friend the address and the keys. My friend wasn’t old enough to drive but he learned. He tells the story now as if he were speaking of raking the leaves.

Prisons are near-deserts of time, though the days, like everywhere, have a rhythm. The sun rises, dreams tumble ever faster through the convict’s mind, a buzzer sounds, eyelids flicker, a gradual brightening outside, sudden day within. The big light in the big house snaps on. The bars, the shackles, the walls—even the lightbulb in its own little cage above—all suffused with time.

In theory you cannot die in prison unless you’ve been sentenced to death, the law is specific on this point. You are to be kept alive but limited, this is the punishment. It’s even safer in a prison hospital—it’s their job to keep you alive. My father has problems with his legs, phlebitis, which killed his sister, and which Nixon also suffers from, so everyone’s heard of phlebitis. This means he will be transferred from prison hospital to prison hospital, with the junkies and the loonies and the terminal cases, and not stuck in with the general population. To separate himself even further he identifies as Jewish. He claims that during the war his mother had converted, to
front-pew Catholicism
, in order to hide her Jewish ancestry. In the federal prison system there are very few Jews, he reasons, so it’s to his advantage to be identified as one, to become a member of a minority, to be separated from the masses of Irish and black prisoners. Though he had been an altar boy for ten years, and if asked he would describe himself as Russian and Irish, part of him still felt Jewish, if only to explain why he felt so unconnected to everyone. In prison he becomes secretary of the Jewish Federal Prisoners’ Association, publishes some doggerel in the newsletter.

Still, he must stay on top of things. His lawyer used a defense of mental impairment at his trial, based on his fall from the ladder—he was not in his right mind when he walked into those banks. It helped at his sentencing—the judge was lenient—but it will not help him now, awaiting diagnosis. Now he must make it clear that although he was not then in charge of his faculties, now he is. In one hospital my father is told his legs have to be amputated, but he refuses the knife.
Real butchers
, he says.
I would have looked like Toulouse-Lautrec, hacked off just below the knees
. Permission is needed, even in prison, unless he is deemed incompetent, which is a real possibility—a doctor could read his transcripts, judgment could come down, he could wake up strapped to his bed, it’s what happens in the wards. But he’s lucky—moved from Missouri to Kentucky, from Connecticut to Ohio, he rides out his time in hospitals, keeps his legs.