Radiomen (20 page)

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“I’m flying out to LA this afternoon; that’s where Coast-to-Coast has its headquarters. I’ve got a meeting scheduled tomorrow with the head of programming. I want him to tell me to my face that they’re thinking of dropping my show. It can’t be anything financial because I bring in plenty of ad revenue and as far as I know, they don’t have any trouble selling my commercial slots. But just in case this Blue Star deal does go through, I’ve also got a meeting scheduled with the World Air satellite people. They might be interested in carrying my program,” he said. Suddenly, a kind of lopsided grin appeared on his face. “I hadn’t thought of it until now, but I guess that’s a little weird—given the context. A satellite radio company might just save the day.”

“Well,” I said. “Maybe Avi’s pulling some strings somewhere.”

“A ghost with influence? He’d make a great posthumous guest for the first satellite show.”

I drank some of the coffee that had been brought to me before the lull and started picking at Jack’s plate of cold eggs. “All this is totally crazy,” I said. “I wish there was a way to just . . . I don’t know. Make it all go away.”

“Too late,” Jack said. “You can’t un-know things.”

“Sometimes I wish I could.”

“Yeah, sometimes we all wish that. But maybe it’s better to be . . .”

I couldn’t help myself; I finished his sentence for him. “Better to be what? Aware?”

He laughed. “Okay,” he said. “Yes. Aware. But promise me you won’t go over to the other side while I’m away, all right?”

“I don’t think you have anything to worry about,” I replied.

Jack had driven to the diner but had decided that he didn’t really want to leave his car at one of the public lots at the airport, so he asked me to do him a favor by taking care of it for a few days. I said sure, so he paid the bill and then I rode with him to the airport, where we said good-bye and I took over the wheel. I drove the car along the looping roads that ran around the outskirts of the terminals to a distant spot I knew, near the huge sheds where salt and snowplows were locked up during the warmer months. There was an employee parking lot here, where I was able to leave the car and then catch one of the airline courtesy vans back toward the main area of the airport. I was early for my shift, so I sat around in the back of the bar for a while, near the lockers, reading a book. It was a spy novel and I had been absorbed by it, but suddenly it just couldn’t hold my attention anymore. Compared to my own life, the spy’s problems seemed easily solvable. Make a few well-placed phone calls. Shoot someone. Or else say,
I give up
. Or maybe, if it seemed like it would work better in certain circumstances,
I give in.

T
WO DAYS
later, I had a rare Saturday off. I woke up feeling restless—something that seemed to be happening to me more and more lately—and wandered around my apartment for a while, picking things up and putting them down somewhere else. I was sort of hungry but sort of not. I thought that if I took the dog out for a while I’d work up an appetite, so I put on his leash and led him out of the building. We wandered up toward Queens Boulevard, where I bought some breakfast concoctions at a McDonald’s and then walked back to my neighborhood.

It was a mild day, but overcast. I didn’t feel like going back inside, so I sat on the stoop, sharing the food I’d bought with my dog. After a while, one of Sassouma’s children—a boy of around fourteen—came out of the building, walking the family’s little dust-colored pet. I said hello to the boy, who solemnly smiled back at me. A moment later, Digitaria turned his head and pointed it upward, seeming to sniff the air above the other dog, which did much the same thing, as if both animals somehow occupied a larger space than their actual size would suggest. Then, without any further interaction between them, Digitaria went back to eating part of a biscuit while the other dog quietly followed his owner away, down the block.

I watched them go and then returned to my own thoughts, which, much like my earlier behavior in my apartment, went from one thing to another without lighting anywhere. The problem was that I still felt like I couldn’t settle down. Eventually, it occurred to me that since I had Jack’s car, maybe Digitaria and I could go for a ride somewhere. Maybe the beach, I decided. My last visit to Rockaway, odd and unhappy as it was, had been months ago—long enough to use my talent for dissembling to pretend it hadn’t happened. Besides, I suddenly had a strong yearning to go back, which I decided meant that my happy memories of summers at the beach were reoccupying their rightful place in my mind, which seemed like a good thing to me. When I was a child, I had liked gray days at the beach almost as much as sunny ones. Days that were slightly gloomy were tailor-made for reading or just sitting on the boardwalk, watching the waves stretch themselves toward the shore and then slowly slide back, as if into a great, gray bowl, pulling shells and pebbles with them. Besides, I had recently read in the newspaper about how, after decades of neglect, urban development was finally coming to Rockaway, though the area targeted for gentrification was much farther up the peninsula from where my family used to spend their summers at the Sunlite Apartments. Two or three miles away from that desolate spot, condo developers were putting up new townhouses, building gated communities that were supposedly going to bring this old working class getaway back to some semblance of its former respectability. Why not go see how that was coming along? At least, it would give me something to do with the restless energy that, so far, had been the animating feature of my day. And because I had the car, the dog could ride along with me. On pet food commercials I’d seen on TV, people were always taking their dogs for walks along the beach. Both the people and the pets seemed to enjoy it; maybe we would, too.

I gave the last bites of my breakfast to Digitaria and then led him to Jack’s car, which I had parked a few blocks away. After I unlocked the passenger-side door, he jumped right in and faced forward, giving every impression that he was familiar with the idea of car rides. I slid into the driver’s seat, turned the key in the ignition and tuned the radio to a station that was playing some hard-line rock and roll.

“We’re going to the beach,” I said to my dog. “You’re going to get to chase some seagulls.” At the sound of my voice, Digitaria turned to me, but then quickly went back to looking out the window. “So here we go,” I said, as I eased the car out of its parking spot and headed toward Woodhaven Boulevard, which I could follow to Cross Bay Boulevard and out across the causeways and bridges that led to Rockaway.

It was a drive of about forty-five minutes. The last part of the trip took us across a toll bridge that grabbed onto the peninsula right in the middle, on the bay side. Turning left would lead me to the streets where I had spent my summers. Turning right took me in an unfamiliar direction, up toward the northern end of the peninsula which, even years ago, had always been the more affluent area.

At the termination of the bridge, I took the unfamiliar turn to the right. At first, as I drove along, I saw what I expected: a few surf shops, some bars and restaurants, the usual street scene of a seaside town. But then, finally—as if the photos I had seen in the newspaper had sprung into life—I found myself driving past block after block of newly erected townhouses painted the color of foam, decorated with trim work in sandy hues. Some of the buildings were shingled like a glossy magazine’s vision of coastal cottages, some bristled with balconies and faux widow’s walks. It certainly didn’t look like the ruined neighborhood I had encountered last winter, nor did it in any way resemble the Rockaway I remembered from childhood. This was something new, something created to fit a new reality, new people, new money. I felt like a complete stranger here, completely out of place.

There were no spaces available to park along the street—signs warned nonresidents away—so I turned around and drove back toward the more commercial area, where I found a parking spot about a block from the beach. I clipped Digitaria’s leash back on his collar, got out of the car and led the dog toward the boardwalk.

In just a couple of weeks, when the summer season officially opened, lifeguards would be stationed at regular intervals along the sand and police cars would be patrolling the boardwalk, so I would never have been able to take Digitaria down to the beach because dogs were officially not permitted. But at this time of year there was no one around to object, so we crossed the boardwalk and went down a wooden ramp to the sand.

Since the day was cool and windy and the sky was overcast, there weren’t very many people on the beach, though an occasional group had set up lounge chairs and umbrellas and were playing cards or just chatting. Other people—some singly, some in pairs—were stretched out on towels, reading or listening to the radio. It was a pleasant scene and I felt more at ease here. Now, finally, I was glad I had come.

Digitaria didn’t seem so sure. He let me lead him onto the beach but then sat down before we’d gotten halfway to the shoreline and stared out at the ocean, which I suppose he’d never seen before. He tilted his head from side to side as if examining this unexpected vista from every possible angle.

He must have finally decided that this new environment was not threatening, because he soon raised himself off his haunches and trotted down to the water. He began—at first tentatively and then eagerly—to splash around at the edge of the waves as they rolled in and out, growling low in his throat. I assumed he was playing some sort of chasing game with the tide, and unclipped his leash to give him more freedom to run around.

But after just a few minutes of carefree play, he suddenly stopped where he stood, and became absolutely still. I could see his body tense as the chilly seawater bubbled around his feet. Slowly, he turned his head to the left. He sniffed the air. His eyes glittered.

And then, as if a tightly wound spring inside him had been released, he took off running. This happened so fast that he quickly became a vanishing object, already passing the first of the wide stone jetties that separated different sections of the beach from each other, before I reacted. I started running after him, calling his name as loudly as I could. As I ran, people turned their heads to stare at me. One man, thinking to help me, ran toward the dog and tried to grab him, but Digitaria just changed course, swiveling away from the Good Samaritan and sprinting straight up the beach, away from the water, finally disappearing under the boardwalk. He was now running free on the streets. My heart was pounding from running and it was only because I was almost out of breath that I didn’t break down into tears. I was sure that I would never see my dog again.

I didn’t know what to do, but some part of my brain had kicked into override mode and I found myself running again, this time heading for the car. I found it without even consciously thinking about where I had parked it, got in and started the engine. My first organized thought since I had seen the dog take off down the beach was to drive around, looking for him. What else could I do?

So I drove up and down the streets in an ever-widening grid, stopping to ask people if they had seen a small, thin dog with a tightly curled tail roaming around anywhere. Everyone said no, so I kept driving. I drove for half an hour, and after that, half an hour more. The afternoon was getting later, the weather turning unseasonably cold. And then it began to rain.

Sheets, buckets, pails of water, rain was pouring from the sky. Streams of water formed along the curbsides; rain pooled in potholes and spread across the asphalt roadbed like a watery veneer. For a few minutes, the rain started to come down so heavily that I couldn’t see well enough to drive, so I pulled over and let the engine idle.

Then, finally, I did start to cry. To the core of my being, I felt incredibly sad, terribly lonely and completely bereft. I remembered reading once—in the magazine
TV Guide
, of all places—that maybe it wasn’t a good idea to make television shows and movies about pets who are lost or in some kind of trouble because small children tend to identify with small animals in dangerous situations. At that moment, sitting in Jack’s car, imprisoned by the rain, that was exactly how I felt—like I was a helpless child and Digitaria was an extension of me, wandering lost and frightened in the rain. I seemed to be reexperiencing every feeling I’d ever had about abandonment, about being estranged from my family long ago, about being on my own for most of my life and too often living near the edge of the economy, supporting myself but just barely, about needing to take care of myself because there was no one else to help me. All of that got mixed up with my terrible sense of responsibility for having lost the dog and the imminent prospect of having to abandon my search and leave him alone in a world where he would face hunger and cruelty and loneliness. I cried until I had the dry heaves. I cried until I just didn’t have any tears left. I cried until I felt I had cried for everything bad that had ever happened to me in my whole life.