The Removers: A Memoir (12 page)

That summer my parents finally split up. My mom moved across the river to New Jersey to be closer to her elderly parents. My dad moved around the corner to Orthodox Street. His house had belonged to a couple for the whole length of their marriage, and Dad bought it from the old widow. A corded telephone was mounted on the kitchen wall with a brass plate adhered to the length of the receiver engraved with the name
of the late homeowner,
WALTER REUSS
. The kitchen stove had lasted from the fifties, a gas model whose every use required a match. The whole back half of the house was sinking, so that the windows and doors didn’t close flush but let in triangles of light and draft.

The two years with Janie had helped my confidence. I could approach anyone with a few drinks in me. And over email, with no courage required and room for endless charm, I was unstoppable. I was driving my old Saab around, cranking Pavement, making decent money. Living in my movie. Racing my problems. Trying to drink more dance more go to the movies more fuck more speed everything up so that I wouldn’t have to be alone. And there began to happen “the scene at the curb.”

I would start every relationship after Janie, even the ones with absolutely no promise, with grand romantic questions. What will it be like when she meets my family? How will she look in her wedding dress? I would woo her, we’d date for a few weeks or a few months, and then would begin the process of being slowly disappointed. God, do her feet really look like that? Her waking-up face is not okay. Did she really just say that Superchunk, the least talented, least inventive band writing songs in English, is better than Pavement? Her mom’s obese. So when it came time to get invited along on a family vacation, or did I want to meet her best friend and the best friend’s husband, or if a party was coming up that I didn’t want to take her
to because I thought there would be women to meet, I’d flake. Stop calling. Sometimes I had the courage or the stupidity to say something in person. But inevitably it would end with her tracking me down on the phone or knocking on my door and I’d step outside and inevitably she would wind up crying at the curb next to her car and I would be stone-faced and then we would always be delivered to the same moment. She would ask, “Don’t you feel anything?” And I would stay unmoved, with my eyes cast down, and she would cry harder for a bit. I wouldn’t say a word, but a ridiculous thought would form: I’m jealous of your crying. And then at some point her face would stiffen into a determined frown. I’m not letting this asshole see one more tear. She’d gather herself and drive away without looking at me, and I’d think maybe she’d been infected. Maybe my failures, my cowardice, whatever damage had been done in my parents’ house, had created a disease in me, an infectious coldness, and I was passing it on to one young woman after another. The irony being that the boy with the ice disease spent his days lighting fires.

How much pain lodges in the body? How much love? How much knowledge? How many resources unquantifiable do we blow away at nineteen hundred degrees? What does it mean to reduce a woman to five pounds of powdered bone in one three-hundred-thousandth the time she lived? I didn’t think of these things at all during the years I worked with bodies. Never did I hold the dead in mind. Never could I bring myself
to calculate the import of the work.

Here in my very hands, a naked woman. I’m touching her chest, feeling for a pacemaker. I’m massaging soap onto her knuckle to jimmy loose her wedding ring. What have her fingers touched, I should wonder. How has my curiosity gone so numb? What have her eyes seen? The winds of which far-flung beaches have blown through this hair? Or have these toes only ever felt Jersey Shore sand? What kinds of people did this heart love? Were you a good girl? Just the hubby then? Or did you get around? What did your mother call you as a baby? Did you like a drink? What made you spiral? Any regrets? What kind of man was your father?

All the connections and possibilities and time in her body, all the links to all the time and bodies of everyone she had ever known and had touched, and from there links to everyone who had ever lived, back to the caves, back to the ooze. And as I’m closing the lid on her casket what I’m really thinking of is the Sixers game tonight and how I can’t wait to see Wilbur and Gazz.

Frankford had become unpleasant, lonely, less civilized, steadily more dangerous. The thought of Dad buying a house there in his middle fifties was an anxious one for my sister and me. One Sunday afternoon he called me in tears. Could I come over? I don’t think he’d ever asked me so nakedly for help. He’d been out walking his dog, Wendy, a little beagle mix, when she was set on by a free-ranging, collarless pit bull.
The thing had Wendy’s whole head in its mouth, swinging her like a chew toy, before Dad was able to kick the attacker’s ribs hard enough to break the frenzy. When I got there he was still red-eyed, shaky. After a while I understood that there wasn’t anything I could do in a practical sense—the dog would see a veterinarian the next morning for the weepy puncture wounds dotting her face—but that Dad needed me there. He needed calm in the house. He seemed older to me that day. It felt easier to love him.

One night in a bar downtown I run into a guy named Tim Simone. I’d taken his computer science class my first year at La Salle, almost ten years before. Part of what he taught us was how to maintain our operating system. One day’s lesson was how to “defrag.” We watched as little primary-colored blocks fled across a white field, scattered groups of information reuniting in their original form, regaining the strength that comes, apparently, from being together in the place they belong. I’d liked Tim because he was young—maybe thirty—and showed no signs of knowing who I was. At the end of the semester he made me a mix tape heavy with Joe Jackson songs.

When I see him at the bar I tell him that the year I was in his class was only a few years removed from my father having been fired from La Salle. He asks my dad’s name. He says, “That was your dad? Wow. I never heard the whole story of him and that woman.”

I think, What woman? But I don’t say anything. I shrug my
shoulders. We wander over to the jukebox to look for “Steppin’ Out.”

We park, Gazz, Wilbur, and I, in the lot of a place called Jetro, a cash-and-carry food wholesaler next to Veterans Stadium, a block away from the building where we’ll watch the Sixers play (in an arena whose name changes every few years after each new merger of the monolithic bank that owns the naming rights), and stand around the open trunk of the car killing as many beers as we can before the start of the game. Although we always miss the start of the game. We stand here forty-five minutes or an hour arguing Beatles vs. Stones or trying to remember the name of the kid in homeroom who shat himself during a fire drill. We talk about sports, our girlfriends, our neighborhoods, bands we like. In this circle we form, we claim what has been bestowed to us neighborhood boys, this legacy of drunkenness and spectator sports and the sun setting behind refineries. We claim each other: our reward for not leaving home, our reward for loyalty and cowardice. Just as my parents had been each other’s reward. Wilbur usually turns up his car stereo to torture us with one of his favorites, something like Skid Row or Sepultura, and keeps the car doors open for more volume. After a few beers we start sneaking off one at a time to piss next to the shielding height of the nearest SUV. Sometimes we throw a football. Sometimes we heckle fans from other teams. The spell breaks when we realize we’re the last ones in the lot.
It’s after seven. Time to chug and jam cans down our pants.

On the night in May 2001 when the Sixers beat Milwaukee to go to the NBA Finals, we were so drunk after the game that Wilbur—who had, almost so inexplicably that it seemed normal, found a box of fluorescent tube lights in the parking lot—wound up in the middle of Tenth Street throwing one bulb at a time high in the air, so that when each one hit the blacktop it popped like fireworks, leaving a white cloud at his feet. Cars drove by honking, fans yelping, high-fiving him, waving Sixers towels. At some point he took off his shirt and threw it to the curb. He lofted more bulbs. More fireworks. More high fives. More honking. How could there possibly be no cops around? There weren’t. He dropped his shorts. He was skipping around with his shorts at his ankles screaming, “Sixerrrrrrs!” He was wearing only white underpants and sneakers. Excessive honking and hollering from all parties. He dropped to the ground on the yellow dividing line in the middle of Tenth Street and did push-ups over the broken glass. Then he drove us home.

On the present night, more sedate by half, Wilbur says to us on the way out of the arena, “What? Do you want to go to Slippery When Wet?”

A tiny place with low ceilings that could just as easily have been an AMVETS hall, Slippery When Wet was in no sense meant for gentlemen. The employees tended to be tattooed with garish implant scars. A few years after this night the place was raided by the FBI, and its co-owners—graduates of our fair alma mater, Northeast Catholic—were arrested on gun charges.
(I think the FBI was disappointed because their investigation—like so many in Philadelphia—reportedly involved public corruption, not guns.)

Gazz had never been inside a strip club before. I’d been maybe ten times, a few for bachelor parties, and Wilbur and I had gone just the two of us a few times. Speaking at least for the clubs in Northeast Philadelphia, we went to these places less for eroticism and more for the reasons one would watch a sword swallower. Wilbur was always best in these situations. Unlike Gazz and me, he wasn’t shy with strangers. He made small talk that night with even the most vacant dancers, of which there was no shortage. He was engaged in this when, I don’t know why, I started rocking back and forth in my chair, staring at the floor. I heard Wilbur tell a woman, “He’s retarded.” And then I heard Gazz say, “He’s our brother. We’re just getting him out of the house for a night.” “Aww,” I heard her say. Then she was on my lap. I was twenty-seven and big—six two, 210 pounds. I was channeling Lennie from
Of Mice and Men
.

“Y’avin a good time, hon?” she said. I nodded yes. And that was that. Probably every woman working that night spent time on my lap. I didn’t pay a dime. A parade of flesh, a comedy of arms legs breasts asscheeks summoning no feelings about sex, just as the festival of death at work every day stirred no feelings about life.

My life had become bodies all day long and a body at night. I was living the inverse of a Buddhist inversion—if I concentrated hard enough, the ancient, rotting woman in my hands
at work would at night become a beautiful naked girl in my bed, or on my lap. I barely felt a thing about any of it except wanting to feel more.

One day in the office Dave asked me about the latest woman I’d been dating. She worked with kids and ran marathons. I told him it had ended badly, as usual.

“She sounded great for you!” he said. “What was the problem?”

“I just, you know, I didn’t feel it.”

He looked at me, but I could tell he was holding back what he wanted to say. I loved Dave. For me, depending on the circumstance, he was a boss, an older brother, and a father. Because he was so fastidious, he could be hard to work for sometimes, but I always felt we deeply respected and liked each other. Finally he said, “You need to let yourself be loved, Andrew.”

I let out a laugh. Which of his wife’s magazines had he gotten this from? You read this on the toilet, right? But even so, he’d been with his wife for twenty years. They had three kids. He knew that exchanging love and trust was the real entry to adulthood, and here I was still fucking around, holding myself back from serious engagement in love or career for reasons more mysterious to me than they should have been. Let yourself be loved—I went home that night and wrote it down on the back of a coffee receipt and slipped it in my wallet.

And yet.

Still I skulked onto the darkened doorsteps of the apartments of young women who’d promised to open their doors.
Crept out of the shadows long enough to be taken in and then up to their bedrooms, and though not blessed with a forked penis I was as quiet as a possum and as businesslike, and as blind as the possum is, I was blind to what all this skulking around meant. I was dumb when it came to sensing that these women wanted to settle down and wanted to love someone and found my sweetness and mildness irresistible even though those traits were merely vestiges of my childhood rather than reflections of genuine character. I’d learned merely to use them to deflect attention. Oh, what a sweet boy he is. What a sweet boy. This is how many of these young ladies thought of me right up until the first day I didn’t answer their phone calls or was spotted with another young lady walking hand in hand just a block away. What a slinking, creeping possum of a low-down carrion eater. Of course this is why the possum scares me. The possum is a coward. He avoids conflict by disengaging, by hiding behind his open eyes. Some think he’s cute, some think he’s vile. But regardless of how he handles himself, the possum does his job. He cleans up the dead. He eats carrion so we don’t have to smell it, see it, catch its disease. He’s evolved to dispose of our trash. I, too, made a life of disposing of carrion. Put you in your box and roll you into hell. I was terrified of the possum, for in that filthy trash-can sitter I saw myself.

Janie called me one day, long after the hairdresser and the kindergarten teacher, a few years deep into the scenes at the curb.

“I think about you,” she said.

This is the part in the movie when the ex he’s been consumed with finally wants him back. This is the point where after all that obsession, with the chance to have her back, he walks away, realizing the fever’s broken, forgiving her, but having safely reached a place where she can no longer hurt him. Or, after much tribulation, he loves her anew, finding his salvation in their reunion. We started sleeping together again, and after a few weeks of menacing her with my old grievances, I dumped her like I had all the other women I dated. I didn’t register even a pang. I was no longer paralyzed but truly dying. I had to get as far away from Philadelphia as I could.