Another Bullshit Night in Suck City Read online

  another bullshit night in suck city

  books by nick flynn

  Some Ether

  Blind Huber

  A Note Slipped Under the Door

  (coauthored with Shirley McPhillips)

  another bullshit night in suck city

  a memoir

  nick flynn

  w. w. norton & company

  new york london

  disclaimer Although this is a work of nonfiction, the names of those mentioned have often been altered, especially the names of those who found themselves homeless for any length of time, or still find themselves “there.” The names of those who may have transgressed the law have also been altered, except for the name of my father, who has done his time and is proud of it.

  Copyright © 2004 by Nick Flynn

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Flynn, Nick, 1960–

  Another bullshit night in Suck City: a memoir / Nick Flynn.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-393-32940-7

  1. Flynn, Nick, 1960–2. Flynn, Nick, 1960–—Family. 3. Poets, American—20th century—Biography. 4. Poets, American—20th century—Family relationships. 5. Homeless persons—Massachusetts—Boston. 6. Fathers and sons—Massachusetts—Boston. 7. Boston (Mass.)—Biography. I. Title.

  PS3556.L894Z464 2004

  811’.6—dc22 2004011796

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

  Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

  another bullshit night in suck city

  HAMM: Scoundrel! Why did you engender me?

  NAGG: I didn’t know.

  HAMM: What? What didn’t you know?

  NAGG: That it’d be you.

  —Beckett, Endgame

  Contents

  one

  automatic teller

  the inventor of the life raft

  apologist

  barracuda

  beacon hill

  trader jon

  ulysses

  winter

  two hundred years ago

  the cage

  funeral, unattended

  hiss & fall

  my dostoyevsky

  exterminator!

  button man

  the time of your life

  chet’s last call

  two

  fire

  funeral, unattended

  pear

  turner’s special blend

  practical joke

  slow-motion car wreck

  dreamwold

  the take

  red sox

  chronic bafflement disorder

  a survey

  near-desert

  rule 35

  barefoot motorcycle

  the fact foundation of america

  snapshot

  the ashmont arms

  thirteen random facts

  fish pier (the two types of college)

  love saves the day

  family friend

  o christmas tree

  evol

  shelter

  three

  chronicle of disaster and the absurd

  crowbar

  morocco

  summer of suits

  silver key

  inside out

  cloverleaf

  the piss of god

  countdown

  riddle

  that man’s father is my father’s son

  mayberry rfd

  like it or not

  transparent

  same again

  the van

  the pine street palace

  ham

  four

  headlong

  fuckin gonuts

  how’s my driving?

  fort point (mountain of shoes)

  the bootlegger

  over 100 lbs.? over 100 miles?

  king of ireland

  five

  santa lear

  six

  dharma

  many ways to brooklyn

  my cardboard box

  flawless (how to rob a bank)

  photogenic

  another way to think of fire

  vodka, stamps, flowers

  twelve doors (the devil’s arithmetic)

  my brother waits for the tiny machines

  the book of jon

  button man (the musical)

  heroic uses of concrete (the city that always sleeps)

  the boy stood on the burning deck

  someday this awl will be yours

  my tree

  some notes

  [debts]

  [bragging rights]

  one

  automatic teller

  (1989) Please, she whispers, how may I help you? The screen lights up with her voice. A room you enter, numbers you finger, heated, sterile almost. The phone beside her never rings, like a toy, like a prop. My father lifts the receiver in the night, speaks into it, asks, Where’s the money? asks, Why can’t I sleep? asks, Who left me outside? The phone rings on a desk when he lifts it, the desk somewhere in Texas, someone is always supposed to be at that desk but no one ever is, not at night. A machine speaks while my father tries to speak, it doesn’t listen, it only speaks, my father’s face reflected dimly on the screen.

  Any card with a magnetic strip will let you in, all the street guys know this, or learn quick. It’s never night inside this room, the lights hum a deafening white. My father stands at the desk, filling out deposit slips—Five hundred to savings, twenty-five thousand to checking, all cash—then puts the slips in an envelope and tosses it into the trash. Drive past and it’s like a window display, a diorama—Late Twentieth Century Man Pretending to Be Banking—brought to you by the Museum of the Homeless. The people who enter, those with money to withdraw, most of them don’t even glance at my father, don’t give him a second look. Dressed well, clean, his graying hair long and swept back from his forehead—just like them, doing a little banking after midnight, on his way to an after-hours club, a late dinner, a lady waiting in the car, that car, by the curb, the engine running, the heat blowing on her legs while she listens to the radio—A little honey in my pot, or, Baby it’s cold outside. Skid is curled beneath the desk—semiconscious or out cold, hard to tell, his boombox cranked up full, he holds it tight to his chest like a screaming child. My father hums. The lights hum. The couple at the automatic teller kiss, the machine clicks out a small pile of bills, my father bends to his deposit slip, Six hundred and seventy thousand, cash, he puts it in an envelope, licks the envelope shut. The couple stand by the door, still kissing, like they have no place better to be, like this is the most romantic spot in the city.

  Others find their way to the ATM after midnight, after the last Dunkin’ Donuts closes. They rattle the magnetic door to get my father’s attention, but unless he knows them he’ll feign sleep or pretend he’s absorbed with his banking. After midnight it’s hard to find an open lobby, a dry place to enter, and for some it’s hard to scrounge even so much as a magnetic card. My father knows Beady-Eyed Bill, another harmless weirdo, unlatches the door. The Beady-Eyed One talks out of the side of his mouth, glancing over my father’s shoulder to scope what’s coming. He fears he’s being watched, and inside this room who can say he’s not? Someone behind that wall is making a goddamn movie of his life.

  Alice, hunched by the trash, swea
rs people come in at night and carve their initials into her flesh. She holds an upturned palm to Bill accusingly, asks, Who’s “J.L.”? The scratches on her hand do look like the letters “J” and “L,” this is true. Bill glances at my father conspiratorially. Alice glares at Bill. And which Bill are you tonight? The one in the gray slacks, or the one that snuck in last night and branded my hand? My father, finished depositing his cash, curls up on the ceramic floor, turns his face to the baseboard, tucked below the window so the fake police won’t see him. Phony sheriff stars painted on their little jeeps, if he can stay below their line of sight it might buy ten minutes of sleep.

  In Boston the bars close at one. The next wave of revelers, more gregarious than the earlier crowd, bleary and headed home, push their way inside. Sometimes they give you a hassle, sometimes they flip you a few bucks. A little lit, sometimes they try to start up a conversation, sit on the floor next to you, offer you a drink, want to know your name. You seem like a regular guy, how’d you end up here?

  Where? my father asks.

  the inventor of the life raft

  His father, my father claims, invented both the life raft and the power window, though sometimes it is the life raft and the push-button locks on car doors. Or some sort of four-gig carburetor that saves gas. In this story my father’s family is rich, with gardeners and chauffeurs during the Depression. His grandfather owned a roofing company that had the contracts for Faneuil Hall and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts—big public works projects that kept them flush while the country struggled. Look inside the grasshopper weathervane on the roof of Faneuil Hall and you will see my great-grandfather’s name, Thaddeus, which is also my brother’s name. My father tells me this, but how to get inside this grasshopper he doesn’t say.

  apologist

  If you asked me about my father then—the years he lived in a doorway, in a shelter, in an ATM—I’d say, Dead, I’d say, Missing, I’d say, I don’t know where he is. I’d say whatever I felt like saying, and it would all be true. I don’t know him, I’d say, my mother left him shortly after I was born, or just before. But this story did not hold still for long. It wavered.

  Even before he became homeless I’d heard whispers, sensed he was circling close, that we were circling each other, like planets unmoored. I knew he drove a cab, maybe my mother told me that, though she said almost nothing about him, except that it was better he wasn’t around. I even knew what kind, a Town Taxi, a black and white. In my early twenties, after I dropped out of college and moved to Boston, I would involuntarily check the driver of each that passed, uncertain what it would mean, what I would do, if it was my father behind the wheel. I knew he lived in a rooming house on Beacon Hill, I’d heard about it a couple years before they evicted him, before he moved into his cab, leasing it twenty-four hours at a stretch, before he blacked out on a vodka jag, hit someone or something, before they took his license away. The day he was evicted was the first face-to-face I had with him as an adult, the second time in my life I can remember meeting him—he’d called on the phone, told me to get over to his room with my truck. It was the first time I’d heard his voice on the phone. Two months later he appeared at the shelter where I worked and demanded a bed.

  The Pine Street Inn was and still is the largest homeless shelter in Boston. State-of-the-art. When my father arrived I’d already been working there for three years, first as a counselor, then as a caseworker. He wasn’t homeless when I first started—marginal, sure, but not homeless. I remember the day he arrived the nights could still be cold. He raised his arms to enter, because every “guest” has to be frisked—no bottles, no weapons. This is the first rule.

  Ask me about him now and I’ll say, Housed. Twelve years. Subsidized. A Section 8. A disability. I’ll thank you for paying his rent, unless you’re also a Section 8. Unless by the time you read this he’s been evicted again. Ask now and I’ll say he’s a goddamned tree stump, it’ll take dynamite to get rid of that motherfucker.

  Before he lost his room I could have met him, if I’d chosen to, at any time. He was never difficult to find. No one is, really. Even the months he was barred from the shelter I knew the three or four spots outside where he slept, each one burned into my internal map of the city. Nowadays I can look at a calendar and roughly pinpoint his location. I’ve seen the inside of his apartment, I know his routine. The first of the month he gets his check, and from this he (hopefully) pays his rent, then buys a gallon or three of vodka. If it is near the first he will be in his room drinking. Easy to find near the first. If it is later in the month he will have to venture out, to soup kitchens for meals, and then he will be harder to track down, at least at midday. He has no phone. If I want to see him I have to go to his apartment building and ring his bell, the bell with my last name taped to it. It will take about a minute for him to buzz me in, his finger stuttering on the button. Or else his apartment will be empty and I will not be buzzed inside. I will then either wander down Commonwealth Avenue looking for him or sit in the local Dunkin’ Donuts and wait for him to appear.

  If I could distill those years into a television game show I’d call it The Apologist. Today’s show: “Fathers Left Outside to Rot.” And there I’d sit in an ill-fitting suit, one of three or four contestants, looking contrite or defiant or inscrutable under the life-draining lights. At some point, after I tell an abridged version of my story, the host will parade my father out, and we will have a reunion of sorts, on national tv, as the camera pans the reactions of the studio audience. Before we go to a commercial break a caption will appear under my face—He wished his father dead.

  The abridged story:

  I worked with the homeless from 1984 until 1990. In 1987 my father became homeless, and remained homeless for nearly five years.

  If it snowed I’d turn up the heat in my loft in the Combat Zone, a whole floor of a building above an abandoned strip joint, look out the window at Boston’s so-called “adult entertainment district.”

  The sign of the Naked Eye, a woman’s neon legs opening and closing on an enormous flashing eye. The Glass Slipper. Playland.

  Cars skidding slightly, footprints filling in. Tiny lights bouncing off whitened streets. I knew precisely the risks involved.

  Many, most of the homeless die, sooner or later, turn up dead, in the most unimaginable, in the most ordinary ways. Robert Kuneman propped upright against a wall in the South End, seemingly waiting for a bus, frozen solid. Fergus Woods sleeping in a cardboard box in his sister’s garage, trying to keep warm with a can of sterno, sets it, and himself, on fire.

  In the summer I’d hear about someone found face-down near the railyard and wonder if the body was my father’s. A reflex. White male, fifties, sixties, could be anyone.

  Sometimes I’d see my father, walking past my building on his way to another nowhere. I could have given him a key, offered a piece of my floor. A futon. A bed. But I never did. If I let him inside I would become him, the line between us would blur, my own slow-motion car wreck would speed up. The slogan on the side of a moving company truck read TOGETHER WE ARE GOING PLACES—modified by a vandal or a disgruntled employee to read TOGETHER WE ARE GOING DOWN. If I went to the drowning man the drowning man would pull me under. I couldn’t be his life raft.

  barracuda

  (1956) Jonathan, years before he will become my father, is back north for another summer. For the past few winters, since he dropped out of college, he’s been working on charter fishing boats out of Palm Beach. When back in Massachusetts he ranges from his parents’ house in Scituate to friends’ couches in Boston. A vapor. Everywhere. Nowhere. Scituate (sit-tchoo-it, from the Native American satuit, meaning “cold brook”), a fishing village about thirty miles south of Boston, is the summer home to a few of the city’s politicians, who’ve dubbed it “The Irish Riviera.” During the week Jonathan lives at home, working for a local construction mogul. On weekends he skips north to Boston, crashes on Beacon Hill with Ray, his best friend. Ray is from working-class French
Canadian Catholic stock—he pays his bills on time and is generous with his friends, which is becoming more and more important for someone like Jonathan. Steady Ray. You didn’t need much money in your pocket, not a whole lot was expected of you. You could live well as a struggling artist, you could rise up or you could drift along. Cocky, his dark hair slicked back, Jonathan’s rising, making a name for himself—The Next Great American Poet—saying it and then moving toward being it, possessing what passes for ambition in those beatnik days. He often wanders Harvard Square dressed in tennis whites, a racket tucked under his arm, though he doesn’t play tennis. Trawling for Radcliffe girls, he calls it. He’d always been slight, and he’d overcompensate with his swagger. Ray’s making jewelry, bending forks into rings, moonstones in spider settings. In later years Ray will open his own factory and make a fair bit of money manufacturing plastics used in missiles—“Daddy Warbucks,” his family will call him.

  One afternoon on Charles Street Jonathan nudges Ray, nods into the crowded sidewalk—You watch, he says, there’s going to be a girl walking down that street, and she’ll be from a wealthy family. She’ll have artistic aspirations but not much talent. She’s coming to Beacon Hill to be part of the scene, looking for someone with talent that she can latch on to, looking to be the power behind a diamond in the rough, even if she still believes that she is the one with talent. Jonathan squints into his sun-drenched future. She doesn’t know it yet, but she’s looking for me.

  Jody, seventeen, home for the summer, works in a coffee shop in Scituate Harbor. A photograph from that time shows a girl with a dark brown ponytail, deep green eyes, a difficult smile. Jonathan orders coffee, chats her up. As he recalls it, I think we went on a date the first night I met her. Your mother was beautiful, for chrissakes. I had a car, some shitbox I’d borrowed or finessed. We went on a date in it that first night. His charm, less tattered than it would later become, before several liquid tons of alcohol crush it out of him, appeals to Jody on some level. Rebellious and adrift, bounced from one boarding school to another (now between Dana Hall and House in the Pines), she comes from money. Her father was running his father’s wool business, and during the war—uniforms, blankets, felt—wool had made money. Jonathan tells Jody he’s back in town for the summer, doing construction, though in fact he’s a laborer, digging ditches. In Palm Beach he’s known as “Barracuda Buck, Native Guide.” Native to what? Jody asks. He tells her about the novel he has yet to write, his faith in it. Barracuda. Half hot air, but Scituate’s a small town—she tells him what time she gets off. After her shift he’s waiting. They drive to Peggotty Beach, park facing the water as the sun sets behind their heads. He knows her family, knows their summer house on First Cliff, the biggest house in town. He’d seen her at the beach before, but she’d been just a child then. He uncorks a pint of whiskey, offers her some. They talk about their families, he tells her how he had to get away from his father (that bald-headed fuck, playing his violin), away from this small town, in order to become his own man. If I’d’ve stayed here I’d be dead. She struggles with her father also, feels he doesn’t know her, has never tried. For the past year he’s been sleeping with his secretary, Jody found a letter (“Not long now, dearest, before we’re in Reno and all this is behind us”). They’re both reading Salinger—Catcher in the Rye in her bag. She reads aloud her favorite passage so far: