Another Bullshit Night in Suck City Read online

  shelter

  We land in Boston just before the ice comes, near the anniversary of my mother’s death. We dock at a marina in Fort Point Channel, home to a small community of live-aboards. That first winter we invent ways to keep warm—plastic on the windows, styrofoam insulation under the floors, three to a bed. Our water comes from a hose, and the hose often freezes. A small woodstove overheats the cabin by sucking all the oxygen out, forcing us to open the doors, to lay flat on the floor, lightheaded and gasping, tormented by suffocation dreams, desperate to be closer to the last pockets of air, until the fire goes out and the cold pours in and we awake shivering. We hang old tires over the sides to keep the ice in the channel from lifting the boat into the air and crushing the hull. Eventually we take to wandering around with electric blankets draped over our shoulders, the extension cord dragging absurdly behind.

  That first winter Ray and Clare will now and then ask Emily to invite me up to their house in Ipswich for a family dinner. Sure, I say, I’ll be there, and then not show. Emily tells me after the first time that it was better I hadn’t gone, that Jonathan had come, that her parents had wanted us to meet, that it hadn’t been pretty. I find it best to arrive unannounced, to be erratic, to keep them guessing. I’ve had enough surprises, it’s better if I’m the one doing the surprising.

  I’m driving a 1963 Chevy pickup, a behemoth, the paint a faded green patina, the color copper turns, duct tape around the wheel wells, the nose already stove in by an eighteen-wheeler when I bought it. A few tons of steel, my armor, a do-I-look-like-I-give-a-fuck-about-the-paint-job? type of truck, a do-I-look-like-I-have-enough-insurance? type of truck. Given a wide berth, if I want to change lanes I put on my blinker and ease into the lane, whether the BMW makes room for me or not. A truck that demands politeness. If I’m going somewhere I don’t really want to go, like dinner at Ray and Clare’s, the truck will invariably die on me, quit moving, stubborn mule. Nothing can hurt me in that truck.

  Not that anything’s wrong with these dinners—the food invariably high-end, the town gentile, lily-white. One could see it as a respite from living in downtown Boston. But I always feel on display. Each glass of wine I throw back feels measured. Here, for the first time in my life, I’m Jonathan’s son. That they want the reunion to take place under their eyes, around their dinner table, with Emily by my side, feels wrong. Perverse. Their intentions may be nothing but generous but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like a freak show, and I choose not to be one of the freaks. Ray asks, Have you heard from Jonathan? He asks about you all the time. I say, I got a few letters. You should get in touch with him, Ray says, he’s getting old, he’s harmless now. I will, I say, I’ll stop by and see him. Ray tells me that my father lives in a rooming house on Beacon Hill, I take the address, fold it into my pocket, and on the drive back to Boston toss it out the window. Years later Clare will tell me that Jonathan would never mention my brother or me at all, that it seemed to her that we just weren’t that important to him. She tells me this with a mixture of revulsion and respect—At least he wasn’t a maudlin drunk, she will say, the type who solicits your pity with talk of O my lost sons….

  Phil has a job with an architectural firm a ten-minute walk from the dock. I work doing carpentry, carving a town-house on Commonwealth Avenue into condos, replacing six-inch molding with drywall, which leaves a nasty taste in my throat. By the end of February I’m laid off (hallelujah), so I drift down to Nicaragua for a couple months to meet up with Emily, who’s studying Spanish. We want to be near the Sandinistas, their revolution a glimmer of hope in the world, just as a few years later the fall of the Berlin Wall will be another glimmer. We come back to Boston and the boat as summer begins.

  Just aft of us tourists pose hour upon hour to be photographed on the deck of the Boston Tea Party Ship, holding aloft a styrofoam bale wrapped in burlap, TEA stenciled on the outside, ready to toss it into the filthy water. At sunset we hang out on our aft deck drinking bottle after bottle of red wine as a thousand revolutions get played out behind us. The bale is tied to a rope so it can be hauled back on deck, to await the next camera, but it often breaks free and drifts over to us. A punked-out girl named Giselle lives on a boat next to ours and works at a homeless shelter. The Pine Street Inn. It sounds at least as worthwhile as how I’m spending my time. Real estate in Boston is moving from an overheated phase into a long rancid boil, and more and more homeless people are appearing on the streets daily. It’s impossible for them not to tug at one’s consciousness. You say you want a revolution? Giselle says I can probably fill in at the shelter if I’m interested.

  three

  chronicle of disaster and the absurd

  (1984) August. A year and a half after my mother dies I’m sitting in a change of shift meeting at the Pine Street Inn. Three in the afternoon, ten, twelve workers straggle into the empty Yellow Lobby to sit on benches in a loose circle and listen to the reading of the Main Log. In two hours these same benches will be filled with homeless men. Most of the workers sip coffee, many smoke, all seem to be only half listening. Each afternoon the 3-to-11 shift will show up in time to hear the 7-to-3 read the log. Ritualistic, those going off to those coming on. Now I know that my father lives in a room on Beacon Hill, maybe twenty blocks west, Ray keeps telling me to visit. My father’s on my radar, but most of the time I shut it off.

  10:20—Two or three proselytizers from an unnamed religious group infiltrated the yard today and some of our guests were seen lined up on their knees on the sidewalk for some sort of ceremony. This is to be discouraged, as we have a captive and vulnerable audience who are easily influenced.

  Chronicle of the lost, chronicle of disaster and the absurd, a near-forgotten document of American history—the Main Log of the Pine Street Inn Men’s Unit. What’s written in the log is nearly always the same, variations on a few themes—someone falls, further down or further apart, a new guest arrives, someone moves on. The reading lasts anywhere from five minutes to half an hour, depending on the kind of day it’s been. There are barrings to be voted on, notes about a guest decompensating, another who’s talking about checking into detox. The men, still outside for the day, are just starting to line up in the yard for their beds. A few are inside, waiting to get into the clinic, or to talk with a counselor. One seems frozen sitting upright, his forehead glued to the table.

  At about 12:30 this afternoon I observed Jack Styles performing certain sexual acts on Bobo Jenkins. While there’s a time and a place for everything I don’t feel 12:30 in the afternoon is the time, nor the Brown Lobby bathroom the place. Because of Jack’s behavior and obvious disregard for P.S.I. rules and his agitation of the other guests, I’m bringing Jack up for barring.

  OFN Bobo for his part in the above.

  Everyone’s acting out continually, in one way or another, whether sitting in a corner with a coat pulled over his head or giddily lit one night after weeks of calm. A guest does have to go the extra mile in order to get noticed above the din. He has to make a significant scene in the midst of an unending scene. Jack is described as “b/m, 6’0”, brown skinned, very active libido.” The vote goes against barring him. Bobo, for some reason, is not even considered for barring, merely put out for the night (OFN). Maybe to be on the receiving end of a blow job is seen akin to being on the receiving end of a punch, though it never seemed that way to me.

  Timers for lights fail, locks jam, radios refuse to transmit. All this is written up, ATTENTION MAINTENANCE, theoretically to be attended to the next day, soon.

  In a few days the Department of Mental Health will give us a way to “pink paper” psychotic guests on weekends. This means that if someone goes berserk we can sign a form which will commit him to a locked ward until Monday morning, when a doctor can evaluate. The police, theoretically, will transport. Then Solomon Carter Fuller, the psych hospital, decides to admit no more patients. A woman died after being left in seclusion unattended for twenty-three hours straight and it’s all over the papers.
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  Ambulance 911 called for a man with cuts on face and head, claiming to have been hit by a car twice on East Berkeley Street. Melvin loses his wallet and $90. Another new guest, Emmett—at least the tenth this month—hearing voices, doubles over in pain at loud noises. Willie puts his fist through a window when refused a cup of coffee. Rene comes to the door with a knife wound to his left hand. Anton reports being robbed by four barrees around the corner at five A.M. Danny’s bleeding profusely from the face. Ultraviolet lights are installed in an effort to curb the spread of contagious tuberculosis. The bomb squad responds to a call they received at their headquarters. Alphonse, found with a utility knife while getting treated for scabies, is barred automatically. A woman calls regarding her missing brother, asks us to have him call her if he shows up. Another man calls for his brother, who left a suicide note at home, so he’s calling everywhere. Riddell keeps falling asleep with lit cigarettes and setting his coat on fire. Nick Hitler, on a rampage, spits in another guest’s face. An unidentified male found facedown on Washington Street—fell on some broken glass and bled to death.

  Another quiet night on the 3-to-11 shift, Lucero writes at nine. At ten Ben Craig, another new guest, comes to the door, spacey and disoriented. Later, as we direct him to a bed, he insists we give him his “real bed.”

  crowbar

  (1984) Christmas. I’ve been working at the shelter for five months—it has begun to enter my bloodstream. Volunteers wrap donated gifts—hats, gloves, socks, cigarettes—to be handed out to the guests on Christmas Eve. Parker’s gift, a pair of red pajamas, delight him, though they pose a dilemma—to take a bed all are required to trade their clothes for a flimsy white johnny, but as the line of men snakes up the staircase, one is now in red. How do you tell a homeless man that he cannot use the gift you have just given him? We might as well have wrapped up a toaster for him, or a gift certificate to have his carpets cleaned. Parker wears the red pajamas every night for two weeks, and he wears them all day as well, under his clothes, as long johns. Until the night I notice a small envelope in his top pocket, and it turns out to have ten joints inside. I confiscate the pajamas, give him back his street clothes, send him out into the cold night. But I let him keep the marijuana. How I came to this punishment I cannot now say. Some would have barred him for the drugs, some might have ignored it. Almost all would have taken the pajamas, though, as they had begun to smell.

  That spring Phil and I decide to move the boat to Provincetown, a village of artists, fishermen and sexual outlaws at the tip of Cape Cod, a hundred and twenty miles overland from Boston, a fuck-you finger of sand sticking into the Atlantic. Emily’s parents have a summer house there, which we can crash in occasionally if the harbor gets too rough. After two years in Fort Point Channel we want to float in water we can swim in. Besides, as real estate along the Boston waterfront continues to heat up, our “landlord” has turned ugly. Boats cut loose, gunplay at midnight. We vanish one May morning before sunup, drop anchor in Provincetown Harbor three hours later, a quarter mile offshore. Phil returns to Boston, to his job, his girlfriend. I drive to the city every other week, to work a night or two at Pine Street, to see Emily.

  In Provincetown I row a tin skiff each morning to shore, row back out at night. If the tide is low I drag the rowboat out over the flats, pants rolled up around my calves, shoes left on the dock. I don’t know what my feet are touching and I grow to not care. At high tide it’s easy—the skiff’s floating above the eelgrass and tiny crabs and muck, I just step in and push off, aim the bow toward where I know the boat awaits, pull at the oars. A few times a day I row back and forth, unless I spend the whole day on the boat, which I often do, if I have enough food, if I have nowhere to be. And if the next day’s also empty I won’t go to shore then either, until days pass without setting foot on land. Emily’s parents can watch me with binoculars, if they choose, and if I smoke enough pot I can almost see them in their picture window, bringing me into focus.

  The days I go into Boston I leave Richard, a new pal, to keep an eye on things—to see if the waterline’s sitting heavy, if the pump’s working. Richard, a sculptor, landed in Provincetown from New York a few months earlier to escape a heroin habit that had gotten out of hand, sick as a dog when we met. We both work at the Moors Restaurant—a “garbage job,” as Richard puts it. Richard, part of New York’s downtown club scene, claims to have made Keith Haring sleep on his couch, spurning his advances. He still has a loft in the shadows of the World Trade Center, and we will eventually go there for weekends sometimes.

  Before we become tight Richard will swim out to the boat after midnight, after the bars close, to work off some excess energy, too shy to pull himself on board, shivering in the dinghy until he catches his breath or gets too cold, and then he’ll head back shoreward. The next day he mentions it—I swam out to your boat last night. You should have come aboard, I say. He swims out with a waterproof plastic case from Marine Specialties dangling from his neck, a dry cigarette and a lighter inside. By August Richard’s leaving cigarettes on board, and sometimes staying over. On an August night we dive from the top deck and as we enter the ocean our bodies are completely lit up by phosphorescence, like underwater superheroes.

  The boat will be anchored in Provincetown Harbor for the next seven summers. Some years I’ll live on her alone, some years with a friend. For long stretches it’s my only real home, which fuels my desperation to keep it afloat. “The ocean’s always looking for a way into your boat,” a Coast Guard pamphlet warns. With other boaters you exchange stories of breachings and near-sinkings and total losses. You tell about storms and how they’d been fought or ridden out or succumbed to. I know one whose boat sprung a plank while being towed, and while jamming some towels into the breach his hand passed clean through the hull, pinning his arm, the ocean rushing in. He had to time the roll of the waves to pull free. I know fishermen who rode out hurricanes with their bow to the storm, the wind sandblasting their eyes until all their blood vessels burst. When they tell the story the no-longer-whites of their eyes shine crimson. I walk the streets studying the tops of trees to measure the wind; I know the tides without looking; I dive on my anchors every other day and reset them in the sand; I see the cabins need paint and try to make more time. All of it fills me so I don’t have to dwell on what’s really in my brain—a palmfull of pills, a gunshot wound, a splintered chair. A nightgown left heavy with blood.

  Summer becomes fall. That time still passes, ignoring my mother’s absence, somehow overwhelms me. Going into my second year at the shelter I’m discovering unknown reserves of bad energy inside me that need to be tapped. Provincetown’s good for that—the so-called last resort, the end of the world, jumping-off point to oblivion. Provincetown can absorb nearly anything, nearly anyone who can’t fit in elsewhere, no such thing as too freaky, too lost, not here. By late October the police make their annual post-summer sweep through town, rounding up the most obvious drug peddlers, the walking wreckage, the ones who’d been flush all summer on tourist hungers and now find themselves eating the profits, the product, spending all they’d accumulated. Summer’s over, the police murmur, buy a bus ticket or check into jail.

  By November I’m caught unawares. As the town emptied I’d stayed on, unsure what to do next. I’d never hauled the boat out of the water, I didn’t have a plan. Late in the season and still a quarter mile offshore—no telephone, no electricity, a propane stove, a radio powered by AA batteries, somehow reluctant to move back onto land, feeling that land itself is a temporary state, a transition. Living on the water quiets my mind. What can I pass through now on my way to more water? Another Christmas at the shelter? I gaze at the shoreline—all those houses, each window lit, families inside, whole lives unfolding—convince myself that I’m not a part of it, that the lives behind each window have nothing to do with my life. The boat has become supreme isolation, chosen isolation, holding myself apart from the world, which I only dimly understand anyway. I can sit on the aft deck and ne
ver be surprised by anything again—no phone will ever ring, no one will knock that I haven’t seen coming for a quarter mile. That I can go to sleep any night and wake up having broken loose—a failed knot, a line frayed, the anchor dragged—that I can drift out of sight of land makes a twisted sense, in line with my internal weather. When everything has proven tenuous one can either move toward permanence or move toward impermanence. The boat’s sublimely impermanent. Some mornings the fog’s so thick that I exist only in a tight globe of clearing, beyond which is all foghorn and unknown.