Another Bullshit Night in Suck City Read online

  “When I was really drunk, I started that stupid business with the bullet in my guts again. I was the only guy at the bar with a bullet in their guts. I kept putting my hand under my jacket, on my stomach and all, to keep the blood from dripping all over the place. I didn’t want anybody to know I was even wounded. I was concealing the fact that I was a wounded sonuvabitch….”

  Jonathan puts his hand under his jacket and doubles over in pain. No, she says, he’s concealing it. His face goes stoic. They laugh. Jonathan sees his novel like that, breaking the world open, and Jody’s willing to believe him, at least this night, and for many nights to follow. For the rest of the summer they’ll meet on the beach that connects the two cliffs, lean against the seawall, out of the wind, out of sight, compare the size of their feet, press their palms together. He’ll tell her more about his book, about Florida, about life on the docks. To be a poet digging ditches is very different from being a mere ditch digger. His family had thrived through the Depression, and he will also, but on his own terms. For a writer the place to be is Beacon Hill, he has friends there, he is known—he promises to take her.

  beacon hill

  Jonathan makes a couple trips back north from Palm Beach over the winter, to carouse Beacon Hill, to see Jody. A trolley connects House in the Pines with Boston—Jody meets him for parties, then for weekends. She’s forbidden to stay out all night but she does anyway, sneaks back into her dorm the next afternoon, takes her punishment. By then her father has moved out, flown to Reno for six months to finalize his divorce, and her mother has stopped answering the phone. Years later she will tell me that when teachers yelled at her she simply blurred her eyes until they ceased to matter. She even shows me how, looking straight at me, narrowing her eyes slightly, heavy-lidded. She tells me this when I am having trouble at school. I try it but it never seems to work.

  That winter Ray meets Clare, a student at Radcliffe. Jonathan will always claim to have introduced the two of them, as he likes to imagine his influence far-reaching, but this is not how they remember it. Clare describes Jody as “the most beautiful woman she had ever seen.” But not too bright, she will quickly add, after all, she was just a child. We’d have these big parties, and she’d always help out, get very concerned that everyone had enough to eat. In the kitchen at one of the parties I remember she asked, “Is China a country or a continent?” Can you imagine?

  In May Jonathan leaves Palm Beach for Boston and moves into Ray’s apartment. Jody has let him know that she’s three months pregnant. Already she’s been spirited out of House in the Pines to the Florence Crittenton House, a home for unwed mothers. At this point no one knows what will happen. Anything could happen. Adoption is a possibility. Abortion, though illegal, is a possibility. There are places to go, back-alley doctors, a girl could take a bus to Providence. It’s up to Jody, of course, but there is a lot of pressure for her to make a decision, soon. Her father by now is back in Scituate with his new wife, back in the big house on First Cliff, having set his first wife, my mother’s mother, up in a new, smaller house across town. He arranges a meeting with Jonathan at Locke-Ober, a restaurant in Boston, demands to know what he intends. Don’t worry, Jonathan assures him, I’m not going down to Florida anymore. I’ll marry the poor girl. A proposition made, a deal struck, whereby Jody’s father will set Jonathan up in business, a car dealership, the details to be ironed out later.

  My mother, though, already has second thoughts about Barracuda. In a letter she never sends to my father, or perhaps the draft of a letter she does send, she writes,

  Christ, how much can a girl stand when the one she loved is always drunk—always up late with another and being tired and bitchy around her, out all the time….

  That August Ray drives Jonathan to the home for unwed mothers, and is the one witness to my parents’ shotgun wedding. My brother is born a few months later. Ray drives my mother to the hospital, Jonathan shows up just after the birth—car trouble. That winter they all live together in Ray’s apartment on the Hill. Clare remembers changing my brother’s diapers.

  Years later, when asked about his two marriages, first to my mother and then to his second wife, both young women from money, my father will say—I never even asked them, they both asked me so I jumped on it. We are alone in his apartment when he tells me this, years after the divorces, the jail time, the homelessness. I’ve known a lot of poor women, and they were very nice, but not marriage material. He glances at a photograph of my brother as an infant in my mother’s arms, propped beside a photo of his second wife helping their daughter to walk. I was thinking of the children we would have together—it was important what their background was, that they came from culture. He looks me in the eye. It was all for the children, my father insists.

  trader jon

  Renault is the only spot open for them in the foreign car market, and they don’t sell especially well. Who the hell wants a Renault? My father is set up as president, though my grandfather maintains ownership himself. They dub this doomed enterprise European Engineering, its world headquarters in Belmont, Massachusetts, one in a row of other dealerships. My father gets to wear a suit to work each morning and drives a new car and his pretty young wife is at home with their newborn and a few people work under him and it all seems to be unfolding nicely. Except my father has no talent for selling cars. And his father-in-law, his backer, his silent partner, is a businessman, and expects a return on his investment. The new son-in-law is expected to show his worth. But soon there is a cash-flow problem. My father has hired several of his old drinking buddies to work alongside, including Ray, and none of them know the first thing about selling cars. Nothing much moves for the first few months, until my father hires an acquaintance named Duffy. Duffy, my grandfather will claim to this day, could sell sand to a beach. The cars start moving, and things look bright, until the folks that bought the cars began returning, to redeem the new radios, or the custom paint jobs, or the whitewall tires Duffy had promised them.

  (1960) After two years of diminishing returns, after they had sold perhaps the only Renaults they would ever sell, my grandfather cans Jonathan as president of European Engineering, cuts his losses, folds up shop. My mother, though wary of her ne’er-do-well husband, is relieved to be no longer beholden to her father. My father decides to take in used foreign cars and sell them on commission, full-time, after having done it on the side, piecemeal, for a while. He leases another garage next door and christens himself “Trader Jon.” His clients are rich, away in Europe for the summer, and these cars—BMWs and Mercedes, Fiats and MGs—sell themselves. But come fall there’s another cash-flow problem. My father takes his time notifying his clients that their cars have sold, waiting instead for them to contact him. And when they do, often the money isn’t there, already spent, and my father can’t say on what. He assumed they were so rich that they wouldn’t miss the money, not right away, but he was wrong. In another version he claims not to have kept track of the books, that he was born to be a president, not a treasurer, and it was the treasurer who set him up. But in the next breath he will claim, gleefully, that the entire “caper” made front-page news. A search through microfilm records of newspapers from that time reveals not a word.

  In January I am born. Again Ray drives my mother to the hospital, just as he did when my brother was born. That June my mother, twenty years old, packs us up and leaves my father. She will never receive any child-support from him, nor will she ever take any money from her father. Or perhaps none will be offered, at least not in a way that she will feel comfortable accepting. Perhaps she wanted to make it on her own. Perhaps she saw that money hadn’t really ever made anything right. Perhaps her father did not want to confuse money with love, not again, and so he withheld the money, confusing them even more. I lost a lot in that car business, is all my grandfather will say now.

  ulysses

  Many fathers are gone. Some leave, some are left. Some return, unknown and hungry. Only the dog remembers. Even if around, m
ost disappear all day, to jobs their children only slightly understand. Gone to office, gone to shop, men in suits hiding behind closed doors, yelling into phones, men in coveralls, reading pornography in pickup trucks. The carpenter. The electrician. They drive to strangers’ houses, a woman in a robe answers the door, they sit at the table with her, she offers coffee and cake, they talk about the day ahead. By nightfall you won’t recognize the bathroom, he promises. Monday we start in on the roof. Many end up sitting around the house all day, sneaking sips in the woodshed. Many drive to other towns, make love to a woman they’ve been making love to for years. Some continue to yell at their sons from the grave, some are less than a tattered photograph. Some sons need to exhume the body, some need to see a name written in a ledger. Some drive past a house the father once lived in as a child, park across from it, some swear that if they could gaze into his face just once their hearts would settle. One friend inherited some money and hired a private investigator to track down his lost father, paid a thousand dollars to find out his father was dead. All my life my father had been manifest as an absence, a nonpresence, a name without a body. The three of us sat around the table, my mother, brother and I, all carrying his name. Flynn?

  Some part of me knew he would show up, that if I stood in one place long enough he would find me, like you’re taught to do when you’re lost. But they never taught us what to do if both of you are lost, and you both end up in the same place, waiting.

  winter

  (1989) My father wraps himself in newspaper some nights, stuffs his coat with newspaper, the headlines finally about him, though he isn’t named. Just more heartstring pieces about “the homeless.” Get it straight, I’ve never flung a knife or shot a bullet at anyone. I’ve only been locked up for two of my fifty-nine years. I’m no jailbird. The nights drop below freezing and still he sleeps outside. “My toes,” he writes me, “are being cut off.” On wet nights he wraps himself in plastic, a Hefty trashbag sealed with duct tape, he weaves himself a cocoon, lies on the ground, puts his feet into the bag and pushes until they reach the bottom. Leaning forward, he tightens the plastic around his ankles and tapes them, and then he tapes the bag around his waist. This way, in the night, the bag won’t slide down his body.

  two hundred years ago

  If you had been raised in a village two hundred years ago, somewhere in Eastern Europe, say, or even on the coast of Massachusetts, and your father was a drunk, or a little off, or both, then everyone in the village, those you grew up with and those who knew you only from a distance, they would all know that the town drunk or the village idiot was your father. It couldn’t be hidden or denied. Everything he did, as long as you stayed in the village, whether shouting obscenities at passing children or sleeping in the cemetery, all would be remembered when they looked at you, they would say to themselves or to whomever they were with, It’s his father, you know, the crazy one, the drunk, and they couldn’t help but wonder what part of his madness had passed on to you, which part you had escaped. They would look into your eyes to see if they were his eyes, they would notice if you were to stumble slightly as you stepped into a shop, they would remember that your father too had started with promise, like you. They would know he was a burden, they could read the struggle in your face, they would watch as you passed and nod, knowing that around the next corner your father had fallen and pissed himself. And they would watch you watch him, note the days you simply kept walking, as if you didn’t see, note the days you knelt beside him, tried to get him to rise, to prop him up. If they were friends and they came by your house they couldn’t help but notice whether you had an extra room, or whether your own situation seemed precarious, marginal. And they might not say anything but they would take it in and wonder, either way it meant something. If this was two hundred years ago you left the village maybe once a month, to bring whatever it was you grew or fabricated—onions or oil, wine or cloth—to a distant market to sell, only to return in a day or two to the village, and you might get the sense, perhaps rightly, that there was nowhere else on earth for you to be, that to leave the village would be akin to banishment, to enter into a lifetime of wandering, to become open to speculation that you’d abandoned your father to his fate, turned your back, left him to die. Taken and not given back. For if you are not responsible for your own father, who is? Who is going to pick him up off the ground if not you?

  the cage

  (1984) I’m twenty-four when I start at Pine Street, full of nonspecific, scattershot longing. “Dissatisfied” is an emotion. When my shift gets off at eleven I go out with my co-workers and drink to the eventual collapse of the capitalist system, to the hollowness of the go-go eighties. Working with the homeless we can hear the buildings crumble. Yet each night we close Foley’s and step out, faintly disappointed, into the still-standing city.

  As a newcomer I often work the Cage, where the bed tickets are given out, and the valuables, if any, are stored. Controlled, in terms of contact with the guests—four hours a night, one-on-one, easy. It is also the busiest time in the shelter, when the lobbies are at their most chaotic, the building just reopened after being shut all day. Three hundred to six hundred men will swell through the doors in the next few hours. This is when dinner is served, when the clinic is open, when the men are shepherded upstairs and into beds, those who managed to score a bed. Slowly I am getting to know them by name, trying to be responsible, to count their money out where they can see my hands.

  4011. Yes sir, sleep will feel fine tonight.

  And your name…?

  What’s the name beside the number? That’s my name.

  Ah yes, the ever-satisfied Jamal Dexter. Smokes dope in the park all day, they say, sells loose joints to the youngbloods. Followed in line by the nearly unintelligible Randy Phillips, who cannot utter his own name, who cannot look me in the eye, who unfolds yesterday’s bed ticket and slides it through the slot, both hands on it, precious.

  Carlos, a co-worker, shows me the ropes. Make sure they sign for everything, make sure the number on the envelope matches their bed number, call a counselor if something isn’t right. During a lull one night he tells the story of how he shot a guy under the tracks of the old Dudley Station, how he’d been looking for this guy to avenge a wrong done to his little brother, how the guy pulled a gun when Carlos found him, shot once but Carlos knew to turn sideways, take the bullet in his biceps. He even turns sideways as he tells the story, Like this, flex, your arm can take it, better than making your whole body a target. After he took the bullet he knocked the gun from the guy’s hand, leveled him with a punch, picked up the gun and unloaded the rest into the guy’s head. In telling the story he holds two fingers like a gun to show how he kept pulling the trigger, click click, click click, long after the gun was empty. He went into hiding for a year, disappeared upstate, came back, began working the shelter.

  Inside the shelter the tension is inescapable—the walls exude cigarette smoke and anxiety. The air is thick, stale, dreamy, though barely masking the overpowering smell of stale sweat. When open the lobbies fill with a constant nameless din, the murmur of hundreds of men, the narcotic drone of a television, punctuated by the occasional freak-out—an altercation here, someone shouting down a private demon there. All heads turn toward the sound, register it, turn away. When blows are being exchanged, if a staff member is there to intervene, he or she will intervene. A balance between escalating and defusing, stepping in and backing the fuck off. The ground floor is divided into the Brown Lobby and the Yellow Lobby, each lobby its own city, cities within the city, each with its own rules, its own physics. Brown is mostly oldtimers—drunks, mellow, regular; Yellow is the youngbloods—psych, addicts, wilder. From my perch behind the steel-mesh screen, when there is a lull in giving out bed tickets, in putting pennies into envelopes, the rhythm of these cities can slowly enter my bloodstream.