Another Bullshit Night in Suck City Read online

  I liked to play what were called “practical jokes.” I had a spoon with a hinge, a dribble glass, a severed rubber hand. I’d leave booby traps around our house, usually a piece of thread strung across a doorway as a tripwire, one end tied to a broom or the racks from the oven, anything that would fall and make a racket. I don’t think I knew that Travis had spent his time in Vietnam checking for trip-wires—I don’t know if knowing would have stopped me. I would set the trap and maybe it would catch someone and maybe it wouldn’t. One night Travis took the racks and tucked them between my bottom sheet and the mattress. I came in later that night and crawled into bed. Why I didn’t notice the racks right off I can’t say, but hours later I awoke from dreams of torture.

  Midafternoon one Saturday Travis comes home after digging sea clams with a buddy. Leaning on pitchforks knee-deep at low tide, they’d each managed to kill a case of beer before noon. He dumps the clams in the sink and tells my brother and me to circle around, he wants to show us his photo album. For the first few pages he’s a teenager, cocky beside hot rods, girls sitting on the hoods, one with her arm draped over his shoulders. The next page shows him at boot camp, Parris Island—crewcut, sudden adult. The next shows Vietnamese women dancing topless on tables, and on the next page a village is on fire. Corpses next, pages of corpses, bodies along a dirt road, a face with no eyes. As the stories of what he’d done unreel from inside him, my brother stands up and walks into his room, back to his wall of science fiction. I look at the photos, at Travis, look in his eyes as he speaks, somehow I’d learned to do that, like a tree learns to swallow barbed wire.

  Years later, when I track him down, he shows me another photo, one I hadn’t seen or don’t remember—him on a dusty road outside Da Nang, a peace sign dangling from his neck. The reason he signed up for a second hitch, he tells me, was so that he could go into villages ahead of his unit, ostensibly to check for landmines and booby traps, but once there he’d warn the villagers to run, because if they didn’t he knew there was a good chance they’d be killed by his advancing soldiers. Then he’d set off a couple rounds of C-4, radio in that it was still hot, smoke a joint, watch the villagers flee.

  The night he showed us his photo album, after the house went quiet, I crept into the kitchen for a glass of water, the sink still full of sea clams, forgotten. Under the fluorescent hum they’d opened their shells and were waving their feet, each as thick and long as my forearm. A box of snakes, some draped onto the countertop, some trying to pull themselves out.

  slow-motion car wreck

  (1972) Portsmouth, New Hampshire (More bars per square inch than any city in America, my father will inform me later, and all the women like to drink and fuck). My father’s crashing with friends, working occasionally as a longshoreman. “Longshoreman” sounds more romantic, more solid, than what he actually is. “Wharf-rat” is a better term. A photograph that appears in a local newspaper shows my father standing beside his friends Tommy (“Tommy the Terror”) and Scotty, dressed the part—black knit watchcap, black wool sweater with buttons along one shoulder, jeans. A pair of leather gloves in his back pocket, a steel hook with a perpendicular wooden handle. The costume to go with the job. The caption under the photo cites the three of them as local artists who work the docks. In Portsmouth he often uses the alias “Sheridan Snow,” perhaps to avoid my mother’s warrant. He has business cards printed up, which highlight his penchant for alliteration—

  This career involves salvaging a chunk of driftwood from the beach, putting legs on it and selling it as a side table. Many people in America invent careers like this in the early 1970s (What color is your parachute?). A few years earlier he’d stalk Beacon Hill in a flowing black cape, and then for a few years he wore one of those two-way Sherlock Holmes hats, to highlight his eccentric, poetic side. Later, when he robs banks, he will try to pass as a country gentleman, in town buying antiques. He will carry a Nikon camera around his neck, wear a tweed jacket (I was always classically dressed, even in Levi’s). As a longshoreman he shows up looking the part of an “old salt,” tells long-winded, mildly entertaining stories, but by all accounts a laggard, next to worthless once the boat docked. Years later I track Scotty down—Jonathan created blustery characters to protect himself from being hurt. He was a great absorber of others’ personalities. He would lift phrases and gestures from those around him, make them his own. He was like a jigsaw puzzle of different people.

  Portsmouth’s a small city. The dockworkers go to the galleries for free wine and to feel like artists. The gallery owners like to have them around, to add energy, wildness. They go out to the bars together afterward, end up in someone’s apartment, make a night of it. Scotty shows up late and Jonathan’s already made a scene, thrown up on someone’s shoes, passed out on the coat pile. After two drinks a cloud will come over him and he’ll be another person, not nearly as fun as the Jonathan of one drink. Even so, Scotty likes him, in spite of his bravado, his bluster. Especially the moments before the second drink, before the cloud. Just twenty, Scotty has “trouble” with his own father, another drinker. Jonathan’s twice Scotty’s age, a father figure, of sorts. Jonathan tells Scotty stories of his brushes with the law, his escapades, he lists all the businesses he has run—the car dealerships, the encyclopedia franchise, the theater space—and gleefully recounts how each collapsed. Clearly a bad influence, this pseudo-dad, and that’s what’s attractive. Jonathan’s been at the art game for a long time now, he likes to drop names, hint at the influence he can muster (Does the name Kurt Vonnegut mean anything to you?). A newspaper clipping he flashes around shows him sitting at the feet of Shirley MacLaine during a Democratic fund-raiser for McGovern. My father makes sure Scotty sees this dog-eared photo.

  As the winter ends, Jonathan finesses a place to sleep and steady pay in exchange for painting a house the upcoming summer in Cambridge. Jonathan proposes that he and Scotty become partners, fifty-fifty. The owners, a couple he met at an art opening, will be in Sweden for the summer. Free rent, easy work, steady cash, my father plans to rewrite his novel in the evenings and on weekends. Scotty, wary, knows Jonathan always tries to get something for nothing, always tries to get over. But he imagines they’ll put in a few good hours each day, make their way through. A house is a finite project, after all. The worst that could happen is what always happens—that Scotty will work harder.

  The job has a charge account at the hardware store—paint, brushes, scrapers, drop cloths. Jonathan charges his coveralls—white, denim, professional. If he has someplace to be later in the day he wears them over one of the Brooks Brothers suits he’d charged to my grandfather ten years earlier (As president of a company I had to look the part). He likes to keep a brush and scraper in his back pocket, even if he doesn’t use them all that much. The first morning Scotty wakes up at seven and Jonathan’s already up and drinking coffee, wearing his spotless coveralls. They sit at the kitchen table in the pleasant sun, suffused with good fortune. Mid-May, the owners won’t be back until September, no urgency, summer spread out before them. They can work half days if they choose. They can take three-day weekends. They can stretch it out. Scotty follows my father’s lead, says he isn’t worried. The owners left five hundred to start off, when they need more it’ll be wired. Sounds fine. Scotty says he wouldn’t mind quitting early some days, getting into the studio, keeping up with his sculptures. Yes, my father agrees, that’s what’s important. Anyone could paint this house—they chose us because we’re artists. In a few years they’ll be able to point to this house and say, Jonathan Flynn painted that. That’s worth something to people like this.

  They talk briefly about how to begin. The bushes need to be wrapped in tarps, pulled away from the house. The ladders laid out, ratcheted up into the eaves, the scraping begun. The scraping, followed by the puttying, followed by the priming—the preparation, they agree, this takes time. Scotty puts his coffee cup in the sink and pulls his paper cap over his eyes. My father reaches for the bottle of Johnnie Walker tha
t has been centered on the table the whole time. A drink to our good fortune, he proposes, pouring a shot into his cup. The scotch, Scotty will later learn, is charged to the owners as well.

  Every morning this is how it will play out—first coffee, a piece of toast, maybe a shot. Then Scotty will climb the ladder and continue scraping where he left off the day before. Jonathan circles below, the paintbrush in his back pocket, surveying, pondering, taking stock, pointing to spots Scotty’s missed. Jonathan prefers to stay off the ladders, focusing his energies on the porch. By ten or so Jonathan says he’s making a run to the hardware store, doesn’t return until nightfall. Shattered. It doesn’t really matter—they’re keeping track of their own hours. Still, within a week Scotty begins quitting at noon. Then he starts skipping days.

  By mid-August Scotty’s vanished. My father circles the unpainted house. Three months and not even the scraping’s done. The porch has been primed, as high as he can reach, and now he must start in with the ladders. He doesn’t like ladders. That low-life, he mutters, leaving him in the lurch, after all he’d done. Sorry-assed kid. The owners are due back in three weeks. Yesterday Jonathan had to tell the husband, by phone, that it might not be done in time. This made the husband bullshit—he’d been wiring Jonathan five hundred every month, always heard glowing reports, fine fine, and now it’s still undone? Jonathan’s cut off from the money, if he wants the balance he’d better finish.

  At this point Jonathan realizes that he’s been too conscientious. All that scraping and priming was just so Scotty would feel needed. No one will notice the eaves anyway, no one will climb a ladder and look that close. As long as it gets a fresh once-over. Jonathan sets the ladder, brings a scraper for a quick scrape, just the big stuff. A paper bucket half full with the final coat. No time for primer, not anymore.

  A little hungover, maybe even still drunk from the night before, he climbs. Maybe a little hair of the dog, why not?—forty-four, son of near-aristocracy, father of three, soon-to-be-famous author, forced to creep around roofs in the sun, to work beside morons, for goons. As he falls he thinks, If you are hurt they will come with their ambulances, they will put you in bed and feed you, they will let you rest. Or maybe that’s just what I have thought, the times I’ve fallen.

  He’s found unconscious on the walkway. He was on the ladder above the back porch and instead of resetting it he leaned over too far, lost his balance, the ladder kicked out, dropped him. When he comes to in the hospital later that day he blames Scotty for everything—for abandoning him, for taking the money, for charging the scotch, for being a fuckup. There might be a head injury, impossible to tell, the extent of the damage unpredictable. The house is left unfinished, a blossom of white on the flagstone just inside the gate.

  dreamwold

  (1972) I get drunk for the first time when I’m twelve, at a place called Dreamwold. This baptism in beer takes place outdoors, in daylight, at an Octoberfest. My preteen friends and I find unattended pitchers and we empty them. Then we find more. Dreamwold is the fantasy village built by Scituate’s most famous son, a man named Lawson, the “Copper King,” a turn-of-the-century robber baron, long dead, the estate broken up into private homes and institutions. I went to kindergarten in one of Dreamwold’s outbuildings. There still exists somewhere a photograph of me walking through Dreamwold with a book on my head for a class in “posture.”

  That December, just before Christmas, Travis tells me to go out and warm up the truck. It’s midnight, a school night. We drive down to the Harbor, coast to a stop beside the chain-link fence around St. Mary’s field, kill the headlights. Town’s asleep, snow falls. A dim light shines from within the trailer guarding the trees the Knights of Columbus sell. Travis tells me to wait, vaults the fence, leaves black footprints straight to the trees. A car slows, passes. Within minutes he’s bounding back, dragging two perfect spruces behind. He tosses them over the fence, I wrestle one into the back of the truck while he one-arms the other. Twenty bucks is too much for a tree, he mutters, then laughs as we pull away. As a kid we’d go into the woods with an ax, he snorts, take whatever we wanted. He cracks open a beer, and for the first time offers me one.

  the take

  (1974) Early February. Brandishing weapons, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) kidnap Patricia Campbell Hearst as she’s watching television with her boyfriend, Steven Weed. The SLA force Hearst into the parking garage and into the trunk of a waiting car. The SLA does not take Weed. I am barely fourteen at this point, “weed” is what I call marijuana. I keep my weed hidden in a book I found in my grandmother’s attic and hollowed out, The Stories of Saki, which was good but not good enough to save the book from my razor. I have a paper route, and I read the story as I trudge through snow at dawn, mesmerized by the kidnapped heiress, by the idea of an invisible army, by the man named “Weed” useless to stop them.

  The ransom note for Hearst comes in the form of a tape recording sent to San Francisco radio station KPFA. In it the SLA demands that Hearst’s father, the newspaper baron, give every “Californian in need” seventy dollars’ worth of “quality” food. One feast, one last supper, and then she will be freed. After brief deliberations Hearst’s father complies. Packages containing two turkey hind-quarters, two cans of tomato juice, two cans of meat, and a box of saltine crackers are handed out to hundreds of people at several food distribution points. Two million dollars’ worth of quality food.

  My father, along with the rest of the country, reads about the kidnapped heiress. In some ways he’s also an heir, but to a fortune he will never see. His father died four years earlier and left him one dollar, in this way guaranteeing that the will cannot be disputed. Last May the “Plumbers” broke into the Watergate Hotel for the first time, word that Nixon may have ordered the break-in is seeping out. I stand under streetlights in the middle of my route, reading about Patty, unable to stop reading about her. Everyone now calls her simply “Patty.”

  After the food is distributed Patty is not returned. All that remains is Weed, who tells the tale over and over, pulling aside the curtain of his hair to show where he took the blow. Without Patty he is briefly a star. Weeks pass, our attention flags, then the image of Patty transformed appears—rifle in her lap, the Symbionese Liberation Army insignia behind her, snakes coming out of her beret—heiress as Medusa, gone over to the other side. Now she is “Tania.” A tape recording of her voice says, “This is my choice,” and the shrink talking head and the police specialist talking head and the crisis expert talking head all say it is likely she’s been brainwashed, likely she’s doing this in order to survive, that she’s reached a state of transference, which is complex and unpredictable and likely to influence her future actions. But to me it seems obvious—to risk so much for one meal, who wouldn’t be charmed?

  During these months many newspapers are sold, subscriptions rise, home delivery desired. I read about her every day between houses, I grow up as I read about her. Weed still occasionally looks pleadingly out from below a headline, though by now no one believes she will return to him. Within weeks Tania is photographed by security cameras holding a gun while the Hibernia Bank is robbed. The roiling interest ignites into a frenzy. The SLA is funding a worldwide revolution. I drop a folded paper onto a porch.

  A year before his fall from the ladder my father sent his novel, or some version of it, to Viking Press and received a hand-signed rejection letter in response. He will xerox this letter for years to come and mail it out again—to friends, to Ted Kennedy, eventually to me—apparently to prove that he is, or was, “known.” Kurt Vonnegut told me to try Viking. I wanted to stay with Little, Brown, but Vonnegut insisted. My father puts the rejection letter aside, picks up a newspaper, reads the headlines. He sees her face, the beret, the gun. The grainy surveillance photo, the getaway, the money. Lifted from obscurity to sensation, a level of fame that a writer of his talent deserves falls into her lap. Huck Finn, Catcher in the Rye, his novel the equal of these masterpieces, but who would kidnap him
, where would they send the ransom note, who would even notice if he was gone? A few months later my father walks into a bank, passes his first forged check. Never shy in front of a camera, he allows himself to be photographed. This first time he even uses his real name, Jonathan Robinson Flynn. Setting himself up for a fall, laying his own end. In subsequent forays he will use an alias, his favorite being “Millard Fillmore,” the president who abolished debtor’s prison.

  If you ask him how he got into the checking business, my father will tell you that Dippy-do Doyle and Suitcase Fiddler heard about his head injury and came looking for him. Doyle, in this version, spends his days playing tennis and orchestrating scams—the brains, apparently, behind a few small-time local hoods. Doyle arranges a meeting at the Dorchester HoJo’s on the Southeast Expressway. Does my father read about Watergate while waiting? About Patty? Is he drinking buddies with Doyle? Has he boasted about his small-time exploits, his nerve, his willingness to do anything? Doyle and Suitcase arrive with a check made out to my father for $8,800, drawn on the John Hancock Insurance Company. Doyle says he arranged for it because of my father’s accident. My father knows it’s shady but can’t resist going along. Suitcase drives him to the Prudential Bank in downtown Boston, just as Doyle ordered, and my father opens an account with the check. On days when my father is the dupe, not the mastermind, he will say, I looked at the check, I had no doubt—I’m him, I’m Flynn. Thus began two and a half years in the checking business. My father will say that by the time he passed the second check he knew it was illegal, but he was “already cooked” after the first one. Asked why he didn’t go to the police, he’ll say that Doyle knew about his kids and threatened to blow our heads off if he didn’t go along. In one version Suitcase Fiddler is the driver, a low-life hood who robbed banks by gunpoint in Canada but now merely drives. He admires my father for never using a gun. In another version Suitcase is a “paper-hanger,” a master, the one who forges the checks, a true artist. The three of them continue to meet at HoJo’s over the next couple years, now Suitcase drives my father straight there after each job. Doyle takes the count, gives everyone their cut. My father claims he never got more than twenty percent, an amount which still irks him, considering he took all the risk—If I had a loaded Magnum I’d walk up to Dippy-do Doyle right now and put it to his head.