The Reenactments: A Memoir Page 9

  personal note: My grandmother remembers that, as a child, Native Americans—Indians—would come to her back door, dressed in rags, begging for food.

  personal note: By the time I was born there were no Indians in my hometown, either homeless or otherwise—the only Indian I ever saw was on tv, in a canoe, with a tear in his eye.

  historical note: In my hometown there is a Cape Verdean community, they live on one street, the same street the dump is on, and when the dump got full, when it came time to find a new dump, the town voted to move it across the street.

  personal note: When Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town came out my friends joked that he was talking about this neighborhood. One friend’s father called Martin Luther King Martin Luther Nigger.

  personal note: My grandmother would flirt with Manny, who ran the dump, so that he would allow her to pick through the discarded furniture. To us, not to his face, she called him a boogie.

  personal note: My grandmother always had a bowl of mixed nuts on her kitchen table from Thanksgiving to Christmas—she called the Brazil nuts nigger toes. . . .

  personal note: My mother did not allow us to use the word nigger, not ever. Our grandmother would whisper the word boogie to us, even when our mother was not around.

  historical note: In a soundproof studio Al Green is so tired, so alone, his eyes turned upward because up is his idea of heaven.

  personal note: My mother called burning down one’s own house to collect the insurance money Jewish lightning, though this was what she herself did, to my childhood home, while my brother and I were sleeping upstairs, and she was not Jewish.

  a note on alternative energy: The center of the earth is on fire, the center of the earth is a planet spinning inside a planet and one of the planets is on fire.

  historical note: If you were white and rode through Roxbury in the 1980s, a black kid might yell out, Hey, that’s my bike, and all his friends would tumble out onto the street and chase you, try to knock you off. The only thing to do was to pedal away very, very fast.

  personal note: Roxbury was one of the first neighborhoods I walked through when I moved to Boston, Ivan showed me around one summer day, the summer after my mother died, we were looking to score, and we did.

  personal note: He’s very articulate, my grandfather would say of Ivan, whenever he asked about him, and he always asked about him. Very articulate dot dot dot bracket for a black man end bracket.

  personal note: One night, after working in the shelter, a couple coworkers and I were drinking a beer by the water in Southie. Some kids came up and nodded toward a Korean guy fishing nearby, told us they were going to stab him with his own knife and toss his body into the bay, asked if we wanted to watch. He’s not bothering anyone, I said, and offered them a beer. I ended up in the hospital with a broken zygomatic arch (holds up the cheekbone), ten stitches in the back of my head, and a broken front tooth.

  side note: When I tell this story some people ask what happened to the Korean fisherman, and some don’t.

  side note: In Boston a few years later I heard of a band called Hey That’s My Bike.

  historical note: A white man drove into Roxbury one night and shot and killed his pregnant wife as she sat beside him in the passenger seat of their Toyota. He then turned the gun on himself, grazing his stomach fat with a bullet. A recording of his desperate phone call to the police played on the news for days, A black man just shot me and my wife. A manhunt followed, which eventually led to an arrest, even though the police, in retrospect, all said it seemed clear the guy had done it himself. The shooter worked on Newbury Street, one of the richest streets in Boston, in a shop that sold furs—Kakas, which in Boston is how we pronounce the word carcass. With the insurance money, before he was arrested, while the black suspect was awaiting trial, this man upgraded his car—from a Corolla to an Acura.

  personal note: This shooting happened when my father was in the middle of his homeless odyssey. Newbury Street is one of the streets my father spent many nights on, in doorways or ATMs or beneath church overhangs, sometimes camping out in the doorway of a fur shop that to this day, whenever I walk past, the word carcass comes to mind.

  EIGHTEEN

  (2011) January, record snowfall, snow everywhere, more coming. Six weeks before shooting is to begin I get a call from Paul that De Niro wants to meet my father. He wants to go to the shelter. He wants to go the next day. It’s Sunday, De Niro is in New York, I’m in Texas, due to teach the next day, my first day of classes. We can take the train up to Boston, Paul tells me, use the time to talk about the movie, about my father. He means the train from New York. I hang up and go online and book a flight. I’m on a plane in three hours. I cancel my classes.

  In New York the next morning it’s snowing—sleeting, really. The radio says that the trains are delayed, that the airports will close. I get a message to meet at Paul’s hotel at nine, plans have changed—we are not taking the train, we will meet De Niro at an airport in New Jersey, a private airport, where a private jet will fly us to Boston. Two pilots are waiting for us, the rain has turned to snow. This is the way it is, nothing will stop us from this trip. Inside the plane it is like a yacht—leather couches, reclining chairs, enough seats for maybe six people. It’s not costing us a thing, I’m told—De Niro has a credit here. I warn them that my father is much diminished, that he is not the same man as the man De Niro will be portraying—the menace is gone, he’s grown old, lost his fight, toothless now.

  ON the plane I sit across the aisle from De Niro, lean in to him as he speaks, but the engine is beside our heads and he speaks softly, so it is hard to make out the words—something about his kids, how one needs to be moved to a school closer to his home, how he is starting to have some trouble. The boy’s mother, who is not with De Niro now, I assume, maybe she’s in California, but I can only understand half of what he is saying. I keep flashing to his hand, wrapped in that white towel, how it pops into flame after he shoots Fanucci in the face, how he watches Fanucci fall, how only then does he notice his hand burning, how he shakes it, his eyes still on the fallen body, how the towel unwraps, how he puts the fire out. De Niro is talking to me, but I am having a hard time hearing the words. It seems as if even he is having trouble finding the right place, the right school, for his kids.

  IT is impossible to know what shape we will find my father in. I worry he will be lost, incoherent. Yet when we show up at Roscommon he’s awake, in the lunchroom (maybe they call it a dayroom?), and lucid. The television is on, each seat taken (The Next Holiday is EASTER). It is a grim place, though the shelter will be grimmer. My father’s apartment, by the time I moved him out, was grimmer. Here he has three meals a day, he has nurses and orderlies, he is taken care of, which is perhaps all he ever desired, aside from fame. And now I am introducing him to Robert De Niro, who will play him in the film version of his life. We move to an empty room. I usually bring a copy of the memoir with me, as it seems to jog his memory (to hold it in his hands, to scan the pages that talk about his childhood, his nights in the shelter, his time in prison), but I realize I forgot to bring it. I know him so well, after writing the book, and yet I barely know him at all. I get to the edge of knowing, then teeter back and forth—that’s what makes these visits shimmer. It is all we can do, all I’ve ever done—stand before what I know, and pulse into the unknown. For years I could not imagine what my father would be like outside of alcohol, yet here he is—he hasn’t had a drink since he’s been inside Roscommon. His stories are different now, not as scripted, yet in many ways the damage is done. My father is eighty—from the life he’s led it’s a miracle he’s alive. I’d have died a hundred deaths by now, if I’d continued to drink like he drank. I forgot to bring my book, but it turns out De Niro has a copy. He pulls it out of his bag—dog-eared, heavily underlined, notes written in the margins. This is Robert De Niro, I tell my father. The actor who will play you in the film we are making about your life. My father nods, doesn’t seem impressed. An
d this is Paul, the director—he also wrote the script. Very nice to meet you both, my father says, though he has, over the years, met Paul a few times before. I show him the book, remind him that it’s about him, about his life. I point to my name on the cover—he is, as always, impressed. A book? How’d you figure that out? What promoted you? I point to the title, remind him that it’s something he said, that he always was good with titles, which allows him to begin, to start talking about himself. It’s like turning the handle on a jack-in-the-box, and out come his stories. Amazing that the stories are still inside him, that he can still find them. He holds forth for an hour, one tangent leads to another. When I try to bring him around to the film we’re making he cuts me off: Let me speak, you wonton fucken goonball. We all smile. Paul writes wonton fucken goonball in his notebook. I take this moment to try, once again, to get him to take it in, that we are making a film about his life. Bob is going to play you, in the movie version of this book. That’s why we’re here, he wanted to meet you. He looks over at De Niro, as if taking him in for the first time. So, you do a little acting? my father asks. You like to act?

  De Niro smiles, shrugs: Yeah, I do a little acting.

  MY father is not surprised, nor seemingly impressed, that a movie is being made of his life. He has always assumed one would be, since he is the most interesting person he’s ever met (only two people can play me—either Dustin Hoffman or myself). After asking De Niro if he liked to act, after De Niro shrugs, I tell my father, He was in The Godfather. The Godfather? my father echoes. That’s a big deal. He narrows his eyes, takes De Niro in more fully. He is the godfather, I say.

  SOMETIMES, in a movie theater, waiting for the movie to begin, the lights start to dim, gradually, and for a moment you’re unsure if the room is going dark or if it’s your eyes, failing. Sometimes you find yourself in a public restroom—often in an airport, on your way somewhere (where?)—standing before the automatic faucet, waving your hands, but the water does not come, the sensor doesn’t sense you. Sometimes, when you try to move your cursor, the trackpad doesn’t register your fingertip, the cursor doesn’t move. You are both frozen—for those few moments it is as if you do not exist.

  Before we leave Roscommon I take pictures of my father with De Niro, of Paul with my father, of Paul and De Niro with my father. The only camera we have is on my phone. I pass it to Paul and he takes a few pictures of me and De Niro with my father, but later I discover that none of the shots with me in them come out. Later, when I show these pictures to people, I have to explain that I was there, that that is my father, that Paul took the pictures, but something happened.

  AN hour later, at Pine Street, no one recognizes De Niro—his hat pulled down low, he keeps covering his face with a handkerchief, as if he has a cold. I point out what I remember—the cage, the front desk, the showers, the dorm. De Niro notices that no one is walking as if beaten down, as if ashamed. Maybe this is their home, I say, or maybe if they look vulnerable they become marks. We stay for an hour or so, see what we have to see, then we go. On the plane home De Niro says that in the film he needs to be able to ramble on, to hold forth, like my father had just done with him. Two days later I hand over six pages of monologues, demented psycho ramblings, distilled versions of things my father has said to me over the years. Rants like this, when he’s being thrown out of the shelter, words that will likely rattle around inside me forever:

  Where is he? FATHER MURDERER. Come out and face me. What does he know? He knows shit. He’s killing himself in this cesspool, he can’t even see it. Where is he hiding, in some little closet, sucking mama’s tit? FATHER MURDERER. Come out and face me, coward. I could have jerked off and flushed you down the toilet. FATHER MURDERER. Face me.

  NINETEEN

  WE weren’t the kind of family to make home movies—we had no 8mm camera, the only camera we had was a cheap Kodak that sat unused in a cluttered drawer for years. I assume we simply didn’t have the money, but maybe my mother’s desire to erase herself meant she didn’t want to leave any traces. Yet all I have left of her now is traces—a handful of photographs, some handwritten letters, ash. Life is so fucken long, I wonder why I’m still here sometimes, you know how it goes—you wonder, you push on. You call an ex-lover, knowing you might stir something up, then you call a friend who is struggling, to offer whatever help you can. You go to a play (Death of a Salesman), spend hours in your car, wander a saltmarsh, erase emails, whatever—when you sit down to write it all swirls around inside your head. Attention must be paid, sure, but running alongside this is the need—the desire—to shut off, shut down, but how? Maybe this is what killed her, this desire—quiet mind, nothingness, nirvana—which I don’t believe she could ever achieve. Unfulfillable, spinning-out in the dark neighborhoods of her mind. How to step outside it, outside yourself (get out of the movie!), dissolve into something larger. Ocean. God. Other. If you cannot find a way to pull back the cotton wool, to see you are part of the larger pattern, what then? We all have this movie, or maybe a handful of movies, replaying in our heads, constantly. The reel, at times, is of the last night with an ex-lover, which either means you’re lucky or damned, depending upon how it ended (how often do we say it ended well?). You play the last moments over and over, in the hope you can see where you went off course, but rarely is there a single moment when love, or anything, goes off course. The lights in the theater go down gradually, and each time you feel panic, then (if you’re lucky) blessed—that at least you are still able to wonder if it’s just your eyes.

  ACTION.

  In this scene Dano wakes up next to a woman who isn’t his girlfriend (I wake up next to a woman who isn’t my girlfriend). Dano’s head is on the pillow, his sideways face fills the screen. All he has to do is wake up (all I have to do is wake up). CUT. His girlfriend comes home a couple hours later and finds lipsticked cigarettes beside the bed (it’s fun to play such an asshole, Dano jokes), and throws him (me) out. No, first she finds the cigarette, then she throws book after book at him (more Yeats, O, you’re so well read), then he goes into the bathroom and smashes his head into the mirror. Dano looks into his own eyes after he has smashed it—wildness, then release. In playback the mirror breaks over and over, all in his eyes. I never broke a mirror, no one ever threw me out, though I did wake up beside a woman who was not my girlfriend, over and over. I couldn’t find that part inside myself that could say, clearly, This is wrong. . . .

  CUT.

  THE first human being captured in a photograph was a man on a Paris street—the buildings stand, yet the horse-drawn carriages, as well as the other passersby, are missing, their motion leaving only ghost traces. But this one man, his boot was getting shined and so he was forced to hold his leg still, long enough for it to be captured.

  His head though, his torso, is ghostly, gone.

  A trailer is parked on Avenue A, the name NICK FLYNN magic-markered on masking tape, stuck to the door. But this is not my trailer, just as the one beside it, with the name JODY FLYNN stuck to it, does not mean my mother is waiting inside. I don’t have a trailer—if I want to talk to Dano I have to knock on his (my) door. Dano walks up, I ask him what he listens to on his earbuds between takes. The Hold Steady, he says, and sings me a line. I ask if he knows the Heartless Bastards, I tell him I’ll burn him some songs. It will be dawn inside the apartment, dawn filters have been taped to the windows. Dano will be drinking a beer and trying to write while a woman (not his girlfriend) sleeps in the bed behind him.

  Wake up, wake up, will be his only line, as he shakes her shoulder.

  OLIVIA Thirlby and I meet up at the Bowery Mission—Olivia is the actress who will play my (next) lover, a woman who works at the shelter, who gets me to apply for a job there. Her character is a hybrid, not based on any one woman, but several. Paul created her for the film—from stories I’ve told him, from his own past—just as he created my father, in some way, and me, though we are closer to being real. I was in a pretty fucked state when I started at Harbor Street,
Olivia will tell Dano. You should think about working there. (In the film Pine Street will be renamed Harbor Street, a lawyer at Pine Street insisted, which I don’t understand—my father is a success story, he made it off the streets alive.) In the Bowery Mission, on the walls near the ceiling of the front lobby, stretching around the room, is a quote from Matthew:

  For I was hungry and you gave me food; I was thirsty and you gave me drink; I was a stranger and you took me in; I was naked and you clothed me; I was sick and you visited me; I was in prison and you came to me.

  Olivia and I are invited to sit in on a service being held in the chapel beside the dining hall—this, it seems, is the rhythm of this shelter—one prays, then one eats. I point out to Olivia that at Pine Street we had no services, it wasn’t affiliated with any church—the homeless were not lambs, the workers were not shepherds—to get a meal the guests just had to line up at dinnertime.

  IN the basement of a Chinese church, huddled between Jesus and poinsettias, eighteen people sit in a circle of chairs. ACTION. Joey Boots says, Hi, my name is Joey, I’m an alcoholic. Joey is the actor who came to the audition with his ass hanging out. CUT. Paul turns to me, asks, Do you have anything? I offer, It’s good if they all say, Hi, Joey, after he says, Hi, my name is Joey. On the walls are framed illustrations of the Stations of the Cross—these are not props (I don’t think). The camera is on its little train track again, this time aimed at Dano’s face. As he listens to Joey Boots, to the airline pilot, to the morphine addict, the camera moves in closer, but they pull the lens so Dano’s face stays the same size—it’s trippy, as if the room were pushing into him, while at the same time falling away behind him. Dano’s hair, I notice, has been dyed darker (is my hair that dark?). Jesus staggers over Dano’s shoulder, his cross driving him to his knees. It doesn’t matter that nothing is unfolding chronologically, that my first day working at the shelter is shot on the same day as my first 12-step meeting, and also my first time drinking on the street with a homeless guy—as Janis Joplin once snarled, It’s all the same fucken day, man.