Another Broken Wizard (2 page)

“She used to be the hottest girl at Burncoat High,” Joe told me upon returning.

“I keep forgetting how long ago high school was.”

“I always wanted a piece of that. Angela Murnion.”

“Well, it looks like she’s got pieces to spare nowadays.”

A drink later, we were the only ones left, except for the Spanish guys whose basement it was. Joe drove us back to his apartment off Lincoln Street, up by Green Hill Park. We were drunk, but still awake. Joe broke out the chess set and we played a sloppy game. I won it, so we were playing best of three. I won that, so it was best of five. He won one, then I won one, so it was best of seven.

“Man, I’m beat. I think I’m just going to crash.”

“So you’re forfeiting the tournament?” Joe said.

“No, I’m not forfeiting, I’m just beat, and I told Dad I’d be at his place by noon.”

“If you’re not forfeiting, then let’s play,” Joe said, getting a sinister smile on his face.

That smile meant he wasn’t going to budge. More than chess, or any competition I can think of, Joe loved to argue. He could go for hours, days, even weeks. It was his sport, and it had no rules except the ones he made up.

“Sure, fine, I forfeit, whatever,” I said, knowing an indifferent abdication would take the savor out of his bullshit victory.

“So you lose?”

“Sure, if that means I can go to sleep.”

“You’re an asshole,” he said, smiling.

“That’s Mr. Asshole to you.”

Joe had two big mattresses laid out on the floor in his room, making an enormous bed. It was big enough for us to lay at right angles to each other. I got the mattress by the window, which was winterized with a taut sheet of plastic.

“So what are you going to do?” Joe asked.

“I guess that after Dad is back on his feet, I’ll go back to New York, and get another job. I had an interview last week. It just sucks because there are a lot of guys like me looking for work right now.”

“A lot of guys like you—that’s a scary thought.”

“I mean a lot of guys with my level of experience who are looking for the kind of job I am. It’s fucking discouraging.”

“Want me to ask around Worcester?”

“No, that’s alright. I have the severance to tide me over. Things have to turn around eventually. Then I’ll get something, work up the ladder, to sector analyst. Maybe from there to research head somewhere,” I said. The story, with its slideshow of summer timeshares, watermarked bonus checks and new imported suits, had been reflexive since the layoff, a bedtime prayer against lengthening shadows of uncertainty.

“So that’s the plan?”

“For now. How’s your job?”

“It’s okay. I have to figure out a way to get out of there. I got written up the other day.”

“What for?”

“This dumb girl parked in the staff lot. And they gave her a ticket, as they should have. So she calls me and says she was only there for a minute and had to park there because she had to get in a paper or else she wouldn’t get credit for this class and wouldn’t be able to transfer out of Worcester State. So I’m like, ‘that’s too bad, but the officers here never give out tickets unless the car has been there for a
while
. You got your paper in on time, so just consider that the price.’ So she says she can’t afford to pay the ticket. I say then she should have parked in the students’ lot and walked the extra hundred yards. So she yells at me ‘it’s not fair,’ and starts crying. I say she should call back when she’s ready to be rational, or better yet, just pay the ticket and not call back at all.”

“So what did you do wrong?”

“That’s exactly it! I didn’t do anything wrong. But she called my supervisor, still crying, and said that I was abusive on the phone. I got chewed out and now I have this bullshit written warning on my record. Not that I care. But the job just isn’t getting it done. I want to get some money together. I’m thinking about moving some coke.”

“Is that a smart idea?”

“I have to get out from under this nine-to-five bullshit.”

“But is that a good way to do it? What happened to getting your degree?” I asked.

“That’s a few years off, more than a few, at the rate I’m going. It’ll happen. But I need to get out of this job first.”

Staring at the pale streetlight that had seeped through the curtains onto the ceiling, I felt the pull of an old drag. No matter how obstinate Joe was in the face of a fight, an argument, even a friendly disagreement, he was still baffled by the faceless opponent presented by long, otherwise empty hours. Those hours had already won too many battles, wrested too many plans from him—plans to become a pilot, a lawyer, a chef, and so on.

“But, I mean, coke? Isn’t the saying that you sell weed with a handshake and cocaine with a gun?”

“It depends on how you do it. But I think I have it locked down. I’ll only sell big amounts and only to my friends, people I’ve known a long time, people who I know I can trust. I just have to be disciplined. And I’ll only do it for a little while.”

I opened my mouth. None of the friends Joe could sell cocaine to were trustworthy. And Joe liked cocaine a bit too much to be in business with it. He was my oldest friend and maybe I should have said more. But it was late, and I honestly didn’t believe he’d follow through. And I didn’t feel like arguing. I closed my eyes and hoped for a few solid hours of sleep.

3.

Wednesday, December 24

Joe was still snoring when I left. It was cloudless outside, but the December sunlight was a thin gruel. The gray-brown landscape was soggy from melted snow. The sand on the street crunched under my sneakers. Bracketed by low snow banks, I drove to a Dunkin’ Donuts for coffee. The roads were busy, but I didn’t spot a single out-of-state license plate in all of Worcester’s traffic. I found Route 9.

Route 9 rose and fell over the hills like a ribbon waved by a restless hand. It was an old turnpike, built back before the railroad and the internal combustion engine, to connect Worcester and Boston. Now it’s a state highway lined with an unremitting string of restaurants, car dealerships, shopping centers and apartment buildings. Since the divorce, Dad lived in one of the apartment buildings. Mom lived in another.

The Mass Pike handles most of the East-West traffic to and from Boston now. But the Worcester mill owners jobbed the Pike so it gave quite a wide berth to Worcester, the second biggest city in New England. The story is that the factory owners didn’t want to compete with Boston wages. As a result, it takes a little more than an hour to drive the forty miles from Worcester to Boston.

That day, Route 9 was mostly empty. The shopping plazas were half alive with last-minute shoppers.

It’s only about fifteen minutes from Worcester, but Westborough is a very different sort of town. Worcester’s heyday came in the first half of the last century, with hundreds of workshops, mills and factories humming along its streets, canals and railroads. Westborough’s boom began in the early1970s, as suburbs cropped up around the hi-tech companies and government contractors that filled the office parks along the newly laid I-495. I knew those office parks by their logos—Data General, Memtech, Raytheon, Wang—which loomed over the highway, and announced themselves on the business cards on my dad’s night table. Those companies brought my parents to Central Massachusetts before I was born.

The Fountainhead apartments beat the future to a punch that was never thrown, and look out of place. Three modern concrete slabs enclose the main lawn of the complex. The huge fountain in the middle of the lawn was turned off for the winter.

Dad had been in the westernmost slab for about a year and a half. And things had been going well enough for him, until a doctor found a lump, close to his heart. The surgeons would have to crack open his sternum to get a good look at it. I pulled into the Fountainhead parking lot, grabbed my bags, buzzed up and he buzzed me in.

The corridor to the elevator was low-ceilinged and utilitarian. Some of Dad’s neighbors put down welcome mats in front of their doors, or taped up their kids’ school work. On the door next to Dad’s was a drawing of a lopsided pair of people, with squiggles around the phrase “I IM SPECIAL.” I coughed, something between a chuckle and a shudder, and knocked on Dad’s unadorned door.

We embraced and looked at each other, blue eyes in broad, ruddy faces. His face had gotten older, with folds and sags here and there, like luggage that hadn’t been put away. He had lost weight since the divorce. We said merry Christmas, his rough cheek scraping against mine. On the side of his door, I could make out the dozen or so coats of paint that had been applied over the decades. We sat down at his new kitchen table, a lightweight thing that wobbled too easily under our elbows. It sat in contrast to the dark wood bookcase behind it. For the dozenth time since the divorce, I was struck dizzy at seeing familiar pieces of furniture from childhood flush against strange walls. Dad was comfortably lost in big a white wool sweater. He was happy to see me—so happy it made me uneasy for a moment. It had been like that since the divorce. Well kid, you wanted a close fatherly relationship for all those years.

“Sorry I’m a day late. I just figured I’d catch up with Joe before the holidays started,” I said, wondering why warm welcomes always trail apologies.

“It’s no problem. We’re going to see too much of each other before too long. How was the drive up?”

“It was a typical holiday mess, jammed up most of the way.”

I put my bags in the room I used when I visited. Then we watched the football recap show on TV. The couch and TV were also from our old house. They seemed too big and too nice for the apartment with its wall-to-wall carpeting and bare walls. Even after a year and a half, Mom’s and Dad’s apartments, like all apartments in the suburbs, set off alarm bells in my head. At best, they looked like a shabby exile.

“So, how are you feeling?” I asked, breaking the silence the TV demanded. Dad muted it.

“I’m okay, I’m looking forward to the game Sunday.”

There we paused and let the rest of conversation go unspoken.

“Thanks again for coming up to help out,” Dad said.

“No problem. It worked out well, with the holidays and this time out of work.”

With that, I started my own silent prayer of clichés:
It fell to me; It was the right thing to do; You regret the things you don’t do more than the ones you do; He was all alone in that sad apartment in the suburbs and so on and so forth.
It helped me combat urge to flee.

“Yeah, it did. You’d think they’d have a better way of doing it. They have to crack open my ribcage, sever the pectoral muscles, then …”

Over the phone, Dad had already explained the procedure to me several times. I don’t think he forgot saying it to me. He just needed to keep saying it, to keep what was coming within the understood boundaries. We were sitting in the shadow of a nasty question mark. And the less certain we were, the more certain our answers had to sound.

He continued: “… meanwhile there’s the risk of all sorts of infection. They say this surgeon is one of the best in the state. But what I want to know is: what about the anesthesiologist? He’s the one that will kill you. After that, though, with the drugs they have and the rehab techniques, it should only set me back a few months. I’ll be back up to speed by this time next year. It’s the sort of thing they do all the time now.”

“Yeah, it’s routine,” I said by way of an Amen to his personal Catechism.

I appreciated him putting on a brave face. It was a courtesy, if nothing else. We drank Diet Cokes in the silence demanded by the TV, while the light faded through the big glass door in the living room.

“I thought we should to go out to eat. I know a good place that should be open tonight. Sushi sound good?” Dad said.

“Yeah. Do you want to do presents now or when we get back?”

We exchanged presents. I got him a DVD player that played the new kind of DVD and a new hardcover, both presents with an eye to the long, boring recovery that lay ahead. He gave me a set of speakers I wouldn’t be able to use until I got home, and some shirts.

4.

The sushi place was in a shopping center in Westborough, though the proprietor had done all he could to make it seem otherwise. We entered through a zigzagging hallway of pale wood that sequestered the low-lit dining room from the vulgarity of the big plate glass window and the parking lot beyond it.

An obsequious Japanese man sat us in the main dining room. Dad rattled off the names of fish and beers to the waiter. The beers came fast and Dad finished his before I knew it. He ordered another, taking me for a designated driver. I took a long swig of my own just to stay competitive. The fish came on wooden blocks. Dad eyed the robe-wearing men behind the wooden sushi bar.

“A lot of these places out here, they’re run by Chinese people. But this place—they’re actually Japanese. That’s what makes the difference. That, and they get the best fish.”

Sushi was always our thing. When I was a kid, we’d go for sushi when Mom was out of town. Back then, the one sushi restaurant in Worcester was a big place next to a roller rink. It was where Dad paid me a compliment for the first time, when I was in high school. I had to go into the bathroom to hide how choked up I got over it. Sushi always made me think of him, of knowing him as my dad, and having the good fortune to know him later, as a friend.

“How’s the job hunt?” he asked.

“I had that second interview last week.”

“The one at … what was it?”