Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (13 page)

(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 never 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.

Though the boat weighs in at sixteen tons I’ve underestimated how difficult it will be to haul her for the winter. Not only to take her out, but to find a home for her on land. In subsequent years I’ll know to haul her earlier, by the end of September at the latest, before the season of nor’easters and emptiness. I’ll know to enlist the help of friends, people who know these waters, know boats. But this first time I’m green, naïve, dumb. I’ve waited too long. I need someone to tow my boat to shore, where a truck will meet her at the ramp, back a forked trailer around the hull and lift her into the air on hydraulic pads. The man who operates this trailer is named Steve, able to thread the beamiest boat down the narrowest street, between telephone pole and stray parked car. But I haven’t yet met Steve, or seen what he can do. I first need to meet Crowbar, who perhaps owns the only boat still in the water so late in the season. I get his name from someone at the Old Colony Tap, who swears he’s due back any minute. After a fruitless hour and a couple Rolling Rocks (“rock ’n rolls,” he calls them) this friend of Crowbar’s offers that he might just know where he’s hiding, if I want to take a drive. I have nothing to lose. I get in his station wagon, and we set out slowly, his muffler grumbling, our exhaust stitching together the couple dozen streets that connect Bradford with Commercial. We stop at a house on Mechanic Street, two other guys pile in. We circle a joint silently. Then we stop at Perry’s, where it seems clear I should buy beer for everyone in exchange for this favor I’m being offered. Crowbar isn’t at the next house we stop at, or the next. The driver pulls up, tells us to watch the car and disappears for what feels like a long time. He comes out shaking his head, passes around some valium. The sun’s low by now, the shadows cold and long, the car moving slower and slower, and with each house Crowbar’s farther and farther away. At one a woman comes out to the car and tells us he just left, but we forget to ask her where he was headed. While waiting outside a house on Nickerson some sort of argument breaks out and the two guys in the back kick open their doors, storm off in different directions. Dark now, darkness falling suddenly this time of year, and I become aware that the car is parked, and I’m alone in it, and I’m not sure which house the driver has disappeared into this time, or how long he’s been gone. Dead-low tide, the boat still chained through the salty ink to the sand. I’ll row out later, check the lines, the pump, maybe even spend one more night.

(1986)
Bicycle past police lights twisting the blue from the night, past a man setting a box on fire to make a pot of tea. Lean forward enough and it’s as if you’re floating, as if there’s no machine supporting you, the earth spinning an inch below your feet. Blur your eyes and sing a little song to yourself to keep upright—the song keyed to the rhythm of pedaling. Skim over the dark earth, arms spread, the sign of the cross,
Look, Ma, no hands
, crucified by the air, crucified by the night. Who doesn’t want to just disappear, at some point in the day, in a year, to just step off the map and float?

After considerable struggle I managed to get the boat on land, then I flew to Amsterdam to meet Emily, who’d been traveling Europe for a couple months already. I needed to get away from the shelter for a winter—the last night at work I’d been scratched in the face by one of the psychotic guests that I had such a good rapport with. He drew blood, just a drop.

Within a month Emily and I find an apartment in Paris, and I find a typewriter in the closet, set myself up to look like a writer. The sublet turns out to be somewhat illegal, the former tenant trying to make some money by passing us the key. Within two weeks the landlord discovers us and wants us out. But we’d paid two months up front and so we stay, even after the heat and electricity are shut off—eating by candlelight, collecting boxes to burn in the fireplace. When it’s time to go, Emily flies back to America and I drift south, to Salamanca, then Lisbon, then farther, taking a boat to Tangier. I don’t plan to stay long, to get high or buy drugs, but by midnight of my first day I’m stumbling through a medieval maze back to my hotel room in Chefchouen, trying to conceal fifty grams of unprocessed hashish under my t-shirt, a grapefruit-sized ball of bright green pollen.

In Morocco I learn to buy cigarettes, to split one open by licking the side, to empty the tobacco onto my open palm, to break off a chunk of hash and balance it in the center, to take a lighter to it until it softens, to blend it all together and roll it into a very heavy joint and smoke it before getting out of bed in the morning. One and you’re ambulatory, it dulls the knife edge of the day. Glide into the market, you can still talk when you’re high, you can always look. Pointy yellow slippers. A multicolored hat. The hashish dulls and simultaneously focuses, reduces the day to a pinpoint, to a voice inside laughing, a board strapped to your back to keep you standing—all you are now is high. Two joints and the doors close, you don’t have to go out today. Who would you see if you did?

I’m reading Duras and Bowles and Beckett—dark, absurd, strangely comforting. I’ve been working in the shelter for a couple years, I want to see how close to the edge I can come without falling. Two weeks later I find myself in an alley in a town called Mogador, buying opium from Mohammed and his friend. Just a little. The alley dead-ends at a wall. Mohammed unfolds a knife to shave off a gram (
what kind of opium needs a knife to cut it?
), then he turns this knife (
goddammit, why is there always a knife?
) toward me, touches my chest with the blade, asks softly if I’m sure I don’t have any more money on me, just a little.

I’ve already been punched by police in Lisbon for taking a photograph of the wrong people. In a few days the police in Mogador will pick me up for speaking with a veiled woman. I’ll have to spend a day in jail while they decided my fate, the hashish and the opium back in my hotel room, in the drawer with my passport. By the time I make my way to the border of Mauritania, to the edge of the Sahara, I see no end to being lost. You can spend your entire life simply falling in that direction. It isn’t a station you reach but just the general state of going down. Once you make it back, if you make it back, you will stand before your long-lost friends but in some essential way they will no longer know you.

I drag myself back from Morocco, finally, and make my way back to America. Emily’s now seeing someone else, and I have no place to live. I go back to work at the shelter, because I miss it, because I need a job. A newcomer, a woman who works the Cage, tells me she’s leaving her apartment in the North End, and maybe I can move in. Incredibly small but ridiculously cheap—two hundred and fifty dollars a month allows you to lie in bed and contemplate the refrigerator. It’s May, the boat’s on land in Provincetown, and I agree to let Emily fix her up and live on her for the summer. By now Phil’s given up on living on the water, and I decide to spend most of my time in Boston, working. Slowly, over the course of the next few months, warily, Emily and I move back toward each other.

The landlord of the North End apartment is an elegant Italian named Luca, and the day he hands me the key, as he’s passing it into my hand, he tells me, slowly and deliberately,
And you know…this is the North End…and that means…no blacks
. I’m touching the key to my new apartment, and I don’t have any place else to live, but my hand jerks back as if burnt.

I take the key, a devil’s bargain. I’ll be gone within six months.

A few days later Luca tells me about some clothes he has in his basement, clothes he’d like to donate to the homeless. Work with the homeless for any length of time and you learn that everyone has a trashbag of old clothes they would like to donate to the cause. Many will call you “noble” for the way you are “sacrificing.” They will thank you, say that they couldn’t do it but are glad you can. Even the mayor will show up, always just before Christmas, and declare that the work you are doing is the hardest and the most important in the city. Luca knows I have a pickup, he wonders if I can go down into his basement with him someday, we can load the clothes together. Sure, I say, but it will take me nearly two years to get back to him. It’s not high on my list, another trashbag full of moldy cast-offs. When he tells me about the clothes he also asks my opinion about the homeless, about the reasons, why there seems to be more and more. This is another conversation I will often have with people, for I am now an expert. They’re all drunks, right? If you give money to panhandlers they’re just going to drink more, right? These people don’t want to live inside, they don’t want to work, this is the life they prefer, right? It becomes clear to me that I’m supposed to console those asking these questions, that they need me to say something that will make them feel better, confirm that there’s nothing for them to do, that the problem is as inscrutable as Africa. Or perhaps they are afraid that homelessness seems more and more to be a fluid state, and they would prefer it to be something one is born into, like India and their Untouchables. Sometimes I point out that eighty percent of the homeless are invisible, like the proverbial iceberg, that when I walk through the city now every other person I see is someone I know from the shelter, but if you didn’t know you’d think they were on their lunch break, enjoying a little sun.
Who’s your favorite bum?
one girl asks, when she hears I work at Pine Street. I find her and her friend on Boston Common, chatting with Warren, another of the friends I got drunk with at Dreamwold all those years ago, the same Warren I wrote sci-fi with a few years later. He blew into Boston a few weeks earlier, appeared at my door penniless and needing a place to crash, as he will every four years or so for my entire life. These two girls see the same guys every day around Kenmore Square, and they go back and forth as to which is their favorite.
Do you know Karl,
she asks me,
the one with the broken guitar?
Even this girl has a bag of old clothes, asks if I can come by sometime.

Most of the people I hang with at this point work in the shelter. I’m also killing time with Ivan, a poet in his late thirties, though he hasn’t published much, if anything, and I’ve never read a word. Dark-skinned, tight dreads, solid, Ivan weighs in at over two hundred pounds. I’ll have him over to my apartment in the North End often, and we’ll get high, and when we emerge into the hallway Luca will always be there, changing a lightbulb, though I never see him any other time, except when the rent’s due. Someone in the neighborhood made an emergency call—
Black man loose in your building!
Ivan and I float down the stairs, Luca looks at us wide-eyed, unable to comprehend how life has gotten so out of control. Ivan and I are negotiating with another landlord to rent an entire building in the Combat Zone, an abandoned strip joint that Ivan tracked down the owner of, and we all meet regularly to hammer out an agreement. We know this new landlord is Mafia, we read about him in the papers, but he treats us all right, and the building is perfect. This strip joint, Good Times, was shut down maybe ten years before by the FBI. The prostitutes literally dragged johns out of their cars as they cruised past. They found that Harvard student in the doorway one morning, stabbed dead. After I’m living there a year or so, Liam, my mother’s gangster boyfriend, tells me that it was the bar he and his boys would frequent when in Boston. He even took my mother there a few times. When we first go inside there are still drink glasses lined up, gold lamé hanging from the walls, a list of the girls who’d be performing that night—Crystal, Amber, Cindi—taped to the dressing room door. Good Times—the sign still hanging above the gate when Ivan and I move in. Ivan takes the top floor, Richard and I take the one below, and we will find tenants for the other two. Just before we move in Richard is diagnosed HIV-positive, he shows me the test results in my truck, parked in the North End. I am devastated but (
lord help me
) I also feel self-conscious—two men crying in a pickup.

By this point my brother and I have sold the house we grew up in, which is just as well, as I never spent another night there, was never able to, after my mother died. Even to this day driving into Scituate takes some effort, a willful distancing from myself. My body pushes itself away from the steering wheel as I drive, as if it wants to crawl into the backseat and curl up forever. I go to Scituate now only to see my grandfather, and before night falls I’m back in my car. We had a yard sale, paid off the mortgage, and put whatever furniture was left into storage, where it will stay for years, sixty dollars a month split between my brother and I, until he moves all he wants out and I keep paying. Both grandmothers, my mother’s mother and her father’s second wife, die within three years of my mother. Only men are left—my brother, my grandfather and me. My brother has become an artist, a painter, supporting himself with carpentry. He lives alone in Somerville in a building he and a hundred other artists bought and converted into live/work studios. The three of us begin having lunch together in the North End once a month. I have some money in the bank now but I don’t know what to do with it. “Blood money,” I call it, and it just sits there.

Working the Brown Lobby I notice a young guy who starts showing up for dinner, standing just on the edge of everything, holding his plate in one hand, eating and eyeing the room. He doesn’t look like he belongs, mostly because of his shoes, very high-end. The leather’s been cut away to reveal two steel toes. A reporter, I think, doing a lousy job of being undercover. I try to draw him out.
Nice shoes
, I say.
I just bought them today
, he replies. I want to encourage him not to get used to the food, to warn him that a shelter is a form of quicksand, but the conversation goes nowhere. The next few times I see him I leave him alone. He doesn’t sleep upstairs, he only eats and then goes.

A year later one floor’s still vacant in the Good Times building. A couple guys come by to look at it—Jasper and Sean—drove out from Indiana together the year before. A few months earlier Richard, Ivan and I had a party, a blowout on all five floors, a couple bands, dim lighting, and the Indiana boys had come. I’ve been trying to get my friends to move in but the building’s still very raw and everyone’s afraid of the Combat Zone. Young and full of energy, Jasper and Sean are trying to be artists, taking classes. They bring dope, we hit it off. We have them come back a few times, just to get a sense of them, and on the third visit I notice the shoes. Jasper’s the guy from the shelter.

Damn nice shoes. A few months later Jasper will sell them to me for forty dollars to help him pay the rent.

It’ll take me a couple years to get back to Luca and his trashbags of clothes. I’ve passed the apartment on to Warren, so I’m still over there fairly regularly, and I see Luca now and then. I make a date to come by the next Sunday with the truck. Jasper comes with me. Luca leads us into the basement, to several racks of suits and women’s dresses, wrapped in clear plastic, with the tags still pinned to them. Luca, turns out, had been a tailor in the fifties and early sixties, and these were the clothes that people hadn’t picked up. Beautiful, from my favorite era of men’s fashion, sleek and tapered. Jasper and I load them all into the truck, along with the racks, and bring them to the building, deciding along the way that we should really each take a suit for ourselves, since we’ve never owned one, and maybe give one to each of our friends. Gowns for the women, and even a couple furs. Back in the loft we set up the racks and try on the suits, settling on a subtle plaid for me, a gray sharkskin for Jasper. Richard takes the vicuna. We get high, and spend that afternoon, and it turns into the entire summer, walking around the Combat Zone in our suits, and all our friends are in suits, we walk into Foley’s like a gang of Mods, in our beautiful vintage suits.