Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (15 page)

Sometimes a man falls asleep in the midst of buttoning his jacket, his fingers hanging on to the last button. Sometimes, embedded in hot asphalt, you see a key, shined by the soles of pedestrians’ shoes. You check your pockets, suddenly worried. The sidewalk calls, using the trick of gravity to bring you to your knees, to close your eyes, to make you sleep. If there’s grass, if you can see it, each blade catches a sliver of streetlight, each blade wants you to hold on. Face-down you swear you can feel the earth spin, hold tight or you’ll spin off into outer space. Forget about ceilings, about walls, about doors, about keys. The bread you ate at lunch is already turning to soil inside you, nightsoil now, darkness hovering inside. Soon your flesh will crumble off you, those on their way to work the next morning will pass your whitened skeleton like so many styrofoam cups—bleached, perfect.

If not for the rats you could crawl beneath a bush. A bush. A bench. A bridge. The alliterative universe. Rats too can pass through that needle’s eye to enter heaven, as easily as they pass into a box imagined into a house. Houses inside buildings, houses inside tunnels, some exist for only a day, some, miraculously, longer. This box held a refrigerator, the refrigerator is in an apartment, a man is in the box. Tomorrow the box will be flattened and tossed, you’ve seen the garbagemen stomping them down to fit into the truck. Wake up on the grass, soaking wet. Dew is the piss of God.
Another bullshit night in suck city
, my father mutters.

And then there’s the Celtics, losing just across town. Last night Mackie had a la-z-boy set up in Rat Alley, watching a television hotwired into a light pole. My father stepped into Mackie’s living room, checked out a couple minutes of play—can these still be called the glory days of Bird? Step out of your room, settle into a discarded recliner—are you inside now or out? Position your chair before your television, take your walk, find your coffee, by morning it all will be gone—no inside no outside, no cardboard box no mansion, no birth no death, no container no contained, a Zen koan, a frikkin riddle. A garbage truck hauled the tv away, another will be put out on the sidewalk tonight. But a la-z-boy, my lord, maybe not again in this lifetime.

A couple months after he’s evicted, a month before he arrives at the shelter, I see my father sleeping on a bench on the Esplanade. No more room, no more cab, all has led to this bench. The first beautiful day of spring, families out for a stroll. He staggers to the edge of the river to piss, his cock wild in his hands. A little girl points. For some reason, each time my mind returns to that day, I remember that little girl.

Every week, it seems, scientists discover a new gene to explain why we act as we do, why we feel sad or why we get fat. Genes, it’s now clear, are a mark on the blood, and the mark can be read and the life plotted. Easy as reading a map. This red mark is your father, across a vast sea from you. The scientists say that one day I could stand in the exact spot my father once stood in, hold my body as he did. I could open my mouth and his words would come out. They say it is only a “tendency toward,” a warning. They say it is not the future, but a possible future.

I got high not long after seeing him on the Esplanade. I had a pipe I brought back from Morocco the year before, a long painted stem, a brass bowl. I told Richard I saw my father sleeping outside and Richard said,
Your father’s a nightmare.

One book in my grandmother’s attic was a collection of riddles, mostly kids’ stuff, lots of those black-and-white-and-red-all-over kind of riddles, but they got more complicated toward the end. It had the Sphinx’s riddle to Oedipus, one about albatross soup I never understood and one that I wrestled with for months—

A sketch showed a man on a sidewalk, pointing vaguely into a crowd. After a year I decided that the guy was looking into a mirror, just to put it out of my mind. Years later I realized I was wrong.

Captain leaves me alone in the office. The needle comes off the record. Take your time, he said, but there was no time. Only so many minutes a counselor can sit outside the fray. I look around the office—Are the walls closing in? Are planets colliding in my brain? Did Captain just sing me a song?

I sat for ten minutes alone in the office, then I went to work. A few hours later my father showed up, made his way to the Cage, presented the bed ticket Captain had given him earlier, disappeared upstairs. No ominous music, no deep chords. He wasn’t backlit as the doors blew open, the wind didn’t pick up, the earth kept spinning. Just another “new guest”—new ones appeared every day. He raised his arms at the door to be searched, just like everyone else.
Bottles or weapons I have none, but that man’s father is my father’s son
. It all took a few minutes. Nothing was said.

I’d grown up watching Otis, the town drunk on the television show
Mayberry RFD
, who let himself into the jail cell each night with a skeleton key, which he rehung within arm’s reach to let himself out in the morning. Each town had a few, at least the towns I knew. A Mugsy. A Mousey. A sign of tolerance. Inevitable. It was said you could get Mousey to hurt someone, to burn down a house, steal a car. All it took was a bottle. His brother taught us at day camp, he led us in singing “500 Miles” on the bus on the way home, and we all knew Mousey, his brother, the lost one—
Lord I can’t go back home this-a-way
. Mugsy’s kids went to school with me, one was in my class, I’d grown up playing with him. Bombardment. Geronimo. We knew them, knew their families, their struggles were public, a failing acted out daily, daily forgiven. We could pray for them, if we prayed.

When I was fifteen, sixteen, you could get Mugsy to buy for you, you could find him in the parking lot of the package store, and for a couple beers he’d buy you a case. If the cops were around he’d have to get in the car with you, like you were all going to a party together, old buddies, and you’d drop him a few blocks away, and drive off into the liquid night.

My father put on a good front at first. Evicted only recently, he’d lived on his own for years. Outside for only a month or so, broke, but still put-together, lucid, somewhat clean. When he first arrives he has one eye unmoored, having been cross-eyed for years. It floats in his head like a ghost satellite. Gave him an intense look, Ray says. On his legs he wears support stocking, for the phlebitis. But he doesn’t appear psychotic, claims he’s never been institutionalized, never been on meds, never even been in a detox. Maybe he has traces of a head injury, maybe in prison he’d been locked up in a psych ward for a while, but the doctors made no diagnosis, at least not one he’s willing to talk about. The drinking, the fall on the head, all “organic” damage, the psych people say, we can’t touch him. A blustering, damaged man, but many are worse off. Where else is he to go?

Even the years before he made his way to the shelter our paths might have crossed. We both did construction, off and on, so perhaps on a job site, leaning on our respective shovels, staring at each other across the ditch we’d created. Since we both considered ourselves writers we might have listened to the same poet at some literary event, breathed the same air. He drove a cab, so I could have been his fare one night, if I ever took cabs. We both drank, so we might have been in the same dive, on the same night, vying for the same waitress’s attention. Boston isn’t a large city, but still a city of four million, so it wasn’t necessary that we would meet. I could have made sure we never did, gone to New York, or San Francisco, or anywhere else on the planet. But I went to Boston, and stayed, and began working at Pine Street, which was and is a village within the greater city, an inverse city, where the majority of the townspeople, not just a few, are drunks or what we used to call idiots.

Three months now since my father first walked through the shelter door. Tonight he’s relatively sober, able to raise his arms for the frisk without attracting undo attention, to move efficiently past the slumbering bodies to the Cage, to check his valuables, sign his name. I watch him from across the lobby, but don’t approach. Even without seeing him I can picture each step he takes. Once upstairs he will hand in his bed ticket and receive his hanger, shoebox, wrist tag. Sitting on the bench with the box beside him he’ll see himself in the funhouse mirror—his head grossly enlarged, his body birdlike, his hands mickey mouse hands. He’ll take his clothes off carefully, hang everything on the numbered hanger, place his shoes and socks in the box. Naked, he’ll rise, hand everything over the counter, get his bar of soap and ration of shampoo. Getting on nine, the rush over, the showers empty now except for him. A trough around the perimeter, like a moat, carries the water and dirt and sweat and suds away.

The day my father walked through the doors I became transparent. I couldn’t find a way to talk about him with my friends, with my co-workers. Some approached, sideways, crablike, offered support, sympathy, but this was merely fuel for my shame. After a while, with the daily frenzy inside the walls, it just became a fact—That guy’s father is a guest here. A newcomer would try to take that in, process it, make it line up with his experience. Maybe his father was missing or a drunk, or had embarrassed him once or twice. Another month would pass, and it became normal. His father sleeps upstairs, like in some parallel home.

Toweled off and in his johnny, my father climbs the next flight of stairs. The days long now, muted daylight filters into the dorms. A live-in staff worker wordlessly aims a flashlight at my father’s wrist. They pass between rows of men, some snoring, some staring wide-eyed into the gloom. One mutters an endless monologue, one paces back and forth to the toilets. One stands at a window watching the taillights on the Southeast Expressway, fading sparks.

One night a co-worker says that I have the worst luck of anyone she’s ever met (
We arouse pity by cultivating the most repulsive wounds
). A version of empathy, I suppose, but I don’t really want to talk about it. If we go out drinking after work, if I end up spending the night with her, maybe I’ll say more, as we talk afterward, as a way to explain something about myself, why I’m the way I am, why I’m in her bed and not Emily’s. An affair is a room to disappear into for a few hours, another place to hide. But if asked directly I’ll say he’s just another drunk, that’s what I’ve always heard, a drunk and a con man, he has nothing to do with me.
I don’t know you at all
, she will say, a few months into our affair,
but if you ever want to talk
…and I’ll smile a skull’s smile and one by one the lights will go off inside me.