Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (23 page)

(2000)
I’m living in Provincetown for another summer, no longer on the boat. I sold the boat for a dollar to a guy who swore to keep her afloat, who turned out to be either a liar or inept. A letter comes in which my father claims to have located
The Button Man
. I show up a few days later at his apartment, and he hands me four binders, four hundred pages, typed out. Not only does it exist, it turns out to be a musical. It starts with a song:

This first musical number is dated 2/15/64, the day after he blacked out and stole the sheriff’s car. The singing starts the moment he awakes in his cell, hungover. I bring
The Button Man
home and read it in an afternoon. A page-turner. Each day he is in jail gets its own chapter. His first day continues:

For thirty pages or so
The Button Man
shows promise—a hybrid of songs, letters, found documents and scrawlings smuggled out of a county jail, woven in with a tone and ideas sampled from
Catcher in the Rye
—a
meta-text
—but, like his life, it soon falls apart, dissipates into incoherence. What would I do if it was a masterpiece, an overlooked classic? What then? Would our blood be redeemed? Would time be made whole? Would I still have such ambivalence about calling myself a poet? Would I have more? Would I have some idea of what it means to be a father, would I still be terrified of becoming one? He cannot die, he tells me, until his work is complete. Perhaps I am digging his grave, perhaps the book you have in your hands is the coin for his eyes. Perhaps the story of his masterpiece is his life raft, what he’s invented to keep himself afloat.

To invent anything you need an idea. See the wooden lifeboats lined up on the deck, slipping silently into the cold sea as the ship goes under—some capsize, some upend, some shake out their cargo to their new life below. Imagine you live on the streets, that you have no key, no door with a metal number tacked to it. Imagine wandering down by the river or the piers, to seek out a likely place to crawl into for what’s left of the night. Listen to the water heave and sigh, lap and break. You might dream of a life raft, a vessel to come and lift you out of this. What does my father imagine when he utters the words “life raft”? A thin skin between his ass and the shark’s teeth? That the cavalry’s on the way? Should he hold out just a bit longer? Does he see his father, coming back for him? Does he see his son, piloting the life raft now, here to ease him into old age? There are many ways to drown, only the most obvious wave their arms as they’re going under.

The man who imagined Pine Street didn’t see it as a life raft, more as a rock you could rest briefly upon, to catch your breath, get your bearings. A man named Paul Sullivan founded Pine Street, and he knew that his guys, many of them, were never going to find their way back to shore. The shelter was meant to be a waystation, a halfway house, but halfway to where wasn’t specified. The cot and the roof and the plate of food were only meant to tide one over. It was never meant to be a life raft. Even a life raft is only supposed to get you from the sinking ship back to land, you were never intended to live in the life raft, to drift years on end, in sight of land but never close enough.

After months of calling the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, of asking where I might locate the original patent for the invention of the life raft, I am directed to the Science, Industry, and Business Library on Madison Avenue, just across the river. There I waste a few more days online before someone finally takes pity on me and directs me to the back room, which houses the actual books of all the patents issued for every year, starting before the Civil War. As I don’t know the date of the supposed invention, I must look in each volume, under the last name Flynn, from 1900 on up. I find that in 1930 an Edmund J. holds the patent for the manufacture of zinc sulfide. I find that in 1925 Edmund P. of Eastman Kodak holds many patents for film processing. I get excited when I find that in 1929 Thaddeus J., who I assume is my great-grandfather, the one whose name is etched inside the grasshopper weathervane on the roof of Faneuil Hall, secures the patent for a new and improved roof drain. After a few more fruitless hours I assume this roof drain is the extent of the inventions in my bloodline. Fifteen minutes before closing time on my third day I find it:

This patent was granted in 1918. Then, in 1942, my grandfather is granted a second patent:

The problem was to keep the body above the waves. The trick was to breathe only air. My grandfather’s patent was used by seven countries during both World Wars. Thousands of heads floating above the waves. I’ll be damned.

Last summer, when I found my father groggy and red-faced in a heatwave, I bought him an air conditioner. Now it’s January and still it’s cranked up full-blast, doing battle with the radiators.
I haven’t touched it
, he swears. I take out my first book, a collection of poetry. Many of the poems deal with my mother’s suicide, some deal with him. It’s the reason I’m here, to give him a copy. Now that I no longer videotape him I need to tell myself I have a reason to visit. He turns it over in his hands as if it’s a holy relic.

(2002)
Music’s blasting from an apartment below. My father’s been stewing over it in his room for a couple days. After his check comes, after a day of solid vodka, he takes the club he keeps by his front door, the same club he used to carry in his cab, a spike in the business end, and lurches downstairs. He raps on the door the music’s coming from and when a guy opens it my father swings the club at the guy’s head. It misses, but shakes the guy up enough that he calls the cops, who come, inform the management company, and now the company wants my father out.

Twelve years now my father has been inside, housed,
sure glad that’s behind us
, though I realize he’s still lost, adrift in his own wrong ocean. But at least he isn’t sleeping under a bush, at least I know that if I choose to I can drive into Boston and find him. I know if I wait until after the fifteenth of the month he most likely won’t be completely hammered. But now I’ve been tracked down by Dawn from the management company, and she’s told me what he’s done, and that he has to go. I ask about the procedure, how long it takes. A month to serve the papers, she says, then another month in court, and then he’s out. It must be a burden, I say, to be the one to put people on the street, and I really mean it, but she says it’s no burden at all. I offer to go up there and tell him about his impending eviction, because I don’t know what else to say. I also tell her that I’ll take away his weapon, which I’m familiar with, as he has brandished it at my head once or twice in the past (
bammo
) in case I forgot he was a tough guy. I offer to go simply because I’d hate for him to do any actual damage. Dawn implies that if I can disarm him then perhaps she’ll reconsider the eviction, though she makes no promises, and I don’t ask for any. After I hang up I lay on the floor for a while as if rabbit-punched.

But I arrive too soon—the vodka still in abundance, he doesn’t remember police or music or attacking anything. When a dim flicker does cross his face he goes into a familiar harangue, about how dangerous the neighborhood is, how just yesterday he got on the elevator and there was a loaded .38 magnum on the floor, which he, of course, didn’t put a finger on, he’s not stupid. When I tell him that I’ve come for his weapon, that if he gives it up there’s an outside chance he won’t be evicted, he begins to scream about being left defenseless in this murderous city, that he will never leave his apartment, showing his resolve by fishing the club out and brandishing it, once again, a foot from my head.

He lowers the club to his side, begins telling me about a twelve-year-old white kid who knocked on his door the other day, asked him where the rental office was.
What the fuck was that about?
he asks.
Out of all the apartments in this building, he comes to my door? Tell me it’s not harassment, pure and simple.
His door is papered on the outside with letters sent to him, from Ted Kennedy, from Patty Hearst, to show the other tenants that he’s someone, that he’s known. A twelve-year-old might mistake it for an office, the letters for official notices.
I’ll tell you something, though, that boy will never knock on my door again
. I tell him that if I leave today without the weapon I’ll have to tell Dawn that he refused, and she will begin eviction proceedings, and I won’t blame her or be able to do anything to help him. He screams some more, about the Supreme Court case he’ll initiate, about them not knowing who they’re up against. At one point he offers to hand it over, if I promise to give it back. As I turn to leave, he follows me into the hallway, calls me back, whispers,
Hey, I’ve got a hammer
, as if I could give this to Dawn and everything would be hunky-dory. As I start down the stairs he screams,
FATHER MURDERER, FATHER MURDERER
, at my retreating back.

Bitter cold walking down Boylston, the cold feels good in my head. I pass the piece of sidewalk where I first encountered Ida, a black southerner in her sixties, who ended up in Boston one winter, broke with no place to live. Ida had a shopping cart and,
No, thank you,
she didn’t want to come on the Van with us to the shelter. All she wanted, once we’d established a rapport, was a grill so she could cook the rutabagas she’d acquired and now took up a good bit of her cart. She just wanted to start a little fire right there on the sidewalk and cook her rutabagas. Farther on I pass a man in the bus kiosk beside the library, hands deep in his pockets, his hood pulled tight over his face, three notes carefully safety-pinned to his yellow parka, pencil scrawl across each page. I don’t know what the notes say because I don’t stop to read them. In an hour I’m on a train to New York, and on the way back to Boston a few days later, I decide to give my father one more chance. I still haven’t called Dawn. He buzzes me in, thanks me for trying to help him out, hands over the club, says he’d appreciate whatever I can do.