Man Gone Down (20 page)

“You need to see the boss,” says Roman. “You need to see Johnny. He knows.”

“He knows?”

Now they both nod in unison, smiling—Roman with his expanding scar, Vlad with his gray gums. I shoulder my bag and leave.

I have gas pains from not eating. I have enough change for coffee and, if they give it to me, some kind of biscuit. The coffee shop's bagels and muffins are inedible; the bagel store's coffee is undrinkable. If I buy a bagel first and I'm not offered a coffee later . . . but if I buy a coffee first, I'll have to bring it to the bagel store, which would be rude. I like the people who work there, and I don't want to offend. I decide to get coffee. Then I remember the ten I just won. I should eat something. I go to the bodega behind the projects. A blonde pillhead is outside.

“Hey, papi.”

She tries to open the door for me, but she's too shaky. It's hard for her to grab the handle, and when she finally does, she hasn't the strength to move it. She's detoxing hard. I can see her skull through her translucent skin. All the blood seems to be collecting there. It's about to burst.

I nod to her, go in, and make my way to the coolers in the back. Bud is on sale. Six bucks for a rack of talls. I grab one and go to tear a can off. The sensation of the cold metal shoots up my arm like a fix. I take my one can and back away. A voice calls from the front.

“Can you keep that closed?”

I come out of my shock and peer down the aisle to the front. Airborne dust lingers in what little light that has made it through the fogged-out storefront. The old linoleum is gritty. There isn't much for sale here—cold beer, warm beer, soda, bottled juice from concentrate, junk food that may have reached the end of its long shelf life on which the dust has settled. I see the clerk now. Hiding behind a rack of gum and candy. I take a single and bring it quickly to the front.

He comes out of hiding. He's only a teen—light skinned and chubby. Behind him is a Budweiser clock and a painting of the crucifixion. Jesus is white, blond. He looks more bored than pained. Next to him is an outdated promotional poster for a liqueur in which a honey-skinned, green-eyed woman in a bikini asks, “What are you doing tonight?” I take a roll of antacid and place it beside the beer.

“Three.”

I don't do anything—a strategy to make him recalculate my tab. He senses this and cuts to the point. He points at the Rolaids. “One.” He points at the beer. “Two.” He taps the counter. “Three.” I keep staring at the crucifixion. He tries to further explain.

“It's only on sale if you get the six-pack.”

I give him the ten. He drops seven singles on the counter.

He reaches underneath the counter and produces a small bag, which he snaps open and places the beer carefully inside.

“All right, buddy.”

I want to respond, with something highbrow and long-winded, but I think of the girl outside, if her head has exploded. For her sake I let it go.

The pillhead tries to open the door for me again. I let her believe that she has. She backs up to let me step through the small opening. I hold out my hand and show her a dollar bill and some change. She does her best to focus on the money and then looks up at me, questioning. She has a wandering eye—the left one. It looks glass until I see the moisture on it. It finally fixes on something in the sky.

I hand her the beer. The crazy eye snaps down to focus on it.

“Papi.” Her hands are shaking. She has a deep lesion on one of her forearms. I open the beer for her. The ritual freezes the both of us for an instant. I give it to her.

“Thank you.”

“You're welcome.”

Someone, I don't remember who, once said while extending his index finger, “A normal person's soul is like this.” He bent it and said, “The soul of an alcoholic is like this. Drinking makes the alcoholic feel that his soul,” straightening his finger again, “is like this.”

Kali made me feel that way for a little while—right, unbroken—but the few sharp memories I have make me feel wrong. She had the power to make one compelled to act: begin a punishing diet and exercise regime, learn another language, or lose oneself at the bottom of the river. Once, before we were married, Claire found Kali's picture inside a book, and was made to feel so inadequate that she was willing to give me back to her. She gasped—looking from the photo to me, while her face steadily drained of blood—wondering where this woman was and how she would figure in our lives to come.

Kali ruined me. That's what I said to myself after I had taken a drink; the first in some time. I'd just grunted to myself,
“I'm not drinking 'cause of some girl.”
After I had sex for the first time, I left Kali's room and went down to the river, hoping that the movement of the
dark water would replace, in my mind, the tableau that wouldn't leave: Kali and I standing naked, facing each other, my penis in her lightly calloused hands.

I decided after Sally that I would never be with a white girl again. Brian said he thought it was racist. Shake nodded his head in agreement and chuckled to himself. Gavin said,
“That's good, I suppose, if you see the world in that way.”

The summer after graduating high school I met a girl, a woman—Jenny—
a black woman.
I was working in the stockroom of one of those giant liquor stores, lost in perpetual amazement of the inventory. She was a receptionist at the travel agency next door and was a few years older. She was short, had bright caramel skin and her hair was pulled long by the hot iron. She never needed to twist it with her fingers or look away shyly. She cut my nervous rambles short by abruptly turning away, or stepping, like a boxer, to quickly cut the distance between us, press close to my chest and look up steeply to kiss me.

It was, of course, a disaster. That awful paradox of being good and prodigal: I had been born to lead my people, but also to find a hardworking black woman, like my mother, as she'd been instructing me to do most of my life. Jenny fit, but I wasn't ready. Whenever she got close to me my anus would burn, or I'd think I was choking. I must have seemed insane to her. In a quiet moment when I was closing up, she came to the back of the store and told me that I was a repressed homosexual and that I should do something about it. After Jenny I decided that I would eliminate all race of woman and girl. When I told Gavin about it, he asked me if I might be gay. I told him I didn't think so, I just didn't like being so close to people. He nodded and said that it was probably for the best—“. . .
heard melodies sweet, right?”

I stuck with that—it's easier than most would think—virginal abstinence. In high school there had been plenty of sex to avoid; in college there was more, and without my friends to hide behind. Shake had left for New York, Brian went away to the Midwest for school,
and Gavin went on monthly benders. I had stopped drinking with him, partly out of some quasihonor, but mostly because his ma had screamed at me that I was helping him die. So every once in a while he'd show up, trembling, and we'd go out and consume just about every nonalcoholic beverage in Harvard Square, twitchily reminisce, and watch the students and hipsters our age prepare to fuck. Sometimes we'd be asked to join, but we'd refuse and the inviters would look perplexed. He'd sketch me and I would write a poem about the girl at the next table or the old drunk out in the street. Sometimes we'd go down to the river and I'd play him a song. Gavin always seemed to be able to listen to things deeply—more than a polite audience—he was engaged.

The Halloween night, sophomore year, after an unremarkable first two semesters of academic probation and athletic withdrawal we were on the MIT bridge, looking west up the Charles, listening to the sounds of revelry traveling downstream. We hadn't said much all evening. He leaned forward over the rail as though he wanted to roll over it, but he only inhaled deeply, straightened, and still looking down said, “
I wonder if the toasts we made were heard and granted
—
if this is oblivion.”

Then he had another fall and somehow went from the public detox to a mental hospital, and I didn't see him for months. I avoided everything. I remember the strange feeling of being both conspicuous and peripheral—an outside insider—not at all prepared for claiming and maintaining a place within the loop. I was waiting—test scores and potential aside—to be revealed as a fraud. I went for long runs along the Charles. It had seemed different when I was boy—hopelessly polluted, something to be avoided—but now, traveling it's narrow paths afforded me a quiet timelessness in which I seemed to move freely.

Then I saw Kali. Something had told me to turn. There used to be a little ice cream shop just off the main drag of the square and I watched her go inside—the big window—point at the board and then the flavor in the case like she was in a silent movie scene, but with
vivid color. I could even see the faint yellow tint of her lemon sorbet—her first lick. She was a
“terrible beauty”
whose existence confirmed for me that there was both an
immortal hand and eye.
I got caught up in her symmetry and she was gone.

I looked for her, waited across from the ice cream shop, drifted around the perimeter of the yard, waited outside thrift stores I thought she might be browsing in, and searched from my dorm room window, while my roommate, a pimply hockey player from Maine, watched with suspicion. I hated him, but I almost confided in him because I didn't know what to do. I drank and waited; wound up hospitalized for exsposure, wandering through the late streets of wintry Cambridge and Boston, trying to figure out what to say to a girl like that, trying to be near her and make her want to be near me.

I tried to imagine her life at school: how she spoke, how she moved. I wondered if she was as alone as I. The other black students, I thought, regarded me with suspicion, because I seemed to have no concrete reason to be there. I wondered how she appeared to them.
Ah, the promised few:
what a horrible burden. There's a limited amount of space for people, any people, anywhere. And on the inside of any powerful institution, especially for people of color, that space gets smaller and stranger. Most white folks believe the reason you've come in is to lift up your people. But you can't bring your people inside, except compressed into a familiar story that's already been sanctioned. And you wouldn't be there in the first place unless you were a recognizable type: the noble savage, Uncle Tom, the Afro-Centric, the Oreo, the fool. Those students made sense, but Kali, I thought, was different—an artist—and her crippling beauty seemed to refract the images around her into new things.

I remember realizing that she may not be a student—may have only been a visitor. The thought made me stop and sit at one of the chess tables in the middle of the square. It was a bleak November afternoon—straining, futile sun—and I was skipping another class, not wanting to hear the mumbling TA paraphrase someone else's thought about Joyce. She appeared on the corner. I saw the blood-red wool
hat first, then the long, dark coat, then her face—dark brown and regal. I knew I could never speak to her, or get near her because I would die, but I followed her down the side street and into a coffee house. I sat, waited, and tried not to stare, but she caught me, twice. And the third time she waved me over.
“Sit down,”
she said—liquid alto and quiet. Her chiseled, dark face and wine lips made me float.

She was the one
of course. Perhaps I was not: love and demographics. She's asked me about my poetry, but when I met her I had to throw out everything I'd ever written about Sally, because it seemed like boyish gibberish. She was politically radical, artistically progressive. And to others—whether or not they liked what she said or did—she made sense: the affect and content were whole. When I finally let her read the new poems I'd written, and she'd seen my confused reaction to her text-laden paintings; walked through the yard with her and felt the weight of observation on us—that we, as a couple, meant something—a burden we'd experienced alone, but as a couple, exponentially so; when I held her hand on Massachusetts Avenue after three coffee dates, when she kissed my neck that night to say goodbye, I could tell I was no good. I watched how she moved, with ease and elegance through different circles—so unlike my nervous skittering. I know she found that skittering taxing. She couldn't understand why it was so hard for me to make it to classes, or sit on the grass in the green; why I never responded to invitations from instructors or the dean to
“come chat.”
And in that voice she'd say,
“This place and these things are for you.”
I still wonder if she believed that.

One night in her room she prepared for bed—moving things about, preparing for the next day—but after undressing she stopped, came to me and helped me take off my clothes. I had thought of us naked, but I could never get past the image of tracing the outline of her body with my palms, as though she was protected by an invisible field.
“Such a strange boy.”
She whispered with that voice in the near-dark, almost to herself. I wanted to say something back, but I didn't and went cold. When we lay down kissing, I became metalled. And when I entered her, I pushed in a mechanical way. I didn't move, I jerked
in robotic spasm. And when I came, I finally felt our heat, my stillness. And I lay in the quiet horror of having been made flesh.

I did go see someone after that: Dean Richard Ray, and he shook his head faster and faster as if he was trying to give his words momentum before he threw them out at me. My collarbone was broken and I stared at his bloated turkey chin shaking to take my mind off the pain.

“You hit a police officer?”

I kept looking at his jowls as he kept shaking them. I didn't remember. I wanted to tell him. He took his glasses off and rubbed his face while sighing. I'd expected him to be angry, but his expression was blank. He looked at my arm in the sling and then a painting above my head—Sargent, I think. He opened my file, pretended to look at it, scanning it with a pen to guide him.