The Cloud of Unknowing (17 page)

Six days. Fuck. He thought of the Penn guy, the chemist. Maybe he'd dropped his roll in the car. Then he thought about the other guy, his roommate's friend, lying on the couch in front of the TV when he came home and got in the shower. Of course. That piece of shit went through his pockets. Isaac was sure of it.

He turned on 42nd Street, across Walnut and into the green canopy of the old maples. The air was still heavy, but the insects had gone quiet. When he stopped to listen for them, he heard footsteps and spun around. Eddie was following him, half a block behind.

“I'm sorry, Eddie. I lost my money.”

“I told you I ain't ask for nothing. I'm headed home just like you are.”

“Okay.” He waited while Eddie caught up and they walked together silently.

“I lost my whole paycheck,” Isaac said after a bit. “In cash. A roll of twenties.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Yeah, it blows. I know who took it, too.”

“You gonna get it back?”

“I don't know. Probably not. I don't want to talk about it. So, that's your old stomping grounds? Over there by Lancaster Ave?”

“Ludlow. 37th and Ludlow.”

“Isn't that all Penn buildings? I never noticed any houses over there.”

“It used to be nothing
but
houses over there, before they plowed it all under. Yeah, that's where I grew up, 37th and Ludlow.”

“No shit? Your house got knocked down?”

“Not just
my
house,” Eddie said, hopping a little. “We had
a— a—” He waggled his hands. “Over on 34th and Walnut we had a movie theater, stores, everything you might need right there in the neighborhood. A drug store. I used to run deliveries after school, take my money and go to the movies.”

“I never heard about that.”

“I expect you haven't,” he said. “I am not one bit surprised. I call that place Atlantis now. Atlantis, you know? But the real name we called it was Black Bottom.”

Kitty would have wanted to know about that, thought Isaac a little sadly. It was the kind of thing they'd talked about: secret history.

“Penn tore it down so they could build all those labs and shit?”

“Well, that's one thing. The other thing is, they ain't want us in a so-called slum. So now everybody living in a worse slum somewhere else, if they living anywhere at all.

“Wait, did Penn tear it down or the city?”

“You tell me the difference.”

Isaac wasn't sure what that meant, but it sounded right. “How old are you, Eddie?” he asked.

Eddie stopped for a moment, and Isaac waited while he thought about it. “I'm forty-two years old. Forty-two, or forty-one or forty-three. One of them.”

When they got to his house, Isaac said good night to Eddie and let himself in.

Eddie crossed Chester Street and looked up to the attic window, where the blessed boy stayed. A light went on. Pearls before swine, Eddie thought. When the light went out again he turned to leave and noticed something under the tire of a car. He squatted down to look. Yes, there it was. A roll of twenty-dollar bills.

The Minivan

I met Isaac when he was doing some work at my house. I think he asked me out because he admired my fiberglass spaghetti lamp. He was foxy, punk rock, bratty in his banana curls and calculator watch. Mostly, he was hilarious. On our first date, at a bar in South Philly, he told me all about his plan to poison the crackheads in his neighborhood by scattering cyanidefilled vials on the sidewalk, and about shooting pigeons by the bucketful in a warehouse he'd once lived in. He had me in stitches with his megalomaniacal fantasies of turning a certain abandoned factory into a fortress of solitude, where he would build his own personal road-warrior batmobile. We sat at the padded vinyl bar and hoisted mug after mug of lager, thrilled to have found one another. Outside, we groped behind a dumpster. We groped
in
a dumpster. Of course, this was before I knew he wasn't kidding about any of it.

One morning a few weeks into our affair, we sat on his sofa and looked at his photo album. Here was baby Isaac, standing unsteadily in a hallway, gripping a bench for support. Here was Isaac as a slack-lipped high school metalhead, eyes stoned and affectless beneath a frizzy mullet. Here he was perched high up on a roof truss in the warehouse, aiming a BB gun at the camera. Next to him was his old dog, Death Isaac, since lost in an acrimonious break-up. There were random snapshots of things he liked: a brutalist municipal building, an ornate Victorian window grate, a boat in a weed-choked lot behind a cyclone fence, christened “The A-HOLE” in stick-on mailbox letters. We flipped through pages and pages of photos of floors
he'd installed or refinished over the years. Isaac described each one: red pine, tongue-and-groove oak, maple parquet. Occasionally there was someone in the background or off to one side holding a shop vac or a bucket, but Isaac didn't identify them as he leafed through the album with me.

He stopped at a picture of a skinny blonde girl in the passenger seat of a van. I thought he was going to tell me about an ex-girlfriend; maybe the one who'd kept Death Isaac. Instead, he began waxing nostalgic about the van she was sitting in. It was an Aerostar, he said, with plush velour seats and AC and power everything, and it was the nicest car he'd ever had. This launched a disquisition on the subject of minivans, which he said were perfect work vehicles. A minivan got better gas mileage than a pickup truck or a full-sized van, but you could still fit a 4 x 8 sheet of plywood in the back. And then you could sit up front in a nice civilized captain's chair, with a cup-holder and everything. He liked his creature comforts. He told me he had drawn plans for a prototype of a modern minivan when he was ten years old, and he therefore felt that it was, in a certain way, his invention.

But Isaac had no minivan now, and indeed no driver's license. An epileptic, he had crashed his Aerostar into the side of a church during a grand mal seizure. The Aerostar was totaled and he was taken to the emergency room, where the doctor who treated him put a medical suspension on his driver's license. He couldn't get his license restored until he could prove he hadn't had a seizure for six months. This would require appointments with neurologists. Also blood tests, various costly scans and imagings, and who knew what else. Furthermore, he wasn't remotely seizure-free. He had hangover seizures, stress-related seizures, strobe light/trance music/op art seizures. He had just-for-the-hell-of-it seizures. “Everyone should have a seizure,” he told me. “It's intense.” He hadn't
seen a neurologist since they sprang him from the hospital. He couldn't. He had no health insurance. And rather than apply for Medicaid, he'd done what came naturally: he had slid effortlessly, numbly, fatalistically off the grid.

Somehow, he was maintaining a floor-sanding business on his bicycle. A floor sander, in case you've never seen one, is a huge, unwieldy thing made out of cast metal. Isaac's weighed probably two hundred pounds. Then there was the buffer, the edger, milk crates full of sandpaper, five gallon buckets of polyurethane—all this had to be transported to and from the job. Astonishingly, he was able to get the housewives who engaged his services to shuttle him and all his equipment and supplies in their SUVs and drive him to Home Depot and Diamond Tool and Bell Flooring, often making several trips a day due to his chronic disorganization. He wasn't apologetic or even particularly nice about it—he was basically a petulant, sarcastic teenager about it—and yet these housewives loved him with all the exasperation and indulgence that their inner soccer moms possessed. I saw it with my own eyes. They clucked disapprovingly at his diatribes against recycling and in favor of apocalyptic forms of population control, but still they made him nice lunches and sewed buttons on his shirts and paid him in cash because he didn't have a bank account.

His inscrutable charm worked on me, too. The clichés pile up as I try to explain: He made me laugh. I could be myself around him. I'd never met anyone like him, gimlet-eyed and crazy in equal measure. Ultimately, what really got to me was that he was so guileless. He concealed none of his emotions, positive or negative; everything he felt seemed to register on the surface of his skin. Within a month he had moved into my house.

Summer came. Isaac and I rode our bikes all over town, and he took me to his favorite spots in his old neighborhood. He showed me buildings he'd pillaged or planned to pillage for glass wall sconces, doorknobs, and other treasures. At a decommissioned bank under the Frankford El he had me look through a hole in the plywood at a grand chandelier hanging from the vaulted ceiling. In the vacant lots around his old house, junkies had arranged sofas and chairs, milk crates, and industrial spools into cozy conversation pits.

At some point in our travels we came across a mid-'80s Dodge Caravan, sun-dulled and putty-colored, beached on a Fishtown sidewalk in the shade of an ailanthus tree. It had a for-sale sign in the back window. “I'm gonna buy that minivan,” he said, and he wrote the phone number down in his sketchbook. I probably laughed, if I reacted at all.

I forgot all about it. Then one afternoon I came home and found Isaac sitting on our stoop, shit-faced drunk. Having nowhere to be that day, he'd polished off a bottle of vodka he found in the freezer and then called the phone number in his sketchbook. “If you can get it to South Philly, I'll give you four hundred dollars cash for it,” he'd told the no-doubt delighted owner of the Caravan. A few minutes after I got home, the minivan pulled up to the curb in a cloud of white smoke and rattled to a stop. I took a look and went back in the house.

After a while, Isaac staggered inside and sat across from me at the kitchen table.

“That's one happy sonofabitch that got your four hundred dollars,” I said.

“Yeah? Well, how am I supposed to get the money for anything better? I can't even drive my tools around. Are
you
going to buy me an Aerostar? No? That's what I thought. Everyone has a fucking minivan but me.”

I asked all the obvious questions: how was he going to
register it? Was he planning to just drive around without a license? Had he even looked at the engine before he forked over his money? But this was all beside the point. Isaac was sick of not having a minivan, so he'd called the guy, and now he had a minivan. And not only was I not happy for him, I was giving him crap about it. As for his driver's license, as far as he was concerned, he was so thoroughly fucked that there was no point in thinking about that either.

“Fine,” I said, “don't call me when you get pulled over for driving around without a license plate.”

Isaac let out a long, quarrelsome fart as he contemplated this, then disappeared into the basement and reemerged with a roll of duct tape and some scissors. He grabbed a box of Cheerios off the table, dumped its contents in the sink, and cut a license plate-sized rectangle out of the cardboard. I followed him outside to see what he would do next. He looked up the street, wrote three letters on the piece of cardboard with a sharpie, then looked down the other way and added four numbers. He taped the cardboard onto the Caravan's license plate holder and got in. The engine turned over after several tries, and the minivan lurched to the end of the block and vanished around the corner.

After a few hours of furious paging, I heard from him. He was at his friend Larry's house. It sounded like there was a party going on.

“Hey, what are you doing?” he asked—as though there'd been no fight and no angry paging. “You'll never guess what. You know that Silvertone Dan Electro I told you about? The one I saw at the junk shop at Frankford and York? Larry bought it. The same guitar.”

“You drove that piece of shit van to West Philly? Without a plate?”

“I have a plate. I make my
own
plates!”

“Isaac, I'll say it again. You don't have an inspection sticker,
insurance, you don't even have a driver's license.”

“That stuff's for chumps. Will you stop worrying? I'm telling you, nothing's gonna happen. This is how we roll in Philly. Hey, if I'd had a minivan yesterday,
I
could have bought this Dan Electro. The case has a little amp in it. You just plug it right into the case. It's totally adorable—right up your alley. You should come over here and check it out.”

“And you're drunk.”

“Aw man, just come over or leave me alone,” he said and hung up.

I got on my bike and headed over to Larry's. Did I think I was going to talk Isaac into leaving the minivan there, or did I just feel like I was missing a good party? Who knows. I'd only been with Isaac a few months, and already I was tired of being the heavy.

The ride was calming. I felt the bad mood slipping off as I rode across the Schuylkill, up Spruce, past the food trucks around the Penn campus. I coasted down Woodland Ave, sweetly dappled in the summer twilight. From the depths of Clark Park came the first cool breath of the evening. By the time I got to Larry's, I wasn't angry anymore. Someone handed me a cold bottle of beer. I found Isaac down in the basement, grinding away on Larry's funny little Dan Electro. I drank my beer and threw my bike in the Caravan and we headed home. Isaac leaned his seat back and dangled one arm out the window, his profile bobbing to some inner soundtrack, and I put my feet up on the dashboard and rolled down the window. I let the night air wash over me. This felt good. But the transmission was definitely slipping a little.