The Flamethrowers (10 page)

He had helped the other inmates write their letters to the women. “
Reach out to your loved ones, 39 cents,
a sign in the common room said. You got an envelope, paper, and a stamp. These guys would be working away with a little pencil like they give you for writing down call numbers at the public library. ‘How do you spell
pussy
?’ they’d ask. ‘How do you spell
breasts
?’ ‘Does
penis
have an
i
in it?’ ”

“What was the pizza cutter for?” Nadine asked.

“For cutting pizza, sweet Nadine.” He gave her a puppy-dog smile.

“When I got out, I thought, okay, unlike a lot of my friends, I know what the inside of a prison is like. Most people don’t even know what the outside of a prison is like. They’re kept so out of sight. You only know signs on the highway warning you in certain areas not to pick up hitchers. While I know about confinement and boredom and midnight fire drills. Amplified orders banging around the prison yard like the evening prayer call from the mosques along Atlantic Avenue. I know
pimento loaf. Powdered eggs. Riots. The experience of being hosed down with bleach and disinfectant like a garbage can. I know about an erotics of necessity.”

“Oh, baby,” the Duke of Earle said.

“There’s something in that. You think you’re one way—you know, strictly into women. But it turns out you’re into making do.”

“I am going to melt,” the duke said, “just puddle right in this booth. I had no
idea
—”

“I don’t want to disappoint you, Duke,” the friend said, “but I’d have to be in prison, and I don’t plan on going back.”

His arm was around me. I was in the stream that had moved around me since I’d arrived. It had moved around me and not let me in and suddenly here I was, at this table, plunged into a world, everything moving swiftly but not passing me by. I was with the current, part of it, regardless of whether I understood the codes, the shorthand, of the people around me. Not asking or needing to know kept me with them, moving at their pace.

“When you get released, they dump you in Queens Plaza at four a.m. Guys are darting in and out of the doughnut shop, wedded in some deep way to prison cafeteria code, drinking coffee, holding a doughnut in a greasy bag like they’ve got a bomb, strutting, but unsure who they’re strutting
for,
now that there’s no guard, no warden, no cellmate. They are just random dudes in Queens Plaza, wonderfully, horribly free. That same hour of the night women and children line up in midtown to get bused out to Rikers for visitors day. Buses letting out felons here, collecting visiting-day passengers there, while most people are sleeping. The prisons must stay hidden geographically, and hidden in time, too.

“After I got out,” he said, “I was incredibly happy. Freedom after confinement is different from plain freedom, which can sometimes be its own sort of prison. The problem was ‘Green Onions.’ Weeks turned to months and it hung around. That surging rhythm was always in my head and I mean always.”

He hummed it. “It woke me up in the middle of the night, like
someone had turned up the volume and there I was, lying in the dark listening to the tweedling ‘Green Onions’ organ riff, waiting for the guitar parts to cut in, stuck inside its driving rhythm, this groovy song boring out the canals of my brain. It was so unfair, because I had paid my debt to society.”

“Green Onions” came on again, for I think the third time, and it felt to me that the whole room was conspiring in some kind of hoax. The friend hummed enthusiastically.

“If you had to hear it for ten whole years,” I said, laughing, figuring if I laughed openly, he would stop putting me on, “how can you stand to listen to it now?”

“Because you have to know your enemies,” he said. “How can you fight if you don’t know what you’re up against? Who are
your
enemies?”

I said I didn’t know.

“See? Exactly.”

*  *  *

Later we danced. My arms were around his neck, his Marsden Hartley T-shirt clinging to his broad shoulders in the heat and sweat of the bar. I had not kissed him but knew I would, and he knew that I knew, and there was a kind of mutual joy in this slide into inevitability, never mind that I didn’t know his name or if anything he said was true.

“You’re pretty,” he said, brushing my hair away from my face.

How did you find people in New York City? I hadn’t known this would be how.

“They could put your face on cake boxes,” he said.

I smiled.

“Until you show that gap between your teeth. Jesus. It sort of ruins your cake-box appeal. But actually, it enhances a different sort of appeal.”

Some women wouldn’t want a man to speak to them that way. They’d say, “What kind of appeal do you mean?” Or, “Go fuck yourself.” But I’m not those women, and when he said it, my heart surged a little.

The hotel, it turned out, was the Chelsea. I don’t know whose room
it was, maybe it was Nadine’s, a room that Thurman got for her. There was the sense that Thurman helped her out when he felt like it and that perhaps she was out on the street when he didn’t. We were drinking from a bottle of Cutty Sark and Nadine was not, it turned out, Thurman’s wife. From a phone pulled into the hallway he spoke with his actual wife, Blossom, or maybe he just called her that, not at all tenderly, a nasal, “Blossom, I will call you in the morning.” He enunciated each word like the sentence was a lesson the wife was meant to memorize and repeat. “In the morning. I will call you tomorrow, after I’ve had my Sanka.” Which sent Nadine into hysterics. “
Sanka!
After he’s had his
Sanka
!”

After he got off the phone, Thurman seemed energized by a new wildness, as if the compromise of the phone call had to be undone with behavior that Blossom, wherever she was, might not approve of. He put on a Bo Diddley record with the volume turned all the way up, and when it began to skip he pulled it from the turntable and threw it out the window. He put on another record, a song that went “There is something on your mind,” over and over, with this clumsy but sexy saxophone hook. At the friend’s suggestion, I danced with Thurman. He smelled like aftershave and cigarettes and hair tonic. There was something synthetic and unnatural about him, the way his hair formed a perfect wave and the crispness of his fitted suit, clothing that kept him who he was, a person of some kind of privilege, through whatever degraded environment or level of drunkenness.

There is something on your mind

By the way you look at me

The friend was dancing with Nadine. Her arms were slung around his neck, her strawberry hair over his shoulder. She pressed her hips against him, and he pressed back.

There is something on your mind, honey

By the way you look at me

Watching their bodies make contact, I wished we could trade partners.

“Well, look at that,” Thurman said. “Take your eye off her for just a minute—”

I felt him fumble for something in his suit jacket. Nadine and their friend turned as a unit, slowly one way and then the other.

Before I understood what it was Thurman had retrieved from his coat pocket, something body-warm, heavy, he was aiming it at them, at the friend and Nadine, who danced to the slow rhythm of the song, pressed together and unaware.

I heard a click. He was pointing it at them. A deafening bang ripped through me.

The friend laughed and asked for the gun and Thurman tossed it in his direction. The friend opened it and took out the bullets and inspected them.

“Blanks,” he said, and gave it back to Thurman, who grabbed Nadine by the neck in mock violence and stroked the front of her dress up and down with the gun barrel. It seemed a stupid and ridiculous gesture but she took it seriously and even moaned a little like it turned her on.

I remembered my cousins Scott and Andy saying blanks could kill a person. Thurman put the gun in a cabinet and brought out a new bottle of Cutty Sark. He poured us fresh drinks and then played “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” on the little electric piano that was in the room. The friend took me up to the roof of the building and narrated the New York skyline. “It’s up here on roofs where all the good stuff is taking place,” he said. “Women walking up the sides of buildings, scaling vertical facades with block and tackle,” he said. “They dress like cat burglars, feminist cat burglars. Who knows? You might become one, even though you’re sweet and young.
Because
you’re sweet and young.”

“What are you, some kind of reactionary?” I said.

“No,” he said. “I’m giving you tips. But actually, the roofs are somewhat last year. Gordon Matta-Clark just cut an entire house in half. It’s going to be tough to beat that. What now, Reno? What now?”

Back downstairs, Thurman barged into the bathroom while Nadine was peeing, for some reason not in the toilet but in the bathtub. He looked at her, sitting on the edge of the tub with her minidress hoisted up.

“You know what I love more than anything?” he said.

“What?” she asked with quiet reverence, as if the whole evening were a ritual enacted in order to arrive at this moment, when he would finally tell her what he really loved.

“I love crazy little girls.” He grabbed her and hoisted her over his shoulder, her underpants still around her ankles. Carried her into the bedroom and shut the door.

“You know what they do?” the friend said. “They shoot each other with that gun. In the crotch. Bang. Pow. It makes your eardrums feel ripped in half the next day.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?” I asked.

“Of course. That’s why they do it.”

The gun went off. Nadine shrieked with laughter. The telephone in the room began ringing.

The friend and I sat quietly, either waiting for the next gunshot or for the phone to stop ringing, or for something else.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey, Reno. Come here.”

But I was already right next to him.

We kissed, his pretty mouth soft and warm against mine, as the phone kept ringing.

*  *  *

When we’d finally lain down on my bed, the early sun over the East River filling my apartment with gold light, I told him I didn’t want to know his name. I didn’t think much about it. I just said it. “I don’t even want to know your name.”

He was wearing the brown Borsalino I’d found at the bar near my house. He took it off and put it on the floor next to my mattress, peeled off his homemade Marsden Hartley T-shirt, and pinned me down gently. My heart was pounding away.

“I don’t want to know yours, either,” he said, scanning my face intently.

What was he looking for? What did he see?

What transpired between us felt real. It
was
real: it took place. The things I’d heard and witnessed that evening, their absurdity, were somehow acknowledged in his dimples, his smirk, his gaze. The way he comically balled up the Marsden Hartley T-shirt and lobbed it across the room like a man fed up with shirts once and for all. Surveyed the minimal room, nodding, as if it were no surprise, but information nonetheless that he was taking in, cataloguing. And then surveying me, my body, nodding again, all things confirmed, understood, approved of.

I had followed the signs with care and diligence: from Nina Simone’s voice, to the motorcycle, to the Marsden Hartley shirt. All the way through the night, to the gun and now this: a man in my room who seemed to hold keys to things I’d imagined Chris Kelly would unlock had I found him. I never did.

*  *  *

When I woke up in the late morning, he was gone. The day was already midstride, full heat, full sun. My head pounded weakly. I was tired, hungover, disoriented. The brown felt Borsalino was gone, and I remembered that I had wanted him to have it, had told him to have it.

I sat on the fire escape. It was Sunday. Down below, the limousine drivers were in front of the little Mafia clubhouse, waiting next to a long line of black cars. They looked sweaty and miserable and I envied them. To wait by a car and know with certainty that your passenger would appear. To have such purpose on that day.

I had said something embarrassing about the Borsalino being
already
his, that it had been waiting for him in my apartment. I was doing that thing the infatuated do, stitching destiny onto the person we want stitched to us. But all of that—me as Reno, he as nameless, his derelict friends against whom we bonded, and yet without whom I never would have met him—all of it was gone.

I had said I didn’t want to know his name and it wasn’t a lie. I had wanted to pass over names and go right to the deeper thing.

*  *  *

Rain fell. Every day, heavy rain, and I sat in my apartment and waited for sirens. Just after the rain began, there were always sirens. Rain and then sirens. In a rush to get to where life was happening, life and its emergencies.

Do you understand that I’m alone? I thought at the unnamed friend as I stood in the phone booth on Mulberry Street, the sky gray and heavy, the street dirty and quiet and bleak, as a woman’s voice declared once more that I’d reached a number that had been disconnected.

It was just one night of drinking and chance. I’d known it the moment I met him, which was surely why I was enchanted in the first place. Enchantment means to want something and also to know, somewhere inside yourself, not an obvious place, that you aren’t going to get it.

was what he’d written in his notebook late that night, his hand trembling, the pen trembling. He had lain down in his clothes and trembled.

Valera is dead.

Here lies a different one.

*  *  *

As he savored the too quickly degrading images, his memories of the Great Ride the night before, its moments slipping away as if it had been a rare and precious dream, receding in the way the best dreams, the erotic ones, must, he looked at his note to himself, which he’d written exhilarated and shaking, the wobbly hand declaring his death.

From now on, he thought, leaves tremble. Not men. Only leaves.

The death was over. The birth had begun.