Townie (13 page)

“I didn’t mean nothin’! Jimmy, I didn’t mean—”

Quinn grabbed the back of Doucette’s leather jacket with both hands, and Doucette jerked free and spun around, the sun flashing off the five-inch blade just before he drove it into Jimmy’s hip.

“
All
the way in,” Daley said. “Right to the fuckin’ handle.”

Then Artie Doucette was running through the student parking lot, and Jimmy was down, his blood pulsing onto the concrete.

Daley helped Jimmy stand. His pant leg was soaked, blood running down his leg into his boot, and Quinn pressed his hand to the wound and limped through the crowded corridors all the way to the gym and Mr. Scanlon’s office, the man who coached Jimmy on the baseball team. He called an ambulance and later we learned that Doucette’s knife had just missed one of Jimmy’s kidneys, that Jimmy Quinn, tall handsome crazy Jimmy Quinn, the one who had beaten up that grown man in front of Sam’s house, had almost died.

For over a week Sam and Kevin Daley and Big Jeff Chabot and I walked the halls looking for any of Doucette’s friends. One afternoon after lunch we found one, a skinny kid with long red hair and buckteeth. Daley backhanded his face and knocked him into a wall of lockers and the kid fell to one knee and Daley leaned close and pointed his finger an inch from his face. “You tell Doucette he’s fucking
dead,
all right? You fuckin’
tell
him.” Then he kicked him in the ribs, and we turned and went looking for more.

I don’t know if it was having the others beside me, or that we were united in our rage, but I felt little fear, only a heart-thumping, dry-mouthed desire to hurt somebody, really
hurt
someone.

JIMMY STAYED
home the rest of the school year, and it seemed a long, long time before we saw him again.

It was June, one of those hot days when you could smell the Merrimack River all over town—the faint smell of sewage and diesel and drying mud, of dead fish and creosote, of rusty iron and the melted plastic of some chemicals we couldn’t name. It was after school, and Sam drove the two of us to Quinn’s big family house on Main Street. His mother answered the door. She looked happy to see us and led us through cool dim rooms to the backyard where Jimmy lay in a lawn chair in the sun.

His hair was longer than I’d ever seen it, and his skin was tanned a deep brown. He wore a tank top and cutoffs. When he saw us, he smiled and grabbed the walking stick at his side and stood.

“Hey, Sam. Andre.”

“Hey, Jimmy,” Sam said. “You look good.”

He did, and he didn’t. He was handsome as ever, but he’d lost muscle in his chest and shoulders and arms. We stood there awhile. I don’t remember what we talked about, just Jimmy nodding and smiling, his eyes on the sunlit trees of his backyard, the grass, his lawn chair in the middle of it. He had both hands around his walking stick, and I could see where the bark had been shaved away with a blade. If Quinn was planning to get Doucette for what he’d done to him, he didn’t look it. Instead, he looked diminished by it, not by what Doucette had done, but that it could happen, that he could actually die before he got out of high school.

We didn’t stay long. Sam and I had gotten jobs washing dishes, and our shift started soon. Jimmy laughed at something Sam said, then he walked back to his lawn chair, most of his limp gone, but the big stick still in his hand like something he wasn’t quite ready to do without.

CAPTAIN CHRIS’S
was a family restaurant overlooking the Merrimack on Water Street. On Friday and Saturday nights, it was crowded from five till closing, and it was one of the places Pop would take us to on our Sunday visits with him. It was air-conditioned, and the floors were carpeted and the tables were covered with rose-colored linens and heavy silver, Muzak playing over the sound system. From wherever you sat, you could see through the tinted windows the river moving by thirty feet below, and now I worked there in a kitchen that was hot and loud and crowded. Between the flaming stoves and the serving counter were four cooks, men in white who never stopped moving. They called out orders to each other, filled gleaming plates with baked haddock or stuffed lobster or prime rib, dropping a cruet of tomato and lemon onto the side, a sprig of parsley, then shouting for Doris or Ann Marie or Nancy to
pick up!

And these women my mother’s age, professional waitresses like Sam’s mother, were dressed in a uniform of skirt and apron and white soft-soled shoes, and they would whisk the plates from under the warming lights of the counter onto loaded trays they’d heave over one shoulder, then punch open the swinging doors for the muted cool of the restaurant. Busboys would roll in a stainless steel cart, its rubber tub full of dirty dishes they’d quickly scrape, then load onto plastic trays, pushing them onto the conveyor belt for one of us to spray down before it entered the machine and came out steaming clean on the other side for another dishwasher to heave and carry back through the side doors to the busing station where he’d stack plates on a shelf, cups and glasses, sort knives and forks and spoons into the right trays, then push the empty tub into a stack of others in the corner and run back into the kitchen to do it again and again and again.

In the back were full-size stainless steel sinks for pots and pans and that’s where Sam spent most of his time in an apron scrubbing bits of fish and potatoes, pasta, grease, and meat off of the bottoms and sides of massive containers. My job was to either load the machine or unload it, and I liked how hard it was to do well, how fast and efficiently you had to move, how quickly I broke out in a sweat and how much like a workout it became. That summer, the man who sprayed down the dishes and worked the machine was a drifter named Charlie Pierce.

Tall and scrawny, his arms scarred with blue tattoos, he was deep into his fifties and had thin gray hair and a coarse voice, though we never heard it much because he rarely smiled or spoke to anyone. Whenever there was a lull in the shift, he’d take a cigarette break out on the back stoop. He’d pull off his white apron and drape it over the railing, then light up a Raleigh and squint out at the river, exhaling smoke through his nose, taking his time.

One night very late, the cooks gone, the last of the waitresses too, it was just me and Sam and Charlie Pierce. Sam and I were wiping down the steel counters, and Charlie was mopping the floor. The transistor radio near the sink was playing, “Leaving on a Jet Plane.”

We kept working and the singer kept singing over and over how she’s leaving on a jet plane and Charlie straightened up from his mopping and shouted, “So fuckin’
leave
then!!”

Sam and I started to laugh, but Charlie was staring at us wide-eyed, like he’d just been insulted and couldn’t we see that? He shook his head and went back to his mopping, swearing under his breath, mumbling to himself.

IT WAS
a Saturday night in July, the place filled to capacity, and the kitchen was a loud, steaming machine of cooks calling out orders, the sizzling of hot oil, the swinging of the kitchen doors, Charlie spraying down the dishes before they went into the washer. There was the hollow clank of pots Sam was scrubbing out back, the chatter of the waitresses as they loaded their trays, some of them balancing three full platters of food up one arm, and the busboys were wheeling in carts of dirty dishes and were so backed up I had to move from the rear of the machine where I was unloading it to the front. The busboy had already run to his station to go set up recently cleared tables, and there were two full carts of food-streaked dishes, glasses, cups, and silverware, and I grabbed plates and bowls and began scraping them clean, sliding them into plastic trays and pushing them onto the belt for Charlie to spray.

“
Slow
down, kid.” His voice came from behind the rack of plastic trays, and I could only see his waist and hands as he sprayed down the dishes I’d just pushed to him.

“I can’t, we’re backed up.” I dropped a salad bowl into the loaded tray, then shoved it under the rack onto the belt and a hot sting shot across my arms and chest, water dripping from my elbows, the scalding water Charlie Pierce had just sprayed at me, and I was rushing around the corner to get him, the head cook dropping a sautée pan and jumping between us, another cook there too, then an older waitress with gray hair in a bun, Charlie saying, “I’ll kill him. So help me, I will take that kid’s life. I will take his life.”

The head cook sent him outside to cool off. He put Sam in his place at the machine, then he turned to me and said, “And you, hothead, calm the fuck down.” In seconds the kitchen was back to normal and I was pushing loaded trays to Sam, my heart still going, and even though Charlie’s words were in my head, I wasn’t afraid.

After smoking two or three slow cigarettes out on the stoop, Charlie came back in and relieved Sam, and we worked the rest of the shift without a word to him or from him.

Five years later, standing in my father’s small campus house he shared with his third wife, I saw a photograph of Charlie Pierce in
The Boston Globe
. It was a mug shot, and he was looking into the camera with the same expression I’d seen before, as if he’d been deeply insulted and couldn’t we all see that? I read the article below him, learned that he lay dying of cancer in prison and was confessing to over thirty years of murdering children. He was telling the police where he’d buried two bodies in Lawrence, one of a ten-year-old boy he said he’d raped and killed the summer of 1976, the summer he worked with us at Captain Chris’s Restaurant down on Water Street overlooking the brown and swirling Merrimack River.

IN THE
seventies, the only gyms were the ones we read about in
Muscle Builder
magazine, iron gyms in Southern California where the professional bodybuilders trained. There was the Y down near GAR Park, but the dues were expensive, and besides, from the outside it was a cinderblock box with few windows and looked like a prison, the only other place where I’d heard men regularly lifted weights.

Connolly’s Gym was down near Railroad Square, a few blocks north of the river on Grant Street. It was on the first floor of an old shoe factory that must’ve been turned into a store at one time because there was no front wall, just floor-to-ceiling windows looking out onto Grant and an empty lot surrounded by a tall chain-link fence. On the other side, weeds had grown up between cracks in the asphalt, and there were a few empty oil drums, a stack of mattresses, an upside-down shopping cart.

Sam and I went down there hoping to see a weight-training gym like the kind we’d only read about, but when we walked into the hot open space, the carpet blue and commercial-thin, the walls whitewashed and still smelling like paint, we saw just two weight benches not much better than what I had in my basement. I almost turned to walk out when I saw the barbells; they were the seven-foot-long Olympics the pros used. They weighed 45 pounds and held big black iron plates. Around the corner a kid was working on a heavy bag, and he wore red Everlast hitting gloves, his wrists wrapped with tape. He looked pretty good, throwing fast punches, bobbing and weaving away from the swaying bag.

“Don’t shlap it, Shtevie, punch it!
Punch
it!” Bill Connolly stood a few feet away. He was over forty and an inch shorter than I was, but he had a deep chest and thick upper arms, and we found out later that when he was younger he’d been a professional fighter up and down the East Coast. He was clean-shaven, and whenever he spoke he blinked a lot and all his
s
’s sounded like
sh
’s.

He shook our hands and showed us around. There were more weights and another bench, a couple of incline sit-up boards. He looked us up and down. “A middleweight and a welterweight. You boys gonna shign up?”

I had no desire to be a boxer. I was more interested in lifting the black iron weights I saw there, the same kind all the bodybuilders used in California. It was hard to get big if you were boxing, too. Sam may have been more interested than I was. His coach still had him off the weights, but he liked the idea of doing his push-ups and isometrics where other people were working out too.

“Yeah,” he said. “We are.”

The dues were cheap, and when we handed our dishwashing money over to Bill Connolly, he smiled and thanked us and took a pen and carefully wrote our names in a notebook. He blinked a lot and asked us twice about the spelling. I began to think this came from taking shots to the head, from getting punched over and over again in the brain.

WE STARTED
working out there right away. Sam did his 666 push-ups, isometric curls and press-downs, pushing and pulling one hand slowly against the other, flexing his big biceps and horseshoe-shaped triceps. And I borrowed money from my mother she didn’t have and sent away to southern California for an advanced bodybuilding course from Franco Columbu, a Mr. Olympia who was also a powerlifting champion and at 185 pounds could bench-press over 500.

Columbu’s pamphlets were full of warnings that these were advanced routines for competitive bodybuilders, but I ignored those. Now, instead of one or two exercises for each body part, I was doing five, four or five sets each, and I moved my workouts from three times a week to six, and they were no longer one hour each but two and a half to three hours. Many times Bill Connolly would walk over and say, “Andre, you’re doing too much. You want power, come hit the heavy bag.”

But I didn’t want to hit the heavy bag. I wanted to be as big as Franco Columbu. I wanted his flaring back, his huge bulbous shoulders, his pecs he could crush a pencil between. For weeks I ignored how tired I was getting, how I was always sore and avoided looking in the mirror because there was never much to see, even
less
than a few months earlier.

One afternoon, Bobby Schwartz walked into the gym. He was over 200 pounds and six feet tall and wanted to lose some fat around his waist. He worked for his father, Saul, who owned a police supply business up on Washington Street, his shop across from Saldana’s bakery that’d been closed down because the owner hired only Puerto Ricans and Dominicans straight from their homelands and was accused of never paying them. Bobby was outgoing and good-looking, and he liked how long I worked out, how skinny I was. He asked if he could be my training partner and I said sure.