Townie (35 page)

“No, what?”

“He’s banging nails now.”

“What?”

“Yep, said he was fed up with it all. He had a very healthy practice, too.”

“Banging
nails
? I can’t believe it.”

“Yep, banging nails. Says he’s never been happier.”

As if the slang of that one phrase could begin to capture the painstaking geometry of building safe, long-lasting structures of concrete and wood and glass. But hearing this story pushed me further down the stream of my thinking, that those on the top were human beings too, and not all of them were happy, were they? Who was I to judge them?

ANOTHER EVENT,
a midafternoon in late August, and my car wouldn’t start so I’d left Pop’s house early and walked down side streets, then under the railroad trestle and past the gas station up to the roller-skating rink and the train depot behind it. It was hot. I was sweating in my black nylon pants and white button-down shirt, my black bow tie stuffed into one of my front pockets. I carried my black vest tucked under my arm, and I could smell the river—rust and oil and dried mud. I was a week from leaving for Wisconsin and this would be my last job working for the warm bisexual Jew who made me laugh and told me once he was really an abstract painter, that he loved the work of a man named Rothko. I did not tell him I was trying to teach myself how to write, but I felt closer to him when he told me that, and I thought of creative people having to earn a living like everyone else. How you had to work but needed time to create. My catering boss seemed to have given up on finding that time. Jeb, too. What was I going to do about that? What was
my
plan?

Now I was reaching for my wallet to buy a round-trip ticket, but all my money was in the bank whose account I was just about to close and there was just enough in my wallet for the fare and a one-way ride on the T. They usually fed us at these parties, though. Before guests arrived, my boss would fix me a plate of whatever they were serving. He’d have me eat in the corner of a kitchen or out on a back porch where no one could see me.

On the train I dozed in the heat, woke up thinking how I was always leaving places. Two hours later I was standing behind a rented bar in the living room of two white doctors from South Africa. He was some kind of surgeon, and she was an anesthesiologist. They were both small-boned and ruddy-faced, and it was clear from framed photographs on the walls that they ran marathons together. I spent long periods against the wall between a lamp and a bookcase doing nothing. My boss and the others were serving dinner outside on a patio beneath the deck, and from where I stood I could see the early evening sky, streaks of coral and purple that were already becoming bottom-lit from the city below. I could hear conversations, too. This was a small party of no more than thirty people, and most of them seemed to be like their hosts, married and in shape and doctors of some sort. Many spoke in that Afrikaans accent I had at first mistaken for Australian. They talked a lot about work, about long hours and the difficulty of collecting on insurance claims, about hospital bureaucracy, the ever-present threat of malpractice suits, a dull conference in a fun city. They talked about where their kids would be going to school in the fall, the lessons they were taking in piano, dance, math, and horseback riding. Sometimes, there’d be a lowered voice, then laughter, and something vaguely sexual and extramarital would be in the air, but not once did I hear any talk of their home country, the one currently in flames; Mandela was withering away in prison, and the agents of apartheid were massacring children in schoolyards, injecting resistance leaders with lethal drugs and throwing them out of helicopters. Rape was being used as a form of mass torture, and in the townships black South Africans had begun to murder anyone suspected of collaborating with the white minority by necklacing them, forcing a gasoline-doused rubber tire over their heads and lighting it on fire.

All of this and more I’d learned in Austin, Texas. Now I was serving the murderous ruling class in one of their homes, and of course they weren’t talking about it. They were free of it. They were here now. They were Americans.

The party and our cleanup was over by nine o’clock. I tried to stay polite to whoever talked to me, but it was like coming down with a fever at a picnic and trying to pretend you felt fine. After I’d loaded my boss’s van with plastic bins of leftover food, the trash bags of half-eaten food, the crates of china and cases of wine we hadn’t opened, he handed me a check and offered to drive me to North Station. I thanked him but told him I needed some exercise, that the late train was still two hours away.

He gave me a half hug and wished me luck in Wisconsin, then he drove off and I was walking down a hill street of more fine homes, my bow tie in my pocket alongside my last paycheck, this money that may as well have been stained with dried blood.

It was a Saturday night in late summer, and I could smell mown grass and pool chlorine, citronella candles and cigarette smoke. From behind a wall came the splash of water, a woman laughing. Jazz played on a record player through an open window somewhere, and I imagined more doctors lived there, or professors, lawyers, businessmen and businesswomen, anthropologists, psychologists, people with culture. People who read books and knew things. All those full bookcases back in the South Africans’ house: medical journals, yes, but also novels and collections of short stories, books on art history, music, and world wars. Wasn’t learning from these just the beginning? Weren’t we then supposed to
do
something?

At the bottom of the hill were the tracks of the subway train. One was just pulling away, its windows bright lighted squares of faces, most of them young and laughing and on their way to a good time. To the left was an intersection of streets and rail tracks where there were restaurants and bars, their doors open, rock and roll playing, a rising tide of voices and laughter, a horn honking, a shout, the smells of baked flour and oregano and the exhaust of a small imported car shooting past me for Kenmore Square where I was walking, this need to move and clear my head. But being in the midst of all this humanity could not possibly clear my head. Life, it seemed, was one big party, and what happened in faraway places or shadowy places at home or in places where people’s skin was darker was just bad news nobody wanted to hear.

And did
I
really want to hear it? Didn’t I want to be in one of those bars drinking a cold beer and watching all the pretty young women? Maybe talk to one of them? Maybe dance? Liz had been accepted to the University of Colorado at Boulder, and all summer she’d been renting an apartment in Boston. The day before she left, we stood under the sun in her parking lot. Her hair had blonde streaks in it from afternoons at Wollaston Beach, and she was tanned and looked happy.

Write me from Wisconsin.

Write me from Colorado.

I will.

Me too.

She gave me a kiss and a hug and I climbed into my car knowing these were lies we’d just told while smiling and waving goodbye. Who was I to feel above anyone? And now I was going off to study the work of dead men nobody read anymore.

But the thought of turning away from what was written about injustice would be like turning my back on a thousand little brothers, all of them standing there with their arms at their sides while grown men punched them in the face.

KENMORE SQUARE
was a small pulsing city, a place I knew only as the subway stop that had gotten me here. A few hours earlier, it was a sunlit convergence of traffic from three directions, two-and three-story buildings on all sides that under the sun were like well-dressed grandfathers dozing on park benches, but now the old men had been replaced by the neon-electric young; the bottom floors were a wall of light—slashes of yellow, orange, and blue—a record shop, an organic pizza joint, a beer garden and Chinese takeout, an underground dance club called Rathskeller’s, an Irish pub and Italian eatery, its doors and windows open, round tables set up with candles burning in glass lanterns, Italian stringed instruments colliding with the bass thump of the dance club, the perpetual river of cars and their engines, the talk and drunken yelps and falling and rising laughter of hundreds of college kids back in town just before Labor Day. The girls were in shorts or skirts and spaghetti-strap tops, their hair pulled up or cut short or flapping down their backs as they walked or ran across the square from one buzzing spot to another. Many of the boys were in shorts and sandals and the short-sleeve polo shirts they were all wearing now, blue or pink, the collars pulled up, this street gang of investment bankers’ kids. There were musicians playing guitars and fiddles and saxophones. In the recessed doorway of a dry cleaning shop, a black kid with drumsticks was tapping out a rhythm on an upside-down joint compound bucket, a coffee can in front of him overflowing with dollar bills. Five punk rockers stood under a streetlamp in tight black leathers and chains. The sides of their heads were shaved clean, and their Mohawks rose from the tops of their skulls red and purple and white, these outfits they could barely move in, this hair that was their art.

I smelled pot smoke, gum on concrete, and the warm granite of curbstones. Up in the hills, the ruling class was putting their white kids to bed, and all the world was doing what all the world did, taking care of their own desires and needs, and right now I needed air and quiet. I walked by a bearded man wedged into a sandwich board. He said something to me and held out a pamphlet, a bright portrait of Jesus Christ in robes looking mournfully at the viewer. I shook my head and stepped past him into a well-lit bookstore.

The air was cool in here, the carpet absorbing my footsteps. Something classical was playing, something with violins that sounded sweetly melancholic, like a sick lover has finally died and the one left behind is on the cusp of knowing she’s relieved.

Older people browsed from aisle to aisle, and I did too. All these books. Thousands and thousands of them. On everything. You could live a dozen long lives just reading what’s in this one store and still not be finished. Meanwhile, more were being written. Every day men and women across the earth were stealing time to find a quiet place to write. And some had to hide what they wrote. They could be shoved into a cell or put up against a wall and shot for these words coming out of them. And I’d written that morning. Sat at the desk in the borrowed room of Pop’s small campus house. I’d been imagining the life of a girl who did not love her family the way she thought she should. Who would read this? And why? What
good
was this doing for anyone but me, the feeling it gave me every time, that somehow by escaping to the dream on the page I became more fully here.

So
what.

I moved away from books with words in them to books of photographs. They were big and glossy and the largest ones were laid out on a table. On the cover of one was the black-and-white portrait of a bodybuilder standing in the same pose as the statue of David, except this man had so much more muscle, his skin oiled and shining. He’d probably spent his entire adult life achieving that. I thumbed through the pages, saw pictures of massively muscled men whose names I still knew. I had worked so hard to be one of them so no one would even think of trying to hurt me or anyone I loved.

I closed the book and slid it back into place. I hadn’t been in a fight since Devin Wallace. I picked up the next book without really looking at the cover, opened it to the images of famous war photographers, some in color, others in black and white, all of human bodies shot or stabbed or burned or blown-up. The first one I had seen in a magazine on our kitchen table when I was a boy. It was the massacre at My Lai. Over five hundred villagers lying in the ditch where they’d been shot to death by American soldiers. Old men and women, women and their babies, boys and girls, a tangle of naked bloody flesh, each bullet hole a dark intrusion. Beneath this was the photo of a small Vietnamese man in baggy clothes. His hands were tied behind his back and his eyes were squinting as if he’d just been hit with a blast of air and not the bullet ripping through his brain from the handgun of the officer at his side executing him in the street.

I turned the page. My mouth had gone dry and there was a buzzing in my fingertips and here was another man at the precise moment of his death, his arms spread as he fell backwards, his rifle falling, the open sky behind him. There were the bodies of American soldiers on the beaches of Normandy. They lay facedown in the damp sand, and their rifles were half buried and the helmet of one still had a pack of cigarettes stuck in the band. There were the charred bodies of the men Jimmy Carter had sent into Iran to rescue the hostages, the melted pieces of their helicopter littered around their bodies like a broken promise. There was Mussolini hanging shot and upside down alongside his mistress. There was the photograph of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima, another of a bandaged Marine rushing through a defoliated stretch of mud to his wounded comrade. And there was one of a woman and her three young sons in El Salvador, all four of them lying dead outside the shack they’d lived in. The woman had dressed that day in a white cotton skirt and a blue sleeveless top. It looked like a man’s T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, and she’d tied the hem tightly around her waist. Her hair was wrapped up in a red kerchief, and she was barefoot and her three boys were too, none of them older-looking than nine or ten. They wore shorts and were shirtless and they must’ve been huddling close to their mother and she must’ve tried to turn them away from the shots for now two lay on their stomachs and one on his side and her bare arms lay across all three of them, dark pools of blood in the dust beneath them. On the skin of the boys were small black marks. I looked closer and saw they were flies.

I closed the book and set it down and walked out of the store and across the square, a car honking at me and others, this sea of hopeful drunk youth from the land of my birth. That family had been murdered by a death squad armed by the government armed by us, paid for with the taxes of the mothers and fathers who had sent their children to this city to learn and to grow, to work hard and become successful people who would then make money and pay their taxes that would go where and do what?