by Dino Parenti
“Do you remember if we hit the 11 first or the 22? ‘Cause I don’t know about you but I don’t want to wind up in fuckin’ Montreal saying merci to every teenager smoking a cigarette who gives us directions.”
Another raspberry.
I wondered, did he grasp yet all the particulars of coping? All its shades? Was he privy to the humbling mechanisms people turned to on a daily basis just to get by? That while most men clung to every last scrap of their youth, some fought tooth-and-nail to forget theirs?
That some might actually resent their longevity?
Something was burning in the kitchen. That, or they’d over-brewed the coffee. Neither challenged to overtake the stink of muscle ointment though, and that jolted me into realizing I’d been stealing looks at the old man with the angel-hair beard and suede blazer who sat at the counter’s elbow under the wall clock. More to the point, the obscenely large gold crucifix around his neck, inset with a pearl at the junction the size of a baby’s eye. The gaudy thing stirred a new kind of agita in my belly. But there was something else about him I couldn’t place exactly until I mentally shaved the bush from his face, at which point it all clicked and I nudged Jimmy’s arm.
“Now that there is the Amish version of Pop. Tell me it isn’t.”
Jimmy, whose mood had ticked down a few more degrees, smile-gazed at the geezer a bit before shrugging.
“Pop’s a hard man to talk to,” he said.
Yeah, I was in for it. The kid would not be deterred.
“Pop comes from a world of bricks, Jimbo. Of sledgehammers. An open book he is not.”
More stool dancing from Jimmy, until the constriction finally got so that he had to shuck his parka.
“Naw, man, that ain’t it.”
My turn to let the spoon drop, and I took even more soggy shrapnel on my arm.
“What’s the problem? Seriously, you’ve been ball-breaking all day. I told you to hit the sack early last night. Didn’t I tell you?”
He fished out his lighter and got into his groove of popping the lid up and down with a thumb. He’d been trying to quit for months, and he once explained how the scratch of the flint wheel was sometimes enough to fool his lungs, and if that didn’t work, he wasn’t above holding his palm over the flame until the sear took the urge away.
I worried that he was about to try it right there and then, but he pocketed the Zippo instead and raked fingers through his hair.
“Jesus, Vic, is this gonna be us someday? This heap of mealy, broken-down meat? I mean, look at ‘em.”
But I didn’t look. I didn’t want to get sucked further into one of his panic spirals, so I focused down on my own face as it floated in the muddy pool of my coffee. Sometimes it was just easier to carve a universe out of the eighteen inches of tabletop your cone of vision provided.
Chuck Berry’s “My Ding-A-Ling”had overtaken “American Pie” on the Wurtlizer, and when I figured he’d settled down some I risked a look at Jimmy. Jimmy with his full lips and almond eyes that the ladies couldn’t stop smiling at, and I wondered, did he know about all those years that I resented his looks? Looks that greased wheels and opened doors better than crowbars and hard work? Did he know about schadenfreude in the objective sense? That when cast-off lovers and spurned colleagues tried to take a piece of that face, that not everyone in the world felt sorry for him?
“I wouldn’t sweat it, Jimbo. You’re cinder block tough, brother—everyone knows that. But one thing you’re not beating is a clock. We’re all time’s sorry, collective punk. All we can do is either grab ankles or fight back. Like Pop.”
His return smile was Paul Newman handsome, and a small part of me I thought long dead cried out a final time before wilting.
“Like Pop,” he echoed. “Just a hair under three minutes to go, Vic.”
A pair of lumber-heavy semis thundered by, rattling flatware and kicking up gales of brown shoulder snow that spritzed all the way to the front windows. I wished one of those truckers would’ve stopped and chimed the bell over the door to swap out the air of the place with something less congealed, but it was just as well they hadn’t.
Jimmy, giggling quietly to himself out of the blue, dragged a slow finger across his belly.
“Wonder if I can do it,” he said. “When the time comes, of course.”
“Do what?”
“You know. Self-off. Like the Japs.”
And in that moment I had an epiphany: that Jimmy’s simper was my acid reflux trigger.
“I think when the time comes, shitting yourself and dribbling pea soup on your crotch will look like a million bucks compared to running a steel blade across your gullet.”
He stopped his slicing, and with the same finger got to scribbling words in the air. His inhale before a confession.
“I ain’t as tough as you think, Vic. Not like you are. You got a handle on things. You’ve had more time to get ahead of the curve. It’s why Pop trusts you the most of all of us. You got his best love.”
Christ Almighty, did Jimmy know that he was gas lighting, or was it just a reflex? Did he know that the first kid’s the guinea pig, and that the guinea pig got force-fed not just all that new, raw love, but all the neurosis and misplaced expectations?
That first wasn’t always best?
He spun back around to face the diners and soon fell into a detailed inventory of every face in the room, as if to record them for some future group doodle. In due time he said, “Wish this wasn’t necessary. I mean the goddamn mess . . . ”
Jimmy, at long last finding his bearings and dealing with the issue at hand.
“Yeah,” I said. “But Pop wouldn’t last in prison, Jimbo.”
And like Jimmy, I twisted myself around and let my eyes hang on each face for a moment, as if somehow the act alone would’ve spooled back the film to before we’d walked in, and a different tactic might’ve pried loose from one of our brains and prevented our excess. But no such double-backing came to pass. No bullet reversed its flight back into the muzzle, and each face stayed as dead as the next: the bearded old man who looked like Pop, the mousy old lady with her locket.
Uncle Harry’s twin, who’d slumped under the booth while trying in vain to plug the air from leaving his lungs with dispenser napkins.
“No, he wouldn’t,” said Jimmy. “But still . . . ”
Their blood had begun to pool at their feet or in their seats, or slithered down the walls behind their heads. Some still dripped from the ceiling. You fight enough war, shoot enough VC, and you could start to match a victim by the distance and intensity of his splatter. Older people had weaker jugulars, weaker blood pressures. They tended to just spill.
It was the young ones who sported geysers.
I shrugged. It’s what I imagined God did when cruising by our world on his slow laps of the universe. “State’s star witness is on the bus, we follow the bus. They don’t provide us photo ID, we’re left but with one option, and that’s to be thorough. Like Pop would’ve been.”
“Yeah, like Pop,” Jimmy said.
He started breaking down the M3s with downcast eyes, and I wondered, did he know that like napalm or chemo, sometimes you had to lay waste to entire mass areas just to eliminate a few nuisances? Or just one?
I got up and worked my way to the kitchen which had started to smoke something awful. I turned off all the burners and opened the back door, mindful not to slip on any of the spilled buttermilk, broken glass, or the cook’s brain matter. On my way back I glanced over at the shattered wall clock, frozen forever at 8:14 AM. Just about the same time to the minute that Little Boy revealed the soul of the universe to 80,000 unawares people of Hiroshima, Japan, freezing clocks, watches, and shadows alike, and I thought again of all our patterns and cycles, and the wisdom or fallacy in trying to break them.
In the end, maybe blood wasn’t always thicker than water, but it will always be harder to clean.
Greaser guns safetied and packed away in my old navy duffle, Jimmy strolled up to
the bearded man kitty-corner from us and finger-traced a crude constellation out of the dime-sized holes punched into his neck, cheek, and forehead above the left eye.
“I see it now” he said. “Clean him up some, and he’d look just like Pop.”
“Yeah, like Pop.” I downed the last of my coffee and sleeve-wiped my mouth. “You done good today, Jimbo. Good control. Better than my first time.”
I had to admit, Jimmy’s sheepish grin warmed my heart for a change.
“How we doing on time?”
“Minute-and-a-half?”
And just like earlier, I practically felt Pop’s grip on my neck at our childish loitering, and I got to wondering what if anything the drawing corners of my mouth were doing on his end. Pop once told me that he’d had kids because he’d lost his sense of self-preservation—his fear of death—but I didn’t think he ever had one. I doubted that we helped.
Outside, the wind had picked up and the snow had started to swirl and eddy, and I wondered if we would make it back down the mountain unnoticed. Wondered if it was still hot in Miami, and if Pop would make it another year or, for that matter, Jimmy. Either way, I was certain to outlive them both. Testimony was my goddamned lot in this whirling mud ball.
“Hell, why not?” I said. “Let’s bag their fuckin’ loot. You collect the gold, I’ll collect the brass.”
“Hot damn!” Jimmy whooped, clapping his hands and checking his watch. “Okay, okay . . . ninety seconds. We can do this. Then we can go get your dumb-ass map.”
“Dibs on Amish-Pop’s cross,” I called out, and started scooping up .45 casings.
SEGMENT 2
EIGHTIES
MUIR WOODS
THE NIGHT OF our seventh anniversary, at the peak of a week-long brushfire outbreak, I busted my wife out of the clinic.
We huddled in an alley, waiting for a bus, sucking at the hollows of our necks to curb the funk of jet fuel and smoking chaparral braising in the late October air. In that regard, Annie got the better end of the deal. The methadone still leached through her sweat in off-putting wafts of cherry Lifesaver and rancid weed, and if that wasn’t enough, she kept slurring metaphysical nonsense about the number seven into my ear, because once on a train, Annie rode it till the rails melted.
Seven years. The time it takes burning live-oaks to grow as tall as a man.
I wondered if she was still pissed at me, or if she even remembered why. A week earlier we had a fight. I did something bad and she mainlined enough heroin to comatose a yak, but it only knocked her out for half a day. She was strong like that, but I still managed to coax her into detox. And now here I was sneaking her out. Maybe I figured out a way to make it up to her. Maybe I was just high in a different way than she was.
By the time the bus finally crept onto Van Ness, she’d collared some of her precious lucidity, though if she recalled our fight, she wasn’t letting on yet.
“I assume the reason for this breakout . . . is forthcoming,” she said in her straight, schoolmarm lilt.
“It’s a surprise, Annie,” I replied, and all eighty pounds that remained of her tensed against me. She hated her name. Thought it belonged to a toy or a porn star, and not an educated being highly attuned to irony and ridicule.
“How long till you split like Max,” she said. It was always a declaration. All our years together, married and otherwise, she declared it at least once a week, regardless of who decked who first.
She reached up to finger the marble pendant around her neck, which I made sure to grab out of the little locker by her bed. It wasn’t a tough lock to pick. We each had one. Nearly identical milky-white orbs with rust-red swirls the size of a blueberry. Mine was missing. It was why we had the fight in the first place. At least mostly why.
We got off on Artesia near Western to a sky in full riot mode. Fire choppers slung loads of retardant while ghetto birds knifed their lights into the city’s gut. To the northeast, where the sun had begun to heave up indigos, the Griffith Park and Altadena burns spewed columns of coiled smoke into the sky like charmed cobras.
Annie watched it all through thousand-pound lids and a borrowed smile, and I wondered if she wondered if she was already dead.
We walked three blocks through flurries of ash to another alley behind a strip-mall that serviced an animal shelter. I used to janitor there before getting fired for boosting needles, and we made our way to the side entrance in the sooty brick with the shallow deadbolt where I used to score. The Korean manager and I used to butt heads over his fascist, administrative airs. Like my old man, he expressed his disgust for my youthful weaknesses. Unlike my old man though, he respected argument and debate, as well as harbored a soft spot for the broken, so when he caught me in the alley one time dealing smack to an Oscar winning film editor, he didn’t press charges so long as I swore to stay away for all time. He died last year of a stroke. The manager, not the editor. The obituary painted him as a kind soul who wrote poetry and kept pigeons. To this day, I still catch myself trembling at parks whenever they flock around old men on benches pitching bread.
When my old man finally drank himself out of existence while I was a sophomore at Franklin, they found him curled up on a similar bench. Some passerby had draped his old blue-and-gold letterman’s jacket over his head.
The side door lockset had never been changed. A solid jerk-and-nudge with a credit card, and the bolt whined past the strike-plate.
Muffled yelps and barks greeted our ruckus. I looked at Annie with her rawboned arms and drawn cheeks. Marveled at the way blood could still weep through so much arterial gridlock and infuse a glow. She used to be generous and aloof, until she’d turned spiteful and aloof, and only in the moments when I was straight and she was in withdrawal did I figure she must’ve thought the exact same thing of me whenever the roles were flipped.
We climbed a long, straight run of stairs, taking it slow, her energy on a tidal frequency of ebbs and flows. Her eyes had regained their verve, however. Resilient, probing globules teeming with acetylene and defiance.
“We’re gonna get caught,” she said.
I shook my head.
“Thanksgiving weekend, lady-girl. Skeleton crew’s working the shelter half. Clinic side should hardly see a soul till Monday. We’ll be long gone by then.”
“Yeah, but how long till you split, like Max.”
Again she clutched at the marble around her neck, and again my stomach brimmed with guilt juice.
I squeezed her shoulder and kept us moving in the vein of my old man when he guided me blindfolded to the park for my seventh birthday surprise party.
The way I did my own boy when I last saw him at age four, before things got away.
Down a short hallway to another door, which I held open for her, and her eyes narrowed with refueled suspicion.
Floor-to-ceiling windows made up one wall of a large, open space floored by rubber mats in a herringbone pattern. In the center, a single chair awaited which I motioned for her to take. More side-eyes from Annie before she finally complied. Of all our hurdles, trust remained a slippery one. She once blurted out to a full bar during a weekend bender that our love was as reliable as the stages of grief, with bargaining appearing twice at the cost of acceptance.
Seven years. Enough time for cells to renew and old beefs to harden.
I stepped around a corner to a wash station and filled the metal basin I’d readied earlier with about four inches of warm water before squeezing in a good amount of liquid bath soap—“forest rain” scented—that I’d found in one of the employee lockers. The worn brakes of her breathing crept around the wall as I worked, a sound that at night transposed into the slow-seeped air from a balloon. She’d been warned by strangers more times than I care to recall that she should quit cigarettes, but neither of us were smokers. In fact, we detested even the idea of inhaling smoke, and we mutually agreed that if either of us ever took it up, it was a surefire deal breaker.
Her wheezing hailed from wear-and-tear. An early
life of swimming and snorkeling, followed by a decade of binges and recoveries, smothering her lungs at long last.
Sometimes when a distant car alarm or dog howl kept me up, I’d become convinced that I could blow them full again if I could just find the damn nozzle. If she would let me. That I could still love a woman in perpetual need of love who simultaneously rebuffed such love was as much repellant as enticement. A formula for any number of maddening dichotomies that have kept us in the bounds of holy conflict.
When I stepped back out, it was to a face knotted by confusion and mockery, what with me playing the part of Amish carriage washer with my old-school metal tub, sponges, and towels.
“Spicing things up, I see,” she said, squirming anew, compacting herself into the chair like Saran-wrapped ground beef.
I placed the basin at her feet and gestured for her to raise them. After grudgingly giving in, I pushed the tub forward and eased her tootsies into the water. Annie hated her feet. She thought them malformed. The lotus-hooves of some emperor’s concubine. But I adored them. Cute and tiny, and with just a slightly deeper arch than most. Her left pinky toe sported a rusty birthmark on the knuckle in the shape of an amoeba.
She huffed more reluctance when I cupped a heel in my palm, and with my other hand lathered up the sponge and began wiping gently around her ankle. Eventually she relented, though she avoided looking down at either myself or her feet, opting instead to stare out the window at the burning city and the light parade over LAX, forehead lines threatening to snap in the middle and burrow into her skull.
Her moments of neglect no longer fazed me. Having ripped apart our veins and exposed our watery blood to one another, there was little left to hide.
I moved to the top of her feet, scrubbing first across the ridge of metatarsals, then along them until reaching her toes, at which point she tensed up again. A low moan wiggled out of her before she turned her teeth loose on her fingernails.
Seven days. The time it takes to fully withdraw from a dose of heroin.
