All the Old Haunts

by Chris Lynch

  “Your rental’s just about up on that, buddy,” the bearded guy says. “Hit or get off the pot, right?”

  I hit. I am familiar with smoke, as I do smoke Camels. But this is new. This is deep. It feels as if my lungs have new parts that I hadn’t used before, deep, deep, and spiked down in the bottommost tips toward kidneys and the lower what-all, and I want to cough.

  No way. I don’t want to cough, and I won’t. I’m having this. Having it.

  I exhale, and as the man tries to take away my smoke I hit it again, hard and deep. The taste is like caramel, only caramel set alight and breathed in.

  The man has gone, the music has changed, and a couple of lava lamps have burned out or been shut off. I stand frozen in the exact dead center of the main room of the big place. Exact, dead center, I am sure, as sure as if there was an X marking the spot. I think I’ll stay.

  “Those Chee-tos?” somebody asks from behind me.

  The music isn’t electronic anymore. It has horns in it, and I like it.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Baked, or fried?” he asks.

  “Baked,” I say, “to a delicate crunch.”

  “May I?” he asks.

  I clutch the bag more closely to me. “No thank you,” I say.

  The Chee-tos are under my arm and something is under the Chee-tos. I look down. It is the package. Christ, the package. I look around. Eva is mingling. She is flitting from one place to another to another being very nice to everybody. I need to talk to her. But I don’t want to leave the X in the middle of the room in the middle of the party. I am assigned the X and no other letter will do. Especially when both the smoke and my bottle of wine come floating back to me. I take the smoke, then some more smoke, then the bottle. There is like three ounces of wine and four of strangers’ saliva in the bottom of the bottle. I’m not that thirsty. I hand it back.

  “Eva,” I finally call.

  She comes. Isn’t she good? Eva is good. I have not met a good woman like Eva. I have not met anyone like Eva.

  Because my father wouldn’t let me.

  “My father’s package,” I say to her as she comes close.

  She brushes my cheek with the back of her hand.

  “Your father’s package.”

  “My father’s package. You said you could get my father’s package mailed for me but the post office is closed and he is very serious about this stuff.”

  “Yes,” she brushes my cheek again, and I feel it, her fingertips brushing the skin of my face, but my thigh and my stomach also feel it.

  She waves. Eva waves, and people come. Two people come.

  “Cripes,” the one guy says, but he is laughing. He is one of the post office men. The guy with him is the other post office man. They are both laughing now. They appear to be laughing at me, but I may just be self-conscious.

  “Hi,” I say, and they laugh harder.

  “Listen,” Eva says, “guys, I told Virgil you could take care of his package for him, so could you do that? For me?”

  One of the men reaches out immediately and snatches the parcel away from me. “Sure we can. Of course we can.”

  The other reaches out and slaps me on the shoulder, kind of hard. “How ya doin’ cowboy? You doin’ okay? Havin’ a nice time?”

  I am about to answer, though I don’t rightly know what the answer is. No matter, words do not come out of me. No matter, the men are walking away, laughing. Walking away, laughing, with my dad’s package.

  What time is it? Jeez, what time even is it? I might have to leave. What time does the hardware store close? The cleaners?

  There is time. Anyway, they should have to wait. They should be made to wait, and to see.

  Hands are on my hips, I think. A bottle of wine is in front of me, a new one. I take a long drink as my hips swivel to bumpety music with the help of some hands. I watch the door open and some more guys and one girl come in as my hips are moved manually by some hands.

  It is the girl. The girl who was with the guy. We are moving, in a crowd. The crowd is a crowd now as the music is better now, and the lights and the wine and the smoke are better and everybody wants to dance.

  I am at a party.

  And she is better, too. The girl is better. She is still very thin, awfully thin, painfully thin. But beautiful. Seriously, softly beautiful. She has spun me around now and her hands are on the front of my hips and she is smiling at me and dancing me and she is beautiful now. With her wispy green and orange and now blue and now purple hair.

  I smile back at her and she takes the wine from me, and her skinny male friend is gone and I knew it could be like this.

  I knew it could be like this.

  Eva comes walking up, nodding approvingly, sizing me up. “Enjoying yourself, Virgil?” she asks.

  I nod, and dance. Then I lurch forward and try to kiss her.

  Eva backs away, and pushes me off at the same time.

  “Go easy there. Are you okay? You sure you’re okay?”

  I nod. I dance, I unclutch, and extend the big bag of Chee-tos to her.

  “They’re baked,” I say, “to a delicate crunch.”

  I don’t stop dancing until I cannot go on. The skinny girl has taken a powerful liking to me, and we are inseparable. Her hands are on me and mine are on her and I knew it could be like this. I knew it would.

  We go to a chair, then we go to a couch then we go to a room and I knew it could be like this.

  Black, it is black. There is music going on in the other room, but it is now very soft and quiet music and there are not bodies moving everywhere.

  I open my eyes and it is not the other room, it is this room. It is the main room, quiet and lifeless and scary. I recognize nobody who was here before. Nobody. Eva is not here and the postal guys are not here, the bearded guy and the guys from the pay phone. And the skinny girl. Not here.

  I am in a chair, slumped, sitting more on my back than my ass. My package is lying on my belly.

  Not my package, my father’s package.

  Christ. I have to go. “I have to go,” I say loudly, desperately, and nobody notices at all. The big room is bigger now, strewn with bodies that do not give a damn.

  I pop to my feet, and pop promptly down onto the floor.

  I sit for a minute, focusing. I have to go. I take the package firmly under my arm, open my eyes as wide as I can, and force myself up.

  What time is it? I am walking down the creepy dark stairway and wondering what time it is and what time the hardware store and the dry cleaners close. I don’t have a watch on. Did I have a watch on? What time is it?

  I float. No I fall, or float, my way down the main street toward the stores. It is awfully quiet. All streetlights and darkness, milky, strobe-y distorted light. Nobody doing anything except cars coming by here and there and I am floating. Like I am falling, but not hitting the pavement, then getting up again and floating on because I have to do this. This is doable.

  I see the shops, and they are too dark. Too dark, they should not be this dark, but that’s just because everything is too dark right now but this will pass. I run, float, run, get nearer. Fall, don’t hit, get back up, lurch.

  I reach into my pocket. The slip. Where is the slip? Where is the slip for the dry cleaning? I check pocket one while I run, while I float. Pocket two. Pocket three while I run, while I float …

  I stop running. I stop checking my pockets. There is no slip. There is no money. I look at my father’s package, and it is opened, but the papers appear to be all stuffed back inside.

  I am standing. Then I am walking. Then I turn and walk the other way. Toward the party. Toward the post office, home, back toward the hardware store, then back toward home.

  I sit. On the curb, with my head between my knees and Dad’s package in my lap. My eyes are closed, everything black.

  Car after car coming close by my head, the only sounds I know. Fine. I don’t know how long I am sitting, or how many cars pass, while I sit, but I sit, and I will
sit.

  Raisins have no business in meatballs, I’m thinking.

  The scent of oil of wintergreen stays in the skin and muscle for days, when properly applied. It’s a deepness secret.

  The heat of his old Olds right by my shoulder. He is breathing heavy, panting, as I feel him crouch in front of me.

  I do not raise my head. It stays between my knees, above his package.

  “I lost the slip,” I say. “To the cleaning, I lost the slip, Dad. You never let me do anything. I lost the slip, but you never let me do anything, and you never let anything happen to me.”

  I’m still saying it, I can hear myself still saying it even though I don’t want to be saying it and I shouldn’t be saying it, as he lifts me right off the ground and carries me over his shoulder to the car.

  He lowers me easy, into the passenger seat. I feel him, hulking bigger than ever, his muscles on muscles on muscles about to burst out of his sweat-saturated blue denim shirt.

  “I’m pissin’ and moanin’,” I say.

  “That’s okay,” he says.

  The insane smell of him, oil of wintergreen and second-day raisin meatball sandwiches, as his cheek brushes against mine.

  One of us needs a shave.

  A Biography of Chris Lynch

  Chris Lynch (b. 1962) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the fifth of seven children. His father, Edward J. Lynch, was a Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority bus and trolley driver, and his mother, Dorothy, was a stay-at-home mom. Lynch’s father passed away in 1967, when Lynch was just five years old. Along with her children, Dorothy was left with an old, black Rambler American car and no driver’s license. She eventually got her license, and raised her children as a single mother.

  Lynch grew up in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood, and recalls his childhood ambitions to become a hockey player (magically, without learning to ice skate properly), president of the United States, and/or a “rock and roll god.” He attended Catholic Memorial School in West Roxbury, before heading off to Boston University, neglecting to first earn his high school diploma. He later transferred to Suffolk University, where he majored in journalism, and eventually received an MA from the writing program at Emerson College. Before becoming a writer, Lynch worked as a furniture mover, truck driver, house painter, and proofreader. He began writing fiction around 1989, and his first book, Shadow Boxer, was published in 1993. “I could not have a more perfect job for me than writer,” he says. “Other than not managing to voluntarily read a work of fiction until I was at university, this gig and I were made for each other. One might say I was a reluctant reader, which surely informs my work still.”

  In 1989, Lynch married, and later had two children, Sophia and Walker. The family moved to Roslindale, Massachusetts, where they lived for seven years. In 1996, Lynch moved his family to Ireland, his father’s birthplace, where Lynch has dual citizenship. After a few years in Ireland, he separated from his wife and met his current partner, Jules. In 1998, Jules and her son, Dylan, joined in the adventure when Lynch, Sophia, and Walker sailed to southwest Scotland, which remains the family’s base to this day. In 2010, Sophia had a son, Jackson, Lynch’s first grandchild.

  When his children were very young, Lynch would work at home, catching odd bits of available time to write. Now that his children are grown, he leaves the house to work, often writing in local libraries and “acting more like I have a regular nine-to-five(ish) job.”

  Lynch has written more than twenty-five books for young readers, including Inexcusable (2005), a National Book Award finalist; Freewill (2001), which won a Michael L. Printz Honor; and several novels cited as ALA Best Books for Young Adults, including Gold Dust (2000) and Slot Machine (1995).

  Lynch’s books are known for capturing the reality of teen life and experiences, and often center on adolescent male protagonists. “In voice and outlook,” Lynch says, “Elvin Bishop [in the novels Slot Machine; Extreme Elvin; and Me, Dead Dad, and Alcatraz] is the closest I have come to representing myself in a character.” Many of Lynch’s stories deal with intense, coming-of-age subject matters. The Blue-Eyed Son trilogy was particularly hard for him to write, because it explores an urban world riddled with race, fear, hate, violence, and small-mindedness. He describes the series as “critical of humanity in a lot of ways that I’m still not terribly comfortable thinking about. But that’s what novelists are supposed to do: get uncomfortable and still be able to find hope. I think the books do that. I hope they do.”

  Lynch’s He-Man Women Haters Club series takes a more lighthearted tone. These books were inspired by the club of the same name in the Little Rascals film and TV show. Just as in the Little Rascals’ club, says Lynch, “membership is really about classic male lunkheadedness, inadequacy in dealing with girls, and with many subjects almost always hiding behind the more macho word hate when we cannot admit that it’s fear.”

  Today, Lynch splits his time between Scotland and the US, where he teaches in the MFA creative writing program at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His life motto continues to be “shut up and write.”

  Lynch, age twenty, wearing a soccer shirt from a team he played with while living in Jamaica Plain, Boston.

  Lynch with his daughter, Sophia, and son, Walker, in Scotland’s Cairngorm Mountains in 2002.

  Lynch at the National Book Awards in 2005. From left to right: Lynch’s brother Brian; his mother, Dot; Lynch; and his brother E.J.

  Lynch with his family at Edinburgh’s Salisbury Crags at Hollyrood Park in 2005. From left to right: Lynch’s daughter, Sophia; niece Kim; Lynch; his son, Walker; his partner, Jules, and her son, Dylan; and Lynch’s brother E.J.

  In 2009, Lynch spoke at a Massachusetts grade school and told the story of Sister Elizabeth of Blessed Sacrament School in Jamaica Plain, the only teacher he had who would “encourage a proper, liberating, creative approach to writing.” A serious boy came up to Lynch after his talk, handed him this paper origami nun, and said, “I thought you should have a nun. Her name is Sister Elizabeth.” Sister Elizabeth hangs in Lynch’s car to this day.

  Lynch and his “champion mystery multibreed knuckleheaded hound,” Dexter, at home in Scotland in 2011. Says Lynch, “Dexter and I often put our heads together to try and fathom an unfathomable world.” Though Dexter lives with him, Lynch is allergic to dogs, and survives by petting Dexter with his feet and washing his hands multiple times a day!

  Lynch never makes a move without first consulting with his trusted advisor and grandson, Jackson. This photo was taken in 2012, when Jackson was two years old, in Lynch’s home in Coylton, South Ayrshire, Scotland. Lynch later discovered his house was locally known as “the Hangman’s Cottage” because of the occupation of one of its earliest residents. One of his novels, The Gravedigger’s Cottage, is loosely based on this house.

  Lynch dressed up as Wolverine for Halloween in 2012.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2001 by Chris Lynch

  cover design by Elizabeth Connor

  978-1-4804-0467-0

  This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media

  345 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com

  EBOOKS BY CHRIS LYNCH

 
; FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA

  Available wherever ebooks are sold

  Open Road Integrated Media is a digital publisher and multimedia content company. Open Road creates connections between authors and their audiences by marketing its ebooks through a new proprietary online platform, which uses premium video content and social media.

  Videos, Archival Documents, and New Releases

  Sign up for the Open Road Media newsletter and get news delivered straight to your inbox.

  Sign up now at

  www.openroadmedia.com/newsletters

  FIND OUT MORE AT

  WWW.OPENROADMEDIA.COM

  FOLLOW US:

  @openroadmedia and

  Facebook.com/OpenRoadMedia