Getting Off Clean

by Timothy Murphy

  “So am I. But 1987 isn’t the time for sorry. Now, my point is, I wish I could go out there and get up on that podium and tell them—” she says, disdainfully, indicating with her cigarette the room beyond the office where the congregation sits—“what I just told you. But I can’t. Why? Because. Because I made my choice. And I also made a choice to live with it.” She pauses to exhale. “You, on the other hand, can get up on that podium and use the voice with which this community has invested you, and tell them that you have a friendship at stake.”

  “With who?” I burst out.

  “With your African-American friend,” she says again in that baby-talk voice, diagramming the sentence in the air for me with her hands.

  I’m so confused I laugh out loud. “But Mrs. Bradstreet, you don’t get it.”

  “What I get is that what’s happening in this community is a crisis of faith. And what I get is that you are in the very special position of having a choice to make: you can exacerbate it with your silence, or you can use the persuasive power of your age, and start the healing in this town.”

  “But Mrs. Bradstreet—”

  “It’s your choice to make, Eric.”

  “But Mrs. Bradstreet—”

  “But what, if you know your choice and you feel—”

  “He’s not my friend! That guy isn’t my friend! Do you get it?”

  I’m jarred back into silence by the sound of my own voice reverberating against the walls of the office. She looks at me, frozen, over her cigarette, the ash of which threatens to fall onto the desktop, and she says nothing, but I watch as her eyebrow arches, slowly, to the top of her forehead, and I’m actually dizzy, and a weird, sweaty, bitter, hateful kind of triumph rushes over me, and it only seems to sink in deeper, deeper, as she says nothing. Outside, I can hear the ridiculous treacly chords of godjangle, and then Phoebe’s voice, overemoting, grotesquely distorted by the bad sound system, on top of them.

  She ashes her cigarette just before it collapses under its own weight. Putting it out, looking down into the ashtray, she says softly: “I guess there are some other issues here, aren’t there?”

  “Can we just forget we had this conversation?” I say, my hand on the doorknob again.

  She looks up at me, looks away, nods vigorously. “Of course. Eric, please. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” I say. “Let’s just forget it, okay?” And before she can answer, I’m out the door, leaving her sitting there in her big Nepalese coat.

  For a second, delirious, I stand in the doorway in the back of the church and look in. Now godjangle has launched into “Turn, Turn, Turn,” with Phoebe singing and playing the tambourine, that revolting song—“a time that you may embrace, a time to re-e-frai-yun fro-om um-bray-sing”—and Mrs. Shapiro-Signorelli is sitting in her moderator’s chair in her Liz Claiborne coordinates playing a woodblock, and half the place is clapping and swaying along, and there are kids on the shoulders of their parents: whole families, whole pews, and people don’t look so anxious anymore; some of them even have that wintry Sunday night glow.

  I just stand there. I want to scream “Fuck you!” so fucking loud that I blow the roof off the whole place. But I don’t. I don’t. I just screw up my face and stand there and throw the whole place the finger—but no one sees, anyway; their backs are turned to me—and then I run outside and drop down on the steps and pound them again and again with my fists until I’m out of breath, and when I’m done, I just sit there for the longest time, with my head in my hands.

  “Hey, Fitzy, why aren’t you inside bonding with the natives?” someone calls to me from across the street, and I look up, bewildered. It’s Mr. Fazzi’s two thuggy sons, Joey and Mitch, the ones who regularly give me wedgies in gym class; they’re walking toward me, bouncing a basketball back and forth on the icy street, and laughing.

  I’m trying to think of something to say to them, to excuse my solitude, but before I can think of anything, someone else calls out to me, in a hoarse, drunk-sounding voice, from the middle of the common. I squint, and I make out the silhouette of a figure reeling its way across the frozen common, toward the church. At first I think it’s Charlie, but then I realize the figure is calling out “Mon vieux! Mon cher!” and the bottom falls out of my stomach when I realize it’s him.

  Oh shit, I whisper to myself, but it’s too late. Joey and Mitch have already turned in the direction of the voice, and when they make him out, Joey shouts, “Get that fucking spic!” and they drop the basketball and start running toward Brooks. “Gentlemen, please!” I hear him protest, freezing in place, but Joey and Mitch don’t stop. Joey runs headlong toward him and pounces, knocking him to the ground as he lets out an excruciating, “Lord!” In a minute, they’re shouting again and again, “Get the fuck out of this town, you fucking spic!” and hitting him in every conceivable place.

  For a split second, I stand there on the steps of the church, frozen, wanting to run to the car and drive home, lock the doors, wrap the pillow around my head, and never emerge again. But I don’t. I don’t know what seizes me, but I run out into the street, heedless of cars, and across the common, where I try to pull Joey and Mitch off him. They’ve closed in on him so completely I can’t even see his face. “Leave him alone! Guy, guys, leave him alone. He’s not a spic!” I’m screaming, and I can’t even believe what I’m saying.

  “Leave us the fuck alone, you fucking pussy,” Mitch spits at me, and pushes me away, onto my ass on the frigid ground. For a moment I’m stunned, but in a minute I’m staggering toward them on my knees. I’m absolutely hysterical now. “Get the fuck off him! Get the fuck off him!” I’m hollering louder and louder. With every punch, he lets out a groaning gag that goes straight to the pit of my stomach.

  By this point, the music inside the church has stopped and people are flooding out, across the street and into the common, men first, women and children behind him. “Stop them!” I yell. “They’re beating him, and he’s innocent, and they’re gonna kill him!”

  About six guys run over and pull Joey and Mitch off Brooks, holding their hands behind their backs while they try to break free and keep saying, “Fucking spic,” over and over again. Now, for the first time, I see him. His face is all fucked up; there’s blood running out of his nose and his mouth; he’s on his side, groaning, in a fetal position, his hands clutched around his stomach. I notice that a silver flask and something in a white envelope have fallen out of his coat pocket. I’m still kneeling, only a few feet away from him; slowly, I stand up and move back half a dozen paces until I’m halfway between him and the crowd. Everyone’s crowding around us now, staring, stricken, chalk-white. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Phoebe and godjangle run across the common and come around the far side of the crowd; Phoebe, her hair flying, still holding her tambourine, gives me a look that says, “What the fuck are you doing?”

  “What the hell is going on here?” Mr. Fazzi bellows; Joey has been passed on to him and he’s restraining him now, both their faces red and swollen.

  “This fuckin’ spic was—”

  “Watch your goddamned mouth, Joey,” Mr. Fazzi splutters, mortified.

  “This—guy was running into the church, probably with a knife or something! He was probably gonna fuck it all up!”

  Mr. Fazzi shoves Joey aside and stands over Brooks. “Son, can you talk? Who the hell are you, anyway? What’re you doing here?”

  But Brooks doesn’t answer, just groans and rolls over, then on to his belly, where he’s facing away from everyone, looking like he’s trying to crawl away.

  “Somebody call an ambulance. He’s in bad shape,” Mr. Fazzi says, and about nineteen people run back toward the church. “Son, what the hell are you doing here?” Mr. Fazzi persists.

  “He’s not doing anything,” I hear myself saying, my voice a tiny thing in the midst of a roaring ocean. “He’s not a criminal. Your two sons starting beating him up for nothing.”

  “Well, who is he?” Mr. Fazzi asks me, defensive.<
br />
  “He’s not a criminal” is all I can say.

  “Well, do you know him?” Mr. Fazzi’s eyes look like they’re going to pop out of his head and into my face. Just at that moment, I glance in Brooks’s direction. He’s turned back somewhat, and he’s staring straight at me, his right eye beginning to swell. Go ahead and say it, I want to holler at him, but he doesn’t say a word. He keeps looking at me, but his fucked-up eyes don’t say anything, either. I turn back to the crowd, and they’re all looking at me, too.

  “No,” I say, and he looks away. “But he’s not doing anything wrong. He was just walking across the common.”

  “Well, he picked a bad night to leave Leicester,” Mr. Fazzi says.

  Does he look like he’s from Leicester, you fucking idiot? I want to shout, but I don’t. I just stand there, ready to puke. Suddenly, Officer DeMarco and another cop come running over and stand over him. “Oh, Jesus Christ,” DeMarco says, sounding more annoyed than upset. “This is that S.B.A. kid we picked up on Great Lake last fall, remember, Mel? He’s from the South or something.”

  “He goes to S.B.A.?” some woman cries out, and suddenly there’s this general cry of dismay and regret, and about five women rush forward and pull out handkerchiefs and try to sit him up and start swabbing at his face and saying, “It’s okay, honey. It was a misunderstanding. It’s gonna be okay.” He can’t answer; he just sits there, like a corpse, and lets these women wipe him up.

  “Smart move, guys,” Mr. Fazzi says, and slaps both his sons upside the head.

  “Well, I don’t know why this guy likes sneaking away from school so much and walking around in the dead of night,” DeMarco says, pointing at Brooks. “All right, everyone,” he says, turning to the crowd. “Let’s get back inside the church. That’s enough excitement for tonight.”

  “Come on, West Mendhem,” Mrs. Shapiro-Signorelli calls out. “We have some serious reckoning to do tonight.” There’s a general murmur of assent, and the crowd starts splintering off, walking back across the ice toward the deserted church with its lighted front doors wide open. But I can’t leave; I can’t say a word, but I can’t leave.

  The ambulance siren has been gaining on us. It pulls up now and two medics come running over with a stretcher. “That’s it, buddy. You’re gonna be fine,” one says, as they move him onto the stretcher and strap him in.

  Suddenly, he manages to lift up his head. What he says is obscured by his fat lip, but we can all still make it out. “I have some unfinished business” is what he says.

  The medics and DeMarco stand there a minute, perplexed; then they laugh. “You can finish your business later, buddy,” the medic says. “Right now, you should probably get some stitches.”

  As they carry him away, I move toward the stretcher to say something to him, but as I do, I notice that they’ve left his flask and the envelope behind. I look around once, then stoop, all in a flash, and just before I stuff it in my pocket, I notice exactly what I had expected: it has my name on it: “The Hon. Eric Fitzpatrick.” By this point, they’re putting the stretcher into the ambulance, and in a moment the siren starts up again, and it careens around the corner and out of sight.

  “What the fuck was that all about?” Phoebe steps up to me.

  “Didn’t you hear?” I snap, distracted. “They were beating the shit out of him for no good reason.”

  “And you tried to pull the Fazzi brothers off him?” she asks, incredulous.

  “Well, I saw them do it! What was I supposed to do?”

  “All right, all right,” she says. I’m shouting at her and I don’t even know it. “Come back inside and get warm.” She takes my hand.

  “Hunh?” I don’t hear her.

  “I said come back inside—”

  “All right!” I shout at her. “Would you just give me a fucking second!”

  “Jesus Christ!” she shouts back at me. “Go to fucking hell, Eric! Go to hell!” And she runs across the common, back toward the church.

  I’m alone here now. I can’t believe it. Right there is the spot where he lay; we were seen by everyone moments ago, and now he, everyone, is gone. The cold was too much to bear; the last people are filing back into the church and the doors are closing behind them.

  I pull the envelope out of my coat and open it up. In old-fashioned semi-blotted ink, on a piece of pale, formal stationery, is written:

  17 January 1987

  I’ll either speak to you tonight or leave this in the hands of some trustworthy soul. I can’t bear this wretched place another day, and I also can’t bear to see you in this tortured equivocating state. I’m leaving Mendhem in twenty-four hours, so if you are to join me this summer, you must call me at Goolsbee and let me know within that time. Then I’ll give you numbers where you can reach me and we can work out the details in the months to come.

  I don’t know if you can fathom just how unhappy I’ve been (I don’t suppose you’ve been terribly happy either)—or, conversely, how very, very content I was with you in that ghastly motor inn last night. It just seems prudent that in a generally unhappy world, if you find some small reprieve from unhappiness, you should do all you can to sustain it. Don’t you think? I do. Even though I don’t let on. Even though we probably seem like the most egregiously mismatched pair ever to walk Job’s earth. We’re so wrong for each other in so many ways, we must be doomed to each other. Isn’t that terribly historic and exciting?

  Please don’t let us just drift away. We’ve said it before, but I’ll say it now in English. Eric, my angel, I love you.

  B.J.T.

  For a long time, I just stand there, in the middle of the freezing common, and stare at the last line of the letter. For one moment, the faint faraway sound of an ambulance siren heading toward Leicester crests, between the hills to the south, then falls away again. I look up at the church, then once more at the letter before I fold it up, put it back into the envelope, and stuff it in my pocket. I am going in that church to get my coat, I say to myself, and then I am getting in the car and driving far away.

  I’m halfway up the church steps when Mrs. Bradstreet steps out from behind a column, smoking again. “They’re waiting for you inside,” she says.

  I can’t even begin to think of what to say, so I just sidestep her and go inside. Everyone is seated again, and Mrs. Shapiro-Signorelli is addressing the congregation, but when she sees me standing, shivering, at the back of the church, she stops short, gestures to me, and says into the microphone, “And here he is!”

  Everyone turns, and before I can run, the entire church breaks into applause. Phoebe comes running up the aisle and starts leading me back down, pushing me from behind. The applause keeps going, ringing in my ears, and Phoebe leads me up to the altar, or whatever it is that Unitarians call it, where Mrs. Shapiro-Signorelli puts her arm around me and says into the microphone: “Eric, you intervened tonight and saved a life. We need the sensitivity and the foresight and the heart of young people like you if we’re ever going to get over this craziness that’s tearing our community apart. Will you talk to us? I mean, will you really talk to us?”

  With that, she pushes me up to the podium and the applause starts up again. There are hundreds of faces out there, but I’m not seeing any of them; I just stare out blankly. The applause finally dies down, and I keep staring.

  “What happened tonight—” I hear myself say. I can’t make out anybody’s individual face; I just see a bobbing pink sea of hollow smudges.

  Eric, my angel—there it is, black ink on pale paper.

  “I think what happened tonight—”

  Eric, my angel, I love you.

  The last thing I can actually really hear, will remember hearing, amplified monstrously through the sound system, is my voice cracking, the way his did when they jumped him and he fell to the ground. After that, all I’m doing is bawling and bawling and bawling, right there on the podium, even as they start applauding again. I’m bawling in front of hundreds of people, and I am absolutely
alone.

  April 1987

  Eleven

  Goody Farnham called this winter the winter of our discontent (it figures she would), but it has passed, and I am now on a train bound for New Haven, Connecticut, to visit Yale University, where I have been accepted as part of the class of 1991.

  That’s a lie. Not the being accepted part, because I was accepted, with a sizeable scholarship to boot, which of course made everyone very happy. The lie is that I’m going to New Haven this weekend, because I’m not (even though there is some kind of welcome program going on there, and that’s where everyone thinks I’m going, of course, and this train does seem to be full of St. Banner types who are probably on their way.) Instead, I have an address on a slip of paper in my pocket, courtesy of the afternoon receptionist in the admissions department at St. Banner. She gave me a phone number, too, but it’s disconnected. I’m not sure what I’m going to, or why, but they’re letting off in New Haven right now—there go the preppies, and out go the lights in the train as they switch engines or something—and for a moment, I go stand out on the platform and drink a Coke, watching my probable classmates tramp away with their duffels and sleeping bags, and I’m wondering which direction Yale is from here, but not following them. Instead, I’m stepping back on the train, and in a minute the lights come back on, it rolls out of New Haven, and now it’s just me and all the other people with unfinished business points south of here.

  All the insanity between West Mendhem and Leicester is basically over. Believe it or not, even during the riots, in the end it was only Jesús Antonio de la Costa who died, when they finally unplugged his life support two nights after the beating. There was what I guess you could call a full investigation for his aggressors—of course, after Beating Number 2, a lot of people thought it might have been the Fazzi boys, until about thirty kids vowed to the police that the brothers had been with them at a party at the exact time of Beating Number 1. In the end, the investigation never came to much—it’s still open, presumably, as is the Kerrie Lanouette case, but the last tip on that, though, was that someone matching the suspect’s description was spotted near San Diego, so all the action has shifted across the country. At any rate, the Leicester Tribune ran a story last month called “Kerrie: Half a Year Later,” in which the Lanouette family said that they still cried for Kerrie every night—they hadn’t touched one of the Cabbage Patch Dolls in her room since the day she left it and never came back—but that basically they couldn’t stand any more publicity, any more rallies, any more stress. They just wanted to get on with their lives. They wanted peace back.