Man Gone Down

by Michael Thomas

  Perhaps we princes were only dreaming. How else do rogues get the chance, either together or alone, to turn everyone on and free the world? The first true children of integration; up south, over pond, peeking out of ghettos; no factories or fisheries or railroad yards for us to languish in—set for dreaming. We slept too long. Everything passed us by.

  I remember the first time I tried to get sober. Sally had just dumped me and I had seen her at a party listening closely in the rec-room basement to a rich boy I despised. I’d promised myself before arriving, alone, that I wouldn’t drink. I went upstairs to the bathroom, touched all the towels, looked into the expensive vanity at the foreign ointments and pills. I thought about popping some, but I closed the door and looked in the mirror. I couldn’t see what Sally saw in my face—what spooked her so. I had seen my father that morning, the first time in some time, hunted him down on my own—surprised him. I guess I was a little bit desperate. I couldn’t talk to my mother about anything, really, certainly not about being dumped by a poor, freckly white girl—any white girl, for that matter. Shake and Brian had already been with too many girls, and Gavin hadn’t been with any. So I went to my father, and I don’t know why I expected him to be anything besides a stranger. I kept pretty quiet, pushed an uneaten sandwich and coffee mug around a diner counter. He didn’t say much, either, just clicked his teeth. A couple of times he looked out in front of him, toward the open kitchen into nowhere, and smiled. When I was getting money out for the check, I’d looked up and caught him shaking his head at me. “When you were a little boy, you were so full of light . . . ,” he’d started. He thanked me for lunch and the opportunity to see me and left.

  Even locked in the bathroom, I could hear Gavin from downstairs, exclaiming over some bad eighties rock in his most exalted tone that “. . . indeed, the party has just arrived.” By the time I got downstairs the negotiations had begun—Brian and Shake were welcome, but Gavin had to go. When he saw me, he bellowed drunkenly, “Mu brathir—Eire nua!” He snatched a bottle of fancy whiskey off the bar and tossed it to me dramatically like it was my confiscated sword. “Sar! Ho!” he bellowed and then ran out the door into the night. I held the fifth by the neck, looked around at the ring of rich boys, had a quick mind—tried to calculate how many I could crack with the bottle. Then I drank and followed.

  We went cruising around downtown in Shake’s new used car—out and aimless. Brian had just dropped two hits of blotter—goony-birds, I think. Shake’s tape deck had just eaten his latest party mix, so we were listening to the radio. Even though it was his car, he thought it fair for everyone to have equal time on the dial. Brian chose first.

  “Classics, dude.”

  “Whose classics?”

  “Come on, dude. One hundred point seven.”

  Shake pulled the car over. We were in Chinatown, on the edge of the Combat Zone—Boston’s tiny red-light district. He shut the motor off and turned to Brian, who was slumping in the back seat, and stared at him coldly. Shake was about as close as any of us could come to being a bully. He was already fully grown and dark. He was already a very good writer. He’d graduated midyear and was on his way that summer to New York to serve as an intern for some well-known director that none of us had ever heard of. I asked him once about his writing, how he did it. “I see things and I write them down—connect the dots to here,” he snapped. I thought that I’d annoyed him so I didn’t push it. I hadn’t known that his anger was targeting something else, the visions, an awakening schizophrenia, which was soon to leave him shaking and alone.

  “What, dude?”

  “I’m in no mood for your shit,” he shot back crisply. All three of his accents—urban black, Jamaican patois, and his father’s high-brow Londonese—were confounding to listeners. He could scare almost any white boy at will.

  “What?”

  “G’wan claat!”

  “Sorry, bro.”

  “I ain’t your brother.”

  “Sorry.”

  He switched on the juice and tuned the station in. Van Morrison was on, singing “Into the Mystic.” Shake nodded to the music and turned it up.

  “This tune’s all right.”

  Brian slouched more, relaxed, and looked out the window. I followed his eyes down an alley where a transaction was going on between a black hooker and a white john. The first few snowflakes were starting to fall. He muttered, “Merry Christmas.” She was pushing him back against the brick wall and behind a four-foot stack of milk cartons, which was their only cover. Brian grinned. His eyebrows twitched involuntarily. What was he doing here? His parents had gotten out of their immigrant ghettos—better diet, better education, and—gestalt. Brian left his academic folks befuddled, sped around drunk in his old man’s car like a broke, rebellious teen trapped in some dying mine or mill town. Brian, the stoned auditor; now he was stuck with us. In slumming, he had gotten a little dose of the void, if only vicariously, but now he was hooked, a true oblivion junkie. Morrison cried about some girl’s “gypsy soul.” Brian fingered an imaginary saxophone and then looked at me, still slouching, caninelike. He looked back down the alley, then back to me. He leaned in smiling crazily from his mounting adrenaline. He tried to make his face look serious and concerned, but he just looked scary and high. He placed his hand on my thigh.

  “Dude,” he whispered, as though he was about to tell me a secret. I didn’t respond. I was too busy trying to fight off the growing sounds in my head of the rich boy’s murmurs and Sally’s breath.

  “Dude. Is your dad white?”

  “Don’t answer that.” Shake was glaring at him in the rearview. “Fuck you, Brian!”

  Brian threw himself away from me and into the corner of the car as though Shake had lobbed a grenade into the back seat.

  “Dude, it’s just a question.”

  “Fuck that!” He found Brian in the mirror again.

  I looked past Brian into the alley. She was now on her knees. He’d knocked over the cartons with the spastic swing of his hand.

  “I just want to know.”

  “Why?”

  “Cause he’s my friend.”

  “No. It’s because you want to know why you have tutors and he doesn’t. Why he’s a letterman and you can’t make any squad.”

  “But you’re in AP math.”

  “Yeah, but we have the same tutor. You see how I work.” He thumbed at Gavin, who was in the passenger seat. “I don’t see you asking him what color his father is.”

  “But I know Gav’s father. I mean, I’ve seen him.”

  Gavin cleared his throat, waved a hand in the air, and assumed his highbrow accent.

  “Must you two do this all the time?”

  “Do what?”

  “Disguise your genuine contempt for each other with racial gobbledy-gook?”

  “Gobbledygook?” Shake wanted to laugh, just because of the word, and that made him angrier.

  “Yes. Well, I don’t know what either one of you is talking about. It just seems as though you’re looking for an excuse to beat his head in and he’s looking for justification to have his head beaten in.”

  “What do you know?” asked Shake, still watching Brian.

  “About what you’re talking about?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I just told you, absolutely nothing.” He emptied his beer, cranked down the window, and finger rolled it into a heap of garbage bags across the narrow street. He produced a pint of vodka from his breast pocket, took a pull, and without looking, offered it to me. I drank and held on to it—something else to focus on. He started rolling his window up. It stuck a bit, moved unevenly, so he guided the glass with his free hand. Shake watched closely. He bit his lip, shook his head slightly and then more and more. “What I suggest is, if you really want to fight, let’s go back to that so-called party.”

  Shake ignored him. He was fixed on something else.

  “You know what I know?”

  “No.”

  “I know busing. I know wh
ite flight. I know glass ceilings. I know higher interest rates on mortgages. I know being put in the remedial reading group—when you’ve already read Chekhov. I know our high school drama department and how they’ll never cast me in a lead. I know how, when I do move to New York, no one will ever produce one of my plays unless I get a bunch of overall-wearing feel-good niggers jumping around the stage singing about how ‘the sun’s coming up on their black asses some day.’ I know what color his daddy was or is but I ain’t telling that muthafucka nothin’ and neither is he.”

  Shake watched Gavin slump in his seat. For a moment he looked as though he wanted to apologize. They liked each other. They just couldn’t seem to talk to each other—as one was too jaded in the areas in which the other was naive. Gavin kept sinking. I don’t think it was because he’d been yelled at, but because he hadn’t been heard. “We can’t do anything for the boy—that’s what they said,” his mother told me the first time we were alone. I always liked his mom, Mary—the only parent who demanded that I call her by her first name. She was much younger than my mother, but she carried the same fatigue. An ex-hippie gone hard and sober. She was a hitter and a screamer and I found those familiar traits comforting. And although she said I was like a son to her, I still wasn’t her boy. She yelled at me but didn’t come after me in that terrified, maternal panic. We had some quiet moments together, usually on car rides home from emergency detox runs. “In first grade they wanted to move him up to seventh. I said no. I didn’t want my boy to be some freak.”

  “We can’t do anything for the boy.” Gavin is one of those people you can’t stand to see sad. He thinks, has always thought, that he wears it well, but he doesn’t. It kills the light in his face, makes him look, rather than hurt or even desperate, like a dead boy—the face resigned to despair. I could see in Shake and in Gavin that I had to do something. I instinctively tapped him with the pint. He turned, saw the bottle, and sighed. I might as well have been handing him a pistol.

  “Mr. Sandman . . .” I pulled the bottle back and started singing. He kept his head turned, his face not changing but no longer descending. He waited like that until I sang the wispy call and he responded, crooning, “Mmmyyesss.” Then he smiled, the freckles like so many tiny Christmas lights turning on cluster by cluster.

  “You guys are freaks,” mumbled Brian.

  “Mmmyyesss,” Gavin repeated.

  I could tell that Brian was beginning to trip: He was twiddling his fingers in his lap. He went back to looking at the pair down the alley, watching the indifferent giving and receiving of a December blow job. It was freezing outside. The harbor wind seemed to have found its way into the alley, too, and was blowing the thickening snow sideways and around. The cold was creeping into the car.

  It’s a strange thing to go through life as a social experiment—bused, tested, and bused elsewhere, groomed for leadership. When I was a boy, my room was full of great men’s images—posters on one wall of Gandhi, King, Jackie Robinson, Malcolm X, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, Stokely Carmichael, a pen-and-ink drawing of Frederick Douglass, The Jackson 5, Crazy Horse, a W. E. B. DuBois bank, and a Booker T. Washington mural. And on another wall the ’67 Red Sox, Ted Williams, a Shakespeare collage, a family tree of the Greek deities, Oscar the Grouch, Bill Russell. And I remember trying to understand the segregation of the images. The best I could come up with was that one wall was my mother’s and the other was my father’s, but even then it was difficult to keep straight; each individual image reflected and rejected the alleged virtues of each group and person.

  That room. Those walls. Gone—cash from a second mortgage invested in some buddy’s business venture. In the summer of ’72 my father had been either laid off or fired. My mother went to work, so he had to take care of me. In the midmornings he’d call up the stairs for me to wake. She would’ve already tried and failed—first by moving things around the room roughly and noisily; then she’d leave and I’d hear the tub running. She’d come back when she was done. I’d open my eyes a crack. She’d be wrapped in a towel, hair in rollers and scarf, hissing, “Get up!” She would leave again, dress, reenter, and rip my covers off with an inscrutable hiss, standing there with my blankets—the freckled Celtic/Black/Indian—red armed, yellow faced, eagle nosed. One eye amber and one eye green. The progeny of, to name only a few, an Irish boat caulker, Cherokee drifter, and quadroon slave—“Get up!” And then she would go, and I’d drift off until my father ascended the stairs and with his stinky instant coffee breath nudged me and whispered my name.

  We’d cook bacon or sausage and eggs, and after we finished I’d clear the table and he’d give me the Boston Globe or a book to read while he washed the dishes. He’d turn on the radio—to the big bands on the AM dial; Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman—pointing at the radio during a Charlie Christian solo: half dressed, suit pants and shirt, and almost always with a slight grin. I rarely saw him frown, even when I’d go to meet him at work after school, even when I began frowning at him. He’d gone from philosophy to drugstore chains to department stores to random mercantile outposts—always some friend’s idea that most people could tell was preselected for failure. And while my mother never tried to hide the fact that we, as a family, had been preselected for failure, he did.

  We’d go out in the late morning on errands—usually to the corner store owned by the Italian boys he’d grown up with—get staples and he’d chat with them, and they’d ask him how my mother was, because she never shopped there. She went a few blocks farther to where a black couple had opened up a superette. Then we’d walk back with the bread and crackers, the peanut butter, the beer, cold cuts, and cigarettes.

  Sometimes we’d play catch. Sometimes we’d perform some kind of chore until the early afternoon, when I’d make lunch: peanut butter and saltines for me, hard salami and Kraft singles for him. He’d set up the folding TV tables in the living room, and I’d bring the trays of food. He’d turn the television on to The World at War and we’d sit and eat—he with his bottle of Miller, me with my milk or water. We’d watch the WWII footage—explosions in the South Pacific, tanks rolling through Italy. He’d leave about an eighth of his beer for me and place it on my table. “Take it easy,” he’d say when I’d pick it up. “Take it easy, pal.”

  When the war show was over, he’d tune in to a game show or Merv Griffin or Mike Douglas—still drinking. When they were over, he’d turn it off—a break before the nightly news—and he’d put the stereo on. I think it was mahogany. It seemed old to me and was enormous, even for an adult—like some giant basement freezer you’d find at your grandmother’s—packed with LPs and 45s and even 78s. The receiver no longer worked, but the turntable did. It was black and heavy looking—wood, metal, and rubber with the solid arm that held the records aloft above the spinning disc below. There were two sliding panels on top, one for the record storage and one for the works, and when he opened it, I could smell the old cardboard covers, the warm vinyl, the wood, the Lemon Pledge. They were all almost too faint, like the imagined smells that emanate from a deep freeze belonging to the colored labels, frosted shapes, and colors of popsicles and waffles and ancient meats and sauces. Later, when I was older and he was gone and the turntable broken, I would still crack it open for that warming scent.

  I’d hear the scratch of the first LP—my father’s perma-grin, now wide, showing his wobbly teeth. He’d smile at me. “Doo doo diddly-ah ya doo-ah ooh.” First, a dose of Ella, maybe Satchmo, then Tony Bennett or Sinatra. He’d usually choose the crooners, or the swingers, though sometimes he’d play Bird or Miles or even Coltrane. Invariably though, he’d finish with Glen Campbell’s “Elusive Butterfly of Love.” He’d never sing along because he thought his voice was rotten. He’d just snap and clap by the stereo, watching me. I’d be beer addled and happy, elated because of the music and his obvious joy, but careful to stay away from his lit cigarettes, although obliging when he’d say, “Light me.” The pop of the match and the sulfur smell, the beer smell, the salami and pe
anut butter and the butterfly of love. Summer’s urban afternoon slowly losing its sharpness. The rush-hour traffic out on Cambridge Street. The beeps and the exhaust through the holey screens. Then no more music on the big stereo—the absent songs hissing in the speakers. He’d clean the bottles and the dishes and hide the tables. Then he’d give me a pen and pad and sit me in the dining room at the table. He’d turn on the television again. I could hear the anchorman talking while I’d write and draw, about the shrinking Massachusetts economy and the expanding Vietnam war.

  When my mother came home, we’d both be in our fogs of the prehangover that comes from drinking in the afternoon. She’d walk by me and ask him, “Did you get a job?” He’d sit back in the couch and sigh, “Lila . . .” And she would try to start a fight, but he wouldn’t bite. She’d turn off the TV, walk by me again mumbling just loud enough to hear, “You should be in summer school,” and into the kitchen, where she’d bang pots and pans around, hissing and mumbling in the same inscrutable way. My father would croon back to her in his baritone, “Lila, he’s only five.”

  She’d call me into the kitchen, and there’d be a plate waiting for me and a scotch and water for her. The radio would be on but tuned all the way down to the right end of the dial, where there was soul. I’d eat—stewed meat, boiled potatoes, fry bread. She wouldn’t. It seemed she never did. She’d move around, busy but slow, doing things and mouthing the words of the songs that came on. I remember them, of course. I listen to them now, but I was a boy then, and although they were so beautiful to hear, they were also so troubling in the same amount—songs of resistance, of loss, of just holding on: love songs, music both sacred and profane, church music evoking sexy fathomless grinds, sexy music calling on God. When she was done with her busyness, she’d sit down. Sometimes she’d sing, “People get ready . . .” Her voice was lovely, but she’d only sing a line or two, then perhaps hum, then go quiet and sip and swallow. She was usually so hard to look at: the eagle nose, the freckles, the green eye, the amber eye. For me, my mother’s face seemed like a void, a historical abyss, an emptiness from which, if I ventured, I would never return. But really, it was rich with artifacts, made of memory and blood, things that could be regarded only in the past, never in the present. Perhaps it was the old beer in my little head that would make her face close, and I’d see it, I’d see her—just her eyes, her skin, below the buggy fluorescent and above the tap water and rye vapors, a song on her lips—she was beautiful.