Another Kind of Madness

by Ed Pavlić

  The two men found spots on the lake where they went to park and strategize. Their arguments about business strategy were always masked conversations about lyrics in certain songs. If Vice had them on a wire, it better have a few champions from Soul Train’s Scramble Board on retainer. P. W.’s choices of tunes were a kind of divination chart. They smoked American Spirits and P. W. played the grooves on the custom system he’d had installed in the Range Rover. Junior remembered P. W.’s observation on one of those nights: “You know, Jazzy and Fresh Prince’s ‘Summertime’ is really a remake of Gershwin, think about it. ‘Give me a soft subtle mix.’” And Junior: “‘And if it ain’t broke.’” P. W.: “That whole ‘living is easy’ thing … it just hit me today.”

  – … You know?

  –Nigga, you right. You should write a book!

  They’d both missed the social part of the music as boys. Underwater in their lives, in detention, the songs were beamed in from space. Communiqués to a gone bathysphere. Back then, they’d debated the success of lyrical choices. Abstract meant they were prisoners of genocidal economic choices made by people they’d never see. People who would never look at them and who used their image every day. Junior and P. W. used the music Ms. Lisa allowed onto the radio in the Center like a series of mirrors. The mirrors stared back. As all prisoners do, they romanticized and exaggerated the freedom of the lyricists and singers who were really fellow prisoners. A falsetto voice chimed in: When you’re short on cash, I’ve got your length. Junior thought that the metaphor was too literal, too gratuitous, and didn’t make sense. The metaphor strangled the line. Junior: “That’s that Verne Gagne shit.”

  –What?

  –It’s “the sleeper hold.”

  –Oh, OK, got you.

  –You know he taught it to his son, right?

  –Which son?

  –Greg, I think.

  The next line in the song, countered P. W., paid back for excess in the first one. Remember, these boys are, like, fifteen at the time. They’re prisoners. P. W.:

  –When you’re weak, I’ll be your strength. When you’re cold. That’s us, man. None of it even makes a song unless both “length” and “strength” rhyme with, say, how Ms. Lisa says what comes after “ninth.”

  –Tenth?

  –See. And everyone in here says you’re slow.

  –So I’ll be slow. I’ll be so slow till I’m gone. I’ll be the invisible g.

  Like all prisoners, they never really left. They still did that. Though, on the outside, P. W. played the songs as if they were part of a riddle: riddle me this. And part divination: roll the shells. It was also a corner hustle for whoever might have been listening: Where’s the pea? The bassline of Anita Baker’s version of “You Belong to Me”:

  –Why’d you tell me this? Were you looking for my reaction?

  Junior:

  –That’s why I didn’t even flinch. No nod. Watch. They won’t do shit.

  Further back, Loose Ends:

  –Baby, I feel it too, what am I supposed to do?

  And Junior:

  –You think it’s that deep? I think it’s a bluff.

  The lines and lyrics wound out of the rhythm that was wound out of how the world moved, how it didn’t spin at the same speed in the same place for very long. Lines that were all about how one listened or didn’t. Usually, when the relevant line went by, the men didn’t need to say anything. Their eyes met and there was a nod between them that, were you watching closely, you wouldn’t have seen happen. One song bloomed out of another until the decades and voices merged into one song. Trussel: Rock is in the pocket, Rock is in the love socket. Janice McClain: Give it up, give it up, give it on up. Change: Reach for the sky, I’ll be nearby. Man Friday: Didn’t I show you love, show you love…. And if you were watching with binoculars you wouldn’t see a thing. Joyce Sims: What price must I pay, to make you see things my-y way-ay, and the lines scat out of view. Paris: I choose you. Floetry: All you got to do is say yes.

  The revolutions were kaleidoscopes. Police could try to follow on the wire if they wanted, record everything. But the code couldn’t be broken—it could only be lived. No one came and went from it, no one was free to leave. Since they were boy prisoners, they’d turned phrases from brain to brain, from eye to eye. In the Center, they did it for as long as Ms. Lisa would allow it. Now, they did it for as long as they wanted, as long as it took. Nothing can come, nothing can come, nothing can come between us. Sade always had the last word. Junior sang along: I’ll wash the sand of the shore.

  P. W. hits pause on the steering wheel.

  –You know it’s “off the shore,” right? “I’ll wash the sand off the shore.”

  –“Off the shore” makes the line ordinary. If it’s “I’ll wash the sand of the shore,” it opens the line into forever.

  –What, grain by grain?

  –Nigga-naw. Sand washed of the shore … the border gone, limitlessness … then you decide the shape, the shift.

  –Shape of what?

  –Naw-nigga, not what, the shape of “if” … which is always the shape of a shift. You know, like when “if” is a fist.

  –Oh, that’s old school. Next you’ll be talking about back in the day when Gimme got shot!

  Somewhere a detective ran a check on a 187, victim’s name: Gimme. So they worked around to the subject at hand. Junior leaned forward and hit play…. blow you right through my door.

  –See. Same as shore-washed sand … door with no way …

  –Shame, ain’t it?

  Junior stared at his own face in the tint of the passenger side window. He nodded.

  ■

  In detention, Junior had lived within the prison of formal control. What he hated most was performance of any kind, the neon exaggerations in them, the formulae. He and P. W. had been surgeons on the inside. They’d bounced songs back and forth between each other. Spent days in secret concert with a chorus waiting for it to leap out of itself. It’d become a spontaneous grammar between them, precise and open-ended. By the time they were released, after nine years inside, they could sniff the lie of plot, the consolations of momentum, of cause, from across town. They’d both stand up after fifteen or twenty minutes in a movie and walk out down separate aisles when the story arrived to guillotine the actor’s subtleties into the performance of the plot. Fuck you. Having been the boys they’d had to be, neither man could stand the sulfur whiff of “behavior.” It attacked the eyes like an allergy. Junior’s favorite saying—he never said it out loud: “In jail everything is obvious.” He remembered reading that in a book in Miss Lisa’s room. He tore out the page and kept it. He isolated that sentence and swallowed it.

  At the movies, one waited for the other outside in the parking lot of Evergreen Plaza. Never more than a few minutes.

  –I wondered how long you’d be in there.

  –I figured you’d already be out here.

  Junior was a committed sensualist and militant moralist, militant against any limits set on the preliminary ambiguities of action. Intuition was close but there was no system, that elevator was no longer possible. Someone who never existed might call him a radical noninferentialist.

  Alexis almost never left Junior’s condo on the lake, off Seventy-Third Street. She wore a housecoat and Gucci slippers. Rose water, blue powder, and epics painted on her toe-nails. Her open robe, belly and nipples dusted as if they’d been loved by moths. Valerie was Junior’s shadow. She was never more than around the corner. These were Junior’s people, his clutch. And P. W., no performer either—he was the sandman’s hook and the heavy sweep of the curtain itself. His job was to cut any plot before it had the thought to begin.

  Junior survived by moving in directions no one expected. By violating whatever people seemed to think the song of the day was about. More often than not, this meant moving exactly in a way so as not to move at all. Learning how to stay still in a hall of revolving mirrors amounted to inventing an invisible kind of arrest. When a killing
opened up a building to his south, he wouldn’t even glance. Low-cost, high-yield concoction came up the Ike from St. Louis. Not a sniff. He’d fallen into immunity through a misperception he didn’t understand. This envelope turned his pharmaceutical connection into a perpetual motion machine. He used the combination to keep himself exactly where he was as the ground moved beneath his feet. He’d say, “I’m either the day before yesterday or the day after tomorrow. People think I’m the clear space in between but that’s just their mirror, that’s their confession.”

  All those around him saw this as his unpredictability. Junior didn’t know exactly what the envelope of his immunity contained, who sealed it, who had sent it to whose attention. He knew there’d been a pact sworn over the dead son of a made man. An underground tremor. It didn’t involve the mayor, DA, or police as much as it involved those who owned influence in those offices. Word was that the only person present at the pact was the best friend of the dead son, the dead heir himself. The friend wasn’t in the game at all and neither was the son. It didn’t matter. Word was that whoever touched the dead heir’s best friend would bring down the whole house of cards. So Junior had decided to look but not touch. For now.

  Word just was. And that’s just what word was. There were all kinds of words. And Junior didn’t have it exactly right, but he was close enough. The friend of the dead son had left town just before his death, true enough. This is my death we’re talking about. So I’ve looked closely. Word was that the friend’s leaving was part of the pact and maybe it was. All the words were likely wrong, of course. Everyone knew that for sure. But no one knew which words were right and which were wrong and so word stayed word. When Jeff Fort’s Temple went off, spoiled meat, it happened that the few blocks claimed by Junior in the franchise auction were covered by the mythic pact, which is exactly why everyone stood back and let him have it. No one expected him to actually take it; no one knew he already had. No one said anything about it. The only proof Junior had that the mythic word held any water at all boiled down to the fact of his daily life. The fact that, each morning when his eyes broke open, he had a daily life.

  As anyone could see, only a serious fool or an untouchable person would have accepted an offer from Junior to be put up in 6329 in return for no one knew exactly what. Junior had known plenty of fools. They were all performers, predictable. Shame didn’t resemble any of them. For instance, when Junior mentioned it, Shame hadn’t asked even one question. There was no negotiation, no poker face, no hesitation. No “What’s the catch?” No “What’s in it for me? For you?” Shame just nodded and said he’d go over there after work. He moved his stuff into the space the following day. All anyone really heard after that was hammers and saws and that piano that no one had ever heard before. If there was anything or anyone to the word, Junior figured it, or they, would do something just like that. In other words, like him, they’d do as close to nothing as possible. Junior didn’t know what to think. So he decided to not think and to simply keep the safety off and deal with Shame as little as possible, which turned out to be not at all. Then he’d wait till Shame showed his hand. Shame didn’t. And Junior’s safety stayed off.

  ■

  Shame stood on the breakwater and watched the blizzard disappear in waves. He’d walked all the way down Sixty-Third Street through Jackson Park and crossed under the Drive to the lakeshore. The Joycelan Steel job was coming to its beautiful end. All the jobs ended this way. The bricklayers left to wherever they went next. He’d find out soon enough. The last of the courses would go in by Friday. The scaffolds at the bottom of the final tank would come down and they would hoist them out. They’d load them on the truck and take them back to the yard. Then he and Jay Brown would bring in the steam washer. The acid-wash wing of the mill would be closed down for however long it took to wash down the end of the job. It would be just them.

  These were waxed brick. That meant one face of each brick was covered in a thin sheet of wax. On small jobs, he and Jay Brown arrived early and waxed each brick themselves. They set them each on their sides to dry. The equipment was low-tech: a paint roller rigged on an axle drilled into a tin cake pan. They melted the wax in the pan with the torch, then set the rig over candles to keep it liquid. Each brick drawn back and forth over the roller. This happened over and over in an unending coma, a rhythm. They added squares of wax to keep the bottom of the roller in the liquid. The first brick was almost weightless. By 80 or so, Shame could barely lift his arm, couldn’t hold it steady. Time to switch. Jay could wax 400 brick without a pause. But he stopped after 150 or so. In this way, Shame and Jay, wordlessly, could wax a few thousand brick in a day. The quiet of their work made Shame feel like a monk. They never talked, as if it was some kind of sin to talk while waxing brick. The candles burned down beneath the pan and were replaced one by one. The bottom of the pan turned black. Smoke spilled up. Their wrists banded black from the smoke that curled around the edges of the pan. Any more than a few days’ worth of that, it was cheaper for the company to buy the brick waxed at the factory.

  For big jobs like Joycelan Steel, 25,000 brick per tank, six tanks, the brick were factory waxed. The wax protected the brick in transit and during the job’s progress. A dropped hammer might chip the face. Even one crack could compromise the seal. Engineers came to the job after the final wash and placed dimes on the joints. Any edge exposed more than the width of a dime would be marked for removal. The bricklayers had to come back and the mistakes were relaid. The foreman said it was in the contracts. So they’d leave each job clean and smooth enough for the dime test.

  What mattered to Shame was a pure beauty and rhythm at the end of the job. They washed all the spit and sweat and curses away until all that was left was clean, smooth pain. Standing at the lakefront, he watched the blizzard come over the Drive. Behind him, wind gusts accelerated the snow, which gave the traffic the appearance of slow motion. In front of him breathed the undulating border between the black waves and the white lung of chaos. The lake gulped the blizzard’s spray, drew it down. At the job, the hose’s nozzle disappeared in steam. They moved the spray back and forth in three-inch swipes, thirty seconds per brick. Concentration in a stance, his mind was his wrists. Behind the jet of steam lay a newborn brick. Another few appeared each minute, pristine, as if they had never been touched.

  The wand wanted to blast off and cavort space. He aimed the white spray between his boots. Thirty minutes was enough, his wrists gone mind-numb. It was time to switch. He watched Jay Brown aim the gun and disappear into the steam. Shame marked the urge to strip off the goggles, hard hat, coveralls and stand nude in the flame-white clouds. He stood at the drain and swept the waves of water and wax back on themselves. The streams and waves met, crested, and dropped the wax into the beginnings of reefs. This must be done on angles so that the water dropped the wax and then washed past down the drain. The reefs of wax cooled and turned gray. Shame shoveled them into empty resin buckets from the mortar materials. The foreman said it was in the contracts: no unattached materials left at the job site and that included wax in the factory drains. “We carry it in, put it in place, or we carry it out,” said the foreman. It was elegant, expensive work. It was opera. And it was doomed.

  Shame watched the steam gather in flashes, light through the cloud became a prehistoric monster. He wanted to scream, “Cut,” to turn off the lights. He feared that if the steam dispersed, bodies would lie strewn in their final stages of agony. Jay Brown’s back hunched like a bear in the steam bath; the broom held itself down in Shame’s hands, the weight of the handle was all that held his feet to the floor. A quick touch, a wrist-twitch caused a new ridge to begin in the wax-wash. Minutes later they’d switch again and the violence of the nozzle would be gone silent, again, trying to blast out of his hands. The pressure was a clean, blind spot, a white inch from the peeled face of a newborn brick. The broom perfectly owned its weight in space. Jay Brown held the jet. The pressure stripped the surface back down to the pain that put it
there. Shame felt like he was in orbit, in slow motion. He watched Jay Brown hold down the ancestor of all light, the obliteration of sight.

  This was an early dinner, the second, after he’d been living in Junior’s building and was still wondering why. How? They hadn’t yet agreed on what he’d do in return for not paying rent. Colleen had invited herself to Shame’s place which, turned out, she had wrongly assumed must have been somewhere near Earlie’s. Shame’s life was a distant planet. At that time, Shame’s job was relining tanks at Peer Foods at Thirty-Fifth and the river. Peer Foods made pickled pigs’ feet. Everyone who worked there spoke Polish, from the young woman in the security uniform at the back gate to the old men with shrunken-apple faces who pushed stainless vats of pig hoofs through the plant. It was a good job. At lunch there’d be a platter of ham hocks and the old men brought loaves of Italian bread, onions and peppers and mustard. Colleen had been charmed by the shimmering irreality of all of this while Shame told her about it at Earlie’s. His eyes were bent in his first attempts to talk to an actual person and the room curved forward and away from him behind her open face. She could only approach what he said aesthetically. She laughed out loud at the alliterative:

  –Right now, I’m working at Peer Foods, a Polish pickled pig’s feet plant in Bridgeport.

  They’d talked a half dozen times over a few weeks. She was from Minnesota, a river town called Winona. She’d been visibly incredulous when he told her that he knew the town, that he’d worked there years ago. He couldn’t remember but thought it was a factory that made chains. Colleen laughed and said she didn’t know but that sounded exactly right. Shame remembered that from the loading dock at the back of the plant he could look over the bluffs across the Mississippi. It looked like three or four rivers snaking between low islands and sandbars in the morning fog. She said he made the place sound much better than it was. And he said that was probably because he was only working there, not trying to live. He didn’t say that that was before he’d begun trying not to live.