Steve got a set of Hot Wheels, a New York Jets jersey with Joe Namath’s name and number, a deck of Playboy playing cards, a package of Topps baseball cards, a Slinky, and an Atari game system, which was the only thing he’d said he really wanted. Jason’s mother started crying when she saw it and said she didn’t know how Santa could afford electronics.
“C’mon, Mom, I saved up months to get that,” Jason said. But from the corner of his eye could see Steve trying not to laugh, which made him feel good about having stolen it.
Later on Jason boiled hot dogs, then watched a Snoopy Christmas movie with his brother. Mom spent the afternoon in her bedroom, calling around different bars.
Wanda thought it was brave of Jason to stick up for his little brother. Jason said it was a much longer story.
“I like long stories,” she said, but Jason didn’t want to get into it.
“Was it hard for your mother to manage after your father passed away?”
“With no one around to punish her, she punished herself. It’s Steve I felt sorry for, because, to be honest, I really didn’t love my mother at all. She could have protected us, but chose not to.”
“Were you in prison when she died, Jason?”
He could tell that Wanda wanted his version of why he’d gone to jail, but he honestly couldn’t be bothered to tell her. No one had cared to listen then, and it was too late now. He had served his time—which really means putting up with what happens to you when you’re inside.
Then Wanda asked him to hold on a minute while she found her cigarettes.
“Finally, the office is empty,” she said. “I smoke one Newport a day, always the same time—have done for years. Be nice to have a drink with it. You still like a drink, Jason?”
XVIII
ABOUT FIVE YEARS after his release from prison, Jason started taking the Long Island Rail Road into Manhattan.
At first he was hopeful and thought he might find a job, even move into the city if things went well. But since his motorcycle accident twelve months earlier, following the breakup of a serious relationship with a woman called Rita Vega, Jason had been drinking just to get through the day.
Most Saturday nights he spent on the Lower East Side, stopping for a beer or some tequila at places he thought might give him a job. A few people told him to come back with a résumé. Another guy—an ex-marine called Rocky—said he needed someone to tend bar until four, but then lost interest when he found out Jason had a record.
One night Jason was almost hit by a yellow cab while walking across Delancey Street. He jumped back and fell down—still unsteady after four months on his prosthetic leg. Three girls in short skirts and platform heels reeled with laughter. “Oh my God, did you see that guy? Oh my God! We almost saw someone get smushed! Oh my God!”
At a liquor store on Orchard Street, Jason bought a half-bottle of whiskey, then carried it in a brown paper bag back to Ludlow Street, where there was more to look at.
An oversize fire hydrant outside a hair salon that was usually occupied by someone in grimy clothes with a cardboard sign was unoccupied when Jason passed, and so he sat down.
After a while two girls stopped in front of him to look for something in their pocketbooks. Jason raised his half-bottle of whiskey and asked if they were thirsty. The girls laughed, but then Jason noticed two men behind them, pulling fiercely on cigarettes.
One of them turned to Jason. “Think you’re a fucking hero with that little tattoo on your neck?” The other one just nodded. They were both wearing black T-shirts, jeans, and polished dress shoes.
“Fucking maggot,” the first man said. “You wanna fuck with me?”
One of the girls got in front of the man and pushed him back. “Why do you have to be such an asshole all the time?”
The other girl was putting away her lipstick. “Let’s go,” she said. “This is boring.”
The other man wanted to go too. “C’mon, Michael,” he said. “Forget about this asshole.”
But the first man just kept staring. “You fuckin’ deaf?”
Jason noticed an empty can on the sidewalk and lowered his gaze, wondering whose lips had once been on it.
By now a few people had stopped to see what was happening.
“You deaf, ya little prick?” the man went on. Then he pointed to the can on the sidewalk and stepped closer. “That your can, you fuckin’ litterbug? You gonna pick it up, or am I gonna make you?”
Jason leaned over and reached for it, then in one motion exploded upward, driving the metal can into the man’s face, shredding the lower part of his lip.
The man’s friend was tall, so Jason had to go in low at the knees to get him on the ground, where he fought like mad—but then cried out as Jason’s brass rings separated his nose.
As usual, there was blood and people screaming.
Then the first man had him from behind. Jason lowered his center of gravity and drove back as hard as he could, but with only one good leg to balance, he couldn’t get enough force to send his opponent through the glass storefront of the hair salon. Even with repeated thrusts, the glass wouldn’t break, so Jason turned and head-butted him over and over until the man went loose in his arms and dropped to the street, blood gushing from his nose and mouth. From a distance people were shouting at Jason to stop.
Jason grabbed his motorcycle jacket and took off. By the time he reached the end of the block, he could hear police sirens. He knew what would happen if they caught him, but felt little remorse.
“If there’s one thing I can’t stand,” he told Wanda on the phone, “it’s a bully.”
FOR THE NEXT few hours Jason dragged his body through the streets of Manhattan, sobering up and realizing that his own nose was broken. One of his teeth was also loose, and his lip had pieces hanging off where the tooth had sliced into it.
Any brawler, he explained to Wanda, knows the feeling of finding an injury later on that you don’t remember getting at the time.
Jason found a gash in his shin that had bled so badly, the lower leg of his jeans was completely stuck to his body.
About four o’clock in the morning, Jason decided he should probably hop the next train back to Long Island, but couldn’t find his wallet. He sat on the curb, and rifled through his pockets, wondering what would happen if the guard caught him riding without a ticket.
He walked a little more, then collapsed on some Church steps at Madison and Eighty-first Street. When a police cruiser slowed and the cops eyeballed him, Jason got up and started the lugubrious trek across town toward Penn Station. After a few blocks, he saw a sign and realized he’d been limping in the wrong direction.
He tried to focus on the street numbers but was soon distracted by the bright glow of a shopwindow just a few steps away. He shuffled up to the glass and looked inside. Things sparkled and glittered under the lights. It was a bridal boutique, and the window had been decorated in the style of a hotel suite on a honeymoon night.
Jason leaned his forehead against the cool glass. The linens on the bed were pure white, and the pillows stuffed with real feathers. Jason wondered if the woman’s robe on the back of a chair was made of silk. He tried to imagine the feel of it between his fingers.
On a white carpet was a pair of high-heeled shoes with red soles. One of them lay on its side. There was a silver champagne bucket with fake ice, and a cork had been set next to a pair of flutes on a side table. Two leather passport holders read HIS and HERS.
On a cabinet were framed photos of the couple throwing leaves at each other in Central Park, unaware of the camera or that they were being watched. Another picture showed them in the cockpit of an airplane wearing headsets and pointing at the instruments.
Jason wondered where the couple was now. A warm bed maybe, ankles touching in the darkness, the soft rush of breath. They would soon wake up and go about their lives. They would look at things in the newspaper and read bits aloud between mouthfuls of toast. They would dress slowly enough to make love, then tak
e a cab uptown to pick out plates and silverware, napkins and candlesticks, for parties where people came to laugh and share their lives. One weekend they might rent a car and drive out to New Jersey or Long Island. That was where they’d be living when their child was born. They would return late from the suburbs with catalogs from brokers and bags of apples or peaches from a farm stand.
With his bruised forehead and bloodied nose against the glass, Jason realized he would never spend a night with a woman who wore silk, nor lay back on a pillow of feathers, nor rest his bare feet on a white carpet, nor possess any photographs of himself lost forever in a single moment of happiness with another person.
There had been someone once. A woman called Rita, with whom he would make love at the beach in summer, and stay up all night smoking cigarettes and going over their lives. But she was gone now.
Then Jason thought of his father. Wondered if there had ever been a time of happiness in his life: a moment when he felt he was safe and that somebody cared for him.
JASON FELL ASLEEP on the train back to Long Island.
The guard thought he looked down on his luck and just clicked his ticket punch in the air.
When he got home, stumbling around the house in bloodstained clothes, heavy with the stink of liquor and urine, he caught a glimpse of himself in the hall mirror and thought again of his father.
Then he took a pillowcase off the bed and cleared out all the beer from his refrigerator. In the freezer were two bottles of vodka, and he put those in the pillowcase too.
After going through the house, then getting a hammer from the garage, Jason dragged the pillowcase of beer cans and liquor bottles into the backyard. Morning had come and the blue air was cool.
Jason’s next-door neighbors were having breakfast when they heard glass breaking from over the fence. Enrico looked at his wife, then stood up from the table. His children, Hector and Carla, stopped eating. “I know it was him who smashed our mailbox last summer.”
Enrico’s wife put down her spoon and touched her husband’s hand. “Just pray for him, Papi,” she said. “Ask God to help him like he helped us.”
XIX
THE NEXT TIME Wanda came over, she brought pizza. It was something she knew they both liked and hoped it might get them talking.
Harvey carried it inside and they ate on the couch. When it was finished, Wanda tossed napkins into the empty box and asked Jason if he currently had employment.
“Not enough to be ineligible for disability,” he said. “Sorry to disappoint you, Wanda.”
“You misunderstand,” Wanda said coolly. “I think it’s good to work—whether you tell us about it or not.”
Jason admitted that he supplemented his disability benefit by selling things online.
Wanda was startled by his openness and asked exactly what was so lucrative.
“Doesn’t matter,” Jason told her. “You can sell anything on eBay. Make a huge profit too—if there’s a buyer.” He described how he spent three days a week trawling the discount stores, outlets, and thrift stores across Long Island in search of things to sell. He told her that he’d found stuff you couldn’t get in other parts of the country or the world: heavy metal concert T-shirts, rare New York City souvenirs, vintage jeans that people in Japan would pay three hundred dollars to own. Some things were collectible, he told her—like Mickey Mouse and Coca-Cola—you just had to keep an eye out. Nothing too heavy, of course, because high shipping charges would slow the bidding.
Jason said he always had ten or fifteen things for sale at one time, but that eBay and PayPal took a cut, which had to be accounted for in the markup.
Wanda ventured to ask if he had anything put aside for a rainy day.
“Follow me,” Jason said, getting up and leading them into the garage.
Spread out on a gray blanket were random pieces of metal that Jason said were the beginning of a custom motorcycle he was building from scratch. It was slow going, he told them—the right parts had to come up for sale online when he could afford them.
“This is my rainy day, Wanda,” he said. “Once it’s built, it’ll be worth at least six grand—maybe seven if the paint job is decent.”
Taped to the walls were posters of women in bikinis, leaning their bodies over gleaming bikes. The trash hadn’t been emptied in weeks, and flies made slow circles in the stale darkness.
“You like motorcycles, kid?” Jason asked Harvey.
She thought about it, then nodded.
“Well, I think they’re dangerous,” Wanda told them, stepping back into the kitchen. “So the two of you are together on that one.”
Harvey asked if Jason would take her for a ride when it was done.
“Oh, sure, kid,” he said. “But chances are you’ll be in Florida by then.”
Wanda wanted to see the rest of the house and asked if Jason had a lady friend. He said he liked things his own way, so it would probably be hard for anyone to put up with that. Wanda laughed and said everyone was like that—but at least he came clean. Then she asked if Jason kept a gun in the house.
When they were back on the couch, Wanda tried to get Harvey in the conversation, but she just picked at the loose threads on her doll’s shirt, nodding for yes and shrugging her shoulders for no.
Before leaving, Wanda told Jason to have a think about everything.
“Look,” Jason said when Harvey was in the car and looking at them through the back window, “I don’t cook, I go out when I feel like it, I got no high school diploma, I live in a shitty house in a shitty neighborhood with neighbors who can hardly speak English—so that’s probably not the best for a kid. Plus, I go through a pack of cigarettes a day, and sometimes I don’t even have enough to pay for that.”
Wanda smiled. “All true. But just have a think. Look inside.”
Jason didn’t know what she meant, but as she was on the threshold of the door ready to leave, he said he would.
HE TRULY THOUGHT that was the last time he would ever see them, but a few days later, Wanda telephoned.
“To be honest,” he told her, “I haven’t given anything much thought.”
She seemed disappointed and didn’t speak for a few moments.
After she hung up, Jason thought about that pizza they’d eaten during her last visit, and looked in the garbage for the paper menu that was taped to the box. After calling in the order, he took a few hits off a joint, then poured himself a glass of Mountain Dew and quartered a jalapeño pepper. When the pizza came, he peeled a slice from under the cardboard lid and turned on the TV.
The SyFy Channel was showing Twilight Zone reruns from the 1960s. One of the episodes was about a plane that landed with no passengers and no pilot. It was a mystery how it got there and where everyone had gone. It made Jason think of Steve and his wife. Where had they gone?
Jason imagined their bodies getting lifted from the mess of snapped plastic and metal; two limp necks. Firefighters tossing handfuls of sawdust from buckets. Artificial lights being erected so the police can measure and take pictures.
ON SUNDAY, WANDA called to say that Harvey was going to Florida for a few days to see how she liked it. Jason told Wanda to wish her luck.
That night Jason couldn’t get to sleep. He tried opening a window, but it didn’t help, so he got out of bed, looked for his cigarettes, and went into the spare room.
He sat on his old drum stool, smoking. His underwear was frayed and there were scars on his body from things that had happened to him over the years. The white plastic on his prosthetic leg seemed to glow in the darkness, and he remembered the glow-in-the-dark stickers his brother had loved so much.
A single bulb lit the scattered objects. There’s just too much junk for this to be another bedroom . . . he thought . . . and the walls are dirty . . . and the windowsills all rotted out . . . and the carpet’s stained . . .
Mixed in with the items Jason had been unable to sell on eBay were mementos from life before his motorcycle accident: a drum set, a broken g
uitar, shoeboxes of receipts, all his old sneakers and boots, posters from a few gigs he’d had on Long Island after getting out of prison.
He’d once believed he was destined for fame and money. The more he drank, the more he felt it was possible. The irony amused him now. After getting rich and buying a house in Los Angeles, a Lamborghini, and an exotic pet, he had planned to show up at Steve’s house with presents and a book of concert tickets. He would rehearse the scenes in his mind as though they were inevitable. They’d spend Christmases together. Wear matching sweaters. Go walking after turkey dinners. It would be like the Guns N’ Roses music video where Axl Rose attends a summer wedding with normal people—but dressed as a famous rock star with tattoos and a cigarette stuck in his mouth.
Jason hadn’t played drums since falling off the back of someone’s motorcycle on the Meadowbrook Parkway. The accident happened after a concert at Jones Beach. They were both drunk and Jason was fuming about his breakup with Rita.
While Jason was in the hospital, his friend who was driving at the time of the crash moved to Los Angeles to continue the rock-and-roll dream, but got into heroin. He used to write Jason from time to time, ask about his leg, boast about the California sunshine, and brag about the girls he’d been with. But then he started asking for money. Rents were getting too high, and his computer had been stolen. Then the letters stopped altogether.
After the accident, Jason tried to keep up his other friendships, find work in the city, go to concerts, walk around the Lower East Side and look at all the pretty girls—but when he stopped drinking, it was difficult to be around friends he had never known sober. And the people in bars filled him with an anger he could no longer swallow.
That first year of sobriety was when Jason most wanted to see his brother again. But the failure of his life felt so close to the failure of their father’s life. And every relationship he had ever attempted lay shattered at his feet like pieces of a broken mirror.
JASON REACHED FOR a drumstick and twirled it in his hands. He tried to imagine what Florida was like. He had seen it on TV. Harvey would have a good life in the warmer climate. She could ride her bicycle year-round. He imagined putting skull stickers on her seat, tying leather strings to her handlebars.
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