16
Stay high ‘til you die. Die ‘til you’re high. High ‘til you die.
Life without the crack buzz has become almost intolerable to John G. When he’d first hit the street, he’d promised himself he wouldn’t mug anybody to support his habit. But the money from collecting cans and panhandling just isn’t enough anymore. He needs a massive infusion.
He’s scared out of his mind as he walks up Broadway at night looking for a victim. His eye sockets feel raw and his throat is dry. It’s been years since he even thought about doing crime and he’s not sure if he’s up to any kind of confrontation. Plus, there’s still a small voice in the back of his mind telling him this is wrong, that everything he’s doing is wrong, and he ought to go back to that nice lady and ask for help.
The street is full of distractions. Taxi headlights. Models flashing their tits on magazine covers at the newsstands. Steam rising from a hole in the road. He can’t screen any of it out.
Finally, while he’s waiting for a light to change on the corner of Seventy-ninth Street, he turns and sees a man in black clothing closing the front door of a hulking gray building. He moves up behind him quickly and closes his right hand around the box cutter in his pocket.
That mental voice is still trying to warn him off, telling him it’s not too late. But the part of him that wants to get high is stronger, and he reaches up and wraps his arm around the victim’s throat.
“Give it up,” he says.
“The wallet’s in my left pocket,” the vie says, bending back, not struggling. “Just take it.”
John G. sticks his hand in, pulls out the wallet and a set of rosary beads.
“What the fuck’s this?”
“I’m a priest.”
The victim turns around and the white square in his collar hits John G. right between the eyes.
“Oh fuck!” John looks up and sees they’re on the steps of a Roman Catholic church.
“Is something the matter?” the priest asks, as if he’s accustomed to dealing with a more professional class of mugger.
“Oh shit!” John G. drops the beads and the box cutter. “God fucking damn it. I’m so fucking sorry, Father.”
“It’s all right.”
“No, really. I’m all fucked up. I don’t know what I’m doing here.”
He scoops up the beads and hands them back to the priest. The box cutter goes back in his pocket. His brain frequencies are scrambling. All of a sudden, he’s not sure what to do with his hands or where to put his eyes. And he’s not even that high at the moment.
“You want to come in awhile?” asks the priest, seeing his confusion. “We could talk.”
He looks a little like Father Drobney from Aunt Rose’s parish up in the Bronx. He has the same kind of dark tonsure of hair around a bald pate and a similar moon-pale face. John G.’s body sways as if it’s ready to follow him into the church, but his feet stay anchored to the sidewalk.
“I don’t know what I could say to you, Father. I’m so mixed up. It’s been about twenty years since my last confession.”
“That’s okay.”
The priest goes fishing into his other pocket for keys. But John G. isn’t moving. He jiggles in place, looking at the traffic lights across the street and the stars overhead.
“Is there something you want to tell me out here?” says the priest, sensing resistance.
“I’m in turmoil, Father. I can’t control myself. I’m afraid I’m going to hurt somebody.”
“I see.” The priest visibly tenses and three ridges appear on his forehead like steps to the top of his skull. “And how are you going to do that?”
“There’s these people, Father.” The jiggling becomes more frantic and he starts grinding his teeth again. “They live like right around the corner from here.”
“And they’re the ones you think you’re going to hurt?”
“I can’t leave them alone. You know? There’s just something about them. I have these feelings for the lady in the family. You know what I’m saying?”
The priest wipes his brow with a handkerchief. “Feelings.”
“Yeah, I have these feelings because she’s just like my wife. I’m very attracted to her.”
“I see.” The priest moves his mouth around, trying to accommodate John and appear empathetic.
“So now she’s with this other guy and it’s like he has the life I was supposed to have. See? He even has a kid like I used to. It’s like he stole my life by moving the molecules around. Do you think that’s possible?”
“Well it sounds a little unusual,” the priest says, trying to sound reasonable about it.
“Yeah, I know it!” John stomps his right foot. “I know it! And I know what I’m doing’s wrong, but I can’t help myself. There’s this part of me that says I have to get rid of this guy she’s with before the molecules can go back in the right place and I can get back what I used to have.”
“I think you have to fight that impulse. Have you sought counseling?”
“I’ve sought everything!” John G. says loudly, looking furtively from side to side. “I been trying to work it out with science! I been trying to work it out with God. And I’m not getting any answers!”
“Well, what’s the question?” The priest fingers his beads.
“The question is why would God give me everything and then take it all away? Why would he kill my daughter and end my marriage? I mean, I start off telling myself it’s all my fault. I mean, I was standing there when it happened. I could have saved her. But then it’s too much. I fuckin’ trip out. So then I get high and all hell breaks loose.”
He wrings his hands and mashes his teeth together, as if he’s suddenly in great pain.
“So what do you think, Father? You think my daughter’s dead because of what I did? There’s gotta be a connection, right?”
The priest moves his hands around, as if he’s trying to conjure comfort out of the night.
“I don’t know,” he says finally.
“Well sometimes that’s what I think. That he’s punishing me. By giving me the virus. But then other times I think it’s somebody else who’s responsible and I just want to hurt them. So what do you think?”
“I think you need to talk to someone and then I think you need to look inside yourself and ask God to forgive you.”
John G. turns his head and looks back at the steam rising like a white exclamation point from the hole in the street. He thinks about what can build up underground.
“You’re telling me God’s inside me?” he says. “I gotta go someplace and . . . think about this.”
In other words, if he doesn’t get high within the next five minutes, he’ll start tearing his own skin off.
“I don’t suppose I could borrow some money,” he asks the priest. “I’m good for it. I swear.”
“You’ve still got my wallet.”
“Oh yeah.” John looks down at the black billfold in his hand and takes out fifteen dollars. “That all right?”
“I can handle it. But do me a favor, will you?”
“What?”
The priest reaches out with smooth, marble white fingers. “Stop by and see me sometime. Okay? I think we might have a lot to talk about. I’m very interested in this business about the molecules.”
“Oh yeah, sure thing.” John returns the wallet and starts walking away backward, as if trying to escape the watchful eye of God. “And thanks, Father. You’re a lifesaver. I’ll come by and pay you first thing next week.”
The priest gives out a heavy dubious sigh, like an exhausted steam engine. “Go in peace,” he says.
17
Bob... Bob ... It’s not that kind of thing, Bob. They want you to serve on the School Construction Board. It’s a dollar-a-year job. If it’s money you want, go join some corporate board with Kissinger and have your meetings in Vail. This is goddamn public service.”
Jake is on the cellular phone with his old friend and client Bob Berger. Dana sits
on the edge of their bed, brushing out her hair and watching the news.
All of a sudden, a voice shouts from the street below. “Repent, you sinner! Damnation awaits you!”
“What the hell is that?” says Bob Berger, who’s calling from Pound Ridge. “It sounds like you got the Red Army outside your window.”
Jake goes over and pulls back the drapes. John G. stands in the middle of the street, arms akimbo and face contorted.
“Jesus is angry!” he cries out. “The army of Christ is marching.”
Jake drops back the drapes and starts pacing around the room, his mouth tight with fury. “Ah, it’s just some bum.”
“Now I know why I moved.”
“Take the job. And give my love to Scotty and Brenda.”
The line goes dead, but as soon as Jake puts the phone down it purrs again. Dana’s friends Rick and Marjorie Baumgarten wanting to know if they’re still on for dinner at the Gotham Bar and Grill on Friday.
“Tine,” says Jake.
“YOU WILL NEVER REACH THE KINGDOM OF HEAVENNNN!!” John G. shouts up from the street. “JESUS WON’T FORGIVE YOU FOR LAYING WITH THE WIFE OF ANOTHER MAN!”
“That’s it,” says Jake.
He puts the phone down and goes to get his sneakers from the closet. “I’m gonna go down there and fuckin’ kill him right now.”
“Jacob, sit down,” his wife says. “Are you out of your mind?”
“Well, what am I supposed to do, Dana? Call the police again? He’ll be gone by the time they send a car and back an hour after they leave.”
There’s bashing and rattling downstairs. Jake goes over to the window and sees John G. trying to lug a shopping cart up the front steps of the town house.
“HEY, get away from there, you sonovabitch!” he yells down.
“Stop that. What’s the matter with you? He can’t get in. You sound like a nut shouting at him.”
Jake turns on her. “Doesn’t it bother you that this bum attacked our son?”
“Of course it does.” She suddenly looks like a solemn schoolgirl. “It makes me furious. It makes me want to kill him too. But what would that accomplish?”
“Let me tell you something, Dana, sometimes a little force goes a long way.” He bends down to tie his sneakers. “My old man used to beat my mother into a hospital bed twice a year and then complain about the bills. But after I got a little forceful with him there weren’t any more trips to the hospital. Understand?”
“You know I hate it when you talk like that.” Dana leans over and props her head up on her right hand. “It makes me think you’re still this angry violent guy inside.”
A long silence begins. A vein pulses near his left temple. For years, he was an unguided missile looking for a target. But being married to Dana has changed him. Somehow she’s helped him make peace with the world, at least for a while. Still there are moments when the distance between them seems as great as the distance between her parents’ house in Stamford and the streets of Gravesend. The moments always pass, but she can never really know what it was like growing up in a housing project.
“It’s just talk, babe,” he says quietly, standing up.
“I know, but he’s sick. You can’t get so pissed off that it poisons you.”
“I still have to protect my family.”
“Of course, but you’re not trying to fight your way out of Gravesend anymore. You don’t have to settle everything with your fists. He’s going to go away eventually. Don’t make the repair worse than the problem. Our life is good now.”
He puts his head against her chest, listening to her heartbeat. Long ago, he discovered he couldn’t really sleep unless she was next to him, so he could hear the rhythm of her breathing. The bond of love.
“Our life is good,” he says. “That’s why I don’t want anything to happen to it.”
“I know.”
“THE VIRGIN IS CRYING!!!” John G. calls up from the street. “SHE KNOWS YOU’VE STOLEN A LIFE!!”
On the floor above, Sonic Youth is making dirty, skronky music in Alex’s room.
“Maybe I could try talking to my supervisors again,” Dana says. “Maybe they can talk to somebody at Bellevue about having him brought in for forty-eight hours’ evaluation.”
“And what if they let him go after that?”
“Then we’ll have to think of the next thing.”
A story comes on the news about a deranged homeless man slashing a woman and her dog in Central Park with a pair of scissors.
“And meanwhile we just wait until somebody seriously gets hurt?”
There’s a loud clang on the gate downstairs. Jake goes to the window and sees John G. on the front stoop, his right arm cocked back like a baseball pitcher’s.
“Oh shit, he’s trying to break in,” says Jake.
“Don’t worry. The gate’s locked.”
“What about the inside door?”
Dana looks stricken. “I thought you locked it.”
“I thought you did.”
Wearing only shorts and a T-shirt, Jake bolts from the bedroom and goes rushing down the stairs. As he reaches the bottom, he sees the front door has been pushed open and the only thing between him and John G. is the locked wrought-iron gate. Fifteen feet away, John G. appears divided into sections by the bars like a figure in a cubist painting.
He reaches into the shopping cart, pulls out a piece of rotten fruit, and hurls it through the bars at Jake.
“Body of Christ,” he says.
WHAPP! A half-eaten plum whizzes past Jake’s face and smashes into the framed Picasso print at the end of the hall.
Jake ducks and bangs his head on the wall. Dana calls to him from upstairs, asking what’s going on. John G. throws an old pear at Jake.
“Body of Christ.”
The pear hits Jake on the temple and juice dribbles down into his ear. It’s like some new postmodern humiliation ritual: getting pelted by rotten fruit in your million-dollar town house. The only way he can stop John G. is if he moves out into the open part of the hallway and lunges to close the front door.
“Blood of Christ!”
A peach hits him straight on the chin as soon as he steps out.
“Goddamn it,” he mutters, putting his hand up to his face to inspect the damage.
John G. howls and punches the bars with his fists, oblivious to the damage he’s doing to his knuckles. Even if the police were to come and arrest him right now, Jake thinks, the charge would only be a misdemeanor for vandalism.
“Baby, please come back! I can still make you happy!”
With one more lunge, Jake manages to reach the oak door and slam it shut. His shirt and shorts are completely soaked in putrid fruit juices. One way or another, this must stop.
From outside, John G. roars one last time.
“BABY, PLEASE DON’T SLEEP WITH ANOTHER MAN!”
18
This time when the cops come for John G. they give him a choice: Rikers or Bellevue. Rikers is thirty days, minimum. He pictures a thousand Larry Louds in cages next to him. Yo, yo, I think I got the virus, man. Bellevue is two or three days on the mental ward, max.
“Take me to Bellevue, you motherfuckers. I’m not responsible.”
He’s brought in the morning after the fruit-throwing incident and immediately sedated. For the first few hours, his mind drifts. He keeps seeing parts of his life playing over and over like scenes from an old movie.
He sees himself as a Patchogue boy growing up in the Bronx. The crumbling tenements and apartment houses gray and frightening as old elephants. The dusty churches and stale Communion wafers. Yankee Stadium and the el tracks. Just about the only white boy in the bleachers on Westinghouse Take an Underprivileged Kid to the Ballpark Day. The kid next to him saying Danny Cater could figure out his batting average by the time he ran down the first baseline. The smell of lavender in Aunt Rose’s living room and overheated plastic slipcovers on the furniture. Instead of his mother’s patchouli and cigarettes. The
memory of love.
He remembers when he first started running away. Right after the time he messed his pants at the museum. He became the Hooky Kid. His truant officer must’ve carried his picture around in his wallet. Let the nuns slap somebody else for a change. There he was. Playing tag at the auto graveyard near Highbridge Park. Sneaking into afternoon games. Riding the subways all day. The A train was the best. The tracks ran right over Broad Channel going out to Far Rockaway and on rainy days water pelted the windows and threatened to wash the cars away.
By high school, he was hardly showing up at all; the only book he read all the way through was Dante’s Inferno. Nuns, football players, algebra nerds, the rough gang hanging out at lunchtime. He couldn’t identify with any of them, couldn’t relate to any of the symbols of success or failure. Perhaps the capacity for homelessness had always been within him. “I wash my hands of you,” said Aunt Rose. “You’re as bad as your father.” Whoever that was. She shipped him off to the foster homes. Long silences and leftovers for dinner. He hunkered down inside himself and learned never to show how scared and lonely he was. It was only later he realized that the families took him in because they got extra money from the state for each foster child who lived with them.
It didn’t matter, though. He was a full-time runaway by then. Spending all his time at the second-run movie houses on Forty-second Street. Continuous showings of Alien and Death Wish 2.
Sometimes he’d fall asleep and the movies and his dreams would blend together.
He reached twenty with a good-sized heroin habit. A guy he knew from the movie theaters introduced him to the clubs downtown. Elgin, he called himself. An educated middle-aged white guy with an accent from somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic. All he ever wanted was a hand job in the balcony. In return he took Johnny G. to the Mudd Club and Tier 3. And introduced him to the kind of people he’d never met before. People who thought it was romantic that he had a heroin habit. They were older and they had money. He was poor and an addict, but who cared? He was riding through the drugs on a burst of youth.
Intruder Page 10
