by Dale Peck
Trucker. He picked the name out himself. He didn’t want to tell me his real name, which I thought was kind of sweet, an inevitable accompaniment to the anachronism of his wife, whose name I did learn, Judy—Judith—although one time he referred to her as Edith, but I didn’t question him about the slip. Trucker was Trucker as far as I was concerned, and Judy was Judy or Judith or Edith or Edie for that matter, it didn’t matter, her life was nothing more than an unknown array of facts reduced to a name and symbolized by Trucker’s wedding band, just as Trucker’s job as a traveling salesman was represented by the two sample boxes that took up the entire back seat of his silver Cadillac. He was fifty-seven years old when I met him, two hundred seventy-five pounds, four bulbous chins stepping down from his tiny mouth to the sharp swell of his torso, the half dozen strands of his hair floating above his head like a rain cloud, and, like a rain cloud, he passed through town twice a month. He never told me which way was coming from and which way was going to but he always told me when he was coming back, and in two years he never missed a single appointment until he missed those four in a row right there at the very end. I never once saw him walk, never saw the tops of his thighs uncovered by the silk of his suit pants, and I could have believed his ass and back were sewn to the seat of his Caddy save for the fact that he traded in the first car halfway through our acquaintance. I told myself I loved him and I believe I did, as much as I ever loved anyone: I loved him because he let me leave him. Trucker was the first person in my life who never left me and never sent me away, and I think I’d be with him still, even after I received the letter informing me of my mother’s death, if he hadn’t given me all those gifts. But that’s one of the peculiar privileges of being an orphan. Early on you learn the self isn’t a tangible entity defined by a list of enumerable characteristics, it’s just a gray zone defined in opposition to what’s around it. It isn’t a statue, in other words, but the rock carved away. By which I mean I wasn’t heading up to Harlem that morning to find out who or what I was: I only wanted to find out what I wasn’t.
THE PAST MAKES for a bad traveling companion. It can’t be led but drags you back at every step, distracting you, slowing you down, throwing you off course. What I mean is, I’d needed to change at 96th Street for the local and I almost slept through the stop. I opened my eyes just as the bell signaled the doors’ closing, and I threw myself out of the car and ran straight into the hot sucker punch of the station. I wavered on the platform like a blade of grass. The heat paralyzed me, only instinct kept me upright. The first thing that came back was my hand. My wrist really: it was a quarter after eleven; then I checked the security of the key around my neck. The sun dripped through the sidewalk gratings, painting shadows that mockingly resembled the bars of a cage. Voices fluttered down, the shed feathers of conversations somewhere above me, and as I followed the words I caught sight of a fat black woman whose breasts were underlined by twinned crescents of sweat. She was eyeing a thin shirtless Puerto Rican man a few feet away from me, something that looked like jealousy filling her eyes. When the Puerto Rican man caught the black woman looking at him, she turned belligerent.
“Whyn’t you put your shirt back on?”
The man shifted position with exaggerated nonchalance, scratched his balls. “Whyn’t you mind your own business?”
“You think that turns me on?”
“I’d like to turn you off,” the man said. “At least turn you round.”
A few people standing nearby chuckled. Headlines fanned faces, eyes darted back and forth. The woman had at least a hundred pounds on the man and she moved in a little closer.
“You think I like seeing your skinny-ass chest and ticky-tacky arms? You know what you should do? You should take a bath. I can smell you from here. And whyn’t you pop those zits stead-a leaving them whiteheads all over your chin? You got herpes, boy?”
The man looked angry but distinctly intimidated. “Lady, I’m-a pop something besides a few zits.”
“Yeah, I’d like to see that, you skinny runt.” She stepped closer to him, and I heard the schmear of sweaty feet sliding in sandals. “C’mon, twiggy, let’s—”
Just then the downtown local roared into the opposite platform and, overpowered by its noise, the woman wandered away from the man with her hands on her hips, shaking her head. As she walked off it occurred to me that this was New York. New York was an accident waiting to happen. Even now, the woman was listing toward two boys throwing a baseball back and forth. Teenagers, although in their gleeful ignorance of the ridiculous place they’d chosen for their game they seemed much younger than me—younger than I’d ever been, or at least since it would have been worse if I stayed. The fat woman was talking to her shoes, the pop! of the boys’ baseball against their mitts metered the seconds to disaster like a leaky faucet, and it seemed to me that if the ball did strike the woman then the ensuing bloodshed would be on a par with CARNAGE ON THE GWB.
I looked at the woman’s back. I wondered if Trucker looked like that, from the back, standing: thick and shapeless as a stick of unpulled taffy. I wondered if Trucker had walked into his own baseball as blindly as this woman, and I looked behind me then, saw that the downtown train was still in the station, and quickly, before I could stop myself, and before anyone could stop me—before the baseball struck the woman and she exploded in a shower of blood—I jumped onto the tracks. I hopped over the third rail, pulled myself into the joint between two cars even as the brakes belched a jet of hot air and the train lurched toward 86th Street. I thought I heard a yell behind me but didn’t turn to see if it was the woman being struck by the baseball or someone exclaiming at my recklessness. I just opened the door, sat down in the first empty seat, refused to look at my fellow passengers until I was convinced we were safely in the tunnel.
At no point had I actually thought I was skipping out on my appointment. It had simply slipped my mind. As soon as I remembered it I told myself I’d get off at the next stop and catch the uptown line. But the next stop came and it was 86th Street and I didn’t get off because I wasn’t sure if there was a free transfer to the uptown line until 72nd. Seventy-ninth came, then 72nd, and as the train was pulling out of 72nd I was still telling myself it was okay—it was early, I told myself, I’d have a bite to eat then head back uptown, the testing center was open till four, maybe only three, but according to Trucker’s watch it wasn’t even noon and I still had plenty of time, I told myself, plenty of time. When the conductor announced Christopher Street I got off the train with the idea I could eat a little something and make it uptown with time to spare. What I was thinking was that I was a gay man new to New York City and I still hadn’t seen Christopher Street or the West Side piers, and so I walked down one to get to the other. Along the way I acquired a juice, something beet purple but tasting more of ginger and carrots, some candles, and the phone number of a middle-aged man who’d chatted me up at the juice bar (he was wearing his own jumpsuit, yellow rather than orange, and he used the coincidence as his pick-up line). The morning’s drama was gone and in its absence a weightless calm had taken over me. I stuffed the phone number in my wallet, dropped my cup of juice in a trash can, and, my feet bouncing in those shoes as if I walked on pillows, crossed the West Side Highway and saw the Hudson River for the first time.
I’d read about the old piers, seen pictures even, or one picture. It must have been taken from a boat far out in the river, and it showed a swaybacked ramshackle structure that looked like a section of an old-fashioned white-beamed rollercoaster. On its maze of warped scaffolding had sat or leaned a half dozen shirtless men whose baskets and brush mustaches were visible across a hundred yards of water. My fathers, I said to myself, my gay dads, for they’d had as large a role in my upbringing as my real father. But the pier was long gone, in its place an asphalt strip that stretched from Chelsea all the way to Battery Park City, a tar ribbon as flat black and ugly as any Plains highway. It was the province of joggers, skaters, bicyclists, dog-walkers, hand-holders
even, of all persuasions; but where the men who once came for an anonymous fuck now went I didn’t know. Maybe they were all dead. Maybe, for the same reason, their descendants now preferred to score in juice bars or gyms or online, but as I made my own slow way down that barren promenade—it was the very antithesis of the Yellow Brick Road—what I was reminded of was the Big N, and what I found myself wanting was a quickie, something to stop the normal flow of time and erect a wall between the morning’s misadventure and what lay in store for me uptown.
What I got, instead, was a splash.
In the movies there are shouts when this sort of thing happens, but in the real New York, I was discovering, no one shouted when you expected them to. They ran, they gawked, they even pointed out the scene to anyone who did or didn’t care to look, but they discussed the situation in a seen-it-all-before tone of voice, and as I hurried toward the confluence of bodies and bicycles at the river’s edge I too felt strangely unexcited, curious, but not aroused. Snippets of voices came to me.
Did he fa
I think he ju
Where di
Over the
Then I saw him. He floated face up, not more than ten feet out, his arms wafting on either side of his body, his legs pale shadows beneath the surface of the water. Save for the current’s rollicking southward drift and the membranous movement of his white shirt and pants, he was still, and I felt it as well as saw it, the tranquility of floating. His eyes were open and he stared straight up. I could see the sky as well, its cloudless expanse reflected in the smooth water around his body, but it was the man’s face that held me, his blank eyes, his hair like seaweed darkly haloing his head, his lips puffing out like rising dough with his refusal to answer the shouts from people on shore.
“Are you okay?”
“You need a hand?”
“Can you make it over here?”
“Man, what the fuck you doing?”
Someone mentioned the police, someone else mentioned the fire department. A skinny man in running shorts ran off to find a pay phone even as a half dozen other spectators pulled cell phones from purses and pockets and belt-slung holsters, but that was all the help anyone was willing to give. With a weak gesture, the man in the water used a fingertip to pull a splayed lock of hair off his face, and all the while the current carried him steadily south—toward, I saw then, a tangled mass of pilings, the jagged base of some long-gone pier, perhaps even the one I’d seen photographed. Its ghostly specter hovered above the river, the ghost of a ghost, and by the time the apparition had dissolved I found myself on the chainlink fence separating the walkway from the river, my feet, freed of those shoes for the first time in nearly a year, pinched in the tight diamonds, my fingers pulling me up with a grace and strength I didn’t know I possessed. This can’t be happening, I was thinking, but that thought was erased by pain, belied by it, as the jagged fencetop tore through the fabric of the ridiculous jumpsuit Trucker had given me and ripped my leg open. I saw the river below me, as black and impenetrable as a chalkboard, and then I saw my reflection—saw the boy I’d seen two weeks ago in the barber’s mirror, his hairless skull as unadorned as a death mask. I wanted to say something to that mask, but before my tongue could find the words my real mouth bestowed a rushed kiss on its reflection, and I was in the river.
I was under water.
There was a moment then, I don’t know what to call it. I don’t know what you’d call such a state. An ending, or just a transition? A suspension? Maybe lapse comes closest. For a moment time stopped, and for that moment I was at peace. I didn’t feel it, didn’t hold it anyway, I couldn’t actually call it my own but even so it was all around me, as palpable as the river’s water. It was like the time I crested the Rockies and let gravity roll me down to the Plains. This much I can tell you: the closest this world comes to perfection isn’t some kind of willed built-up thing. It’s emptiness. It’s absence. I heard my heart beat while I was down there. It was the only thing I could hear, the only thing I could sense in that dark plunge, my heart’s outward press and the water’s inward push. For the first time since I’d arrived in New York I had a clear sense of where I ended and the world began. I thought of The Well then, thought that all the water that had never come out of its dust-clogged spigot was right here: I was suspended in it. I floated in the water that wasn’t sex. And then I gave in, for the final time, to Trucker. On our last day together I’d done what I always did. I slipped my shorts off without taking off those shoes, scooted across the seat, straddled him. It was easier if I faced the steering wheel but that day I knew I needed to look at him. My ankles rode on his thighs and my knees flanked his hips. “Hey,” Trucker said as I undid his belt. “What are you doing?” I didn’t answer, just took what I knew would be there, curled my spine, bent my head so far to one side that my ear was practically touching my shoulder. Friction and the roof of Trucker’s car filled my hair with static electricity. On more than one occasion Trucker had burst out laughing at my hair standing on end—Albert Einstein he called me, Don King—but that day all he said was, “Come on now, don’t be crazy.” But I ignored him, just rocked up and down as I always did. “James,” Trucker said, “don’t you realize things have changed?” And, when I still ignored him: “James? Why are you doing this?” It never took Trucker very long and it didn’t take him long that day, and it was only after he’d finished that I said, “Because it was there for me. Because you had it to give to me. Because nothing’s changed,” I said, “and I never could refuse a gift.”
It was the flavor that brought me back. The oily stuff filling my mouth tasted like…like what? It tasted like semen, and I almost swallowed a mouthful of it. But I spat it out as soon as my head cleared the surface. I’m not sure how I cleared the surface. Maybe it was just the air in my otherwise empty stomach ballooning my body upward. Swimming had started automatically, a sort of messy breast stroke, and it was only when I looked in front of me that I remembered the man.
His white clothes glowed under the river’s surface like a submerged beacon. As I swam toward him I felt the salty water stinging the wound on my leg, and it was the only thing real to me, that little pain, but even it had the soft focus of a fever dream, as my mind filled with an image of blood inking the water each time my legs frog-kicked me forward. When I got closer he turned toward me. “Please,” he said, “keep away.” But I just ducked under the water and with seallike agility flipped myself over and came up beneath him so his shoulders rested on my chest, looped an arm around him. “Please,” he said, struggling feebly, “just let me go.” His words were in my ear along with the sound of the river, and I could feel his heart beating against my forearm. “Let me go.” I turned to him, saw up close whiskers and wrinkles, the softening profile of a man slipping into middle age. I kissed him then, on his cold cheek. Pressed my lips against his skin and held them there until he said, “Oh,” and then again: “Oh.” He stopped struggling, and with my free arm I paddled us to the shore, and there waiting for us was a slimy but still solid length of rope or root just sticking out of the earth as if it were the anchor of the city itself. I grabbed on to it, and we waited for what would happen next.
What happened next was that a couple of men scaled the fence and reached their arms down to us. The hero act is catching: there were lots of We got ya’s and Here comes the cavalry’s, but even with all the acting it was only a couple of seconds before they’d clasped the man’s limp hands and pulled him off me. He’d begun to cry, a mewl of shame and chagrin, and the sound only reinforced the idea that I’d made a mistake, that I hadn’t saved this man but condemned him. The man’s crying became a wail as the men on the shore slung him over the fence’s barbed top like a sack of animal feed, his sobs were all I could hear as they reached to help me. I tried to avoid his eyes but they were all I could see. He was hung over the fence like something already dead, but still his head lifted up and he fixed me with a sad stare and he said, “You shouldn’t have, you shouldn’t have, you shou
ldn’t have.”
For the first time I looked at him. His hair was dark and he was about forty and although he had his own face I couldn’t see it. All I could see was that he might have been my father, even as I knew he wasn’t and never would be. As I backed away from him I felt hands on my back and shrugged them off more successfully than the man who wasn’t my father had shrugged off mine. When I’d backed all the way through the crowd and felt the space empty out behind me I turned and, shoeless and sodden, ran for home.
By the time I made it back to Dutch Street I was nearly delirious. My bare feet were blistered and bloody, the cut on my thigh had opened again, and closed, and a long thick brown streak showed where the hairs on my left leg were stuck to the fabric of the jumpsuit. What was worse was that it was dark, and it had been just after noon when I jumped in the river. Where had the time gone? Where had I gone? My keys were missing from my pocket, also my wallet. I entered the building through the shop and screamed Nellydean’s name until she materialized from one of her secret dens. In response to my demands she walked to the box of ostrich eggs I’d found on the long-ago day I’d gone looking for a touchtone phone, and when she cracked the egg a key as rusty as its predecessor fell into her palm. I snatched it from her, stumbled upstairs, and the first thing I saw was that the computer Trucker had bought me had finally found its way to me, sprung up on the vast surface of my mother’s desk like a pox that’d been incubating for weeks. My impulse was to throw the boxes out the window. “Fuck you, Trucker!” I screamed into the empty room. “How could you do this to me?” But what had he done? What was his fault and what was mine, what had I done and what had simply happened? What had happened? It was all confusing, and it was all I could do to lift the computer boxes to the floor, all I wanted to do was sleep, to slip if I could into the lush psychedelic comfort of a fever dream. I climbed onto my mother’s desk and closed my eyes; the stone was hard but the coolness was like a pillow cushioning my hot body. Like the last, this chapter ends with a disembodied voice delivering a cryptic message. But this time, at least, I knew it came from a dream. It was just a gurgling at first—or was it crackling? Was it a fire, or was it the river, or was it the voice of the headless statue in the garden? I strained to make it out. I opened my ears as if they were my heart itself, and the words fell into my soul like medicine from a dropper:
