Home Town

by Tracy Kidder

  The therapist told him, “You’re suicidal because of the massive amount of drugs you’ve been taking.”

  “And it hit me, pow!” Frankie remembered.

  That was when everything started to make sense. While in jail he’d met a nun, a volunteer, who had instructed him in meditation and theology. She’d told him, as he recalled her words, “You meditate to get healing. To become whole. That’s what we’re here on earth for. And after you’re whole, you try to become holy.” The only good thing about jail was the time it gave him to think. In the long hours of doing nothing, Frankie pondered the nun’s words, until he thought he understood. “There’s a natural magnet, name it anything you wish, God, Buddha, infinite intelligence, the Supreme Being. We’re all part of Him and there’s a natural draw. Eliminate vices that get in the way, the pleasures of the flesh, which I’m guilty of.” It followed that there was a reason for his crack addiction. That was the Supreme Being’s idea. “That’s all to block the natural pull of the Supreme Being. It’s like a test.” Frankie felt angry, though. “Why do you put me through all this, you asshole?” he asked the Supreme Being. He didn’t feel this kind of talk was dangerous. “He’s got the kind of sense of humor, you can call him an asshole,” Frankie said. “So I’m defying the Supreme Being by calling Him a jerk and an asshole.” And, as he told his Northampton therapist, he was waiting for an answer.

  Then he met a woman. At the time he and Carmen were estranged again. He was walking north up Pleasant Street and this other woman, who had just driven into Northampton from the West Coast, was walking south, both of them heading for the same pizza joint. The place was closed. They got to talking at the door. The annual Indian Pow Wow had convened at the fairgrounds. He and the woman went to it together. Frankie said something about the dances being religious ceremonies, and she asked him if he had an interest in religion, and he poured out his whole story to her. “Tears were coming down my eyes, which is hard for me to do with a female,” he remembered.

  The woman listened. Then she said, “I never heard such a crock of shit in my life.” She went on, “This is just a bunch of whining. There are no victims, Frankie.” Then she told him about karma. “Deserve it or not, that’s where karma comes in. Basically it gives you what you need. To purify yourself.” The idea reminded him of an ad for the marines he’d seen on TV. “It’s like a sword heated and pounded,” he thought. “All for you to evolve and learn from.”

  Frankie felt that forces far beyond him had answered his angry question, first through the nun, then through the therapist, and finally through the woman from out west. She was clearly a messenger. “This is a meeting from three thousand miles away,” Frankie said. “I don’t believe in accidents.” Northampton was a place of spiritual power, just the sort of place the Supreme Being would choose. Everything had come together now. He had his answer. “There is a reason for this bull, and maybe I’m supposed to pass on the word. God has a terrific sense of humor. Life doesn’t stink if you look at the whole picture. I’m a poor, worthless piece of shit right now, but I have a little contribution to make.” Working for the cops as a drug informant, helping them arrest a man like Tyrone, was part of the divine plan for him.

  But it is one thing to believe you are being tested, and another to endure the tests themselves. Frankie had to struggle to keep the picture focused. Peter and the state drug cops and especially Oakie, who was one of his oldest friends in town, could certainly have treated him better. They seemed to think they’d done him a great favor by getting him breaks on the motor vehicle and crack charges. But how was he supposed to stay connected to the drug world if he didn’t have a car and if he didn’t buy some crack now and then? True, he had intended to smoke the crack he’d bought in Holyoke, but he really had been doing research, too, so he could help them bust the dealer later. “They’ve been playing me. My life is at risk. There are twelve to fourteen people who would love to put a bullet in me for the cases that I did. The cops get what they want. Cases, pats on the back, promotions. What do I get? What did I ask for? My car and my license. That’s nothing. These guys in blue, there’s just black and white to them. But there’s a thousand different colors we don’t even know about.”

  On the Supreme Being’s test, however, Carmen was the toughest question. After she’d filed her latest charges against him, he had filed some against her, and she had been very nice and loving toward him while the ones he’d filed were pending. The day he dropped them, they were supposed to go to the social service agency on Pleasant Street for marriage counseling. She said to him. “Never mind that marriage counseling. I never want to see you again.”

  “So you were only nice to me so I’d drop the charges,” he told her. “You know something? I’m tired of this roller-coaster ride. I’ll go along with anything you want.” He got some divorce papers typed up. He brought them to her. “Do me a favor. Sign these papers.”

  Relating this story, Frankie said, “I used to cry and stuff, but this time I didn’t do the wimpy stuff.”

  A few days later she called him at Grove Street. He should meet her at Pulaski Park. She would sign the papers. Then Frankie realized they’d need a notary public as a witness. He had no money at all. He stopped in at the office of a lawyer he knew, who said she’d notarize them for free. He walked back to the park. Carmen was sitting near the Academy of Music in the summer morning, drinking vodka.

  “And she has an appointment for alcohol counseling!” Frankie thought. But he didn’t criticize her. He felt sentimental, on the brink of this final act of their marriage, and he said a few sentimental words as they started walking toward the lawyer’s office. They were walking down the alley beside the police station when she started calling him a mama’s boy.

  “Okay!” he yelled. “Divorce this mama’s boy!”

  They stood there shouting at each other, and after a while one of the higher-up cops—maybe it was the police chief himself—came out. “What’s going on here?”

  “I’m getting divorced,” said Frankie.

  “Well, you guys please quiet down. I’m trying to read.”

  He arrived at the lawyer’s office with Carmen trailing after him, yelling, “Mama’s boy!” And then she wouldn’t sign the papers. The secretary in the lawyer’s office started laughing. “Damn!” said Frankie, holding a thumb and forefinger half an inch apart. “This close to getting divorced.” He followed Carmen back toward Main Street. They passed a construction site. The workmen stopped to listen in. They started laughing too. Carmen kept yelling, “I ain’t signin’. I want some money.”

  He followed her all the way back to the substance abuse agency building, pleading with her. “Carmen, I want to get on with my life.” He followed her inside, to the little cafeteria at the agency. He got a cup of water, and suddenly, feeling overwhelmed by his karma, he threw the water in her face. Carmen was threatening to file new charges against him when one of the agency’s therapists appeared, and Frankie had to explain himself. “This is an oxymoron type of thing. She wants to get rid of me, and she won’t give me a divorce. She loves me, she hates me, she wants to see me, she doesn’t want to see me.” He left the place still married.

  He still craved cocaine. His car was impounded. He owed about a thousand dollars in parking tickets and couldn’t get a license until he paid the fines. He had to go to court in Holyoke in a few weeks, and the cops down there would demand that he do some work for them for free. And he was broke and living in a shelter. One day a bag of donated clothes arrived there. Rooting through it, Frankie couldn’t find any men’s clothes, just women’s. He took some of them, and put them on. “Just for a joke,” he insisted. “I don’t have any tendencies.” But the effect surprised him. “I felt like a different identity. I’m not Frankie anymore. Frankie had enough pain and suffering.” He went to his room in a skirt and blouse, lay down, and slept all day, his first sound, peaceful sleep in a long time.

  Afterward, though, he felt worried. “What’s happening?” h
e asked his therapist. “Am I changing or something?”

  His therapist reassured him: “No, you just needed a break from being Frankie.”

  The only problem was that Carmen heard about it. “Hey, you got a boyfriend, Frankie?” she said the next time he ran into her in the park.

  “Anything to hurt me,” Frankie said bitterly.

  He was about to lose his disability, his only source of income now. But the temporary change in identity and the summer weather seemed to have restored his spirits. He took a break from sitting in the park to stroll around Smith College, mostly emptied out for summer. Shambling across the Neilsen lawn, passing under the giant London plane tree, Frankie thought of the Smithie he had met this spring. “Her father’s rich. She’s Mexican with blond hair and blue eyes, a gorgeous little thing. I met her in the laundrymat. But check this out. Can you believe it? I was too shy to call her.” He ambled back to Pulaski Park. Small, buxom Carmen was sitting there with her new boyfriend. Frankie went up to them and shook hands with the boyfriend, then walked over to a bench some distance away. “That’s the guy who took my place. In his dreams. Ever see anybody so glad to meet his wife’s boyfriend?” Frankie laughed and laughed, half slithering off the bench. “Fuck it. It’s America. He can have her. Just divorce me, please.”

  A man in casual, respectable dress—oxford shirt and khakis—came down the sidewalk. It was Frankie’s regular doctor, and he greeted Frankie with a smile. Frankie wanted to show him the papers he’d received, notifying him that he was being taken off disability. He rooted around in his trouser pockets, producing as usual fistfuls of business cards and rumpled court papers. The doctor looked at the notification. “Well, we’ll just have to start over,” he said. He walked on.

  “He’s a real humanitarian doctor,” Frankie said. “Best I ever had.”

  Frankie languished around town, laughing, trading stories with other unemployed people in the park, killing time. And then the test resumed. He got evicted for a week from the Grove Street Inn. He walked in smoking a cigarette, and one of the workers there reminded him that this was against the rules. At that moment he was feeling gloomy about walking into a homeless shelter, remembering the days when he was flush with cash, and he said, “Go fuck yourself.” He was banished and wouldn’t leave. The management on duty called the police. Frankie said he wanted to get his windbreaker from his room. A friend, a fellow resident, said he’d get it for him. In the meantime the cop arrived. Standing outside, Frankie saw the cop’s reflection in the window of the front door. The cop had intercepted the friend and was searching the pockets of Frankie’s windbreaker. Frankie watched as the cop found both his crack pipe and the nip of vodka he’d left in the pockets. So he was ready when the cop came out, carrying the jacket.

  “This yours?” the cop asked him.

  He denied it was his jacket, and the cop let him go. But it had begun to rain, and now he had no jacket. He spent most of the night in Pulaski Park and most of the next day wandering around town while his clothes dried out. He was tired. Tonight he’d have to find a place to sleep. In the evening, he ran into a friend from Grove Street who told him to go to the emergency room at the hospital. “Act like you’re real depressed.” His friend said that had worked for him. Emergency Services had put him in their “respite bed,” available for people in desperate straits, said Frankie’s friend.

  So around nightfall Frankie hiked up Elm Street to the hospital, about a mile away. He went in and told the nurse that he had tried to kill himself last night, by overdosing on his antidepressant. “I hear there’s, like, an asbestos bed for things like this,” he said. The nurse and a doctor questioned him and they did blood and urine tests, but no one from Emergency Services came. He languished in the waiting room for hours. Finally the nurse came out and told him, “They don’t have a bed available, but you’re going to be all right.”

  “I coulda told you that three hours ago,” muttered Frankie.

  He walked back to town, to a rooming house, and knocked on the door of a man who used to be a friend. The man let him in but said Frankie couldn’t stay, because he was trying to get off drugs, and they argued, and the man called the police. So Frankie started walking again. He headed out of downtown toward Florence. The agency Service Net had recently opened a renovated apartment building for the needy there. Frankie had tried to get a room in it, but had been turned down. “They picked a pot dealer from the shelter instead,” he reminded himself indignantly. It was almost dawn when he arrived. Someone he didn’t know let him in, and he went into the building’s common room and stretched out on a sofa. He had just fallen asleep when yet another cop arrived and rousted him. He could smell himself now, an odor like rotting fruit. Frankie walked back downtown. To the rooming house at 96 Pleasant Street, the place where he’d lived as Samson before he had met Carmen. Some old acquaintances were loitering outside the front door. “The cops’ve been all over the place, lookin’ for you,” one of them said.

  “Holy shit,” Frankie thought. “Somebody who looks like me did something.” He was irritated with the cops in general. He had his pride, but then again he wasn’t about to call Carmen and ask her to hide him. There was only one thing to do. “All right. I’ll call Oakie.”

  “Where are you?” Oakie’s voice was loud. Frankie had to hold the phone away from his ear. He was too tired for loud noises.

  “I’m not tellin’ you,” said Frankie. “What’s goin’ on?”

  “Nothing. Just don’t miss your court date down in Holyoke.”

  Frankie thanked him. He was greatly relieved. “I can tell it was all right just the way he said it.”

  This was like an omen. That very day he met another woman, overweight certainly, but sweet. “Anyway, I’m not into that physical shit,” Frankie said. And she had an apartment at River Run. He moved in with her. But Frankie didn’t go to his court date in Holyoke—he didn’t have a car now and that morning it just seemed too hard to go by bus. And Oakie, of all people, had him arrested on the default warrant. He spent a week in jail in Ludlow, which he hated, partly because he couldn’t smoke in there. Then Peter made a phone call for him—anyway, that was what Peter and Oakie said. He came back to town, and returned to the woman’s apartment, only to find some other men there. He got into a fight, which he lost. Being broke and homeless can be an exhausting business in itself.

  Then he got lucky again. A local woman had a boyfriend at the county jail, who had begged her to smuggle in some cocaine. The woman went to a friend of Frankie’s, an old Northampton rooming-house friend, and he went to Frankie, who knew just what to do. They sold the woman a bag of baking soda for $500, and split the proceeds. When she realized she’d been burned, the woman confronted Frankie’s conspirator. He blamed Frankie. She said she wanted Frankie killed. His friend said he’d do the job. She gave him $300 in advance. The man split that money with Frankie too. So now Frankie had $400. He used most of it to get back together with Carmen, figuring that if he had some money, she would take him in. She was living in a neighboring town. For three weeks he partied with her and her boyfriend, and, while he partied, he waited for revenge. They used up his money first, mostly on crack; then they started cashing the stolen checks that her boyfriend had. Her boyfriend wasn’t very cagey. Frankie made sure that he didn’t forge any signatures himself. The night the money ran out, Carmen got angry. There was a fight. The neighbors called the cops. Frankie left the apartment just in time. He was standing outside the elevator with his shoes in his hands when the police arrived. They arrested both Carmen and her boyfriend, charging them with possession of crack cocaine and Carmen with assault besides. Frankie also told them about the stolen checks. They let him go.

  Things were looking up. After his last short stint in Ludlow, he had gone to Springfield, borrowed some money from his father, and gone to the Mardi Gras, a Springfield strip joint, or, as Frankie put it, “a tit bar.” He had spent the whole afternoon there, drinking and recuperating from his week in ja
il, and who should walk in but an old friend and business associate, a man he’d met years ago in Northampton. Frankie’s old friend had gone straight—he swore he had—and was living in Springfield now. He owned both some apartments and a small homerenovation business, called Hearth ’n Home Construction. He offered Frankie a job and an apartment in Springfield. Carmen, meanwhile, had started making overtures of reconciliation. After all, Frankie would be the only witness against her on the pending assault and cocaine charges, and she’d been evicted from her last apartment. It seemed as though, at last, a better life was beckoning.

  Archeologists surmise that portions of humanity stopped wandering when they began to make graveyards and other fixed investments in a place. But the traveling instinct has never been fully suppressed. It remains as powerful as the nesting one, especially among Americans, a famously peripatetic people who get misty-eyed over the idea of home. Some try to reconcile this paradox by saying they carry home with them wherever they go, and this was true of Frankie if it was true of anyone. He didn’t find it hard to imagine leaving Northampton. He still liked the town, its mellowness, its lack of blaring horns, but the comfort had gone out of it for him. It had grown too small. All the cops knew him and his unlicensed driving status. Besides, at the Mardi Gras that day, he’d discovered new opportunities elsewhere. On an August afternoon, he sat in the bar of the old Bay State Hotel, saying good-bye to Northampton. An old Claudette Colbert movie was playing on the TV. An elderly man sat alone at the bar. Frankie, drinking beer, sat at a table from which he could keep an eye on his new car.

  It was a used and rather battered American car. “I got it for a deuce. It runs good.” He had found a license plate for it at a junkyard, and a 1996 registration sticker to put on the plate, which he’d found in a parking lot—crouching down behind a properly registered car and carefully peeling off the sticker.