by Paul Russell
It threw me, sort of—like another one of those things that when you think about them later, it seems like maybe you should’ve made something of it, but at the time you didn’t think to. Still, it was something I went on about.
“You really don’t remember.” I was playing like I was hurt he didn’t remember, and I guess I was hurt a little. All that stuff in the Nu-Way Laundromat was stuff I thought back to a lot, especially when I couldn’t go to sleep and so I started to do those mind exercises Carlos had told me about that very first day, about thinking back to things and trying to be there all over again. It occurred to me—maybe every time I did that I was changing something about what really happened, and so if I thought back to it enough it’d be like rubbing your finger on something that’s painted and wearing the paint away. It bothered me that Carlos was remembering something completely different, and I wondered if that was maybe because he didn’t think back to it as much and so he hadn’t rubbed as much away.
You probably know by now how I tend to get caught up thinking about one thing and I worry and worry it till it starts driving me crazy. I guess starting right that minute on the sidewalk, this one thing became the newest thing to drive me crazy. Trying to think—could I really not remember the way it was, in which case I was crazy, or was it Carlos who didn’t remember, and then he was the crazy one? And how was I going to know one way or the other about it, since only the two of us were there and nobody else?
I was sure I was right. I had to be. That laundromat was something important for me to think back to a lot. It was the one instant where everything in my life changed, though I didn’t know it at the time. I thought I was still living my same old life, but I wasn’t. That life had stopped being there the instant Carlos walked in the door: I was already in some crazy new life without even knowing it.
It bothered me that Carlos could remember all that so completely differently. Unless he had some reason for not telling it the way it happened, in which case what was that reason? To keep it just between the two of us? Or because there were other things that got in the way of telling it straight that he knew about and I didn’t? And so there I’d go off in another direction, worrying it out to the threadbare end and still not getting anywhere.
A few days after that interview, I happened to be alone with Seth. He was in the apartment going through some boxes of stuff Carlos stored for him there. I think he was kind of pissed off at not being able to find what he was looking for—which meant it probably wasn’t exactly the best time in the world to try to have a conversation, but I went ahead and had one anyway.
“Seth,” I said.
He didn’t look around at me, he just kind of grunted and kept tossing stuff out of the box onto the floor.
“You remember that first time you met me, when I came to where you all were shooting, with Verbena and the pickup truck and everything?”
He emptied a box of tools out on the floor.
I told him how I remembered that day one way, with me being the only kid there, and Carlos remembered it completely different, and anyway that wasn’t even the first time Carlos ever met me.
Seth must’ve found what he was looking for, because he stood up and turned around and looked at me. He was holding some camera-piece.
“Look, Tony,” he said, and this is exactly what he said—“you are really pretty amazingly dumb.”
It wasn’t what I was expecting him to say. I just looked at him back.
“I don’t understand,” I said. And really, when I look back at it all, I guess he was right—I really was pretty amazingly dumb. But then, how was I supposed to know anything?
“You weren’t exactly the first kid to come nosing around Carlos,” Seth said like he was mad at me personally for that fact, “and you sure as hell aren’t the last. So don’t get any ideas.”
All at once I completely knew what he was talking about. It came in a sort of rush right at me, and I’d never even thought about it before.
“Oh that,” I said—like I knew what he meant all along.
Maybe Seth was pissed off at Carlos for some reason that day and that’s why he told me, or maybe he would’ve told me the same thing anytime I’d asked him about it, but I hadn’t ever asked before.
“See,” he said, “I just think people have got a right to know certain things. So they can make their own decisions, if you know what I mean. But to do that they’ve got to know what’s what.”
“And you’re going to tell me what’s what,” I said.
“Since no one else seems to want to? Yeah. Sure. Like I’m the one to do it. And like you didn’t know Carlos has this sex thing for kids. I mean, you’re not stupid.”
“No, I’m not stupid,” I said, though of course you might say I’ve always been stupid. This was a conversation we should’ve been having a long time ago.
“So—he gets them.” Seth shrugged. “They just come around.”
“What do you mean, they just come around?”
“Like you came around,” he said. “That’s Carlos. Whatever gets you through life, I say. Whatever takes you to hell and back again.”
“So he was fucking around with some other kid besides me back in Owen?” It was like I was hearing myself do the talking but I wasn’t really there.
“Who remembers Owen?” Seth waved his hand like Owen, Kentucky, bored him to death. It wouldn’t exactly have been the first time in the world somebody had that reaction. “Owen was just some little town where we were making a movie.”
“I was in Owen,” I said.
Seth laughed. “Yeah,” he said, “you were in Owen.” He shook his head like he thought it was all too funny. “You wouldn’t smoke my goddamned pot in Owen,” he said. Like it was still some sore spot with him. “Sure there was some other kid in Owen. That’s why we were in fucking Owen in the first place, some kid Carlos saw in the grocery store and he liked the looks of so that’s where we were going to shoot the last part of the film. All so he can drive up and down the goddamned street looking for this kid, which I hate to say it, but it wasn’t you.”
“Who then?”
“How do I know who? I don’t think Carlos ever found him. He wanted to write this script for him. He had it all worked out. This kid was going to be the star of his next movie. He always wanted to do a movie with a kid in it, and he never had.”
It sort of made me light-headed, hearing all this for the first time. Like I probably should have sat down in a chair before he told it to me. “Look,” Seth said, “I’m not saying you should do anything different, just because maybe now you know some things you didn’t know before. But I’m betting you probably knew them. I’m right about that, aren’t I? That you knew them.”
It was odd—because suddenly it seemed like I did know them all along, I just never sat down and said them to myself.
“I guess I knew,” I told him. “Yeah, I guess I guessed it.”
He just nodded. He had these big eyes that made him look funny sometimes, and sometimes they made him look sad, and this time he looked sad. I thought how he wasn’t a bad guy, Seth—just he had a terrible temper and was always at least a little bit stoned, so you never knew what he was going to do next.
“You’ve had some kind of time, haven’t you?” he said, sort of out of the blue.
I knew he meant Sammy, and the way Carlos cooped me up with him to see if we’d break—but we didn’t, so Carlos went ahead and made the movie.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s been some kind of time.”
“But you’re not sorry.”
I shook my head. “Why should I be sorry? It’s not over yet. Things are just starting up.”
“You really think that?”
“I really do,” I told him. I wasn’t sure whether I did or not, but it seemed like the thing to say. Because the whole time we were talking my brain was racing ahead about five hundred miles an hour to all the things I never thought about till now. And now I had to say to myself Carlos was fucking around with
other kids than me and what does that mean? And what my brain was saying was, Not much. Here I had the whisky and the sex and a bed to sleep in, and a movie I starred in and what more was I supposed to want than that? We had some kind of time together, me and Carlos—that was enough for me to say.
“So you’ll be staying around?” Seth asked. He was using his gruff voice on me, which meant he was trying to be nice to me without being too nice. “No matter what?” he said—like he was anxious about it.
“Probably I will,” I told him. “You can’t get rid of me just like that.” I smiled at him, the way I do when I’m being mean. “I’m going to be a star,” I told him. “You just watch me.”
“I’m watching you all the time,” he said. “I’m the camera lens.” We stood there looking at each other, me this kid who’d just turned eighteen about a week before and Seth, who must’ve been forty, with his big belly and his beard and him holding that stupid camera-piece that, now that he’d found it, he didn’t exactly know what to do with anymore. Which I guess put the two of us in the exact same situation—not knowing what to do with what it was we’d just found.
It was some kind of understanding between us right then. I know he thought I was stupid and all, but I don’t really care. Things wouldn’t have worked out the way they did if it’d been any other way between us, and I think we both probably knew that, even at that instant we were standing there looking at each other. Because for a stupid kid I was always pretty smart, and Seth knew that.
“You can tell Carlos you told me,” I said. “You can tell him I’m okay.” I planned to figure out later, on my own, if that was true.
“You’re sure you’re okay?” Seth asked one last time while he was heading out the door. “You can stay at my place if you’re not.” Like he was afraid I was going to snuff myself or something all because Carlos was fucking some kid other than me.
“I’m fine,” I told him. “You’ll see how fine I am.”
He sort of grumbled at that and then he was gone, and I was standing there in the middle of the apartment with the sun coming in through the windows and lighting up all the dust specks in the air so you couldn’t believe you were always walking around breathing air that dirty, and the whole weight of it sort of hit me. I thought back to that night I tried to run away and then came back because I found out I couldn’t run away, or I didn’t want to—and I thought, I’d have gone completely insane if I found out about all this back then. But now it was just something that was happening and it wasn’t going to be the end of the world. It was just part of me and Carlos, and I almost had to laugh, thinking about Carlos chasing that kid around Owen and coming up with me instead.
Still, I didn’t feel too great, so I took a walk uptown—which you may be saying, Tony, that’s what you always do when things don’t go your way, and I guess that’s true, but that’s the way I am. It helps me to get out and look around and see what’s what, to use Seth’s phrase. So I went uptown to the library. I wanted to look at that picture I used to look at, the one of the guy my age feeding his little sister some soup in the ghetto. I hadn’t gone back there since we’d made the movie, and it was really strange to see it again. It made me remember those times I spent in the winter talking with Sammy, which seemed like a dream now that the movie was made. Like making the movie emptied all that out of me the way you’d drain pus out of a sore. It made me sad to look at the picture and think that kid from Lodz was still dead whether I looked at his picture or we made that movie or not. He was still dead and I was still going on, and looking at him now was like looking at some old picture of me a long time after I’d stopped being that person anymore.
Though I guess you never completely lose it, that person you used to be, and so I hadn’t lost him either. He was going to be with me a long time to come.
I put the book back on the shelf wondering if I’d ever come look at it again. Then I went on the few blocks to Central Park, where in the summer we played soccer but we didn’t anymore because Carlos was always away during the day again and even though it was different now because I knew the city and got out and about a lot more, still it was sort of the same as it was back in the winter.
There were a few guys playing soccer, and even though they signaled me to join if I wanted, I didn’t. With Carlos not there I didn’t feel like I was part of it, even though it was great to watch those guys stampeding up and down and guiding the ball in between each other’s legs, and the dust and sweat and you could hear their heavy breathing when they stopped for a time out. I sat down on this little hill where the grass was worn away and there were candy wrappers and I almost sat down on a used condom till I moved a ways away and sat down again—and I watched them play for maybe an hour, feeling sad and far away from everything, and just watching like it was a movie, and I remember thinking to myself how, number one, I wasn’t angry with Carlos, and how, number two, I wasn’t going to let him fuck with me anymore or fuck me either for that matter, and how, number three, if I was thinking that, then what Seth told me that afternoon must really hurt a lot inside and I thought I was taking it pretty well, but I guess I wasn’t.
It’s one more of those times when I should’ve just walked away from everything but I didn’t. I was never very good at doing that, I guess—except maybe that time hearing Ted dry-humping his mattress put a move on me. Otherwise, with me it’s sort of like those little animals that get hypnotized by looking into the eyes of bigger animals; they can’t move, they just have to keep looking no matter what happens. I guess I was always one of the little animals. And Carlos—well, Carlos was Carlos.
By the time I got back to the apartment my throat was full up with looking at those soccer players. I was drunk with seeing them play the way they did, in and out of each other like they knew exactly what they were doing all the time—which they didn’t: I’d played out there before so I knew. And I also remember this, vividly even though it’s nearly ten years since then—by the time I got back to the apartment I was completely calm, and I knew what I was going to do.
When Carlos came in that night I was already in bed but I wasn’t asleep, I was just lying there in the dark, peaceful, ready for whatever was going to have to happen. Carlos didn’t turn on the light—he undressed and slipped into the bed next to me. He didn’t touch me or anything like he usually did. He just lay there next to me. We were both on our backs, looking up at the ceiling.
“So I hear you and Seth had a little dish-fest this afternoon,” he said—like it was just a piece of gossip that didn’t have anything in particular to do with him.
I felt strong. “Where’d you hear that?” I said.
Carlos reached over and turned on the light. At the same time, he said, “This pretty kid I was fucking up the ass told me.”
It wasn’t exactly what I expected him to say, and it made my heart go cold. He smiled that tight smile of his, and his Cherokee cheekbones rode up higher than ever, and it was like he was saying, Go on, fight me about it.
“Which one of them?” I said it as coolly as I could manage.
Carlos looked at me. I think I surprised him, matching him one for one like that.
Of course, I couldn’t match him very long.
“Do you want to meet him?” he asked.
I felt the floor give way under me. I couldn’t think of anything else but to risk it and say, “Sure, I’ll meet him. Anytime you want me to.”
Carlos grabbed me by the hair. “I knew I liked you,” he said. “I knew there was something about you, and I wasn’t wrong.”
I started to get really mad.
“So all that stuff back in Owen, about the movie script and everything—you just made it up.”
“I had to think fast,” he said. “Otherwise I was going to lose you.”
“Which maybe would’ve been better,” I told him, “for the both of us.”
“Definitely not,” he said. “Absolutely definitely not.”
“I can’t believe it,” I said. “You’r
e fucking around with little kids.”
I wanted it to sound like I was furious, though I knew I couldn’t, exactly.
“You’re not a very good actor sometimes,” Carlos said.
Which made me sort of punch him in the shoulder, and he punched me back. It didn’t go any further than that. We just lay there for another minute or so.
“But you’re a very good person,” he went on to say. “You’re always a very good person, which means life is hard for you.”
“And you’re not a very good person?” I asked.
“Are you kidding? Anybody who thinks fucking is a way of life’s not going to be a very good person.”
I told him I thought fucking was a pretty good way of life. “It’s sure gotten us some times, now hasn’t it?”
“Oh, anything can get you by for a while,” Carlos said.
He looked sadder than I’d ever seen him.
Sometimes it was pretty hard to talk to Carlos. You felt like he was lying on the bottom of some deep river and you were in a boat fishing for him with a long line and no bait. I told him, “If I learned anything from The Company, it is—you take things but you also have to give them back. Okay? Lots of people probably say they believe that, but I think I really do, Carlos. I think it was you and Sammy who taught me that, even though at the time I didn’t know that’s what I was learning.” Which was a kind of surprising thing for me to say—but as soon as I said it, I knew I meant it completely.
“I think I have faith in you,” Carlos said. “I think that’s the only way to put it.”
“What do you mean, faith?” As usual, Carlos was about ten steps ahead of me. He was an incredibly reckless person in a lot of ways, but I think he also had this incredible sense of what he could do and what he couldn’t do—and the whole time he was with somebody, he was letting the rope out, and tightening it up, and always playing right on the edge of things. When you think about it, it’s amazing he didn’t blow it more times than he did.
“I’m talking about having faith in how you see things. How things can be bigger than you or me, and how that doesn’t seem to bother you the way it would bother most people. How I think maybe you know how to stand aside and watch yourself, and see what’s what with yourself. Which is what makes you a such a terrific actor when you’re not faking it.”
