by Adam Wilson
“Shit on a brick,” Spine says.
Downstairs, there’s a guy. A black guy, I should say, because it makes a difference. The difference is we want black people to like us. None of us had black friends growing up. In college, the black kids stay separate, have their own a cappella group.
The black guy in our living room looks only marginally homeless. He smells of wet ink and burnt plastic. Has holes in his Nikes, holes in his sweater. His lips are dry and tinted white.
We circle. The intruder brushes glass from his body like he’s unaware we’re watching, wielding weapons. He scratches his arms, mumbles under his breath.
“Hey, guy,” Mike C. says.
And suddenly the intruder’s snapped out of his daze, borne into motion. He grabs one of Spine’s guitars—they’re mounted on the wall—holds it two-handed from the neck like he’s about to hit a backhand. But the guitar is heavy; the intruder’s arms buckle under the Gibson’s weight. Instead of swinging at us, or dropping the ax and hustling back out through the window, the intruder sits on the glassy floor and begins to play.
The guitar is Spine’s pride and joy—a semihollow ES-335 with cherry finish—his favorite of the five guitars he owns. I’ve seen him polish the thing for over an hour.
The intruder strums the open strings, plucks a C chord, fingers a dainty little lead. Then he starts crying.
“Fuckin’ A,” Mike F. says.
We’re still surrounding the guy. I don’t have a weapon, but I notice I’m holding Spine’s laptop like I might smash skull. Mike F. flicks the Taser on and off, pockets it. Mike C. unballs his fists. Donny’s knife is back in chrysalis. I put the laptop on the coffee table. Spine’s still gripping the bat. The intruder’s still crying. The girls, wearing Spine’s T-shirts, watch from the staircase. They grip each other’s arms. One shirt says “Legend” in gold lamé.
I fill a glass of water. The intruder wipes his tears. He sniffs the water.
“Smell all right?” Donny says.
The intruder nods, takes a small sip, then a bigger one. He clears his throat, prepped to make a proclamation.
“Cigarette,” the intruder says. The voice is thin and weak, like an un-amped guitar—no sustain.
Spine fishes a cig from his bathrobe pocket. He lights it himself, hands it off to the intruder. For a second their fingers touch.
The intruder takes a deep drag, exhales through his nose. The rest of us stand staring. The intruder eyes our apartment. The floor is covered in trash and hardened socks. On the ceiling hangs a tie-dye banner with Bob Marley’s face silkscreened in the middle.
Outside it’s raining. The wind carries rain in through the broken window. It’s the end of April, and it gets cold at night. The intruder is shivering. He takes another long drag, sticks the cig between guitar strings.
Spine nervously watches, bracing for ash marks on the neck of his ax. I imagine he’s thinking of the story down the line, the way he’ll tell it at a party one day—the guy who broke in and played the blues, scarred the cherry Gibson with a cigarette tattoo, imbued it with a hint of hard living.
“How about a beer?” the intruder asks. His voice sounds louder now, more sure.
Donny grabs two from the fridge, tosses one over, pops the other for himself.
The intruder takes a slug. He licks his lips and says, “Ah.”
I sit on the La-Z-Boy. Spine, Donny, and Mike F. are on the couch. No one’s picking up the broken glass. We don’t have a dustpan. The girls have moved into the doorway, and the intruder has noticed.
“Hello there,” he says, and smiles for the first time. He’s missing half a front tooth. The girls look like kids at a grown-up party, pulled from sleep by parents for the party guests’ amusement.
Spine points a finger at the intruder. “Watch it,” he says.
For a second we tense. Spine looks at the bat. Then he laughs, hard. He actually slaps his knee.
Mike C. packs a bowl, sparks it. Spine picks up another guitar, this one an acoustic. He hammers out twelve-bar in E, playing ninths to show off, sliding up and down the neck.
The intruder tries to keep up. He’s not as good as Spine, but knows the pentatonic scale, a couple riffs.
Spine grins like an idiot, says, “Play it, babe.”
We take hits off the bowl. I look at the girls’ legs, wonder how their thighs got so tan. I try to see if they’re wearing underwear. The girls wrap themselves in a wool blanket stitched with the Coca-Cola logo.
Mike F.’s got his bass now, joined in on the jam. Donny slaps at an African hand drum. One girl—Ankle—pulls a bag from Spine’s pocket, lays out lines on the table. The intruder perks up, puts down the guitar.
“You first,” Spine says. He hands the intruder a rolled up hundred. The intruder looks skeptical. He snorts and hands the hundred back to Spine, making a show of his non-stealing.
Next thing I know he’s standing, singing. Spine, Mike F., and Donny accompany.
“I broke into a house.” Ba-wah, ba-wah.
“Wasn’t soft as a mouse.” Ba-wah, ba-wah.
“Thought these white boys would kill me.” Ba-wah, ba-wah.
“Gonna drill me and beat me.”
“Gonna grill me and eat me.”
We’re all laughing, even the girls. Spine has that Connecticut smile going, the kind that whispers, “I’ve won at life!” His blue eyes actually sparkle. The girls swoon. The intruder continues.
“But they give me a smoke.” Ba-wah, ba-wah.
“And they give me a toke.” Ba-wah, ba-wah.
“And they give me some coke.” Ba-wah, ba-wah.
At this, the intruder leans over and huffs another rail. Comes back in on the next bar, still in time.
“Now there’s just one more thing.” Ba-wah, ba-wah.
“That my new friends can bring.” Ba-wah, ba-wah.
“Make me scream cry and beg.”
“Wait for it,” Spine says.
“For a touch on those legs!”
The intruder winks at the girls, sticks out his tongue.
“Ew,” says Ankle, furrowing her upturned, tiny nose. Toes appears not to have heard.
“Hey now,” Spine says.
It occurs to me that everyone is very high. The intruder takes another cigarette from the pack out on the table.
“You got a name?” Spine says.
“Jess,” the intruder says.
“A girl’s name,” Spine says.
“That’s right,” Jess says.
“Well, Jess,” says Spine, “we can’t let you steal any of our shit.”
“Ba-wah, Ba-wah,” Jess says.
The rain’s coming harder now. Jess looks out the window. I see the rest of his night flash before him, the way it will go when we kick him out and he comes down. The rain won’t let up until morning.
“There’s a couch on the covered porch, though,” Spine says. “If you want to crash.”
Around this time, I was coming to terms with my lot in life. May came on, clothes came off—first sweaters, then socks and stockings—barefoot coeds sunning in the quad, books splayed across burnt stomachs.
I was onto Trotsky now, dreaming of Mexico. I sat in my room while the others partied downstairs with Jess; I listened to mariachi, sniffed imagined bougainvillea, ate takeout enchiladas. When I closed my eyes I saw Leon in that freight train, groggy head resting on a rice bag, rolling through Tampico at dusk. I saw Frida Kahlo slow-riding him, eyebrows arched, twisting the corners of his mustache with her fingers. Some nights I could feel the sweep of Stalin’s ice pick through the center of my brain.
A knock on the door.
“Entrez-vous,” I say.
There stands Isabelle—Spine’s actual girlfriend—slouched like a sunflower too heavy for its stem. She wears a thin linen dress belted high above her navel. My room is dim, lamp-lit, and in the shadowy doorway she looks almost like a silhouette, features blurred, but the shape of her apparent: heavy breasts, the crescent curve of ca
lves.
I’m on the futon mattress, back propped against the wall. My immediate instinct is to take cover under blankets, hide myself in the face of Isabelle’s beauty.
Isabelle has told me that I’m like a brother to her, her best friend. These are awful words, the plight of the sensitive man. I’ve been battling them for years. Isabelle picks a book up off my desk, flicks the pages, puts it down. She takes a cigarette from my pack but doesn’t light it. She puts the unlit cig behind her ear.
“New roommate seems interesting,” she says. Her eyes flitter across my bookshelf, scanning for fresh purchases. She doesn’t look at me. Her eyes are green.
“That’s the word for him,” I say. “Interesting. The situation is, well, I don’t know exactly.”
“Well, Robert is certainly infatuated,” she says, using Spine’s given name.
“That’s Spine for you,” I say.
“Spine, Spine, Spine,” she says, and lies down on the futon, inches from me, head on the pillow. Isabelle smells like shampoo and the faintest trace of sweat. We’ve reclined like this a hundred times, but still my heartbeat quickens.
I could slip beneath the linen, hold my palm against her panties, feel the heat coming off her.
Sometimes I think she wouldn’t stop me. I’ve never tried. Spine finds my friendship with Isabelle amusing and pathetic.
“So he broke in,” she says, “and you let him move in with you.” She’s trying to sound exasperated but can’t hide that she’s impressed.
“Spine let him,” I say. “And he hasn’t moved in. He’s just crashing for a while.”
“Shit on a brick,” Isabelle says, imitating Spine’s nasal whine.
I snatch the cigarette from behind her ear, walk to the window, lean against the sill, and smoke. Isabelle crawls under the duvet, oblivious. If I told Isabelle about Ankle and Toes, it would only make things worse. She would tell me to fuck off. She might hit me. She would wait to cry until she was alone. She would let herself believe whatever lies Spine would spin to fix the situation.
Telling her I love her wouldn’t help the matter either.
“You figure out your summer plan?” she says.
“Still working at the bookstore,” I say.
“What about Paris?” she says. “Me, you, and Robert, smoking in cafés? I thought that was on?”
I see myself alone at a bar, fumbling with my French, waiting for them to finish fucking so I can reenter the hotel room.
“Too expensive,” I say.
“Suit yourself,” she says. “It’s too bad, though—so many beautiful women in Paris. I figured we could find you one.”
Later on, I can hear them. Spine grunts from the gut. Isabelle sounds like a bird, no, not a bird, more like a bell—clean tone, natural vibrato. I imagine her mouth open wide, the tremor of her tonsils, the rush of air coming out.
Donny worked at Campus Convenience. Twice a week during his afternoon shift, Donny’s boss’s and his coworker’s lunch breaks coincided, leaving Donny alone in the store for twenty minutes. When the coast was clear, Donny would call us on the house phone and scream, “Biotch!” into the answering machine. We’d grab backpacks and go, cleaning out the aisles, stocking up on freezer supplies.
Spine insists that Jess come along.
“I don’t know, man,” Jess says. “Sounds off to me.” Jess bites his bitten nails, looks sideways at Spine.
“Not off,” Spine says. “Easy.”
Spine pulls on one of those full-face ski masks with holes cut out for eyes.
“Trust me, baby,” Spine says.
“Take that fucking mask off,” I say. “This isn’t a movie.”
“Seems off,” Jess says, and shakes his head. “Something’s not right.”
We run through the aisles, adrenalized. I feel sexy and alive. We steal Slim Jims, Ritz crackers, gummy worms. Jess is in and out in a matter of seconds with only a Snickers bar to show for it.
“I ain’t playin’,” he says, when we’re back home.
That night we feast. Spine buys one of those three-foot sausages from Stop and Shop, and we cut it in pieces to top our stolen frozen pizzas. We mix vodka with Mountain Dew, smoke joints and cigarillos.
Jess minimally partakes. I’ve never seen him eat. I get the sense that he’s waiting, watching and waiting for Spine to lay out the lines, conspiratorially hand Jess a rolled up hundred, whisper, “Play it, babe.”
It’s getting toward dawn. We’re high as skyscrapers, looking over the mountainous heaps of our living room city, scraping smatterings of powder, the dregs of Spine’s stash. Ankle and Toes are twitchy, moody. They’ve stopped massaging Spine’s neck and shoulders. They lie head to foot on the nasty floor, staring up at Bob Marley, listening to Spine play some slow fingerpick. Jess sways, smiles. Spine scratches his chin.
What Spine wants is for Jess to lead the way, searching the city streets for one last hit.
“I don’t know, man,” Jess says. “This ain’t the hour.”
“Buddy,” Spine says. He’s got a hand on Jess’s shoulder, and he speaks in a calm, low voice like he’s a boxing coach, coaxing his fighter in for one last round. “Now or never, dawg,” Spine says.
We walk outside. The sun lingers on the horizon, threatening to burst the graying black. The streets and lawns smell like dew. Jess leads us. We follow, trancelike, weaving over Longfellow Bridge as the skyline approaches. We’ve been walking for an hour. I’m sweating, half asleep, or maybe I’m sleepwalking and the morning is a surreal dream: this sleeping city, our holey leader, Spine, humming the blues.
Jess leads us through the Chinatown gates into the old Combat Zone. I remember hearing stories about this place: the night-beat hookers asleep on benches, fishnet legs fetally curled; cops hitting the homeless with nightsticks; human corpses laid out with the morning trash.
Things are different these days. The city is quiet. The streets are empty. It smells of fish. Jess tells us to give him all our money.
For a second we hesitate, look up at the building, back at Jess. His hands are in his pockets.
Spine takes out his wallet, peels off a fresh fifty. The rest of us give Jess tens and twenties. Jess crumples the money in his palm. Whatever we’re getting, we’re overpaying. Jess says to wait outside.
We light cigarettes almost in unison, blow smoke at the remaining stars as they shine weakly against the gray and coming blue. We check our watches.
Jess reappears ten minutes later, grinning. We follow him to the harbor, watch the ocean lap its waves. Jess pulls a bag from his pocket. It looks like pebbles.
Walking back to Cambridge, as the sun warms my body, I feel like part of the people’s cavalry, its vestigial remains.
The next day Donny calls us in for another round of theft. Jess doesn’t come along. Says he’s too tired, needs some shuteye. He says shuteye like it’s a word he’s only just learned.
When we get back to the house everything is gone: instruments, plasma TV, stereo equipment, all our laptops.
“Shit on a brick,” Spine says. “Shit on a goddamn, motherfucking brick.”
Jess must have had help, known a guy with a van. Our furniture’s gone too—Spine’s king bed, even the corduroy couch with all the rips and burns.
At first, it’s hard to believe. I stare at the empty living room as if the stuff is still there but I’m just not seeing it, not looking hard enough.
A smile slowly opens on Spine’s face. His lips snake toward his ears. Spine starts to laugh.
“He deserved it,” Spine says. “He deserved it all.”
When Isabelle knocks on my door that night I don’t say a word. I’m under covers with the lights off, listening to our next-door neighbor play piano. I’ve been having trouble sleeping. The neighbor repeats the opening bars of some famous overture, a piece I recognize from movies but could never name.
Isabelle enters anyway, climbs into bed, lays her head against my chest. I lie perfectly still and try to slow my breathin
g. Isabelle adjusts herself, gets comfortable. She lays a leg over my legs.
“Spine passed out on the carpet,” she says. “Took too much Klonopin.”
“It’s been a stressful day,” I say.
“He thinks the whole thing is hilaaaaarious,” she says, elongating her vowels in imitation of Spine. “Now he gets to go on a shopping spree. What an ass.”
The hair on my arm stands from the static friction. The neighbor keeps screwing up on the exact same note and starting over.
“Why?” I say.
“Why what?”
“Why Spine?” I say. I run my fingers gently over her arm, just the tips. There is a long pause. Isabelle inhales like she’s about to say something, then stops herself. She fidgets a little and I stop stroking her arm.
“Don’t you see?” I say.
“See what?” Isabelle says.
I take a strand of her hair between my fingers. Isabelle says nothing. I only have to turn a tiny bit. I give the softest kiss I can, hardly a kiss at all, just closed lips brushing her ear.
“Don’t,” Isabelle says.
I roll on top of her, pin her arms to the mattress.
“Stop,” she says.
I’m not the kind of guy who acts like no means yes even when it does. I try to wear this weakness as a badge of honor. I roll off Isabelle, sit up.
“I can’t do this anymore,” I say.
“Do what?” Isabelle says.
“I’m done,” I say.
“Just come back and cuddle me,” she says, and yawns. It’s the yawn that gets me.
“No,” I say. Isabelle pulls my arm.
“You’re being dramatic,” she says. “Come on.”
“I’m done,” I say.
“Fine,” Isabelle says. She pulls herself up. I listen for her footsteps, let myself sink into the mattress. It feels like I could just keep sinking, falling through the floorboards, burrowing until I’m beneath the house itself, a mole to the earth’s soft middle.
