by Max Winter
Only enough matches for a fireplace fire and restarting it, so for supper I roasted my hot dog on a stick. Saving the bread for tomorrow.
1/27/01
My mom was young when she had me and when she died. To go with the breast cancer she’d already had, she got brain cancer from the sewing machine she hung her head over forty-eight hours a week for at least a thousand weeks. Electromagnetic fields. I would watch her change. I remember wondering, Did they get thrown out or put in a jar or burned in a furnace? I looked to Pop’s bookshelf for answers, and all I found was a book on World War II, which I hid in my room. I’d read it under the covers with a flashlight. It was the piles of bodies that made me feel most ashamed. But I couldn’t stop myself from looking night after night. The pictures made me feel weak in a way I liked. I felt delicate, like paper.
I missed two pantry shifts at the restaurant to bury her. I asked for more time off, and my boss told me, “We all got folks who die,” and went back to sweating onions. “Life is showing up,” he added over his shoulder. Later, during one of his six smoke breaks, I pissed in the chicken stock, took his knives, and walked out the front door through the dining room. At home I tattooed L-O-V-E on the knuckles of my left hand and was about to write H-A-T-E on the right when I realized I needed all the help I could get and went with L-O-V-E again. Come on, world, I thought. I’m right here.
“Tell him I died,” my dad supposedly instructed my mom right before he split. I wasn’t even born yet. “I was young,” my mom told me when I turned nine and started asking questions. “But he had these white jeans and looked like Steve McQueen.”
“Hank LaChance was a chucklehead,” yelled Pop from the parlor. “Ham-and-egging son of a bitch cost us the States. Twice!” Pop couldn’t see worth a damn, but he had ears like a bat. He kicked my father off his coaching staff before he knocked up my mom, who at that point had been going out with his starting center. I’m glad Mom at least had a little fun at one point.
She was seventeen when she met my old man, who was twenty-nine. Thirty? Who knows. Older than her. I watched the second hand sweep across the face of the kitchen clock. “Sex makes kids,” my mom whispered at me after it had swept past the 3456789. “Don’t forget that. You’ll save trouble.”
Me, I’ve always liked older women. They’ve got more of whatever it is that makes us different from the animals we wear and eat and keep as pets, and they at least know to lick their goddamn finger before they go sticking it where they shouldn’t. But I’m talking about college girls when I mean young. A high schooler? Come on. I’d rather fuck a sack of cats and knuckles. But my mom was old inside, like me, and for a lot of the same reasons. Who knows about my old man. I sure don’t.
Cleaned all the cloudy mirrors with alcohol and covered them with sheets. To keep them clean.
2/12/01
When this job is through, I’ll need a place of my own. I’m thinking of moving back to the East Side, where all the trees are and X isn’t, and where they don’t have house fires, except for that one time my painting crew forgot to hose down the side we had just heat-stripped. It burst into flames while we were fifteen minutes into cold beers at the Hot Club, watching the sun set over the power plant. When we saw the smoke rising from College Hill, we even joked about it. It was a Friday. No one got hurt, but our boss got sued and we got fired.
I’m sorry I didn’t see it up close. Watching it burn might have really been something.
When I was twelve, I set that one field on fire but didn’t have the guts to watch. It wasn’t an accident, but I could’ve easily pretended it was. Back then, people might’ve believed me. If I knew then what I know now—that getting in trouble is just a bunch of bullshit they use to keep you in line—I would’ve stuck around to see the flames eat the grass in lines and feel that hot nothing inside me, somewhere up above my balls, until my knees shook.
Real trouble’s not something you get into or out of. It’s something you are or are not.
Weather was warm. Recemented loose steps. Four in all.
2/13/01
The last time I lived on the East Side was in the early ’90s, in a Mount Hope four-bedroom with drop ceilings and roommates who would fake break-ins to steal and hock each other’s shit, then pool money to buy it back. Near the end, when we hadn’t paid rent for at least two months, our landlord, Ike Hafkin, sent his kid over to block their van in the driveway with a long black Skylark. He got out, sniffed at no one, pulled up his jeans, and walked away, smiling. Later, we slim-jimmed his Buick, pushed it down the street, drove the van to a friend’s, then pushed the car back and locked it up. When the kid returned the next day and saw the van gone but the car exactly where he had left it, he looked to the right, to the left, then up at the sky. I watched between the blinds, from the couch.
I never liked that kid or his slumlord dad, but him crying on the sidewalk has stuck with me just the same. Then he put something from his pocket into his mouth, and I went to go throw up. I tend not to think, Poor kid, about any kind of rich kid, let alone some crybaby who’s older than me, but he sure looked like there’d be hell to pay when he got home, and I can feel that.
I came out of my nod to see my worst roommate, Zeke, nodding, across from me. Wet? I thought. Wet. At his feet, an empty bucket. “Fuck?” I asked, and threw the first thing I found at him. He flickered awake. “Fuck,” I said.
“You weren’t breathing,” he said.
“That’s not help.”
“I waited to fix.”
I gave him the finger. Again, apparently.
“That’s how I knew you were okay,” he said.
When I came out of it, it was dark and quiet and Zeke was gone.
At the end of the month, Hafkin evicted us. We scattered, and I wound up downtown, I think, over a gay bar for poor gays—twenty bucks a week, week to week.
I got clean, met Cliff and all those noise dudes. Then Cliff got the idea to live in a mill building above a flea market. Things were looking up.
2/14/01
Maybe I could pull off a place on Ives or Governor, at the wrong end of Fox Point. Soon all that’ll be left for folks like me will be Pawtucket, and after that, it’s back to Central Falls. But Pawtucket’s it for me. Third move’s as good as a fire, Mikey used to say.
2/16/01
Unscrewed clogged sink drains, cleaned out wads of hair, scum, something that shrank in the light.
It’s a small state. I could track down my old man and ask what gives? This is, after all, the same guy who returned again and again to the scene of the crime: who coached the same team he had let down as a player, who knocked up the high school sweetheart he missed the first time around. I can’t imagine he left town. But why should I. He didn’t want a kid, so he split. He was still pretty young. What man can’t understand that? I can understand that. Besides, how I grew up was as much Pop’s fault as it was my old man’s. I’ve made all my own choices in this life. It’s pretty easy to understand what’s what if you’re being honest.
2/27/01
I wound up doing time for some straight-up wrong-place/wrong-time-type bullshit. Look, I know firsthand how it’s like this with every con, and I’m not saying I am or was or ever will be innocent—no one is. But what got me put away was not my fault. This was when I was twenty-two and had been using on and off, mostly on, since I was eighteen, so I already had my share of chickenshit priors—copping, holding, breaking & entering—but I’m not going to talk about junk. People will go on and on about it, but in the end it’s pretty fucking simple: first it makes you feel great, then good, then only okay, then back and forth between that and shit till you finally decide to kick and go through hell and back just to get to a whole new kind of dull. Make no mistake: in the long run, shit is awful. But in the short run? Well . . . There you are.
This particular story starts with me chasing down a girl named Viv, who wasn’t a junkie yet and who wouldn’t finish art school and looked great
knocking in bank shots and back shots of rum. At some point her rich family cut her off for skipping class and shooting up, so hocking her ex-roommate’s stereo had been her idea—besides, she told me it was hers, the stereo. Seemed like a plan. Viv waited in the car and split as soon as the cops pulled up to the pawnshop. I never told them about her and did the time just like I thought a good guy would, and she never so much as came and visited. Plus she leaped at the chance to get clean without me around to drag her down—at a fancy retreat in Newport, and on her folks’ dime. This was when I was young and still wanted the kind of woman that got painted on the sides of bombers, and not the kind bombardiers carried around pictures of: girls who kissed soft and cooled pies on windowsills. The kind of girl who’d’ve stuck by me.
Viv and I met at a Bad Brains show at the old Livingroom. Me and a pal split a couple bottles of Hong Kong cough syrup waiting for doors. The sunlight hurt my eyes, but I still caught hers across the parking lot. I can’t remember who smiled first, but at some point we were both smiling. Later, in the pit, the codeine wore off and the ephedrine kicked in, and my vision became a smaller and smaller box, like an old, just-switched-off TV, and there she was, handing me the cherry Coke it turned out I needed all of. The color came back like that. My lungs held all the air in the club. We made out. I could taste the back of her throat and wanted more.
She was a year older, and over the next couple weeks we explored the seedier parts of Providence while we both cut class: me from Central Falls High, her from RISD. Look at you, I would say, corrupting a minor, and she would laugh. We had the same interests: punk rock and getting high. I took the bus to Providence and we’d meet up downtown, which was even more of a wasteland back then. The river was low and mostly paved over, the walking mall chockablock with wig and kung fu shops and pigeons and shitass drunks. After we had scored and fixed at this one biker bar underneath the highway, we’d sometimes split a hot dog—or a lobster roll if we were feeling rich—and a side of kidney beans at Haven Brothers. Or maybe just grab a cup of gray coffee and pocket a couple packs of crackers for later. Then we’d walk along the buried river, find the open spots, and stare down into the dark, metallic water. The river was slow and green and foul, and at low tide you could see all the rotten tires and rusted axles and whatnot sticking out of the muck.
Went up on roof. Replaced missing and broken pigeon spikes with filed-down date nails.
3/01/01
I’ll give X this, she’s made a point not to ask her family for money. Nothing’s worse than a rich kid who acts broke. Whenever these assholes go fake broke, they just ask their folks to write them a check. Real broke is your folks hitting you up for cash. Rich kids like to sit back and window-shop, play it cool—confident that things will work out for them in the end. And they will. Meanwhile, guys like me, we see something we want, we know we have to take it.
So why do I keep winding up with rich girls? I don’t know. I do know you can’t fuck guilt away.
Punch list is filled. Will find more chores. I walk around looking for them.
3/06/01
Descaled brass faucets.
I wish I were simple enough to find pride in fixing things, not because I want to feel proud, but because feeling it over working on someone else’s shit would have to mean that I’m all out of shame.
When I was making ends meet with yardwork, our crew took lunch breaks around the corner from Prospect Park. Because it was late March and still winter cold, I stayed in the truck with Teach—who I met in prison, and who hooked me up with the job once he got out. Maynor, who’d had enough of both of us, sat on the tailgate and ate the tortillas his wife had made and wrapped for him in tinfoil. I knew they were still warm, because I could see the steam rising in the rearview mirror. I couldn’t believe they stayed hot like that. In between bites of my peanut butter sandwich, I tried to shut out Teach’s Camel and hot coffee noises. And there she was: a moonfaced little girl in a dirty shirt with missing buttons and no shoelaces, her belly poking out in the middle of a school day. She stood on the street, just down the hill from us, looking like a refugee from someplace worse than Providence. Krakow, maybe. Some shithole in Peru. But, you know, in the late ’40s or something. She might as well have been in black-and-white. And she couldn’t speak English. I could just tell by looking in her eyes. The same way you can tell a virgin or a racist.
I put my sandwich down on the dashboard, next to Teach’s bag of weed, and got out and brushed myself off, just in case she was allergic. Moving slowly, and trying to come off as friendly-like, I approached her. When I got a respectable distance—maybe ten feet—I made up a whole form of sign language on the spot: opening my arms to suggest a neighborhood, closing them into a triangle to represent home. She stared in my direction for what felt like an hour, me frozen in a church shape with a stupid, fake, I’m-not-the-bad-kind-of-stranger look on my face. I repeated my symbols and held them. Nothing. And again. At some point my smile cracked. Just about then, for whatever reason, she turned away and walked to the tenement just down the street—a house that, so help me, I had never noticed before. Like her, it looked like it belonged in the past, back when downtown was even worse and Benefit got real slummy in spots. Sure there are still some ratty apartments here and there, but ratty in a collegiate sense. In other words, not ratty. But this was city poverty I was looking at. Too many mailboxes stuffed with former tenants’ collection notices, scaly paint the color of Chinese pollution, old sheets for curtains, the odd electric candle in the window. And when the little girl got to the basement apartment door, it opened and a grandpa-old guy pulled her inside, looking straight at me with what probably wasn’t even his worst look. He waited a solid minute before closing the door, just holding it and looking at me.
Back in the truck, between slurps of coffee, Teach told me he knew him, the old guy in the basement. That he was from the Ukraine and used to be a cop in Mexico. That Teach caught hepatitis cleaning his toilet in Juárez. Then something else. Teach’s stories were hard to follow. They trailed off like that.
3/11/01
Last night I slept in the only bedroom I hadn’t tried, thinking it might help. It didn’t. The twin beds are covered with dustcloths and look like they just died. I set my cot up in the far corner. You probably have a name for this room that I wouldn’t use even if I knew it.
I woke up thinking of Georgie Carwash talking at X like he does at all the other man-less neighborhood girls. All day long he lets them have it. Is my ex fair game now? Or does Dreadlocks see her home at night? I know I should want him to, but I don’t. Even though I can see—as clear and slow as cocktail ice—X alone and fumbling with the front door dead bolt while, across the street, Georgie checks his pompadour in a Plymouth’s side-view, wipes back a stray pubic-looking curl with one of his meat-hook thumbs. I want to bury my hands into that gasket of neck fat and wring the air from him. I want to see those puffy slits roll back into his skull. And then I want to bash that skull against the street until it comes apart like a pumpkin. Some nights I wake up choking, my heart pumping, and I’ll listen to the waves lapping against this rock and try to think of nothing, a nothing that, if I’m lucky, takes the shape of a still, clean lake instead of something human. I fall back asleep, hoping this time to sleep without dreams, like a convict lucky enough to have scored some halfway decent shit.
4/3/01
Ran into X yesterday, which turned out to be a long one. Had spent the better part of the afternoon at the corner bar, keeping an eye out for Georgie, who was nowhere to be seen, which wasn’t like him. Then I saw her walk by. Yelled hey, and wait up. “Hi, Rob,” she said flatly.
“Where’s Georgie?”
“He brought me flowers,” she said. “So I spent a couple hours staring at him through the blinds and repeating ‘disappear, disappear,’ over and over. The next morning he was gone, and no one’s seen him since.”
“You’re a witch,” I said, and made a point to grin just in cas
e she got me wrong.
“You don’t know the first thing about me,” she said back, but not at all playfully. We talked about something else after that—work or the fucking weather—but what, I can’t remember. The whole time I was fixed on her jaw, noticing how strong and set it looked, wondering if her face had gotten meaner since I’d left or if she’d always looked hard and antsy like that. Or if it was just with me. I had to say something. What could I say?
“I just want you to be with someone good, okay?” I said. “Just promise me he’ll be good to you.”
“How dare you say that,” she said. And before I could say anything—not that I had anything helpful to say—she had already turned and headed back to what had once been our place.
After three or four hours of walking around town, I crashed at Teach’s. His apartment had nothing in it and he turned in early. I couldn’t sleep, but not because I couldn’t sleep on floors. I spent the rest of the night staring up at his ceiling and destroying with my mind the shapes it made there.
4/16/01
Sanded soffits.
Since I’m going to burn this, I might as well fill it.
Growing up, the only non-war or non-sports-related reading around the house was Pop’s collection of gas station maps, which he kept in a shoebox under the bathroom sink. By fifteen I could visualize every road and campsite and pond in southern New England. Block Island seemed the most interesting, so I broke my mom’s weekly cigarette twenty for change at the milk store and took a bus to Providence, where I bought a one-way ferry ticket, figuring I could get work as a busboy or dishwasher at one of the hotels or dinner halls. In my trash bag I had a change of clothes, a hand towel, a Walkman with a couple tapes: one cool—but not then—the other never cool.
