by Dodds, Colin
“So, how about Joe? How is he?”
“Yeah, he got arrested. I went out with him to blow off some steam and talk over his options the other night. We were up late.”
“What was he arrested for?”
“The police broke into his house and found some drugs.”
Mom’s eyes widened in shock and curiosity.
“What kind of drugs?”
“Marijuana,” I lied.
“Was it serious, is he going to jail?”
“That’s what everyone is trying to figure out. I’m going to make some calls either tonight or tomorrow to get a better idea.”
“You and your friends. Even in preschool, if there was an impulsive, troublemaking kid—you’d be his best friend by the end of the day.”
“I think the crazy ones are your only chance. Most people are so boring that they’re barely even there. You’re never going to get anywhere with them,” I said, knowing how Mom loved when I said terrible things she not-so-secretly agreed with. She smiled.
“It’s true,” she seconded. “And the more boring they are, the more they want your attention. There’s one woman at work who comes up to my desk every day to complain about her boss. She tells me her boss said this, tells me what time her boss showed up, what her boss was wearing and when she wore it last. Then she tells me that she has one foot out the door. She says it twice a day, at least …”
Mom went on telling her tale of the boring woman, which despite her flourishes and outrage, became a boring story in the process. I drank my wine. The tired woman who’d been staring off from the back table came over and took our plates. We left the restaurant around eight. There was no decent movie to go see, no café to go have dessert at. I walked Mom back to her car and said good night. I was on the road when Joe called.
“Those fuckers are making me take sick days for when I was in jail. It’s total bullshit. I asked them: ‘What if I’m acquitted, do I get the days back? Do I get reimbursed?’”
“At least they didn’t fire you. Aren’t they all cops?”
“Fuck them. I almost lost it in the office. I was a total mess yesterday. What the hell were we thinking? Who drives around until eight in the morning? Sober?”
“I guess we do. But we did at least discover the lost city of the Incas.”
“Fucking Peru, Mass. That was the capper. Man, I left work at five oh one that day and went to my mom’s house and slept for about fifteen hours straight. I still have to clean up my place.”
“Jesus. I hope you don’t run into Marissa.”
“Whatever. I’ll clean it. But tonight, I’m getting fucked up. My friend John Crowder is getting kicked out of his place in off Highland Street so he’s throwing a complete and utter rager tonight. He says he’s got six cases of booze and someone’s supposed to bring a whole tank of nitrous.”
The image of a night at a Worcester party with Joe flashed before me. A night of cursory introductions and forced conversations with strangers, and of interminable remember-whens with the people I did know. A night of insisting that I was just in town for a few weeks, met by doubting nods. A night of not getting fucked up enough to feel at ease, but still getting too fucked up to drive home without risk.
“Man, I’m going to pass. I’m still a little wiped out and my only clean shirt just got splattered with tomato sauce. But maybe tomorrow. Call me when you get up?”
“Okay, will do.”
“And Joe, please, when you go to this thing, go there with a lot of friends. Be careful out there. You don’t want another ambush and you don’t want them to revoke your bail.”
Joe said that he knew, and that it would be cool, and we signed off as I descended the hill by the I-495 off-ramp. At the Fountainhead, someone must have been having a party because I had to park at the far corner of the parking lot. I walked the cold and starry hundred car lengths to the halogen-lit doorway. Dad’s apartment seemed like a barely tolerated house of exile to me when I arrived. But the mess I’d made had made it almost a home. Inside, I watched people sing and build and kill each other on the TV. I picked up my phone and called Jeff. This time he picked up directly, without his group home roommate handing the receiver off to uncertainty itself.
“Hey man, it’s Jim, how are you?”
“Oh, hey, Jim, man, what’s up?” Jeff said, sounding out of it.
We each gave our recaps. Mine was short because I didn’t feel like going into detail. His was short simply because he wasn’t doing very much. We talked around our recaps and played at sounding normal. He did it because he thought I required it. And I did it because I thought I had to set the bar for sanity.
“Well, maybe you should go back to school,” I said somewhere in our masquerade of banality.
“I know. I will go back to school and receive training for the profession of my choosing,” Jeff said in a robot voice that made us both laugh like fools.
The old Jeff reached out and told the truth—that his damaged mind was now unable to become the machine that we, his peers, demand it become. He told the truth funny. And our laughter forgave his infirmity as well as my pretensions of health. Our laughter reminded me that a thread would always connect us, despite the failings of mind, body or character that would invariably occur.
From there, our conversation drifted more freely across old times, sneaking out, driving around with other escapees from their homes, mild things that seemed momentous after lifetimes as children in our parents’ homes. We talked until it got too late, like animals feeding excessively before another long and certain famine.
52.
Saturday, January 17
The next day was so routine that my memory of it is pale as the tale of a tale of a tale. The weather was cloudy and cold, as it should have been. Route 9 was commercial and drab as it should have been. Dad was surly and exhausted as he should have been. I didn’t care about the day-old tomato sauce stain on my last supposedly clean shirt, as it made no sense to dress up for the rehab place.
The only blip of life came when I was talking with Dad at the rehab center. We were talking about the time right after Mom left him. He said it was ironic that I had become his best friend. We both knew what he meant and said no more.
Driving back from the rehab facility, Olive called and delayed our date until later that night, as she should have, given my own half-assed efforts for her affections. And I failed to insist or charm, as fit my own record of ambivalence. Automata ruled the day, as it often does.
Joe called and invited me to the second day of the raging party he’d called me about a day before, as he should have. And I declined, as made sense. Then Olive canceled on me. I was in Dad’s apartment, reading my book about Worcester, when she called.
I can find the day on a calendar. It was Saturday, January seventeenth, the day before the AFC and NFC Championship games, three days before Dad was supposed to return to his apartment from the rehab facility. I remember, because it mattered later, that my blue polo shirt stank and suffered from a central tomato sauce stain.
I rummaged through Dad’s t-shirts and put on one with a modern Patriots logo, known as the Flying Elvis. But the logo looked wrong—too modern, slick and forward moving. So I grabbed an older white t-shirt with a rip in its side-seam, bearing the older team logo on it. The old logo was Pat Patriot bent poised toward the viewer, archaic and pissed off—an honest face from the decades before the Massachusetts Miracle. That logo had only made it to one Super Bowl in thirty years, and then lost spectacularly. You could see Pat Patriot’s weather-beaten face and his physical normalcy, his frailty as he leaned toward you and growled. The shirt was thin from wear and fit well. I put it on and watched TV, where the bright achievements of the world floated up and vanished like cinders from the raging inferno of a vast frustration.
I called Joe and he gave me the address of the party. I grabbed my coat and hit the road, stopping for gas in Shrewsbury next to the abandoned gas station and across from Trippi’s Big & Tall and The
Gun Room. Despite having been to a few hundred iterations of the party ahead, I was excited. It looked like a good night to get drunk and let the chips fall where they may, I told myself as my savings filled up Dad’s SUV.
The pink sky over the farther hills shone unprecedented and pregnant with possibility, despite the cold, despite being nearly thirty years old, despite the dull track record of Massachusetts, the grim track record of reality as a whole.
The party was in an apartment just off Highland Street. It was somewhere between dying and being born when I arrived. There was still a lot of liquor, a foamy-but-live keg and a tank of nitrous oxide, which was the star attraction, in the quietest corner of the room. People emerged from stupors long enough to inflate another balloon from the tank, inhale it and find a place to lay themselves, lost in the chemical narcissism that wonders “Am I high enough?”
Joe was the hot center of all sound at the party. He was arguing with a lanky blonde guy about whether Matt O’Brien should get first-degree or second-degree murder. He gave me a half-drunk hug hello and admitted to getting some sleep in the kitchen that afternoon. Joe found me a fresh bottle of scotch, said the host of the party had left and took me to an evacuated bedroom. We sat on a pair of the milk crates that furnished it.
“So I wanted to run this by you: The more I think of it, the more I think I may have to snitch on Walshie. But I want to warn him ahead of time. How would that work—if they went into his place and didn’t find anything?” Joe said, drinking clear liquor out of a commemorative Celtics glass.
“I guess it’s one of those things you have to negotiate with the cops or the DA or what have you. Is cooperation enough, or will the deal depend on the results of what you tell them?”
“The new lawyer said I would probably have to cooperate in some way. But he didn’t get into specifics. I have a list of guys I would hand over on a silver platter. Hopefully, I won’t have to snitch on Walshie.”
“You’re sure this is what you want to do?”
“Jim, don’t tell anyone this, but I can’t sleep and I’ve been having nightmares when I do get to sleep—all about just that one night in jail. That’s why I stayed at my mom’s, and why I slept here this morning. I can’t even imagine spending another day in jail. I’ll basically do whatever I have to, so long as it keeps me out of jail.”
“I think that makes sense,” I offered, thinking of James Printer, the Praying Indian, with a decapitated head in each hand.
By ten o’clock, the nitrous-oxide zombies in the next room were a flat-out downer. So we left in Joe’s car. He said to bring the scotch bottle and I did. We took swigs of it in a public parking lot off Green Street.
“This is where Sully and his goons got Smitty,” Joe said.
“You sure we should be here?”
“Yeah, don’t sweat it. We’re going to the Lucky Dog. They all know me there. Want to finish this bottle?”
“Man, let’s make a night of it, not a four hours.”
“You’re no fun anymore,” Joe said, taking a long swig of the scotch and giving me the finger while he did.
I met him halfway with a swig of my own that sent up a throaty prayer to the vomit gods. It felt good. That night, I agreed with the whiskey that daily life is a poison that needs to be yakked up.
At the Lucky Dog, Joe got us in for free. The band playing that night was a variation on the chubby guy screaming incoherently over a wall of angry guitars. This one had two chubby guys screaming, one bald and the other with a goatee. They sort of took turns unwinding their vocal chords for the sporadically enthused audience. It was loud as hell.
Joe knew everyone, shaking hands, yelling down the bar and waving to a half dozen people on our way to two seats at the bar. He bought us some shots. They went poorly with the scotch. I tasted licorice, cherries and lighter fluid. The noise from the band was so extreme that our conversation consisted of what we could shout or gesticulate. Between songs, Joe made introductions to people he knew, comments about the women at the bar, and an offer of cocaine. I declined the coke and Joe vanished with someone whose name I didn’t quite get.
I ordered a beer to settle my stomach and Kyle showed up, wearing a clean white windbreaker, new white sneakers and a white baseball hat. It looked like his Saturday night wear. He asked about Joe and I pointed to the bathroom. He made a face and turned to get the bartender’s attention. The first band finished and the next one was setting up when Joe came out of the bathroom, looking excited. The drugs, noise and people all gave him what he wanted. And what Joe wanted not to do was lower his voice or his eyes.
Walking over to us, Joe worked the crowd at the bar, shaking people’s hands, embracing them, waving and yelling to the people he saw and hugging a cheerful fat girl, then kissing her until she pushed and someone pulled him off in a friendly sort of way. He laughed in the face of the guy who pulled him off. He did all this in the twenty feet between the bathroom door and where Kyle and I were standing.
Nothing seemed wrong with any of it. It was the kind of craziness that moved the time along, carried Saturday night further from the weekly realities. Everyone was glad to have Joe there, fucked up as he was. Joe gave Kyle a big hug and let rip with a wild, coke-and-booze-soaked oath of fealty and friendship. Between bands, you could talk.
“Feeling good, Mr. Rousseau?” I asked.
“I was just thinking about that. I mean, yes, I am high as the Sputnik puppy’s kibble bowl, but do I feel good? I mean, I’m so excited my heart is trying to crash through my ribs and I want to chew my own teeth. But is this feeling good? I don’t know. Hey, Jim, are you almost done with that book about King Philip’s War?”
“Not yet, man. I’ll give it to you when I’m done.”
“Did you read the account of the Mohegans torturing the Narragansett that they captured? You would remember it if you did.”
Joe was breathing heavy and talking in bursts. He paused to say a quick, emotionally exuberant hello to a guy and two girls who were heading toward the door.
“I don’t think so.”
“It was written by an English guy who was hanging out with the Mohegans just before the war started. Anyway, the Mohegans took a Narragansett warrior as a captive. Then they took him back to their camp and stood around him in a circle. And the Narragansett started singing. Then the Mohegans took him apart, bit by bit, over the course of, like, twenty-four hours. They broke his fingers, then skinned his arms—all kinds of awful shit. But the Narragansett, he just kept singing. He’d pass out from the pain or the blood loss periodically. Then they’d wake him back up. And he’d start singing again.”
“That’s crazy. Was it a ritual thing?”
“I’ve been thinking about it. I think he sang just to say fuck you to his torturers,” Joe said, his eyes big and his face wild, with the vein bulging in his forehead, making it look as though his ponytail was all that kept his head from exploding. He gave two middle fingers to imaginary torturers to underline his point. “The guy, the Narragansett, sang because he knew he was flat-out fucked, and all he had left of himself was defiance.”
“Do you want another drink?”
“Yeah, totally. But, what was I saying? I was saying something. You asked me something.”
“A drink?”
“No. But yes. But before that.”
“Uh, I asked if you were feeling good.”
“Oh yeah. Well, that’s exactly the question. I guess that in my own spoiled, white-guy-on-drugs way, I feel like that Narragansett. The bastards may get to me, but they’ll never know it. And I may be fucked, even the lawyer my mom is paying will concede that point. But I’m still singing.”
“Yeah, about that …”
“Let’s do two more shots. Rum this time?”
“Whiskey. I’ll get this one.”
Then the band began. They introduced themselves in a nervous, self-effacing sort of way, making bad jokes. Then the guitars emitted a loud, menacing thrum and impenetrable high-pitched thrashin
g. The once-nervous lead singer—a tall and obese white guy with a shaved head, baggy t-shirt and a braided, dyed goatee—let out a shrill and throaty roar. Conversation again vanished from the room. After a couple songs, Joe went to the other end of the bar and started talk-yelling with a group of girls down there. Kyle was over by the stage, nodding his head enthusiastically to the roar and screech of the music. I stayed where I was, trying to enjoy my light beer, thinking of Worcester in the 1600s, left abandoned over long decades, freelance and French-sponsored Indians marauding its hills. I thought of Worcester since World War Two, losing jobs and people, grasping at straws, building a mall downtown. I thought of the screamer on stage and the Narragansett, defiant, fucked and singing.
The next few songs passed wordlessly because of the deafening noise. I saw Joe coming out of the bathroom, looking like he was being carried on the shoulders of a grateful nation, his mouth wide and his eyes roaming. He bumped into Kyle and they started toward the door. He yelled into my ear that they were going outside for a smoke. I yelled I’d go out to meet them as soon as I got the drink I’d ordered. The bartender was a thin, pale girl who looked enough like Olive that her coldness surprised me. She took her time getting my drink and then even longer giving me change.
I was sorting my change from her tip when Kyle poked his head through the door looking alarmed, mouthing words I couldn’t hear. I followed him outside and around the corner, toward the yelling and a small crowd.
“What the fuck is your problem, buddy?” I heard someone yell as we rounded the corner. The sidewalk on the side street was dark. A small crowd stood back and watched the scene. No one spoke. The orange streetlights cast shadows on their faces.
A short, clean-cut white guy in a new, brown leather jacket pointed a gun at Joe. And Joe, in a black t-shirt, walked toward him, his arms outstretched and a wild, open-mouthed smile on his face.
“What are you going to do now?” the guy yelled at Joe.
“What are you going to do? Shoot me?”
