by Adam Rapp
The room’s only saving grace was a naked window overlooking the back alley and an iron fire escape slanting across the pane. Man, there’s something about fire escapes that I love. I can totally gaze at them all day. Maybe it’s because they’re sort of like these secret places where you can just sit and smoke and think.
One summer when we were kids, my mom took me and Welton down to Sullivan, Illinois, to visit our aunt Ricky. Before she married Uncle Mike and moved to Iowa, Aunt Ricky lived in this old apartment building in southern Illinois that had this amazing fire escape. Welton and I were like eleven and ten then. We spent that entire Saturday watching cars and spitting, our legs hanging over the edge of the fire escape. My mom was cool and brought our dinners out to us and let us eat right there out on the fire escape. Later on, it started raining and all the pedestrians pulled out umbrellas and they sort of bloomed like these giant flowers. And the rain had turned the streets shiny and the cars looked like toys and it was a beautiful moment in my life.
Welton even captured it in that weird way of his. He went, “Black roses, Steve. Look at all those black roses.”
In the alley below the window of my room at the old Y, there was a man sitting against a brick wall. The rain had stopped, but he was soaked. He kept clawing at his chest and arms. He was probably being devoured by mosquitoes. Either that or he was just sick of it all. It was like he was trying to claw his skin off so he could start over or something.
I couldn’t tell if he was homeless or just trying to hide. I watched him for about five minutes and decided that he wasn’t either. He was just there. This was his place in the world. One person gets a corner office in a big city overlooking the ticker-tape parade, and someone else gets a urine-stained wall in the back alley of downtown Foote, Iowa. It all comes down to destiny or irony or one of those things you’re supposed to learn about in English class. Dentistry or Ironing I saw written on one of Welton’s English Lit notebooks.
Above the desk there was this framed picture of Jesus. He was reaching his hand out and making this face like he was about to get shot. I couldn’t stand looking at it — it reminded me of the Jesus picture back in my room at home. I tried to take it down, but it was bolted into the wall, so I wound up stripping my pillowcase and draping it over the frame.
After that I unlaced my Red Wing boots and let my feet breathe. I know I wasn’t doing much for the general smell of the room, but I didn’t care.
There were voices in the next room. Two men and a woman. It sounded like they were playing hearts because of the way one of the men kept saying how the woman was trying to shoot the moon. Her name was Georgia and she had a voice like a clarinet.
I have to admit, for a second it was sort of turning me on, because I kept imagining Georgia in a very positive light. She was donning designer swimwear with fringe or whatever and she was lying on her stomach with the bikini-top straps untied. I was lathering her up with sunblock and my hands were getting into all the cracks and crevices. The image got me pretty excited, and before I knew it, I had an erection. At first I thought it would go away, but it kept getting worse, like harder in that painful way. So that’s when I did something a little weird — I started barking at it. Like a Great Dane or a pit bull or whatever. I literally barked at my erection!
And it worked, I’m not kidding.
“Ruff!” I barked at my erection. “Ruff, ruff!”
When things finally calmed down, I stretched out in the bed and tried to let my head go blank.
Bur Georgia was sort of laughing again.
“She’s shooting the moon!” one of the men shouted. “She’s doing it again! She’s shooting the fucking moon, bro!”
Man, my head was starting to totally spin. I got out of bed and walked about fifty circles to try to catch up to it. I thought I was going to faint, so I grabbed a pack of Camel Lights and a bottle of Robitussin out of my dad’s Marine Corps bag and practically ran out of the room.
The hall was empty and brown, and it smelled like that sawdust the janitor uses at the gifted school when some kid vomits in the room with all the xylophones. There was a sign taped to the wall with an arrow pointing to the end of the hall. It said SMORKING. I’m not trying to be cocky or anything, but I’d bet some free cell phone minutes that it was supposed to say SMOKING. Not to get philosophical or anything, but I think there’s like one guy who puts up all those signs. THIS WAY. SMOKING. PLEASE REMOVE SHOES. NO PARKING ANY TIME. DON’T LOOK DOWN. He probably like lives under the city and all he does is watch TV reruns until those color bands come on the screen and then he climbs up from under some sub-basement at like five A.M. or whatever and pastes those signs up in the blue-black light of the early morning.
Once I heard Dantly tell Welton that the Native Americans used to call that particular part of the morning “between the wolf and the dog” because the sky is so deep blue and spooky or whatever that you can’t tell what’s what. Is that a wolf on that hill or a dog? A man or a monkey? A saint or the devil?
The floor was cold and clammy against my bare feet. It felt like I was walking in some random hospital where a bunch of toilets had overflowed into the hall. I had that weird rust sensation in my mouth again, and I could taste the diner hot dog crawling up the back of my throat. Man, I totally thought I was going to puke, but I managed to keep it together.
In the lounge there were about eight overstuffed chairs and a few coffee tables and so many ashtrays you would have thought that they had arrived there first and the furniture was brought in just to make things fair.
This priest was reading next to the window. In the lamplight he looked pretty lost and lonely. He was holding a lit cigarette and the smoke was curling into the bottom of the lampshade, all slow and moody. Even though he didn’t appear to be a very big guy, he had maybe the longest fingers I’ve ever seen.
I sat down in a chair that smelled like alcohol and potting soil. I tapped out a cigarette and lit it. The priest was making this totally unreadable expression. I couldn’t tell if he was happy or sad. He was wearing a pair of glasses that it made it sort of difficult to make out his eyes.
I opened my Robitussin and took a drink.
“Are you okay?” the priest asked. His voice was clean and friendly. He had dipped his glasses down on the tip of his nose so he could see me. He was a lot younger than I thought, probably in his thirties.
I said, “I’m okay. Why?”
“You’re drinking cold medicine.”
He pushed his glasses back on the bridge of his nose.
“Summer flu,” I said, screwing the top back on the bottle.
The priest closed his book. It was The Power and the Glory by Someone Greene.
He stared at me for a moment.
“Are you from town here?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “East Foote, actually.”
Then he smoked and exhaled and crossed his legs. His cigarette was burning so slow I was starting to think that he made some cheap deal with the tobacco devil.
“Is everything okay at home?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Everything’s fine, why?”
“Well, you’re spending the night at the Y.”
I could totally see what he was talking about. I must have been pretty suspicious-looking.
“How old are you, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Eighteen,” I said, lying.
“Do you go to Governors?”
“I go to the gifted school. In East Foote.”
“I see,” he said.
After a minute, to change the subject, I went, “Are you like a priest?”
He was like, “Yes, I am actually. I am indeed a priest.”
“What religion?”
“Roman Catholic.”
For some reason I blessed him. I was like, “God bless you.”
“Well, thank you,” he said.
God, I’ve never been such a smart-ass. I have no idea what got into me. But that was just the beginning.
“Well, I don’t actually have a family,” he explained. “In layperson’s terms, that is. In a figurative way, my parish is my family.”
I then said, “Well, God bless your figure, then.”
The priest chuckled a few times and said, “Are you Catholic?”
“I was raised Catholic, but that ended.”
“When did that end?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess when Christmases started sucking.”
He laughed again and smoked.
“What parish did your family attend?”
“St. Rose’s over in East Foote.”
“Of course,” he said. “Father Newman’s an old friend.”
I unscrewed the top of my Robitussin and took another drink. I could feel the syrupy warmth starting to swell in my chest.
Our conversation stopped for a minute. I smoked about half of my Camel Light and he stared out the window. You could see that it had started to rain again.
After a minute the priest rose out of his chair and came toward me with his hand extended. For a split second I thought he was going to like bless me to death or something, but all he wanted was a handshake. The guy was like six inches shorter than me, but he made me feel totally nervous.
“I’m Father Bob,” he said. “Father Bob Underwood. What’s your name?”
“June,” I said.
“June,” he repeated.
“Yeah, June,” I said. “June Nugent.”
“Well, it’s nice to meet you, June,” he said, taking his hand back and returning to his chair by the window.
We sat in silence again. Our cigarette smoke was making these totally weird, ghostly shapes. For some reason I was starting to get really nervous.
After a moment I said, “So, Father Bob, can I ask you a question?”
He replied, “Of course.”
I had no idea what was going to come out of my mouth — I really didn’t.
“What’s like your take on God?”
“I’m not sure I understand the gist of your question, June.”
“I mean, like the big bang and all that. The holy mysteries. Like what’s his plan?”
“His plan?”
“Yeah, his plan.”
“Well, June, I would say his plan is love.”
“But what does that actually mean?” I asked.
“It means that he wants us to spread love. To help each other. Have you ever heard of the golden rule?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But that just seems sort of fake to me.”
“I’m afraid it’s not, though. It’s not fake at all. Sometimes it’s just a matter of simply letting Him in.”
“Father Bob,” I heard myself saying, “what I guess I’m asking is, if God is this holy force or whatever, then where is he? Does he hang out at the mall? Is he like hiding under some holy log in Jerusalem?”
“God is everywhere, June.”
“But what does that mean? Is he like a tree or — or — or — or like a bird? I mean, is he like oxygen?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes, June, he very much is oxygen.”
“And how do you like get the guy to help you? How do you get oxygen to take some interest?”
“Well, you pray.”
“But I used to pray all the time, and he never came through. For instance, I’d be at the dog track. And I’d be down to my last two dollars, and I’d like put my hands together and totally look up at the sky and ask God to let the four dog come in the top two so I could win the quinella.”
“Well, June, one shouldn’t use prayer as a means to obtain things. That’s not what God intended.”
“I’ll tell you something, Father Bob. Nine times out of ten, the four dog doesn’t finish in the top two. Nine times out of ten. And like my mother . . .”
I had to stop because I was suddenly hyperventilating like crazy.
“What about your mother, June?”
I tried taking a drag on my cigarette, but I dropped it on the floor and accidentally stomped it out. I couldn’t even light another one because my hands were shaking so bad. About four others fell on the floor and rolled under this totally diseased-looking half-sofa. I practically wasted an entire pack of Camel Lights.
“June,” Father Bob said, “is your mother okay?”
Suddenly I was coughing so bad it was like I had lung cancer. I coughed about forty-seven times.
Father Bob was suddenly pointing at my face.
I said, “Why are you pointing at me?”
“Your nose is bleeding.”
I touched my nose and then looked at my fingers. There was so much blood it was like I had been shot.
Father Bob then rose out of his chair again and produced a white handkerchief and was starting to ease it toward my face when I swiped his hand away.
I was like, “Don’t!”
There was blood all down the front of my shirt now.
“Okay,” Father Bob said, taking the handkerchief back. “I’m just trying to help.”
“I mean, what are you doing here, anyway?” I said.
Father Bob said, “I live here, June.”
“You live here?”
“There was a fire at the rectory last week. It’s just temporary.”
“Stay away from me!” I practically screamed.
“I’m not coming near you, June,” Father Bob said, all calm and collected. “I was just trying to help you.”
That’s when I stood.
Man, I was suddenly so wasted I could hardly keep my balance. I pushed past all the orphaned furniture and zigzagged back down the hall. The walls were so brown, it was like someone had smeared them with feces.
As soon as I got back to my room, I locked the door and lurched to the sink. In the cracked mirror, my reflection was this total horror movie. I had no hair, and about a gallon of blood was gushing from my nose.
I’d started to wash my face when there was a knock on my door.
“June?” I heard.
It was Father Bob.
“June, are you okay?”
I turned the water off.
I imagined him leaning up against the door, all lonely and sad, with his weird long fingers sort of touching the door.
“June,” he said, “you left your cold medicine in the lounge.”
I said, “Keep it.”
“Why don’t you open the door?”
“No,” I said. “Leave me alone.”
“I don’t want to hurt you, June. No one wants to hurt you.”
I didn’t answer. I could see his feet under the crack in the door. We were quiet for a minute. All I could hear was my own breathing.
“Okay, then. I’m just going to leave your medicine in the hall. It’ll be right here on the other side.”
After a minute his feet disappeared and I could hear his footsteps fading down the hall. I didn’t open the door for the rest of the night. I wouldn’t have opened that door if someone had held a gun to my head.
The first thing I did after Father Bob walked off was I got cleaned up in the sink. My nose finally stopped bleeding, but it took me about a half an hour to get all the blood off my face. Man, blood is by far the hardest thing to clean off your skin.
After I got cleaned up, I did about the dumbest thing I’ve ever done — I went into the closet. Not even an hour before, you couldn’t have paid me a million dollars to open that closet, but I suddenly decided it would be okay, so I went inside and closed the door. The reason it was so stupid is because I sort of pretended like it was a telephone booth, and I called Welton. I like totally dropped a quarter in the coin slot and everything.
Welton said, “Hello?”
And I said, “Hey, Welton. It’s Steve.”
“Hey, bro.”
“What’s goin on?” I said.
He said, “Nothin’, dude. Where are you?”
I said, “I’m at the Y, man.”
He went, “Like the Y Y?”
“Yeah,” I said. “The one in Foote. The old one with all the bumper-pool tables.”
He said, “The old Y?”
And I was so cool — I really was. I said, “Yeah, man. The old Y. Nothing but weirdos here.”
Then Welton said, “So why are you calling, bro?”
“Well,” I replied, “you remember that summer when Mom took us down to southern Illinois to visit Aunt Ricky and we like sat on the fire escape?”
Welton was like, “Yeah, bro. I totally remember that.”
“And how we were dangling our legs and target-spitting and then Mom like brought root beers and sloppy joes out to us and then it started raining and all those umbrellas came out. How they like bloomed?”
“Yeah, bro. They totally bloomed.”
“They were like black roses, weren’t they?”
Welton said, “They were totally like black roses.”
“That was the best, wasn’t it?”
“That was the best, bro.”
“It was so the best. . . .”
That’s when the phone conversation ended. I can’t remember who hung up first. All I know is that I was standing in the closet and my mouth was so dry it was like I had eaten sand. I tried to swallow, but the walls of my throat kept sticking together. I sat down on the floor and started to sing this Bottomside song called “Forty Holes and Forty Goals” that Welton always listened to. I only knew this one part of the song, but I sang it over and over.
there’s a hole
in my head
there’s a hole
in my pocket
there’s a hole
in the floor
there’s a hole
in the door
i’m gonna find it
i’m gonna fill it
there’s a hole
I sang that part of the song over and over. And my mouth was so dry and my throat was so raw and tired, but I kept singing it.
After about a while — it might have been an hour, no kidding — I stopped singing and came out of the closet and went to the sink and slurped water out of my hand for like ten minutes straight.
