Man Gone Down (11 page)

We'd cook bacon or sausage and eggs, and after we finished I'd clear the table and he'd give me the
Boston Globe
or a book to read while he washed the dishes. He'd turn on the radio—to the big bands on the AM dial; Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman—pointing at the radio during a Charlie Christian solo: half dressed, suit pants and shirt, and almost always with a slight grin. I rarely saw him frown, even when I'd go to meet him at work after school, even when I began frowning at him. He'd gone from philosophy to drugstore chains to department stores to random mercantile outposts—always some friend's idea that most people could tell was preselected for failure. And while my mother never tried to hide the fact that we, as a family, had been preselected for failure, he did.

We'd go out in the late morning on errands—usually to the corner store owned by the Italian boys he'd grown up with—get staples and he'd chat with them, and they'd ask him how my mother was, because she never shopped there. She went a few blocks farther to where a black
couple had opened up a superette. Then we'd walk back with the bread and crackers, the peanut butter, the beer, cold cuts, and cigarettes.

Sometimes we'd play catch. Sometimes we'd perform some kind of chore until the early afternoon, when I'd make lunch: peanut butter and saltines for me, hard salami and Kraft singles for him. He'd set up the folding TV tables in the living room, and I'd bring the trays of food. He'd turn the television on to
The World at War
and we'd sit and eat—he with his bottle of Miller, me with my milk or water. We'd watch the WWII footage—explosions in the South Pacific, tanks rolling through Italy. He'd leave about an eighth of his beer for me and place it on my table.
“Take it easy,”
he'd say when I'd pick it up.
“Take it easy, pal.”

When the war show was over, he'd tune in to a game show or Merv Griffin or Mike Douglas—still drinking. When they were over, he'd turn it off—a break before the nightly news—and he'd put the stereo on. I think it was mahogany. It seemed old to me and was enormous, even for an adult—like some giant basement freezer you'd find at your grandmother's—packed with LPs and 45s and even 78s. The receiver no longer worked, but the turntable did. It was black and heavy looking—wood, metal, and rubber with the solid arm that held the records aloft above the spinning disc below. There were two sliding panels on top, one for the record storage and one for the works, and when he opened it, I could smell the old cardboard covers, the warm vinyl, the wood, the Lemon Pledge. They were all almost too faint, like the imagined smells that emanate from a deep freeze belonging to the colored labels, frosted shapes, and colors of popsicles and waffles and ancient meats and sauces. Later, when I was older and he was gone and the turntable broken, I would still crack it open for that warming scent.

I'd hear the scratch of the first LP—my father's perma-grin, now wide, showing his wobbly teeth. He'd smile at me.
“Doo doo diddly-ah ya doo-ah ooh.”
First, a dose of Ella, maybe Satchmo, then Tony Bennett or Sinatra. He'd usually choose the crooners, or the swingers, though sometimes he'd play Bird or Miles or even Coltrane. Invariably though, he'd finish with Glen Campbell's “Elusive Butterfly of
Love.” He'd never sing along because he thought his voice was rotten. He'd just snap and clap by the stereo, watching me. I'd be beer addled and happy, elated because of the music and his obvious joy, but careful to stay away from his lit cigarettes, although obliging when he'd say,
“Light me.”
The pop of the match and the sulfur smell, the beer smell, the salami and peanut butter and the butterfly of love. Summer's urban afternoon slowly losing its sharpness. The rush-hour traffic out on Cambridge Street. The beeps and the exhaust through the holey screens. Then no more music on the big stereo—the absent songs hissing in the speakers. He'd clean the bottles and the dishes and hide the tables. Then he'd give me a pen and pad and sit me in the dining room at the table. He'd turn on the television again. I could hear the anchorman talking while I'd write and draw, about the shrinking Massachusetts economy and the expanding Vietnam war.

When my mother came home, we'd both be in our fogs of the prehangover that comes from drinking in the afternoon. She'd walk by me and ask him,
“Did you get a job?”
He'd sit back in the couch and sigh,
“Lila
. . .” And she would try to start a fight, but he wouldn't bite. She'd turn off the TV, walk by me again mumbling just loud enough to hear,
“You should be in summer school,”
and into the kitchen, where she'd bang pots and pans around, hissing and mumbling in the same inscrutable way. My father would croon back to her in his baritone,
“Lila, he's only five.”

She'd call me into the kitchen, and there'd be a plate waiting for me and a scotch and water for her. The radio would be on but tuned all the way down to the right end of the dial, where there was soul. I'd eat—stewed meat, boiled potatoes, fry bread. She wouldn't. It seemed she never did. She'd move around, busy but slow, doing things and mouthing the words of the songs that came on. I remember them, of course. I listen to them now, but I was a boy then, and although they were so beautiful to hear, they were also so troubling in the same amount—songs of resistance, of loss, of just holding on: love songs, music both sacred and profane, church music evoking sexy fathomless grinds, sexy music calling on God. When she was done with her busyness, she'd sit down.
Sometimes she'd sing,
“People get ready
. . .” Her voice was lovely, but she'd only sing a line or two, then perhaps hum, then go quiet and sip and swallow. She was usually so hard to look at: the eagle nose, the freckles, the green eye, the amber eye. For me, my mother's face seemed like a void, a historical abyss, an emptiness from which, if I ventured, I would never return. But really, it was rich with artifacts, made of memory and blood, things that could be regarded only in the past, never in the present. Perhaps it was the old beer in my little head that would make her face close, and I'd see it, I'd see her—just her eyes, her skin, below the buggy fluorescent and above the tap water and rye vapors, a song on her lips—she was beautiful.

We'd hear the front door open and click quietly shut, and we'd know he was gone. While I got ready for bed, she'd pick out a book for me, and in the lamplight, surrounded by the pictures of great men, some shadowed, but because of the busted shade, some still with a hint of glistening, I'd read to her until I fell asleep.

“Why is it called the oldest profession?”

We ignored Brian. Shake turned the car on, startling the woman. She was alone in the alleyway, looking at us. She was short, chubby, and wearing the obligatory blonde trick wig. Brian was watching her as though he would call on her, if he could've found his pecker through his lysergic haze. He started to roll down the window. Shake stopped him cold.

“You roll down that window and I'll break your fuckin' arms.”

“I just want to ask her something, man.”

“Leave her the fuck alone.”

“I just want to ask her something.”

“Ask her what?”

“Why she does it.”

Gavin fogged up his window with his breath and quickly drew a cartoonish eagle—tongue out and cross-eyed, like some rascal had just brained it with a mallet. The horns introduced the Beatles. Gavin
wrote, “Love, love, love” under his sketch. She walked out of the alley, past the car, and down the street. I could see that Brian wanted to defy Shake, but he was starting to hallucinate. He began to stare at the carburetor's hump as though he was a herpetologist and it was an anaconda sleeping on the floor. She disappeared into one of the strip clubs on the street.

The snake disappeared, and he jerked his head up. “You'd think that it would stop.”

“What would stop?” asked Shake, annoyed.

“Prostitution—sex for sale.”

“What are you, high?”

“No, Shake, hear him out.” Gavin turned to Brian, who was now fiddling with his coat zipper.

“I mean, why isn't something else the oldest, like selling bread or wheat or water? What about wisdom? Haven't people needed knowledge as long as they've needed sex?”

“I thought you said wisdom,” said Gavin.

“You know what I mean.”

“No, I don't.” He opened a beer and looked into the hole as if it was an imploded star. “You're confusing your terms—your argument. You're confusing me.”

Shake started to laugh. Gavin tried to hush him.

“You guys are just fucking with me because you think I'm fucked up.”

Brian snorted and grunted like an angry two-year-old. The acid seemed to be making his face distort—for me. He settled himself and looked out his window back down the alley, then out the front, down the street, at the row of strip clubs on both sides. He sighed, “Why doesn't someone do something?” He shook his head, gestured in front of his mouth to conjure the words—“Something heroic.” He pointed out the front window. “Look, there's at least six strip clubs on this block alone and I don't know how many hookers and pimps in alleys, man.” He sipped at his beer and made a face as though it should've tasted different. “I mean, I thought technology was supposed to be the great liberator.”

“Technology?” spat Shake. “What technology?”

“Technology,”
he stressed, as though changing the intonation would provide clarity. He waited. No one responded. “Like cars, bombs, indoor plumbing,
electronic radios.”

“Maybe,” said Gavin, “technology just turned out to be a more advanced oppressor—each advancement that much less humane.”

“Aw, fuck it, dudes—fuck it. Forget it. I'm just tripping.”

“Nah, Bri,” said Shake, turning, suddenly taking him seriously. “But you've got to understand that
this,”
he gestured out the windshield, “this is just a microcosm—for capitalism.”

“Dude, you sound like
you're
high.”

“Capitalism?” asked Gavin. He erased the crazy bird, finished his beer, and opened another. “Capitalism—hah—we need more beer.”

“Yeah, Gav,” warbled Brian. The drugs were working on his voice. “How many beers do you have stashed in your coat, man?”

“Enough.”

“You gonna sell your surplus back to us later on?”

“My good man, with beer, there is no such thing as surplus.”

“See, dude—they got you right where they want you.”

“Who?”

“The beer companies.”

“Yes, they do, underage and chemically dependent.”

Brian propped himself up and clenched his jaw like he was either summoning all his courage or trying to suppress a violent stutter. He threw in a finger point, too. “So who's the pimp and who's the ho?”

“Pal,” Gavin chuckled, “I'm afraid your analogy isn't analogous.”

“Yes it is.”

“No, sir, it is not.”

Shake jumped in. Still strangely interested. “Anheuser-Busch is the pimp. Budweiser or Michelob or whatever product is the ho, and the drinker is the john.”

“No,” said Gavin.

“No?”

“No.” He took a long pull. “You've misnamed some players and omitted others.”

“Go on then.”

He pointed at his can. “Anheuser-Busch is a company, made up of employees, many of whom don't share in the company's profit. Augustus Busch—whichever number they're on—and his family, are the only pimps, and everyone and everything assisting in the delivery of the product to the consumer, who in turn is not substantially enriched by the process—anyone who truly labors is the whore.” He took another pull and exhaled in mock satisfaction. “You are correct in saying that I, the consumer, am the john, but alas,
you've forgotten the product,
which is the buzz, the high, that swirling in my heart and head that makes me feel a part, that makes me continue on, babbling in this most idiotic manner about this idiotic topic, that makes me carnal and stupid. Gentlemen, yes, indeed, they have managed to distill, package, and market sex, good times, and death in a tin can.”

“Dude, you're tripping.”

“No. You are. I'm drunk. But I'll tell you something.”

“What?”

“As soon as I wean myself off this cosmic barley tit, I'm going to turn Augie Busch's little ash can out into the streets of East Saint Louis.
Hah!
Trick or treat, Bud Man!” He crushed the can and, forgetting that he'd rolled it up, bounced it off the window.

“Dude, you've lost it.”

“Fuckin' Brian. What kind of Irishman are you?”

“I'm half Greek.”

“Oh fuck you, asshole—Greek—you believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.”

“Okay,” said Shake. “But until Lorna Doone and his great wave of heroes dry out, what gets done in the meantime?”

“Yes,” said Gavin, still agitated, pointing a finger in the air. “There needs to be a plan in the interim.”

“What?” asked Shake.

“Love,” said Brian.

“Love. Shut up. The closest thing I've seen to being an act of love has been my dad's three jobs—how much he did work, works, and will continue to work.”

“Why, so he can buy you a car?” Gavin scoffed.

“I bought this. I see you riding in it, too.”

“I know. I know,” sang Gavin. “I wish my old man worked like yours.”

Shake went back to Brian. “So an act of love is going to stop tricks from getting turned, or these guys from drinking, or you from getting high every day?”

Brian pointed at the largest club, the Naked Eye. “There are women, and men, in there being exploited.”

“They want to be there,” said Shake.

“No, they don't.”