My Other Life (54 page)

It was seven-fifteen. I had been in the apartment for nine hours and twenty minutes. I had eaten two and a half slices of pizza and drunk three beers. I had spent twenty-two dollars on them. There were eighteen ornamental brass tacks on the long side of the old coffee table in front of the sofa, where the comic book
Awful Dwarfs
lay; ten on the end, probably fifty-six brass tacks altogether.

I heard water running and then someone muttering, oddly similar sounds drizzling in the next room, and then, "I'm going to be late for work."

It was Weechie, yawning, rummaging in the kitchen, opening and closing the refrigerator door, gathering the videocassettes into a plastic bag.

"See you later," Bun-Bun said. "I just have to find my keys."

At the door between them there was a kiss, a beautiful murmur, a moment of the most casual intimacy, a sweetness that made me envious.

"Love ya," one of them said, and I lay there in the shadows with my back to them, regretting my lost love.

As soon as Bun-Bun had gone too, I got up and put on my shoes and stretched and wondered what to do. The two men—the children in this little family—were still asleep.

I looked in the refrigerator, not for something to eat but just to see what was there. A box of crackers, another of Cocoa Puffs breakfast cereal, a jar of peanut butter, a bottle of pickles, another of ketchup, some jam, an uncovered bowl of leftover beans, and what looked like a large bar of soap with teeth marks on it and a bite out of one end. There were dishes in the sink. I used the bathroom, which smelled of herbal shampoo and a perfumed powder that stung my eyes. The bathroom was the only place in the apartment where I saw any books. They were paperbacks:
The Raven Master,
thick with dampness, and
Rubyfruit Jungle,
with a nail file serving as a bookmark.

Uncomfortable in the apartment, feeling like an intruder, I left by the front door, my eyes numbed by the strange light of the snowstorm. The snow was not deep but it covered everything, and the cold day, the knowledge that the snow would not melt, seemed to give it a solemnity. Below me, on Mystic Avenue, I saw Weechie standing at a bus stop. I walked over to her.

"Can I give you a ride?"

She hesitated, actually drew back, then recognized me. "Didn't even know you had a car."

Just then a car went by, a Mercedes speeding, throwing up salt-melted slush, and a woman at the wheel talking fast into a phone, going to work. I felt envious and insignificant, until I thought: But who would I call?

"All I have to do is find it."

I had left it parked in front of the Mystic Lounge. We walked towards it and saw that already the plows had pushed a high bank of street-soiled snow against it. But it was a four-wheel-drive Pathfinder and I had no trouble bursting through the snow and onto the road.

"You work at Wellington Mall, right?"

"You got a good memory."

I said, "You mentioned something about a tattoo party."

"A like great memory," she said, nodding.

"I've never been to one. Will you take me?"

"Anyone can go, it's no problem, but OK. I'm meeting Bun-Bun after work," she said, and then with a shudder of anticipation: "I get so hyper just before these tattoo parties."

The strangeness of this sentence and the excited way she said it were all the encouragement I needed to spend the day in Medford and meet up with her and Bun-Bun later. She sat in the front seat and, as we crossed the river and traveled up the parkway, under the interstate at exit 31 to the mall, she smiled to herself the whole way, holding her hands to her heart, as though cherishing a secret.

"You're a writer," she said after a while, as though to show me that she had remembered something of me, too.

"Yeah, but today no writing—I'm going skiing."

"You can drop me here," she said, being considerate as we neared the mall, because a snowplow at the mall entrance had snarled traffic. And outside the car she said, "So where's your skis?"

"On the roof rack."

She laughed, because having left them on the roof rack I could not expect ever to see the skis again, and this was usual to her.

She said, "They ripped you off," and did not even pause to commiserate. The fault was mine.

"
Bastards,
" I muttered, and drove farther up the parkway to a diner, where I had breakfast and read the
Globe.
Then I parked my car at Wellington station and took the T into Boston, and browsed
in bookstores, and crossed the common and walked up Boylston to the library. I killed another hour, had lunch, and took the T to the Museum of Fine Arts, where I spent the rest of the day in a desperate stupor of contentment, looking at pictures and being grateful for the snow that had kept everyone at home. When I left the museum, the snow had stopped falling and the night was cold and clear.

Later, it seemed odd to be ducking through the rip in the chain-link fence and making my way through the fresh snow to the apartment in the projects off Mystic Avenue. But already it was like a routine, I knew the way, I had learned how to go home.

Blaine, in a baseball hat and winter coat, was sitting cross-legged on the sofa smoking a joint, watching television. He was barefoot, his ankles very white. He was staring hard at the TV screen, where a man in the crude disguise of a wig and sunglasses was talking fast and a description flashed under his face:
Is Unfaithful to His Wife but Does Not Want a Divorce.

"
It's the sex, sure, but it's also the thrill of it. And I need it. Hey, I love my wife...
"

A woman in the audience was shouting, "
If you love your wife so much, why are you catting around?
"

"
Ever hear anything about morals?
" another woman said with indignation into a microphone that was being held by the host, a black man with a shaven head and a bow tie.

"
Look, lady
—no,
I listened to you and now it's my turn. We tried counseling, we tried therapy, we tried videos. We tried sex toys.
You
heard what I said. It didn't work, nothing—
"

"
You are going to break up your marriage.
"

"
It's holding my marriage together.
"

His confident logic made me sad.

"
Now let's hear from...
"

"Where's Mundo?" I asked Blaine.

"In the bar. He like lives there."

"You think he has a drinking problem?"

"No. Do you? People who get judgmental—they got a problem. You hear what I'm saying?"

"Yeah, sure."

"
They
got the fucking problem." And he gripped the remote and throttled it and the TV gasped and there was Nelson Mandela.

"I got such a problem with blacks," Blaine said.

"He's South African. He was in prison for twenty-seven years. I remember his trial. I was in Malawi. Central Africa. He—"

"Africa's so screwed up," Blaine said, and pressed his thumb into the remote again, and got a hockey game—men sprinting at each other like gladiators, swinging sticks. "Mundo had a breakdown, man."

The word was wonderful, because it never had to be explained. A breakdown was sudden, inconvenient, understandable, worthy of pity. No blame was attached, nothing was expected from you. A breakdown made you an invalid and won you sympathy. My struggling against it, my pride, putting on a brave face, all that had accomplished was to isolate me and leave me friendless. Or perhaps—it was just possible—I had spent a deranged twenty-four hours. My sitting in this dingy room in the Medford public housing projects on a cold evening with a druggie my son's age, watching a rerun of
The Montel Williams Show
and waiting to be taken by strangers to a tattoo party—perhaps this was a breakdown.

"I was messed up too," Blaine said. "I had job burnout."

He zapped the hockey game and was now watching an old John Wayne movie,
Wake of the Red Witch.

"I saw that movie at the Medford Theater in Medford Square in about 1954."

It was a crucial scene. John Wayne, helpless in an old-fashioned diving suit, looking for the pearls, has his air tube severed and begins to drown, his helmet filling slowly with water.

"Does this thing suck or what? An astronaut trying to swim!" Blaine switched back to Montel Williams and the adulterers.

"
I always use false names. That way I keep everything separate. My wife never...
"

There were unselfconscious scuffing footsteps in the hall. Bingo began to bark furiously.

"I could make a movie," Blaine said. "I've got some incredible ideas."

Bun-Bun came in, pink and gasping from the cold and the climb up the stairs. She yanked her wool hat off her wild hair and laughed, glad to see me. She knelt and scratched Bingo and said, "We had your book! Did I tell you I work at this consignment shop in Somerville? Your book was there in the box. The other woman read it. Cheryl—she's the one who told me."

"Now you can read it," I said.

"No. We sold it. What I'm saying is, I told Cheryl your name and she knew you. She read your book in high school, and she said we actually had the book in the shop."

"They didn't like me at Medford High and now they're reading my book."

"She went to Somerville High," Bun-Bun said. "But I can relate to what you're saying. People hassle you but they won't let go." She looked at Blaine. "This guy's a famous writer."

"Ever watch this shit on acid?" Blaine said. It was auto racing. "It is so cool."

"But did Cheryl like the book?"

"Yeah. She even told me a little about it."

"The plot?"

"No, the guy. He's kind of bummed out, but he's real focused."

"Right."

"So he decides to like get away from it all. He needs to be like validated."

"With his family," I said.

"Cheryl didn't mention any family. But society the way he sees it is in denial."

"Right. America seems corrupt. So he goes to Central America."

"Is that where this pond is?" she asked.

"He's in the jungle."

"In a little cabin, right? He real, like, centered?"

I fell silent. I said, "That's
Walden
by Henry David Thoreau."

"Isn't that your name?"

"Pretty close," I said.

Blaine said, "I'm going to call my movie
Deal With It, America.
"

I said to Bun-Bun, "How about that tattoo party?"

"I'm supposed to meet Weechie at Dunkin' Donuts in a half an hour."

As we were leaving the apartment, Bun-Bun looked across the room to where Blaine lay crumpled on the sofa, his baseball hat on backwards, working the remote switch between his toes while he sucked on a joint and tapped the ashes into the small opening in the top of a can of Sprite. In a sudden reflex he swigged from the can, got ashes in his mouth, and gagged, and spat, and swore.

"He's real high maintenance," Bun-Bun said softly as she shut the door on him.

The donut shop on Mystic Avenue was bright and warm and smelled of freshly made donuts.

"You want some?" I asked.

"I never eat donuts," she said. "I never eat anything. Know how I got heavy? Apples. They're all sugar."

We went outside and watched for Weechie, but all I saw was a man in a new car in the parking lot making a telephone call from a cellular phone and gesturing in an insistent way with a cigarette. He was the sort of nasty thug that I had seen long ago in Medford, and he looked the same, the greasy slicked-back hair, the pudgy face, the dark thievish eyes. I had feared their stupidity more than their violence, and I had fled from it as soon as I was able, making my exit from Medford at seventeen and never returning until now.

"Them phones are so cool," Bun-Bun said.

The man got out of the car, cursing, still yakking on the phone. He had short legs and shiny shoes, and he slipped on the ice as he passed me and almost lost his balance.

"The fuck you lookin' at?" he said to me, regaining his balance and turning his stumble into a little strut. He pushed the door open, lifting his elbows.

I had grown up here, I had heard that question a thousand times, and after fifty years I still had no answer to it except what I said to Bun-Bun: "Let's get out of here. He doesn't like me." Because I was staring, as I had always done in Medford—standing there, seeing everything; listening, hearing everything; saying nothing.

'"Vinny Dogs' Dogano," Bun-Bun said. "He's with the Angiulo mob."

I glanced back, through the store window. He was eating a donut, and had sugar on his cheeks, but before he saw me I turned away.

"We just saw Vinny Dogs at Dunkin' Donuts," Bun-Bun said to Weechie when she arrived.

Weechie, snapping her chewing gum, looked at the little man in the bright window. She said nothing, but her expression was one of fear, awe, curiosity.

"So where's this tattoo party?" I asked.

"Riverside Avenue."

On our way, while I negotiated the icy road, Bun-Bun said, "But I never think of writers when I read books. I don't care who wrote them. Hey, like I never noticed. You gave me something to think about."

I asked, "How do you know that mobster back there?"

"We used to dance at one of his bars, Weechie and me," Bun-Bun said. "I know what you're thinking, but I wasn't heavy then. Exotic dancing."

"He owns bars?"

"Nah. He's an enforcer."

In conversations with people who asked me about my past, I always told them I came from Boston. I talked about the woods, the library, my rifle. But this was nearer to what I had known: the ignorance, the mob, the small-town fame of bullies, all this ice. It was what I had chosen to forget. The truth was always more interesting. I had come from nowhere.

Riverside Avenue was another street that had been cut in two by the interstate, but the number we went to, near Medford City Hall, was a house I had delivered Sunday newspapers to one school year, pushing a cart with big rusting wheels through the slush and the rain.

There was no bell. We went into the front room on the first floor of the wooden house, and I could see at once that except for the tattooist it was all young women and girls, fifteen or so. The tattooist was bearded and wore a blood-spattered apron. His own tattoos were elaborate Japanese designs, up and down his arms and on the back of his neck. He was sitting on the edge of a chair while a woman on a hassock was having a blown-open rose tattooed on her shoulder.