Townie_ A Memoir Part 2

FOR A week I saw him at the Jackman, in the halls, in the asphalt yard, in the street out front, but he stayed away from me. He was like a wolf who'd been caught and defanged and sent back out into the wild a different wolf. But on the afternoon of the fifth day, the sun high over the cl.u.s.tered houses of the South End, George Labelle walked into our house and the living room where I sat with my brother and sisters in front of the TV. He was as big as Sullivan but fat, as mean as Clay but subservient, and he grabbed me by the shirt and yanked me to my feet. He had the beginnings of a mustache and he smelled like B.O. and Pepsi, and I was holding on to his fists as he started dragging me to the front door, making grunting sounds, his body so much larger than mine. I had never spoken to him and knew him only by name and I knew he was going to kill me once he got me onto Lime.

Labelle's face jerked forward. His eyes began to water. He let go of me and covered his head, and that's when I saw Suzanne and the broom she held, its stiff bristles she kept jabbing at his skull. "Get out! Get the f.u.c.k out out!"

Labelle turned and she poked him in the face. He blinked and jumped back. "s.h.i.t! He paid me! Clay f.u.c.kin' He paid me! Clay f.u.c.kin' paid paid me!" me!"

"I said get out out!" Suzanne jabbed him in the ear, the neck, the back of his head. Then he was fumbling with the doork.n.o.b and running across Lime Street to Clay waiting there on the sidewalk, his face a mixture of disappointment and amus.e.m.e.nt, his. .h.i.t man kicked out of the house by my sister, my big sister Suzanne.

SOMETIMES I'D have trouble breathing. I'd be standing in our small kitchen, my hands on the sink, and a big, invisible hand would squeeze my chest and rib cage. The room would start to tilt, and I'd sit on the floor awhile and stare straight ahead at the shifting wall. I'd stare at any blemish on my skin. I didn't have many, but whenever I did I was convinced I'd been bitten by something poisonous-a spider or small snake that had slithered up from the river and into our house. I'd wake in the middle of the night and walk down the creaking stairwell to the bathroom and turn on the buzzing fluorescent light; I'd stare at a small red spot on my arm, convinced since I'd gone to bed that it had moved farther up toward my shoulder where it would soon disappear into my chest and heart and kill me. Sweat would break out on my forehead and the back of my neck. My mouth would be as dry as when Whelan chased me down the street. I didn't want to give my mother something else to worry about, nor did I want her to see such fear and weakness in me, so I'd wake Suzanne in the tiny room she shared with Nicole. My older sister would climb out of bed and turn on the overhead bulb. She'd rub her eyes and squint down at the spot on my arm. "Andre, that's a f.u.c.king zit. zit. Go to sleep." Go to sleep."

SUMMER CAME and now windows were open and there was Larry's yelling, there was a woman yelling back at him or somebody else in another house, there was the canned laughter and commercial jingles of six or seven TVs, there was a bottle breaking, a drunk singing, a motorcycle or lowrider revving its engine, then peeling away from the curb, there were the smells of hot asphalt, the dusty concrete of broken sidewalks, cat s.h.i.t and dog s.h.i.t and gasoline, there was the wood baking in the lumberyard near the Merrimack, again the faint smell of sewage and motor oil and mud, and when the wind blew in from the east you could smell the ocean, dead seaweed and open seash.e.l.l and wet sand, and it was a Sat.u.r.day and Jeb and I were running from Clay and Labelle and two others I didn't even know; they'd come walking down the middle of Lime Street under the sun and seen us sitting on our stoop doing nothing.

"Get 'em!"

And we were up and running down Lime and across Water Street. We climbed a rusted chain-link fence and came down on a pallet of plywood and jumped off it to the ground. We ran past a forklift, its driver watching us under his cap, a cigarette between his lips, and my chest hurt and the air was too hot but we couldn't stop and we ran past stacks of naked two-by-fours and two-by-sixes and two-by-eights, and we climbed onto this last stack and leapt over the fence into high weeds and chunks of broken cinderblock, and we kept running.

We ended up under a pier on the river. It was cool and shaded under there. We crouched beneath heavy planks and cross timbers, their posts black with creosote, the lower ones near the water covered with white and green barnacles. Half sunk in the mud were broken gla.s.s and a couple of tires, and we could see beyond this to the sun glinting off the river. It felt safe.

Jeb, eleven and thin but taller than I was, started gathering up pieces of colored gla.s.s. Even then he was making things: little sculptures made from junk, pictures he drew, watercolors, and he was always taking things apart-fan engines, radios, once the back of our TV just to see how it worked. He needed to know how things worked. worked.

I was happy to stay down here forever. Go steal some plywood and some nails and tools and build a floor and walls under the pier, make it a place only Jeb and I would know about. It was going to be hard to get back to the house without being seen. We'd have to wait till dark.

I heard the helicopter before I saw it, the thock-thock-thock thock-thock-thock of its ma.s.sive blades, the way the water spread out smooth and rippling as it hovered over the middle of the river. Then there was an orange and white boat there too, the letters COAST GUARD painted on its bow, two men in black wet suits and scuba gear jumping into the Merrimack. of its ma.s.sive blades, the way the water spread out smooth and rippling as it hovered over the middle of the river. Then there was an orange and white boat there too, the letters COAST GUARD painted on its bow, two men in black wet suits and scuba gear jumping into the Merrimack.

We knew what they were looking for. People drowned in that river. It had one of the most dangerous currents in the country, especially here, at its mouth, and I wished we'd left then before the divers brought up the body. It was bloated to three times a man's normal size, the round head matted with blond hair, the face a pale pumpkin, his mouth open, dark, and bottomless.

We didn't know how we'd get back home without being found, but Jeb dropped his pieces of gla.s.s and we both crawled fast out from under that pier and ran under the sun.

THE HOUSE was almost always dirty. Whatever ch.o.r.es Mom would give us, we just did not do. But some days, cooped up in that small hot house, one or two of us would finally leave the TV, grab the broom, and start sweeping the floorboards, the narrow wooden stairs and hallway. We might wash the backed-up dishes in the kitchen, find the mop and scrub the floor. We'd go up to our rooms and make our beds, pick dirty clothes out of the corners, and stuff them into a garbage bag for when we went to the laundromat. Sometimes I'd go out to our tiny enclosed yard and sweep the concrete stoop. In the corner of the fence was a rusty rake and I'd use it on our dirt yard. I made straight even lines parallel to the fence. It was still a dirt yard, but standing on the concrete stoop after, looking down at it, our home seemed somehow more orderly, our lives within it more comprehensible.

NONE OF Mom's cars ever worked for long, but she was able to drive home the Head Start van and at least two Friday nights a month, she would load the four of us into it and take us on a Mystery Ride. If we asked where we were going, she'd say, "Who knows? It's a mystery mystery."

Suzanne, at thirteen, wearing hip-huggers and smoking Kools in her room, acted like she was too old for this game, but I think she secretly liked it as much as Jeb, Nicole, and I did, each of us sitting on our own seat, the windows open, the radio playing rock and roll, the warm air blowing in as we drove out of the South End and the abandoned buildings of downtown. Sometimes we'd get on the highway and go fast and leave it all behind. Or else Mom would stay on the back roads near the Merrimack, winding through groves of hardwood and pines where people with enough money lived in houses you could barely see from the road.

Mom-only thirty-three years old, slender, and beautiful to men, I knew, because they were still always coming around-she nodded her head to the music and blew the smoke from her Pall Mall out the window and she sang along and tried to raise us all up out of the hole we were in. Soon we'd be hungry and somehow the mystery ended at Skippy's, a hamburger joint built off a fast two-lane in the pine trees. The cheeseburgers were cheap and juicy, and they were served in red-and-white-checkered baskets heaped with curlicue fries. We'd sit at a picnic table spotted with squirrel and pigeon s.h.i.t, and we'd eat this hot and perfect food and wash it down with cold c.o.kes.

Afterward, if she had the money, we'd continue our Mystery and find ourselves at the drive-in, the sun setting over a ma.s.sive movie screen rising up out of scrub and weeds. Because of the van, she had to park in the far back and she'd pull it sideways so we could hook three or four speakers onto our open windows, each of us with our own bench seat to stretch out on.

Most of the movies were rated R and most were bad; I remember fast cars and naked b.r.e.a.s.t.s and pistol barrels flashing in the sun. Some disturbed me, like Joe Joe where a father hates hippies and gets another father to go shoot up a commune where the first father accidentally kills his own daughter, her dead body lying b.l.o.o.d.y in the snow. There was where a father hates hippies and gets another father to go shoot up a commune where the first father accidentally kills his own daughter, her dead body lying b.l.o.o.d.y in the snow. There was Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?, Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?, Dustin Hoffman playing a hit music composer who has a split personality and ends up committing suicide in his private plane. There was Woody Allen, who talked fast and said funny things about s.e.x I was embarra.s.sed to hear in the van with my mother. But it was the Clint Eastwood westerns I really liked; he could shoot and kill and did it all night long to bad men who'd done bad things to him and his family. He didn't run from them. He didn't hide. He faced them, usually three or four at once, and in just a few words he told them what he thought of them, then drew his Colt and gunned them down like the pigs they were. Dustin Hoffman playing a hit music composer who has a split personality and ends up committing suicide in his private plane. There was Woody Allen, who talked fast and said funny things about s.e.x I was embarra.s.sed to hear in the van with my mother. But it was the Clint Eastwood westerns I really liked; he could shoot and kill and did it all night long to bad men who'd done bad things to him and his family. He didn't run from them. He didn't hide. He faced them, usually three or four at once, and in just a few words he told them what he thought of them, then drew his Colt and gunned them down like the pigs they were.

One Friday when there was a warm, misty rain and we had to roll the van's windows up, we watched Billy Jack. Billy Jack. The lead actor wore a tight black T-shirt that showed off his chest and arm muscles, and he plays an Indian and a Green Beret who fought in Vietnam. He's also a master in some form of martial art, and he spends a lot of time alone, walking softly, his carved and handsome face shadowed beneath the brim of his black cowboy hat and its band of beads. But then his wife, a kind and pretty blonde, opens a Freedom School for Native American children on the reservation and when she drives the kids into town for ice cream, they get chased out by white racists and she ends up being staked to the ground spread-eagled where she's raped and left to the ants and the sun and Billy Jack spends the rest of the movie hunting down the men who did it and he beats them to death using roundhouse kicks to the temple, straight rights to the face and heart and groin, fast and lethal moves I'd never seen, these cruel, vicious men reduced to silent b.l.o.o.d.y heaps on the floor or in the dust. The lead actor wore a tight black T-shirt that showed off his chest and arm muscles, and he plays an Indian and a Green Beret who fought in Vietnam. He's also a master in some form of martial art, and he spends a lot of time alone, walking softly, his carved and handsome face shadowed beneath the brim of his black cowboy hat and its band of beads. But then his wife, a kind and pretty blonde, opens a Freedom School for Native American children on the reservation and when she drives the kids into town for ice cream, they get chased out by white racists and she ends up being staked to the ground spread-eagled where she's raped and left to the ants and the sun and Billy Jack spends the rest of the movie hunting down the men who did it and he beats them to death using roundhouse kicks to the temple, straight rights to the face and heart and groin, fast and lethal moves I'd never seen, these cruel, vicious men reduced to silent b.l.o.o.d.y heaps on the floor or in the dust.

That night I couldn't sleep; my heart wouldn't slow down. I kept seeing myself do that to Clay Whelan and George Labelle and every kid who'd ever punched or kicked or pushed me; I saw myself doing it to the drunk who'd p.i.s.sed in our hallway; I saw myself doing it to the two or three boyfriends of my mother's I never liked; I saw myself doing it to anyone, everyone.

3.

ONE SUNDAY AFTERNOON, Pop drove up to our house on Lime with Theo Metrakos. He had thinning dark hair and a thick mustache, and he was an inch or two shorter than my father but well-built. He was a first-generation Greek studying for his Ph.D. in literature, one of Pop's roommates in an apartment in Bradford, though I didn't know any of this at the time. All I knew is he had muscles like Billy Jack, that later in the day I cut my foot on a piece of broken gla.s.s in the sand and Metrakos carried me piggyback a hundred yards up the beach to the blanket where Pop had a cooler with ice and drinks. I put ice on the cut, and Metrakos ran back to the water and dived in and swam over the waves and stayed out there swimming for close to an hour.

This beach was ten or twelve miles away on the New Hampshire coast. Sometimes, if a Sunday was real hot and Pop couldn't afford a movie, he'd take us there. He'd park his Lancer across from a row of tiny beach houses and lead us over the bright sand to a wide-open place scattered with families and couples and little kids, the waves breaking softly in front of us. While we were pale and sunburned easily, he was tanned and had his shirt off right away, his chest and flat belly covered with dark, curly hair, his skin a deep red-brown. He'd lay out a blanket for us, then roll out a reed mat for himself. When I was older, I would learn this had always been his favorite season, that after a morning of writing, then a long run, he came here every afternoon to read and doze and lie in the sun. Most of the time he'd bring a girlfriend with him, though he rarely did when he was with us. Maybe because there wasn't room in the car. Maybe because he didn't want to mix his two lives, but I knew from photos he'd still sometimes show me that his girlfriends were young and rich-looking and beautiful, students he'd met at the college.

At the end of the day, the sun setting in the dunes behind us, Metrakos put on running shoes and ran the fifteen miles home. He left thirty minutes before we did but was already four miles down the road when we saw him. He wore a bandanna around his head and no shirt, his back gleaming with sweat. As we pa.s.sed, Pop honked the horn and we all waved at Theo and he smiled and waved back. On both sides of us were salt marshes, acres of mudflats and sea gra.s.s, deep yellow-green under the last of the sun. I sat back in my seat and wondered how anyone could run fifteen fifteen miles. I also liked how kind Metrakos was, how respectful he was to everyone he talked to. And smart, too. Educated. miles. I also liked how kind Metrakos was, how respectful he was to everyone he talked to. And smart, too. Educated.

OUR MOTHER had a new boyfriend now, Bruce M. Her other boyfriends looked like convicts compared to him; he picked her up on a Sat.u.r.day night in the summer, and as soon as he pulled to our curb on Lime Street, we knew this one was different. He didn't drive a beat-up van or a motorcycle or a loud muscle car, he drove a sleek gray Jaguar XJ6, a car I didn't even know existed, and when he stepped out of it, we saw a slim, clean-shaven man wearing good shoes, ironed pants, and a shirt and tie. tie. It was navy blue, and when he got close enough, we could see dozens of tiny peace signs sewn into it. It was navy blue, and when he got close enough, we could see dozens of tiny peace signs sewn into it.

Mom introduced us to him and he smiled down at each of us and reached out his hand. He actually looked happy to meet us. Mom wore a skirt and earrings and as they crossed Lime in the late-afternoon light, the four of us huddled at a window and watched him open the pa.s.senger door for her. He laughed easily at something she said, then he walked around the hood of the Jaguar and climbed in behind the wheel. We must've been leaning on the curtain because the rod pulled from the window jambs and came down on us and we all hit the floor laughing, sure they saw us spying.

"I like that one," Suzanne said.

"I hope she marries marries him." him."

One of us said that. I don't remember who, but it could have been me.

HE SLEPT over that first night and most every weekend after that. He gave Mom money and there was food in the fridge, gas in the car, and he drove us to Schwinn Bicycles up the river and bought each of us a brand-new bike. I forget what the girls got, but Jeb picked out a yellow ten-speed and I chose a bright tangerine five-speed chopper with a banana seat and two-foot sissy bar in the back. It looked just like the motorcycle Peter Fonda rode in Easy Rider. Easy Rider. It was the bike of outlaws. It was the bike of outlaws.

That afternoon we rode those bikes up and down the streets of the South End. When the sun went down, Bruce wanted to take us all out to eat somewhere and before we left, Jeb and I went out back with our new rubber-coated chain locks and ran them through the four bike frames, locking them to a cross-brace in the fence. I checked the latch on the gate, then dragged two cinderblocks over and wedged them against it.

At the restaurant, an air-conditioned one in Andover that had white linen table cloths and rolled napkins, Bruce said we could order whatever we wanted. He and Mom sipped bourbons and laughed a lot and kept looking at each other over the table. We'd never gone out with any of her other boyfriends before. Part of me felt guilty; if there was going to be a man eating at the table with Mom and us, it should be Pop, shouldn't it? But Bruce was warm and easy to talk to and somehow whatever we said, he found interesting or funny or intelligent, and he would say so, looking us directly in the eye.

I looked away. I looked down at my plate. In our weekly dinners with Pop, he would talk with the four of us too, but he didn't look us in the eye very long. Instead, there was the feeling he had a lot to do, that this meal was something it was hard for him to take time for. But there was something else, too. Many years later, when I was in my twenties and staying for a few weeks with my father and his third wife Peggy, I'd watch her set a romantic dinner for the two of them, light candles, and complain later that he never wanted to eat that way with her. "Why?" I asked.

"Because he's shy. Don't you know that about him? Your father is actually shy. shy." But Bruce wasn't, and he was looking at me in a way no adult ever had, not a man anyway.

WE GOT home from the restaurant after dark, and I walked straight through the house to turn on the outside light and look at my bike. At first I thought I was seeing dead snakes. Our cut bike chains were lying in the dirt and the rest of the yard was empty, the gate wide open.

Then I knew what I was seeing, and how could we have been so stupid? Why did we go riding those bikes in this neighborhood, advertising them like that? And I should've known you can't trust good things to stay good. I should have known that.

Lying in bed that night, Nicole crying in her room, Suzanne still trying to soothe her, Jeb silent in his bed beside mine, I pictured us getting home just as the bike thieves were putting the hacksaw to our chains. In my vision they were grown men and I was the first in the yard and I said nothing to them, just started punching and kicking until they were dead. Not hurt, but dead.

A few days later I was sitting on our front step, one eye open-the way it always was-for Clay Whelan. The sun was high over the town, and a kid on a bike came riding up from Water Street. I could see the chopper forks and the sissy bar. I could see the k.n.o.b of the five-speed gear shifter, and as the rider got closer I could see the frame itself was no longer orange but a dull, spray-painted black and red and green. The kid started pedaling standing up and I saw how new the seat looked, how brightly orange it shone in the sunlight, though it'd been sliced down the middle to make it look older, its white foam protruding like guts.

My heart was punching a hole in my chest and I was about to run into the street. Then I saw who the rider was: Cody Perkins. He glanced down at me like I was not there. Like I was not. not. And I watched him pedal my new bike all the way up Lime Street and away. And I watched him pedal my new bike all the way up Lime Street and away.

THE MAILMAN came in the afternoons while the four of us sat in front of the TV. Our mailbox was rusty and hung crooked against the clapboards, and we could hear him opening it, the creak of its hinges, his footsteps walking away on the concrete. One afternoon amongst the bills was a blue envelope from Lake Jackson, Texas. It was addressed to all of us, and Suzanne opened it. It was a card from our mother's older sister, our Aunt Jeannie, and her husband, our Uncle Eddie, two people we'd heard of but barely knew. Inside it were four checks, each one made out to each of us kids for fifty dollars. The four of us looked at each other. We kept looking down at the checks in our hands, but I was drawn even more to the card and those two handwritten words: Aunt Aunt and and Uncle Uncle. The fact of them, living two thousand miles south of us. Our grandfather and grandmothers, too. Mom had told us we had fifteen first cousins down there, that thirteen of them were our ages, Pop's sisters' kids, and they lived one block away from each other in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I knew only a few of their names. Standing there with that check, there was the feeling that our family of six had been marooned up here, that our young mother and father had somehow taken a wrong turn.

JEB AND I fought a lot. He was younger by a year but taller and stronger and he almost always won. One afternoon in the house on Lime Street he had me pinned to the floor of the upstairs hall, his foot on my neck while he kicked me in the ribs. Suzanne broke it up, yelling at us, swearing, her black eyeliner looking so dark against her pale skin. She made Jeb go downstairs, then she went back into her bedroom, and I pulled from behind my door the metal stilt leaning against the wall. I don't remember where we got it or where the other one was, but it was an adjustable stilt like circus performers use and it was heavy and over four feet long.

The only bathroom in the house was at the bottom of the back stairs, and we had to walk through the kitchen and the rear landing to get to it. I knew Jeb would have to go sometime, and I stood there at the top of the stairs, the stilt resting over my shoulder like a spear, and I waited.

Thirty minutes or an hour went by. Suzanne kept playing her favorite 45 at the time, "D.O.A." by Bloodrock, the sirens wailing over and over again as the lead singer's character dies in the ambulance of an overdose. I could hear the TV voices too, then there were footsteps over the kitchen floor and I raised the stilt and pulled my arm back and there was my seven-year-old sister Nicole's red hair, and I let out a breath and lowered the stilt.

Twenty minutes later, Jeb came. Over Suzanne's record player I could hear his heavier footsteps down in the kitchen. I held my breath and when I saw his frizzy hair I hurled the stilt down the stairwell. There was the dull clank of metal on bone, his head jerking sideways as he and the stilt fell to the floor.

I thought he was dead. But he began to cry and raised both hands to his temple. Then he saw me at the top of the stairs and he dropped his hands and sprinted up the steps and he punched and kicked me and called me motherf.u.c.ker.

ONE AFTERNOON I chased him with a butcher knife. He made it to the bathroom and slammed the door, one with slats, and I kept jabbing the blade through the cracks, trying to stab him in his wrists and hands.

IN MOVIES now, whenever a bad man would die a b.l.o.o.d.y and well-deserved death, I would feel so much pleasure I would nearly laugh. One was Walking Tall, Walking Tall, the true story of Buford p.u.s.s.er who single-handedly cleans up the evil that has overtaken his small town, swinging a homemade bat into the bones and skulls of criminals. Buford p.u.s.s.er is who I wanted to be. Billy Jack, too. And later, Charles Bronson in the the true story of Buford p.u.s.s.er who single-handedly cleans up the evil that has overtaken his small town, swinging a homemade bat into the bones and skulls of criminals. Buford p.u.s.s.er is who I wanted to be. Billy Jack, too. And later, Charles Bronson in the Death Wish Death Wish movies, Clint Eastwood in movies, Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry. Dirty Harry. When I thought of the word When I thought of the word man, man, I could only think of those who could defend themselves and those they loved. I could only think of those who could defend themselves and those they loved.

WE MOVED again, this time to Haverhill, and when the doctor evicted my mother and us four kids from his old office near the hospital, we moved to the west side of town and lived first on Marshland Ave, then, a year later, on Columbia Park. These were streets of well-maintained two-and three-story houses with hedges and real lawns fathers mowed on weekends. There were late-model cars in the driveways, and Columbia Park was really a boulevard with a long gra.s.sy center shaded by oak and elm and maple trees. Our new rented house was a Victorian with a rounded turret and a front and back porch. The yard was small, but it had gra.s.s, and in the rear corner was a tall beech tree that rose as high as the house.

Mom was working in Boston now, forcing slumlords to remove lead paint from their buildings. I knew she made $133 a week doing this, and I knew Pop's child support was $340 a month, but just the rent for this new place was $500 a month. How would we afford it? I was expecting to get evicted pretty quickly.

But Bruce helped. He had bought us new bikes again, a Sony color TV, and a stereo. He gave Mom money to cover some of the bills and groceries, and he started sleeping over not just on the weekend but weeknights too. He was still warm and seemed interested in whatever we might say, but he also drank a lot of bourbon at night, quietly and alone, reading a book or watching some sport on TV. By now we knew he was separated from his wife, that they had seven children who lived with her south of Boston.

Columbia Park was a nicer-looking street than we'd ever lived on before, but three houses up lived a blonde stripper with large silicone b.r.e.a.s.t.s. For weeks she'd climbed out of her Camaro with white gauze taped to her cheek and jaw, and I thought she had an infection of some kind, but then I heard the real story, that the stripper's mother, a small chain-smoker she lived with, got mad and shot her daughter in the face.

It was the kind of thing that happened in the avenues. To get to them I just had to follow Suzanne down Columbia Park across Main Street to Seventh Ave, a narrow hill street of tin-sided houses behind chain-link fences. They had no driveways and on the sidewalk or at the curb would be a battered station wagon or Pontiac LeMans with no hubcaps, a Duster with a sandblasted hood. Plastic children's toys would lie on the cracked concrete among cigarette b.u.t.ts and empty nip bottles, and on their sides here and there would be shopping carts for when the car wouldn't start and the welfare checks came in and usually the mothers and wives or girlfriends would push the carts a mile and a half away to DeMoulas and load up with cans of Campbell's soup, eggs and milk, bags of potato chips and cases of c.o.ke and Budweiser, bottles of Caldwell's vodka.

Halfway down Seventh Avenue was a cl.u.s.ter of yellow apartment buildings, two rows of them three-deep back from the street, each three stories high. The ground around them was packed dirt worn smooth and there was a gravel parking lot scarred from rain and in the back of it, up against a field of weeds, was a green dumpster I'd never seen empty; it was full of babies' diapers and old mattresses, dozens of beer bottles, pizza boxes, damp condoms and instant coffee jars and plastic shampoo bottles, a broken chair or torn lamp shade, a kitchen knife with no handle.

At night the apartments were lit up and loud, the windows open in the summer, no screens in them, maybe a fan blowing, the constant drone of TVs and radios, kids crying or laughing, a woman or man yelling, someone from another apartment shouting to shut the f.u.c.k up! up! Someone was always calling the cops, and there'd be one or two cruisers pulled up to the curb, the door open, the cab's light on, the dispatcher a static voice in the air. Someone was always calling the cops, and there'd be one or two cruisers pulled up to the curb, the door open, the cab's light on, the dispatcher a static voice in the air.

I don't know when Suzanne started going down there, but I knew why. It's where you'd go to cop some brown mescaline, orange sunshine, or THC. It's where you'd go to buy an ounce of Mexican gold or a tab of four-way purple blotter acid or to sit in a dark hot room full of teenagers and grown men and women and take the joint pa.s.sed your way and mooch a free hit. It's where everyone else went, to the building farthest back from the street.

There were no young families in this one, just men in their twenties and thirties who earned their rent by collecting it from everyone else, two or three going from door to door on the first of each month demanding cash. Some of them were with the motorcycle gang the Devil's Disciples, and they had long hair that fell down over the devil's insignia of their black leather jackets. They wore heavy motorcycle boots and faded oil-spotted jeans and dark T-shirts. A lot of them had beards or mustaches and they carried folded Buck knives in leather pouches at their hips. In the plywood half-wall of the top porch were three holes in a close grouping from a .38 or .45, and from that apartment there was always music blaring-Black Sabbath, Electric Light Orchestra, Alice Cooper, Led Zeppelin, and the Allman Brothers. There were always three or four motorcycles parked in the dirt or mud, and day and night people came and went.

We smoked every morning at the bus stop too. It was on the corner of Seventh Ave and Main Street right next to Pleasant Spa convenience store, a gray vinyl-sided box with dusty plate-gla.s.s windows advertising Marlboros and Borden's milk and Ajax. The owner was short and fat, his fingers brown from tobacco, a smoking cigarette forever between them or his lips. He called us punks and f.u.c.kin' a.s.sholes. To the right of his store were wooden steps leading to the apartments above, and that's where twelve or fifteen kids waited each morning.

Some of them lived down in the avenues, some on the streets across Main, but we all looked the same: there was Glenn P., a heavy kid with wire-rimmed gla.s.ses and thin brown hair. He wore a faded army jacket, the inside pockets usually holding cash and the dope he sold, mainly THC or joints at a buck apiece. In his Dingo boots, the kind I eventually got my mother to buy me, he carried a pint of Southern Comfort and he'd pa.s.s it around on the steps to Nicky G., Bryan F. and Chuck and Al, Anne Marie and Dawn, my sister Suzanne, and me.

I took a sip and hated the sweet burn going down my throat. I smoked pot, too. I drew in the smoke like everyone else, held it till my chest hurt, then blew it out, and I hated what happened next, how a part of me slipped inside another part of me to watch me go so dully through the morning. But I couldn't say no, couldn't draw attention to myself and maybe get insulted and have to fight. Only a year or so on this side of town, and I'd begun to wear my hair tied back in a ponytail, and every day I wore my one pair of jeans, my Dingo boots, a T-shirt, and the brown leather jacket with the zippered sleeves my mother couldn't afford but ended up buying for me anyway. A man driving down Main Street to work at seven any weekday morning would see just another delinquent drinking and smoking on the steps of Pleasant Spa, just another kid like Nicky G. with his long hair, black as an Apache's, his sideburns like Greg Allman's, his hard chest from the bench presses he did in his garage, the fact he'd f.u.c.ked every girl in that neighborhood at least once, including my fourteen-year-old sister, and then he was off after some other girl and Suzanne cried for a week in her room and I despised him, tried not to talk to him or look at him or smile at any of his jokes, but if he pa.s.sed me a joint or Glenn P.'s Southern Comfort, I took it and said nothing.

The long yellow bus would pull up and I'd sit in the back with Suzanne and the Heads from the avenues. Sometimes Glenn P. would pa.s.s his bottle, sometimes he'd keep it to himself for later. We'd ride down through the streets, the driver stopping every few blocks to pick up more kids, the girls dressed like Anne Marie and Dawn and my sister; they wore tight hip-huggers that went so low you could see two dimples just above their b.u.t.t cracks, and the Italian or Puerto Rican girls had that brown line in the skin that ran from the belly b.u.t.ton straight down past the pink and yellow rim of panties. They wore tight tube tops and no bras, their nipples erect in the winter behind short leather jackets dyed green or red or purple. Their hair was wild or braided, and the eyeliner around their eyes was thick and black, their lip gloss glistening.

As the bus pulled up in front of them, they'd take one last drag off a cigarette and flick it into the street. They'd climb onto the bus and make their way past the kids with lunch boxes and books and homework they'd actually done, to the back where the rest of us were.

"Mornin', Tina."

"f.u.c.k you, Glenn. Where's the fin you owe me?"

"Blow me."

"In your dreams, f.a.ggot."

There'd be laughter and more swearing at one another, talk of a fight that was coming, of some Acapulco gold or Angel Dust due soon, who had just f.u.c.ked whom and who was knocked up and who got rid of it and who wiped out his bike down to the beach and might lose a leg.

We pa.s.sed the junkyard and a Catholic church, we rode down under the railroad trestle for Lafayette Square and all its barrooms around the rotary, then the package store and car dealership that year-round had Christmas lights lit up over its used and repossessed cars. We rode up Broadway past a funeral home and St. Joseph's Church and then we were out near the highway, the bus turning into the lane for the high school, a rambling one-story complex of cinderblock and gla.s.s, a statue of Michelangelo's Lorenzo de' Medici Lorenzo de' Medici sitting out front, though whenever I saw it, the form of the man with his elbow on his knee looked to me like a man on a toilet. sitting out front, though whenever I saw it, the form of the man with his elbow on his knee looked to me like a man on a toilet.

The bus pulled around to the back lot where seniors parked their Monte Carlos and Camaros and Dusters and Trans Ams, a few motorcycles too. Facing the lot was the entrance between the M and L wings. The kids in the front of the bus, the jocks or the studious ones no one had a name for, they went inside to make it to their lockers and desks before the homeroom bell, but I followed Suzanne and the rest to the metal grates up against the walls. There were dozens of kids already there, smoking cigarettes or pa.s.sing joints or dealing whatever they had, a pocket for their product, the other for cash. And there'd be a lookout for Perez, one of the narcs who wore leather and pretended he was a senior though his shaved whiskers left a dark shadow and there were lines under his eyes and he was at least thirty and a pig, what we still called cops from the antiwar days we were too young to be a part of.

BECAUSE OUR mother worked in Boston, she had to leave for her job before we got out of bed. Most mornings, only Nicole would be on time and walk herself to school a half mile north. Jeb, Suzanne, and I would sleep till we woke two or three hours later than we should have to catch the bus. Some days we'd stay home. Other days we'd go to school, which meant a four-mile walk through town across Main Street down into the avenues past the Dobermans or German shepherds chained in their dirt yards. In some were babies' toys scattered among the dog s.h.i.t, the dogs barking at me behind chain-link fences. I'm sure Suzanne and I walked together many days, but I remember more clearly doing it alone, cutting across Cedar down Sixth Avenue past the auto parts store and junkyard, the battered sh.e.l.ls of cars sitting in the weeds, many of the windshields collapsed into the front seats, the rims rusted, the lug bolts like eyes staring out at me.