Townie_ A Memoir Part 4

Still, some would come around at night. Once, close to ten o'clock, Mom lay on the floor in front of the TV in her work clothes, a pillow under her head, her cheap coat covering her like a blanket. A knocking echoed from the front door and Nicole got up and answered it. I was sitting in a wicker chair. I was half asleep, but there was a mild electrical current telling me that I I should have gone to the door, not my ten-year-old sister. should have gone to the door, not my ten-year-old sister.

She walked back into the room. Her back was held erect with her scoliosis brace, her chin resting on its plastic collar. "It's Glenn P. He wants to talk to Suzanne."

Mom opened her eyes. "Well you tell Glenn P. to go take a flying f.u.c.k."

Nicole turned and walked through the hall to the door. I could see her red hair pulled back over the rear collar of her brace. "Um, my mom says for you to go take a flying f.u.c.k."

If Glenn P. said something back, Nicole didn't repeat it. She locked the door and walked back into the living room and sat down with her homework.

ONE RAINY afternoon in April, I came home to another full house and I went straight upstairs and there was Kip L. and Donna H. coming down the narrow hallway. He was half a foot taller than I was but lighter, his skin white, blue veins and capillaries standing out in his arms and hands. People said he shot heroin, and I was sure that's what he and Donna H. had been doing up here, maybe in the bathroom, but her halter top was unb.u.t.toned and beneath the flared hem of her hip-huggers were bare feet. As she pa.s.sed me in the narrow hallway she smelled like sweat and Kip L.'s leather jacket.

They didn't say anything, and I didn't either. Then they were back downstairs and I walked into my room. Rain pattered against the window. The only light was gray and shadowed, and I flicked on the overhead bulb. Lately I'd been making my bed some mornings, pulling the top blanket or bedspread tight at the corners. I could see it was still made but rumpled, and there, in the middle of my mattress, was a spot of wetness the size of a quarter.

ONE WEEKDAY morning I'd somehow woken before anyone else and went down into the kitchen to see what there might be to eat. Usually the inside of the fridge was nearly empty shelves, but I was reaching for its handle anyway when I heard the hissing. I turned to see the blue flames of the front burner. It had been going all night. Inches away was a greasy Burger King bag on a stack of dirty dishes, and I rushed over and switched off the gas. The air was warm and smelled like scorched metal.

That night, long after everyone was in bed, I lay on my mattress and pictured the flames climbing the walls, thick smoke filling the hallway, snaking under our doors, blackening the gla.s.s of the windows, suffocating us before the fire even made it to where we slept. I got up and went downstairs and checked the k.n.o.bs of the oven and stove. I touched each one five times, turning it to OFF and holding it there. But this did not seem to be enough. I moved to anything electrical and unplugged it, too. I started with the kitchen clock. I hurried to the lamps in the living room, even the stereo and TV, unplugging them all. Then I moved quickly to the front door and checked the lock, again having to touch the cool metal five times to make sure. I crept through the dark house to the back door and did the same there. Then I climbed the stairs and lay in bed and tried to sleep. I'd think of my brother wanting to die; I'd see the exhaust pipe and the vacuum cleaner hose, and I'd hear the drums on the radio, feel the carbon monoxide entering my lungs like a thief.

JEB AND I began building again. The backyard was small and square, probably thirty feet by thirty feet, but in the far corner away from the house was that tall beech tree. Tacked into its trunk at its base was the corner post for the side and rear fences, short rotting planks on rails, the one we hopped over to get to Cleary's house down the back alley to Main Street. It was the one we hauled our stolen lumber over, too.

Cleary helped us. At the bottom of the avenues on Primrose Street, not far from a Catholic church and cemetery, was a lumberyard. They kept most of their wood outside under tarps surrounded by a ten-foot chain-link fence, but there was no barbed wire at the top and lately they'd been tossing used pallets on the sidewalk outside.

At night, long after we'd eaten and Mom had dozed off, Jeb and Cleary and I would run down Seventh past the lighted noise of the apartments, the dogs barking, TVs blaring. We'd get down to Primrose where every other streetlamp was out, the lumberyard lit up with only one security light over the door to the office, and we'd check the street for a pa.s.sing cruiser, then stack those pallets and climb up and over, the points of the fence sometimes catching on our pants or shirts, and we'd drop down onto a stack of plywood and head for the eight-foot two-by-fours and two-by-sixes. They were pale white in the shadows and smelled like dry wood and were hard and smooth under our hands, and we yanked them from their stack and leaned them against the fence, then pushed them up and over to the first of us down on the other side.

We needed nails, too. The office and warehouse were locked and there was that light over the office door, but lying in the black shadows around the corner were discarded sections of steel bands that had been cut away from what they'd held together. There was loose rope and spools of cable, more pallets, and all along the asphalt up against the warehouse were scattered loose screws and nails. We'd pick up as many as we could and load up our pockets. When I climbed back up over the fence, I thought it was the fence poking my thigh, but it was the nails, fifteen or twenty of them.

It seemed like we'd been in there a long time. We walked back up into the avenues where very few of the streetlights worked, most of our walk safely in shadow, and we pa.s.sed the tin-sided houses with no front yards, the shades or curtains drawn, each of us carrying no more than three or four two-by-fours over our shoulders, but we walked along like men who worked, men who had actually earned what they carried.

WE WERE building a tree house in that beech in the backyard. Our landlord had a shop in the bas.e.m.e.nt, and we went down there and found a couple of hammers and a handsaw. In the garage, hanging on the wall, was a wooden ladder, and within a day or two we'd built a fairly level platform fifteen feet up in the branches of the tree. For the flooring, we'd stolen a sheet of plywood from one of the stacks in the lumberyard, but it took two of us to carry it back home, and when we went back for more a few nights later, there were bright floodlights shining down into the yard and the warehouse and office.

Cleary stood there in the dark, his hair over one eye. "Holy s.h.i.t." Then there was the sound of something heavy sliding over the asphalt, then a rattling, then a German shepherd charging us till the chain yanked straight. And we ran.

We needed walls and a roof. Weeknights we wandered up and down the avenues looking for sc.r.a.p piles behind houses, but there seemed to be a dog chained in every third or fourth lot. Once we hopped a fence and dropped down into a packed-dirt yard. There was a motorcycle, a lawn chair, and a picnic table. In the corner a couple of bikes leaned one against the other, and Newburyport and Cody Perkins and whoever had hopped over our fence and stolen our bikes came rushing back and I began to feel like somebody I didn't want to be, an exterior light coming on and shining on the three of us. "You motherf.u.c.kers want to get shot?"

Cleary pushed open the gate and we ran up Fourth Avenue in the dark and didn't look back until we were on the other side of Main, breathing hard, sweating under our clothes, Cleary saying that was boss, "That was so friggin' boss. boss."

WE GOT the rest of the materials from our bas.e.m.e.nt. Before renting the house to us, our landlord had started building a recreation room. The floors were still poured concrete, but he'd hung a ceiling to hide the exposed subfloor and joists above, and he'd framed walls along the length of the foundation and around the furnace and oil tank and wood shop, tacking fake paneling to the studs. Jeb had studied the situation and seen right away that if we went behind the wall near the furnace, we could rip out every other two-by-four and the paneled walls would still stand and look the same from the finished side.

It was easy to take the hammer and swing it down at the base of the stud till it slid away from the nails that held it. Then we'd grab the bottom and yank till the panel nails ripped free and we'd keep yanking till the top nails gave too, and we'd carry the stud up the bulkhead steps and outside.

I did a few, but Jeb was faster, his hammer-swing more efficient. Out in the yard, Cleary or I would pull the nails out of both ends and then straighten them out on the concrete driveway, tapping them with a hammer until they were usable again. The sun was on us, and I could hear the party sounds coming from inside the house-the stereo turned up loud, some kid laughing louder, high or half drunk, and I may have felt superior out in the yard building our new house high in the beech tree with our stolen materials, but I hoped n.o.body would come out and see us. I hoped n.o.body was in my room. I hoped Nicole had locked herself in hers, as she always did, though she never talked much anymore to anyone, and I didn't talk much to her either.

"Hey, you guys, come look." Jeb stood on the lower steps of the open bulkhead, a cobweb in his long frizzy hair. "I found something."

We followed him back into the dark bas.e.m.e.nt beyond the shop to the oil tanks. We could hear the squeak of the living room's floorboards above us, the ba.s.s beat of the stereo, voices and the tapping of someone's boot.

"Look."

Leaning against the wall were ten or twelve brand-new sheets of paneling, four feet wide and eight feet long, a thin layer of dust coating their top edges.

BY THE weekend, we'd built frames for our walls, then nailed to them those thin sheets of paneling. We had five sheets left over and we used all of them for the flat roof, stacking one on top of the other. Now the roof was strong enough for us to stand on and we made it a deck and took our last two-by-fours and nailed some of them lengthwise from branch to branch for railings.

Because we didn't know how to frame windows, our tree hut had none and when we crawled inside our short narrow doorway that faced Cleary's alley, we were crawling into a black hole that smelled like sawdust and bas.e.m.e.nt musk, but it was our black hole, and we didn't want just anyone climbing into it either.

We got rid of the ladder and built a rope elevator. Just above the hut there was a long branch jutting out from the trunk, and into this we screwed two heavy-duty pulleys we'd found in Cleary's bas.e.m.e.nt. It's where we got the rope too, coiled under a workbench.

Cleary's house didn't have a bulkhead entrance like ours and the only way in was through his kitchen and down the stairs. When the three of us walked into the house on that weekday afternoon, his mother was on the couch watching their black-and-white TV, Merv Griffin maybe, her yellow plastic tumbler in her hands on her lap. She was slow to look up at us, her eyes glazed over, the whites pink.

"Hi, honeys, you boys hungry?"

"No, Ma." Cleary was already halfway down the bas.e.m.e.nt stairs. Jeb followed him, but Cleary's mother was smiling at me like I'd just said something funny to her. "You need a haircut."

I shrugged.

"How's your mom?" She took a long sip off her drink.

"Good."

"She still working down to Boston?"

"Yeah," I said, though I don't think either of them had ever met. I wanted to go downstairs but didn't want her to know I didn't want to stand there talking to her anymore, Cleary's drunk mother in her clean house, always so clean, the linoleum floors swept and mopped, the rugs vacuumed, the coffee table and TV and windowsills free of dust, even the windows looking out onto the dirt alley were as clear as if they held no gla.s.s.

Sometimes I would think how good it would be to have our mother at home all day too, to have her there to make sure we got to school, and to have her there when we came home in the afternoon, an adult who wouldn't let just anyone into her warm, clean house.

Even if she was like this.

Her attention was back on the TV now, men in shirts and ties sitting around talking, and I went down the bas.e.m.e.nt stairs, ducking my head under a joist, hoping Cleary and my brother had found something useful.

TO GET up into the hut, you'd sit on a short section of two-by-four, the rope it was tied to between your legs, and you'd pull on the other rope hanging a foot away, the pulleys creaking as you rose up and up till the hut's floor was at your chest and you'd keep one hand gripping the rope, then reach out with the other and grab the inside jamb of the door, lift your knee onto the platform, then let go of the rope and hear the whistle of it through the pulleys as your two-by-four seat fell to the ground and you were inside. When all three of us were up, one of us would lean out and grip the rope and pull both ends and the seat up and n.o.body could get in unless he was a monkey.

But what was there to do up there? Soon it was fall, then early winter, and it was cold in the hut, and late at night we ran up and down Columbia Park stealing welcome mats from every front or side porch, our faces lit up under the exterior lights, and we hauled the mats back, tossing them one at a time up into the hut, then tacking them to the inside walls and ceiling till you couldn't see the paneling anymore. We found an orange electric cord in the garage and ran it down the trunk and along the fence to our house where Jeb pulled it through a crack in the bulkhead doors and plugged it into a socket near the washer.

Down on Seventh Avenue, on top of the trash pile in the dumpster, was an electric heater, a brown metal box, half of its safety grille kicked in but the coils looking new and untouched.

"Give me ten fingers." Cleary put both hands on the steel lip of the dumpster. He kept glancing back at the apartment houses behind us, mainly the one with the rent collectors, but there were no motorcycles out front and no music playing. Three or four times a year, the collectors went on drug runs down south somewhere. Kids talked about it at the bus stop, what was coming up here from New York and New Jersey and Florida. The mud beneath us was frozen, and from somewhere deep inside the apartments a baby cried. I squatted and knitted my fingers together and Cleary put his cold sneakered foot into them and pushed off into the trash.

NOW THE hut was warm. We'd hung a wool blanket over the doorway, and the orange glow of the exposed heater coils gave off almost enough light but not quite. Soon we had a small lamp up there, its shade scorched in spots, and Cleary got hold of a radio too. It was old and covered with dried paint splatter, but if we kept it in the corner facing southeast, it got pretty good FM stations down in Boston, and every time we were up there it'd be playing Led Zeppelin or Aerosmith or the Stones, though sometimes it was just DJ talk and we'd switch it off.

Girls were coming up now. Girls who were strong enough to pull themselves up our rope elevator. Some of these were from Cleary's alley, and they were twelve or thirteen and wore tight hip-huggers and smoked Marlboros or Kools and swore a lot. Others came from a few streets over. One was the little sister of Ricky J., one of the rent collectors who'd thrown us out of the pot party and beaten the s.h.i.t out of Cleary. She was short and thin and wore so much black eyeliner she looked like some kind of night rodent. Cleary bragged to us once that she liked to give b.l.o.w. .j.o.bs and that she swallowed, too. Right off she seemed to like Jeb, his wild hair, the soft brown fuzz on his cheeks and chin, his blue eyes and sweet smile.

I had sort of a girlfriend now and while Jeb and Cleary and their girls made out in the hut, I was starting to spend my afternoons at Rosie P.'s house a few blocks west and closer to the highway.

Rosie was black and quiet. She had a neat afro and a pretty face, and she wore small gold earrings like a woman. We'd met months before when we were both thirteen, at a party up in the woods at Round Pond, a Sat.u.r.day night and thirty or forty kids drinking around a fire, pa.s.sing joints, listening to the Alice Cooper blaring from the speakers of a Camaro somebody had driven down the trail to the clearing. I was standing next to Rosie, our backs to the dark water, and she seemed shy and kind. I offered her one of the Schlitz Tall Boys we'd brought. Cleary had stolen money from his mother's purse and we waited outside a liquor store on Cedar Street for over an hour till somebody bought some for us, a big Dominican man in a suit jacket, his Monte Carlo parked half on the sidewalk, its engine still running.

Rosie smiled and took the beer. Her older sister Laila was there too, laughing at something Cleary was saying or doing and she kept eyeing my brother.

Usually these parties got broken up by the police. From across the water, one or two cruiser spotlights would shine in our direction, lighting up the trees and casting their shadows across our faces. Then there'd be flashlights, their light paths jerking up and down as cops on foot came for us, and we'd start running.

But this night, somebody threw leafy branches on the fire and they began to smoke up right away. Someone else yelled, "That's poison sumac, sumac, a.s.shole!" A few began coughing, then a few more, then the owner of the Camaro revved his engine and headed back up the trail, his headlight path rising and falling with each dip and rut, and Jeb and Cleary and I ended up at Rosie and Laila's house. a.s.shole!" A few began coughing, then a few more, then the owner of the Camaro revved his engine and headed back up the trail, his headlight path rising and falling with each dip and rut, and Jeb and Cleary and I ended up at Rosie and Laila's house.

It was a freshly painted clapboard two-story with a small green lawn in front on a street with other houses just like it. Inside, the rooms were as clean as Cleary's, no dust or clutter anywhere, pillows set on the sofa, a bowl of apples on the small kitchen table, the hardwood floors gleaming under the lamplight.

Laila and Rosie were being raised alone by their mother who was working two jobs, one in an office, the other in a restaurant. In the six months I was with her daughter, I never met her mother or even saw her.

I don't know whose idea it was for the five of us to go up to the girls' bedroom, or if it was Rosie or Laila who lit the candles, or where we got the bottle of wine we began to pa.s.s around, Jeb and Laila sitting at the foot of the bed, Cleary leaning against the bureau, Rosie and me sitting side by side up near the pillows. The record player was on, Bill Withers singing "Lean On Me," and Rosie's tongue was in my mouth and we kissed a long time. Once I looked up and Laila was standing between Jeb and Cleary, kissing one, then the other, her hand rubbing Cleary's crotch.

After a while the three of them were gone, and Rosie and I stretched out on the bed on top of her covers. I was thirteen and had touched b.r.e.a.s.t.s before, a girl when I was eleven and she was twelve, and it was like holding a soft-boiled egg gently so it wouldn't break. Rosie let me touch hers that way under her shirt and we never stopped kissing and soon her jeans were unsnapped and unzipped and I was rubbing her pubic hair, so much more than I had, and I kept expecting there to be some kind of hole there, that if I kept rubbing, it would be like finding a b.u.t.ton that would open her secret compartment. She seemed to like what I was doing, but I began to wonder if something was wrong with her, if some girls just didn't have holes and couldn't have babies. Or maybe I couldn't find it because she was a virgin, and it wasn't there yet.

This went on for a long time, maybe half an hour, my wrist burning so I had to switch hands. Then Rosie arched her back slightly and my fingers slid lower and into the warm, slippery answer to all I'd been asking myself, my lips never leaving hers, this girl I'd just met.

A WEEK later we did it on the floor of her bedroom while up on the bed Laila made out with Jeb or Cleary or Sal M., a handsome slow Italian kid who lived close by. The room was dark, but I remember a nightlight plugged in near the bureau. It was shaped like a seash.e.l.l and it gave off a dim white light over Rosie's pretty face, her eyes closed, then mine too as something happened to me that had never happened to me, this gathering and gathering in the very center of my body that seemed to pause, then pulse and pulse though it was like I was falling and I knew something was leaving me and going into her.

A few days later, on a bright afternoon lying clothed on her mother's made bed, she told me that had been her first time.

"Me too."

"You know what my sister says?"

"What?"

"No protection, no affection."

She straightened her legs and reached into her front jeans pocket and pulled out a small plastic package. She handed it to me. On the front was the silhouette of a man and woman facing each other, sunset colors behind them. Rosie and I looked at each other, then started kissing, and I learned how to put that thing on and we did it on her mother's bed.

This is all we ever did. We never ate a meal together or got dropped off at a movie, or even went walking. And she only came over to my house a few times. Mom would be asleep on the wicker couch or the floor or maybe in her room reading a book, and Rosie and I would go to mine.

Laila had done it with Jeb and Cleary, and probably Sal M., but she was older than we were, almost seventeen, and soon enough she had a boyfriend, a white basketball player who'd pick her up in his black Mustang and they'd roar down the street and away. By now Jeb and Cleary had forgotten her and were back up in the tree hut with some of the neighborhood girls. And maybe what happened next came because Ricky J.'s little sister told someone what she'd been doing up there and with whom, told Ricky and her older brother Tommy, too.

MOST FIGHTS broke out when you didn't see it coming. I'd be walking down the crowded corridors of the school, too hot because like most of the kids from the avenues I wore my leather jacket all day long, my ponytail halfway down my back, my eyes on the backs of kids ahead of me as I moved from one cla.s.s where I said nothing to the next where I said less.

"f.u.c.kin' a.s.s a.s.shole!" The slam of a locker, the slap of feet over the hard floor, the soft thudding of a fist thrown again and again into someone's face, like waxed wings flapping, then a joyous shriek of someone yelling "Fight!," and we'd all be running to them, crowding around the two or three bodies flailing away at each other in the center. In a school of over two thousand students, this happened once or twice a week.

It was a cool morning in October, the sky was gray and looked heavy with snow. The second bell had rung and Suzanne and I and all the dealers and smokers and loud trash-talkers from out back stepped off the grates and headed for the gla.s.s doors of the high school.

And again, it was like stepping into still water that suddenly has a current and it was pulling me forward, a bunch of us rushing for something happening on the concrete stoop in front of the doors, a big-breasted girl in a short green jacket straddling the chest of another girl, punching her in the forehead, her eyes, her nose, her teeth, yelling, "You c.u.n.t! You f.u.c.king c.u.n.t c.u.n.t!"

Other kids were laughing, cheering, urging the one on top to kill her, urging the one on the bottom to fight back, her nose splattering blood on the concrete beside her ear.

Then Perez the narc pushed through us and grabbed the top girl under the arms and pulled her off and she kicked the other girl in the crotch and a knee and the girl jumped up, her eyeliner streaked, her nose and mouth b.l.o.o.d.y, hair in her face, and she charged after the girl who'd just done this to her, just like Cody Perkins had gone after Big Sully, this much smaller girl going after the bigger one Perez held, and again I felt small and weak because I knew I'd be running; if I were that girl, now was the time to run.

BUT SOME fights came with a warning. Word would get out that somebody was going to kill somebody else, beat his head in, demi him out, kick his a.s.s for some slight; owing money he was never paying back; s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g another's girlfriend and bragging about it; telling another, "He's a p.u.s.s.y. My mother can take him." And then the other comes around with maybe a bat or a knife or just fists and feet to prove otherwise.

GLENN P. had just flicked his smoking roach into the gutter of Main Street. "I wouldn't want to be your brother right now."

"Why?"

"'Cause he's f.u.c.king dead, that's why."

Glenn P. hooked a strand of hair behind his ear and smiled at me like he was witnessing something that satisfied him more than he thought it would. "It was gonna be Ricky, but he got shanked in the leg so guess who's coming home on leave?" Glenn P. turned and walked into Pleasant Spa for chips and Pepsi, his usual stoned breakfast. I'd just been in there with change I'd stolen from my mother's purse, and I'd bought a c.o.ke and a w.i.l.l.y Wonka bar. Now my heart was thudding in my chest, my mouth dry as the bus pulled up to the curb from Seventh. I thought of the J. brothers' little sister, her heavy black eyeliner, her skinny little body, the way she'd probably talked too much about fooling around up in the tree hut with my brother, who right now was either sleeping late or just leaving the house to walk to the middle school.