Another Broken Wizard (4 page)

Mom’s morbidity was nothing new. When I was six, she told me that if she ever got to be as forgetful and generally decrepit as her own mother, I should kill her. I remember wondering whether I’d still go to jail if I had her permission.

“I guess you have a point there, Mom. But what are you going to do? Kill yourself?”

“With some of these lingering diseases—Alzheimer’s, terminal cancer—you really don’t have much choice but to kill yourself.”

The lights of the closed businesses blazed on in the cold vacuum of night. Dick’s Sporting Goods, Legal Sea Food and Starbucks gleamed above the pitted and shrunken snow banks. The signs reconfigured the landscape into a dormant, scrambled message.

“Mom, I advise you think of your only son, who won’t get the insurance payout in the event of a suicide.”

“Actually, with my policy it doesn’t matter if it’s a suicide.”

“Really?”

“Really. You just have to hold the policy for five years. And I’ve had it for more than that, so it doesn’t matter.”

Thanks Mom.

And with that last unthinkable thing, we climbed the hill to her apartment building. Mom said it was past her bed time, and our Christmas concluded. Sometime around ten, Serena called. She was upstate, with her parents. She had gotten stoned with them, so the conversation stopped and started as her attention wandered. I guess my attention wandered too, sitting so close to the mad antics of the muted TV, and so far from her. But the conversation eventually found its holiday rails—the many faux pas of older relatives, the food, the good and bad gifts.

“… But at least the squash and cheese potatoes came out okay. I just can’t believe it’s been three years since grandpa died,” she said.

“I know—unbelievable,” I said, then realized I’d never met her grandfather. Serena and I hadn’t yet been together a whole year.

“Unbelievable, huh?”

“Sorry babe. I mean, you know.”

“Man-robot speaks.”

“At least he’s polite.”

She giggled and I laughed, glad for an awkward moment of connection in the phone call.

“I miss you,” she said.

“I miss you too. I’d invite you up to stay at Dad’s apartment, but the hospital is probably where I’m going to be for most of next week. Maybe after that, when things get more settled, I’ll get us a hotel room for a weekend. I have a car. I could show you where I grew up.”

“That sounds like fun. I’m actually a little scared of it, after the stories you’ve told me.”

“Don’t worry. The dangerous part is easy to avoid,” I said.

Just a week before, Serena and I got into our first real fight. She was mad I’d be away so long for Dad’s surgery. And I was mad I couldn’t avoid the situation, and that she wasn’t more sympathetic. But we’d talked through it, and things were putatively okay. Serena had a way of saying that everything was okay. She helped me tell myself, almost thirty with a career if not a job, that I was doing okay. Still, it took longer than I’d like to say good-bye.

Then it was quiet. Not wind-through-the-trees quiet, but near-the-highway quiet. The occasional truck tore by, just down the hill from the apartment. A six pack of Sam Adams from when I’d visited in the summer was still tucked into the bottom compartment of the refrigerator door. I cracked one open and tried to imagine Mom’s empty hours in the apartment, between the end of the workday and sleep. She had wanted her solitude without a false face on it. And here it was.

I stayed up late drinking and letting the TV tell me all about money I had and the money I didn’t have, the man I was and the man I wasn’t. It took a while. Mom and I crossed paths as she woke for the next day.

6.

Friday, December 26

In the afternoon, Mom and I waded into the holiday shopping crowds at Shoppers World and
The Natick Collection
. There really wasn’t much else we could think to do in Framingham, and I had to return some shirts. The stores were jammed with dazed shoppers exchanging yesterday’s gifts to harried retail clerks. It was a headache. I called Joe from outside Filene’s Basement.

“What’s up, brotha?” he answered, sounding ready to roll.

“I don’t know. What’s on tap?”

“Thinking of hitting some of the bars—and there might be a party later.”

It sounded good. With three days until Dad’s surgery, there was air I still wanted to breathe. Back at her apartment, I said good-bye to Mom and hit the road.

Riding the bumper of the car in front of me on Route 9, I could hardly breathe from the frustration. An eagle held a tractor trailer in its beak on the sign for a trucking company. It read “Eagle is better than par!” The sign frustrated me. So did the other signs: Dent N’ Scratch, Monarch Spring and Wireforms, Home Depot, Lighting Showcase, Bed Bath and Beyond—men like me had moved the earth for these things. We had given our lives, forty hours at a time, for these things. And now, how could we say anything except that we were satisfied with the result?

Crossing into Worcester, I started to breathe more easily. At the Lucky Dog Music Hall, Joe was drinking by the door, in a black rayon shirt illustrated with a dragon fighting a tiger. He was talking with the owner, Erik. They liked Joe at the Lucky Dog, liked him enough to fire and then rehire him more than a few times. Joe introduced me to Erik, who let me in without paying the cover. I ordered a beer and Joe told me how had been fired the last time around.

“I was bartending, and I over-served myself. Like, I was out past the last boundary fence of anything even resembling sanity. So this guy orders a beer.”

“And that’s all he did—order a beer,” Erik interjected.

“Exactly, by all accounts a perfectly reasonable guy. And I remember thinking I didn’t like his face. So I said I didn’t hear him, and he leaned in to order, and I punched him in the face. But by the time I hit him, I realized that it was the totally wrong thing to do. And Erik is like, right there,” Joe said, punctuating the story with his laugh.

“So Joe just looks over at me and says ‘I know.
I know
.’ And he takes off his apron and leaves. It was the easiest time I ever had firing anyone,” Erik said, cracking up along with us.

People forgave Joe. For all the dumb, destructive things he did, he was never malicious for very long. And he had a way of inviting even the people he’d wronged to laugh along. They mostly did. After all, he he’d given them a good story. And that was worth something.

The Lucky Dog was peppered with faces I had known and half forgotten in the last decade—people from little league, from keg parties, from high school, from McDonalds’ parking lots, friends I’d willingly or accidentally lost touch with, an ex-girlfriend I’d say hello to, and one that I wouldn’t.

“Jim fucking Monaghan, how the hell are you?” said Terry something, emerging from the crowd and offering me his hand.

Terry looked pale in his black leather jacket and weathered Red Sox cap. We’d played little league and gone to high school together. I hadn’t seen him in at least a decade. We did the recap. Now he taught high school in Shrewsbury and had a daughter who lives with her mother. I gave mine, leaving out that I was unemployed, that my folks had split, and that Dad was days from surgery. It’s funny how you can live ten, fifteen years, but can’t be bothered to discuss it, can’t get excited about the story. It amounts to a line or two, careful to sound content, careful not to boast. It wasn’t that I didn’t like Terry—he’d never been anything but nice to me. But there was no place where our lives intersected, except in time and space. We drank a shot together and I excused myself to go to the men’s room.

The night’s first band started tuning up. Erik told me it was a hardcore band, which meant an angry wall of sound fronted by a fat guy with a shaved head and possibly a goatee. He would scream, gesture angrily and rock violently back and forth. It seemed like every third guy in Worcester was in a band like that. Erik, Joe and I drank and joked around until the band started screaming, thrashing and so on. After a few songs, the music got on my nerves, and Joe knew the unattached women at the bar too well to want to stay. We left and I followed Joe’s white Buick Skylark across town to Ralph’s.

7.

Along with the birth-control pill, liquid-fuel rocket, monkey wrench, smiley face and barbed wire, Worcester is the birthplace the diner. And an old green diner fronted Ralph’s bar and diner. I followed Joe around an old mill building remade into a furniture showroom, past Ralph’s spastic green neon sign, and down a crumbled concrete stretch that wasn’t exactly a parking lot and wasn’t exactly a street.

The stretch was Friday-night crowded, so we parked in the shadows beside Ralph’s. In the darkness I could see I-290 atop a palisade of shadow in the distance. The city light reflecting off the clouds made the sky pink. No one had ever spoken or wrote or sang of a pink night sky. It had once made me believe I was dealing with a totally new experience.

Inside Ralph’s, Joe knew too many people to list. It was a series of exuberant, cursory hellos. Upstairs, another hardcore band was playing, but you could only hear the roar of it when the jukebox paused between songs. We ordered drinks and Joe found an Italian girl who was spilling out of her jeans and low-cut shirt.

“Tina, you know you’re the hottest girl here, don’t you?” Joe said, his mouth agape with a wild smile.

“Joe, don’t start. You do this every time you get drunk,” Tina said, clearly enjoying her opportunity to abuse him.

“Me? Drunk? Maybe drunk on your utter hotness.”

“How’s the leg?” she asked.

“My leg is great. How’s Theresa?”

“Theresa’s fine.”

“Not as fine as you.”

“Later, Joe,” Tina said and walked off to the pool table.

“She’s Theresa’s best friend. I guess she’s not in love with me. Not yet,” Joe said, gulping his whiskey through the ice cubes.

“How is Theresa?”

“She’s alright—works over at the mall. I see her now and then. We say hi. We’re pretty friendly, considering.”

“That’s good. It’s important to get past that stabby phase in a relationship.”

Theresa was Joe’s ex-girlfriend from a few years back. She buried a steak knife in Joe’s leg after he called her by another girl’s name at a party. According to legend, she said nothing before or after—just stabbed and left. I remember Joe dropping his pants on the sidewalk to show me the fresh scar. Even now, the incident brought on Joe’s machine-gun-like laugh.

“Stabby,” Joe said between guffaws.

Joe tried to order us some shots, but the laugh took over, bending him until he emerged inspired, saying, “Man, let’s get fucked up tonight—what do you say?”

We did shots of something that made my throat open negotiations with representatives from the land of vomit. The drinks and the laughs kept coming. Before long, Joe and I were in a bathroom with a skeletal Irish kid named Tommy, doing key bumps from a baggie of powder. It cut the worst of the drunk and kept us in the game. Last call came at 1:30, and cop cars waited near the door to make sure we left without incident.

On the way to our cars, two big guys started throwing punches in the shadows beside Ralph’s. Their friends joined in, and it became a nasty scrum. Shadow legs kicked and shadow arms reached out from the mass and reached back in with vicious speed. The cops took their time getting over there, to give the fighters time to wear out. The big guys, winded and bloody, made a show of yelling at each other as their more peaceful or law-wary friends separated them. The smaller guys acted like they wanted to keep fighting, but didn’t honestly struggle when their own more sober and less bloodthirsty friends pushed them apart.

In the end, there was just one guy who really wanted to keep fighting—the smallest guy. He was around five foot four and couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred thirty pounds. He was covered in blood. He fought off all peacemakers and went after one of the original big guys—the bigger of the two. When a bouncer went over to block him, the little guy ran around him. Passing into the light, you could see that the little guy’s blue winter coat was ripped and covered with blood from his badly abused face. But he kept on, cursing at people he could hardly see. Finally, two big, friendly looking guys smothered him.

With no fight left to join, the little guy approached Joe and I in the milling, post-fight throng. He was distracted and distraught. His heavy breathing made little blood bubbles swell and explode out of his working nostril. His coat, jeans and sneakers were all covered in blood to some degree and he only had one open eye. Joe gave him a cigarette. The little guy spat blood into the darkness between puffs. One of the cops came over and Joe walked away. The little guy tried to do the same, but the senior of the two cops grabbed him. The cop was a burly Italian guy made burlier by his bullet-proof vest and winter coat. He shone his flashlight on the little guy’s face humanely, at an angle.

“Hey, let me see,” the cop said.

The little guy tilted up his chin at the cop. Most of the blood, I could see, came from his nose, with some flowing from a cut over his closed eye.

“You want to go to the hospital?” the cop asked.

The little guy shook his head and spit more blood off to the side.

“Was it a fair fight?” the cop asked.

The little guy nodded, scowling at the cop.

“Okay,” the cop said. Satisfied that they wouldn’t have to file a report, the cops wandered off. I walked back to the car and met Joe and Tommy.

The sky over the I-290 was still pink. But the scene, for all its apparent wildness, seemed precedented as hell. It was written, sealed away and forgotten already. And us too-mortal folk, with our desires well-handled by the bars and the cops, had been dispatched to oblivion. I gave Joe forty dollars, which he gave to Tommy for more blow. Tommy agreed to meet us back at Joe’s place by Green Hill in about an hour.