Russell Banks: Lost Memory of Skin

Tony didn’t mind that the Kid was small and underage. He was energetic at least and seemed intelligent enough and told Tony that he had no problema being paid in cash off the books. Tony admitted that he hadn’t wanted to hire Haitians from the neighborhood because most of them couldn’t speak English well enough and no way he was going to learn their lingo. Not at his age.

The Kid figured Tony was racist and wouldn’t have hired anyone who wasn’t white like him anyhow or someone almost white but that didn’t bother him and instead made him feel lucky that both his biological parents were white people. He had never met his real father or seen a picture of him but he was pretty sure if his father wasn’t a white guy his mother would have told him as she was in no way a racist and now and then actually seemed to be attracted to men who weren’t white since at least three of the boyfriends that he knew about were black dudes and two others were very dark Cuban or Dominican guys, one or the other, he wasn’t sure and they never said. She told him black men were sexier than white men and were better hung which he wasn’t sure of even after being in the army and seeing lots of black guys naked. She said it didn’t matter but he had a feeling it did. Because he’s never actually made love to a woman the value of having a large penis is one of the many things about sex and women that he still wonders about. He does know from watching porn that big looks better.

He kept the job at the light store all through high school and worked there full-time after he graduated right up until he enlisted in the army. Tony never promoted him or gave him a raise but the Kid was okay with that because he was able to cover all his expenses with what he made. He lived at his mother’s rent free so he only needed enough money to pay for cigarettes and his and Iggy’s food and his increasingly regular visits to Internet porn sites. He put most of his earnings into a savings account at the Wells Fargo neighborhood bank branch and was given a debit card that he could use to pay for his porn, his phone cards, and other incidental expenses. Once a week he gave Tony enough cash plus a ten-dollar surcharge to buy him a case of beer. He had no friends — only acquaintances — and no girlfriends and essentially no family either. He wasn’t sure if this should bother him but since he had no idea how to go about obtaining friends or girlfriends or family he made the best of the situation and not only never complained — who would listen, who would have cared? — he told himself that actually he preferred things this way because he at least had Iggy and didn’t have to answer to anyone except Tony Perez and even Tony he could say fuck you to and walk away if he felt like it. Back then there were all kinds of jobs — thousands of them — available to a kid like him that were just as good as his job at the light store.

Larry Somerset the new guy lugs a large dark green duffel bag over to the Kid’s tent and sets it on the ground and smiling in a contrived casual way hunkers down beside him on the side opposite Iggy like an overfriendly uncle. He’s positioned himself a little too close to the Kid for comfort and his breath smells like old moldy cheese. The Kid looks beyond him and over his shoulder thinking maybe he ought to pull somebody else into this conversation since this guy Larry is a little creepy somehow. Maybe he is a baby-banger. The Kid isn’t afraid of Larry. He just feels trapped by the bright insincere light of the guy’s smile. Very few people down here ever smile like that. Very few people down here smile at all. The Kid can’t remember the last time he smiled.

In the shadows he sees Otis the Rabbit leaning against a girder watching them. Otis is maybe the oldest resident although probably not eighty-five as he claims, more like seventy-five but being eighty-five gets him a certain amount of admiration and status as does his claim that he was a professional featherweight boxer who fought in Madison Square Garden on the undercard twice back in the 1950s. He’s a short dark-brown man tight and trim with a white grizzle of a beard and a bald head that he covers with a black beret. He has the professional fighter’s squashed nose and ridge of scar tissue above the eyes and he stammers a little which might be a result of too many blows to the head.

Otis the Rabbit Washington was his fighting name because of his quickness he likes to say but once he confessed to the Kid with a certain small pride that he got the name because he was an expert rabbit-puncher and could knock a man out with it and get away with it even though it was illegal. He says the reason he’s here is because he was caught pissing in a parking lot next to an apartment house in broad daylight and a white woman looked out a first-floor window a few feet away and saw him and claimed he was showing her his dick. He likes to say that a black woman would never have done that. But he was homeless to start with, he says, sleeping in the parks and behind Dumpsters and getting constantly rousted by cops and square-badge security personnel so for him becoming a sexual offender and landing under the Causeway with official permission was in a way a move up. He’s a juicer who supports his habit by canning recyclables and with as much of his Social Security check as his sister will give him after she takes her cut for acting as a mail drop.

Otis the Rabbit likes the Kid and the Kid likes him and unlike most of the other residents they do favors for each other. Now and then when they have nothing better to do Otis shows the Kid a few moves and has promised to show him his patented secret version of the rabbit punch someday. He says he taught a legal version to the welterweight champ Kid Gavilan that Gavilan made famous as the bolo punch. You deliver it with your left hand after a hopping side step to the left but need to set it up with a wide-swinging right which opens you up in front and makes it a risky punch. Otis thinks the Kid has possibilities as a bantamweight except that at twenty-two he’s almost too old to start now and is probably not allowed to train or fight in public anyhow especially wearing an electronic ankle bracelet.

The Kid stands up and ignoring Larry Somerset stretches his arms, rolls his neck, and touches his toes once. Larry stands too, still making that toothy smile. The Kid flips his cigarette butt in a bright arc into the Bay. He’s trying to quit smoking by cutting out one cigarette a day every week and is down to thirteen a day now. Next week he’ll be down to twelve a day. In twelve weeks one a day. Then zero. The Kid is nothing if not self-disciplined. Actually he’s more patient than self-disciplined.

Say, Kid, I’m wondering if you could give me a little advice, me being a newcomer here. So to speak.

What kind of advice?

Well… I need a place to sleep. You know, shelter from the storm, as the song says.

Can’t help you, man. Everybody here’s on his own. So to speak.

I can pay you, if that’s the problem. Really, I need help. I just need a place for tonight. Until I can set up my own place. You know, get my own tent set up. I had to sleep outside on the ground in Centennial Park last night. No fun. I’ll go downtown tomorrow. Pick up a tent and whatever I need for cooking and so on at a Target or something. I only just got here and wasn’t aware that it was so… open. I didn’t expect to be met with such hostility. I mean, they told me at the park that there were cots and so forth. Like it was a kind of unofficial shelter for people. People like us.

Yeah, well, you were told wrong.

Evidently.

I don’t think I’m like you anyhow. Nobody’s like anybody else down here.

What would you charge for letting me sleep in your tent? Just this one night. I have cash. I have my own sleeping bag in my duffel there.