Michael Chabon - The Mysteries Of Pittsburgh

" Cleveland, what is this?" I said. "Is this a test?"

Lurch unhooked an old felt homburg from the doorknob of the closet and walked over to the old man. He bent far down and pulled the hat onto the man's head, and kept pulling, until the hat came unblocked, the felt stretched and took on the shape of the man's skull, and his eyes disappeared under the crumpling brim. Lurch pulled, the man cried out and grabbed at his tremendous forearms, the felt stretched, a small tear opened.

"Stop!" I said.

Lurch stopped. He lifted the hat, delicately dented in its torn crown, and hung it from the doorknob. The old man lashed out at Lurch and hit him feebly on the thigh.

"Let's go," said Feldman.

"After you, Mr. Bechstein," said Lurch.

We went out. I turned my eyes from the sickening look of hatred and thanksgiving in the eyes of the old man-the look, that is to say, of respect.

They drove us down to the foot of the hill, Cleveland behind Lurch, me with a great view of the smelly expanse of Feldman's back; as usual, things were proceeding too quickly, and also as usual, I was hesitant to acknowledge the implications of these things; so instead I shouted through the sweaty wind to Feldman, whom, despite myself, and despite my anger at Cleveland, and despite the lingering fear of guns and brutality, with which I was still trembling, I rather liked.

He said that he and Lurch had been members of rival motorcycle clubs-Feldman of the Pittsburgh chapter of the Outlaws, and Lurch of a black gang called the Down Rockers-who had met in the thick of a race riot, crowbars in their hands, bitter curses on their lips, and had for some reason begun to laugh. After that they were inseparable. They'd quit their gangs to work as a team, and had been hired as muscle by Frankie Breezy, the same man who had hired Cleveland, and the man whose "franchise"-it certainly didn't belong to Cleveland-we were just now leaving.

We were almost to the bottom of the hill. I could see Cleveland 's parked motorcycle and smell the cloying sugary stink of the algae roasting along the riverbank.

"Feldman. Tell me. This whole thing was a setup, wasn't it?"

"Sure."

"Why did he do it?"

"Hey, he's your friend, Dennis. And you know," he said, in a softer voice, easing up on the throttle, "you ought to take better care of him."

We pulled up behind the other Harley, I got off the bike, and we shook. Then he and Lurch roared away across the shimmering blacktop. It was quiet for a long time.

"Well," Cleveland said finally. "So your father's in town. That's interesting."

"You make me so angry, Cleveland, fuck. What was that? What was the point of all that?"

"The point? The point was those guys would have done your nails and made you a cheese omelet if you'd asked them to. Your father's a wise guy, Bechstein, he's big. I told you. And by extension, see, you're big too. You partake of the bigness of your father. What is there to be ashamed of? The point was-"

"If you think now I'm going to let you meet my father-"

"I don't need you to make the introductions. Dennis. I can just pick up the red courtesy phone in the lobby." He lit a cigarette and shook out the match. "Look, Art, I guess this is sort of insane. "

I was overcome with a feeling of great, wary relief, the way one is when one grasps at a straw. "It is insane, Cleveland. Yes. It is. Let's not even discuss it."

"Of course you don't have to come along. I can drop you off at the bus if you want. Or you could just wait around, kill some time in Kaufmann's or something, and then I'll take you home."

"Oh."

"But I would like you to come with, you know, it would make everything so much simpler. I mean, what is the big deal? I'm your friend, am I not? You don't introduce your friends to your father? I take it he's met Phlox?"

"Yes, he has."

"Well? I just want to meet him, that's all. Just shake his fabled iron hand."

"No," I said. "I won't. I just won't. No, you are not my friend, Cleveland. You've played around with me too much. Forget it."

"Fine. I'll have to call for an appointment."

"You really would go without me."

I turned from him and walked down to the riverside and stood in weeds and rusty cans. I was hot, overcome by a feeling of brute sleepiness, and I was two hours late for my foredoomed rendezvous with Phlox. I saw that I'd been mistaken when I thought of myself as a Wall, because a wall stands between, and holds apart, two places, two worlds, whereas, if anything, I was nothing but a portal, ever widening, along a single obscure corridor that ran all the way from my mother and father to Cleveland, Arthur, and Phlox, from the beautiful Sunday morning on which my mother had abandoned me, to the unimaginable August that now, for the first time, began to loom. And a wall says no; a portal doesn't say anything.

"I'm not your friend?" He crunched into the grass beside me. An old, yellow flap of newspaper wrapped itself around his boot.

" Cleveland, do you realize what you're asking me to do? Do you appreciate the misery this means for me?"

"No. I can't," he said. "You never let me."

I looked at him. He almost smiled, but his eyes were fixed on me, unblinking, his forehead wrinkled. Then he started over to the motorcycle. I followed with his broken eyeglasses, and he fit the parts together as well as he could.

It is true, I know, that I failed to permit Cleveland any real sense of the world within me, which was, and is, a world of secrets (but that is putting it too grandly, for it was only a world of things that I could not-no, that I needed not to say), and I regret this failure all the more now, when I realize that he-oh, Cleveland-five times opened wide to me the doors of his strange world. Five times that summer I rode Cleveland 's motorcycle, my head squeezed into the banana-yellow helmet that had once belonged to his little sister. Each time, as we set out, I would clutch the metal bar behind me, but he drove, of course, like a maniac, threading his way among speeding cars, running down yellow lights, even hopping briefly up and off the sidewalk to avoid tie-ups, and I always finished with my hands more securely upon his hips, and would shout and laugh into his helmet. It was at these times, these five quick, alarming times, my fists full of hot black jacket, my helmet clicking against his, that I felt most linked to him, most understanding. I knew why he did the things he did. There would be nothing but his wide back, his laughter, and Pittsburgh whirling past, each of its trees a short hiss. The speed and the roar and the nothing that isolated us were more exciting, more true and intimate, than anything I ever felt that summer with either Phlox or Arthur; there was no shadow of sex to mar or deepen it. There were only laughing fear and my hands, like so, on his hips. We were friends.

He took me to his house so that we could shower and he could change his torn clothes, dig up an old pair of glasses. If I have not already described Cleveland 's own abode, it is because the first time I saw it was that day, when everything seemed new and newly foreboding, when I was filled with giddy fear and with curiosity. Arthur had already made me a little apprehensive of what he called the Casa del Fear, by alluding darkly to its ever changing roster of inmates, its collapses and minor fires, strange animals, dunes and towers of unwashed clothes and dishes. "It's not a house," he had said, "it's an implosion." It sat in the middle of a small wood in the middle of a Squirrel Hill city block, a forgotten place gained by a narrow, cracked drive that was barely visible from the street. It might have passed for haunted, had its exterior not been decorated with tricolor giant wooden cutouts of Felix the Cat, Alice the Goon, Beany and Cecil, Mr. Peabody and Sherman, Ignatz Mouse and his flying brick. But it had gables, a queer, peeling turret, an iron fence, its shutters dangled crazily, and there was something vaguely human about its visage.