Michael Thomas - Man Gone Down

“What?”

“What yourself?”

“We need to make more money.”

“You mean I need to make some money.”

She stood up, frustrated, angry, but Claire’s never been good with anger. She’s never known what to do with it. She cries.

“So I’ll work, too.”

“Doing what? Can you make more than a full-time sitter?”

She fumbled.”

“It shouldn’t be so hard. You’re smart. You’re talented. .”

“Assuming what you say is true, that’s still a long way from money, honey.”

“Why?”

“I don’t make the rules.”

“Why don’t you? She slammed the table with her hand and went to kick it, too, but she stopped. I fingered my sternum.”

“I’m the problem, right?”

“You’re not a problem.”

“The problem. Look, I figure, to deal with all this, we have two choices. I leave and you can marry someone rich. Or I die and then you’ll be rich and can do whatever you want.”

“Fuck you!”

“Fuck me?”

“You just think I’m some greedy, shallow, spoiled. .”

“I didn’t say anything about you. I’m just saying that I’m probably worth a lot more dead.”

She slapped me. I could see it coming. She had to get around the table, line me up, and then decide whether or not she really wanted to do it. And when she finally did let go, it was the most noncommittal blow I’d ever received. It wasn’t like my mother’s eighty-foot iron tentacle slap. Her wrist folded and her hand went limp on impact. We were in trouble because I knew she could never make me do anything I didn’t want to do.

Then the debate returns: private or public, New York or elsewhere, and can we afford to live in a town that has good public schools. Then she looks at me and considers herself and can’t come up with anyplace else. And then I tell her something about my past, that there weren’t any ski trips or beaches or whatever people do to luxuriate and that the only thing I came out of those years with intact was the dim notion that I wasn’t quite ready to resign myself to any fate prescribed for me because of melanin or money — that I’d put off death for a while and dream. So back to the school debate: “Imagine if you and Gavin had gone to private school . .” Claire has always loved what she’s perceived as my high mindedness, until, of course, it’s turned on her. Then it’s just scary and mean. And I had many responses — from “I would’ve hated those people” to “I do, all the time.” And even that light cuff drew tears. I can’t stand it when she cries, when that mouth turns down into an exaggerated frown. I used to do anything to stop it.

Marco’s phone rings. I answer. He speaks before I can.

“Hey, you up there?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you see the numbers on the side? Shit, is there a flashlight there?”

“I’m good.”

“All right, it should be tilted at a thirty-five-degree angle — is it?”

“No. It’s about thirty-seven.”

“Okay, so make sure the arrow is pointing to thirty-five.”

I do it.

“Great. It’s in. Lock it down.”

I do and make sure all the bolts are tight.

“Fuck. It’s three-nothing already. What the fuck happened? All right. Come down.”

His command annoys me so I sit. Then I lie down on the silver-topped roof. It’s still warm from the day, soft, almost tacky, but the sun sank before the rubber began to melt. No stars tonight, just the pale sky and the pink. I don’t want the memory of Claire’s frightened face. I’d rather it be calm, at least, that long mouth like the stretched clouds above. It doesn’t come. The night won’t conform; it whispers a memory, instead: “No one can touch your immortal soul.” My mother used to say, sometimes before walking out the door for the day, sometimes before drifting into sleep, “You are the light of the world. . you are the salt of the earth. . and when the world has lost its taste for you. .,” in such a way, with such conviction and good timing, that I thought she’d made it up on her own. My father, although he was an atheist, seemed to agree. Whatever my soul’s nature, they both believed it needed edification. They took advantage of my early reading skills and comprehension and had me memorize things: he, song lyrics, poems, long prosaic passages, and sports stats along with band and team rosters; she, important civil rights events and the dates of assassinations.

They met over a tray of Salisbury steak in the main Boston University cafeteria. She was rearranging the meat. He was waiting with his tray. Neither one of them ever went much deeper than that — how the senior class president and the semiliterate drifter went on to get married and have me. I suppose it would be simple to say that he was on his way up and she was gorgeous, and they were both unlike anyone the other had previously met.

I hear the brakes of a car down on the street, followed by a string of curses uttered by a young person. They’re more plaintive than aggressive. Someone else giggles. “We weren’t bad,” I say out loud. We were never bad. Alcoholic? Yes. Damaged? Certainly. Lost? Perhaps. But never bad. And, I mean, they got us early, the next greatest generation. They got us — the Harvard sociologists, PhDs, Eds, swarming out of Cambridge to the bedroom communities west of Boston; the aspiring and lapsed Jesuit priests, the transcendental remnants, the hippie holdouts, the civil rights holdovers, the art freaks, no-nukes and Greenpeace, the pacifists, the liberal Jewish intellectuals with their intoxicating gravitas.

I tried to stop smoking weed before I was seventeen — came up sober for a breath — but, but what? — I, we, went back down for the cool air of sleep, the wind through a summer day’s screen: ill-advised runs to New York to the head shops on Macdougal for canisters of nitrous, the stop in Washington Square for the squirrelly brown buds of shit weed sold by a guy named Willie, who looked black, save for the eyes and the violent Spanish flourishes thrown at the impatient junkies trying to cut in. Then back to Boston. We graduated from whippets to whole tanks of gas. We rode around in Brian’s father’s car, filled balloons, put on Jimi Hendrix, and were slapped to other realms of being.

Perhaps we princes were only dreaming. How else do rogues get the chance, either together or alone, to turn everyone on and free the world? The first true children of integration; up south, over pond, peeking out of ghettos; no factories or fisheries or railroad yards for us to languish in — set for dreaming. We slept too long. Everything passed us by.

I remember the first time I tried to get sober. Sally had just dumped me and I had seen her at a party listening closely in the rec-room basement to a rich boy I despised. I’d promised myself before arriving, alone, that I wouldn’t drink. I went upstairs to the bathroom, touched all the towels, looked into the expensive vanity at the foreign ointments and pills. I thought about popping some, but I closed the door and looked in the mirror. I couldn’t see what Sally saw in my face — what spooked her so. I had seen my father that morning, the first time in some time, hunted him down on my own — surprised him. I guess I was a little bit desperate. I couldn’t talk to my mother about anything, really, certainly not about being dumped by a poor, freckly white girl — any white girl, for that matter. Shake and Brian had already been with too many girls, and Gavin hadn’t been with any. So I went to my father, and I don’t know why I expected him to be anything besides a stranger. I kept pretty quiet, pushed an uneaten sandwich and coffee mug around a diner counter. He didn’t say much, either, just clicked his teeth. A couple of times he looked out in front of him, toward the open kitchen into nowhere, and smiled. When I was getting money out for the check, I’d looked up and caught him shaking his head at me. “When you were a little boy, you were so full of light. .,” he’d started. He thanked me for lunch and the opportunity to see me and left.