Michael Thomas - Man Gone Down

“We can’t do anything for the boy.” Gavin is one of those people you can’t stand to see sad. He thinks, has always thought, that he wears it well, but he doesn’t. It kills the light in his face, makes him look, rather than hurt or even desperate, like a dead boy — the face resigned to despair. I could see in Shake and in Gavin that I had to do something. I instinctively tapped him with the pint. He turned, saw the bottle, and sighed. I might as well have been handing him a pistol.

“Mr. Sandman . .” I pulled the bottle back and started singing. He kept his head turned, his face not changing but no longer descending. He waited like that until I sang the wispy call and he responded, crooning, “Mmmyyesss.” Then he smiled, the freckles like so many tiny Christmas lights turning on cluster by cluster.

“You guys are freaks,” mumbled Brian.

“Mmmyyesss,” Gavin repeated.

I could tell that Brian was beginning to trip: He was twiddling his fingers in his lap. He went back to looking at the pair down the alley, watching the indifferent giving and receiving of a December blow job. It was freezing outside. The harbor wind seemed to have found its way into the alley, too, and was blowing the thickening snow sideways and around. The cold was creeping into the car.

It’s a strange thing to go through life as a social experiment — bused, tested, and bused elsewhere, groomed for leadership. When I was a boy, my room was full of great men’s images — posters on one wall of Gandhi, King, Jackie Robinson, Malcolm X, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, Stokely Carmichael, a pen-and-ink drawing of Frederick Douglass, The Jackson 5, Crazy Horse, a W. E. B. DuBois bank, and a Booker T. Washington mural. And on another wall the ’67 Red Sox, Ted Williams, a Shakespeare collage, a family tree of the Greek deities, Oscar the Grouch, Bill Russell. And I remember trying to understand the segregation of the images. The best I could come up with was that one wall was my mother’s and the other was my father’s, but even then it was difficult to keep straight; each individual image reflected and rejected the alleged virtues of each group and person.

That room. Those walls. Gone — cash from a second mortgage invested in some buddy’s business venture. In the summer of ’72 my father had been either laid off or fired. My mother went to work, so he had to take care of me. In the midmornings he’d call up the stairs for me to wake. She would’ve already tried and failed — first by moving things around the room roughly and noisily; then she’d leave and I’d hear the tub running. She’d come back when she was done. I’d open my eyes a crack. She’d be wrapped in a towel, hair in rollers and scarf, hissing, “Get up!” She would leave again, dress, reenter, and rip my covers off with an inscrutable hiss, standing there with my blankets — the freckled Celtic/Black/Indian — red armed, yellow faced, eagle nosed. One eye amber and one eye green. The progeny of, to name only a few, an Irish boat caulker, Cherokee drifter, and quadroon slave— “Get up!” And then she would go, and I’d drift off until my father ascended the stairs and with his stinky instant coffee breath nudged me and whispered my name.

We’d cook bacon or sausage and eggs, and after we finished I’d clear the table and he’d give me the Boston Globe or a book to read while he washed the dishes. He’d turn on the radio — to the big bands on the AM dial; Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman — pointing at the radio during a Charlie Christian solo: half dressed, suit pants and shirt, and almost always with a slight grin. I rarely saw him frown, even when I’d go to meet him at work after school, even when I began frowning at him. He’d gone from philosophy to drugstore chains to department stores to random mercantile outposts — always some friend’s idea that most people could tell was preselected for failure. And while my mother never tried to hide the fact that we, as a family, had been preselected for failure, he did.

We’d go out in the late morning on errands — usually to the corner store owned by the Italian boys he’d grown up with — get staples and he’d chat with them, and they’d ask him how my mother was, because she never shopped there. She went a few blocks farther to where a black couple had opened up a superette. Then we’d walk back with the bread and crackers, the peanut butter, the beer, cold cuts, and cigarettes.

Sometimes we’d play catch. Sometimes we’d perform some kind of chore until the early afternoon, when I’d make lunch: peanut butter and saltines for me, hard salami and Kraft singles for him. He’d set up the folding TV tables in the living room, and I’d bring the trays of food. He’d turn the television on to The World at War and we’d sit and eat — he with his bottle of Miller, me with my milk or water. We’d watch the WWII footage — explosions in the South Pacific, tanks rolling through Italy. He’d leave about an eighth of his beer for me and place it on my table. “Take it easy,” he’d say when I’d pick it up. “Take it easy, pal.”

When the war show was over, he’d tune in to a game show or Merv Griffin or Mike Douglas — still drinking. When they were over, he’d turn it off — a break before the nightly news — and he’d put the stereo on. I think it was mahogany. It seemed old to me and was enormous, even for an adult — like some giant basement freezer you’d find at your grandmother’s — packed with LPs and 45s and even 78s. The receiver no longer worked, but the turntable did. It was black and heavy looking — wood, metal, and rubber with the solid arm that held the records aloft above the spinning disc below. There were two sliding panels on top, one for the record storage and one for the works, and when he opened it, I could smell the old cardboard covers, the warm vinyl, the wood, the Lemon Pledge. They were all almost too faint, like the imagined smells that emanate from a deep freeze belonging to the colored labels, frosted shapes, and colors of popsicles and waffles and ancient meats and sauces. Later, when I was older and he was gone and the turntable broken, I would still crack it open for that warming scent.

I’d hear the scratch of the first LP — my father’s perma-grin, now wide, showing his wobbly teeth. He’d smile at me. “Doo doo diddly-ah ya doo-ah ooh.” First, a dose of Ella, maybe Satchmo, then Tony Bennett or Sinatra. He’d usually choose the crooners, or the swingers, though sometimes he’d play Bird or Miles or even Coltrane. Invariably though, he’d finish with Glen Campbell’s “Elusive Butterfly of Love.” He’d never sing along because he thought his voice was rotten. He’d just snap and clap by the stereo, watching me. I’d be beer addled and happy, elated because of the music and his obvious joy, but careful to stay away from his lit cigarettes, although obliging when he’d say, “Light me.” The pop of the match and the sulfur smell, the beer smell, the salami and peanut butter and the butterfly of love. Summer’s urban afternoon slowly losing its sharpness. The rush-hour traffic out on Cambridge Street. The beeps and the exhaust through the holey screens. Then no more music on the big stereo — the absent songs hissing in the speakers. He’d clean the bottles and the dishes and hide the tables. Then he’d give me a pen and pad and sit me in the dining room at the table. He’d turn on the television again. I could hear the anchorman talking while I’d write and draw, about the shrinking Massachusetts economy and the expanding Vietnam war.

When my mother came home, we’d both be in our fogs of the prehangover that comes from drinking in the afternoon. She’d walk by me and ask him, “Did you get a job?” He’d sit back in the couch and sigh, “Lila . .” And she would try to start a fight, but he wouldn’t bite. She’d turn off the TV, walk by me again mumbling just loud enough to hear, “You should be in summer school,” and into the kitchen, where she’d bang pots and pans around, hissing and mumbling in the same inscrutable way. My father would croon back to her in his baritone, “Lila, he’s only five.”