Michael Thomas - Man Gone Down

“Nigger thinks he’s cute.”

I straightened myself on the bench, flattened my back against the cold stone, and, staring back at the squat yellow man, now scratching his thick knuckles, said, “I’m not a nigger.”

The F booms a few blocks away from the southeast as it comes up from underground. I scan the empty night. No audience up here, only me. There shouldn’t be any ironies when you narrate to yourself, no secret distances or disconnects, prophecies or deep levels of interiority: And I will be true to the boy who is me . . I’m surprised I never realized that while we were being groomed to become leaders of the next great enlightenment — student-athletes, scholar-artists, and philosopher-kings — we were training ourselves to be Wino Henries, Hobo Bobs, and Boxcar Willies. No true idealist has a solid backup plan. A train, a train; to be on a train. To tramp about with a nation sack and guitar and the bitter bitter past on your ass. With rushing air and iron wheels to accompany your blues. Suicide or flight. Suicide and flight. Suicide in flight. I think, though, that it would be hard to be a twenty-first-century hobo, especially one who was badly injured. I should’ve been born somewhere else, sometime else, when I could walk and ride the rails in any direction. But the F only runs from Queens to Coney Island and perhaps not even the blues could sing of or heal the damage incurred in a failed escape, a botched suicide — broke limbed, frozen, and mute. And that would matter, being unable to sing but still remembering — riding the F inbound and out.

I get up and walk to the back of the building. There’s a three-foot length of electrical conduit and an Astroturf mat. Next to it is a bucket of golf balls and Marco’s newest driver. He’s set up to shoot out at the river, although it would take a drive of well over a thousand yards, carrying over blocks of brownstones, parked cars, and pedestrians to reach it. I pick up the club and set up on the mat. I like to stand tall at address and get my hands as far away from my body as I can at the top of my backswing. I let it go. The club head whistles down and around and over and up. I stand tall again in my follow-through and bring the club back down in front of me. I wonder if Marco keeps track of how many windows he’s shattered.

I put the club down, pick up the conduit, and rest it on my shoulder. Gavin got The Science of Hitting for his fourteenth birthday. I was just getting to know him and we’d meet in the park with only a bat and the book and take turns studying each other’s swings, making sure the other was doing exactly what Williams said. “He was a monster,” Gavin told me the first time, bat behind his left ear, uncoiled in his follow-through, watching the arc of his imaginary blast. “He was a monster of obsession, discipline, and knowledge.” I turn on an inside fastball and send it off into the night sky. In my mind I can’t stop it. I’ve knocked it clear off the planet, only to be caught by some ionospheric netting. I swing again — another blast. You blew it. You threw away a good one. I turn the bat into a guitar and start strumming. I try to make it a song — a blues song. I hum random notes, hoping something in the night sky will hear it, structure it, and sing it back. Nothing comes. I wave one hand in the air, fingers spread, trolling the night for a song: “Hmmm-hmmm, hmmm-hmmmm. . Trains are gone. . hmmm-hmmm, hmmm-hmmmm. . Baseball is, too. . hmmm-hmmm, hmmm-hmm-hmm. . But it’s all right. . hmm-hmmm, hmm-hmm. . I ain’t blue. .” Then, “You better come on, in my kitchen. It’s gonna be rainin’ outdoors.” It’s not my song. But it’s a song nonetheless — good enough for now. I’m sure Marco is passed out on the couch. I go back inside.

Thomas is awake and seems agitated. He’s near the surface, pivoting on an invisible vertical axis with aggressive fin flicks. I’ve seen him do this before, usually late at night when one of the boys has to be put back to sleep after a nightmare. I’d lie, depending on who it was, on the top or bottom bunk. The hallway light was always on for them, and Thomas would flick left and right in its glow. I’d watch that fish. I’d listen to the boys’ breaths. None of them possessed the language to describe what had made them shoot out of bed crying, or twitch, wide-eyed under water. C or X, panting, quieting, then wiping his eyes and lying back down, without determining whether it had been a noise or a shadow. Neither boy speaking words: Neither boy believing that words — anyone’s — could unburden him of his shapeless and seemingly nameless fears. And so I would stay until I heard his soft snores, wait for them to deepen, and imagine that the fish’s scales were reflective and luminous and spread light all around the dark little room.

It’s a strange thing to go through life as a social experiment, especially when the ones who conceived the experiment, the visionaries with sight of the end, with an understanding of the means, are all gone. No more DuBois. No more Locke. No more Gandhi. No more King. No more groovy social theorists or hippies or activists or anthems.

For some reason I believed that when someone sang about love, that’s what they were singing about. I thought that I was a poet when I was younger — that I was deep. Perhaps I’d always been the one who’d been too fixed, too literal, and missed out on all the subtleties one could mine a work of art for — to get laid, to get paid. That if you quoted someone, or turned on the right song, with the lights just so, money could change hands or clothes could come off. Perhaps that’s why Sally balled the first guy she met after me. And Sally wasn’t a tart, wasn’t a denizen of casual sex. I’d watched her regard us, consider forever with me, and say to herself, “No.”

It’s a strange thing to go through life as a social experiment. If you were born of ideas, then all you have are ideas. Sitting on the floor of some dark room playing “Lay Lady Lay.” Strum-plucking my guitar, singing softly. Wondering when the world would begin. I could never get close enough. Not with his words, not with mine. I used to think that the failure was hers. Now, I think, perhaps it’s mine. There’s a world where young girls blush and sigh when they are touched, and it may be that it is good and quiet.

I suppose I should’ve been a superhero or an agent with no mission — AWOL, lost, forgotten, like a cold war relic, the laboratory, the training camp blown-up, the notes destroyed, my creator insane or in ashes. There would be, of course, those who knew of my existence. Perhaps they’re watching me, or looking for me. I should have been a vampire or a werewolf. But if that were the case, then there would be some kind of unbroken bloodline tracing back to the original. I feel artificial, man-made, like saccharin or LSD, something synthetic that was fucked up but issued nonetheless. I should have been something inexplicable, but at the same time nameable — a tolerable paradox, a recognizable dichotomy — like the Silver Surfer, both blessed and cursed; protector of the innocent, the ignorant, the stupid, the cruel; guardian of the land of the obvious; and, obviously, phenotypically different. My internal conflicts need be expressed not in words but through the power cosmic —bolts of pure space funk and blues blasting from my fingertips. Then love me or hate me, you’d at least see.

If I have the power cosmic surging through me, it seems only to give me angina and a nasty paranoid streak. I turn my gait up a notch. It hurts, but Brooklyn is dark and the streets are mine. There are no cops, no nervous pedestrians. I run and think, or I think and run — either way, I meander through the treed streets in the Heights: ginkgo, birch, oak, American elm. Their thick leaves sheath the streets, delineating a distinct border between earth and sky. They are healthy trees. Most of them have neat beds of perennials at their base, or ivy — Boston or English — and are fenced by wrought-iron painted black, or unfinished cedar. It’s a wealthy neighborhood. The houses are even bigger than Marco’s. They are old, kept old with the detailing — crown molding, sconces and chandeliers, dark oak floors, antique dining rooms, shutters, and mahogany doors.