Michael Thomas - Man Gone Down

She’s back. She’s carrying a bag. She doesn’t look at me. She opens the door and holds it in place with her back.

“Go in.”

I don’t.

“This is just silly. You’re going to catch your death out here.” She nods her head in the direction of the entrance, this time in a very deliberate way while making a strange sucking sound with her mouth. “All right then, go on.”

I go in. She lets the heavy metal door slam shut. Then without putting her bag down she opens the gate of the freight elevator, then the up-and-down doors. She moves powerfully, gracefully. She’s long, tall. There’s no hesitation or awkwardness to her.

“Go ahead,” she says. I shake my head. “They work on the third floor. You can go in.” I shake again, but she leans toward the opening and that seems to pull me in. We ride up, jerkily thankfully, because it gives me something other than her to consider.

“I think it’s illegal,” she says as we stop with a boom. She goes for the door. “It’s not at all to code, but does anyone really inspect elevators?” She opens the gate. “We’re here.” She steps out. I follow. She closes the gate and starts to a door. I follow.

“No, you’re over there.” She points to a doorless opening while getting her keys out — still one handed. She does it every weekday morning — puts on something just respectable enough, just after she’s shampooed — gotten her keys from the basket in the kitchen and gone to get her one coffee and whatever else was in the bag. But not on weekends. Weekends she stays in later? Doesn’t go out at all? Brews her own? “ Why don’t you just make your own?” Claire would sometimes ask. I like to buy coffee in a shop that sells a good cup — just to check in, just to see if things aren’t too far gone. Claire doesn’t need that. Whether she likes them or not, Claire actually gets along with people. She’s able to walk among them, even those she dislikes. Their presence doesn’t vex her because she has the ability to make them feel good — when she smiles at them, gives them her approval with all that Anglican highness. And she looked down with all her Anglican highness and deemed it was okay. Not this one. She looks out in a secret way. She won’t tell what she’s thinking. Judgment isn’t reserved, but it is withheld. And now she isn’t even looking at me any longer. She’s through her door, having opened it just enough to slide through.

And then as if on time delay the picture of her appears in my head, not quite in memory, more like a flash at its gates, bidding them open. Her muscle, at least the mass in her calves, is beginning to change from fast to slow twitch — a light sagging beneath the skin that makes it ripple slightly. Older than Claire’s but younger than that waitress at the Ramada: Janet. She had that fully baggy skin — baggy cheeks and jowls. Baggy triceps. She used to smile at me when we came in. She’d ask me how I was doing, point over at Charlie behind the bar, and ask him if he remembered me. He’d answer very quietly, “Of course I do,” in a singsong kind of way. Then she’d bring me things as though I was some nomadic prince whose arrival she’d foreseen: soda, beer nuts, pretzels, more soda, and sometimes a whole jar of cherries — which I hated but dared to eat anyway to see how sick I could make my stomach feel while I watched my father booboopbeedoo his way from the bar to the jukebox to a corner table and sit with someone in the afternoon’s blind darkness. We’d have been outside playing catch and he’d have rubbed his shoulder or grabbed his elbow and walked to me, slowly exaggerating the throwing motion. And then later, me with the junk food and the sick gut and our two mitts and ball on the bar, I’d spin on the stool and he’d be gone. I’d feel a little panicky and scan the dark lounge for him. Baggy arms would’ve stopped talking to me, stopped giving me things, and Charlie would’ve moved himself to the other end of the bar — being busy. And I don’t know why I think about it in this particular way, this particular tense, because it may have happened only once, or it may not have happened at all. And the subjunctive narrative I’ve created may only be myth culled from knowing the neon red sign of the motel, and years later, knowing what dim lights and strange perfume signified. Perhaps I’d only smelled it on him once — the stink of the lounge queen’s sex on my father. Or heard it in my mother’s hiss — muttering to herself, three scotches down, banging the skillet around the kitchen. I wish her hiss had remained inscrutable. Whatever the case, the memory, the myth, the vision rips through me awkwardly like a jagged blade. So it happens again and again. So it happened again and again — the lounge queen standing beside me — dye job, white-woman perm, blue mascara. “Don’t make yourself sick, sweetie.” She’d rattle the bowl, the nuts or pretzels, smirk at me, and stare as though she had the power to hypnotize, not for my sake, not to help me forget, but for her own. Sometimes she would touch me — pat my head, caress my cheek with the same hand that had been pulling on my old man’s cock. “What a cute little boy,” she’d say. And Charlie would still be ashamed at the other end of the bar. And Janet’s eyes would signal that my father had returned. I could always smell him behind me, all the familiar smells, but also those that weren’t his — soap and her. He’d have his hand on my shoulder and hers would be on my face and it seemed as though I completed a circuit — him connected to the dark air of that skanky lounge, the air connected to her, then to me. I knew it should’ve made me jerk and wretch, but it didn’t. I’d sit there on the stool and Charlie would continue to ignore and Janet would look at me, not like I was a prince, but some pitiful waif, and then to him, almost as if to say, “I could take care of the boy if you’d fuck me like you fuck her.” And now, like then, things go black, and I’m left only with the feeling: them having connected me to whatever it is they want, whatever it is they do to get it, and the price of the ticket, which they, in all their wanting, are unwilling to pay.

The elevator moves. I back into the space. I don’t want to be here. There must be a stairway down. No. No escape. I have to work, but I don’t have to stand in the hallway like a fool. I go inside.

The loft is L-shaped. One wall, almost fifty feet long with seven-foot-tall windows, runs south along the Greene Street side. The south wall has more, which overlook Broome. It’s dark outside. The rain makes me remember that I’m wet. I look at the radiators. They’re too small for the space. The ceilings are twelve feet high and broken up by sprinkler runs and ductwork. Even in the dim light I can tell most of the work here has been finished. In the corner are paint cans, a couple of ladders, tarps. The elevator doors open. I walk out of its sight line, around the L, into the kitchen. The cabinets are done.

“Motherfuckin’ dark as shit.”

It’s Chris. After all this time I can tell his voice — deep, but not truly resonant. Articulate with a bit of a Bed-Stuy edge. He turns on the lights. He’s with other people. They walk heavily, slowly. It’s eight now, but they don’t seem to be in much of a rush to punch the clock. They all have paper bags full of deli breakfast. There’s no one running this job. They’re going to take their time. Breakfast is on Nancyboy, which of course gets passed on to the client.

“Jesus motherfucking Christ,” says Chris when he sees me — deadpan — to belie his surprise. “What’s up?” He throws a short wave and turns before I can respond. He goes to the corner sill and studies his breakfast from outside the bag. He reaches in, arranging the coffee and the buttered bun within. Then he takes the items out and arranges them on the sill. The other two, whom I don’t recognize, follow suit on their own sills. They eat quietly. Young men slouched in preparation for becoming old.