Michael Thomas - Man Gone Down

The crud doesn’t come off easily, so I roll the paper around my finger and bear down. This method works better, but now I’m sanding a much smaller area. And the window frame seems to expand, rise through the ceiling, extend through the south wall, and out to Broome.

There are people walking the streets, some in coveralls, some in suits, different kinds of women — dressed down, dressed up — moving north and south. I wonder if they’re natives or transplants. Why did they come — foolish question. Everyone comes to be a star, but the numbers don’t bear out — winners versus losers. I suppose that one could say we were winning, Shake, Gavin, me, even Claire — having escaped our fates: artless concrete toil, drunken wife, and child-beating, brick-dry republican husbands. Death. Made so many dreadful mistakes and escaped many of them with impunity. And we were all still alive, relatively optimistic — trying to do something every day. But the lucky to be alive line doesn’t mix well with the rasping, the banging, and all the people below moving with so much self-assurance. Yes, I made it through almost a year and a half — a free ride — in Cambridge, flamed out, came back in the city with the others. And we had some peace — writing, singing, staying sober, leaning on each other. Then I met Claire. Then Shake went insane, and soon after, Gavin fell off. Brian. Fucking Brian. Calling from across the world to wish me luck and say that “a centipede bit me on the testicles.” Where had he picked up that little English accent? — Ah, there but for the grace of God. . It sounds hollow, even unuttered, a coward’s mantra or some duplicitous line — like a malt liquor slogan on a ghetto billboard. It’s the conspiracy of the haves— How do you keep a good man with a wee problem down? Keep him thanking his lucky fucking stars he’s got what he’s got.

I was supposed to have been somebody. I was full of promise. “What happens to a dream deferred?” “How can you mend a broken heart?” What if you don’t keep your promise? But who made it for you? If not you, then why is it yours to keep? I was supposed to have been somebody — not anybody — somebody who mattered and to whom things mattered. I was born a poor black boy of above-average intelligence and without physical deformity. I was born a poor Indian boy of above-average intelligence and without physical deformity. I was born a poor Irish boy of above-average intelligence and without physical deformity. I was born a poor black boy of above-average intelligence and without physical deformity, and therefore I should lead my people. It didn’t work out that way. Even my father felt he could shake his head at me. “When you were a little boy you were so full of light . .” People have spoken of the light: finding it, holding it, keeping it alive by torch or a memory of flame — the sun, a burned image on the mind-slate to be remembered until the next day, ’til rising. Or will memory eclipse it? What do we remember? What do we now see? I don’t remember an exchange of vows. Who had passed that light to me? All that light he said he’d once seen? It hadn’t come from him, Daddy Bing Cocktail, at least I thought not. It hadn’t been passed down in backwash beer or hopeless baseball teams or hep and cool cats — the vacuum he’d left, nothing had rushed to fill it. Nothing displacing nothing — and so on.

Lila had told me there was a light. I’ve pieced it together over the years, why she left the South, why she drifted and wound up in Boston — some star she saw. We’d just moved out of the city to Newton. She was tired. She’d been lying to the school about our address, sneaking me across the border to the suburban public school. I suppose that I’d been kicked out of the private one I’d been attending. They’d revoked my scholarship — or that’s how I put it together — for fighting perhaps. And I say perhaps because other boys fought, fought often, and were allowed to stay. I’d watch them fighting over things that seemed silly — cupcakes, candy, the rules for games — they’d tear and kick and curse and cry and have to be dragged apart, still crying and kicking. I didn’t do that — at least, that’s what I believe.

One boy had said to another that my mother was “funny looking.” Not so great a slight, but in another light, an enormous one. And they whispered it back and forth, giggling. “Ugly freckle face,” turning to look at me. Giggling, whispering for what seemed to be a long time. There seemed to be no one for me to appeal to — to make them stop. Our teacher, who was usually so quick to halt any disobedience, either hadn’t heard them or hadn’t cared. I don’t think she cared much for me, the quiet boy who never spoke out of turn, who answered her questions, who looked up at her blankly — stoic little black boys must be unnerving to old white ladies — as though she was Bull Connor: not strident, nor with defiance, but without any discernible fear — the face of infinite cheek to turn once and again, again.

“You are the light of the world,” Lila had said. It wasn’t fair when I hit the boy closest to me — the boy who’d started it. We’d lost the house the year before, moved to an apartment, been evicted from that, and had just moved into some dark little shithole. My mother, whose freckle face was odd, had picked up her pace of drinking to perhaps counteract the burdens of money and parenting and whatever else failing people go through. So it wasn’t fair. I had rage held in waiting, and I channeled it via my fist into that little pink face.

I think that, much as many Christians don’t really know the beatitudes, most people don’t really listen to or understand the blues. Most people don’t understand, or have never experienced rage. It isn’t singular, random, episodic. It’s cumulative, with a narrative thrust like a black-iron locomotive. It’s always there or on its way, started initially by some unseen engineer, some fireman wraith endlessly shoveling endless coal into the fire. Hot locomotive rage. Inexorable. And you can keep switching that train, switching it, keep it on the long runs of rail through your wastelands until one day when that rage is closing in, you don’t switch. You let it run. And for an instant it feels so good — the smack-thunk of skinbone on skinbone, feeling youself strike something and having it give. And what it looks like — brown fist on white face. It makes sense — to me at least. We’ve reached the end of the line, and for a moment it all makes sense. Even in the screaming, the chaos. Even when the station collapses. Even the casualties. The body count makes sense, until of course you realize that this isn’t your stop — you’re not supposed to be here. “I wish I was a headlight, on a northbound train. .” But it’s too late for that. Now your little classmate’s on the floor, chair and desk toppled. Snot and tears and blood. The smeared, dislocated face huffing, gagging for air with an intermittent shriek each time he finds his breath. Then gasping to find some more. And Mrs. Kline taking my wrist and leading me to the office. I remember waiting. It seemed like a train station. And when the balding white man (there always seemed to be one) opened his door and looked at me as though I should feel guilt and shame, I knew I was in the wrong place, the wrong time — that I should’ve died long long before or long to have yet been born. I didn’t say much then. I just answered his questions, but I know what I’d have asked him if I knew then what I know now: “Tell me how long the train’s been gone.” The other one I was supposed to be driving. Although he probably wouldn’t have known.

How had I missed it? I had been waiting right there. If it’s not too far on down the line, then— stop that train — my promise is leaving me now. My promise. I was born a poor black boy of above-average intelligence, and therefore as the future leader of my people I was given the light for me to keep — not to let shine but to hold on to in the darkness like a star shrouded by night’s sky cloak until I was ready to reveal it. But it’s a strange thing to go through life as a social experiment: promethean metaphors; this school and that school; this test and that test; Moses and Jesus and Martin and Malcolm; Socrates to Baldwin; Shakespeare to Dylan; Jeremiah and community; community centers; marches, church basements, and city hall stairs; and the good white schools with the good white people — and I was like Daniel. I was supposed to have been someone. I was full of light — full of promise. I punched that white boy in his face, and all promises and contracts were cancelled. They ran me out, and then Lila beat me pretty good, or bad. She drew blood. O, the many uses of an extension cord. But I didn’t cry. I looked at her as I had looked at the headmaster, like I did Mrs. Kline — just as my mother had taught me — with the fish-eye, the dead-eye, the mask of dignity; and it scared her. It stoked her rage. She went for me again, kicked over a box of plates. She hit harder. Then she stopped, dropped the whip, covered her eyes with her hands, and let out a high, long, broken whistle whine, shaking her head slowly. She cried for what seemed to be a very long time. And when she stopped, she peeked out from behind her hands as if to see if I had gone. I didn’t show it, but I was scared to see what would be on her face when she saw me still standing there. She smiled. And the places on my body where she’d whipped buzzed and seemed to rise with heat. It didn’t hurt. And I knew from her face, the crazy, random face gone soft and quiet that there was, shot through the both of us and through the air, love. There was light in that little room. It moved through me, warmer than my blood. It was in her. It was all around us — the sink, the table, the counter. Her face seemed to glow from a place I couldn’t discern. Love. And it wasn’t so particular as her love for me or mine for her; it seemed to have always been there, and through our rawness we both felt it — balm on wounds. Everything would be all right.