Michael Thomas - Man Gone Down

“Thank you.”

I go in.

“So will you think about it?”

“Yes.”

“When can you come by — after work? Maybe six?”

“That’s fine.”

She starts to go, then stops. “But tomorrow — not tonight. . I can’t do it tonight.”

She’s not quite so cool anymore. Perhaps her hair, her clothes are, in fact, accidents.

“You probably don’t want to come straight over. You might want to make it seem to them that you’re going home. I mean, I don’t want to make it difficult for you.”

“Six is fine.”

She smiles sweetly, a bit girlish.

“By the way — Helena.”

“Good to meet you.”

She waits for a response.

“Ishmael.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Great.”

She lets the door close, looking at me, then turns away before it bangs shut.

When I get back upstairs, the lads are grumpy. I’ve been gone awhile. They do their best to hide it, the guys I don’t know, because they figure that I’m stupid. The Dubliner holds up a hand of forgiveness for his forgotten banana. Chris shakes his head when he sips his tepid drink.

I sit on the other side of the loft from the rest, wondering when this steak will leave me, contemplating hunger as the flip side. KC wanders over.

“Get lost, man?”

“Long line.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“You go to the one down the street?”

“Yeah.”

“Which one?”

“Down the street.”

He thumbs eastward. I point west.

“Broome, just before Canal.”

“Yes,” he says, too excited, as though he’s a game show host. “That’s the one. They busy?”

“Incredibly.”

“Man, I’d like a spot like that.”

“I suppose they do okay.”

“Phhfft!” he blows spit. “More than okay. More than okay. And you know the owner there?”

“No.”

“The big one, behind the counter, just watching. Sometimes he’ll bag things when it’s busy. Was he bagging today?”

“I didn’t notice.”

“Yeah, sometimes he’ll bag, but most times he’s just watching. He’s always watching, making sure nobody steals from him. If it was my place — pssst — I’d be gone.”

“You’d let people steal?”

“Mon, de wouldn’t need to steal ‘cause I’d be fair with ‘em. The motherfucking Mexicans he got back there — they got to steal. He don’t pay ‘em notin’.”

“You’d pay them?”

“Pssst!” He turns away as though I’ve insulted him. “You know I do other jobs, mon?”

“I suppose.”

“You know what I pay him?” He points to Bing Bing, who has already fallen asleep on a windowsill. “A whole lot more than he make here. You got to. You got to pay for it, man. Not be cheap like this guy.” He thumbs into the air at the unseen accused. No one else seems to be paying attention to his little rant. I don’t know how it happened, but we’re friends again, better friends than we ever were before. Perhaps the rest had already heard it all and I was merely a new ear. KC shakes his head and almost as abruptly as he started, ends his sermon. He feints a move away, then, as if to catch me off guard, stays.

“What happened, man?”

“What do you mean?”

“What happened to you, man? I thought you had big plans. Why you back with us?”

“I need a check, just like you.”

“Pssst! What you talkin’ ’bout na?” He points. “I thought you was a professor or something?”

“No. Nope.”

He looks at me with a canine suspicion.

“No, huh?” He nods his head. “All right. All right.” His face closes up again, and I can’t help but think that I’ve hurt his feelings. I offer up what I can.

“It didn’t work out.” A mumble. More for me than for him. It’s too quiet, and he’s already moved to a more guarded place inside — not willing to hear my story now, even if I was fully committed to telling him. I was born a poor black boy of above-average intelligence and without physical deformity and therefore I was chosen to lead my people, but some shit happened on my road to glory and I kind of lost my way. But I came back. They gave me another chance. But somehow it was different. And I don’t know if it was because I’d sobered up or because my mother had died or because the world had changed — or because of all those reasons. Or because somewhere along the way I had become just too damaged to be of any use to anyone. And so I never finished. I never wrote that dissertation because what the fuck can you definitively say about anything unless you pretend? Act like some circus ape gesturing and mimicking for petting and treats. And so never was tenured and so became a career adjunct — an academic mercenary — drifting from class to class, school to school, and could scarcely do that until one day, you wake up and you’re nothing and nowhere. Blah blah blah. Never finishing.

KC looks at me as though he’s witnessed me escape from a burning building — frightened, I suppose — morbidly and sympathetically curious.

“You okay, man?” he asks, giving me a bit more space. “Because it looked like you were looking at something that wasn’t there.”

“I’m fine.”

“Yo, you look high — not anymore — you looked high for a second. You had that faraway look in your eye.”

All of a sudden we go back to work. My lateness has actually done them a service — compressed the time between break and lunch. But for me it marks the amount of time left in this day — not so bad if I was building something, but the life of a paint scraper is tedious, hideous. The crud comes off but in no way is it archaeological. The strata, that past, is smudged and buffed into oblivion, and voilà: a brand-new skin. This is taking too long. I need toxic chemicals.

“ What happened to you, man?” I see myself in the classroom slowly pacing in front of the students with a book held in the air asking, “Whose cup trembles? Who will drink in the world’s sorrows?” And them, looking back, some wide-eyed, some dead-eyed. There was the odd white native slacker, but they were immigrants’ children mostly — some, immigrants themselves, the blacks and Latinos, almost all of whom were first-generation college students, and mostly all of whom believed in the utility of knowledge. They’d made it through the city’s abominable school system and were having to listen to me go on about the qualities of this one’s syntax or that one’s style, perplexed as to how this figured into possessing a marketable skill set. And me wondering what the hell it was that I thought I was doing to them — for them. Fixating. Becoming vulnerable in public by immersing myself in the words. “The bone’s prayer to God is death.” One day in some academic outpost, some student had broken the spell — raised his hand:”. . but my copy reads, ‘The bone’s prayer to death its God.‘” And I wanted to slap him, not out of embarrassment in the fact that I’d been reading it wrong for a decade, but because of the way he’d puckered his lips, as if he was now the secret master of that line. A little smug face quietly signifying that he got it.

* * *

“That’s lunch!”

They’ve already prepared for their escape. Safety glasses and masks are off. Chris is already walking to his coat while drying his hands. I climb down off the Baker and wait in line for the sink. The steak has disappeared in form and benefit, and I feel as though I haven’t eaten in days — light-headed, weak, jittery.

The sink is mine. A sandwich or whatever else I can scrounge up doesn’t seem as though it will be enough. I need more. I figure I’ll follow them to wherever they’re going. I’m sure, having been working here awhile, they’ve sussed out the cheapest spot.