Michael Thomas - Man Gone Down

“Yo, C-dawg.” He turned and saw me, smiled weakly, walked over and took me by the hand. We turned toward the kitchen. The adults had entered and Edith and Claire were handing out drinks. My boy, big-eyed, vulnerable, brown, looked in at the white people. They looked out at him. The White boys ran into the room. The older one was crying. His father scooped him up and shushed him. The younger hid behind his mother. X came in, arms bent, mouth open. He was stomping instead of sprinting. He roared at everyone and stomped out.

“Do you have to go?”

“Yeah.”

He let go of my hand.

“He’s definitely a T. rex now.” C turned and punted the ball across the yard into a patch of hostas. He watched it for a while as though he expected the plants to protest. He turned back to me, squinting his eyes, I thought, to keep from crying.

Claire’s grandfather wanted to sing that song at our wedding, but he’d stopped taking his Thorazine the week leading up to it and “flipped his gizzard.” So he’d sat quietly next to his nurse, cane between his legs, freshly dosed, staring into the void above the wedding party.

My father tried to assume the role of patriarch. In the clearing, between the woods and the sea, under the big tent, he’d stepped up on the bandstand. Hopped up on draft beer and with ill-fitting dentures, he’d taken the microphone. “May you and your love be evah-gween.” He’d been unable to roll the r ’s. The drink and the teeth had undermined his once perfect diction. He raised his glass to tepid cheers.

Ray Charles is singing “America the Beautiful.” It’s a bad idea to put on music while trying to make a plan. It may be that I need to stop listening altogether. Dylan makes me feel alienated and old; hip-hop, militant. Otis Redding is too gritty and makes me think about dying young. Robert Johnson makes me feel like catching the next thing smoking and Satan. Marley makes me feel like Jesus. I thought for some reason that listening to Ray in the background would be good, or at least better than the others. He’s not. I’m confused. I never know what he’s singing about in his prelude. It makes no sense. A blind, black, R & B junkie gone country, singing an also-ran anthem — dragging it back through the tunnel of his experience, coloring it with his growl, his rough falsetto. The gospel organ pulse, the backing voices, not from Nashville, not from Harlem, Mississippi, or Chicago — they float somewhere in the mix, evoking pearly gates and elevators going to the mall’s upper mezzanine, “America, America . .” It falls apart. I remember back in my school when people used to co-opt philosophy. They’d say that they were going to deconstruct something. I thought, one can’t do that; one can only watch it happen. Only in America could someone try to make the musings of a whacked-out Frenchman utile. Anyway, the song falls apart. Perhaps even that’s incorrect; I hear it for its many parts. It’s not like a bad song, which disappears. In this, the multiplicity sings. “America . .” Democracy’s din made dulcet via the scratchy bark of a native son. “God shed his grace on thee . .” Things fall apart, coalesce, then fall apart again. Like at the beach — fish schools, light rays. It’s like being a drunk teen again, waiting for Gavin in the freight yard under the turnpike. The whistle blows. I see him appear from behind a car, bottle held aloft in the sunset. Things fall apart, come together, and sometimes I feel fortunate to bear witness. The timpanis boom. “Amen . .” I have to hear that song again.

I don’t. I turn it off. I go into the kiddie bedroom, turn the light off, and lie down in the kiddie bed. I need to make a plan, which means I need to make a list of the things I need to do. I need to get our security deposit back from our old landlady. I need to call the English Departments I’m still welcome in to see if there are any classes to be had. I need to call more contractors and foremen I know to see if there’s any construction work. I need to call the boys’ school to see if I can pay their tuition in installments. I need an installment. I try to make a complete list of things in my head. It doesn’t work. I open my eyes and try to picture it in the darkness. Claire has always been good at making lists — to do lists, grocery lists, gift lists, wish lists, packing lists. They have dashes and arrows to coordinate disparate tasks and do the work of synthesis — laundry to pasta, pasta to rent check, rent check to a flower or animal doodle in the margin, depicting perhaps the world that exists beyond the documented tasks or between them: of fish minds and baby talk and sibling-to-sibling, child-to-parent metalanguage or microcode; the green tree that grows in the middle of the ocean; the space in which the song exists.

From downstairs Marco’s clock chimes out the half hour. Outside, around the corner, the busted church bell sounds its metal gag. I’ll be thirty-five at midnight. The phone rings. It’s Gavin.

“Mush, what’s up?” His speaking voice, accent, and tone are always in flux. It’s never contingent on whom he’s speaking to, but on what it is that he’s saying. Now he uses a thick Boston accent. Not the bizarre Kennedy-speak that movie stars believe is real outside that family. Rs don’t exist and only the o and u vowel sounds are extended: Loser becomes loo-sah. It’s a speak that sounds like it needs a six-pack or two to make it flow, to make it sing. He sounds happy, full of coffee, still inside, yet to be struck by the day.

“S’up?”

“Nothin’, mush.”

“All right.”

“Happy birthday, mush. I’m a couple of days late.”

“You’re a couple of hours early.”

“Sorry.” He switches to another speaking voice, closer perhaps, to what his must be — a smoker’s voice, in which you can hear both Harvard and Cavan County, Ireland. Gavin spent much of his adolescence with his father in jazz bars and can sound like the combination of a stoned horn player and a Jesuit priest.

“It’s all right.” I’ve been told that my accent’s too neutral for me to be from Boston.

“You don’t sound so good, man.”

I almost tell him why — more out of resentment than camaraderie. He owes me at least four hundred dollars: a credit card payment, or a couple of weeks of groceries.

“I’m fine.”

“What’s the matter, white man gettin’ you down?”

“You’re the white man.”

“No, baby, I’m the Black Irish.”

“No. I’m the Black Irish.”

“Whatever, man. You drinking?”

“No.”

I had three friends in high school: Shaky — née Donovan — Brian, and Gavin. Brian had to become a Buddhist monk to sober up, went missing for a decade in the Burmese jungle, disrobed, became a stockbroker, and died in the Twin Towers attack. Shaky, who in high school and college had been named Shake because of basketball prowess, had moved with Gavin and me to the East Village, where he had a schizophrenic break. He was now roaming the streets of Lower Manhattan and south Brooklyn. Privately, between Gavin and myself, his name had evolved to Shaky. Gavin fluctuated between poems, paintings, and biannual death-defying benders, losing apartments, jobs, and potential girlfriends along the way.

When I moved out of the place I shared with him and in with Claire, he’d come to visit and use her mugs for his tobacco spit. We’d drink pots of coffee and cackle about institutions and heebie-jeebies and never ever succeeding. Gavin never dated much. Never settled down. He rarely had a telephone and was reachable only when he wanted to be. “He checked out,” Claire once said in such a way as if to be asking me if I’d done the same. She liked him, perhaps even loved him, but she was scared of him and he felt this. By the time C was a toddler she’d unconsciously pushed Gavin out of our lives — to the point where I didn’t even think about him in her presence. But after a while, when Claire could see that I’d had enough of the gentrifying neighborhood and private-school mixers, she tracked him down and invited him to a party at our place. He’d had a good five years clean and had managed to start over again in Boston and get himself a Harvard degree. “He’s too smart and cute to be single,” she’d said, looking at a commencement photo. When he returned to New York, she’d thought it would be a good idea for us to escort him back into the mainstream.