Michael Thomas - Man Gone Down

It was this past spring and he looked well — tall, dark haired, blue eyed, strangely russet skinned, as though some of his many freckles had leaked; the Black Irish. He’d made the transition, despite a good decade of delirium tremens and shelters, from handsome boy to handsome man. His lined face and graying hair made him look rugged and weary, but his freckles and eyes still flashed innocent. He’d just had a poem rejected by some literary rag, but on arriving, he seemed fine. We sat around the table. My girl was in my lap playing with my food. There were three other couples besides us, a single writer friend of Claire’s, and Gavin. The woman, his alleged date, asked him what kind of poems he wrote.

“Sonnets.”

“Sonnets?”

“Petrarchan sonnets.”

She giggled. “How quaint.”

“Quaint, hmm.”

He emptied his water glass, refilled it with wine, and swallowed it in one gulp. Claire looked at me, concerned. He drank another glass, excused himself, and stood to leave. I caught him in the hallway.

“Where are you going with this?” I asked.

“Down, I suppose.”

Three days later he showed up, beat up and already detoxing. Claire used to try to swap stories with us, about drunken uncles and acquaintances that had hit it too hard. She’s never seen me drunk. I never had a fall as an adult. I never suffered Gavin’s blood pressure spikes, seizures, or bat-winged dive bombers — only some lost years, insomnia, and psychosomatic heart failure. But she watched Gavin convulse on her couch while her babies played in the next room. She realized that the stories we told had actually happened to us and not to someone we used to know. The damage was real and lasting. And more stories were just an ignorant dinner comment away.

“How are you, Gav?” I ask. It sounds empty.

“I’m all right, I guess. My bell’s still a’ringing a bit.” He pauses for me to ask where he’s calling from, how the last jag went down, but I don’t. He covers for me. “You bustin’ out for the weekend, or are you staying around?”

“I’m supposed to go.”

“So you’re going to be away Friday?”

“I suppose.”

“Kids making you a cake?”

“Yeah. Probably.”

“Hey, man?”

“Yeah.”

“Your kids start giving you Old Spice yet?”

“No.”

“What’s going to happen?”

“C’s going to count to thirty-five, and even though he knows the answer, will then ask me how old I’ll be when he’s thirty-five.”

He snorts a laugh. “Children — a paradox.” He shifts to Mid-Atlantic speak, the accent of one who hailed from an island between high-born Boston and London. “I have no wife. I have no children.”

“Yes.”

“I’m calling from a pay phone in a detox.”

“Yes.”

“I went on a twelve-week drunk because a girl didn’t like my poems.”

I should say something to him — that I’ll come visit with a carton of cigarettes, or pick him up, like I always used to — but Claire’s list opens up in my head like a computer file and I stay silent.

“Mush.” He switches back. “Do something. Get your head out of your ass. Go get a coffee.” More silence. “Happy birthday.”

I go downstairs. It’s dark. Out of respect for my host I leave the lights off. I go into the kitchen. It’s posh and industrial, clad in stainless steel, maple, and absolute black granite. I open the oversized refrigerator. There’s a Diet Coke and a doggie bag. Butter. Marco is a good bachelor. The house seems far too big for the three of them. I close the door and wonder if it’s better to have an empty large refrigerator or a full one. There’s a white ceramic bowl on the center island full of change. I pick through it, taking the nickels and dimes, leaving the quarters, as though big-change larceny would be too great a crime.

There’s a big window in the back of the house. It’s double height. It rises up through a void in the ceiling above. The mullions are aluminum, glazed with large panes of tempered glass. The curtain-wall spans the width of the building with one centered glass door. It’s a structure unto itself. Like everything else in the house, it’s unadorned. It looks out on the backyard, which isn’t much, gravel, an unused sandbox, two soccer goals, and the neighbors’ tall cedar fences on all three sides. There’s no ocean, river, woods, or great lawn to look upon — functionless modernism. It may well have been a mirror — two stories tall, twenty-five feet wide — the giant mirror of Brooklyn. People could come from far and wee to look at themselves in it. I could run the whole thing for you, Marco. I’ll only take 20 percent. It’ll pay off whatever it cost you to put it in within the first year. I realize I don’t know how much it cost, how much the whole house cost to buy and renovate and furnish. I don’t have any way to price the glass, the metal, the labor, the markup. Marco had asked me my opinion on the quality of the work overall, the natural maple doorjambs and stairs and cabinetry — not with any bravado — he just wanted to know if he’d been treated fairly. I never told him anything. Perhaps he’s still waiting, though it did seem strange, the master negotiator, asking me for reassurance. What could I say to him now? I’ve stolen his change and watched his building fall.

I take the money and go out. I have a twenty in my pocket, too, but I don’t want to break it — not on coffee. Breaking it begins its slow decline to nothing.

I’ve forgotten that people go out, even on weeknights. Smith Street, which used to be made up of bodegas and check-cashing stores, looks more like SoHo. It’s lined with bars and bar hoppers, restaurants and diners. Many of them are the same age I was when I got sober. There was a time when people spoke Farsi and Spanish on the streets and in the shops, but now there’s white people mostly, all speaking English, tipsy and emboldened with magazine-like style. They peer into the windows of the closed knickknack emporiums that have replaced the religious artifact stores and social clubs.

It’s hot but not muggy. I walk north with the traffic, trying to stay curbside so as to avoid getting trapped by meandering groups and hand-holding couples. I hop the curb and walk in the gutter to get around the outpouring from a shop. There’s a party going on or breaking up. Inside there are paintings hanging on the wasabi green walls. There are small halogen track lights on the ceiling. Their beams wash out the paintings. Nobody’s looking at the work.

“Hey!”

I can tell whoever is calling is calling for me. It’s a woman’s voice — full of wine and cigarettes. A bus approaches. I have to step up on the sidewalk toward the voice. She’s standing in front of me.

“Hey,” she says again in a cutesy, little girl way. Her hair’s in pigtails. Her face is as hot as the lights. “I know you.”

Her name is Judy or Janet or something close to that. Her daughter was once in a tumbling class with X.

“Hello,” I answer. I’m a foot taller than she is. I can’t help but look down at her. She looks up at me, still smiling.

“Jeez, I never realized you were so tall. Now I know where that boy of yours gets it.”

“Actually,” I say, looking over her into the crowd of partygoers — I don’t recognize anyone—“I was a small kid. I grew after high school.” She’s still smiling, but her face has lost some of the heat it held. She doesn’t seem to care about the info.

“Whose show?”

She looks surprised. She touches her chest lightly with both hands. The bus rolls behind me, hot with diesel funk. My first job in New York was as a bike messenger. I once watched a guy skid on an oil slick and go down on Madison Avenue in front of the M1. It ran over his head — popped it open. Everyone watching threw up. She leans against the bus stop sign, flattening a breast against it.