Monday, August 08, 2005

Don't You Leave Me Here

“Heh heh,” he says to the naked woman. She smiles up at him from satin sheets, a wind through the open window ruffling white lace on black skin, and Scott turns the page. He’s sitting in the tattered green chair with a glass of Jack Daniels, the ice cubes rattling softly, the Penthouse on his lap, saying “Heh heh” over his red beard. His thick arms rest on the arms of the chair and white stuffing seeps through the upholstery. He says to me, “Hey little girl, you seen Joey? He back from work yet?”

Joe and Scott on Saturday afternoons watching Kung Fu movies on TV, talking about Friday night, Joe says, “That new club Stage West, they got these moving stairs going up to the second floor.”

“Oh they got moving stairs, do they Joey?”

“Yeah, there’s one set going up and one going down.”

A stream of grunts comes from the television set, hands and feet flying, flesh hits flesh. Scott leans back looking at Joe, his eyebrows raised in mock admiration, his knuckles tufted with red hair.

“Well ho-de-do, they got moving stairs, going up and going down!”

Joe nods with dignity but Scott slaps his knee, eyes sparkling. “How about that, eh little girl, moving stairs, that’s a real first-class joint, I’ll have to go and check it out.”

Joe pushes his glasses up his nose and rolls his eyes at me. Scott says, after consideration, “Moving stairs, ho-de-do!”

Joe gets up slowly and shuffles over to the coffee table. He brings out the white HI-FLYER frisbee upturned with a quarter ounce of shake in it, sits back on the couch and runs the front flap of a Zig-Zag pack through brown leaves, holding the frisbee slanted. Round shiny seeds roll to the curved bottom. “‘Only one paper can be pulled at a time,’” he reads off the pack, “‘Qualitie Superieur,’ hmmm.” On the front flap a man who looks like a pirate is smoking a rolled cigarette. His eyes disappear in black ink.

My mattress is in the attic, by a small window at the base of the roof. Through the window I watch the street, the yellow school bus stops outside, I watch the wind in the tops of the trees. The roof slopes upward in a pyramid; its sides come down to crouching-height and its point is higher than my fingertips can reach. The brown wood beams smell dry and dusty in the heat. I sleep surrounded by boxes that say Welch’s Apple Juice, Sanyo Receiver, Markel Quartz Heater, Ellington Farms Produce. There are boxes of clothing (some mine) and a box with DC painted on it in day-glo orange which is for my dirty clothes. I watch black leaping spiders drop lines of silk from the rafter to the window sill, and one afternoon I saw an egg sack bloom into baby spiders, almost too tiny to see, colorless and many-legged, spilling out into the endless air.

In the evening Joe quietly gets drunk (sometimes when Joe is drunk he lowers his head and nudges my shoulder saying “baaaaa, baaaaa” tenderly) and we watch television. Scott isn’t home yet, the midnight movie comes on, and then Scott’s old Plymouth chugs into the driveway, I can hear the rust rattling in the fenders. Scott comes in with his girlfriend, a tall black-haired woman who chain-smokes Camel straights, blowing the smoke upward, her lower jaw extended, teeth bared, the smoke spreading angrily from her. She sits down on the couch, Scott sits next to her and she tries to pull her skirt free from under him.

“Hey Joey guess what, Marla here can’t find her car.”

“She can’t find her car?” He looks at her. “You can’t find your car. Where’d you leave it?”

Marla yanks the skirt out. “If I knew that I wouldn’t a lost it right?” she says petulantly.

“She parked it somewhere around here, we was at the Bridge Street Pub and we walked around looking for it, couldn’t find it, it’s really hid good. Marla here, we had a pitcher of that iced tea at Carry Nations, that Long Island Iced Tea they got there, and Marla’s really wasted, heh heh,” he elbows her side, “aren’t you, Marla. You can’t hold your liquor, you know that girl? Hey, are you feeling a little sick, you gonna throw up? You want me to show you where the bathroom is? Heh heh heh.”

“Scott, you’re a bastard.”

“Mmmm, I know that, Marla.”

“I could drink you under the table.”

“One pitcher of Ice Tea, ...” Scott says and Marla taps an emphatic finger on his knee, “under, the, table!”

Joe pushes his glasses up his nose. “Well Martha, ah Marla, you must be pretty drunk if you lost your car.” He nods to himself in agreement.

Scott chuckles. “You know what else?” Marla is staring at him. “She left her keys in it too.”

We all laugh, we can’t help it, except Marla who stands up, bumping the lamp. It wobbles back and forth.

“I don’t have to take this tinda, kinda shit from you.”

“Ah, settle down Marla.”

“And I don’t have to listen to that from you Scott, don’t you order me around, you asshole, I’m not hanging around here. I’m leaving.”

She grabs for her pocketbook strap and misses, grabs again and gets to the door.

“At least I’m not a fucking junkie like you Scott,” she yells. “At least I’m not a fucking alcoholic like you, Joe.”

She slams it behind her and the doorbell which never works when you push the button, now rings in sympathy with the door.

Joe rolls his watery brown eyes and Scott shrugs. “What d’they got on the movies tonight little girl?”

In sweet autumn Indian Summer, Scott and I sit on the porch in broken down chairs, the paint peels and I scrape at it with my toe. The neighbor’s calico cat wanders up the steps and rubs her arched back on the railing. It’s China White all afternoon, slow and sleepy, I look through a gap under my eyelids and the maple trees are leaping out of their own souls in red and orange, the birches swing and lift loose yellow leaves. The old man next door rakes leaves into piles and his wife watches from her front steps. She smiles and I smile back. Inside the house Joe is banging pans, running water, boiling spaghetti noodles. I hear his heavy feet cross into the front room, hear him slip a record on the turntable and scratchy Hot Tuna drifts out through the screen door; don’t you leave me here, pretty baby if you go give me a dime for beer... Scott chuckles. “Heh heh.” He sings softly, barely moving his lips. “Well I never had one woman at a time, now if you see me, tell I’ll always have six-seven, eight or nine... don’t you leave me here, don’t you leave me here... pretty baby if you go, leave me a dime for beer... don’t you leave me here.”

We live on Flower Street. Two blocks down and across Main is Jack’s Grocery, a tiny shop with bald-headed Jack behind the counter. Farther up Main is the park, then the white church and Friendly’s Ice Cream on the other side, then Harvest Beads and Silver where you can buy carved pipes, Afghanistan socks, tiger-eye necklaces and concert tickets. Up at the corner is the Antique Store and from there you can look all the way down Main Street. There’s the Coin Exchange and the Prayer Tower with its yellow cross saying Jesus horizontally and Saves vertically, and the Adult Bookstore (movies 25 cents) its windows covered in grey paper and three black Xs painted just above the window sill.

On Sundays we go to the Prayer Tower for the free cheese they give away. It comes in one-pound blocks, bright yellow, wrapped in thick plastic and put in long cardboard boxes, coffin-like, saying Pasteurized Process Cheese Food in humorless black letters.

“What is this Cheese Food stuff?” Joe says contemptuously.

Down past the bookstore is Mary Lewis Youth Shop which sells Indian print skirts and pre-faded jeans, and then the Goodwill and the pawn shop and the Woolworth’s and the plasma center on the corner where the highway goes past, into East Hartford.

There are five traffic lights on Main Street between the Antique Store and the highway. During the day the street is blue and dusty between cars; at night the store windows are dark, reflecting the white streetlight and the white of your face. The yellow cross glows all night. Crazy George wanders by, headed for the park. Sometimes we see the Christian, which is what we call him, not knowing his name. He stands quietly under a light, rapt and raising his hands, palms outward in wonder. Sometimes we hear him blessing the glistening cars as they pass.

Warm afternoons I count filthy jean-pocket change and go to Friendly’s for an ice cream cone. Crazy George is there in a green army coat and knit cap pulled to his earlobes, mumbling to no-one but himself and then, white eyed he suddenly slaps the counter, looking up. “Hey, can I have a refill?”

Sometimes I see the Christian sitting at the counter on one of the revolving stools, a five-scoop sundae in front of him, a maraschino cherry sliding slowly down the whipped cream, leaving a trail of red syrup. He folds his hands in front of him and humbly lowers his head, saying grace.

Joe brings home boxes of free tomatoes; we have tomato sauce, tomato salad and tomato sandwiches. Scott slices the tomatoes and places them mushy, full of seeds, between brown bread; no butter, no mayonnaise, just bread and tomato. “Heh heh,” he says to me, raising his red, thick eyebrows. I buy bags of frozen peas at Jack’s Grocery, we live on frozen peas, tomatoes and brown sugar.

Once I found a cornfield and filled my shirt with ears of corn but back at the house, Joe shakes his head, looking out over the frames of his glasses with amused sorrow. “Cow corn.”

“I can’t eat it?”

“Naw, it’s cow corn.”

I shuck it anyway, peeling down the threads of translucent silk and dumping the ears in the double-handled aluminum pot.

But it’s mealy and tasteless, I take one bite and give up, and the precious butter melts down into the puckered kernels.

* * *

Joe wrote to me last week; he’s stopped drinking and found Jesus. He says how’s California. He says he thinks of me and what am I doing? The other night I dreamed I put my foot through a pane of glass and drew it back, glass slivers stuck in my shoe. But I saw Scott, who is dead now and free, walk through the web of cracked glass as if through air, chuckling in his beard. I would like to say that I sang to him, maybe about leaving a dime for beer, but I never could carry a tune, even in my dreams.
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