The Day the Bozarts Died Page 9

  I knew enough to forbid myself television absolutely. Talk about a slippery slope: you can always watch TV. Sure, there may be an hour worth watching. Maverick in the 50’s, Fugitive in the 60’s, Rockford in the 70’s. What the hell, Law and Order in the 90’s. But now you could watch Law and Order five times a night, could watch TV 24/7. Like the Internet (for those of you with private lines) TV can burn whatever time you need it to burn. It’s a fucking incinerator.

  And it can take you to a very bad place, where you carry in your carry-out dinner, switch on something almost benign or respectable (the news, say), only to find yourself still watching at the stroke of midnight as four talking suits dissect a grisly murder trial in Utah. You want to turn it off and the damned thing won’t go off, its godforsaken heart just keeps on beating.

  Some nights I forgot to eat. It got so dark so early that selecting a “dinner hour” began to seem completely arbitrary, though I was usually aware (like an animal, I suppose, instinctively) of the moment when Nina would be placing her latest award-winning dish on the ex-husband’s parents’ ex-dining table. A brief pang of hunger then might send me to the carryout venues. Otherwise the night could simply drift. It might be so long since I had spoken aloud that I would need to utter a few trial squawks (pepperoni/ pepperom) before reaching out to The Pizza Express.

  As the streets of our town got locked in under the progressive layers of ice and snow, I began to wonder if I should roll with it and just fucking hibernate. I had turned out to be a genius at something after all, you see. With my correct sleep number in place I could, like Barney himself, sleep at any time of the day. Could, in fact, barely avoid sleeping. Unconsciousness was tickling constantly at the margins of my consciousness.

  Unwilling to sleep my life away, refusing to become officially depressed (“There is meds, you know,” urged The Clapper, ominously), I forced myself to “get out of the house” part of each day, plunging off through the cold white landscape. Frequently I would hike the three miles to Weeks Square and (falling back on my training at the Monk Barrett School) see a film for free at the six-screen cineplex there.

  You go to the side door (marked Exit Only) which empties into the alley off Covenant Street and (arriving just as a dozen or so dazed filmgoers are being disgorged into the daylight) you go in as they are coming out. Monk had even mastered a moonwalk move, facing the alleyway while moving backward into the dark confines of the theatre. Riding the backwash, he called it.

  Not that staying awake in the movies is a piece of cake. I slept in there too. It’s both dark and bright, which strains the eyes for starters, and it’s airless, running up the oxygen debt like an airplane. And while popcorn can forestall unconsciousness (I have never dozed while on the munch), popcorn was up to five bucks, well beyond my means. So, about halfway through the movie, I would find myself snapping awake with a serious case of pretzelneck, and have to straighten my head carefully with both hands.

  It was good, though. Not the movies. They were almost always godawful, not merely trash but bad trash. But I figured I was getting my money’s worth, salt for salt, and just rolled with it. It made for a routine: the long trek down, the two hour burn inside, then a cup of coffee somewhere in the Square (if only to provide some waitress with an opportunity to find me invisible and inaudible) and finally the long trek home. The regimen kept me moving.

  What kept me better (albeit tenuously) anchored to the real world was the snow itself. We really did get hit with 114 inches that winter, a new world and Olympic record or something. That was the year God mistook Canterbury for Buffalo. The snow grew like white corn: knee-high, waist-high, neck-high. Everyone who owned a car (which is to say everyone except me) went to the nuthouse. Their cars, of course, went nowhere.

  Because here in Canterbury they do not process snow physically, they leave it for the residents to process mentally. When the streets are chockablock with snow, eye-high on both sides, they expect you to locate your car with a metal detector, extricate it by telekinesis, and store it in your back pocket for a month.

  This set of circumstances, so exasperating for my fellow citizens (so few of them accustomed to travel by bobsled, or luge) was a pure gift to me. The city became beautiful. Each week it looked more and more the way it must have looked in say 1948, when people still had feet. Moreover, the snowy, impassable streets became a major source of social life for me. I came to count on cheerful exchanges with passing strangers. I was frequently helping senior citizens with doors and stairs; down at the Sycamore Square Post Office, many presumed it was my fulltime job.

  I became a roving ambassador, available to drivers stuck in ruts and snowbanks, all of them eager to rejoin the rat race—going, thereby, from one rut to another. As fate would have it, most of those stranded drivers were female. “Straighten the wheel, that’s it” and “Rock it now, keep rocking it” were my lines, as the ladies struggled for traction.

  Invariably they held they could not possibly thank me enough (patently untrue) though the half dozen I invited out were unanimous in their demurral and looked so alarmed at the shift in our relations that I stopped asking. I came to understand these icy assignations, these foreshortened blind dates, were more important to me, socially, than to them. They just wanted to get going. They had jobs, after all. They had lives.

  “Happy to be of service,” I would smile, and as the winter drifted along I realized how true this was. It did make me happier. It gave me a sense of purpose, it packaged the endorphin rush that comes with physical exertion, and it enabled me to put a smile on a woman’s face every quarter-mile across Canterbury.

  By the Ides of March, those few humans I had kept in my purview began fleeing south. They couldn’t take it. Liz, Ed, and Clapper headed for different corners of Florida with their families, Barney and Chloe went to Barbados. I had no doubt that good old Phil was philling my slot at Nina’s rented cottage on Tortola.

  The most southerly destination I could conjure was my sister’s house in Connecticut. I may have overstayed my welcome there—certainly I tried to—though I also tried to pay my way by shoveling the walks and driveway, taking on the grocery shopping (albeit with Lisa’s credit card, in Lisa’s car), and pushing my niece out of ruts and snowbanks. “Rock it now, Maze, keep rocking it.…”

  Maisie and I had been pals forever, we hit it off from the getgo and that never changed. When the kid was maybe 10 or 11, Lisa would tell friends how Maisie had a “harmless crush” on her Uncle Stan and her father Rick would say “Let’s hope she gets over it before she’s sixteen.” As if I would get fresh, or something, with my own sweet niece!

  Anyway, that year Maisie did turn 16 and she got over it bigtime. She had become a sort of mirage at home, just another teenager who is not really there even when she is there. Like all the other girls lodged in snowbanks around New England, Maisie was eager to get going. “Love you, Stash” was my reward, as ever, and yet with a difference: it was more of a greeting card sentiment now, a rote quote as she buttoned her coat. “Love you too,” Stash would say, to the receding form.

  She did not need a surrogate anymore, a cloth monkey’s uncle, for now she had Hesh. The ultimate catch for a high school cutie. Fill a suitcase with superlatives and you will have Hesh: honors student, fine handsome son, polite deferential suitor, speedy black quarterback. Hesh was life’s prize, plain and simple. All I could offer was my expertise with the tight tricky icepack at the end of the driveway. I would get her going and she would go to Hesh.

  The Bozarts was still deserted when I returned from my less-than-tropical vacation. Word of ongoing snowstorms had leaked south and they all stayed put. Even the Ravello Brothers had come unravelled and fled to the sun in desperation. What the hell, they might as well get some use out of all that money.

  The silence at night could be otherwordly. Sometimes I felt like a grade school janitor mopping up after hours, a single figure ranged against the hollow echoing spaces of cafeteria, gymnasium, auditorium. My sweet old w
orld had been gutted, transformed into a gulag without walls.

  Coming down Carver Street with my PizzaIndianChinese in hand, I was traversing a similarly evacuated cityscape—white silence swept by cold black wind. The entire Tech District had sunken into a frozen, post-Chernobyl state.

  I was down to my last nickel when Smiley put me back on the payroll. Hallelujah, right? But I needed the money and I needed the jolt. The first words out of Allie’s mouth (“Mind your manners, boys, the professor is back”) lifted me right out of the doldrums. Until then I hadn’t even noticed the snow was shrinking. Spring was coming on fast, the eternal return, and now it was just a matter of time before work resumed on my Passamaquoddy musical.

  My first pay packet (108 dollars American!) made me feel rich enough to buy the beers at The Red Stripe. Barney was so impressed that he invited me to a poker game—not their Friday night couples thing, this one was a muster of cutthroat lawyers, in a back room at their downtown office. Lacking any other explanation for my endless “tailspin” (or my apparent recovery from it) he concluded I was finally getting over Nina.

  Whatever. I came home from The Stripe in such high spirits that, late as it was, I wanted to make a run at the play. In honor of new beginnings, I scratched out the old title (Furniture in the Raw) and scratched down a new one, Fight No More Forever, after Chief Joseph’s knockout walk-off line. Then I shuffled the notes and folders and smoothed out a fresh page. A tabula rasa.

  What happened next (to keep it rasa) was like a cosmic April Fool’s prank that began with a lighthearted wild card promise and concluded hours later with me tossing the play in the wastebasket forever. Not that it made any sense to do so, but then everything about this incident was a perfect non-sequitur, if you are out there stooping for sequiturs.

  Remember, I had been unable to hook up with a girl in forever-and-a-half. It was as though I’d forgotten the secret password, or had my license revoked. Yet now, as I lit the midnight oil, someone actually was tossing pebbles at my window and what’s more the someone turned out to be a young woman, a slip of a thing in a hulk of a parka, smiling up from the parking lot. Saying “Hi,” like this was nothing out of the ordinary.

  Saying she had a few questions about the building, and mine was the only light on. Hey, I had questions about the building too, and welcomed her to the symposium. Things had already started looking up and this poppet with her blonde bangs, dimpled cheeks, and hopeful jobseeker smile might be next on the list.

  She shed her backpack and parka like a turtle shedding its shell, going from bulky and forest green to slim and pale as cream in the process. Pale skin and pale broomstraw hair. Her mauve and turquoise vest was flecked with something like isinglas, so that it came at you like a disco ball. So did she, for that matter. She was much wider awake at midnight than most people are after two hours with Mr. Coffee in the morning.

  “I’m one-fourth Choctaw,” she said, by way of introduction. “On my grandmother’s side.”

  Which knocked me back. In retrospect I would realize she never gave herself a name, but names were unnecessary in the light of such ancestry. I could not have been more certain of her cosmic purpose. She had come forward in this strange fashion, at this odd hour, to bear witness. The gods of dramaturgy had dispatched her to enhance my understanding of Indian lore. Whatever riddles had been muddling my Passamaquoddy play, this girl would solve—for surely, here came the Indians over the hill!

  Outwardly, the poppet cleaved to a different agenda. As a college undergraduate and now as a graduate student (she rattled along in fluting racing moderngirl vernacular) she had pursued a concern variously rendered as Minimalism, Survivalism, and The Interstitial Economy of Means. When I must have looked puzzled or incompletely up to speed, she shorthanded all this to “Thoreau?”—enunciating and questionmarking the great man as though offering refreshments. “Coffee?”

  She had lived, experimentally, in a small garden shed and later in a boiler room and was searching for something similarly modest here. Had I seen the movie, a recent fantasia where between floors 7 and 8 of a high-rise lay a cramped space half a storey high (Floor 7.5 to be precise), a secret niche for lodgers flying below the radar? Well, something of that sort would be perfect.

  “Something off the grid. Interstitial, you know? That’s my thesis title by the way: Inhabiting the Interstices.”

  This conversation had begun with genuine excitement (and with the undeniable romance of a boldly made, nocturnal, neo-Shakespearean connection) and had proceeded in intellectual earnest (as she explained to me how extravagant were my own living quarters, and I raised for her the moral issue of freeloading, for had not Thoreau’s mom picked up some of the slack for him, not to mention his pal Ralph Waldo) but after a couple of hours the karma began to slip. The moment was waxing bogus. Interstices Girl remained eager (pressing me to show her the storage bays in the basement as though I were the fucking realtor here) but to me something felt very wrong.

  Or everything did. In no way, for one thing, did this poppet suggest a single watered-down particle of Native American heritage. Inside the nifty vest and baggy Army surplus trousers resided a slim blue-eyed blonde with nearly translucent white skin. Further, it was hard to imagine that such a well-groomed creature had dwelled in any crack or crevice.

  It simply did not scan. She had materialized like a blithe-spirited Elizabethan lass wandering in the forest of Arden; she had come from nowhere and yet from hello was angling to stay on. Some sort of quid pro quo was implicit and the quid would not involve guns or dope, it would involve sexual favors, no? Which not only lacked verisimilitude, it reeked of ham-fisted plotting. If someone was out to get me (to make a fool of me or worse, a criminal) why not send an underage blonde with a backpackcam to entrap me? “Stanley will fuck anything …”

  Who would have sent her? Not Nina, not Rose. Kristen Dane, that’s who. Who else but Kristen Dane, really? Fine to make a fool of Stanley Noseworthy, yet how much finer to put him out on the street. Even if he kept his mitts off Interstices Girl and merely countenanced her cool move into the storage bay, could not said Noseworthy be held accountable as an accessory after the fact? (Or before the fact, for what even was the “fact” in that preposterous parlance?) Be held in the crime of Whatever: Clandestine Occupancy, Theft of Services, Trespassing with Intent to Inhabit?

  Well I was not the pigeon they took me for. Maybe sex had become so hypothetical, such a distant drum, that I only wanted it hypothetically. And maybe that’s bullshit and Clapper would tell me to get myself some meds. I could sort out that part later. Right now I was too tired even to lament a missed opportunity. (If any.)

  Besides which, something more troublous had been needling at me this last hour, an even deeper humiliation had been simmering, as she so energetically outlined her platform. This was the growing extent to which chatting up Interstices Girl was making me feel like an Interstices Boy—and an aging Interstices Boy at that. Scheme, scam, or scholarship, as we sat there matching survival strategies, it became increasingly clear that I was (for the third time in 20 years) essentially homeless. That I had been working the corners for food like a glorified rat. PizzaIndianChinese was the least of it.

  The most of it was this: the poppet might be an agent provocateur, she might simply be a fraud (in which case how pathetic was I in my eagerness to accept her as an authority), or she might be on the level, just an idealistic child who wanted to live in a dollhouse, and she was who would talk to me. She was the only one who would talk to me.

  Bedtime for Bonzo, any way you frame it. I needed to extricate myself. I did not wish to hurt her feelings (if any) or to wrong even a 25% Choctaw squaw (if any) but I would have to be a hardass. What took me another hour to round her off was being a hardass with a soft touch. In the end I gave her ten bucks (the going rate for reverse escort prostitution?) and she was happy to take it.

  My first flush was guilt: what if she had nowhere to go at 2:30 a.m.? My second was relief: think twic
e before you answer the next pebble, boy. Then I took one look at the pile of paper on my desk and closed the curtain on my unborn musical. Don’t ask me why. It had nothing to do with the poppet and it had everything to do with her.

  Call it a non-sequitor, or a deus ex machina, or anything else of Latin derivation you like (and who says it’s a dead language) but I never scratched down another word on that play. That’s not quite true. I crossed out Fight and replaced it with Write on the title page. Write No More Forever. Then I junked it. Not that it filled six dumpsters or anything.

  My little winning streak hadn’t lasted long. I dropped forty bucks playing five-card stud with Barney’s card sharks that weekend, then on Monday morning Smiley fired me for the last time. Hey, why not hit a man when he’s down? He did apologize for having given me two minutes notice instead of the customary two weeks, and the humanist in him handed me four quarters “to cover your transportation costs back home.”

  The rest of my severance package was a six-pack of Rolling Rock from Allie and the boys, partial proceeds from the sale of a couple of hooked rugs.

  * * *

  “The Day The Bozarts Died,” by Lucy Young, reprinted from The Baskin Reader:

  It was 1993 when, for the first time, a vacancy at Blaisdell #4 was not filled instantly. Always in the past, thanks to the Canterbury grapevine, replacements would start lining up at the slightest hint of a vacancy. By late summer of 1995, however, when a second studio became available, the first was still unoccupied.

  It was unclear what lay behind this shift, although the rents had crept up. “The increases were always small,” says Celia Firestone, “tied to the inflation rate, or the tax escalator clause, one or two percent at a time. But somehow you found you were not getting such a great bargain anymore.”