My car is a block away and I think I can make it. So this isn’t the end of the world. The parking lot’s three sides where it’s walls and the walls full of windows looking down on me. I take my hat off and put the gun in my hat. The gun’s heavy on account of it’s full of bullets. It’s full of bullets because I can’t imagine it being anything else. It’s really too heavy to go carrying in a hat, but this arrangement will have to work as I have a ways to go and I don’t want the gun trying to de-pants me in the getaway.
I walk down more steps that go into the parking lot, carrying my hat, with the gun in my hat, with my hat in my left hand. There’s no one else in the parking lot when I cross it. The gun in my hat still isn’t well hidden. I take my scarf off while I’m walking and I ball it up some and place it on top of the gun in my hat and it’s a little better. Still there’s the money sticking out of my pockets; I’ll need to be careful that none falls out. I go left when I get to the sidewalk, and I’m walking up Hampshire. They’ll be coming up Mayfield, and if they catch me I’m fucked.
Sometimes I wonder if youth wasn’t wasted on me. It’s not that I’m dumb to the beauty of things. I take all the beautiful things to heart, and they fuck my heart till I about die from it. So it isn’t that. It’s just that something in me’s always drawn me away, and it’s the singular part of me, and I can’t explain it.
There’s nobody out here except me and one other guy; he’s on the same sidewalk as I am, coming toward me from the other end of the block. We will meet eventually. I see he’s dressed like an old-timer, and that’s good: if he’s old then I doubt he gives a fuck about what I’m up to. The important thing is don’t act like you robbed a bank.
Act like you have places to go and people to see.
Act like you love the police.
Act like you never did drugs.
Act like you love America so much it’s retarded.
But don’t act like you robbed a bank.
And don’t run.
The important thing is don’t run.
The sirens coming up Mayfield now, and the grass is like a teenage girl. And the stoops!—the stoops are fucking wondrous! There’s a fuckload of starlings gone to war over a big wet juicy bag of garbage—look at them go! The big swinging dick starling’s got all the other starlings scared. He’ll be the one who gets the choicest garbage!
This is the beauty of things fucking my heart. I wish I could lie down in the grass and chill for a while, but of course this is impossible, the gun in my hat could be a little obvious, the money sticking out of all my pockets too. And the sirens telling everyone I’m a fucking scumbag. I bet they hope I’ll try something so they can drink my blood and tell their women about it.
I say good morning to the old-timer. He says good morning. And if he suspects me of wrongdoing, he is good enough not to mention it. We go about our business.
I’m three quarters there now.
So maybe I get away.
And here come the sirens.
Here come their fucking gangsters.
The sirens screaming now, now turning.
And I feel peaceful.
PART ONE
WHEN LIFE WAS JUST BEGINNING, I SAW YOU
You don’t know how afraid I was you’d go away and leave me. And now I’ll tell you what happened at the zoo.
—EDWARD ALBEE, THE ZOO STORY
CHAPTER ONE
Emily used to wear a white ribbon around her throat and talk in breaths and murmurs, being nice, as she was, in a way so as you didn’t know if she were a slut or just real down-to-earth. And from the start I was dying to find out, but I thought I had a girlfriend and I was shy.
We were 18. We met at school. She worried about money and I smoked $7 worth of cigarettes every day. She said she liked my sweater, said that’s what she had noticed first, why she had wanted to talk to me. A grey cardigan—wool, three buttons, from the Gap—she called it an old sad bastard sweater. Which was fine.
She liked Modest Mouse and she played Night on the Sun for me. She had me read two plays by Edward Albee. I thought Albee was a kinky fucker. And I wondered about her. Her eyes—green—were bright, merciful, sometimes given to melancholy, not entirely guileless. And I’d listen to her tell me about the abandoned factories and the cemetery where she’d grown up, the places where she’d skinned her knees. And her voice took me over.
This is how you find the one to break your heart.
* * *
—
IN THOSE days I didn’t know anything, I was going through a blotters phase, and Madison Kowalski thought I was a bitch. I did it to myself, but she was still a cunt for it since she was supposed to be my girl. And she gave head to Mark Fuller in the Woodmere Olive Garden parking lot. It fucked me up when I found out, but I forgave her.
“Because I love you,” I said.
“I love you as well,” she said.
Mark Fuller was good at lacrosse, that’s what he was known for. And he had hair highlights. Maybe I should have had hair highlights too, but I didn’t. And there were other girls who wanted to be with Mark Fuller, so he could afford to force Madison Kowalski’s head down on his dick till she choked on it. That’s why she said to me, “I appreciate that you don’t force my head down.”
And it fucked me up when I thought about it, but I thought about it anyway. I often fucked myself up thinking, like how I used to think you were always supposed to be in love with the girl. I’d got a lot of bad advice. It was 2003. All indications were that things were coming to an end.
* * *
—
MADISON HAD gone out of town for school, gone to New Jersey, to Rutgers. I didn’t know why she had chosen the school she had; I didn’t follow schools. But she was smart or she had got good grades anyway. With me it was different. I stayed on in the suburbs east of Cleveland, Ohio, where I had lived since I was 10. I was attending one of the local universities, the one with the Jesuits and a lot of kids who were fucks, a good school. I shouldn’t have been there. Just my folks had enough money so that it was expected. It wasn’t like we were especially fancy people or I was a legacy or whatever you’re guessing at, more like with them it was one of those vicarious sorts of things that can set a kid up for failure, how they were saying they’d have liked to have gone to college and fucked around reading about Sir Francis Bacon and all that shit so why wasn’t I happy? I didn’t know. All I’d figured was the world was wrong and I was in it. So I went to school because people’d said go to school. Which was a mistake. Still you don’t ever get to choose.
I sold drugs but it wasn’t like I was bad or anything. I wasn’t bothering anybody; I didn’t even eat meat. I had a job at the shoe store. Another mistake I made. No interest whatsoever in shoes. I was marked for failure. But allow that I had tried. I went to work most days, in the afternoons, when I could have been doing better things, such as anything (we are talking $6 an hour). I had a well-cultivated sense of shame, what kept me going; didn’t ever call in sick.
I went to classes in the mornings, sometimes missed classes. It was my shame again; my shame would keep me out of classes sometimes. I didn’t ever miss English though. Emily was in my English class. The class was shit, but I always went because Emily’d be there. And we’d sit next to one another; that’s how we first got to talking.
She was from Elba, New York, which was the same lake as Cleveland, the same kind of town, only a little shittier. She was impressed that I had a job at the shoe store, impressed that I sold drugs. She said she’d been educated by nuns and hadn’t ever gone to school with boys. She made it seem as if she knew nothing of boys to speak of. Turned out this wasn’t so much true, but it’s whatever. She was good and I liked her. I liked her better than I liked Madison Kowalski. But I was still fucked up about Madison. I even showed Emily a picture of her.
“That’s Madison,” I said.
She said, “She’s so pretty.”
Madison was pretty.
* * *
—