I HAD to take James Lightfoot to the police station in Linndale. James Lightfoot was a good guy but he was also fucked in the head. I don’t know the details of exactly why or how he was fucked in the head or if there were any such exact details. Probably he was just born fucked in the head. And I guess I’d been born that way too and it was only a coincidence that I had been to a war and the war probably hadn’t had much to do at all with my being fucked in the head. Anyway James Lightfoot wasn’t a happy person because people treated him like shit because he was almost normal but then he wasn’t and he had a lazy eye and he was real skinny like you knew he couldn’t ever fight and what all he had was just the things that no one gave a fuck to take from him.
He had to pay off a warrant and I had to take the money in and pay it off because there were other warrants out for him and if he went into the police station they’d arrest him. I snorted some coke before I left my apartment and I picked up James Lightfoot and we drove to Linndale. I hadn’t ever been to Linndale before. It was the first I’d heard of it. We got to the police station and James Lightfoot gave me the money to pay the warrant off with and I went inside. I told the policeman behind the glass that I was there to pay James Lightfoot’s warrant off, and he said he needed to see my ID. So I gave him my ID and when he took it he went back somewhere in the office and I looked down at my hand and there was coke all over my hand from where I’d touched the driver’s license. I was embarrassed and not a little worried but I stayed because if I left I was fucked anyway and then the policeman came back and he didn’t even mention the coke on my driver’s license. So I was alright and the warrant was paid off like that.
We drove back to the East Side, and James Lightfoot wanted to sign some of his paychecks over to me so I could give him the equivalent in cash for them since he couldn’t have a bank account because he was in ChexSystems and his credit was totally fucked. We went to the bank and the teller wouldn’t let me deposit the checks James Lightfoot had signed over to me, even though he was right there and he had his passport and I had enough money in my account to cover the checks. The bank people thought we were undesirables. So we got nothing and we left. I drove James Lightfoot to James Lightfoot’s mom’s house and I got on the phone and called the bank’s eight-hundred number and told them that I was a war veteran and that the teller and the manager at the Warrensville branch had treated me like I was an undesirable and that I didn’t know what I was going to do yet but it sure as fuck wasn’t right the way they treated people. And I got off the phone. I was in the driveway and the summer burned my eyes and everything had changed and nothing had changed.
* * *
—
ZO? WOULD come around and spend time with me some days. We’d go to ’80s night together every Sunday. I guess she liked me despite my being a lame fuck. That or she liked cocaine. Maybe it was a little of both. She really was good though. She played the cello and she’d gone to school for that. And she could speak all these different languages. She would speak French and I liked the way she did the r’s. I’d ask her to do the r’s and she would. Then I’d try but I couldn’t do them for shit and she thought that was funny. I tried to snort a line of coke off her stomach, but there was no air-conditioning and her skin was dewing so it didn’t work and I licked it off her.
We went to the lake. She drove. She had a little white Volkswagen. I couldn’t drive it because it was a stick. She ran all the stop signs. This was some kind of matter of principle with her evidently; I don’t know what specifically but she hardly ever stopped for them.
We got to the lakeshore and we were wearing our bathing suits. She looked real good in hers. She had the whole flawless complexion thing going for her. She was like a girl in a magazine. She looked good in the sunlight whereas I looked bad. I hadn’t been getting out much in the daytime and I was very pale. You could see the marks all over from where the sand fleas had been at me the summer before, when I’d been out in the marshes and the shit canals and all that. I hadn’t been eating much of late either, and I had the cocaine physique. And there were the cigarette burns too, as the tendency in those days was to burn myself with cigarettes whenever I got down in the dumps. All in all I was another stray dog with the mange.
Many dead fish were washed up on the lakeshore. They were all around us on the sand in their various phases of decomposing. But this was how it always was at the lakeshore. The lake smelled like gasoline. We went in the water and we swam around some. We kissed. After a while we drove back. And suddenly it was as if she didn’t like me, as if she hadn’t ever liked me at all. She’d do that from time to time; she’d just change her mind about me. It made me feel like shit; but then I’d say to myself, You totally deserve this.
She was supposed to fly back to Barcelona at the end of August. I’d always known that. That had been what was supposed to happen when I first met her. But I hadn’t thought it was possible that I’d live to see it happen. Then it happened. Before she left she gave me a letter. The letter said: “Wait.”
She waited two days.
I waited three days.
* * *
—
OTHER GIRLS. Some girls I didn’t deserve. Some girls I deserved. One thing: I was always an asshole.
When I was gonna kill myself I went to the VA hospital. I waited in the waiting room. There were two other people there. Elderly. A man and woman. The man had an oxygen tank and one of those hats that tells you what battleship he was on. The woman—his wife, I imagine—looked like a potato that was about to whistle a tune. A happy tune. When it was my turn I told the hospital people that I was real close to doing it but I didn’t believe in it and now I didn’t know what to do. They said hang out here and they sent me back to the waiting room except to a different part that was boxed in with Plexiglas and they shut the door and I sat there for a while, away from the other people. Then a lady came and asked me if I wanted to be an inpatient and already I knew that’d be bad so I said I’d just leave. She said she’d make an appointment for me to see a psychiatrist in a few days. I said alright.
That Saturday the National Guard sent people to my apartment to come get me. I had my mind made up that I was through with the fake soldier bullshit. I followed them down to the armory and told the one guy I’d try from now on because I was on the spot and I had to say some shit like that even though I knew I wasn’t gonna try and I didn’t. After a while they lost interest, so I was free because I was more trouble than I was worth.
When I ran out of money that winter I had to go get a job. I worked at a restaurant again. Six nights a week and it paid shit. Girls left me alone for a little while.
And then it was spring again. And then it was summer again. Spring was like a foot in the grave. Summer was a fucking joke. I’d turned 23. James Lightfoot went to rehab. I moved to Belmar. Belmar was alright till the ceiling got wet and fell in. I called the landlord and said the ceiling had got wet and fallen in. He sent a guy who put in a drop ceiling. When the drop ceiling got wet and fell in I knew it was time for a change. I quit my job. I left everything. I left the furniture. Actually I threw it into the yard. I threw it off the porch from the second story. All I took when I moved was the bed and a rug I liked.
I was into heroin. I had sold my TV and injected it. I’d found a decent enough heroin guy: Three-Hundred. This was before Three-Hundred was a piece of shit. I moved into a one-bedroom above the sandwich shop at Coventry and Mayfield, next to the convenience store where they had wine. The sandwiches were excellent. Things were good. It was fall. I liked fall. I was completely fucking broke and the world’s economy was in crisis. It looked like maybe the world would stop and then we’d be okay. No more pretending. I went to ’80s night for the fuck of it. This is when I met Libby.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE