Cape Cod Noir

THE OCCIDENTAL TOURIST

BY KAYLIE JONES

Dennis



Last April we were waiting with our twelve-year-old daughter at the baggage carousel in Orlando, Florida, when the elderly couple standing beside us struck up a conversation. “Gee, the bags are taking forever,” the wife said. “We never used to check them, but we’re getting old.” Her husband added that they’d been to Disney for their big anniversaries since they’d first discovered it with their kids. Were we going to Disney? Absolutely, said my husband with as much enthusiasm as he could muster—we’d resisted as long as we could. All during the flight, my husband had complained that for the same amount of money we could be scuba diving in Belize. “Oh you’re going to love Disney World,” the wife said. “Where you from?”

“New York City,” I told them. They nodded knowingly, then the husband said they were from Charlestown, Mass. “Bet you never heard of it,” he added with a devilish twinkle in his eyes.

Oh, I’d heard of it, all right. The Mile of Terror, the townies used to call it with profound pride. This was thirty years ago; more bars per capita than any other town in the United States. And the memories came flooding back. It was like finding an old shoebox in the very back of the very top shelf of the closet, filled with bright, sharp photographs.

Gavin McDermott was on a football scholarship at our Little Ivy League college in Connecticut. He was a Boston Irish Catholic boy from Dorchester. “You’ve heard of a mick,” he’d say, “well I’m a BIC.” Good thing he was proud of it because he couldn’t have passed himself off as anything but. Tow-headed, blue-eyed, with a shovel-shaped Irish nose that reminded me of the snout on a great white shark, Mac had been a Golden Gloves champion in high school, and in college he was an extremely fast and enormously strong cornerback.

One night there was a big keg party at DKE, the fraternity of which he was president. I was standing at the basement bar drinking Mount Gay rum and pineapple juice when a DKE brother squeezed in beside me. “Liz, you’d better come quick, Mac and Sean McDermott are about to start fighting again.” Sean, no relation, was from Chi Psi, the other Animal House frat on campus. The two McDermotts, who were no relation, had a long history of getting blotto and beating each other to a pulp; no one knew what had started it.

Though I didn’t know the first thing about boxing, my father had also been a Golden Gloves champion, and then a pro for a while, and this, along with the fact that I typed Mac’s English and social studies papers, often making corrections, was the foundation of our long and abiding friendship. I did not feel the slightest ripple of fear as I walked up to the two towering McDermotts, who stood nose to nose, eyes glistening madly, faces pale and tense, and told them to cut it out. Mac’s eyes were blind with rage. For a second I thought he didn’t recognize me. Then he backed away, mumbling, “Liz, you’re nuts. One day you’re going to get yourself killed.”

No one knew, least of all me, why I had this effect on Mac. Once, when I wasn’t there to talk him down, he kicked and punched in the windshield of some innocent car parked on the street and the police arrived en force, three squad cars with lights and sirens blaring. He hid in DKE’s secret room, behind a wall in the basement, where they brought the pledges to meet the Witch. I knew this because I’d been the Witch during Pledge Week.

No one turned Mac in to the cops.

There were nine kids in his family and sometimes a few of them would come down from Boston to watch him play football on Saturday afternoons. His sisters looked so much like him that one of his DKE brothers beside me in the stands said, “What’s Mac doing sitting in the bleachers in a fright wig?”

The summer of my junior year, after I got fired from my waitressing job in the Hamptons for telling off my boss, Mac invited me to visit “me and my buddies” on Cape Cod. He’d just graduated and had no idea what he was going to do come fall. For now, though, summer was in full swing and he was planning to play on the Cape as long as he could. “Coolest place you ever saw, Liz. I got a job as a bouncer in this nightclub in Dennis. Me and my buddies, we got it great. You can sit at the bar and drink all night for free. No one’ll bother you.”

My mom was in the south of France with a guy I couldn’t stand. My dad died of a heart attack when I was a senior in high school; I knew long before he did that he should never have married my mother, a debutante who was looking to shock her parents. I weighed my options—south of France or Dennis, Mass. Never one to turn down a free drink, I took the Orient Point ferry to New London and drove up the coast in my old VW Rabbit, following the signs to the Cape. “There’s only one road,” Mac had said, “you can’t get lost.”

You couldn’t get lost, but you could certainly get stuck in traffic. It was bumper to bumper all the way. I finally arrived around four in the afternoon.

Mac came out of the long, narrow clapboard house and sprinted down the short driveway to my car. He gave me a quick hug—never one for physical displays—and said, “Now, Liz, these guys, they’re from Charlestown,” as if this was supposed to mean something to me. I waited. “They’re a little rough around the edges,” he continued, “if you know what I mean. They never saw a college like we went to.” He winced and cocked his head, a typical Mac expression that could mean any number of things, but mostly that he was uncomfortable with the topic and didn’t want to discuss it further.

Inside the narrow house the cheap wood paneling made the living room dark as a vault. Sitting upright on the wilted couch was one of his sisters—Mary or Cathy—who especially in the dark did look an awful lot like Mac in a fright wig. The girls in the McDermott family were quiet; I don’t think his sisters ever said more than three words to me. I’d try, God knows, to engage them in conversation, but they just wouldn’t talk. In any case, my attention was soon diverted; the house was filled with people. One very pale fellow with mussed hair sat hunched in a corner of the living room, beer in hand, legs jiggling up and down. Every time the phone rang, he jumped up out of his seat.

“What’s wrong with him?” I asked.

“That’s Bobby,” Mac murmured as he showed me around. The walls were thin, the doors made of hollow plywood. There were three or four beds in every room. I had no idea where I was going to sleep but I didn’t want to make a point of bringing it up. “Bobby had a little tussle a couple nights ago. He’s kinda laying low for the time being.”

A typical Mac dysphemism. Next came the diversion: “How about a cocktail?” He rubbed his hands together vigorously and opened a kitchen cabinet.

I knew him well enough to stop asking questions. The cabinet was filled with bottles, every kind of alcoholic beverage imaginable. Mac, bless his heart, had stocked up on Mount Gay rum and pineapple juice.

By the time we got to the nightclub, I was feeling no pain. The place looked like a former warehouse, corrugated siding and tiny windows way up high. The bar was in the center of the cement floor and had four sides with the bottles stacked in the middle on shelves, so no one was at risk of ever having to wait too long for a drink. Within minutes of the doors opening, the place was jammed. Mac led me to an empty stool at the bar and sat me down, then went back to the door, where he was collecting the cover charge and barring unsavory types from entering.

One of the Charlestown roommates, Doyle, was behind my section of bar. There was a disco ball spinning in the background, projecting galaxies on the walls. People danced. I was careful not to wobble on the high stool and planted my elbows firmly on the shiny wood bar top. Doyle was missing a top incisor, which gave his face a strange, lopsided look. Every time he smiled or laughed, the black hole in his mouth was a shock. He liked to stick the filter of his menthol cigarette into the hole and leave it there while he puffed away, squinting against the smoke. He made sure my Mount Gay and pineapple juice never got below three-quarters empty. Earlier in the afternoon I’d watched him iron his jeans on a board in the living room, precisely and crisply, taking his time, making sure the crease was perfect. He wore a clean, ironed, button-down preppie shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. The music was so loud it was impossible to have a conversation, but a great deal could be communicated, simply by the delicate lighting of a cigarette or the pouring of a drink, or the replacing of a wet napkin, or the clinking of glasses in a toast. Doyle was good at his job, elegant and efficient. I tried to push a twenty-dollar bill toward him for the tip jar but he pushed it back without a word. They were hospitable, these Charlestown guys.

Every time a stranger approached me and tried to start up a conversation or buy me a drink, Doyle would whisper something in his ear and the fellow would scurry away. I gathered Gavin McDermott, guardian of the gates, had at some point gotten drunk here and lost his temper, just as he had in college. Pretty soon I had a two-foot-wide berth around me, even though the place was packed like a subway car at rush hour. I was delighted with my new status.

When Doyle took his ten-minute break around back, I decided to join him. He was of medium height and very slim, with a dark, golden tan and pale brown hair and large, round eyes of an almost translucent cerulean green. I’ve only encountered that eye color one other time, in a little girl in my daughter’s ballet class. I mentioned how beautiful the color was to the girl’s mother and she said they were from Estonia; the color was fairly common there.

But Doyle was from Charlestown, born and bred. Earlier in the day, while he was carefully ironing his jeans, he’d told me that the only place he’d ever been besides Boston was the Cape. Now, as we were leaning up against the corrugated metal wall of the nightclub around back, alone, blowing smoke up into the night sky, I asked him what happened with that guy Bobby. Why did he keep jumping out of his chair every time the phone rang? And why had he opted to stay at home alone tonight rather than come to the club?

“He got into it in the Combat Zone a couple nights ago with some guys that bat for the other team, if you get my meaning. He stabbed one a them and the guy died.” Doyle’s voice was even, as if he were discussing a friend’s unfortunate and inconvenient ankle sprain. “Cops are looking for him.”

I was trying to think through the fog of Mount Gay and pineapple juice. Didn’t that make us guilty of aiding and abetting, or something? Harboring a criminal? I’d never met a murderer before. Was it my job to run to the closest pay phone and call the police? Mac would never speak to me again. And who was I to make that kind of decision? I was just visiting, I’d never seen this guy before. I liked Mac and I really liked this place, getting to sit in a prime spot at the bar all by myself, watched over by Mac and his friends. So I nodded at Doyle as if I understood exactly and let it go.

Doyle dropped his mentholated butt on the dried seashellcovered ground and stepped on it. “Mac is in love with you,” he said in a neutral tone, and walked back toward the door.

“It’s not like that between us,” I protested, wanting to explain, but when Doyle opened the door the music hit us like a detonation. It was useless to pursue the conversation.

“Mac doesn’t pick up girls,” Doyle said sometime later, during another break. We were smoking out back again. “He’s not, I guess, relaxed about sex, would be my estimation. He’s a different kind of tense around you.”

All these years we’d been friends and Mac had never made a pass at me. “I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about!” I countered, sounding for a moment just like my mother.

“You’re a rich girl, aren’t you?” Doyle said with a smile, sticking a fresh cigarette into the black gap between his teeth. I’d never before met anyone with an incisor missing. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

“My mother was a debutante,” I replied with a nervous chuckle.

“What’s a debutante?”

I laughed. He leaned forward and kissed me, all menthol breath and vodka and orange juice. We’d been keeping up, matching each other one for one, all night.

In the wee hours of the morning, after the nightclub closed, I wanted to go to an after-hours party with Doyle but Mac pulled me away and drove me back to the house. Bobby the wanted murderer was nowhere to be seen. I was sitting on the faded, wilted couch, when Mac leaned in awkwardly to kiss me. I tried to push him away with both palms. His eyes slipped out of focus, became glazed with rage; I recognized the look and felt a tremor of fear before defiance kicked in.

“Don’t you know how you make me feel?” he muttered between clenched teeth. “You know, don’t you? You know.”

“To hell with you, Mac,” I said, and in a flash he was on top of me. I struggled to free myself; I felt like I was lying under a refrigerator. He got his hands around my neck and started to choke me. Doyle came through the front door just as I was losing consciousness and he lifted the cheap trunk that they used as a coffee table and whacked Mac with it on the back of the head.

Doyle pulled me up to sitting, Mac out cold on the floor beneath us. “You all right? He could’ve killed you.”

I rubbed my neck, trying to catch my breath. “It’s weird,” I said, “at the time, I didn’t really care. I guess I’m drunker than I thought.”

While Mac slept it off, Doyle and I walked around the neighborhood of one-story houses. We sat down on someone’s lawn, which was slightly pitched. It was very dark. “Sometimes Mac gets violent when he drinks too much,” Doyle explained, as if he were talking about his aging uncle’s blood pressure. “It’s like a switch goes off in his head. You can see it in his eyes. Tomorrow he won’t remember.”

“I know,” I said. “Everyone always protected him at school. What’ll happen to him now that he’s back in the real world?”

“Everyone will keep on protecting him.”

We talked for a long time. There were no stars in the sky; the clouds had rolled in as they often do near the beach at night. I told him about my mother and her awful boyfriend, gambling and partying in the south of France. I told him about how my dad died alone, drunk and broken, in a flophouse in upstate New York. Even I had walked away from him, and he’d been the only person I ever loved. I explained to Doyle that sometimes being on the move seemed best. Four years of college was the longest I’d ever stayed in one place. But I knew the only chance I had was to finish, and to keep on learning. Reading and reading until I knew so much no one could hurt me. I didn’t know who I was or where I was going but I knew I had to keep on learning. I told Doyle these things I had never told a soul, feeling his warmth and his breath beside me but not able to see him. He told me he had a girlfriend who was in a Charlestown gang called the Stingers, all girls. He said if she ever found out he’d fallen in love with someone in ten minutes flat, she’d cut us both up, but good.

“Is Doyle your first or last name?”

“Last. My name is Bill—but no one calls me Bill except my parents.”

The darkness gradually began to fade around us. I saw the house’s mailbox take shape, a set of lines forming a silvery rectangle in the darkness. Then I noticed the watery rose-colored sunlight on the wet grass; dew had soaked through our clothes. The pale green color of the grass was the same as his eyes.

“You have the most beautiful eyes,” I told him. And kissed him again for a long time.

“We better get back,” Doyle finally said. By now the sun was shining brightly and I felt dizzy and exposed. The birds had started chirping, making a racket. We walked back through the deserted neighborhood, all the houses one-story summer rentals set out in orderly crescents, with little square lawns.

When we walked into the house, Bobby was packing up his stuff. He said he was driving back to Boston to turn himself in.

He didn’t have much, an old backpack filled with dirty clothes. He was shoving socks in a side pocket. He said hiding out was too much for his nerves. Waiting all night for the cops to show up. It was an accident, he told us, as if he were practicing for his interrogation. He never meant to hurt the guy. It was self-defense, he added, suddenly inspired.

He hesitated at the door, shuffling his feet. “Well, later then,” he murmured, and disappeared.

Mac had gone into one of the bedrooms to sleep off his drunk. He would either not remember or pretend it had never happened; that was his way.

I decided I should go also; perhaps the south of France was a better idea, after all. Doyle walked me to my car and leaned in through the driver’s-side window as I rolled it down. “Just know this,” he said. “This isn’t over.”

He wrote his phone number in Charlestown on a corner of my map and I gave him my mother’s phone and address in the city. I promised to call him as soon as I got back to college and had a number of my own. He tapped the roof of the Rabbit lightly a couple of times, and I drove off.

While I was a senior in college and then a graduate student at Columbia, I would go up to Boston on occasion to see him. Once, we rented a motel room off the interstate, and another time we spent a warm spring afternoon driving around Charlestown in my VW Rabbit, Doyle behind the wheel. The Mile of Terror, the townies called it. He showed me Bunker Hill. No one was home at the apartment where he’d been born—the Doyles didn’t trust hospitals, he explained—and he still lived with his family on Dunstable Street, in a complex of two-story condominiums with gray aluminum siding, all the units exactly alike. In the living room, on the wall above the gas fireplace, hung a family portrait of all six Doyles: father, mother, three sisters, and Bill, sitting in a field of flowers with an unlikely blue sky and white puffy clouds overhead. The artist had painted in Doyle’s missing tooth.

He told me that night in another motel room that he was thinking of taking a trip across the country. I never found out if he went.

Many months later, when I was beginning my serious downward spiral, Doyle called me one morning in my apartment near Columbia.

“I got a big favor to ask you. If you can’t do it, just say so. I need three hundred dollars,” he said. “I got a debt to pay.”

“Who do you owe?” I asked.

“Filene’s Basement. I ran up a credit card.”

I wasn’t rolling in money, but it wouldn’t be a hardship to give it to him. “How do you want me to send it to you? Is a check okay, or do you need cash?”

“I can cash a check in the bar where I work.” After a pause, he added, “Thank you, Liz. I knew you’d come through, and I’ll never forget it. If you ever need anything, you know where I am.”

A year passed and I was working nights as a temp in a law firm, trying to finish law school. I was sort of seeing a guy I’d met in the Marlin, a bar on 110th and Broadway, around the corner from my apartment. Drinking close to home, it was easier to stay out of trouble. Joe Giorno had a black mustache and a Datsun 280z and lived in Hoboken. He worked for a moving company and dealt a little cocaine to Columbia students on the side. He said dealing coke was a lot easier and more lucrative than humping furniture around the city. One night we were in his 280z on our way to his place in Hoboken when he said he had to make a little detour. He drove down a street in the West 40s, slowing as we passed a parked car. There was a guy behind the wheel who wasn’t moving, his head thrown back and his mouth wide open. There was a muddy smear of blood on the window.

“Shit,” Joe said. Then he turned to me: “If anybody asks, I was with you all night, you understand? All night.”

I dug Doyle’s phone number out of an old address book and called him as soon as I got home the next morning.

“Doyle,” I said, and he knew who it was. I started crying. He asked me for the details calmly, like a doctor listening to a patient’s symptoms. He wanted Joe’s full name and exact address.

“I’ll make some calls,” he said. “Don’t worry about it anymore. But Liz, listen to me. If anybody comes looking for you, get up here as fast as you can. You’ll be safe here.”

I never again heard from Joe Giorno. No one ever came looking or asking questions. He was gone, as if he’d never existed. I stopped hanging out at the Marlin.

Doyle sent me a card on my fortieth birthday, to my mother’s New York City address. By then I’d moved around the city many times. By then I’d also been sober for nine years. The card had a bottle of French wine on the cover and the inside read, You’re just like wine, you get better with time. He’d signed the card, Love, Doyle.

Standing in the Orlando airport waiting for our luggage with the elderly couple from Charlestown who loved Disney World, I considered asking them if they knew the Doyles on Dunstable Street. But there were probably hundreds of Doyles in Charlestown, and I did not remember his parents’ first names, if I’d ever known them at all.

Later, in the rental car driving to Disney World, while our daughter slept sprawled across the backseat, I thought about telling my husband the story. But that girl no longer exists, and my husband has never met her. He’s never seen me drunk. He doesn’t know about Mac, or Bobby huddled in that Cape Cod living room, how close I came to the edge. I am now a mother who takes her daughter to Disney World, married to a man who does the same.

I think of Doyle still, and my heart feels warm as I send good thoughts his way. From time to time I feel him thinking about me, and wonder how he’s faring.