15
The city was changing, but then it was in the nature of cities to change: perhaps it was just that I was getting older, and had already seen too much fall away to be entirely comfortable with the closure of restaurants and stores that I had known. The transformation of Portland from a city that was struggling not to drop into Casco Bay and sink to the bottom into one that was now thriving, artistic, and safe had begun in earnest at the start of the 1970s, funded largely with federal money through the kind of pork-barrel appropriations that are frowned upon by pretty much everyone except those profiting by them. Congress Street got brick sidewalks, the Old Port was rejuvenated, and the Municipal Airport became the International Jetport, which at least had the benefit of sounding futuristic, even if, for most of the last decade, you couldn’t fly direct to Canada from Portland, let alone anywhere that wasn’t part of the contiguous land mass, making the ‘International’ part largely superfluous.
Some of the gloss had gone from the Old Port in recent years. Exchange Street, one of the loveliest streets in the city, was in transition. Books Etc. was gone, Emerson Books was about to close due to the retirement of its owners, and soon only Longfellow Books would be left in the Old Port. Walter’s restaurant, where I had eaten with both Susan, my late wife, and Rachel, the mother of my second child, had shut its doors in preparation for a move to Union Street.
But Congress Street was still flying the flag for weirdness and eccentricity, like a little fragment of Austin, Texas, transported to the northeast. There was now a decent pizzeria, Otto, offering slices late into the night, and the various galleries and used bookstores, vinyl outlets and fossil stores, had been augmented by a comic book emporium and a new bookstore, Green Hand, that boasted a museum of cryptozoology in its back room, which was enough to gladden the heart of anybody with a taste for the bizarre.
Well, nearly anybody.
‘What the fuck is cryptozoology?’ asked Louis as we sat in Monument Square, drinking wine and watching the world go by. Today, Louis was wearing Dolce & Gabbana: a black three-button suit, white shirt, no tie. Even though his voice was not loud, an elderly woman eating soup outside the restaurant to our left looked at Louis disapprovingly. I had to admire her courage. Most people tended not to give Louis looks of any kind other than fear or envy. He was tall, and black, and quite lethal.
‘My apologies,’ said Louis, nodding to her. ‘I didn’t mean to use inappropriate words.’ He turned back to me, then said: ‘What the fuck is whatever it was you said?’
‘Cryptozoology,’ I explained. ‘It’s the science of creatures that may or may not exist, like Bigfoot, or the Loch Ness Monster.’
‘The Loch Ness Monster is dead,’ said Angel.
Today, Angel was wearing tattered jeans, no-name sneakers in red and silver, and a virulently green t-shirt promoting a bar that had closed down sometime during the Kennedy era. Unlike his partner in love and life, Angel tended to provoke responses that varied between bemusement and outright concern that he might be color-blind. Angel was also lethal, although not quite as lethal as Louis. But then, that was true of most people, as well as most varieties of poisonous snake.
‘I read it somewhere,’ Angel continued. ‘This expert who was looking for it for years and years, he decided that it had died.’
‘Yeah, like two hundred and fifty million years ago,’ said Louis. ‘’Course it’s dead. The fuck else would it be?’
Angel shook his head in the manner of one faced with a child who can’t grasp a simple concept. ‘No, it died recently. Until then, it was still alive.’
Louis stared hard at his partner for a long time, then said: ‘You know, I think we need to set a limit on the conversations you can join in with.’
‘Like in a churrascaría,’ I offered. ‘We could turn up a green symbol when you can speak, and a red one when you have to sit quietly and digest whatever it is you’ve just heard.’
‘I hate you guys,’ said Angel.
‘No, you don’t.’
‘I do,’ he confirmed. ‘You don’t respect me.’
‘Well, that is true,’ I admitted. ‘But, then, we really have no reason to.’
Angel thought about this before conceding that I had a point. We moved on to the subject of my sex life which, although apparently endlessly entertaining to Angel, didn’t detain us for long.
‘What about that cop, the one who’d started coming into the Bear? Cagney?’
‘Macy.’
‘Yeah, her.’
Sharon Macy was pretty and dark, and she’d certainly been sending out signals of interest, but I had still been trying to figure out how to deal with the fact that Rachel and our daughter were now going to be living in Vermont, and that my relationship with Rachel was effectively over.
‘It was too soon,’ I said.
‘There’s no such thing as “too soon,”’ said Louis. ‘There’s just “too late,” and then there’s “dead.”’
A trio of young men in loose-fitting jeans, oversized t-shirts, and fresh-out-of-the-box sneakers oozed along Congress like algae on the surface of a pond, heading for the bars on Fore Street. They had ‘out of town’ written all over them – well, written anywhere that wasn’t already occupied by a brand, or the name of a rapper. One, God help us, even wore a retro Black Power t-shirt, complete with clenched fist, even though they were all so white they made Pee Wee Herman look like Malcolm X.
Beside us, two men were eating burgers and minding their own business. One of them wore a discreet rainbow triangle on the collar of his jacket, and a ‘Vote No on I’ badge beneath it, a reference to the impending proposition intended to overturn the possibility of gay marriage in the state.
‘You gonna marry him, bitch?’ said one of the passing strangers, and his friends laughed.
The two men tried to get on with their meal.
‘Fags,’ said the same guy, clearly on a roll. He was small, but muscled up. He leaned over and took a French fry from the plate of the man with the badges, who responded with an aggrieved ‘Hey!’