Another Broken Wizard Read online

  Joe drove his Skylark past Plumley Village and I followed in my gold rental car, to the walled school. They hadn’t put the chain in front of the driveway, and we drove in. The place gave me a shiver. In the middle of the parking lot, Joe got out of his car. I did the same, closing the car door as quietly as I could.

  “Remember your plans for this place?” Joe said.

  “Which one?”

  In the frigid air, my breath made satisfying little clouds. The school, convent, and gymnasium-auditorium-church building, surrounded the parking lot on three sides, all of them made of that tan-yellow institutional brick. Coked-up and half drunk, we stood at the granite feet of Rosa Venerini. She stood as unsmiling as the sisters who followed her, book in hand, rosary beads slung from a rope belt.

  “The racquetballs,” Joe said.

  “That’s right. It was either turn it into a crack house or fill it with racquetballs. I’m just waiting on the money to do it.”

  “You would still do it?” he asked, lighting a cigarette with a preternatural focus.

  “Man, I don’t know. I know that the kind of torment they served up here is the kind that all sane, successful adults are supposed to forgive, supposed to say was for our own good. But I promised myself I’d do it. I feel like I owe that miserable kid I was that much.”

  “I actually don’t mind the place. I have fond mostly memories.”

  “That surprises me. It’s not like they treated you much better.”

  “It was St. Johns I really hated. That fucking place. No girls, forty hours of homework, fucking asshole teachers.”

  “Yeah, St. Johns was grim. But what wasn’t grim?”

  I stopped myself before I said the rest: What wasn’t grim in Worcester? An attack on the town always felt like an attack on Joe. He had stayed, made the best of it, fought the good fight to keep it interesting. I’d fled, and didn’t feel right acting superior, not to him.

  “One of the best days of my life was when I quit St. Johns. I told Mr. Hood I was going to join the ten percent,” Joe said.

  “Ten percent?”

  “Yeah, he had this theory that every society has a bottom ten percent that accounts for all of its crime, its unemployment and so on. So on my last day, I said ‘Mr. Hood, I’m off to join the ten percent.’ Mr. Hood was not amused. But he shook my hand and wished me good luck.”

  The ten percent invited Joe just before high school. He got stoned and lost his virginity to a blind-drunk girl at a party that summer. And a world waited for him there—a parade of girls made available by drink and smoke, new friends who had sloughed off homework and other hassles, and wild, violent nights that refuted the evidence left by the day.

  Venerini was where Joe and I became friends in the fifth grade. We paused to take it in. That night’s booze and cocaine, along with all the time passed together made the moment feel special.

  “I remember our last day at this place, throwing cold cuts behind the lockers,” I said.

  “That must have been the one thing we didn’t get caught doing,” Joe laughed and threw away his cigarette.

  “Like when you got suspended for laughing at that girl’s funeral?”

  “That’s not fair. I didn’t laugh at the funeral. I laughed because I was about to laugh. And I was only about to laugh because I thought of how bad it would be to laugh during her funeral. And I only thought of laughing because you elbowed me in the ribs during the mass.”

  “I was just elbowing you back.”

  “I seem to remember you starting it.”

  We argued the point until Joe suggested we head back to meet Tommy. Across Belmont Street, through the side streets by the hospital and up the hill, Joe drove slowly, as if nuns still peered over his shoulder.

  9.

  In Joe’s kitchen, we sat around a gray Formica table on hard, mismatched kitchen chairs. Tommy put two small jars of coke and a little baggy with just a trace of powder in it on the table. Tommy asked Joe if he had any beers.

  “No, just tap water and this rum that doesn’t taste right. But you’re welcome to it.”

  “Weird rum, huh? Golly, I guess we’ll just have to do a pile of hard drugs then,” Tommy said, his eyes bugging out for comical effect.

  Tommy tapped a portion from one of the vials out onto a CD case and handed it to Joe. He cut the lines with exaggerated precision.

  “Jesus, they took less care drawing up the Peace of Westphalia,” I said.

  Joe’s laugh started silently, just pursing his lips with an alarmed look on his face. He had the presence of mind to put down the CD case. From there, the laugh began its progressive convulsion, infecting all of us. Eventually, Joe collected himself and began cutting the lines again, which reminded him of the joke, which made him laugh again, which made us laugh again.

  Finally, Joe carved the lines, took a deep snort and passed me the CD case. I took a line and passed it to Tommy. I sniffled for a few minutes, knowing it was stupid to be snorting coke, but too drunk and already high to give an honest damn. I wondered if any of my prospective employers would require a drug test, and did another line. The stuff was strong, filling my mind with World War Two stock footage.

  “How you feeling, Jim?” Joe asked.

  “Good. Great. Let’s invade Connecticut.”

  “I know, right?” Joe said, breaking into another wild round of laughs.

  “Those fuckers are soft, they’re ripe for it.”

  We did more coke and more still. Things got funnier, but meant less. I never really liked coke that much. I think Joe liked to see me get high. It let him think I hadn’t grown the pretensions that would separate us. I liked it for the same reason. I did another line.

  “This shit is alright. Where did you get it?” Joe asked.

  “Walshie’s,” Tommy said in a powerful exhalation.

  “How is that guy? I feel bad. I haven’t seen him since the night he lost his hand.”

  “Walshie is alright. But that fucking hand always gives me the creeps. It’s just this pink stump, and he doesn’t cover it or anything when you go over there. But he’s still a cool guy,” Tommy said, sniffling and widening his eyes.

  “Jim, you met Walshie. We bought a sheet of acid from him during that summer you were back from college,” Joe said.

  “The guy over by Rotmans?” I said. I actually said it more like ovah by Rowautmans, as the drugs, booze and atmosphere made my accent resurface.

  “Yeah, him. It was nuts. Last winter, he had this party with a ton of booze and a ton of, well, everything. It was just supposed to be some close friends, but word got out. I was there until they made me leave. I guess I got a little rowdy and broke some things.”

  “This isn’t the time you stole a car from outside Dunkin’ Donuts, is it?” I asked.

  “Actually, it was. But after I left, these kids from Kilby Street show up at the party to rip off Walshie. So Walshie’s roommate, his best friend, gets out a shotgun to scare them off and ends up shooting off Walshie’s hand.”

  “Shit,” I said. The coke made me wonder if I’d said it solemnly enough.

  “No shit,” Tommy said, excited as hell to carry the conversational torch. “He has this big steel door now. It must weigh about three hundred pounds. And he says he’s stopped drinking, doing coke, everything but weed. He says he’s going to go to Clark once he gets the money together for tuition,” Tommy said.

  “That’s a plan,” Joe nodded.

  It seemed like everyone Joe knew in Worcester had a plan, to go to school, to move to Rhode Island, to fake an injury to their union, to buy land in Maine, to rob a sporting goods store, to work at their girlfriend’s father’s Ford dealership, to buy clothes at the Salvation Army and sell them on eBay, to learn carpentry and become a contractor, to grow and sell pot at their stepmom’s house, to open a restaurant, to get a Canadian law degree by mail, to work on a fishing boat.

  “What’s that?” Joe asked, pointing to the little baggy.

  “Walshie sa
id some guys at WPI made it. It’s got some fucked up name like R2D2 or something. He says it’s nutty stuff, pretty trippy. He says this little baggy is enough for three or four guys. I’m into it if you guys are,” Tommy said, holding up the tiny ziplock bag.

  “You up for it, my brother?” Joe said, giving me his maniacal smile.

  Before I say I snorted it, I would like to state that I do know better. I knew I had a career and an apartment and friends and responsibilities back in the city in which I had chosen to live. I knew that a functioning brain was essential to all of that. I knew that, especially since the divorce and the layoff, I didn’t have much of a safety net in the world. And I knew that if something went wrong, no one would even be able to tell the doctors in the emergency room what drug I had taken.

  But Joe had a way of making you not give a damn. It was one of his best qualities. Tommy shook the fingernail’s worth of white powder onto the CD case and cut it up into miniscule lines. The teensy-tinsy line of powder burned my mucous membranes. Tears rushed to my eyes and as I blinked, the air filled with jovial patterns.

  The patterns congregated into autonomous forms that judged us, then flowed on into fresh patterns, with fresh judgments. Joe’s and Tommy’s faces poked through the web of patterns in vivid colors. Tommy waited until Joe and I had stopped blinking, resumed breathing, and appeared to be happily fascinated with the activities of the empty space in front of us. Then he did his line. We all sat there a minute, regarding the strange scene strangely.

  “Oh shit, I am tripping like Gerald fucking Ford,” Joe said.

  It summed up our situation well enough. Joe started to laugh, then got distracted. I stared into the silvery, undulating ocean of the Formica table surface. After an indeterminate period lost in similar pursuits, we decided that our place in this world wasn’t under the fluorescent light tubes of Joe’s kitchen, but out under the stars of a wider world.

  “Be quiet, my neighbor’s a cop,” Joe said, whisper-giggling as we walked down the hallway of the apartment house.

  From there, we crossed the street to Green Hill Park. The frozen grass crunched under our feet as we crested one of Worcester’s seven cardinal hills. The sky spread itself about as wide as it ever did in that town.

  “I remember sledding on this thing. After an ice storm, we used to fly down it,” Tommy said, licking his lips as he looked at the hill. “See you guys at the bottom.”

  Tommy ran down the hill, first jogging, then sprinting, then leaping into the air with his arms spread. On his third or fourth leap, he landed badly, going down face first and rolling to a stop. The ground was cold and hard, but we could hear him laughing and whooping near the foot of the hill by the wilted remains of a snowman.

  “I think I’m just going to walk this one,” Joe said.

  “I’m with you. How long does this stuff last?”

  “What? This stuff we’ve never done before and don’t know the freaking name of? Either two hours, or forever,” Joe said, laughing.

  The laughter made the patterns in the air swarm about us like giddy, ugly angels singing our unknown names. We laughed until the cold air burned our throats. It was twenty degrees out, and the park was empty—even the cops wouldn’t bother cruising by. The drugs flushed the exposed skin on my hands and face with blood, so it didn’t feel too cold. Tommy was quiet on the ground when we got to him. He stared at the parting clouds and moved his lips, like a movie character on the verge of prophecy.

  “The stars are coming out. But not when you need them. It’s just that there’s never enough. That’s the only way you even know you’re here. The light never comes all the way through,” he said, locking his eyes on Joe.

  “Come on, we’ll go to the light,” Joe said, offering down his hand and pulling him up.

  The light in question shot up from the foot of the hill, onto a series of rough-hewn granite slabs. In darkness broken only by dirty orange street lights, the bright white memorial lights stood out like the supernatural itself. On closer examination, the slabs listed the names of the young men from Massachusetts killed in Vietnam. We three men, young during another unpopular war, on drugs we didn’t recognize, wandered past the names of the dead. It should have been more sobering, I guess. But long years of Catholic faith and middle-class anxieties had made solemnity a hard sell for Joe and me. And Tommy was just too high to care. He sat on the freezing concrete and took in the view.

  “Your dad was in Vietnam. Was he fucked up by it?” Joe said.

  “I don’t think so. He doesn’t talk about it too much and he doesn’t talk about it too little. It definitely wasn’t a good time, to hear him tell it. Mom said he used to get rattled when helicopters flew by.”

  “He got shot, right?”

  “In the leg. They almost had to amputate it,” I said.

  “That’s fucking crazy,” Tommy said.

  “What does he say about it, about being there?” Joe asked.

  Joe had never met his own father. And he was scared of my dad as a kid, but also fascinated. Sons are always on the prowl for some idea of how to live. Dad never much liked Joe. But it was touch-and-go even with me, his own son, for a while.

  “Yeah, he’s funny about it. One time I asked him why we never went camping. He said, ‘because I spent two years in the jungle being shot at, that’s why.’”

  “Most of these guys died,” Tommy said.

  “I think all of them did,” Joe said.

  “Really? You think?”

  I wandered away from the memorial, to the darkness where the grass and the concrete met. I looked out over a pond and the golf course rising on the hill beyond it, to see what the drugs would make of it. Poised in hallucination, I lost the thread of the conversation. I thought of Joe, how he spun gold out of ordinary things—petty arguments or trying to get laid or getting high or holding a grudge or drinking— simply by taking them too far.

  “… It was the Domino Theory. We couldn’t let Communists take over the little countries and we couldn’t really go all out, because of the threat of nuclear annihilation. So we were painted into a corner, kind of,” Joe was saying.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Joe was just telling me why we didn’t win Vietnam. It fucking sucks. It’s sad,” Tommy said.

  “Yeah, trying to get our way while being careful as a long-dicked dog in a room full of rocking chairs, basically,” Joe said

  Unfortunately, the drugs brought the image to life. I rubbed my face and blinked until it faded.

  “That’s great, Joe. Now I won’t be able to watch CNN without thinking of dog dicks smushed on a wood floor. Thanks a bunch,” I said.

  “Fucking dog dicks!” Tommy yelled into the night.

  “Oh man, don’t think about dog dicks. I was just talking about mutually assured destruction. Think about that instead.”

  “Great, that’s just great. Thanks, man.”

  “Dog dicks!” Tommy barked.

  “Tommy …”

  “Dog dicks!”

  “Enough dog dicks …” I started, and then trailed off.

  Things were still weird, but not as surprising anymore. The peak had passed. We walked back up the hill, which seemed about five times longer and twice as steep as he one we’d come down. Back at Joe’s, Tommy got in his car and drove home. He made it, I hear.

  Joe and I took our positions on his sprawling plantation of a bed. I set my cell-phone alarm and closed my eyes, praying for a little sleep. Coming down from the cocaine and mystery drug was a dose of hell.

  “What’s up?” Joe asked into the darkness.

  “I’m just figuring out tomorrow, writing e-mails, sending off resumes, helping Dad around the house, stuff like that.”

  “I am going to sleep for twelve hours, then eat two Dunkin Donuts’ egg sandwiches and watch some movies at my mom’s house.”

  “Well, then I have to say, having thought it over, screw you.”

  “Jim you Mick yuppie bastard, you’re my oldest frien
d, I love you,” Joe said.

  “Back at you, you froggy, last-of-the-Mohicans nutjob.”

  9.

  Sunday, December 28

  Dad had his season tickets since the early nineties. Back then, the Patriots were one of the worst teams in the league, playing in a stadium where you rented seats to clip onto the aluminum bleachers. But lately, they’d won a few Super Bowls and built a new stadium, with working seats, plentiful urinals, an alert security force, and even a shopping center outside of it.

  It was only around ten in the morning when we pulled into the dirt lot outside the stadium. We parked under a pine tree and I went to work unfolding a table and chairs and setting up the grill. Dad sat down and I poured him a beer. The shouting drunks and the Patriots flags hoisted from trucks and campers at the edge of the trees made the Foxboro parking lot feel like the encampment of a Gothic tribe nearing the gates of Rome.

  I cooked cheeseburgers on the grill. Dad criticized how I handled the spatula, how long I cooked the burgers and how much cheese I used. But when it was done, he grunted in praise. Hot and bloody, held in cold hands, surrounded by trees, camaraderie and washed down with beer, the burger didn’t have to be perfect to be damn good.

  The game was Dad’s last hurrah before his surgery. The next day, he’d start his pre-operation fast.

  Police and news helicopters cruised the sky above us. The game was one more chance for Massachusetts to matter, and everyone was excited. Among the fans, a few had dressed for attention, with body paint and costumes. One strolled the parking lot in a new Arizona Cardinals jersey screaming “Let’s Go Cardinals” at the top of his lungs and otherwise taunting the fans who milled around their grills and coolers. Greeted by jeers and insults that included most of his family tree, he went on screaming in blinkered rage, cheering on the opponent.

  “What’s the story with that guy? He was here last time I was up, rooting for the Dolphins,” I asked.

  “He’s here for all the games. He’s always wearing the other team’s jersey and shouting up a storm. He must have season tickets.”