Saturdays

A man with low self-esteem takes a beating.

My mother, Iris, was a woman of letters. Well-heeled, she came from Mayflower stock, attended Julliard, spoke French, and corresponded with Oppenheimer. She did not think fondly of me. I was talentless at best--at worst, I was reprehensible.

She’d met my father at an art fair in Mystic, Connecticut. They shared a passion for Hemingway. Manny was a brakeman for the Union Pacific, a towny, a brawler, and a heroic figure in my eyes. He knocked Iris up higher than a kite, and they ended up with me for their efforts. My sister, Miranda, was born two years later.

***

Beautiful Miranda, statuesque with China-doll features and tumbling hair, was my opposite and explicitly my superior--how I envied her. She had our mother's attention during breakfast. I had oatmeal and my silent resentment.

***

I was fourteen when my mother decided she’d had enough. She took Miranda and moved to Algiers. Still, she sent Manny and me enough to get by each month. We received Christmas cards that smelled of Iris’s perfume. These helped Manny go nuts… one piece at a time.

Soon after the abandonment, I proved my cowardice before my misfit buddies. They thought it was a good sport playing chicken with trains. They’d stand on the tracks while oncoming locomotives came barreling around a blind curve and then leap off at the very last second. I froze when it came to my turn.

Broken Pete spit on my shoes and called me a pantywaist. 

Who knows what happened to those guys? Some might have ended up badly, others not so badly. Others ended up on Bank Street.

***

Today, I lay on my flat’s floor while Clooney purrs and touches my battered face with her nose.

***

Yesterday, I’d taken a vodka shot before going out for the morning paper, walking one side of the building’s hallway, and passing a trail of blood drops leading to my neighbor’s door. Making it down the stairs, I exited onto Bank Street.

Broken Pete stood on the opposite sidewalk. He was trying to close his fly while supporting himself on a parking meter. He stared through me.

Bells jingled as I opened the door to Fatone's Smoke Shop. The air was pungent. Display cases of cigars sat along one side of the narrow room, newspaper stacks on the other. Fatone sat at his register.

I grabbed a copy of The New London Day and headed to the counter as Fatone tracked me with his single good eye. The other lay poached in a hammock of infected goo. He wiped the monstrosity with a tissue, and his lips pulled back into a piano-key grin.

"Hello, Alfred," he said.

I dropped the paper on the counter and fished coins out of a pocket.

"I saw the cigar Indian out front," I said. "It's new?"

"There's nothing new in the world, Alfred, only things that've returned from the past."

Perhaps this was another of his Schopenhauer quotes. 

I stuck the paper under my arm and headed for the Hygienic Restaurant.

Bank Street was waking to the dawn of a new day. A cleanup was underway. Security gates clattered, bar doors flew open, disinfectants fumed. Mop carts rolled over terrazzo tile. Degenerate pigeons pecked the gutters.

I pushed past the restaurant’s door and sat in a booth. My regular server, Norma, arrived a moment later. Everything about her stirred up my loneliness: her compassionate brown eyes and flawlessly neat uniform. Even the pencil in her hair made me yearn for her. She put a hand on my shoulder.

"Would you like some French fries, Hun?”

My despicable eyes fell on her breasts. She pretended not to notice.

"And soda, please."

She brought my order, and I smiled, watching her backside as she moved to another section, shaking a catsup bottle over the fries then glancing down at the sound of a suction pop. My stomach turned like when I stepped barefoot in Clooney’s warm puke. A dead mouse and a slop of catsup lay on my fries. I needed air, so I dropped a ten-dollar bill on the table, grabbed my paper, and returned to the street. Before long, I was heading down a paved embankment, jumping a fence, and starting along the train rails.

Waves rolled in from Long Island Sound and crashed the beach. I'd hoped the shore breeze would make my problems smaller, but it was no good; the creosote-impregnated rail ties smelled like Manny’s jacket and reminded me of the unrequited love we shared for my mother.

***

It was ten years ago that Iris got sick. She lasted two days, then sat in a chair and croaked. That’s when it got bad with Manny. He went over the deep end. Miranda had Iris cremated, then moved to a swanky loft in Foggy Bottom.

***

I dropped the paper on the rails and watched it tumble apart with a gust of wind. Discontent had the better of me. I grabbed a rail spike off the ballast and heaved it into the sawgrass. Gulls circled as I looked down the track to the blind curve where I’d proved my cowardice.

***

Miranda flew in from DC.

She demanded my help getting Manny processed into a psychiatric facility. I resisted; I told her to chase herself, then caved and followed the plan.

They came for Manny two days later. It was shameful. I was half-drunk, and my gloom was twice its standard size. Manny panicked and stumbled sideways down a hall. He tried hiding in a closet.

I stood and watched while they manhandled him. A strapping psychiatric nurse put him in restraints. The nurse's boss, an austere b***h with Ayn Rand's face, gave Miranda a form to sign.

His brain was shot. It got ugly. They tossed him in the transport van. He struggled and sobbed. I shouted that I'd visit him as they slammed the door. In the end, I saw him just once again, took a train upstate, and got a cab at the station.

The Eastern Sanatorium had a cemetery with a broken fence. Manny was broken, too. When I entered the building, the nurse at reception glanced at me from behind plexiglass.

I spoke through a metal baffle, telling her I was there to visit my father, Manny Silva, then took a seat and waited on an orderly. 

He had nasty teeth. He led me through a side door that led down staircases. I got a dose of fear. Why had I even come here? I grabbed at a handrail and missed. I was short-circuiting. Bile and dizziness, shortness of breath.

"This doesn't feel right,” I said. “Are you sure about where we’re heading?”

"He's in the West Wing, so we're going."

My father didn't recognize me when we finally got to his ward. His appearance made my skin crawl. I couldn't speak. I moved closer, hoping to jog his memory. But I saw his eyes were sinking. It seemed to make the odor stronger.

Manny died weeks later. I accused Miranda of being responsible and called her a w***e. She was unruffled by my outburst and told me she was the executor of Manny's estate, then let me know I'd receive a sizable split.

That one shut me up. "Estate?"

"Yes," said Miranda, "Iris made investments for him. You're entitled to a good deal of money. Hardly the course I'd have taken," she added.

The news turned me into a wet sparrow. In my delight,I drank steadily and lost my forklift job.

***

I started back for Bank Street. My favorite watering hole would soon open, and I was getting dry.

There was a small amount of action: a boozy woman sat at the far end of the bar with an empty glass and some sailors shooting pool in the back. Seating myself on a stool near the entrance, I ordered a bunch of shots, got lousy, and could have bested a hyena with the stupidity of my laughter. I called the bartender over.

“Set me up,” I slurred, “And give one to the lady. What the hell is her name anyway? No need to cut me off. I leave when I deem it necessary… and of my own accord.”

"Her name is Moll," said the barkeep, filling my glass and pushing a rag down the bar.

Sailors ducked in and out of the restroom. The stink of urinal bars wafted out like diseased gardenia.

The bartender put the drink in front of Moll, and she tossed it back without acknowledging where it'd come from. I ordered a double and downed it.

I kept looking over at her as she gazed into the mirrors. Then, I became doubly obnoxious. I slid off my stool and approached her with a leer.

"Why give yourself such a hard time...Moll?" I asked nastily.

“Get the hell away from me.”

I stumbled up to the sailors.

“Can any of you boys tell me why the dyslexic killed himself?”

They glanced at one another.

"He lost his faith in DOG… Get it? I don’t call him God, though. He’s Shorty in my book. How about Pearl Harbor? Who wants to hear how I survived it?”

“Don’t get reckless, s**t heel.”

I was cruising for it but ignored the warning signs and launched into my story.

“I was sitting against a gun turret with the Sunday paper when the almighty started crushing volcanos and hurling down the slag. I jumped to my feet. A pressure shock blew my white hat off. I tried escaping, but bombs were punching through the deck front and behind me. Nobody below deck had a chance. Pieces of bulkhead and black smoke poured out of the bomb holes. I took off running. No direction. No reason. A three-hundred-pound hatch slid out of the sky. It hit the deck so goddamn hard that my feet went numb. An anchor chain tore loose and helicoptered over my head. Fuel washed over the deck, and my feet went from under me. I tried getting up but kept landing on my a*s because of the fuel. It's ridiculous, but I was worried about how foolish I looked going a*s over bandboxes on the same piece of deck.

I told Shorty I'd swear off if he let me live. You swabs might think that's funny. Laugh if you want, but I'm talking about death. I crawled for the ship’s rail. Something jagged slashed my right hand open. I didn’t know what because I couldn’t see from having fuel in my eyes. I reached out and felt the ship's rail. I dropped over the side. That’s how I escaped that tub. She’d been a proud ship once, a heavy cruiser with eight-inch guns. Six months later, I shipped out on a destroyer. A U-boat sent her to the bottom with a single torpedo. Down she went, and back into the water I went. The sharks were gonna rip me up. Instead, a rescue operation came along….”

One of the sailors called me a stolen valor sonofabitch and nailed me with a good punch. I took it like a man; I even picked up my fists. 

"Come on, you sons of b*****s!" I shouted. 

That's when I took a haymaker flush. Down I went.  I grabbed Moll's leg and tried to pull myself up. She jumped up and kicked me off. The sailors stood back, figuring I was nuts or had enough. But it wasn’t enough. I wanted more, so I lunged at Moll and grabbed her crotch. She slapped my face, and the sailors gave me the heave-ho into the door. It didn't open like in Westerns, though; down I went. They dragged me up and pushed me through the door. The sidewalk rushed up to meet my face. I bounced and rolled into a sitting position with blood and broken bridgework in my mouth. Broken Pete stood smiling. Once a pantywaist, always a pantywaist.

"You're nothing better than me, just as bad off." I managed.

I crumbled over sideways, slipping close to unconsciousness.

Norma came out of the Hygienic. She pushed the sailors back and lifted my head off the sidewalk.

"Leave him alone,” she said. “Can't you see he's had enough?"