Sometimes I Think About It Page 2

  “No offense,” she told me when I met her years later, “but I didn’t give a shit.”

  I said goodbye to Justin in his small room with white walls on the ground floor of the institution. It was early in the morning, the desert sun rising above the low buildings, and he wasn’t quite awake. His dark hair covered his eyes. His gym shoes were in the hallway in front of the red walking line, and he asked why I was being let out first. I told him I didn’t know. They drove me to the Greyhound station, and then they took off my handcuffs. I slept on a bus for three days as it snaked slowly across the country from Las Vegas to Chicago. They gave me four dollars when they let me out, and I spent it on cigarettes and candy bars. We stopped at the McDonald’s dotting the highway and a state fair in Carbondale. The man next to me fed me whiskey in a coffee cup, and I slept against his shoulder at night. He was fresh out of prison and asked if I would be willing to snatch someone’s purse. I said I didn’t think I would be very good at that. Justin wouldn’t get out for several more weeks, and when he did he would be re-arrested on an oustanding warrant and he would go to Audy Home and his parents would refuse to pick him up and the state would take custody of him and he would spend the rest of his childhood in a state home in the Chicago suburbs.

  When I got back to Chicago, I slept on the streets, as I had been doing for so long now. I slept on a friend’s porch until his mother found out. I slept on the same rooftops. I hooked up with a children’s agency, and they put me in Central Youth Shelter. It was a gladiator arena filled with children awaiting placement, stuffed thirty to a room. We sat around during the day watching television or playing basketball in the fenced-in yard. The shelter was understaffed, and nobody would tell me where I was going or when I would get out. Then I walked away.

  I slept for a while in a house connected to a Catholic church and in private homes of people who had volunteered to take in children while the state waited the requisite twenty-one days to decide if the state was willing to take custody. There was something wrong with the adults who took me in, all men living alone. I think they were pedophiles and I was a disappointment to them. I played pool with other homeless children at the Advocates Center beneath the Granville train tracks. There was a girl there, a year older than me, tall, thin, and freckled. She always beat me and then did this little victory dance with her hands, fingers stretched like wings. She had the biggest smile.

  Then I slept in the house I had grown up in, which my father was in the process of selling. It was an obvious mistake.

  I woke into his fists, and I tried to cover my face. He dragged me into the kitchen, where he had clippers, forced me to my knees in front of the cabinet, and shaved my head. It was the second time he did that. There were giant bald patches from where his hands slipped, and I looked like a mental patient, which was ironic. He must have been waiting for me, or searching the neighbor hood. He had planned to do this. Revenge for something. The meanest thing possible, worse even than the beating, worse than handcuffing me to a pipe, was to be humiliated in front of everyone. To be a circus freak. It was an act of raw cruelty well within my father’s emotional range. Something he felt was owed him for being negatively portrayed as a parent, for the hatred he saw when he looked in my eyes. But that’s not what this is about at all. This isn’t about hate or love or what went wrong between my father and me or the kind of resentments that never go away. This isn’t about splitting the blame between bad parents and bad children. It’s not about culpability. It’s about sleeping and the things that are important to that, like shelter and rain.

  That night was the last night of my homeless year. It was the end of August, and high school would start in a couple of days. I had cut my wrist open, and there was a bright-red gash that bled throughout the afternoon. It was hot, and a festival was under way in the park. A soft breeze cut around the sleigh hill and a few clouds pocked the long sky. I solicited beer, and people bought me beer because they thought maybe I was crazy or maybe they could get me to leave. I asked one man if I could go home with him, and he said, “Look, I bought you a beer,” which was true enough. As night fell, a band ascended the stage, and I danced while they played, slamming in the mosh pit at the top of the baseball diamond, my wrist still open, splashing traces of blood on people’s clothes. Proof I was there.

  I crawled in the entryway of an apartment building across from the park. I didn’t care anymore. I slept in the open and I heard footsteps pass and a door closing, and then opening again. The floor was small tiles held together with cement, and the door was a glass case barreled in dark wood. I rested with my head on my arm and my knees pulled toward my chest. I had a sack of clothes somewhere. A friend’s parent had given it to me, long white shirts and discarded pants, but I couldn’t remember where I’d left them. My jeans were torn, and I wore a black rock-and-roll T-shirt. I knew it was only a matter of time until the door closing became a phone call and the phone call became swirling red and blue lights and the lights became a backseat and a window with bars.

  The police came, and they asked where my parents were. I told them I didn’t know, which was true. The police weren’t mean or angry. They were just doing their job. In the morning I met a different set of officers, who didn’t wear uniforms or carry guns. The new officers offered me sandwiches and something to drink. They asked what happened to my wrist, and I told them I fell on a tin can, but they didn’t believe me. I was taken to a hospital, and a kind nurse used surgical tape to close the hole in my wrist.

  “Why would you do that?” she asked, and I wanted to laugh at her. I wanted to ask if she was offering me a place to stay. But she was just concerned and nice, and I would meet a lot more people like her. Things got much better after that, though it took me a little while to recognize it. Things were going to work out fine, save some scars.

  —Peterborough, New Hampshire, 2005

  My Little Brother Ruined My Life

  “Are you a masochist?” It’s the first thing Bosco asks me. He’s fourteen years old now, almost my height, five eight, creamy white skin, and a small German nose from my stepmother’s side of the family. He’s wearing pajama bottoms and my father’s green bomber jacket. We’re in a cab, returning from the airport. He’s here to stay with me for ten days. And I’m realizing I’ve made a terrible mistake.

  “Why would you think that?” I ask. I just flew into San Francisco two hours earlier myself. I haven’t been home in weeks.

  “Dad says you’re a masochist. He read it somewhere.”

  “I’m a fiction writer,” I say. “It’s fiction.”

  “Sure it is,” he says.

  We go to a party for people from the university. Bosco grabs two beers from the fridge and hands me one. “He’s a little young to be drinking, isn’t he?” Claire asks. Claire’s a poet from Georgia. The house is filled with poets and short-story writers. Jackets are piled on the bed in the bedroom, and people are lying on them or on the floor, telling stories about losing their virginity. Everybody has an MFA, so every story has a small, inappropriate observation. “He put his hand between my legs at the movie theater. I was wearing my mother’s skirt …” “I was fifteen and she was nineteen. It was the day after my best friend committed suicide.” My brother hangs on the front steps with Kaui’s boyfriend, Andy, and Andy tells him not to do heroin. “Everything else is OK,” Andy says.

  “That guy was cool,” Bosco says.

  …

  I don’t know my little brother as well as I should. We’ve met only a handful of times. I left home before I was his age. My father and I never really mended our relationship. He remarried, made money, moved to the suburbs, had my little brother and sister with his new wife. I wrote a book about growing up in group homes and the violence there. My father thinks I have exaggerated my victimhood at his expense. We get along for months at a time, and then I’ll get some note explaining how he wasn’t that bad a father, how he didn’t shave my head, he gave me haircuts, and I’ll remember waking to my father’s f
ists and being dragged along the floor, into the kitchen. My father likes to joke that he only handcuffed me to a pipe that one time, and look how many stories I’ve gotten out of it. He thinks he should have been a worse father because it would have helped my writing. Sometimes I tell my father it’s best we don’t talk for a while. So I was surprised when he suggested Bosco come out and stay with me. I was more surprised when, after saying yes, I found out the ticket was ten days away.

  What I have to keep telling myself is that Bosco is a kid, and being a kid is hard. I’m not jealous that he’s growing up with two parents in a big house in the suburbs. I want to be a good brother, but the truth is that I don’t have the skills. I’ve borrowed a sleeping bag for him; my studio is so small. He sleeps on the wooden floor, his feet inches from my head. His feet smell, and I’m going to have to tell him about that.

  “Stop walking into me,” I say. We’re on Sixteenth Street, and Bosco keeps brushing against me and I keep moving further away until I am against the buildings.

  “I’m not. You’re walking into me.”

  “From now on I’m going to call you Underfoot,” I say. “You see these lines on the sidewalk? Stay on your side of the line.”

  “You stay on your side of the line.” The streets are crowded and the fruit vendors are out, so it’s hard for either of us to stick to our grids. We pass the Victoria Theatre, where Hedwig and the Angry Inch is in its final week.

  “It’s like my feet are magnets and you have a metal head.”

  We try, we try. We watch a basketball game at my friend’s house, and I lose fifty dollars. “What were you thinking?” Bosco asks. “Syracuse is sooo much better.”

  “You’re fourteen years old. You don’t know anything about college basketball.”

  “Neither do you, apparently.”

  We head to the Orbit Room, where my ex-girlfriend is getting drunk with her friends. I worry that my brother will think I drink too much. Then I worry that maybe I drink too much.

  Theresa is wearing blue jeans and a torn black shirt. It’s always tough to see an ex-girlfriend and realize she’s getting better-looking. Theresa has been at the protests all day in Oakland. “They fired rubber bullets at us,” she says proudly. “It was amazing.”

  The Orbit Room has round cement tables that are four feet high, and people sit around them on tall stools. Bosco is off talking to someone. I say to Theresa, “This is awful. It’s like coming face to face with a part of yourself you had no interest in knowing.”

  “You’ll do fine,” she says.

  “No,” I tell her. “I don’t like children. Also, my apartment is too small. And I’ve been sick recently, I have this ringing in my ears.”

  “Don’t think about yourself,” Theresa says. “Think about your brother.”

  “Why do I have to think about him?” I ask. “He has everything. Can we stay with you?”

  “No. I’m getting on with my life.”

  It’s almost one in the morning and we’re walking home. “Why’d you break up with her?” Bosco asks. “She’s the whole package.” He sounds like my father. My father always spoke of women as if they were frozen meat.

  “Yeah, she’s great,” I say, and I think of how if I hadn’t broken up with her, we would be at her place now. Bosco would be in her extra bedroom, and I would be on the inside of the spoon.

  “You’ll never get a girlfriend like that again.”

  A child sleeps on my floor. The morning is full of rain. I watch my hands as I type. I have scars up and down my wrist from all my suicide attempts.

  My father writes to say that my fourteen-year-old cousin went to one concert and became a doper, and now my uncle is going to throw him out. This is why I hate email. I tell my father that I was doing dope long before my first concert and that maybe my uncle should be a little more thoughtful in assigning blame. My father tells me my uncle has a family to think about. This is my father’s favorite notion. The idea that a family must abandon one of its own for the good of the whole. That’s why he moved while I was living on the streets, he says. Because I was a drug addict and he had to think of the family. Which is why, when the police found me after a year on the streets, and asked where my parents were, I answered that I didn’t know. Honestly, I didn’t. But my family was just two people then, my father and my sister. So I’ve always been skeptical of that argument. I’ve always been skeptical of parents who abandon children for the good of the family.

  I introduce Bosco to Amber, a sixteen-year-old girl from the writing program where I volunteer as a tutor. We go to a movie that isn’t very good and then dessert at an overpriced coffee shop. “So how long are you here for?” Amber asks Bosco.

  “Until next Sunday.”

  “Wow. A whole week more.” Amber is young and pretty. She’s an A student, the editor of her school newspaper. She can make Bosco into a better person. Young boys are so easy to manipulate. They think of only one thing. Someday, when he’s older, Bosco will also think of his place in the world and how people don’t appreciate him enough. He’ll worry about how hard it is to make a living. He’ll feel jealousy and anger when he is passed over for a promotion and then self-loathing for his own small-mindedness.

  Amber takes Bosco back to her home in the Haight. I take the opportunity to get some work done, push his things into the back of the studio, and do the dishes. When he comes home we both have one of those Smirnoff Ice drinks that I have in my fridge.

  “What did you guys talk about?” I ask.

  “Drugs, mostly.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. She likes to do mushrooms.”

  “Oh. Yeah, mushrooms are good. When I was your age I loved acid.”

  “My friend does acid,” he says.

  “Acid is bad for you,” I tell him. Though I know I’m too late. I can tell he’s going to become a horrible drug addict and imagine the next time he visits he’ll steal my laptop and sell it for crack.

  “She said I was weird.” He’s leaning against the wall, below the lip of the window. I live on a busy street. Dirt from exhaust pipes builds up along the base. My little brother has something more to say. He has that kid smile. He thinks he’s so cool. I raise my eyebrow.

  “I shook her hand, but she wanted a hug,” he says. “I might have been able to score, but I didn’t try.”

  My brother and I have card-playing ancestry. Our grand father played cards every day of his adult life. He was an absentee father. He worked during the day and played cards at night. My uncle said he nearly gambled away their house. Because I’m the best euchre player at the university, people are always trying to take me down a peg. I get paired up with my brother.

  “That’s a spade,” I say, pointing to the jack of clubs.

  “No, it isn’t.” He’s on his third beer. He’s sucking them down like water. Perhaps he’ll be an alcoholic before he turns eighteen. Everybody’s half-drunk, and they holler at Bosco to bring them drinks. He’s become the beer boy.

  “It is a fucking spade.”

  “Why are you swearing at your brother?”

  “When spades are trump, the jack of the same color becomes the second highest trump.”

  “You should have told me,” he says. He turns everything back that way.

  “I did tell you.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Why don’t you just admit you’re wrong?” I say. “Why don’t you take responsibility for your actions?”

  “Why don’t you admit you’re wrong?”

  “Your grandfather would turn over in his grave if he saw you playing cards that way.”

  After one more beer apiece, Bosco and I stumble home, arm in arm. The restaurants are closed; the world is asleep. “That’s nothing,” Bosco says, peeing on the wall of a live-work loft building. “Me and my friend Jimmy drank a whole bottle of whiskey. I don’t get hungover.”

  “That’s one more thing you can look forward to.”

  He’ll be leaving in a few days,
and we haven’t done anything. We haven’t seen either bridge, Golden Gate Park, the ocean, or the bay. We haven’t been to any museums. We haven’t hiked Lands End or gone rock climbing. When people ask him what he did in San Francisco, Bosco will say he got drunk. But the thing is, I don’t have a television. I don’t have PlayStation. I don’t have Internet. There is absolutely nothing to do in my apartment except read, write, and get drunk. There’s a message on the machine from my father. “I just wanted to check in on my boys, make sure you’re having a good time.” Anyway, there are only a few days left, and I’m counting them off. Walking near Polk Street, I offer to pay for Bosco to go to bed with a transvestite prostitute.

  “Shut up,” he says.

  “You won’t notice the difference,” I tell him.

  “You’re sick.”

  “I’m going to tell everybody you did it anyway, and they’ll believe me because I’m older than you.”

  It’s late on Thursday night, and there’s been a party at the tutoring center, with raffles and piñatas. Friends of mine are drinking at the bar, but they won’t let Bosco in. Bosco says I should go without him; he’ll wander the Mission District. I tell him I don’t think that’s a good idea. We stop to see Theresa at a reading in a used-book store.

  “I’m leaving him with you. I’m going out.”

  “Like hell you are.” She’s wearing a charcoal-gray skirt. Her legs are tight and tanned, swimmer’s legs. I slip my foot under her foot, which dangles off the armrest of a comfy chair. She moves it away. There’s a blond boy with her, smiling awkwardly.

  “Let’s all go back to your place,” I say. “I’ll buy.”

  “You’ll buy what?”

  “Anything. I don’t care.”

  “No. I’m doing things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “This is Sherman.”

  “Hello, Sherman.”

  Later, at the Pakistani restaurant near Guerrero, we split rice, naan, and an order of chicken tikka masala. “I take back what I said about her,” Bosco says. “She’s not that nice.” He’s on my side.