Columbia Park was a nicer-looking street than we’d ever lived on before, but three houses up lived a blonde stripper with large silicone breasts. For weeks she’d climbed out of her Camaro with white gauze taped to her cheek and jaw, and I thought she had an infection of some kind, but then I heard the real story, that the stripper’s mother, a small chain-smoker she lived with, got mad and shot her daughter in the face.
It was the kind of thing that happened in the avenues. To get to them I just had to follow Suzanne down Columbia Park across Main Street to Seventh Ave, a narrow hill street of tin-sided houses behind chain-link fences. They had no driveways and on the sidewalk or at the curb would be a battered station wagon or Pontiac LeMans with no hubcaps, a Duster with a sandblasted hood. Plastic children’s toys would lie on the cracked concrete among cigarette butts and empty nip bottles, and on their sides here and there would be shopping carts for when the car wouldn’t start and the welfare checks came in and usually the mothers and wives or girlfriends would push the carts a mile and a half away to DeMoulas and load up with cans of Campbell’s soup, eggs and milk, bags of potato chips and cases of Coke and Budweiser, bottles of Caldwell’s vodka.
Halfway down Seventh Avenue was a cluster of yellow apartment buildings, two rows of them three-deep back from the street, each three stories high. The ground around them was packed dirt worn smooth and there was a gravel parking lot scarred from rain and in the back of it, up against a field of weeds, was a green dumpster I’d never seen empty; it was full of babies’ diapers and old mattresses, dozens of beer bottles, pizza boxes, damp condoms and instant coffee jars and plastic shampoo bottles, a broken chair or torn lamp shade, a kitchen knife with no handle.
At night the apartments were lit up and loud, the windows open in the summer, no screens in them, maybe a fan blowing, the constant drone of TVs and radios, kids crying or laughing, a woman or man yelling, someone from another apartment shouting to shut the fuck up! Someone was always calling the cops, and there’d be one or two cruisers pulled up to the curb, the door open, the cab’s light on, the dispatcher a static voice in the air.
I don’t know when Suzanne started going down there, but I knew why. It’s where you’d go to cop some brown mescaline, orange sunshine, or THC. It’s where you’d go to buy an ounce of Mexican gold or a tab of four-way purple blotter acid or to sit in a dark hot room full of teenagers and grown men and women and take the joint passed your way and mooch a free hit. It’s where everyone else went, to the building farthest back from the street.
There were no young families in this one, just men in their twenties and thirties who earned their rent by collecting it from everyone else, two or three going from door to door on the first of each month demanding cash. Some of them were with the motorcycle gang the Devil’s Disciples, and they had long hair that fell down over the devil’s insignia of their black leather jackets. They wore heavy motorcycle boots and faded oil-spotted jeans and dark T-shirts. A lot of them had beards or mustaches and they carried folded Buck knives in leather pouches at their hips. In the plywood half-wall of the top porch were three holes in a close grouping from a .38 or .45, and from that apartment there was always music blaring—Black Sabbath, Electric Light Orchestra, Alice Cooper, Led Zeppelin, and the Allman Brothers. There were always three or four motorcycles parked in the dirt or mud, and day and night people came and went.
We smoked every morning at the bus stop too. It was on the corner of Seventh Ave and Main Street right next to Pleasant Spa convenience store, a gray vinyl-sided box with dusty plate-glass windows advertising Marlboros and Borden’s milk and Ajax. The owner was short and fat, his fingers brown from tobacco, a smoking cigarette forever between them or his lips. He called us punks and fuckin’ assholes. To the right of his store were wooden steps leading to the apartments above, and that’s where twelve or fifteen kids waited each morning.
Some of them lived down in the avenues, some on the streets across Main, but we all looked the same: there was Glenn P., a heavy kid with wire-rimmed glasses and thin brown hair. He wore a faded army jacket, the inside pockets usually holding cash and the dope he sold, mainly THC or joints at a buck apiece. In his Dingo boots, the kind I eventually got my mother to buy me, he carried a pint of Southern Comfort and he’d pass it around on the steps to Nicky G., Bryan F. and Chuck and Al, Anne Marie and Dawn, my sister Suzanne, and me.
I took a sip and hated the sweet burn going down my throat. I smoked pot, too. I drew in the smoke like everyone else, held it till my chest hurt, then blew it out, and I hated what happened next, how a part of me slipped inside another part of me to watch me go so dully through the morning. But I couldn’t say no, couldn’t draw attention to myself and maybe get insulted and have to fight. Only a year or so on this side of town, and I’d begun to wear my hair tied back in a ponytail, and every day I wore my one pair of jeans, my Dingo boots, a T-shirt, and the brown leather jacket with the zippered sleeves my mother couldn’t afford but ended up buying for me anyway. A man driving down Main Street to work at seven any weekday morning would see just another delinquent drinking and smoking on the steps of Pleasant Spa, just another kid like Nicky G. with his long hair, black as an Apache’s, his sideburns like Greg Allman’s, his hard chest from the bench presses he did in his garage, the fact he’d fucked every girl in that neighborhood at least once, including my fourteen-year-old sister, and then he was off after some other girl and Suzanne cried for a week in her room and I despised him, tried not to talk to him or look at him or smile at any of his jokes, but if he passed me a joint or Glenn P.’s Southern Comfort, I took it and said nothing.
The long yellow bus would pull up and I’d sit in the back with Suzanne and the Heads from the avenues. Sometimes Glenn P. would pass his bottle, sometimes he’d keep it to himself for later. We’d ride down through the streets, the driver stopping every few blocks to pick up more kids, the girls dressed like Anne Marie and Dawn and my sister; they wore tight hip-huggers that went so low you could see two dimples just above their butt cracks, and the Italian or Puerto Rican girls had that brown line in the skin that ran from the belly button straight down past the pink and yellow rim of panties. They wore tight tube tops and no bras, their nipples erect in the winter behind short leather jackets dyed green or red or purple. Their hair was wild or braided, and the eyeliner around their eyes was thick and black, their lip gloss glistening.
As the bus pulled up in front of them, they’d take one last drag off a cigarette and flick it into the street. They’d climb onto the bus and make their way past the kids with lunch boxes and books and homework they’d actually done, to the back where the rest of us were.
“Mornin’, Tina.”
“Fuck you, Glenn. Where’s the fin you owe me?”
“Blow me.”
“In your dreams, faggot.”
There’d be laughter and more swearing at one another, talk of a fight that was coming, of some Acapulco gold or Angel Dust due soon, who had just fucked whom and who was knocked up and who got rid of it and who wiped out his bike down to the beach and might lose a leg.
We passed the junkyard and a Catholic church, we rode down under the railroad trestle for Lafayette Square and all its barrooms around the rotary, then the package store and car dealership that year-round had Christmas lights lit up over its used and repossessed cars. We rode up Broadway past a funeral home and St. Joseph’s Church and then we were out near the highway, the bus turning into the lane for the high school, a rambling one-story complex of cinderblock and glass, a statue of Michelangelo’s Lorenzo de’ Medici sitting out front, though whenever I saw it, the form of the man with his elbow on his knee looked to me like a man on a toilet.
The bus pulled around to the back lot where seniors parked their Monte Carlos and Camaros and Dusters and Trans Ams, a few motorcycles too. Facing the lot was the entrance between the M and L wings. The kids in the front of the bus, the jocks or the studious ones no one had a name for, they went inside to make it to the
ir lockers and desks before the homeroom bell, but I followed Suzanne and the rest to the metal grates up against the walls. There were dozens of kids already there, smoking cigarettes or passing joints or dealing whatever they had, a pocket for their product, the other for cash. And there’d be a lookout for Perez, one of the narcs who wore leather and pretended he was a senior though his shaved whiskers left a dark shadow and there were lines under his eyes and he was at least thirty and a pig, what we still called cops from the antiwar days we were too young to be a part of.
BECAUSE OUR mother worked in Boston, she had to leave for her job before we got out of bed. Most mornings, only Nicole would be on time and walk herself to school a half mile north. Jeb, Suzanne, and I would sleep till we woke two or three hours later than we should have to catch the bus. Some days we’d stay home. Other days we’d go to school, which meant a four-mile walk through town across Main Street down into the avenues past the Dobermans or German shepherds chained in their dirt yards. In some were babies’ toys scattered among the dog shit, the dogs barking at me behind chain-link fences. I’m sure Suzanne and I walked together many days, but I remember more clearly doing it alone, cutting across Cedar down Sixth Avenue past the auto parts store and junkyard, the battered shells of cars sitting in the weeds, many of the windshields collapsed into the front seats, the rims rusted, the lug bolts like eyes staring out at me.
But I felt watched by no one. Those weekday mornings we slept late and didn’t go to school, our report cards showed as sixty to eighty absences a year, dozens and dozens of marks for tardiness. No adult at school really seemed to notice much. There’d be an occasional letter sent home to our mother, but the counselor or vice principal or whoever it was always wanted to meet during a weekday. How could she do that? She had to work.
I’d make my way through town, past the boarded-up shops on Winter Street, the gas station and used car lot, the pizza shop and Dunkin’ Donuts where on summer nights old men would sit in lawn chairs in the parking lot, smoking and talking and spitting.
At Railroad Square, I’d walk under the black iron trestle covered with hot-paint graffiti: Joey and Nina 4-ever, Tommy loves Denise!, USMC Cpl. Steve L. RIP, U suck! I’d walk over broken glass and cigarette butts in my Dingo boots and leather jacket, my hair tied back. Maybe I’d thought if I looked like the toughest kids at the high school, they’d leave me alone and I wouldn’t have to fight for just glancing at them a second too long. After a while it worked; because I looked like them, they didn’t see me anymore. But the cops did. Especially those late weekday mornings walking through town when I should’ve been in algebra class, world history, gym; I’d pass more barrooms, a lock shop, St. Joe’s Catholic Church, a cruiser pulling up and a cop yelling out at me, “Why ain’t you in school?”
“I had a doctor’s appointment.”
“Where’s your parents?”
“Working.”
“How’d you get to the doctor?”
“Walked.”
“Well, keep walkin’.” And he’d drive off in his police car, his antennas swaying back and forth like a scolding finger.
It seemed that each day I got up just wanting to get through it. I didn’t know if my brother and sisters felt the same way, but my mother seemed to; most weeknights, Bruce quietly drunk, sipping a bourbon and reading in the front room, she’d be stretched out on the floor in front of the TV asleep in her work clothes by eight o’clock, my brother and sisters and me free to do whatever we wanted, do homework or not do homework, fight or ignore each other, ignore the five days of dishes stacked in the kitchen sink and on the counters; ignore the overflowing garbage in the trash bucket or the mountain of bags in the garage because none of us carried any out to the curb on garbage night; ignore the dirty clothes hanging out of the full hampers in both bathrooms; ignore the fact that we each did our own laundry when we needed to, one at a time, going down into the basement and putting into the machine one pair of underwear, a pair of jeans, a pair of socks, a T-shirt and sweater, using an entire load, then drying the same outfit for an hour in the dryer, each of us doing it this way; ignore the dust everywhere, the loose hairs, the grit tracked over the linoleum floors and throw rugs; ignore that our dog, Dirt, shat regularly up on the second-floor hallway in the dark corner near the stairs up to my attic bedroom; ignore that we could walk out of that house and not come home till midnight or later; ignore that most nights Suzanne would go up to her room with a boyfriend and smoke dope and listen to her albums; ignore that twelve-year-old Nicole had installed by herself a padlock on her bedroom door, one she locked with a key she kept with her at all times; ignore that our father never called us and we never called him.
JEB AND I had a new friend now, Cleary, whom everybody called by his last name. After the high school let out at two-thirty, I’d take the bus home and wait for my brother to walk back from the middle school, then he and I would go to Cleary’s house down the dirt alley behind our garage. It was a tiny two-story of four rooms and a bathroom, the backyard just big enough for his father’s Chevy, though we rarely saw him. We saw his mother a lot, a big-breasted woman who started her drinking every morning in tall plastic cups filled with vodka and Pepsi. Some afternoons we’d knock on Cleary’s door, hear nothing, then walk in over the yellow linoleum of the kitchen and the living room where his mother would be passed out on the couch in front of the TV, her mouth open, a cigarette still burning in the ashtray.
We’d call our friend and he’d come leaping down the stairs smiling, always smiling, his short dark hair sticking up in a cowlick, a smattering of freckles across his cheeks. In the summer he wore cutoff shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt. In the winter it’d be fake jeans from Zayre’s, a T-shirt and denim jacket covered with magic marker peace signs.
We’d walk a half mile down Main Street past houses built so close together there were no yards. Window shades were drawn and you never saw anybody sitting on a porch. Cleary walked on the balls of his feet and bounce-walked, and he was always scheming, talking about the girl he was going to screw or the Corvette he’d own one day or the real Mexican switchblades he heard you could order from a magazine. He’d shove you into a mailbox and laugh and start running, and we’d chase him, Jeb’s wild frizzy hair bouncing, my ponytail slapping my back, and we’d go through GAR Park where, when the weather was warm, Dominican and Puerto Rican families laid out blankets and ate together. In the middle of the green was a statue of Hannah Duston, this woman who long ago was kidnapped by Indians along with one of her children, and late one of those first nights, after her ten captors were asleep, she crawled out from under her blanket and took a hatchet and killed every single one of them in their sleep. Then she scalped them. The statue is of her in a long dress, a hatchet in her half-raised arm, her eyes on Main Street which sloped down past the shopping plaza to the river and the Basilere Bridge over the Merrimack. It was named for the first soldier from Haverhill to get killed in Vietnam, a war that was still going on, though we didn’t think much about that.
One February morning we skipped school and went downtown. It was ten or eleven degrees and the dirty snow piled along both sides of Washington Street had become ice; the air made my lungs hurt. Our noses, ears, and fingers felt burned. The three of us had a dollar to share so we sat in a booth at Valhally’s Diner and drank coffee with so much milk and sugar in it you couldn’t call it coffee anymore. The Greek man behind the counter hated us; he folded his black hairy forearms across his chest and watched us take our free refills until we were giddy with caffeine. Cleary went for his seventh cup and the owner yelled something at him in Greek. On the way out Cleary stole two dollars someone had left on their check under a sugar shaker.
He paid our way on the city bus that was heated and made a loop all the way through town, along the river, up to the Westgate shopping center, then back again. We stayed on it for two hours, taking the loop six times. For a while I looked out the window at all the red brick mills, the storefronts with their dusty window
s, barrooms on every block. The bus was warm, too warm. In the far rear, away from the driver, Cleary took out his black-handled Buck knife and carved a peace sign into the aluminum-backed seat in front of him.
After the bus, we made our way through the narrow factory streets, most of the buildings’ windows covered with gray plywood, though Cleary’s mother still worked at Cohen’s Shoes, when she wasn’t drinking. We walked along the railroad tracks, its silver rails flushed with the packed snow, the wooden ties gone under. The summer before we’d built a barricade for the train, a wall of broken creosote ties, an upside-down shopping cart, cinderblocks, and a rusted oil drum. We covered it with brush, then Cleary siphoned gas from a station wagon behind Cohen’s and poured it on. Jeb and I lit it, air sucked by us in a whoosh, and we ran down the bank across the parking lot into the abandoned brewery to the second floor to watch our fire, to wait for the Boston & Maine, to hear the screaming brakes as it rounded the blind curve just off the trestle over the river. But a fat man in a good shirt and tie showed up at the tracks, then a cop, and we ran laughing to the first floor where we turned on the keg conveyor belt, lay on it belly-first, and rode it up through its trapdoor over and over.
As we made our way through town it began to snow. My brother and I were hungry, but Cleary was never hungry; he was hawny, he said. One morning, as we sat in the basement of his house and passed a homemade pipe between us, his mother upstairs drunk and singing to herself, Cleary said: “I’m always hawny in the mawnin’.”