SUMMER IN NASSAU COUNTY was fireflies and bottle rockets and cats getting it on in the shade of parked cars and playing cards clothespinned to bike spokes—all that Norman Rockwell crap—so you can bet people freaking loved the Bicentennial. Through the windowscreen of his basement room at midday, Charlie could already smell the sulfur trails of sparklers. It was funny, though, if you thought about it: those elegiac little flags flapping on the neighbors’ lawns were just advertisements, basically, planted by a local life-insurance salesman whose name was printed on the poles. To get anywhere near the real heirs of the Revolution, the punk rockers, you had to go into the City. Not that he’d ever have put it this way to Mom. Instead, he told her he wanted to go see the tall ships. With friends, he said—an alibi she was only too eager to accept. They hadn’t discussed how he’d be getting there; later, he could claim there’d been a miscommunication. But she’d wanted him back by eleven. “Even if the fireworks run over. Eleven—repeat it back to me, Charlie.”
“Geez, Mom. Mellow out.” He’d left the room before she could change her mind. That was yesterday.
Now, in the upstairs bathroom, he used scissors to attack his head. Cutting your own hair was harder than you’d think, and he almost wussed out at the sight of the first clump stuck like a reddish thistle to the slope of the sink, but then he pictured Sam’s grin when she saw him. With the faucet running to cover the sound, he plugged in his dad’s old electric razor and prayed it still worked. The motor whined. Hairs snowed crimson onto the formica. It came across so tough on the sleeve of Brass Tactics, which he’d set on the counter for reference—the strip of uncut hair sprung defiant from the scalp—but in the mirror, with the bucolic drone of some homeowner’s lawnmower and the pop of early firecrackers in the background, it looked like a starved rodent had collapsed atop his skull.
He used some balled toilet paper to sweep the hairs from the counter into the bowl of the sink, and thence down the drain. Then he knelt to check the tiles for strays. Before he’d finished, a splashing sound made him turn around, and what he saw almost gave him a heart attack. The sink was overflowing. Shit. He grabbed a towel from the towel-rack. By the time he reached the faucet, runoff had snaked across the sloped floor, under the door, out into the hallway. Fucking shit. In his haste, he’d taken one of Mom’s monogrammed towels, but there was no going back now. He did his best to soak up the water and then fished in the drain, trying not to register the gunked texture of the pipes. He came up with an evil little Hitler moustache of hair. He wadded it in Kleenex and flushed it down the toilet.
Out in the hallway, towel in hand, he stood listening for Mom. Abraham, age three, appeared in the doorway of the room where the twins should have been sleeping. The blameless mouth widened as Abe took in the water on the floor and his brother’s ruined scalp. He clapped a hand to his cheek and pointed just to make sure Charlie knew he knew. “You rat me out, I give you a bruise,” Charlie said. “Now go finish your damn nap.” It was no fair, having brothers too young to be mad at. And this was their lawn being mowed outside; Mom must have gotten tired of waiting around for Charlie and decided to do it herself. He dropped the towel and swabbed it around with his foot and balled it up at the bottom of the linen closet. He waited for the mower to move into the backyard. Then he bolted down the stairs and out the front door, snatching Mom’s car keys off their hook en route, hoping like hell she wouldn’t see him.
THE WAY SAM TALKED about her dad made Charlie kind of scared of the guy. So, notwithstanding the prommish scenario he’d envisioned—ringing the bell, being invited in to wait in the living room until Sam emerged blushing from the back of the house—he idled at the curb and honked until she came out. If she was thinking of this in date-like terms, you couldn’t tell it from her clothes. She wore her same old Television tee-shirt. She did, however, say his hair looked amazing, which instantly made everything pretty much worth it. She’d brought their jointly owned eight-track of Horses, and on the way in they listened to it twice through, singing along as they descended the back half of the Q-Boro Bridge like a bomb lobbed at Midtown: Coming in / in all directions, / white, / shining / silver …
Charlie was worried about Mom’s wagon getting stolen if he left it parked for eight hours in the Village, so they took a spot above Fourteenth and headed down on foot toward where a friend of Sam’s was supposed to be getting off work. She’d been nipping from a brown-bagged bottle. He reached for it and, after checking for cops, took a swig. “This is one of those guys from your record-store photo shoot we’re meeting?”
“His roommates are the ones having the party. They’ve never even let me see their place, so you should feel honored I scored you an invite. You know who I heard might be there? Billy Three-Sticks.”
“Shut up.”
“I’m serious. Sol’s friend Nicky knows everybody, allegedly.”
They ambled south, passing the fiery bottle of O’Shakey’s Irish Whisky. The city that day was like a carnival: sailors in white uniforms clotted on corners, sidewalks so crowded tourists were walking in the actual street, irritated drivers laying on their horns. Every dozen yards or so a density of pot hit him right in the nose. Hooray, America. Everyone, even the most down-and-out people on Third Avenue, which was like the world capital of down-and-outness, seemed to be wearing red, or white, or blue.
Everyone, that is, except Solomon Grungy. They found him in front of a restaurant south of Houston, sweeping what looked like a windshield wiper across the plate-glass, leaving comet-trails of discolored foam. He was taller even than Charlie, but burly and weathered and so pierced as to be almost perforated, and it didn’t look like underneath his bandana he had any hair at all. “Wait here a minute,” said Sam, so Charlie hung back, settling himself on an iron stoop to wait for the signal to come over and be introduced. His inhaler tasted bitter. Soon Grungy was disappearing into the basement restaurant, and she’d rejoined Charlie. “Change of plans.” She had to yell to make herself heard above ten thousand motorcycles that were just then passing a block away. “The dishwasher walked off the job, so they’re going to give Sol a crack at it. It means it’s going to be another few hours before he clocks out.”
“What is he, an all-purpose washer? Like, you name it, I’ll wash it? Windows, dishes, whatever?”
“He needs the money, Charlie, okay? It’s either that or keep stealing. We should go somewhere and wait.”
Washington Square Park, where they ended up, was a fucking zoo. Hippies playing guitar in the dry fountain. Kids everywhere. The sun over Jersey was medium rare. On a bench overlooking the playground, they ate hot dogs from a cart. Then she dug a frowsy plastic baggie out of her pocket and shook what looked like bits of dried Play-Doh into his hands. “Magic mushrooms,” she said. Color Charlie intrigued—but also hesitant, having heard somewhere that it was impossible to tell poison mushrooms from the edible kind. As he watched her bolt her own handful, he wanted to warn her. But she seemed okay, so he downed half of what she’d given him and when she wasn’t looking pocketed the rest. They washed away the sawdusty taste with some Coke into which she’d mixed the O’Shakey’s and then leaned back on the bench.
“I remember I used to go out with my dad and his guys on the barges to help fire the Fourth of July show, once I was big enough,” she said. “He would have wanted us to come, but he’s not doing the city’s fireworks this year. Couldn’t make it cheap enough.”
“That stinks,” Charlie said.
“Yeah, but probably for the best. It’s just a button you push, not a lighter or anything, and you have to wear these stupid goggles. Besides, can you imagine being that close to fireworks, tripping? There’s supposed to be a roof at this party tonight everybody can watch from.”
A mood of general benevolence massaged the nerves that should have tightened here. Or maybe it was the mushrooms. The yellow-pink sky had reached down to run a thumb across her cheek, and there was blue just below that, by the nose-ring. Her whole neck-and-shoulder area, in fact, was emitting little glycerine swirls of color as she watched tiny patriots conquer the slide. He touched her shoulder. She turned as if to say, What? but then their eyes met. Hers were no longer brown, as he’d thought, but goldish-green, like light in the springtime—liquid, lickable sun. “Holy shit,” he said. He could actually see her feelings.
“I know,” she said. As if she could see his, too. Assuming there was even any difference.
They sat for several lifetimes watching kids like flowers sprout over the playground equipment under the breathing trees. They became these kids, somehow; they didn’t have to talk about it. Sam took his hand with her sweaty hand and he just knew exactly what she meant. Then the streetlights came on, reminding them about the fireworks, and how they should head back down to Sol Grungy. She wobbled a bit on her feet, crossing Houston, but Charlie helped her.
It was dinnertime now, and the picture windows of the garden-level restaurant were full of long-necked creatures in summer suits, but Charlie could see they only looked vicious because they were lonely. Inside, classical music was playing. Classical music was amazing! He felt like a golden beam, turning surfaces translucent, seeing down to bone. With his sword of light he parted the dining room and Sam headed through the breach. Ignoring the waiters, they pushed into a corridor. She poked her head through a curtain into the kitchen, where three people whirled furiously. “Pssst. Sol!”
“Who the fuck is this?” someone said. “Get these two the fuck out of my kitchen.”
Charlie whispered, loudly, “We’re Sol’s friends.” Sol stared for a second at the bellowing steaming silver box at which he stood. Then he peeled off his rubber gloves and redundant hairnet and came out into the hall.
“Jesus Christ. I told you it was going to be a while. I hardly started and you’re going to get me fired.”
“So?” she said, slurring. “You hate this shit. Let’s go party.”
“You see how busy we are? You can’t be in here.”
“Listen to yourself, man. ‘We?’ ”
Charlie hummed along with Vivaldi, or whoever, unconcerned that Sol was looking for a way to get rid of them. “Look. You guys come back at ten, someone’s supposed to be relieving me. I’ll take you to the thing.”
“But we wanna see fireworks. And I wanna meet this Captain Whatsis of yours.” Charlie had never heard her like this before, wheedling, whining, her forehead beaded with sweat.
“I’m serious. You stay around here, I’ll kick your ass. Both of you.”
Out in the street, there was nothing to do but finish the whisky. It couldn’t touch Charlie anymore; he was too powerful. But Sam kept belching and, when they reached the corner, put hands on thighs, leaned forward, and blew chunks into the gutter. A woman in a long skirt muttered something in Yiddish Charlie should have understood. Sam’s elbow felt cold and thin to his hand. He couldn’t see her feelings anymore. “Are you okay?”
She sat down hard on the curb, right there in the middle of everything. Her eyelids were heavy, her lips gray (though maybe that was just ’cause it was getting dark). “Come on, Sam. Hey.” She stood woozily, collapsed against him. Something was definitely wrong. Usually she could mix beer and pot and pills in a single afternoon and still be fine by dinnertime. It was Charlie who had to watch himself, or be squired on her arm to Penn Station to catch the 7:05 home. He led her back to the restaurant. The stereo was between songs or something. The hostess was ready this time, and stepped in front of him as a diner behind her made a crack about his hair. “Look, we can wait outside,” Charlie said. “Or we can sit right here, your choice. But you better go get your new dishwasher.”
Sol met them out front, under a shorted-out streetlight. He looked ready to take Charlie’s head off, but Charlie preempted him. “I really think there’s something wrong with Sam.” Hearing her name, Sam smiled but didn’t open her eyes. Sol squatted to inspect her.
“Shit. What did you guys eat?”
“I don’t know. A hot dog, chips.”
“No, asshole. What did you eat?”
“Uh. We took some mushrooms earlier?”
“You ate the mushrooms?”
“Just a little, though.”
“How little? Caps or stems?”
“Just stems, I guess, for me. Just the tiniest bit.”
“Christ. I told her to wait.” Solomon Grungy stared at Charlie. “Well, I can’t fucking walk off without getting paid. You’d better take her ahead to the house, it’s not far. Keep her away from the roof. Get her down to the basement, give her some water, see if she’ll throw up again. She can crash in the bed when she’s done. I’ll come find you.”
“Isn’t there a party? How will people know we’re invited?”
“What do you think it is, a country club? It’s a fucking party, man. You just walk in.”
Charlie half-walked and half-dragged Sam to the address he’d been given. Inside, there were people shouting, music coming from the upper floors, a black-lit parlor in which all you could see were kegs of beer lined up against a plasterless wall and gleaming teeth attached to Mr. Potato Head heads. The smoke was so thick he had to reach again for his inhaler, but at least no one noticed them come in. He found a stairwell and lugged Sam down to the basement. He had to stoop to keep from walking into pipes. The windows were dark. The fireworks would be starting any minute. He meant to put her to bed, but when he turned on the only lamp he could find, a dim bulb without a shade, there was still puke on her face, and he couldn’t let her sleep like that.
A bathroom the size of a phone booth had been built out in one corner of the room—that’s what the pipes ran to. Maybe a shower would help. He turned on the water and waited until there was steam and then arranged Sam on the toilet lid. “I’m going to leave you alone in here. I want you to get in the shower. And don’t drown.” Amazing, how authoritative he could sound.
But as soon as he let her go, she slumped against the wall. “Donleavmeere.” The skin of her eyelids was almost translucent. You could see the contours of the eyes beneath.
“Okay, but you have to get into the shower, Sam. It’ll make you feel better. I won’t look.” He stood in the doorway, his back turned, but he couldn’t hear anything above the whir of the ventilation fan, amplified by the flimsy walls. When he peeked, her fingers were fumbling at the button of her jeans.
“All right. On your feet.” His ’shroom-induced potency now revealed itself as a pretense; really what he was was scared. He tried his best not to brush against the soft skin of her belly as he helped her with her zipper, not to consider the legs revealed when he tugged her jeans downward. He’d seen legs before, hadn’t he? He squatted to get the rolls of denim past her ankles. She put her hands on his shoulders and grunted as he removed gym socks shabby like his own.
She stood above him now in the faded black shirt, and underpants of startling girlishness, thin white cotton with a faint fuzz beneath. With her eyes still shut she swayed from side to side, in obedience to the music through the ceiling. Of course she wouldn’t be wearing a bra. “You can’t get the rest yourself?”
For a minute, she didn’t respond—she might have been asleep—but then she bit her lip and shook her head. He lifted her tee-shirt. His heart was going to blow right through the walls of his chest. There were her tits, perfect pale apples, their small stems hard from the basement chill. Her panties she’d have to take off herself—there was no way he’d get through it. He turned away, crippled by turgidity, and ordered her into the shower. He only turned back around when the curtain was drawn, her body a smear behind the moldy plastic. “You all right in there?” She sputtered in response. For both of them, the mushrooms seemed to be giving way again to simple drunkenness.
She’d been in for a few minutes when it occurred to him she’d need a towel. There were no cabinets here, nowhere for a towel to hide. He stole out into the larger room, but it was bare of anything connoting domesticity, save for the couch, the lamp, a wall mirror, a yellowed mattress in the corner. He went back into the bathroom and stripped his own shirt off. The mirror, mercifully, was steamed over, sparing him the shock of his white skin and countable ribs. The haircut he now blamed for getting him into this mess. “Okay, turn off the water,” he instructed. “I’m going to hand my shirt over the bar.” The fact that she took it was encouraging. “You can dry off with it.” All that separated his nakedness from hers was the shower curtain and his own jeans and underpants, but any hint of sex was gone. It was, instead, as if they were small children, playing at some piece of make-believe. Or as if she were the child, and he the parent. He handed her her own clothes over the shower rod and gave her time to put them on. She handed his shirt back. He wrung it out and draped it over his shoulder and opened the curtain. He helped her rebutton her impossibly tight jeans. “Deep breath,” he said. Then she pushed him out of the way and knelt by the toilet and puked up a thick brown mess, once, twice, three times, until nothing else came up. He sat beside her and held back her hair.
And now what? Her color was better, she’d regained the power of speech—Sorry, Charlie, she said—but she hardly seemed fit for the outside world. Nor did he want to have to explain their presence to the older punks upstairs. The mattress with its twisted sheets looked like a breeding ground for bedbugs, so he led her to the couch, wrapping her in a dingy afghan. Somehow in the process of getting her to lie down, he ended up with her head on his lap. Outside, fireworks were going off: small ones, locally, and then deep in the background the huge municipal boom. He reached to turn off the lamp. It was as dark as he supposed it ever got in this city. When she felt for his face, he noticed for the first time how small her hands were. “Hey, Charlie?”
“Hey, Sam.”
“Did I ever tell you the one about the Loneliest Man in the World?”
“The what?”
Her voice was extra-hoarse from puking. In the future, she was saying, they’d have all this technology, and no one would ever realize they were lonely, because no one would ever have been anything else. Only one person would know the secret.
“The Loneliest Man in the World?” he guessed.
She yawned, arched her back like a cat, went still. He thought she’d dozed off, but then she spoke again. The Loneliest Man in the World, she said, only has room in his heart for one person, and if he can’t have that person, he locks himself away. He tells himself no one could possibly love him, but really, it’s that he refuses to love anyone else. With her lips barely moving, she might have been talking in her sleep. “You listening?”
He’d swept her hair back over the arm of the couch, so it wouldn’t get in her face. Now he touched it. “Shh. Get some rest.”
She made a feeble raspberry. “Shut up, Charlie. Listen to me. This guy won’t let himself … not even the people like fucking blasting their love at him. People all around, who just want to love him.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I worry about you,” she slurred.
“You worry about me? That’s funny, Sam. Do you worry like I might pass out in a stranger’s basement and choke to death on my own puke?”
“I worry you’re making yourself lonely, because—”
“I’m not lonely,” he said, or breathed, and then, as if to prove it, he leaned down and kissed her. For seconds, his eyes stayed closed; easier this way to imagine that she knew this was him, that this was what she wanted, their lips pressing together, hers still faintly acid, and that this was why she didn’t stop him. Really, he discovered when he pulled back, it was because she had passed out, head centimeters from his fly. He sat in the dark for a long time after that, trying to see her clearly.
“SHIT SHIT SHIT.” He shook himself awake. His legs were numb, his face sticky. The pop of fireworks had long ago stopped. What time was it? Mom was going to freaking kill him.
He roused Sam and made her walk him upstairs, partly because he was afraid to go alone, but partly so he’d know she could do it. Streetlights and electric green ailanthus swam in the windshields of parked cars. Some strange insignia on the door smelled like wet paint. She was going to stay, she said. She was sure Solomon Grungy would come, or was already here. She would catch the train later.
But how would she get home from the station?
There were cabs, she pointed out. Buses.
Maybe he could pick her up.
“It’s late, Charlie. You said you had to go, so go.” The way she said it—embarrassed, not looking him in the eyes—was a conversation-ender. He didn’t know what to do, give her a chummy shove or reach for her hand or try to kiss her again, so finally, while she watched from the stoop of the strange house, he pushed off into the riotous shadows and headed approximately north, toward where he hoped the station wagon still was.
An hour later, he was on the great artery of the L.I.E., in the protein jacket of his mother’s car. Sodium lights, veiled in humidity and mosquitoes, turned the landscape alien. Big colonies of apartment buildings appeared at intervals, deserted except for lights on a few random floors. Four hundred years ago, Indian tribes had moved among the black trees that fringed the roadway. Ex Post Facto sang about this, albeit elliptically. There was that song “Egg Cream Blues,” with its line about “kicking over stones in a Protestant graveyard.” Or was it “kicking over homes”? The crude mono of the recording and the singer’s strange accent made it hard to tell. Charlie chewed on a foil gum-wrapper to stay awake. He supposed it was really Sam he was mad at. After all his careful care for her, she had opted to stay with the friends who’d neglected her. He popped out EPF and felt under the seat for an old T. Rex cassette he’d hid there so she wouldn’t make fun. By the time it hit side two, the late-night traffic had slowed and narrowed to a single lane. There’d been an accident; men in uniform stood in the fuchsia bloom of flares, letting cars through one at a time. And what if they chanced to look in? Did he look drunk? High? Was he? He put on his Mets cap to cover his Mohawk. He rolled down the window and leaned forward and rode the brake.
When he reached Flower Hill, his mom was waiting in Dad’s superannuated armchair. He was pretty sure she’d turned off all the lights for the dramatic moment it would create when she pulled the pullcord. “Do you know what time it is, Charlie?”
“Can’t we talk about this in the morning?” He was already moving toward the basement; he could hear the soft retreat of small feet on the carpet upstairs, where his brothers were out of bed listening. But now his mom was up, too, a flurry of polyester.
“We can talk right now, young man. About why your shirt is all wet, for starters.”
“We should sleep in, look at this with clearer eyes.” He’d almost made it through the door to the basement when she snapped on the overhead light, the better to see him.
“Charles Nathaniel Weisbarger—what did you do to your hair?”
He could feel the bare skin peeking from under his ballcap, and he froze, one hand on the doorknob, as did his shadow. Things were suddenly very serious. If she insulted his hair right now, he was never going to forgive her. She reached up and pulled off the hat. And now they were both frozen, except, perhaps, for the jackass tears gathering in his eyes.
Her voice was soft. “What is wrong with you?”
He picked a spot on the wall to stare at. “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“Charlie, is that liquor I smell?”
“Some people I was with were drinking.” It wasn’t until it was out of his mouth that he realized the Innocent Bystander defense—perfectly reasonable when she’d smelled Sam’s cigarettes on him back in May—made no sense for a product that was liquid, not gas. At least I didn’t eat mushrooms, he wanted to point out. Not as many as Sam, anyway.
“It is liquor! You drank, and then you drove my car.”
“I didn’t.”
She turned him toward her and slapped him. “Don’t you lie to me. Who were you with?”
He was sitting on the carpeted floor—not because she’d actually hurt him, but out of a wish not to be hit again. He covered his head with his arms, and all the hot frustration of the day was swelling and trembling in him and it seemed anything might have happened. But he couldn’t stand to have his own mother think the worst of him. “You don’t know her,” he said. If he thought her relief that it was a girl keeping him out late would mitigate her fury, he was mistaken; the next day, he woke up grounded. And the next, and the next, and so on into the fall.