It was the limbo week between Christmas and the New Year, and the Sabres had just lost. They really should’ve won, too, but they didn’t. Up two goals in the third period, with ten minutes to go, but they lost. And now the whole night was fucked.
Louis stood up and booed at the television in a horsey, exaggerated way until Cullen told him to stop. Louis sat back down and I could see that he was actually angry about this: one midseason hockey loss.
“Bad teams lose these games,” Cullen announced, almost smirkingly.
“Bad teams? Be serious. We were one game away from winning the Cup two years ago.”
“Two years! Time to flip your calendar, little guy. Those days are done.”
Cullen was enjoying himself, taking it out on Louis, pretending he didn’t care just as much. For the last three days I’d felt this strange thing happening here. We’d always acted this way, but suddenly I was on the outside of it. It wasn’t that I was made to feel unwelcome so much as they just weren’t interested in crucifying me anymore. I was just a guest.
“You gotta be fisting me,” Louis grumbled to no one. “Every goddamn year. How does this shit keep happening to us?”
I couldn’t help smiling. I’d barely been gone four months, yet somehow they’d invented a whole new way of speaking. Filthier, funnier, more oblivious.
“You see,” Cullen said to me drunkenly the night before. “Because instead of saying kidding me he’s saying—”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” I said, and Cullen smiled.
* * *
To be honest, I was still a little shaky from flying. I’d told my mother not to count on me for Christmas. They’d only just started rerouting flights over my house, in Washington, D.C., and the sound alone made my chest tight. I told her I was looking into bus tickets, or train schedules, or a ride share, maybe, but I wasn’t really planning on anything. I couldn’t care less about the school’s winter break. My idea was to just stay put: to remain in my own city; in my own neighborhood; inside my house.
Then she sent me a plane ticket, and that was that.
I took some comfort in the long lines at the airport. I’d never really seen that before. But when the line stopped for me, I was shocked. Shocked when they found a bike wrench in my backpack. Shocked by the way the TSA lady held it up. Even the man behind me turned away in embarrassment. I raised my hands and tried to accept the crowd’s guilt. I had forgotten it was there; I really didn’t know. I was very, very sorry.
I barely protested when she moved to throw the wrench away. I stood still as she waved her magnetic wand over me one more time. And finally, when she was satisfied, she nodded, and I thanked her for letting me fly in spite of my crimes against National Security. I bowed and I genuflected, and I tried to reorient myself on the other side of the metal detector. I sort of expected not to understand what was going on here.
* * *
We stood in Cullen’s driveway, kicking ice and passing our last two cans of beer. A snowplow went by in a cloud of silted exhaust that stained the snowbanks brown. We watched its orange and yellow lights flicker as it dropped the blade with a harsh metal scrape, before gathering, and running cleanly along the snow again.
The stinging cold was sobering in small doses, and not entirely unpleasant. I always found myself more sensitive to the weather coming back to it. The low-watt sunshine and the sharp, leafless trees. The frozen, invisible smells of cordite and gasoline in the air. And the cool, continuous quiet of nighttime. These long, gray, birdless winters. Buffalo, a girl once told me, was where clouds went to die. I always liked that.
We’d decided to go out to a bar and someone said something about a taxi. Louis and Cullen were bickering about dooeys, which was a term I didn’t know. Louis was saying who had what dooeys and when.
“Dooeys?” I asked. “Do both of you have DUIs?”
“Just one,” Louis said with a scowl, and I nodded dumbly.
The taxi was an old yellow minivan with a peeling checkered stripe. Cullen pulled back the door and held it, like a gentleman, as I slid across the bench seat next to Louis. I could feel the heater on blast, buffeting us with the smell of sweat and smoke and Febreze. Our driver turned his head toward the dome light as he waited: an impossibly fat young man in a Santa hat.
“Ho, ho, ho. Where to?”
“We wanna get drunk at the Summit Street Saloon, Santa,” Louis said.
“Right-o.”
He popped the minivan into gear and began eyeballing me in the rearview. I held my face down in a frown, which was a plea not to speak. Santa had big clay ears and tiny marble eyes, and greasy skin that duffled around the neck. He wore a pencil sketch of a mustache that was marred, in all directions, by violent constellations of acne, running off his cheeks and into his collar.
This was the guy I pictured when someone said the word lardass.
“I was just thinking,” he finally said. “You boys look like you could use a little ganja tonight. Am I right? Santa’s running a special New Year’s deal.”
None of us said anything, not a word. We just left the poor kid hanging there, which seemed to depress and demoralize him all out of proportion. Santa was not much of a pusher, which was too bad for him.
“Nobody?” he said.
I was actually sort of relieved that Louis and Cullen weren’t interested, but it was too late. Santa gave up, right there on the spot, and offered to smoke us out for free. No one was strong enough to say no to free drugs, and this made Santa fat and jolly again.
I watched as he let his belly out into the wheel and took both hands away. A lighter flickered in the dark and he inhaled asthmatically, slowing the car down with him. I took the glass bowl over his shoulder, and I passed it away to Louis. Everything about this made me anxious, and I reached behind me for my seat belt then. Santa struck me as a guy with a couple dooeys at least.
That first hit seemed to liven him up, too, and he started telling us racist jokes about ragheads and sand niggers. I was inhaling deeply and not following how this began. But Cullen was hee-hawing in a way meant to mimic Louis’s laughter. Leaning across me with a big, shit-eating smile. But Louis wouldn’t bite.
“No, dude, that’s not funny,” Louis said to Santa, in total seriousness. “You’re telling it wrong. You’re stepping all over the joke.”
And suddenly Louis was telling his own racist joke.
Out the window the taxi dollied through illuminated cones of static as my body flushed with heat. My fingers tingled and the capillaries in my head locked. I didn’t like this at all. This was all really happening where I lived. Terrorism was not some abstraction on the television. It was the promise of endless war. It was the fear of people and buildings. It was the suspicion of strangers and foreigners. It was the avoidance of crowds and public transportation. It was the brand-new paranoid connections that bloomed inside our heads with no clues for how they got there, or what to do next.
After a full month of waiting on death, I went back down into the Metro, where a Muslim man got onto my train and began reciting loudly from the Koran. This deep, impenetrable monotone issuing down the long car. Incanting life, incanting death, I didn’t know. I watched as people found him in the rabble—this wraith in white cloth—and the tidal way that they backed up and emptied out at each next stop. Looking for a new train. Looking for the stairs. Looking for a police officer, perhaps.
But I decided to stay. I would not be scared off by this boogeyman in his ghutra and his robes, because I wanted to know what he was saying. I wanted him to see me watching, too. I wanted him to know that I was paying witness. One more stop, I thought, exhilarated; and one more, I thought, terrified. What was this that was happening now? And could it be a thing that was happening to me?
When the man finished his prayer, he sat and closed his book. Staring down the empty aisle, utterly expressionless. But as we pulled through the dark tunnel into the high-ceilinged station, he turned to watch the crowds on the platform. The car stopped and the doors opened, and a crush of new bodies pressed in all around. I stood up to keep watching the man. Thumbing his pages right to left, preparing himself again. The bell chimed, and the hydraulics released, and I suddenly found myself reaching out to catch the closing doors.
“Because his goat is his wife!” Louis said loudly, and the three of them snorted with laughter. Louis laughed the loudest, elbowing me. “You get it?”
I didn’t say anything. I was staring out the windshield with the perfect sensation of landing through a cloud. Searching for the absent ground, and waiting for the wheels to touch. I looked up at Louis with the scenery coming back again. Christmas lights blinking madly; American flags frozen to their poles. Just like everywhere else.
“That was stupid,” Cullen said. “And not funny. And offensive toward goats.” The cabdriver snorted again.
“Why did you laugh, then?” Louis asked indignantly.
“I was still laughing at Santa’s joke. It was like a little aftershock. I just got another part of it, ha-ha.”
Louis glared at him, and I felt my ears begin to ring. I had the sudden need for this taxi ride to stop. And almost as suddenly, it did.
* * *
Outside the bar, I felt Louis’s hand on my shoulder. “Santa anagrams to Satan, dude. Think about that. I didn’t see any registration on the dashboard. Who was that guy?”
“Be serious!” Cullen berated him loudly.
“I’m just saying, I don’t feel so good. I think there was something bad in the pot.” Louis was licking his lips and staring at Cullen. “Don’t you think it tasted a little anthraxy?”
Cullen didn’t say anything.
“My mailman died of anthrax,” I said absently. Louis turned to me and squealed with laughter, like he couldn’t even help himself.
“I’m serious. I haven’t picked up a single piece of mail in over three months.”
“Jesus. Both of you, fuck off!” Cullen said tersely, as he opened the door to the bar and let it slam shut behind him.
* * *
The Summit Street Saloon was a wash of neon beer lights, and wood-paneled walls, and shiny linoleum floors. There were balding pool tables, and ripped leather stools, and water stains on the ceiling. Red and white Christmas lights hung heavy over every pipe and beam. They really overdid it, which you had to give them credit for.
Highlights of the Sabres game were playing on the televisions, and everybody stopped to watch. Mesmerized; horrified. Laughing because they all really cared. I heard Cullen tell somebody that we should’ve won. And someone else said, “Yeah, but we didn’t.”
* * *
“The Baby Boomers have fucked us.”
I said this out loud, at the dinner table on Christmas. In front of my Baby Boomer parents and their Baby Boomer friends.
“How do you mean?” my Boomer uncle asked with a quizzical smile.
“I mean in the corrosive, soul-sucking way … fucked.” This hung over the table like a bad smell, as people wiped their mouths and set their forks down. I took another sip of wine as my sister scowled at me.
“That’s called righteous indignation,” she sneered.
“And whose side are you on?”
“The side of not being a rude, boorish asshole.”
“All right, all right,” my mother said, but I didn’t care. This was the point. They were all talking about everything without really talking about any of it, and it was pissing me off.
“I hardly think that the role of each generation is to decide what is and is not—” my father began, but I cut him off.
“And George Bush is the president that you all deserve. I hate to say it, but he is your worst selves come home to roost. And none of you seem to give a good goddamn fuck about it.” I paused to look at my uncle again, with my own quizzical smile. “Fucked…” I said. “That’s how I mean it, totally fucked.”
Throats were cleared and glasses tinked together, before my uncle broke the tension with a laugh. Wagging his finger at me, like he just got the joke.
“You’ve been in the Big Apple too long, kid. Har-har-har.”
Everyone chuckled and moved on happily. It wasn’t even worth correcting him. This had been happening all week. They all seemed to think I lived in New York City for some reason. Weren’t they paying any attention? Didn’t anyone care that a military target had been hit in Washington, D.C.? Didn’t that fucking mean anything?
My mother frowned at me across the table in a sad way, and I did feel bad then. I’d been doing this a lot. I was finding it hard to just sit still and relax here. In three days, I’d argued with my brother that 9/11 proved Buffalo was in the Midwest. I’d ruined a perfectly nice dinner by explaining some revolting fact I’d read about turkey farms. And I cited widespread pederasty in the Catholic Church as the reason I would not attend Midnight Mass (or any church services) with the family.
My mother said she was afraid I was losing my sense of humor.
We tried to do simple things together, as a family. My parents wanted us to go to the movies, but we couldn’t agree on anything to see. My sister accused me of trying to make them watch “cerebral movies,” which made me laugh, because it was true. I knew exactly what an insufferable ass I was being, and I didn’t care. I wanted to have a real fight with somebody about something, but no one would engage me in any way. Everyone just sort of shrugged and put up with me, and it was making me crazy.
* * *
I looked out over the bar at all these disappointing and disrespectful children, and I felt myself slipping into inebriation. Everyone was still talking about the Sabres, and I couldn’t blame them. I’d watched the game, too. I saw the same thing. Up two goals in the third period. Bad teams lose those games.
Right on cue, the clip started over on the televisions, and we all stopped our conversations to watch these last three goals play out like deaths in a Greek tragedy. People groaned and heckled. Someone asked if this was what we paid them for.
I heard Louis tell somebody that it was un-American not to grow up in a dump, and I turned back around to face him.
“Are you talking about here?” I asked.
“Sure. Here, there, everywhere, man. God Bless America.”
I sort of liked this cracked sentiment. I couldn’t deny that I did feel safer in Lockport somehow. After all, this was the place where clouds came to die.
We ended up sitting down at a table in the back, where we could all stop talking, finally. I noticed Cullen staring at a girl near the bar, and I understood immediately that he was going to ditch us.
“Uh-oh.” Louis smiled. “Looks like somebody’s about to get a dick suck.”
“Are you fisting me?” Cullen scowled. “Cut the fucking shit, already.”
“What?” Louis said, pretending not to understand.
Cullen turned away again, and succeeded in inviting this girl to join us at our table, in some nonverbal way. I nodded hello, trying not to smile at what Louis had said. I’d never heard it put quite that way before.
“Which one of us do you think will die first?”
Louis asked this, obviously. His face was blank, and I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right, until I looked at Cullen. Louis turned more generally to the girl and me.
“Because I think there’s a better than even chance that it might be Cullen. Cullen could die really young. Really, really young.”
“I said, fuck off, idiot.” Cullen pushed out his chair and took the girl by the hand, disappearing for real. Apparently Cullen was even more afraid of death than I was. Or, at least, I was glad that Louis thought so.
Louis sank into his chair and brooded. There would be no consolations in this bar for us tonight, and certainly not sex. I slunk back, too, and watched in disbelief as the Sabres game started over on the televisions. This was the late-night replay, and I smiled, remembering how we got an early one somewhere. I looked around the bar and saw others thinking the same thing. Here comes a goal.
* * *
I’d watched infinite amounts of television in the last week. I’d forgotten how much time we spent shut up indoors here. Sitting on the couch with my brother and sister. There were all these new shows on the food channels about eating as a kind of masochism. All the shows were like this now, and we were surprised, and slightly embarrassed, to admit how much we liked them. They were short and colorful and took great pains to disguise themselves as travelogues and situation comedies. They were careful to never explain what was really going on, or why our faithful host was always doing this to himself.
“Bad economy,” my sister said, and we laughed.
“Violent narcissism,” I added.
There was a strange bonding happening as we watched the fat man flagellate himself with food. We marveled as he showed up in each new town with his sweaty arms around the locals. A prelude to the gluttony. Short-order cooks fixed him novelty plates and troughs. Let’s add a dozen eggs; let’s add a hundred peppers; now let’s melt the cheese. His face choked and his arteries bulged as his pancake makeup began to drip. He suffered as he told us how delicious it was. Mooning and mugging as he kept on eating. Every half hour brought him closer to the brink of vomiting and heart attack and death. He was laughing and making a joke of death. Always laughing.
We were sickened and exhilarated by these new shows. We couldn’t stop watching them. We said we wanted the host to stop, but that was a lie. We wanted to see him get the thing he had coming. We wanted to see him buckle and hit the floor unexpectedly. Would they show that on television if it happened? Would that be going too far? Was that too real? Was anything on TV real anymore?
“Jesus Christ,” my brother said with a kind of awe. “The terrorists’ heads must explode when they watch this shit.”
* * *
I looked back over the bar at all these bleary kids I went to high school with. Bodies reduced to frosted tips, and upturned collars, and terrifying eye makeup. They were a sea of leather jackets and boot-cut jeans. I was definitely drunk tonight, I thought. Time had gotten away from me, or they were closing the bar down early. Either way, it was last call and everyone was being hustled out the doors.
But Louis and I continued to sit at our table, watching the Sabres play on. We were winning now, and besides, there was nowhere else to go. But they weren’t really going to let us watch the whole game over again. And eventually the bartender came over with two unopened cans of Genny and told us to hit the bricks.
* * *
In a weird way I sympathized with the Baby Boomers. They grew up thinking that the Soviet Union was going to drop the Big One on them at any moment. They went to sleep at night dreaming of atom bombs and radioactive cities. And not without good reason. This was a penance for the bombs of their fathers. So who could really blame them for buying Walkmans and doing cocaine and fetishizing Wall Street? They had cable TV and porno on VHS tapes, so what if they were raping the planet? Maybe they really did think these were End Times.
My uncle put his hand on my shoulder before he left to drive home drunk on Christmas night. “Don’t kill yourself worrying so much, kid. You just need to get laid more.” He winked, and I nodded solemnly because I thought that he was right.
* * *
Outside the bar, people stood around in huddles. Someone asked us if we wanted a ride and Louis spoke up to say no. We were staring at an empty car left idling with its lights on. Louis said that we could ghost-ride it into the canal. I smiled and told him we could drive ourselves home instead. But Louis said that it was a long way, and we had better start walking.
We opened our beers and packed through the dead field behind the bar, under a dull scrim of snow. I realized for the first time that Louis wasn’t wearing a jacket. He said he’d left it in the bar and it didn’t matter anyway. I asked if he was cold and he said no. I asked again after a hundred yards, and he said yes, but he didn’t care. I thought Louis might have taken some pills or something inside the bar, but I didn’t ask. I just kept my feet moving in front of me: feeling the cold, and watching it billow out as my breath.
I felt like I was sleepwalking now. I used to do that when I was young. Waking up in the shower, or out in the yard, even. Feeling startled and embarrassed, even though I was alone. I could still remember the way the dark trees looked just like a stage set to me. Tacked up against the unmoving sky. I would blink until I really saw them there, jarring in their three dimensions. It struck me then that this was not like TV, where something is always happening. This was real life, where you could stop and freeze endless stretches of nothing at all. Everything in its right place, and all of it made real.
I would go back inside the house and never speak a word of it. Lying down in bed, with my wet hair, and counting up the sleep I’d lost.
Louis bent down and picked up a horseshoe, and I could tell how much it pleased him. He kept swinging the thing in his hand, back and forth, back and forth, while we walked. It was so rusty and old, but it was beautiful just the same. It must have been so cold in his hand that it felt like fire. Louis finally let the horseshoe go and we watched it sail away into the darkness.
I laughed and threw my beer can out into the night after it, and we sleepwalked on. It was easy to enjoy the way that impossible things always happened in a dream to move the plot along. Like walking home with Louis, and waiting on the first light of day. Watching the scenery come wheeling off the stage. Hearing the invisible snow machines humming in the rafters. Blinking my eyes on the red numbers of the clock. Waiting to fall out of bed, onto the floor, out of the dream. Just waiting.