Richie’s left arm doesn’t work; neither does his face. The arm hangs limp, like the catch of the day, but the face, like a maniac appliance, clicks through far too many major emotions in the course of a minute. You see every Richie there is in the time it takes for him to proudly reel off the first and last names of all of the executives he has met while working for the last thirteen years in the print shop at Mrs. Paul’s fish stick factory. It’s like a Richie train passing before your eyes and your first reaction is to want to run home and sharpen a screwdriver.
He rents the downstairs of one side of a duplex next door, and our places are separated by only a narrow concrete driveway that we share. The house he lives in, like some ancient druid earth mound, is a magnet for tragedy. There was a woman who used to live upstairs who tried to commit suicide after she jilted her boyfriend and he succeeded in killing himself. After he was gone, I heard her sing love songs at the top of her voice along with the stereo. Then she took some pills and broke all the plates. There was a young pregnant mother with bad teeth and three kids who was addicted to alcohol and smack and who, after she fled in the middle of the night, was being hunted by the FBI. One night, after she had the baby, she asked me to go to the bar and buy her a twelve-pack of beer. Thinking of the child, I refused and gave her all my cigarettes instead. There was a stoned-out Laurel and Hardy couple who sold satellite dishes. During the day they were filled with hippie sincerity but they duked it out every Saturday night. And there is the woman who lives above him now, Patty Playpal, whose boyfriend socked her in the face because he couldn’t stand her incessant, coke-fueled blather for another second. Richie, fifty-four, with a ball-peen-to-the-forehead personality, must have felt this place drawing him across time and space the way a trout feels the persistent tug of the hook.
Suzie is his only companion. She’s dark and noble and has a wide ass. Her collar is black, studded with chrome points, and her favorite thing, next to Richie, is a rubber cheeseburger. He comes home from lunch every day to walk her and at night he takes her to the park. When he’s not yelling at her to stay out of the road, he slips her button-size pizza snacks. He does all of the talking and she does most of the barking. You can see he’s a lonely guy. In fact, he exudes loneliness like a gray perfume from his Sears work pants and stretched out T-shirts, from the hair that peeks out of his ears, and his laugh that is like the cry of someone falling from a skyscraper. Whenever he sees my wife or me outside, he’s immediately there with some dry-ass conversation about home heating bills or methods for flea eradication. He must watch us all the time. When we take the kids and dog to the park, we are there no more than ten minutes before Richie shows up, wondering why he saw me out of work on the previous Wednesday at two thirty in the afternoon. I tell him I was watching the kids, and this brings on his raucous Saint Vitus dance of mirth as if he were a child on the verge of wetting his pants. We keep the boys at a distance for fear that someday he will explode or catch on fire.
Over the past year, I have been caught in many a discussion with Richie. They are one-way affairs, since he is the expert and you are in need of his knowledge. Most of these lost moments are spent on how he was able to save money. He shops at three different grocery stories—one for meat, one for treats, one for paper products. I tilt my head to the side and nod as if he is relaying the recipe for eternal youth, but all the time I’m waiting for him to take a breath so I can cut in and say my good-byes. While I wait, I’m picturing him—evangelical late-night television, blue clouds of generic cigarette smoke, and half a bottle of store-brand diet orange. Richie likes his treats. “You know, your Yodels, some fudge swirl ice cream, pretzel rods,” he says. His kid brother “blew his brains out with a shotgun.” This story is always punctuated by a long, sophisticated exhalation of cigarette smoke. His ex, Barbara was “the finest gal in the world.” “Never loved her, never really loved her,” he repeats like a Greek chorus. The woman who lives above him tells me that when he knows she is home he jerks off and moans loud enough to rattle her bathroom fixtures. Once a month, he tells me either a racist story or one in which a guy has an incredibly big dick.
I often wonder why I feel obligated to talk to him. A lot of times when I know he is outside in his front yard, I stay in or go out the back door. I have a wife and two kids and a demanding job, so why do I have to care about Richie? Pity is a dead little animal in your heart. I’ve really wanted to tell him, “Look, Richie, you’re a big loser. You’re a boor, a moron, and a pervert.” But now Richie has cancer, and he is half the Richie he used to be. Sorrow is bad enough, but sick sorrow—get me a cross and a wooden stake. His kidney has been removed and three inches of his left thigh bone have been eaten away. He needs crutches to get around and spends all his time sitting on his couch, watching the women’s workout shows and listening to, as he puts it, “the light classics.” When my wife or I leave the house, he cannot come out any longer, but I know he is in there, watching. At night I hear Suzie, jingling her collar in the tiny backyard, and the sound of Richie blubbering travels through the wall of his house and up the canyon of the driveway into my attic office window. These same sobs I heard once before, long ago, from a child lost at the World’s Fair. The first night I heard Richie, a bat crawled through the hole in our bedroom ceiling and flew low and silent, circling in the dark.
The doctors have rigged Richie with a shoulder holster device that slowly emits an experimental drug into his system. If it is supposed to make him appear yet more grim and withered, melt his face to a Kleenex-thin skin that fits his skull like a driving glove, it’s working. He labors feverishly at a little table, figuring and refiguring his bills with pencil and paper, and reading, as if studying for a final exam, every scrap of information from the insurance company.
When he calls, I never recognize his voice. “Who is it?” I ask, and he says, “It’s Bitchy Richie,” shrill and defensive, almost daring me to despise him. In recent calls he has told me about his past addiction to methamphetamine, his two marriages, his grown sons who tell him he was a failure as a father. When I can’t listen to any more of it, I ask, “How’s the leg?” My wife says he is confessing his life to me over the phone. Carrying Richie’s sins must change me in some way, because every night my three-year-old comes to sleep in our bed with us. I wake in the middle of the night and he is patting my shoulder. The only time I do not have Richie somewhere in my head is when I’m killing bats with my son’s toy broom. They come every night now, and I can’t afford to fix the roof.
One night I wake to the whisper flap of leather wings and have a premonition that Richie will die during a blizzard. After a couple of days Patty Playpal upstairs will take the coke spoon out of her nose long enough to smell something bad and finally notice Suzie howling above the drone of her own monologue. She will find the remains of Richie hunched over his table, about to make the final calculation. I don’t think I will be moved to go to the funeral, definitely not to the wake. I can always say the kids have colds. After that, I will be expecting his ghost for a few months. Not horrifying—perhaps just a glimpse of Richie at midnight, in the park, calling for Suzie, who has remained behind. Then, when that’s over, I’ll think of him from time to time, probably in summer, because he used to let me borrow his electric lawn mower. My memory will grasp the whole sad Richie saga for an instant, and I will get up off the stoop and go in for supper. Maybe that night, when the kids are sleeping, I’ll say to my wife, “Remember Richie?” She’ll shiver a little and shake her head, and then the two of us will bust out laughing.
It’s so hard to do good in this world, so hard to love and keep oneself aloft. Every day I pray that Richie will go away to the hospital so that I can forget about him and pretend that life is more than just an experimental drug. He doesn’t call anymore and his crying has grown weaker. I paid the guy who lives behind me to climb on the roof and patch the place where the bats were crawling in. The rain still leaks through, but we catch it in buckets and flush it down the toilet. My sons grow bigger every day, and I watch vigilantly so that I can snatch away their loneliness before they notice it. I am constantly telling my wife how beautiful she is. I listen to her carefully, trying to find the person she was before we met fourteen years ago. All the dreams I have now are of some northern land with massive hills and overcast sky. I am there alone on business and can only speak to my family by phone. Each night it becomes more and more difficult to remember the name of my hometown, my number, my reason for being where I am. The people on the street are few, and when I ask them where the bus station is they snicker and give me bad directions. When awake, I’m keenly attuned to coincidence, searching wood grain and clouds for faces, trying with all my heart to rediscover my place in the story.
A Note About “Every Richie There Is”
This story, which first appeared in the literary journal Puerto Del Sol in 1993, is basically true. For those who have read my previous collection, The Drowned Life, the final story in that book, “The Golden Dragon,” takes place right around the same time, when we were living in the same duplex, and involves one of the same characters. If the mood ever strikes me, I have at least one more story to write about that time, and it is about the house that the character Richie inhabits in this tale. That story is a ghost story, as, in a way, both “Every Richie” and “The Golden Dragon” are.