Jesus' Son: Stories

The Other Man

But I never finished telling you about the two men. I never even started describing the second one, whom I met more or less in the middle of Puget Sound, travelling from Bremerton, Washington, to Seattle.

This man was just basically one of those people on a boat, leaning on the rail like the others, his hands dangling over like bait. The day was sunny, unusual for the Northwest Coast. I'm sure we were all feeling blessed on this ferryboat among the humps of very green-in the sunlight almost coolly burning, like phosphorus-islands, and the water of inlets winking in the sincere light of day, under a sky as blue and brainless as the love of God, despite the smell, the slight, dreamy suffocation, of some kind of petroleum-based compound used to seal the deck's seams.

This guy wore horn-rimmed glasses and had a shy smile, by which I think is generally meant a smile that occurs while the eyes look away.

It was his foreignness, inability to make himself accepted, essential loserness, that made him look away.

"Do you like some beers?"

"Okay," I said.

He bought me a beer and explained that he was from Poland, over here on business. I stayed and talked with him about the obvious things. "It's a beautiful day"-by which we meant that the weather was good. But we never say, "The weather's good," "The weather's pleasant." We say, "It's a beautiful day," "What a beautiful day."

He was a sad case. His jacket was lightweight and yellow. He might have been wearing it for the first time. It was the kind of jacket a foreigner would buy in a store while saying to himself, "I am buying an American jacket." "Are you having," he asked of me, "a family? Any father, mother, brother, sister?"

"I have a brother, one brother, and my parents are both living."

He was driving around in a rented car, with an expense account: a youthful international person doing all right. A certain yearning attached itself between us. I wanted to participate in what was happening to him. It was just a careless, instinctive thing. There was nothing of his I wanted in particular. I wanted it all. We went downstairs and got in his new-smelling rented car. We waited for the boat to dock and then we drove down the ramp and just a very short ways to a restaurant and tavern on the waterfront, a loud place dappled with sunshine and full of the deep tones of thick beer ware.

I didn't ask him if he had a wife or was father to a family. And he didn't ask me about those things. "Do you ride the motorcycle? I do," he said. "I ride the small, the one, we say, ah, yes, motorscooter, you call it. The big Hell's Angels have the motorcycles, no, I ride the small motorscooter, excuse me. In Warsaw, my city, we drive in the park after twelve in the night, but the rules are saying ho, you must not go to the park after this time, 12 p.m. middle-night, yes, ah, midnight, exact, precisely, it's against the rule, the law. It is a law, the park is clawsded. Closed, yes, thank you, it is a law for one months in jail if you try it. Oh, we have a lot fun! I put it on my helmet, and if the polices are catching, they will-bung! bung! — with their sticks! But it doesn't hurt. But we always get away, because they walk, the polices, they have no transportation for that park. We always win! After the middle-night, it is always dark there."

He excused himself and went to find a bathroom and order one more pitcher of beer.

We hadn't yet mentioned our names. We probably wouldn't. In barrooms I lived this over and over.

He came back with the pitcher and poured my glass full and sat down. "Ah hell," he said. "I'm not Polish. I'm from Cleveland."

I was shocked, surprised. Really. Not for one second had I thought of something like this. "Well, tell me some stories about Cleveland, then," I said.

"The Cuyahoga River caught on fire one time," he said. "It was burning in the middle of the night. The fire was just floating along down it. That was interesting to see, because you'd almost expect the fire to stay in the same place, while the water travelled along beneath it. The pollutants caught on fire. Flammable chemicals and waste products from the factories."

"Was any of that stuff you said, was any of it real?"

"The park is real," he said.

"The beer is real," I said.

"And the cops, and the helmet. I really do have a motorscooter," he said, and assuring me of this seemed to make him feel better.

When I've told others about this man, they've asked me, "Did he make a pass at you?" Yes, he did. But why is that outcome to this encounter obvious to everyone, when it wasn't at all obvious to me, the person who actually met and spoke with him?

Later, when he dropped me off in front of the apartment building where my friends lived, he paused a minute, watching me cross the street, and then left, accelerating swiftly.

I cupped my hands around my mouth like a megaphone. "Maury!" I called, "Carol!" Whenever I came to Seattle, I had to stand out here on the sidewalk and shout up toward their fourth-floor window, because the front entrance was always locked.

"Go away. Get out of here," a lady's voice called from a window on the ground floor, the window of the manager's apartment.

"But my friends live here," I said.

"You can't yell in the streets like that," she said.

She came closer to the window. She had chiselled features, wet eyes, and tendons standing out in her neck. Fanatically religious utterances seemed to quiver on her lips.

"I beg your pardon," I said, "is that a German accent you have there?"

"Don't give me that," she said. "Oh, the lies. You're all so. friendly."

"It isn't Polish, I hope."

I stepped back into the street. "Maury!" I screamed. I whistled loudly.

"This is it. That's the finish."

"But they live right up there!"

"I'm going to call the cops. Do you want me to call the cops?"

"Jesus Christ. You bitch," I said.

"I didn't think so. The friendly burglar runs away," she cried after me.

I imagined jamming her into a roaring fireplace. The screams. Her face caught fire and burned.

The sky was a bruised red shot with black, almost exactly the colors of a tattoo. Sunset had two minutes left to live.

The street I stood on rolled down a long hill toward First and Second Avenue, the lowest part of town. My feet carried me away down the hill. I danced on my despair. I trembled outside a tavern called Kelly's, nothing but a joint, its in-sides swimming in a cheesy light. Peeking inside I thought, If I have to go in there and drink with those old men.

Right across the street was a hospital. In a radius of only a few blocks, there were four or five. Two men in pajamas stood looking out a window of this one, on the third floor. One of the men was talking. I could almost trace their steps back to the rooms from which they'd wandered tonight with everything they stood for disrupted by their maladies.

Two people, two hospital patients up out of their beds after supper, find each other wandering the halls, and they stand for a while in a little lounge that smells of cigarette butts, looking out over the parking lot. These two, this man and this man, they don't have their health. Their solitudes are fearful. And then they find one another.

But do you think one is ever going to visit the other one's grave?

I pushed through the door into Kelly's. Inside they sat with their fat hands around their beers while the jukebox sang softly to itself. You'd think they'd found out how, by sitting still and holding their necks just so, to look down into lost worlds.

There was one woman in the place. She was drunker than I was. We danced, and she told me she was in the army.

"I'm locked out of my friends'," I told her.

"Don't worry about a thing like that," she said, and kissed my cheek.

I held her close. She was short, just the right size for me. I drew her closer.

Among the men around us, somebody cleared his throat. The bass's rhythm travelled the floorboards, but I doubt it reached them.

"Let me kiss you," I pleaded. Her lips tasted cheap. "Let me go home with you," I said. She kissed me sweetly.

She'd outlined her eyes in black. I loved her eyes. "My husband's at home,"' she said. "We can't go there."

"Maybe we could get a motel room."

"It depends on how much money you have."

"Not enough. Not enough," I admitted.

"I'll have to take you home."

She kissed me.

"What about your husband?"

She just kept kissing me as we danced. There was nothing in the world for these men to do but watch, or look at their drinks. I don't remember what was playing, but in that era in Seattle the much favored sad jukebox song was called "Misty Blue"; probably "Misty Blue" was playing as I held her and felt her ribs moving in my hands.

"I can't let you get away," I told her.

"I could take you home. You could sleep on the couch. Then later on I could come out."

"While your husband's in the next room?"

"He'll be asleep. I could say you're my cousin."

We pressed ourselves together gently and furiously. "I want to love you, baby," she said.

"Oh, God. But I don't know, with your husband there."

"Love me," she begged. She wept onto my chest.

"How long have you been married?" I asked.

"Since Friday."

"Friday?"

"They gave me four days' leave."

"You mean the day before yesterday was your wedding day?"

"I could tell him you're my brother," she suggested.

First I put my lips to her upper lip, then to the bottom of her pout, and then I kissed her fully, my mouth on her open mouth, and we met inside.

It was there. It was. The long walk down the hall. The door opening. The beautiful stranger. The torn moon mended. Our fingers touching away the tears. It was there.