a stone wall. After I waved the first two cars on, insisting I was all right, pumped up with adrenaline, not wanting to believe Mary’s wrist was broken. After finally accepting a lift and checking her into the hospital, after calling my mother to say everything was fine, a small accident, No, no need to come down. After I forgot to hang up the phone, after I knocked all the magazines off the waiting room table, suddenly overcome, I just needed to lie down for a second. After I rose up, minutes later, some part of me knowing something was wrong, by then I was seeing triple. After I staggered down the hall to the admissions desk, I think I need to be looked at, I managed, my eyes already gone yellow. I sang the theme song from Winnie-the-Pooh to Mary, waiting to get her wrist set, as we lay side by side on our gurneys, a curtain between us, both still tipsy from the schnapps, begging the nurses for more painkillers, laughing, as the blood from my broken spleen, unnoticed, drowned me from within. When I woke up that morning after going under the knife I can remember my brother halfheartedly pulling my mother off me as the nurse rushed in. Or perhaps he was egging her on.
A few months before the motorcycle accident I had been with Mary at my house. An April night, my mother bartending, not due home until one or two. If my mother was away on a Saturday night Mary was in my bed. That night, after we came up for air, we were drinking whiskey in the kitchen, and Mary opened a notepad to write something down. In the pad she found a letter my mother had written, a suicide note, undated, but referring to the time after Travis had left the house, the summer of the Red Sox, maybe three years before. I read it, and told Mary, told myself, that it must have been from that time, a hard time for us all, but she had gotten through it, and everything now was better. I made this story up on the spot, I had to tell myself something. We killed the bottle of whiskey, and I tore the note out of the notebook and took it into the yard and burned it, four pages in all, and never mentioned a word of it to my mother. But from then on I kept a closer eye on her, and within four months ( Seek, seek for him, / Lest his ungoverned rage dissolve the life / That wants the means to end it ) I drove my motorcycle into a wall.
the ashmont arms
(1978) The day he’s released from Danbury, the prison where he finishes out his time, my father takes a series of buses straight to Ray and Clare’s house outside of Boston. The first thing he does, after two years without a real drink, aside from the occasional swallow of homemade prison wine (“pruno”), is get drunk. He tags along to a local party that night and ends up rolling Ray in a rug, standing him in a corner. It’s good to be free. There are women at the party, some he knows from before, some he doesn’t. The next day the hostess asks Ray if he knew Jonathan was an ex-con, that he’d just been released that day. Ray assures her that he isn’t violent, that he tends to get drunk is all. Ray and Clare by this time have two children, both girls, nineteen and sixteen. The girls remember Jonathan from before he was put away, and they hadn’t liked him much then. Cross-eyed. Unpredictable. Disreputable is an understatement , Ray admits— Wives couldn’t stand him, he was the drunken slob who tries to make your daughter .
Still, the ex-con’s an old friend, and once again he’s shown up penniless. Clare’s cousin Margaret owns a few rooming houses in Dorchester. Margaret has nine kids of her own but she has a soft spot for broken-down men and knows how to handle them and, more importantly, how to get rid of them if they get out of hand. Her buildings are ramshackle three-or four-deckers, three apartments on each floor, a hot plate and a sink with hot and cold running water in each. Shared bathrooms. Fine for the guys who end up there—marginal, somewhat or full-blown alcoholic, depending on the
A few months before the motorcycle accident I had been with Mary at my house. An April night, my mother bartending, not due home until one or two. If my mother was away on a Saturday night Mary was in my bed. That night, after we came up for air, we were drinking whiskey in the kitchen, and Mary opened a notepad to write something down. In the pad she found a letter my mother had written, a suicide note, undated, but referring to the time after Travis had left the house, the summer of the Red Sox, maybe three years before. I read it, and told Mary, told myself, that it must have been from that time, a hard time for us all, but she had gotten through it, and everything now was better. I made this story up on the spot, I had to tell myself something. We killed the bottle of whiskey, and I tore the note out of the notebook and took it into the yard and burned it, four pages in all, and never mentioned a word of it to my mother. But from then on I kept a closer eye on her, and within four months ( Seek, seek for him, / Lest his ungoverned rage dissolve the life / That wants the means to end it ) I drove my motorcycle into a wall.
the ashmont arms
(1978) The day he’s released from Danbury, the prison where he finishes out his time, my father takes a series of buses straight to Ray and Clare’s house outside of Boston. The first thing he does, after two years without a real drink, aside from the occasional swallow of homemade prison wine (“pruno”), is get drunk. He tags along to a local party that night and ends up rolling Ray in a rug, standing him in a corner. It’s good to be free. There are women at the party, some he knows from before, some he doesn’t. The next day the hostess asks Ray if he knew Jonathan was an ex-con, that he’d just been released that day. Ray assures her that he isn’t violent, that he tends to get drunk is all. Ray and Clare by this time have two children, both girls, nineteen and sixteen. The girls remember Jonathan from before he was put away, and they hadn’t liked him much then. Cross-eyed. Unpredictable. Disreputable is an understatement , Ray admits— Wives couldn’t stand him, he was the drunken slob who tries to make your daughter .
Still, the ex-con’s an old friend, and once again he’s shown up penniless. Clare’s cousin Margaret owns a few rooming houses in Dorchester. Margaret has nine kids of her own but she has a soft spot for broken-down men and knows how to handle them and, more importantly, how to get rid of them if they get out of hand. Her buildings are ramshackle three-or four-deckers, three apartments on each floor, a hot plate and a sink with hot and cold running water in each. Shared bathrooms. Fine for the guys who end up there—marginal, somewhat or full-blown alcoholic, depending on the
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