Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas

about popping some, but I closed the door and looked in the mirror. I couldn’t see what Sally saw in my face—what spooked her so. I had seen my father that morning, the first time in some time, hunted him down on my own—surprised him. I guess I was a little bit desperate. I couldn’t talk to my mother about anything, really, certainly not about being dumped by a poor, freckly white girl—any white girl, for that matter. Shake and Brian had already been with too many girls, and Gavin hadn’t been with any. So I went to my father, and I don’t know why I expected him to be anything besides a stranger. I kept pretty quiet, pushed an uneaten sandwich and coffee mug around a diner counter. He didn’t say much, either, just clicked his teeth. A couple of times he looked out in front of him, toward the open kitchen into nowhere, and smiled. When I was getting money out for the check, I’d looked up and caught him shaking his head at me. “When you were a little boy, you were so full of light . . . ,” he’d started. He thanked me for lunch and the opportunity to see me and left.
    Even locked in the bathroom, I could hear Gavin from downstairs, exclaiming over some bad eighties rock in his most exalted tone that “. . . indeed, the party has just arrived.” By the time I got downstairs the negotiations had begun—Brian and Shake were welcome, butGavin had to go. When he saw me, he bellowed drunkenly, “Mu brathir—
Eire nua!”
He snatched a bottle of fancy whiskey off the bar and tossed it to me dramatically like it was my confiscated sword. “Sar! Ho!” he bellowed and then ran out the door into the night. I held the fifth by the neck, looked around at the ring of rich boys, had a quick mind—tried to calculate how many I could crack with the bottle. Then I drank and followed.
    We went cruising around downtown in Shake’s new used car—out and aimless. Brian had just dropped two hits of blotter—goony-birds, I think. Shake’s tape deck had just eaten his latest party mix, so we were listening to the radio. Even though it was his car, he thought it fair for everyone to have equal time on the dial. Brian chose first.
    â€œClassics, dude.”
    â€œWhose classics?”
    â€œCome on, dude. One hundred point seven.”
    Shake pulled the car over. We were in Chinatown, on the edge of the Combat Zone—Boston’s tiny red-light district. He shut the motor off and turned to Brian, who was slumping in the back seat, and stared at him coldly. Shake was about as close as any of us could come to being a bully. He was already fully grown and dark. He was already a very good writer. He’d graduated midyear and was on his way that summer to New York to serve as an intern for some well-known director that none of us had ever heard of. I asked him once about his writing, how he did it. “I see things and I write them down—connect the dots to here,” he snapped. I thought that I’d annoyed him so I didn’t push it. I hadn’t known that his anger was targeting something else, the visions, an awakening schizophrenia, which was soon to leave him shaking and alone.
    â€œWhat, dude?”
    â€œI’m in no mood for your shit,” he shot back crisply. All three of his accents—urban black, Jamaican patois, and his father’s high-brow Londonese—were confounding to listeners. He could scare almost any white boy at will.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œG’wan claat!”
    â€œSorry, bro.”
    â€œI ain’t your brother.”
    â€œSorry.”
    He switched on the juice and tuned the station in. Van Morrison was on, singing “Into the Mystic.” Shake nodded to the music and turned it up.
    â€œThis tune’s all right.”
    Brian slouched more, relaxed, and looked out the window. I followed his eyes down an alley where a transaction was going on between a black hooker and