The Last Bender, Chapter 2

CHAPTER TWO

            I drove through the security gates of Monozone’s underground garage and into the orange gelatin concrete of Bartholin Plaza. A squat, liver colored sun struggled against the herringbone bay. Garbage trucks trundled down the block.

            The road still bore traces of a double yellow line but no one paid it any mind. Every couple of seconds I would swerve to avoid a pothole only to thud into another. Soon I was on the interstate and headed home.

            The sun was so bright I had to shield my eyes. I had forgotten to bring sunglasses. The city-bound lanes were crowding up with commuters but on my side there was only the occasional bus. I hated coming home at dawn beneath the green highway signs, looking at drowned grass and mud cracked by the sun, litter trapped on chain link fences and sea gulls taking off over pools of black water. It reminded me of coming home after the war, a busted bag, a junky with nowhere to go. The life I had fled to in the city was gone, everyone dead or married. Dad was proud of me in that pathetic, flag waiving way the old have. He didn’t know what I had become. The world as it was meant nothing to him. He and his gas guzzlers sat on porch couches with sagging springs smoking cigarettes and drinking beer. He didn’t know any more about me then than the day I was born, and I was at an age where that mattered, never having felt the hatred of a child.

            For the first time he thought I’d done something good and right and I told him what a joke that was. What I was doing there had ceased to be a question. All my time was spent thinking this one thought which I could never remember. It took about ten minutes to get sick thinking but thinking was better than the crazy pictures I kept seeing. My head was a sparking circuit board and my thoughts were acrid twists of smoke. The thing is they had kicked it in enough to break it but not to kill it. He thought I went to war because I believed in something. It wasn’t like that at all. They couldn’t grind it out of you if it wasn’t there. I didn’t even want to kill anyone.

            Tranzidene was standard army issue. You weren’t meant to take it unless you were captured, but there it was and there I was and everyone knew what to do right away. We called it Hero. Or Brave. Sometimes Home of the Brave, or “Someone’s up on his high horse.” Sometimes you’d say, “Is the General in the room?” or “The King is dead.” The first one means “Is anyone holding?” and the second, that you’re out of drugs. It is the kind of heroism you get when you don’t feel anything at all and all you do is stare out at the world from this cold little dot where your soul used to be. 

            One day, as I lay on the couch popping smoke rings at the ceiling, I had this realization. Drugs are a form of belief. Every day, one of this thought’s eight tentacles tore a new chamber into my brain till no amount of Tranzidene could vaporize the pain. The ever-fleeting heat failed to return or came on like a blowtorch. I was a five-alarm nerve cell burnt through with belief.     

            The city is divided into rings defined by money. At the heart is Five Joints, the molten core around which the city wraps its first ring of velvet collared rich–generals, lawyers, doctors and crooks–in high rises and townhouses. That’s the first ring.

            The second ring surrounds this luxurious fruit and its pullulating nut like a halter, places carefully tucked under concrete, at the bottoms of ramps abutting sluggish inlets. From an airplane you see pills of concrete and bales of wire on abandoned flats. Every fixture is stripped of brass and copper. All the porcelain is gone. A breakdown here freezes the bowel and prompts panicked calls on the phone, as a hungry man with yellow teeth and eyes circles your car, banging at the panels with a two-by-four.

            After that ring comes the ring I grew up and lived in, the third ring. It’s full of angry T-shirts, three generations of rage and everyone’s in someone else’s army.

Between tours of duty, you bag groceries and fix cars. Drive trucks and put out fires. Or you might just sit at home and watch t.v. with a bottle of gin and some flat tonic. When I was a kid, everyone had a flag, a dog and an old man losing his mind on the porch.

            I turned down the exit onto the old road that parallels and sinks beneath the interstate, lined with one story clapboard homes and parked down the block from my house, between a motorcycle and Mrs. Robuto’s laundry truck, and walked up the brick path to the front door.

            As soon as I got into the house I took out the piece of paper, smoothed it open, and read it by the hall light. .cap 1831. It could have been a license plate. Maybe someone at work would have a clue.

            I lay on the bed but couldn’t sleep. The case bothered me. I didn’t like that. It should never happen. At the end of the day work is done. I went to the kitchen, made a sandwich and drank a cola. I sat there staring at the sky and the lumpy putty around the window. If I looked closely enough I could see the imprint of my father’s fingers. The window looked out on the tomato garden out back. My grandfather and my father grew them and so do I.

            I decided to try sleep again. People were up, starting cars and going to church or the park; they were walking to buy newspapers and bagels, brushing the grit from their eyes. The sky was whitening on the top of the back fence through dew and honeysuckle. But the bedrooms would stay dark till three when the daylight scattered through breaks in the curtain.

            I shut my eyes and all my nerves seized up. Blood splashed on the ceiling and the walls; it soaked the coverlet and rained its sticky salt in my hair. A fist like a wrecking ball jammed a chisel in my chest and the blood shot back onto its knuckles. I felt like a side of beef. Piece by piece I fell apart, as flesh dissolved into tissue, tissue into blood and the blood erupted from me. I gasped for air, murdered in bed. And then came this combination of pity and remorse, diffusing like an odor. What the fuck was wrong with me? What is it, I think.