A Home at the End of the World, Page 6

  “Right, man,” I said.

  Again, the silence opened. Again, in defiance of Adam’s fierce concentration on the front of the line—where the red-faced woman ladled up some sort of brown triangles in brown sauce—I started in on a story. Today I told of a new, experimental kind of college that taught students the things they would need to know for survival in the world: how to travel inexpensively, how to play blues piano and recognize true love. It wasn’t much of a story—I was only an adequate liar, not a brilliant one. My fabricating technique had more to do with persistence than with inspiration. I told lies the way Groucho Marx told jokes, piling one atop another in the hope that my simple endurance would throw a certain light of credibility onto the whole.

  Bobby listened with uncritical absorption. He did not insist on the difference between the believable and the absurd. Something in his manner suggested that all earthly manifestations—from the cafeteria peach halves floating in their individual pools of syrup to my story of a university that required its students to live for a week in New York City with no money at all—were equally bizarre and amusing. I did not at that time fully appreciate the effects of smoking more than four joints a day.

  All he did was listen, smile vaguely, and offer an occasional “Yeah” or “Wow.”

  Again, he sat and ate with us. Again, he walked us to our math class.

  When he had gone, Adam said, “I was wrong yesterday. You’re weird er than he is.”

  Adam and I took less than a month to realize that our friendship was already a childhood memory. We made certain attempts to haul it into the future with us, because we had, in our slightly peevish, mutually disapproving way, genuinely loved one another. We had told secrets; we had traded vows. Still, it was time for us to put one another aside. When I suggested one afternoon that we steal the new Neil Young album from the record store, he looked at me with a tax accountant’s contempt, based not so much on my immediate dishonesty as on the whole random, disorderly life I would make for myself. “You’ve never even listened to Neil Young,” he said. “Man,” I said, and left the sphere of his cautious, alphabetizing habits to stand near a group of long-haired high school students who were talking about Jimi Hendrix, of whom I had never heard. I stole Electric Ladyland after Adam, with a sigh of exhausted virtue, had walked out of the store.

  We did not accomplish the split without rancor or recriminations. I had an immediate new friend and he didn’t. Our final conversation took place at the bus stop before school on a warm October morning. Autumn light fell from a vaulted powder-blue sky that offered, here and there, a cloud so fat and dense-looking it might have been full of milk. I motioned Adam away from the knot of other kids waiting for the bus and showed him what I’d brought: two pale yellow pills stolen from my mother’s medicine cabinet.

  “What are they?” he asked.

  “The bottle said Valium.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “A tranquilizer, I guess. Here. Let’s take one and see what they do.”

  He looked at me uncomprehendingly. “Take one of these pills?” he said. “Now?”

  “Hey, man,” I whispered. “Keep your voice down.”

  “Take one and go to school ?” he asked, in a louder voice.

  “Yep,” I said. “Come on.”

  “We don’t even know what they’ll do to us.”

  “This is one way to find out. Come on. My mom takes ’em, how bad can they be?”

  “Your mom is sick ,” he said.

  “She’s no sicker than most people,” I told him. The pills, yellow disks the size of nailheads, sat in my palm, reflecting the suburban light. To end the discussion, I snatched one up and swallowed it.

  “Weird,” Adam said sorrowfully. “ Weird .” He turned from me and went to stand with the others waiting for the bus. We had our next conversation twelve years later, when he appeared with his wife out of the red semidarkness of a hotel bar in New York and told me of his cleaning business, which specialized in the most difficult jobs: wedding gowns, ancient lace, rugs that had all but married themselves to the dust of ten decades. He seemed, in truth, to be quite content.

  I slipped the second pill back into my pocket, and spent the morning in a drowsy bliss that matched the weather. When I saw Bobby at lunch, we smiled and said, “Hey, man,” to one another. I gave Adam’s pill to him. He accepted it, slipping it into his mouth with simple gratitude and no questions. That day I did not tell any stories; I hardly spoke at all. I learned that Bobby found sitting silently beside me just as amusing as he did listening to me talk.

  “I like those boots,” I said as he sat for the first time on the floor of my bedroom, rolling a joint. “Where did you get them? Or, wait a minute, that’s the kind of question you’re not supposed to ask, isn’t it? Anyway, I think those boots of yours are great.”

  “Thanks,” he said, expertly sealing the joint with a flick of his tongue. I had never smoked marijuana before, though I claimed to have been doing it regularly since I was eleven.

  “That looks like good stuff,” I said of the plastic bag full of green-gold marijuana he had produced from his jacket pocket.

  “Well, it’s—you know—all right,” he said, lighting up. There was no scorn in his stunted sentences, just a numbness and puzzlement. He had about him the hesitant quality of an amnesiac struggling to remember.

  “I like the smell,” I said. “I guess I’d better open the window. In case my mother comes by.”

  I naturally assumed we needed common enemies in the forms of the United States government, our school, my parents.

  “She’s nice,” he said. “Your mother.”

  “She’s all right.”

  He passed the joint over to me. Of course I tried to handle it in a polished, professional manner. Of course on my first toke I gagged so hard I nearly vomited.

  “It’s pretty strong,” he said. He took the joint back, sucked in a graceful nip of smoke, and returned it to me without further comment. I choked again, and after I’d recovered was given the joint a third time, as if I was every bit as practiced as I pretended to be. The third time I did a little better.

  And so, without acknowledging my inexperience, Bobby set about teaching me the habits of the age.

  We spent every day together. It was the kind of reckless overnight friendship particular to those who are young, lonely, and ambitious. Gradually, item by item, Bobby brought over his records, his posters, his clothes. We spent just enough time at his house for me to know what he was escaping from: a stale sour smell of soiled laundry and old food, a father who crept with drunken caution from room to room. Bobby slept in a sleeping bag on my floor. In the dark, I lay listening to the sound of his breath. He moaned sometimes in his dreams.

  When he awoke in the mornings, he’d look around with a startled expression, realize where he was, and smile. The light slanting in through my window turned the medallion of hair on his chest from gold to copper.

  I bought myself a pair of boots like his. I started growing my hair.

  With time, he began to talk more fluently. “I like this house,” he said one winter evening as we sat idly in my room, smoking dope and listening to The Doors. Snowflakes tapped against the glass, whirled down into the empty, silent street. The Doors sang “L.A. Woman.”


  “How much would a house like this cost?” he said.

  “Can’t be too much,” I said. “We’re not rich.”

  “I want a house like this someday,” he said, passing me the joint.

  “No you don’t,” I told him. I had other things in mind for us.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I do. I like this place.”

  “You don’t really,” I said. “You just think you do because you’re stoned.”

  He sucked on the joint. He had a cultivated, almost feminine way of handling his dope, pinching a joint precisely between thumb and middle finger. “So I’ll stay stoned all the time,” he said on his exhale. “Then I’ll always like this house and Cleveland and everything, just the way it is now.”

  “Well, that would be one way to live,” I answered.

  “Don’t you like it?” he said. “You should like it. You don’t know what you got here.”

  “What I’ve got here,” I said, “is a mother who asks me first thing in the morning what I think I’d like to have for dinner that night, and a father who hardly ever leaves his movie theater.”

  “Yeah, man,” he grinned.

  His forearm, thick-wristed, golden-haired, rested casually on his knee. It just rested there, as if it was nothing special.

  I believe I know the moment my interest turned to love. One night in early spring Bobby and I were sitting together in my room, listening to the Grateful Dead. It was an ordinary night in my altered life. Bobby passed me the joint, and after I’d accepted it, he withdrew his hand and glanced at a liver-colored mole on the underside of his left wrist. His face registered mild incredulity—in the thirteen years he had known his own body, he had apparently not taken stock of that particular mole, though I had noticed it on any number of occasions, a slightly off-center discoloration riding the fork in a vein. The mole surprised him. I suspect it frightened him a little, to see his own flesh made strange. He touched the mole, curiously, with his right index finger, and his face was nakedly fretful as a baby’s. As he worried over that small imperfection, I saw that he inhabited his own flesh as fully and with the same mix of wonder and confusion that I brought to my own. Until then I had believed—though I would never have confessed it, not even to myself—that all others were slightly less real than I; that their lives were a dream composed of scenes and emotions that resembled snapshots: discrete and unambiguous, self-evident, flat. He touched the mole on his wrist with tenderness, and with a certain dread. It was a minute gesture. Seeing it was no more dramatic than seeing somebody check his watch and register surprise at the time. But in that moment Bobby cracked open. I could see him—he was in there. He moved through the world in a chaos of self, fearful and astonished to be here, right here, alive in a pine-paneled bedroom.

  Then the moment passed and I was on the other side of something. After that night—a Tuesday—I could not have returned, even if I’d desired it, to a state that did not involve thinking and dreaming of Bobby. I could not help investing his every quality with a heightened sense of the real, nor could I quit wondering, from moment to moment, exactly what it was like to be inside his skin.

  Night after night we roamed the streets like spies. We befriended a bum named Louis, who lived in a piano crate and bought us bottles of red wine in exchange for food we stole from my mother’s kitchen. We climbed up fire escapes onto downtown roofs for the strangeness of standing in a high place. We dropped acid and wandered for hours through a junkyard that sparkled like a diamond mine, rife with caverns and peculiar glitterings and plateaus that glowed with a bleached, lunar light I tried to scoop up with my hands. We hitchhiked to Cincinnati to see if we could get there and back before my parents realized we were missing.

  Once, on a Thursday night, Bobby took me to the cemetery where his brother and mother were buried. We sat on their graves, passing a joint.

  “Man,” he said, “I’m not afraid of graveyards. The dead are just, you know, people who wanted the same things you and I want.”

  “What do we want?” I asked blurrily.

  “Aw, man, you know,” he said. “We just want, well, the same things these people here wanted.”

  “What was that?”

  He shrugged. “To live, I guess,” he said.

  He ran his fingers over the grass. He handed me the joint, which was wet with our mingled saliva, and I blew a stream of white smoke up into the sky, where the Seven Sisters quivered and sparked. Cleveland sent up its own small lights—television and shaded lamps. A passing car left a few bars of “Helter Skelter” behind on the cold night air.

  April came. It was not swimming weather yet, but I insisted that we go to the quarry as soon as the last scabs of old snow had disappeared from the shadows. I knew we’d go swimming naked. I was rushing the season.

  It was one of those spring days that emerge scoured from the long, long freeze, with a sky clear as melted snow. The first hardy, thick-stemmed flowers had poked out of the ground. The quarry, which lay three miles out of town, reflected sky on a surface dark and unmoving as obsidian. Except for a lone caramel-colored cow that had wandered down from a pasture to drink in the shallows, Bobby and I were the only living things there. We might have hiked to a glaciated lake high in the Himalayas.

  “Beautiful,” he said. We were passing a joint. A blue jay rose, with a single questioning shrill, from an ash tree still in bud.

  “We have to swim,” I said. “We have to.”

  “Still too cold,” he said. “That water’d be freezing, man.”

  “We have to, anyway. Come on. It’s the first official swim of summer. If we don’t swim today, it’ll start snowing again tomorrow.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Everybody knows it. Come on .”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Awful cold, though.”

  By then we had reached the gravel bed that passed for a beach, where the cow, who stood primly at the water’s edge, stared at us with coal-black eyes. This quarry had a rough horseshoe shape, with limestone cliffs that rose in a jagged half circle and then fell back again to the beach.

  “It’s not the least bit cold,” I said to Bobby. “It’s like Bermuda by this time of year. Watch me.”

  Spurred by my fear that we would do no more that day than smoke a joint, fully clothed, beside a circle of dark water, I started up the shale-strewn slope that led to the clifftop. The nearer cliffs were less than twenty feet high, and in summer the more courageous swimmers dove from there into the deep water. I had never even thought of diving off the cliff before. I was nothing like brave. But that day I scrambled in my cowboy boots, which still pinched, up the slope to the cracked limestone platform that sprouted, here and there, a lurid yellow crocus.

  “It’s summer up here,” I shouted back to Bobby, who stood alone on the beach, cupping the joint. “Come on,” I shouted. “Don’t test the water with your fingers, just come up here and we’ll dive in. We’ve got to.”

  “Naw, Jon,” he called. “Come back.”

  With that, I began taking off my clothes in a state of humming, high-blown exhilaration. This was a more confident, daring Jonathan standing high on a sun-warmed rock, stripping naked before the puzzled gaze of a drinking cow.

  “Jon,” Bobby called, more urgently.

  As I pulled off my shirt and then my boots and socks, I knew a raw abandon I had never felt before. The sensation grew as each new patch of skin touch
ed the light and the cool, brilliant air. I could feel myself growing lighter, taking on possibility, with every stitch I removed. I got ungracefully out of my jeans and boxer shorts, and stood for a moment, scrawny, naked, and wild, touched by the cold sun.

  “This is it,” I hollered.

  Bobby, far below, said, “Hey, man, no—”

  And for the sake of Bobby, for the sake of my new life, I dove.

  A thin sheet of ice still floated on the water, no more than a membrane, invisible until I broke through it. I heard the small crackling, felt the ice splinter around me, and then I was plunged into unthinkable cold, a cold that stopped my breath and seemed, for a long moment, to have stopped my heart as well. My flesh itself shrank, clung in animal panic to the bone, and I thought with perfect clarity, I’m dead. This is what it’s like.

  Then I was on the surface, breaking through the ice a second time. My consciousness actually slipped out of my body, floated up, and in retrospect I have a distinct impression of watching myself swim to shore, gasping, lungs clenched like fists, the ice splintering with every stroke, sending diamond slivers up into the air.

  Bobby waded in to his thighs to help pull me out. I remember the sight of his wet jeans, clinging darkly to his legs. I remember thinking his boots would be ruined.

  It took another moment for my head to clear sufficiently to realize he was screaming at me, even as he helped me out of the water.

  “Goddamn it,” he yelled, and his mouth was very close to my ear. “Oh, goddamn you. God damn .”

  I was too occupied with my own breathing to respond. He got us well up onto the gravel before letting go of me and launching into a full-scale rant. The best I could do was stand, breathing and shivering, as he shouted.