75. Crossing

Even today I’m thinking about jumping from one of those long bridges that spans those nooks of the ocean that’ve been misnamed as rivers and bays. There are a few, not very far from this block, and I could walk along their sides. I had to cross one of them to get here; I’ll have to cross it or another to leave. Crossing is just that: You’re not on one piece of land or the other, one state or the other; you’re on the bridge.

On one shore, you freeze, you’re hungry, somebody beats you; none of it changes. But you don’t know what’s on the other side, even if you’ve been there before. The streets on the side you know follow perfectly straight lines—or at least they seem to—to other streets, to avenues, to railroad tracks—you never realize they were abandoned—or to graveyards. On the other side, you don’t know where the streets, the alleys—Are there streets? Are there alleys?—will lead you. Even if you’ve been there before, you’re not sure of where you’re going.

The body the police identified by my former name was rolled on its head on a cellar floor under a house abandoned on a street that ends two and a half blocks from the street that cuts it off at the other end at a storefront of dirt and broken glass that separates rotted ties and rusty rails from the street. No one who doesn’t live on this street, or the street where it ends, has ever seen it. Or died on it: That’s one of the risks you run when you’re there. No escape—to what? Die here, don’t go to the other side. Or maybe you go, die, to the other side.

But there’s no going to the other side without crossing, without the bridge. A place where you’re not there or there. Almost every bridge big enough to take you away from this block has a sign, a marker, on it telling you when you’ve crossed from one town to the next, the county line, the state border, the national frontier. The line is completely arbitrary: You never see it; you never know you’ve crossed it until you see the sign. Still, you haven’t gotten to the other side; you’ve left because to get from the place to which you’ve come, you still have to cross.  (That’s why I think of jumping; that’s why I never will. ) There’s no coming back; there’s only going back. And on most bridges, you can’t do that without going to the other side first.

And you don’t know whether you can leave—actually, sometimes you know you can’t—once you’ve gotten there. You can’t follow the streets, the alleys, or even the wind, in the same way on the other side as you did in your old home. Nothing on the other side takes you in the same direction.

So the only certainty you have is that you’re on the bridge. But you can’t stay there—that’s not the purpose of a bridge. I remember reading that Paris grew into the great metropolis it’s become when the Pont Neuf—the first bridge in centuries to be constructed without houses on it—opened to the traffic of the time.

On the Pont Neuf, on the Brooklyn or Golden Gate or most other bridges, you can stop to look at the view, if you were ever impressed by such things. But you can’t stay, no matter how pretty or tall the buildings, no matter how softly the light shimmers on the water. You have to move along, from it, away, at some point. Then there’s the other side. Or the river, the bay, the ocean.

At least you always know which way the water flows: to the trench opening all around you, inside, at the bottom. The way it’s always gone. Not like the streets on the other side.

I think about jumping now, again, when I’m within sight of what I’d always hoped for. Only days from the operation, if all goes according to plan: I didn’t even know about the operation when I was living on this block. I knew only that I didn’t live in that body, with my former name: dead on this block. Or worse: dying, waiting to die, on this block.

Nearly every day I envisioned that body dropping form one of those bridges, dropping all the way to the bottom of the ocean. I wished there was another place, another body, for me—another time, even.

I left only because I knew the body on this block would kill me before…before I could…kill myself. Kill him. Die. Die on this block. Before this body, this block, this house, could take it—whatever it was—from me.

Yet I never knew what was on the other side of the street where the block ended. Or how I could get there, or if I ever would. But knowing what was there: That kept us here.

Mother always knew I’d go, but I don’t think she knew when. Or how. She also knew I wouldn’t come back because I couldn’t. But now I have no choice but to go.

71. Waiting to Escape

If all goes as I intend—I’ve given up planning a long time now—I’ll be away from this block for good tomorrow. Still, it’s a relief, almost, to be here now.

Now I know there’s still at least one place where bricks continue to fade and flake, but the walls they’re in are still standing. Where roof tiles and sides darken with the shade of green copper turns when it’s been left out in the rain. But I know there’s no copper, or any other metal, in those tiles because of the way they curl around their edges and splinter, though they never quite fall apart.

And the people—the ones who still remain—women—are as I expected, though somehow not quite as old. The lady whose name I never knew, still pale and lined but not wrinkled in the way of people who spend their lives in the shadows of their homes. Not much exposure to sunlight—or to rain or wind, either. Her black dress, another ageless but not timeless layer, gathered into neat if not completely symmetrical folds around her waist by some band I can’t see. Just like what she always wore, except that it’s black.

Mrs. Littington, she’s another story. Her jacket sheathes the small mounds of her breasts and falls in a nearly straight line to her hips, which are tucked into pants of the same color, and the same shape, more or less. It makes perfect sense on her, just like the dark hair that reins in the crown of her head and clings in perfectly straight segments that end around her ears and, in the back, just above the collar of her jacket.

It’s not comforting, really, to see her, the lady whose name I never knew, the houses, the yards in shades of gray that end in chainlink fences, a street that ends in a cemetery yard on one end but whose other end cannot be seen fro here. However, I’m glad to see everything here for what I assume to be the last time.

Some people leave the places where they were born and raised because they need to know that not all people look or talk like their family members or neighbors, and that not everybody lives in the same kinds of houses. I learned such things, too, but it wasn’t the reason I left. In fact, if I’d learned otherwise, it might not’ve made any difference to me.

Adam left. The man whose body was found in the basement—and whose autopsy has my former name—is gone. And Louis, whom those other boys in school nearly killed. The other boys, who might’ve killed me if Louis hadn’t been there. All somewhere else, I don’t know where. Now mother’s on her way out. I expect I’ll be, too.

None of this makes any difference, really: This block is still more or less what I left. At least, it feels that way. Which, of course, is enough reason to get out and stay away.

Most of all, I’ve got to get out while it’s still safe, at least relatively, for me to be here. The lady whose name I never knew—She’s squinting in my direction again! Hopefully, I’ll be out of here before she starts talking to me, asking me questions: before I find out she’s recognized me.

70. Forgetting

Probably nobody has ever remembered any event or person, or even object, completely. What I’ve never understood is why anybody tried.

What I understand even less is when people try to make a scene, recollection or piece of furniture seem older and more enshrouded in a gauze of mist than it already is. All those commercials that were shot in grainy black-and-white when film, video and any number of other could reproduce and store the colors paraded in front of them. Why cloud up a clear vision of a day? Why make houses and the things in them seem even more weathered than they actually are?

Mother never talked about the past—hers or anyone else’s. Not even mine. But it seemed that everyone, except her and Adam, who spent more than five minutes with me tried to get me to talk about what was gone, what they could never experience.

Or they tried to wipe out my recall: something they could no more do than to remember their own lives. We’ve all had doctors who told us the needles they stuck in our arms didn’t hurt, or teachers or other adults who told us we weren’t hurt after some bully—or the adult in question—punched, kicked or shoved us.

The result—at least for me—was always the same when any adult condescended or simply lied: contempt, on both sides. Likewise for anyone who tries to blur an already blurry picture. Even the ones who really believe they’re trying to ease my pain, in the end, earn my anger because they’re trying to blunt the edge of my recollections.

By the same token, I don’t try to recall everything, everybody, every moment. Even if I could, I couldn’t keep them, just as I can’t take every article of clothing I’ve ever worn with me. It’s one of the first lessons you learn when you can’t stay some place.

And the moment you begin to move, from necessity, the faces, the voices, the pieces of a house, all disappear into a blur. Or they lie submerged, bubbling through the cauldron of your dreams you don’t remember in the morning.

69. Poverty and Survival

In a town like the one where Vivian grew up, next to the sea, the houses of people—like her father –who’ve seen or will see no other place all have the bleached, splintered look of wood that washed up on the beach in some earlier winter. Even the houses that’ve just been sanded and painted seem like flotsam morphed into fixtures, and that is how you can tell them from the cottages of the people who spend a few weeks out of every year in such a town.

Likewise, true country houses—like the one in the countryside near the Rhine where Adam and some people he’d never seen before or would never see again huddled, curled or flopped through a harsh, endless winter—differ from the retreats of city people. The homes of peasants never shed their tattered shawls of autumnal dust and sunsets that abrade window frames before the season’s final rain.

And in a factory town, nothing is ever excavated from the layers of soot that settle on it.

On this block, the air is that of someone—mother, the lady whose name I never knew, any of the women who stayed—or something, like a worn winter coat, that’s survived another season, somehow. Leave for a while, come back, and those same people, their coats, their houses, are still there, looking more worn and a bit heavier, but not any older than you remember.

Survival into the next season. That’s all any of us do, whether we stay on this block or leave it. Survive: It’s the operative word of the uncertain, the desperate, the deprived, the poor. Every mother thought about it—for herself and her child—whenever she gave birth on this block. Mother’s even admitted that sometimes she wasn’t sure of how or if I or she would make it. To this day, I don’t know all of how or what she did. But in spite of the beatings and deaths I experienced here, I wouldn’t say I’ve had a particularly hard life. After all, in spite of everything, I don’t recall having gone hungry.

Still, I’ve always told—and convinced—whomever I’ve met that I was poor. I wasn’t looking for sympathy; I only found myself in situations where I needed to sum up my childhood in a word. And it fit.

Perhaps nobody would agree with it, but I’ve come up with a foolproof definition of poverty. It’s when nobody can give you—and you don’t have any—advice on how to live. All they can tell you about is survival. How they survived. How you’ll survive. How others didn’t survive. They can even tell you of “good” and “bad” ways to die and what’s worth dying for: love, country, god, whatever. But nobody knows how to live, or for what. That’s why one of the few books written by a male that seemed to me in any way truthful was Angela’s Ashes. The guy who wrote it grew up poor by anybody’s definition of the word—including mine. And, by the same token, a poor little prep school boy, Holden Caulfield, is equally impoverished. Only from deprivations like his, or Frank Mc Court’s, is a man capable of speaking the truth.

68. Their Stories

For all that I’m recalling now, there’s much I never could tell, even if somebody’d want to hear it, to hear me.

Not that I know so much, or more than anybody else in this room. Certainly not more than mother. For that matter, I’m not sure that what I know, what any of us has ever known, matters now. But, like this block, it’s all anybody really knows.

The man the cops found in the basement and tagged with my former name—that man confirmed what I’d suspected ever since the cops broke down Adam’s door too late to keep him from suffocating in gas fumes. The police report, and the stories I’d heard about Adam—and, for that matter, anything anybody might’ve said about me since I left this block—confirm one of the few iron-clad truths I’ve learned: When a man from this block dies, whether here or someplace else, nobody ever really knows the whole story about his death.

Sometimes you hear outright lies—like Adam was possessed by evil spirits. Or the man they found in the basement was me. Or that my former name was that of a sexual predator, who was killed in retribution (or retaliation, depending on who’s talking) for his preying on young boys. Or that it was done by someone he didn’t pay, or who didn’t pay him.

Mrs. Littington—who declared Adam one of the tuer Christ—said that her god had avenged himself on the people who killed his representative on earth. In the time she lived on this block, she never went to church, and I never heard her mention—except for what she said about Adam—deities or anything else that existed beyond her own life. I didn’t have the courage, or whatever, to point out this self-contradiction to her. For that matter, neither she nor anyone else ever explained what was going on when Jesus—sentenced to hang on a cross for a crime that would’ve gotten him community service in other places and times—rose from the dead three days after his death. If he was God in human form, how—why—could he die? Why would he deem such an improbable act necessary to atone for the alleged sins of people.

Why—from a God whose divine will brought Adam to Bergen Belsen and this block and me into the body of a man—were there so many?

None of it made sense; none of it could be pieced together, any more than the accounts of the men who managed to escape this block, however briefly. Nor did the stories of heroism or treason in the wars they fought, or the grotesque details of dismembered corpses found in the rivers, bas, oceans, lots, garages and other places near this block that are seen by nobody who’s from here.

Men have always lied, exaggerated, distorted, omitted and embellished when telling of each other’s deaths. It’s noting new, and it’s been called journalism, biography, history (especially military history) and psychology. My one and only disappointment with the female race, so far, if that so many of us have, for so long, simply echoed what we’ve heard.

67. Memory of a Season

It still amazes me how little’s changed here. Sure, the only people remaining from the block as I knew it are in this room now. If you’re one of those people who believes that any neighborhood is its people, then you’d think that the place I knew ceased to exist long ago, perhaps when I left this block. You’d be right, in a way, I guess.

When I think of change, I’m not thinking about which houses have disappeared and which ones have been built, or what stores opened and closed, or what kinds of cars are parked around here. To tell you the truth, I don’t recall many of the places, at least not exactly. I’m not completely sure—except for the house where Adam lived and the one where mother and I stayed—which ones were here and which weren’t. Maybe it’s just as well: I’ve never had attachments to rooms, furnishings or architectural details. Good thing, too: When you have to move from one place to another as often as I have, sentimental attachments are the spindly heels that can break under you as you step up onto a curb.

But then there’s something else I recognized as soon as I got here. Some may call it a “feeling in the air.” It has to do with the light, which is the only thing that truly defines any place. No matter where I’ve woken, I’ve always known where I was—or, at least, where I wasn’t—by the light of the place.

The light on this block, even though it changes through seasons, cannot be mistaken for any other. The kind I recall most clearly seems to’ve begun today, or within the past few days. The sky is overcast, but the air is not completely gray: It’s been tinged by shingles and painted wood that’ve just begun to show splinters that were hidden by summer shadows. The day is also tinged with flecks of rust escaping from crumbling bricks.

In other places, they call the season with this light “autumn,” and it’s pretty. Here, it’s fall and it’s not melancholy, not sad. It just is, and everybody knows that winter—with or without snow—follows. And the gray, the white, will fill the street, the alleyways and ground between the houses like ash. When it clears away, some of the people—the women—you saw during the fall will sit on stoops, or scrape and poke little patches of ground around their houses. And sunlight will glare off pores of skin—faces, then arms and sometimes legs—newly uncovered. For what seems a brief moment, the faded paint and flaking bricks fill your eyes with echoes of colors struggling to rise from gaps of soil between slabs of concrete.

This cycle of light, my most vivid recollection, is now the only reason I could ever have to return to this block after mother’s gone. And I’m sure it’ll never change.

66. For Them

Weddings were always for other people. Just like graduations, or any prize I’d heard about. They handed kids diplomas in the schools we attended, but I don’t remember anybody I know getting one. And the ones who exchanged vows—they always came from someplace else, away from this block. And we never saw them again.

Other people. For all I know, mother’d never been married. Or maybe she was never not-married. Not until I got away from this block did I realize that kids learn, at some time or another, their parents were children who probably didn’t know each other. Then there was the ceremony like the ones I used to see in church. For one brief moment, they were as clear, as unambiguous, as black and white—because they bathed in the glow of whatever color of glass was struck by that day’s light. That hue would tinge whatever pictures people carried with them—even after the marriage dissolved—like the sepia in old photographs.

Mother never talked about whoever fathered me, much less about whatever circumstances brought them together, or how they came apart. Or, for that matter, if they were ever really together in the first place. Or, for that matter, where—much less how—she came to have me by him.

Other people got married. Other people had children. The kids on this block are like the houses, the church, the stores on the avenue—they are always in a moment, one that extends from the first to the last anybody can recall. They’re always there; nobody knows who or what was there before them; nobody remembers when they’re gone. And nobody sees them graduating or getting married: If they do those things, they’re somewhere else.

But the funerals…Mother, now. The man who got my former name when they found his body in the basement. Sammy and Don—two men I called “uncle” until they ended up in caskets that weren’t opened while I was at their funerals. Anthony Giordano, who volunteered for the Navy because he knew he was going to get drafted, who came home in a body bag. David Held, who was drafted. And—I know I’m jumping back and forth in time, whatever that is—Jimmy McCulley, who, it was said, “fell off the pier”—so close to this block, though I’ve never seen it—where his uncle used to unload boats. Freddy du Maars—all I ever heard was that he “fell.”

And, of course, Adam. From him to mother, death was always somebody I knew well—or at least as anybody I’ve known since. Except for the man in the cellar, I felt sorrow for them but I could’ve felt even more than I did if I hadn’t felt relief—and yes, I admit, envious—that they were finally out of that endless moment we all occupied. For Adam, and now for Mother, my sense of relief is heightened because they were—are—at least to my knowledge—no longer suffering on this block.

Death happened to them: the only two people, I believe, with whom I’ve ever truly empathized. Other people—if I could in any way relate to or care about their experiences—I could only imagine, or just think about, whatever pain they might’ve conveyed in my direction.

I’ve been to other funerals since I left this block. For a while, it seemed that every week someone I met in a bar or on the street died of AIDS or was shot or beaten to death. I went to their funerals whenever I could, not because I thought it would change anything, but because of something Mother taught me: You give respect to people whether or not they know you’re giving it. If she’s right—and nothing I’ve seen tells me she isn’t—then respect is all you can give the dead if you’re going to give them anything at all.

For that alone, she deserves my respect. And of course for many other reasons, the first of which is that she did something I’ll never do—not even after the surgery: She gave birth. To me.

65. Too Late For Laments

Soon I will no longer have any need, or reason, to feel shame or to apologize. I can’t recall mother having done either, or that she ever expected one or the other of me. When I was a child, some kids stole other kids’ bikes or jackets, insulted each other by questioning each other’s sexuality or practices, or damaged or destroyed property. I did none of those things, although they were done to me. Certainly that didn’t make me any more moral than, or superior to, anyone else.

I realize now that you only learn about shame and contrition when you’ve had to express them yourself. The only such experience I had growing up was having to say something called “The Act of Contrition” during mass. I didn’t understand it, even after I looked up the word “contrition,” probably because it made no sense for me—or anyone, really—to say it. Even at such a young age, I realized how silly it was, and how it was even sillier to talk to someone who wasn’t there, especially if someone told you he was there but couldn’t tell you where, much less how or why.

For that matter, all apologies now seem absurd—now there’s a word I wish I’d known then!—in the way that alarms installed after a burglary seem pointless and useless. The deed is done; the doer is gone—mentally, if not physically. He’s gone on to other things, unless of course he’s rationalizing or gloating over what he’s done. In which case he isn’t going to apologize anyway.

Even if I’d given that man a chance to acknowledge his rape of me, it wouldn’t’ve changed him, or me, or anything. You could even say that if he could or would see how he’d violated me, he wouldn’t’ve said he was sorry. I wonder now whether that’s what mother thought.

And so it wouldn’t’ve made any sense, or changed anything, if I’d apologized for having retaliated—had I done such a thing—in the moment after he attacked me, or in the future. Beating, mutilating, killing him wouldn’t’ve been acts of rage, an emotion that precludes—some say precedes, but I don’t see how—sorrow.

Mother never expected apologies from me, even though nothing I’ve done, nothing I’ve become, justifies the difficulties I caused her. I’ll never know—though I can guess accurately, I think—whether she’d wanted or planned for me. Not that she ever implied, even in anger, that I constricted her life, as other parents have told children who became some of the people I’ve met since I left this block. Vivian’s father always reminded her of his abandoned ambitions toward a musical career, or that he’d played drums behind guitarists and singers whose records kids—and sometimes their parents—in my generation, even on my block, bought and listened to. Maybe mother had no such aspirations, simply because she didn’t have time to have them. But if she’d had dreams, I never heard about them.

It’s no surprise, I guess, that she never even made me apologize for not having aspirations of my own. For one thing, I was never sure I’d grow up to realize them. In fact, I was sure I wouldn’t live long enough, or that if I did I’d end up in jail or a mental hospital. That’s what happened to the young men here—or else they simply disappeared. Even if I survived to seventeen, eighteen years old on this block, I’d had no idea how I’d finish high school, much less go to college. Not that I’d want either one. School, for me, was always just a place where I was prey and supposed to get used to it. And expect no apologies, no expressions of shame from anyone.

Not that I would’ve expected anything from the other kids—mostly boys—or the teachers, the principal or anybody else. Kids beat up other kids in the hope that someone else wouldn’t beat them. They won fights, games, competitions—none of which mattered away from school, much less this block—so they wouldn’t have to experience defeat for the moment, a day or—they hoped—forever. They did what they did—just as I lied, stole, sold my body and killed—and offered no apologies or explanations for the same reasons I didn’t, mother didn’t, why nobody on this block did. You don’t—or perhaps you can’t—justify anything you do to survive, to make it from one moment to the next. Some people—we often hear about them in the news—may try to offer an expression of contrition, an acceptance of responsibility, for their deeds or those of their parents, long after they’re done. But they’re not lamenting the deeds themselves: Usually, they’re ruing some outcome of it. Like that scientist who said “I have become death!”– or something like that– long after he and his colleagues exploded the first atomic bomb.