Monkey Boy by Francisco Goldman (free ebook reader for pc txt) 📗

the platform between cars, snow blowing in around his legs, say into his walkie-talkie that it was going to be a long delay because the boy’s jeans were stuck, or maybe he said frozen, to the iced-over nose of the locomotive. The police forensic unit had to get the jeans off in a way that preserved them as evidence, and a special fluid and applicator had been sent for. Flashing red lights suffused the snow and ice-laced window, turning it into a nearly translucent slice of intricately veined living tissue. An image from one of José Martí’s New York City crónicas came to me: Martí standing under the elevated tracks after a blizzard as blood drizzles and drips down through the cindery air onto the snow around him, some onto his bowler hat and the shoulders of his overcoat, and he realizes that a man has thrown himself in front of the train that just roared past overhead. I used it in The House of Pain, that incident. Martí is walking along, musing on his miserable marriage, blaming his wife, and it happens, blood like red rain on snow. Outside the stopped train, as afternoon turned to evening, the snow kept falling, darkly tumbling past the lit-up windows of houses with backyards abutting the railroad tracks. I resigned myself to missing Borgini’s book presentation. So many times when I was a boy I’d walked on the railroad tracks of my town, often long past nightfall, passing unnoticed behind the backyards of houses just like those. I could walk a long way on one rail, putting one foot in front of the other, without falling off. Had the boy who committed suicide lived in one of those houses, and when he heard the first still-far-off blast of the train’s horn, had he crossed his backyard to the tracks? I remembered the couple of boys in my high school class who’d committed suicide and the three who’d died of heroin overdoses, but I especially found myself thinking about Brian Cavanaugh, whom we’d called Space. During a snowball fight alongside the railroad tracks, Space’s little brother lost his footing and stumbled or slid into the path of an oncoming commuter train and was killed. Space, still in elementary school at St. Joe’s, was there and witnessed it. Everyone in high school who’d previously gone to school with Space at St. Joseph’s, including Marianne, used to say that he’d drastically changed after his brother’s death. That he went from being an A student altar boy to being the kind of kid who, like me, didn’t try in school at all. But Space also became much more of a caustic rebel than I ever was. Even Ian Brown used to steer clear of his fearless kamikaze sarcasm.

Stepping out of South Station onto Atlantic Avenue, I head over, like I almost always do after arriving in Boston by train, to the Congress Street Bridge. My footsteps always lead me there. A cold wind is blowing in off the harbor, but it’s only a couple blocks away. I’m thinking about Space and the friendship we had in the tenth grade. Space’s father, George Cavanaugh, was a banker in Boston and supposedly when he was drunk at night he’d even say, It should have been you, trying to save your little brother, who fell in front of the train, but all you did was watch. Notoriously mean fathers, meaner than anybody else’s, that’s what linked me to Space, like a pact between us whose terms didn’t need spelling out. Everyone knew about “George” and “Bert” and their distinct personalities, Space’s father’s clenched fury and disparaging, thin acid voice that his son was so good at imitating, mine with his snarling mockery, shouting, and violent rages. Our fathers hated us, and we publicly hated them back, flaunting our mix of martyrdom and heroism. Every day Space and I came to school with some new hilariously horrifying or just horrifying story to tell. On some school nights, in the a.m. hours, I used to get up from my bed, sneak out of the house, and run—how tirelessly and swiftly I could run!—through the silent dark streets to Space’s house. Space always let me in through the back door, and we’d hang out in his basement, drinking beer he’d snitched from his father and chilled in their meat freezer. Sometimes we’d sip straight gin, smoke pot, and blow the smoke out a window, and we’d stretch out on the old sofas down there, hardly talking to each other, listening in our introspective complicit stupors to records with the volume low. Father, Yes son, I want to kill you, mother … arrrrrRRRR! Space leaning forward to lift the stylus and play that song again, over and over we listened to it, silently or just above a whisper mouthing Jim Morrison’s words and anguished scream, grimacing and gesticulating. After two hours or so, I’d go home, sneak back into bed before my father woke for work.

The Congress Street Bridge looks out on the Boston Tea Party ship wharf where, in the spring of my senior year of high school and into that first Boston Bicentennial summer, I had an unlikely job as a tour guide. Unlikely because out of all the local boys who would have given anything for that job, why me? But no one else had a Mamita like mine, always exhorting: Don’t forget, you’re Guatemalan too. Maybe not the most helpful advice for growing up in a town like ours, but I’d responded by becoming an obsessed American Revolution nerd. It was the best thing my mother could have done, I know now, all her reminding that I was “Guatemalan too” embedding in me the map of an escape route into my own future. Even back then, in my attempt to counter it, look what it led to, an ineluctable bad fate turned evitable, because I doubt I would have gotten into a respectable college without my job