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The
Quality of Tears
At first glance
I mistook her for a child. She was tiny,
but it was also the way she dressed, in a short dark pleated shirt and denim jacket that made me think Catholic schoolgirl. And it was the size of the man she clung to; he
was large and boyish with a drop of light brown hair that all but covered a face hung low above her mass of inky curls. The skirt, then, was fashion; they were lovers
besotted with mutual affection. It’s hopeless I thought—between my nearsightedness and the head cold that’d
set up shop between my eyes, all visual impressions were unreliable that week. Even under the dim fluorescence of the 50th Street subway station, the throbbing forced my normally wide-open eyes to squint.
But my ears still
worked, and as I grew close I heard unmistakable sobs. My instinct was to look away, but away meant into the faces of others standing nearby, leaning against walls and the
station’s blue pillars decked with black-and-white placards stamped “50”, balancing bags and briefcases
as they paced and shifted their weight. They also heard her muffled chokes, and while some looked on shamelessly, others gazed elsewhere—but not for
long. Her tragic song sucked them in,
and soon averted eyes rose above the distractions of books and newspapers to follow the drama. The sound followed me down the platform. I pulled out my paper, but as the seconds dwindled, I found myself praying
for a shrieking train to obliterate her pathetic whimpers.
Emotions are windows
into the souls of others. As a witness I’ve
grown immune to most;the midtown gauntlet serves up a steady barrage of raucous joy, sniping petulance and goggle-eyed wonder;
such impressions usually last as long as it takes to cross a congested street. Public tears are something else. The soul is
past hope—certainly past caring for matters of propriety. It’s the overheard conversation that makes me wince,
a sign that certain madness (fleeting, I hope) lurks beneath our composed surfaces awaiting the instant something (or someone)
pushes a button that bursts the dam tumbling us down to the depths of despair. All of us walk that tightrope, and when I see
a man or woman succumb I’m reminded of my own vulnerabilities, my own bottled pain.
A few years back I was walking north
on Lafayette in the dead of
winter. Up ahead a young man wielding a
large carryall hailed a cab on the corner of East 4th. The headlights of oncoming traffic revealed a
face streaked with tears, and as I passed I heard it, that terrible cry of someone so waylaid by misery that comfort might
elude him for some time to come. That face—those wails—pursued me for days. My imagination cooked up scenarios: he’d
just broken up with his lover—the bag contained remnants of the failed relationship, like changes of clothes, shoes,
toiletries and all sorts of other accumulated crap. Or perhaps a friend had just died and he was on an errand of commiseration, off to share his weeping with other mutual
friends of the deceased. Later came the
realization that these weren’t original thoughts—I was merely projecting past experience, moments from my life
that’d driven me to the same show of despair on similar streets.
Unlike the man on Lafayette, the distraught girl on the platform had someone
to absorb her staccato punches of exhausted breaths. I put on my glasses for another look. She was still holding on, he was still holding her up, holding her head with his large hands against the lapels of
a dark gray suit, a shield against the prying eyes of strangers peering inside the open door of one’s lost resolve.
If I'd words for the texture of his hands,
Rough would do, as would worn, weather'd or dry.
My father's lives etched along bold fingers,
Dusked palms, and creased knuckles cracked with the cry
Of a guilty murderer's confession.
When he revealed he'd killed a man, my mind,
Submerged with selfish eighteen year-old woes,
Came up for air, put childish things behind.
His hand's weary history was complex.
Bald assumptions of labor and heavy toil,
Ground into hands that once clapped tight my own
Naïve paws, made way for turbulent coil.
That bleak day I ceased taking for granted
Hand's records mired with germs of truth slanted.
Two Boys
Once I believed, a long time ago, that he and I were different. Others
thought so too, as I’d discover over the years. Even after his death, friends
and acquaintances might recall something he said, a peculiar mannerism that made me cringe, or an act of kindness or derision—their
reminders forced recognition of how dissimilar we were. Memory prompts memory: such recollections begat long forgotten moments
of other’s first impressions. Whenever I’d introduce him or he’d
introduce me as “the spouse,” the way revelation flickered across the outsider’s face was something to see:
acknowledgement mixed with surprise or amusement, a raised eyebrow, a secret smile that wore itself a hair too tight.
He was tall. For ninth months of the year he wore skin so pale, our joke was that he glowed in the dark. The bright white epidermis disappeared in summer when his skin took on a glowing hue, as if he’d
been rinsed in amber. He had to burn himself to achieve this, something he did
with a grudging acceptance. The tediousness of his transformation from snowy
to swarthy—the peeling, the pricking pain—brought a dual discomfort to our relationship: while the butterfly shed
his flaky cocoon, he would not be touched without unleashing a whelp of self-pity.
I was average, though he called me
short. I had no issues with the sun, being a perfect mix of my mother, a high-yellow
gal from the South, and my father, a man whose densely dark skin resembled the bark of a tree under the moon. The summer tipped my complexion to Daddy’s side of the spectrum, but I was immune to sun damage. Whatever burns I collected were the result of cooking accidents, or with the advent
of puberty, the shaving depilatory my older brothers swore by to keep ingrown hairs in check.
The thick gray paste that smelled like month-old eggs often left my face raw, but these were mundane abrasions after
a childhood filled with scrapes, fractures and periodic beatings designed to make—and keep—me a good boy.
I don’t think his folks ever
touched a hair on his chestnut head. He was an only child; being the sixth of
ten children, I saw him as simultaneously exotic and lucky. Like an Army brat,
he’d spent his childhood traveling from one midwestern town to the next, all to accommodate his father’s rise
as a dog food salesman for Ralston-Purina. By the time high school rolled around,
his folks had purchased a classic ranch out in Montgomery, a tony suburb of Cincinnati. It was worlds away from Corryville, where my family
occupied two crammed floors over a storefront. It was a neighborhood where, if
a white face appeared, the supposition was that they were either selling insurance, driving a patrol car or passing through
on their way to one of the numerous hospitals built on its borders.
He was two years older than me. Well read (an English major!), he knew his geography and could argue politics. I never thought I’d catch up to his intelligence, or what I’d perceived
as his larger experience of the world. My sense of direction was so bad, my brothers
joked that I couldn’t find my way from the living room to the kitchen with a trail of breadcrumbs. I was smart about inconsequential things: movie trivia, Hollywood gossip culled from biographies borrowed
from the library. Before we met I’d acquired an extensive knowledge of
plays but he knew literature, had actually read Faulkner, Kafka, Donne. My only
satisfaction was that he couldn’t spell worth a damn.
Now I believe that such differences
were superfluous—it was our sole similarity that mattered. Even after we’d
grown older, and in the brief years after we parted, neither of us managed to grow up.
For some reason I’d survive this gnawing peccadillo. He wouldn’t
be so lucky.
Boy Meets Boy
“Hi—you’re Eee-nis, right?
Baritone, breathless: without warning, the voice over his right shoulder brushed his ear in a sigh of panic, as if
the speaker had been chased by dogs. He hadn’t heard footsteps, or the
usual whoosh from the door separating the auditorium’s main stairwell from this tiny chamber that housed the theater
department’s bulletin board and green room. Ennis looked up. It was the grad student—the one with a thing for Pinter, and the object of his yearlong crush-at-first-sight.
“I’m Dan Seymour, god you’re hard to pin down.” He extended his hand and Ennis felt the warmth
of its soft boniness. He was a good five inches taller than the young black man,
less skinny in person than from a distance.
“It’s Ennis.”
“Excuse me?”
“Ennis—‘Dennis’ without the D, if that helps.”
“Oops, I’m sorry.” A pained look blushed across his broad face, and Ennis immediately regretted
the correction, for while he was self-conscious about many things, he possessed not a whit of vanity about his name. The “penis” rhyme was the most common mangling, the one adults readily
embraced. It was benign compared to what he’d endured in grade school:
Anacin was popular then, but so was Anus. His tact had been to pretend he hadn’t
heard them, rather than feed their heckling flames. One day his father overheard,
but it was Ennis who bore the brunt of his scolding: “That was my Daddy’s name, don’t you let them kids
mess it up.”
Charged with defending the name of a man he’d never met, he hit on the Dennis mnemonic soon after since that’s
what most people assumed they’d heard whenever he was introduced. What
the grad student didn’t know was how much pleasure Ennis took in the mispronunciations.
It happened so frequently that now he took it in stride, along with the speaker’s physical manifestations of
discomfort: just before the unsuspecting victim stumbled over his tongue, perhaps their brows would knit, or the eyes might
widen. He’d learn to spot such tells—they helped him gauge to what
degree how much of the speaker’s embarrassment he’d have to assuage.
Quickly he bailed the tall, lanky man out with one of his common rejoinders.
“Blame my father—it’s all his fault.”
Dan's smile curled with the quick impatience of someone who loathed public humiliation—though for
the moment, the only witness was the lone nineteen year-old undergrad. “Jean-Louis
said I should talk to you. I’m doing The Dumbwaiter for my directing
workshop. It’s a two-character piece, they’re Cockneys, kinda petty
criminals, but they’re also yes-men…”
Ennis
let him ramble, though he’d heard it before. Jean-Louis Baldet was Ennis’
acting teacher, and the advisor to the theater department’s MA directing candidates.
A month ago the dynamic Frenchman hosted an afternoon session to introduce graduate directors to the department’s
acting majors. Maybe Dan hadn’t noticed him in the back row; Ennis, on
the other hand, couldn’t take his eyes off the mysterious man he’d first noticed the previous fall, stalking rehearsals
for Jean-Louis’ production of The Devils; from the stage some nights, Ennis watched him sit cross-legged in a
corner on the Wilson Auditorium stage, or looking up from the dark cavern of the theater’s orchestra seats.
He’d floated around of the corners of the younger man’s consciousness like a ghost, but right now he
was close enough to touch. Ennis took in the huge gray eyes—imploring,
cat-like—and the large triangular nose. Like Ennis’s, the features
were almost too big for his face. How did Jean-Louis put it? Yeah: out of scale
for real life, but perfect for the stage. A big chestnut brush of a moustache
tickled his nostrils; flecked with glints of rust, it obscured the tiny bump of upper lip like a veil. Long licks of chestnut framed his heart-shaped face, caressing the neck and chin, a James Taylor album
cover sprung to life.
He had to turn him down. What he couldn’t tell Dan, or anyone,
was that he was exhausted. Right after The Devils, his professors had
granted a leave of absence so he might make his regional theater debut—though with the proviso that he’d make
up the missed work. The scramble was on to get it done by the end of the year;
aside from that, there was also his job to consider. Those hours were a given;
he needed the money.
But Jean-Louis wouldn’t accept the fatigue excuse. Like all gurus,
the professor inspired Ennis’s misguided sense of obligation; he’d championed the actor’s potential all
year and in return, Ennis didn’t want to appear ungrateful, or worse, lazy. He’d
have to come up with an excuse that would insure a reprieve.
He let his gaze drop, as if the answer lay on the hallway floor. For
the first time he noticed Dan’s bare feet. Oddly bright against the green
cement, his blunt toes looked as if he’d spent a lifetime kicking walls. They
curled and flexed provocatively; sprigs of tawny hair sprinkled their tops, trailed up the instep before disappearing beneath
the frayed cuffs of his coveralls.
He might as well been naked. Somewhere from the depths, a “yes”
came out of the actor’s mouth, followed by a fear he’d not felt since two years before, when he’d first
stepped on stage.
The Boss Ted
Davidson’s desk was perched on a platform in the middle of Save Discount’s headquarters, so regardless of where
you were in the store, his head and shoulders were always visible, like a judge poised to rain down wrath. Hell sitting on top of heaven, one of the female cashiers mumbled,
though everyone knew why he’d situated himself on such a promontory: from there he could see his employees and his especial
bane, the occasional shoplifter. He wasn’t one of those men who’d stand
for his business walking out the front door.
When he smiled his face radiated a kind of icy bitterness, and from the beginning
I’d always found it difficult to meet his gaze, a look that simultaneously challenged as it stripped you down. It was of a piece with his voice, masculine but bright as a thunderclap, a sound likely
to make you jump if you weren’t expecting it. Those impressionable aspects were
nothing compared to the sight of his hands. Ted’s fingers were stubby and thick,
like sausages that managed to escape the butcher’s window. They looked as if
they pumped iron instead of a huge Victor cash register, or the massive electric calculator whose keys he spent the
majority of a day’s hours tapping as he sat in his throne-like office surrounded by pillar-like shelves of men’s
shaving needs on side and women’s hair needs on the other. His fingers exuded confidence, right down to their stare-worthy nails, exaggerated pale bumps with fine ridges
like the shells of snails that surfaced and pulled themselves along the moist cement walk adjoining my mother’s garden
after a strong Cincinnati rain.
He was my boss from the week after my 14th
birthday to the week before I moved to New York at
the age of 22. He owned Save Discount Inc., a quartet of health and beauty-aid stores
that served downtown Cincinnati exclusively, and it was there that I worked as a stock clerk and cashier, though such janitorial
tasks as window-washing and all-around maintenance also feel within my purview. A
family affair: me and my older brothers Alan and Jeffrey made up the primary menial workforce (Ted’s two boys Scott
and Paul joined our retail chain gang for extra cash during the summer). Our father,
who worked for a restaurant supply store next door, sold Ted on the idea of hiring us. For
him it was a boon—his financial obligation to us ended the day we signed on at Save Discount, not counting room and
board. I can still hear him crow: “You got yo’ own money now, you can
take care of yo’ selves.”
Ted was white, Kentucky-born and rumored to be a prodigy who’d graduated
from high school at the age of 14. His short, liberally salted hair organized with
a side part, he was icily handsome with scornful gray-blue eyes that flashed like the passing of overhead clouds; of average
height, Ted was so physically swift that the sound of his walk preceded him—this kinetic impression lingered even when
he stood stock-still. Though I can’t ever recall him in a jacket, he always
wore a white shirt and tie.
I’ve only feared two men in my life: my father and Ted Davidson. My youthful paranoia convinced me theirs was a conspiracy to keep me cowed, for light moments when either man
was around were few. My father’s commandments were gospel at home: “You
don’t do what I tell you, well, you can get the hell of my house.” Daddy’s
occasional whippings or slaps were pro-forma; a like aura infused those hours at work, though Ted never raised his hand. Instead he’d hiss something like, “You
still stocking those shelves? My grandmother could do a better job—what in the
fuck is taking you so long? You need me to light a fire under your ass?”
His words felt indivisible from the imagined blows of those swift thick hands. In my mind, the two men’s voices ran together, echoed each other in their south-of-the-Ohio
River drawl and their bright startling timbres. With Ted, too slow a response to a
question or a command elicited withering retorts, ones that left me feeling stupid and impotently angry. No one could make the word “boy” sound more demeaning but when I complained, my father accused me
of willful laziness: “They ain’t nuthin but words—you got another job lined up?”
Ted’s presence exacerbated my minimum wage blues. I hadn’t developed an instinct to rebel; if I’d been a different kind of adolescent, he and I would
surely have come to blows. But I loathed conflict; I was obedient to a fault. Perhaps my father thought the work might exhume some toughness from my scrawny frame, but
in the brightly lit confines of Save Discount, I felt less an employee, more a servant. Ted’s
dictum, “Never argue with a customer,” guaranteed a fair amount of browbeating from strangers, but my compliance
didn’t end there.
If someone broke a bottle of hand lotion, it was my job to mop up the sticky
mess. If another store ran out of an item, Ted would send one of us off with the product
and a warning not to dawdle: of course he knew how long such errands should take. Dust was verboten at Save Discount Inc., so unless I was assisting a customer, unloading
a delivery truck, or in the stock room ripping up empty boxes, I worked the aisles with a feather duster in my hands—like
someone’s maid.
I made sure there were “no holes” on the shelf, arranging the merchandise
to make it look as if the store was always fully stocked. A half-hour before closing,
it fell to the clerks to sweep and mop. All but one of the stores had flecked butter-colored
linoleum floors, and each night I’d politely edge around the remaining customers as my eyes scanned the floor for bits
of gum, sticky Lifesavers or some other broom-defying obstacle that I’d remove with a single-edge Gem blade. After sweeping the aisles with a push broom, I’d swab them with a heavy mop, a callus-etching activity
that made me loathe the smell of Pine-Sol forever. Throughout, Ted was always five
steps ahead of your inevitable mistake: he couldn’t understand why the simple task he’d assigned hadn’t
been thought of and completed before he’d thought to utter it.
Keeping an eye out for shoplifters was also my job, and one I dreaded. The “suspects” were almost always black; sometimes they were obviously riff-raff,
but often they fell into the gray area of a customer who might be merely killing time in the store, or taking a touch too
long to make up his or her mind about a product. I lived in dread of confronting someone
about a pack of gum, or tube of Chapstick. Ted and his other store managers sensed
my reluctance, which made them ride me even harder: “You got to get real close, you got to stick to him.” Fortunately I never had to get tough, but the times when Ted did, he seemed to actually
enjoy it—thank God he didn’t carry a gun.
The day I left Save Discount felt as if I’d been let out of jail. But as they say in the movies, escape is futile. Bounteous,
multitudinous retail Manhattan, city of stores, won’t let me forget. Whenever I encounter an empty shelf at Duane Reade, or an indifferent (or incompetent) cashier at Macy’s,
the same involuntary thought murmurs: If this were Save Discount, Ted Davidson would have someone’s head…
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