The Nearness

The Nearness I grew up just the other side of the tracks, by the railroad, near but always outside the good part of Brooklyn. In those days, my mother would read and reread the travel section in the Sunday paper. About places that were warmer and sweeter. Places promising each week that they were near, or at least within reach. But seeing just how far away those places really were, she would put the paper out with the garbage. As useless as old chicken bones. My father spent his days trying to get near the things he wanted for his family. A better job, enough of the never-enough kind of money, a house big enough to hold his dreams for himself, his wife and young son. Things that were somehow always just beyond his reach. On Mondays when he took out the trash, he would see my mother’s thrown-away hopes for some kind of better Elsewhere. So he would walk the few blocks to the local produce and buy her some day-old roses from the remainder bin. The kind that smell sweet for only a day or so before they wilt. That was enough to hold back the not enough. And it drew them nearer to each other. That temporary wilt-too-soon sweetness. Every night he would head out trying once more to drag all they wanted closer. He came home at dawn, bone tired and beaten down from the reaching for some unreachable want, but somehow larger,too. Like the trying and failing, the sacrificing and enduring are the only way for a heart to become greater. But the better jobs always went to someone else, and in spite of all those graveyard shifts, that nail-it-down kind of happiness was always a step faster, always howling ahead on the train to Elsewhere. And every time the train howled, my mother would take a breath, lower her eyes and pretend there wasn’t a roar every hour on the hour at the bottom of her heart. I began to feel the rattle of the train each night in my dreams. I learned to listen to the howl in my parents’ eyes. I could hear it in my mother’s gaze and my father’s stare across the tracks at the brighter lights beyond. The year I turned sixteen my father finally lost his job. The house went as well, and happiness, once just beyond the tracks, was suddenly much farther away. The only thing free in that town was hope, but I could see that it, too, was asking more than they had. Like so many other things that year, hope packed up and went Elsewhere. And my father didn’t know anything to do but try and chase it down in another town and another job. So he sold what he could and loaded what was left into a station wagon. Then he stared at the map, trying to see which Elsewhere would let the kind of life they wanted near. At sixteen I was old enough to think I knew better. But I was dirt dumb and iron stubborn so I decided to stay on alone. There were fights and tears. Angry words thrown out, the kind you hear echoing back at you for years, wrestling you down with regret in the middle of the night. And there was a new sadness in my mother’s eyes. I see it still. That sharpness I put there. The night before they finally left my father did the only thing he knew to do for her shaken and crumbling heart. He bought her some day-old roses. And that dawn I watched as he prayed that their temporary sweetness might somehow be enough before turning out onto the interstate headed for Elsewhere. I got a job and then another and then a couple more. I spent a few nights shivering on a park bench. I slept in church pews until they threw me out for praying with my eyes shut. I begged my way onto friends’ couches. I wore out welcomes and tested the patience and kindness of anyone that ever tried to help me. I was ungrateful and reckless and carried a chip on my shoulder the size of a redwood. Finally, I scraped enough money together to afford a room in a beaten down boarding house in the bad part of town. I went to school, too, but for the most part I was waiting for the train to take me to the life I could hear howling in my dreams. That year for the first time, all around me, I began to feel the nearness. The nearness of what I thought was love—the nearness to a girl, her breath on my cheek, her head on my shoulder. But it also brought the nearness of loss—the kind of ache you never really outdistance, that always comes wrapped inside the kind of beauty you can’t ever quite forget. All I wanted was what would be, certain that it would bring only success and happiness. But I knew nothing of the terrible, the unbearable that comes welded to it all. And I knew nothing of the part in each of us that has to be broken and spent to be changed. To pay for all we hope to become. Each day I would sit in class next to my friend Kenny, listening to the drone of geometry. Kenny’s father beat him up regularly. Many days he wore the black and blue of it around his eyes, like a birthmark. His mother finally left, abandoning them for another town and another man, which turned out to be just another hope. She thought a better life was near but it turned out to be much farther than she had reckoned. There is really only one kind of life. It gets cut up by circumstance into different shapes and disguised so we can believe it’s somehow better than our own. But scrape a little at any life and you’ll find the same tangle of hope and heartache. In math class some days I would look into Kenny’s face and all I could see was an unbalanced equation. He was the remainder, the variable that would never fit. All his old man saw when he looked at his face was hers. So he hated him . . . and loved him . . . then hated him some more. And each night the old man’s fists tried to erase him like he was a wrong answer on a chalk board. I was always bad at math. But back then all I wanted was a way to explain the square root of hope. All I wanted was to solve the hypotenuse of my own hunger. So every day in class I would shut the book, close my eyes and try to figure how someday I might finally learn to subtract the fear . . . or divide the longing . . . or multiply the hope. But there is no school for all that. So I would study Kenny’s face instead. He was my primer. And sometimes, I could feel the nearness of living trapped beneath his bruises. Waiting. That autumn I took yet another job working weekends busing tables at an Italian restaurant out by Coney Island that turned out to be run by the mob. They were working that part of the city with some real estate scam. One of their guys owned the place and they’d meet there every weekend to get paid and then loaded. They would line their new Cadillacs up in the dirt lot out back then go in to slow dance with their girls to the trio that played the same set list each week. Sinatra, of course, Tony Bennett, some Charlie Rich. The mob guys all had the same haircut. They all wore wide lapel suits and see-through black socks and pinky rings. They all laughed too hard at their own jokes and squinted at every stranger. They ate too much and drank too much and had red florid faces. Your basic walking heart attacks. And they all made this choking sound when they talked—an accent. Sicilian. It sounded like they were grabbing the words by the throat and trying to drown them. That accent would get thick when they were talking hard and low about some guy that refused to get in line. Once or twice I heard it in muffled curses when they had some poor bastard in the alley behind the kitchen trying to beat some silence into him. Mercy makes a sound when it’s dying. It always cries out and pleads at first. Then it mumbles, a terrible pointless prayer before it resigns itself. I have heard it many times. Then it dies quietly. Everything they said was stained by that sound. The sound of dying mercy. They all carried guns,too,but you could only see them strapped on if they reached too far for one more anisette or cannoli. They kept them within reach, I suppose, as a way of reminding themselves that loss was always just around the corner. They thought they could somehow kill it along with the mercy they strangled daily. None of these mooks was Michelangelo. They were mostly just muscle, used to slapping people around. It was just a way of life with them. Like breathing and walking. A guy steps out of line and he gets slapped down. He sees something he shouldn’t and maybe he catches a beating. He says something to the wrong guy and suddenly he’s in an alleyway staring at eternity and praying it isn’t black. One night in Manhattan I saw some of this same crew drag a guy out into an alley off Prince Street. He saw too much and knew too much and talked too much. Seeing and knowing are virtues, but talking is a sin. And he talked to the wrong people. That night as they dragged him out and wrestled him down he kept begging, “Please, no . . . please.” One of these mutts had a steak knife and I remember the moment the talker realized what was coming. He stopped struggling and a terrible silence enveloped him. It only took a moment for them to do away with their worry and every word he might ever say, along with his tongue. He let out a shriek like an animal in pain and started crying like a hurt child. One of them laughed then kicked it, the tongue, into the gutter, where all unspoken words finally settle. As they let him up, mouth full of blood and silence, I couldn’t help but think he realized he would never speak again. Never talk to a cop but now also never whisper in a woman’s ear or call out to a son, never hail a cab or order a cup of coffee, never sing to himself on a side street late at night . . . and never ever cry out to God except in that unspoken echo that waits in the back of a man. He let out a terrible wordless howl. The kind of sudden despair that wraps itself around you and never lets go because you don’t have the words to beg it to anymore. I stood in the shadows, trembling. Some uptown boy scout, down there buying weed on the corner of Prince and Broadway, watched the whole thing from a parked car. “Stop . . . Stop!” he hollered. “For the love of God, stop! It’s not right. It’s not right.” After, one of their crew walked over to him. Leaning in the open window he quietly said, “It ain’t wrong or right, kid. It’s just living . . . like dark following day. No one tells the dark it’s wrong each night. That’s just how it is. So listen buddy boy. You be the day. We’ll be the dark.” Working that mob place one Saturday night, I tried taking away a plate from one of these fat hoods, a made guy they called Salvatore. “Are you finished with your manicotti, sir?” I asked. One of the mooks howled, “Manicotti? Sal, listen to this kid. Maroneeee!” Sal looked up. “Where you from, kid?” I gazed back. Blank stare. “I mean where are your people from?” I stuttered, “I’m . . . Irish . . . sir.” “Irish.” He grimaced. “No wonder. It’s not manicotti, kid. Repeat after me. Manigottttthhzzzttt. You try.” “Manicotti,” I whispered. They all started wheezing and laughing too hard and squinting at me like I was some poor bastard boy left in the woods and raised by Irish wolves. I tried again. I reached down like I was going to cough and couldn’t quite get the phlegm out of me. It felt like I was drowning in the word. “Manigothhhhhhht.” “See that.” Sal grabbed me by the ear. “Irish here is learning. Probably grow up to be a cop.” And the table erupted in laughter. “Stop it, Sally. Leave him alone,” one of the mobster girls said. She was tall and curvy and had a sweet smile and too much makeup, the kind that if she brushed up against your cheek would leave a mark. “He’s just a kid. Can’t you see how scared he is?” The truth is, I was terrified. Sal stared hard at her and hissed, “Oh that’s right. You like them Irish guys. Like that fireman from Bensonhurst.” His demeanor changed to a snarl at the memory. “What happened to him, Angela? No . . . body . . . knows where that maricone disappeared to.” One of the guys at the table said, “You want to find that mick go look for the pieces in the Gowanus Canal,” and started laughing. But he stopped when he saw Sal staring hard and cold at him. Angela murmured defensively, “That was nothing, Sal. You know it was nothing, honey. This boy . . . just leave him alone.” Then smiling, trying to defend me, “Besides, he’s kinda cute.” She reached up and brushed the hair off my forehead and I could feel a terror in me at the nearness of her. Sal said, “Oh yeah? You like the little Irish punk so much? Dance with him.” The trio was playing that old Charlie Rich standard, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World. They played it over and over every weekend because the mob girls swooned for it. I suppose it helped them pretend these guys were just misunderstood romantics instead of thugs that smacked them around all week and always regretted it in time to get laid each Saturday night. Charlie Rich sang again and again. “Tell her I’m sorry.” Story of their lives. Angela turned away. But Sal, angry now, said, “No, you like the kid so much, dance with him.” He squinted hard at me and then at her and I could see the meanness starting to percolate in him. Angela, a little afraid now, lowered her eyes and whispered, “Sally—” He glared at her and hissed, “No . . . dance!” He was trying to embarrass her. Humiliate her with me, like I was a prop. She looked down, swallowed hard then took my hand and led me to the dance floor. All the other couples stopped and stepped aside until it was just me and this mobster lady alone in front of the band. I had never danced before. I had never even touched a woman. She put my hands around her waist and then her hands on my shoulders. And in a low voice said, “Don’t be afraid. Just lean in. Sway . . . that’s right. It’ll be all right, honey . . . just sway with the music,” she whispered. The singer began to croon. I started to sway but my feet didn’t move. She glanced defiantly at Sal’s table, then carefully rested her head on my shoulder. I felt her settle a little closer, trying to put my awkwardness at ease. I can remember feeling like I was changing into glass, becoming transparent. I was certain she could see my heart leaping in me. And I suddenly knew what a pane of glass must feel the moment before a rock comes crashing through it. Certain that something is hurtling toward it, that it will be broken, changed forever. She drew me a little closer and I had a feeling for the very first time that there was something coming for me. Not Sal. Not his gun. Not this girl. But something behind them all. Something behind everything. I felt it reaching in and tapping on me, looking through me and marking me as something that would someday have to be broken. I turned my head and saw her glance at Sal. He was squinting hard and cold at her. And I felt her tremble a little, like she knew there was a beating waiting for her. Maybe not tonight or tomorrow, but soon. I was terrified at the feel of her arms around me . . . at the nearness of it all. But I felt something else as well. Some part at the very center of me wanted to protect this girl from what we both knew was coming. Protect her with my skinny sixteen-year-old arms and my glass heart. The music swirled and we swayed. And the song seemed suddenly sad to me. Like it was trying to apologize for every flaw hidden in every heart. Like it was trying in vain to absolve us all. She was scared and her makeup, now all over my shoulder, was running because she was crying a little. But she smiled bravely at me and then hid her eyes. The song faded into a vast silence and she reached up and touched me on the cheek. Then she looked at me like I was an ancient relic from some long-ago kind of life she could barely remember. “That’s enough," Sal said. As I let go she grabbed my hand and squeezed it hard. Then she disappeared to find a place to fix her face. I started to pick up a dish and Sal grabbed my arm. “Let me hear it Irish.” “Manicotti,” I whispered through gritted teeth.They all laughed so hard the table shook. I walked past the dance floor where the couples were returning, then turned into the kitchen breathing hard and feeling my temper rise. “Manicotti,” I shouted. Then I turned and threw the plate at the wall and it broke into a dozen pieces. I would get off from the mob place at about 2 a.m. They paid me all of $12 a night. That winter there was a gas crisis, some kind of embargo, and suddenly there were long lines at all the gas stations. So I spent a couple mornings each week waiting in a line to pour that $12 into my tank. Every Saturday night after work my friend Kenny would meet me, always smelling like beer and cigarette butts. And we would walk past the lot filled with brand new Cadillacs. Kenny was the kid in every school on permanent detention. There was never any rule he didn’t bend until it broke. Instead of weakening him, his father’s beatings made him defiant—to everything. It happens like that sometimes. Kenny was sure he was right even when he knew he was wrong. He practiced his slouch and smoked from the time he was eleven. He was reckless in the way people are when they stop caring about themselves. It was like he discovered the world was cruel too early and that nearness to cruelty left him wanting only to match it with his own. He was willful and full of contempt. He was ruined, in a way, but in some other essential way, remained unbroken. And I loved that about him.It seemed like bravery to me at the time. It still does in a way. That night he opened the trunk of his Mustang and pulled out a two-foot length of siphon hose and a glass milk bottle. I followed him over to a yellow Fleetwood Cadillac at the far end of the lot. We ducked down and he whispered, “Watch this.” He stuffed the hose into the tank. Then he put the other end in his mouth. He inhaled hard on it and a torrent of gasoline came rushing out. He stuck the hose into the bottle and spat the gas into the dirt. In a minute the bottle was full. “These Guidos will never miss a gallon,” he said. “Now you.” “Kenny,” I hesitated. “I don’t know.” “You want to wait in that gas line for an hour tomorrow? C’mon—they owe you.” I nodded and we crept to the next Caddy. I remember it was black and had fins and the white walls were covered with mud. I stuffed the hose into the tank, then inhaled as hard as I could. I felt my mouth fill with gasoline. It burned a little like it was looking for something to explode in me. I swallowed half of it and started choking. Kenny grabbed the hose and jammed it into another milk bottle. And a minute later I had a gallon of gas. Thus began my life of crime. I was sixteen and broke. I had three jobs besides the mob place. I was so broke I had to park my car on a hill because the battery was dead and I couldn’t afford a new one. I’d roll down the hill and pop the clutch just to charge the ignition. It was like some part of me could never find the spark and needed a running start and always would. But that night I carefully poured the stolen gas into my car. And as I watched the fuel gauge nudge up off Empty, I felt different. I felt rich. And I began to look forward every week to siphoning off a gallon of retribution. It felt right to me. I can remember taking the plates off their tables as they barked orders, thinking about how I would get payback a gallon at a time in a muddy lot in the middle of the night. It felt like justice. It still does. We decided it wasn’t enough so we started bringing a dozen milk bottles. And we started taking a gallon from each of the Caddies, topping off our tanks and selling the rest. It all felt dangerous, like dancing with Angela. But there was something far deeper to it, too. Something that was swimming near but underneath it all. I had the feeling that I was tempting whatever that was to reach up and begin to siphon something out of me. And though the gasoline poured into my mouth again and again each Saturday night I was sure some part of me was still forever stuck on Empty. Maybe someday, I thought, I won’t have to roll downhill and pop the clutch to start. I began to reek of gasoline. Teachers would open windows when I was in their class. Girls would make a face and move to the far side of the hall. Kenny had to stop smoking because he was afraid he’d go up in a ball of flames. One night on the news we saw this Buddhist monk set himself on fire. “That’s how I’m gonna go,” Kenny said. “One big explosion some night.” One big explosion. It doesn’t happen like that, though. It’s always a series of small explosions. People rarely go out in a blaze of glory. We all burn up quietly, catching fire a little at a time until there is nothing left to burn. With our dozen bottles of stolen gas each Saturday we would drive to an open all-night Chinese restaurant off Route 7. It was really just a takeout joint but the owner, an old man from Hong Kong, had big plans. He had gotten a beer license and put in a bar, a small stage and sound system. For some reason he named the place Paris. I guess he thought it would be a night club like the one in his favorite movie, Casablanca. He saw himself as Bogie and used to repeat lines from the movie. When he was a little drunk he would sometimes yell, “We’ll always have Paris!” though no one ever understood what he meant. Every Saturday night one of the stir fry cooks, another Chinese guy, would get up, battle the feedback and sing country western songs with a Chinese accent. “Rike a rhinestone cowboyyyyyyyyy.” It was deeply funny. And a little sad. The owner hired a bartender and waited for the throngs he was sure would appear. But, of course, no one ever came. Why would they? It was a Chinese takeout joint. So the bar was almost always empty except for a few drunks that needed some afterhours place to finish off getting tuned up each weekend. We would stop there at 3 in the morning and the old man would shrug, look at the empty seats, then let us sit at the bar and drink rice beer. We would sip it, trying to wash the taste of gasoline and innocence from our mouths. And later, tank full of stolen mobster gas in a car that needed a hill to start, I would blow down the highway. I was sick of speed limits. I was tired of being hungry all the time. And I was sick of the emptiness I felt all around me. I’d look into the rearview mirror and see my eyes barely nudging north of E. It always felt like I was trying to catch up to something that was near but just beyond the reach of my headlights. There was a straightaway next to the tracks. That night a train came barreling past. I put the pedal to the floor and ran down that two-lane flat chasing the train at 70 . . . 80 . . . 90 miles per hour, trying to outrun the worry and the doubt and hoping to catch up to life. At last so near. That year a new girl, Allie, short for Alyssa, started at my school. She was Italian, dark eyes and hair, graceful in the way that some girls are. Always in perfect time with everything around them. She swayed a little back and forth when she walked like there was a rhythm hidden under everything that only she could feel. And everything about the way she moved seemed to beckon me. She was smart, but hardly ever said anything. Shy, but certain, too, in what she was and would one day become. She stood out among so many kids like me scraping up against the dull daily edge of uncertainty. But there was a sadness in her, too. One girl said Allie’s father had been killed somehow. She said shot but that was just talk. A new math teacher made every kid stand up and say what they wanted from his class. Allie hesitated, then in a low voice barely above a whisper said, “I want to find the equation . . . to make Heaven closer.” For a long moment it was like sound itself had died. All I could feel, listening to it, was a kind of longing in her . . . for some nearness. For her father I suppose. I was a loudmouth. I felt like everything I said was hollering, Which way? How far? and always the when when when of what I wanted. When will I get near? But Allie wasn’t a question. She was an unspoken declaration. She was a law of physics, an unseen force, like gravity. And being close to her felt like being near some hidden kind of truth. I tried endlessly to talk to her. All I could manage were pathetic mumblings and worn phrases from movies. And the words were always drowned out by the thunder of a bell that only I could hear. I became convinced that there was a bell in my head. I could hear it pealing in me under every word. Allie would stare wordlessly back at me like I was speaking another language. I guess I was. I was speaking the language of want and loneliness. That language has no words. It’s a howl inside you. One day you hear it deep in the black woods of yourself. It rises and falls and you try not to listen but soon it’s under every word. And you worry that your heart has become a wolf that will someday devour you. She would stare at me like she could hear the howl. Like she was trying to translate the foreign language of the boy with the wolf at his heart. But after a while she began to whisper back at me. Just a murmur. She talked in a low voice, like everything that could ever be said was a kind of secret. Every once in a while she would even laugh a little. And when she did it felt like wind in the trees in late summer, when it’s so hot you can barely breathe. It was full of relief and mystery and the only thing that could cut the stifling heat of sixteen. I told Kenny one Saturday night between Cadillacs that I was going to ask her out. He had a mouthful of gas and spat on the mud we were kneeling in. “What for?” he asked. “She ain’t much.” I took the hose from him and jammed it into the next gas tank. “I can feel something,” I said and inhaled. I was suddenly afraid that the spark in my heart would reach my mouth. I felt the river of octane cross my lips and I jammed the hose into a bottle. I spat the gas out and took a deep breath and said, “I just want to be near her.” Kenny rolled his eyes. “I’ll bet.” And he shoved the hose into the next Cadillac. Sal stepped into the lot and lit a cigarette. It was 2:30 a.m. He stood there looking out at the cars, then walked over to the one we were working, admiring it. He took out a handkerchief and started wiping some mud from the grill. We held our breath and flattened out behind a wheel well, as near as we could get until the shadow of the moon hid us entirely. He squinted right at us then flicked the cigarette toward the lot, right where we had been spitting the gas. We both stared at the glowing ember wondering if our lives were about to explode. Just then Angela, the mob girl I’d danced with, came out and grabbed him by the arm, pulling him back toward the restaurant. They were both drunk and started to argue. She was trying to get him to come back inside and he was brushing her off. She touched him on the arm and grabbed his hand. He bared his teeth, shook his ring hand free and slapped her hard across the jaw. The force of the blow knocked her to her knees and I instinctively began to struggle to my feet. The cigarette was at the very edge of the gas puddle. Kenny was reaching for it with one arm and pulling me down with the other. Sal was leaning over her now, hollering, “How’s that feel honey? You want some more? I got plenty.” She was on her knees, holding her face and I could see the welt from the ring start. “No Sally . . . no honey,” she begged. “I didn’t mean nothing. Whatever you want, honey.” I pushed Kenny’s arm away and started toward them but he dove and wrestled me down. And I could feel that urge in me again. Instinctively all I wanted was to step between this thug and the girl that squeezed my hand when I was terrified. Kenny whispered hard into my ear, “What are you gonna do tough guy—140 pounds and your skinny Irish arms against that hood and his gun? Shut the hell up,” he begged. But I was still struggling so he pleaded, a hard and low whisper, “Let it go. Can’t do nothing for it. Let it go.” I stopped struggling and nodded. Mercy dies quietly. I have heard it many times. That night I felt like a traitor to myself and for the first time in my life, a coward. I felt like I’d had my tongue cut out. Cowardice is a little like drinking curdled milk. At first it makes you want to wretch, but you hold it down and hold it down some more and soon all of you is spoiled. That night, on my knees in the mud, I listened as my own heart beat itself into silence. And lying there I promised myself I would never drink that curdled milk again. Never lie down in that mud of myself. Never let that part of me go bad. Angela crawled away and got to her feet and, holding the side of her face, disappeared inside. Sal took a deep breath and looked at the moon. He adjusted the ring on the hand he used to hit her. Then he wiped the mud from his shoes and followed her in. Kenny leapt forward with both hands crushing the butt into the dirt. And we gathered up our full milk bottles and drove as fast as we could to the Chinese where we drank rice beer in silence,thinking about all we had seen. Living, so far away for so long, now seemed suddenly near. Nearer than it had ever been. We all burn up a little at a time. We burn the days and the years. If we are lucky we burn away the fear and the doubt along with them. We burn up the first kind of hope and wait for a deeper kind to take hold. But this deeper hope is not the kind that assures us that everything will always be ok. It won’t be. It’s the kind of hope that whispers what you endure is changing you—slowly—making you greater by what it demands you burn away. It is trying to make us into what we should be—in the only way it can—if we can just endure the burning long enough. There has always been a spark in me. When I am in some jam of my own making and staring at long odds, or certain some dark night that dawn will never come, I have learned to turn toward it. So I gave myself over to that spark and to the burning that followed. I used it like a torch in the darkness of myself. I kept it close, protecting it, afraid of the cold of it all if that fire ever went out. And in time I found a way to let the spark burn inside my words—incandescent in the dark of me. Each morning I would see Allie pass by, swaying back and forth through the halls. I was trying to teach the spark to find its way into my words so she might feel the burning in me. But I was worried too because all I could taste was the gasoline in my mouth. All I wanted was to feel her head on my shoulder. All I wanted was to feel her squeeze my hand. So one day I inhaled hard, turned to her and mumbled, “Allie, there’s something I’ve been thinking about.” She got a panicked look in her eyes, like some spark she had been feeling too was suddenly near. I stood there in silence for a long moment listening to the howl in me. Finally I whispered to her, “I don’t know why this is but my heart aches . . . around the edges . . . whenever I’m near you . . .” I was staring at the floor like it might fall away at any moment. Then I raised my face and looked into her eyes. “I think maybe if we get closer . . . the ache might stop.” She looked at me with a billowing tenderness. It happens like that in some women. It’s like a gale in them. It rises and wanes in their eyes. But then she blanched, looked down and away. “I want to,” she whispered. “But I can’t.” Her voice shook a little as she took a deep breath and looked up into my confused gaze. “My mother, she would never let me see . . . a boy like you.” “Like me how?” I asked. “Not Italian, no family.” She looked away. “Alone in the world.” Her voice caught and she blinked hard like she was trying not to cry. Alone in the world? Is that what I am? I thought. I hesitated, then finally said, “I can fix that. What else?” She took a deep breath and looked away. “You smell like gasoline . . . all the time.” For a moment I thought about kneeling every weekend in a muddy lot siphoning gas from the mobsters. I thought about the danger and the justice. Then I looked into her eyes and felt the nearness. “I can fix that,” I whispered to her. Then in a loud voice like I wanted the world and all its problems to hear me. “I can fix that!” Kenny of course thought I was an idiot. He promised to fix me up with the sister of some girl he was seeing in the next town over. “She’s stacked,” he argued at me. I shook my head. It was Allie. Only Allie. So I started getting up at dawn to wait in the lines before school and I’d spend my entire $12 pay on gas. And Kenny would drive by and wave. I didn’t care. I would have given up gas and driving and the invention of the wheel itself just to find a way to get Allie to squeeze my hand and whisper her certainty into me. The week after I quit the gas business I left Kenny in the muddy lot siphoning at 2 a.m. I drove to the Chinese alone and drank rice beer and wondered how I would ever get near to what I wanted. I was always out of gas, always looking for a hill to park on, always hungry in ways that were hard to understand. Sometimes when I looked into a mirror, tired from one of my jobs, I’d see my father staring back at me. And I could hear a train. That night the old Chinese man looked into my face like he recognized something in me. He touched me on the hand and shook his head with a kind of sadness I didn’t understand. Then some drunk stumbled over, waved a dollar bill at the old man and smiled at me. “Can you break this?” The old man took the bill and dropped the change into his hand. The drunk turned to the juke box, then pawing it managed to find the slot and dropped a quarter in and Charlie Rich began to sing. Once more he was apologizing for all the heartache in the world but promising too that it would spin on and on, long after everyone stopped listening. That song runs only two minutes and thirty-three seconds, but it has played on in me for decades. Sometimes late at night in a half dream I can hear it and once more I am dancing with some faceless woman in my arms who is whispering something I can never quite make out. She is squeezing my hand hard like she is trying to warn me. Warn me about what’s near. Outside an ambulance rushed by. Just flashing lights. No need for the sirens so late on a deserted road. I watched it pass by, said a silent prayer and then drove home. That night I felt like I was about to step over some invisible dividing line between what life was and what it would become. It was waiting for me. The ambulance lumbered past, back toward the restaurant and the muddy lot. Back to the mobsters and their hangout, and I suppose back to that final unforgotten outpost of my own innocence. It sped past silently, like memory does now. I still see it some nights, lights flashing . . . back back back . . . until it finally stops where my friend lay broken and unconscious in the mud. “That’s how I’m gonna go out,” Kenny always said. “One big explosion some night.” It doesn’t happen like that though. One of Sally’s guys had come in late with his lights off. He saw Kenny and the hose and the bottles. “You gonna steal from us?” he hollered, flipping on the headlights and stepping out of a black Caddy with fins. Kenny didn’t run. He never did. He stood up and walked into the light with a bottle full of gas in one hand and a hose in the other. Then he lit a cigarette and said in a loud voice, “That’s right Guido. What are you gonna do about it?” They beat him, of course, with a tire iron. Beat him until his face was swollen twice its size, until his back was fractured in four places, until the bones in both feet were shattered. It was just a way of life with them. Like dark following day. The next morning I put on my best white shirt and dark pants. I put on my church shoes. I stared hard into the mirror inspecting myself and readying my most persuasive arguments. I was going to make Allie’s mother see me—who I really was—and find a way for her to let her daughter see me, too. Then the phone began to ring. A phone rings sometimes and the world changes. The words creep down the wire and into your ear and they find a soft place and dig in forever. They crawl inside where they stay, circling around and around. Then they chain themselves to you, chain you with all you never wanted to believe could be. I dropped the phone and ran out the door. Kenny was unconscious when I got there. His mother was crying in the hall. I walked in and stared at the bandages, the machines, the blood. The nurses were rushing back and forth talking hard and low at each other like they always do when they are sure mercy is getting harder to hear. And I remember wishing my heart would stand still. But it was racing, racing like something with teeth was chasing it, suddenly near. The first time you feel the bite of it, the wolf at your heart, you think you won’t survive the pain. But you do. You feel your heart struggle a bit to escape, but its jaws are locked down tight. And you think, This can’t be how it is, how it will be forever. But it is. It never lets go, not completely. Not ever. It will never devour your heart entirely though some nights you wish it would. Just so you wouldn’t have to feel the bite of it over and over. And from that moment on it will always be near. I walked to his bedside and took his hand. I squeezed it hard. Then I left. Allie’s house was a big imposing estate on the rich side of town. But it was ostentatious in the way people that have been poor for generations can be with money. It’s like they’re trying to drown the memory of having so little for so long, with too much. There was a hill, so I parked on it. I was going to make the old lady see me, who I really was or might someday be. I was going to make her trust me with the thing she cared most for in this world. To anyone watching I was just a nervous boy walking toward a house. But that morning I felt like all the gasoline I swallowed was circling the spark in my heart. And somewhere, way down deep, it had finally begun to ignite. In the driveway was a black Cadillac with fins. Choking down the anger I walked over to it. Whitewalls covered in mud. You have to decide in your life sometimes between rage and hope. That day I chose hope. I turned, took a deep breath and rang the bell. A small Italian woman, Allie’s mother, appeared, opened the door and stood there grimacing at me. I was ready. I launched into my speech, about to tell her who I was and why I was there. I would tell her I was a fine person, that I had dreams and heart and a will that no amount of trouble could weaken. I was ready to tell her that I had respect and real feeling for her daughter. That I wanted only to be near her—her grace, her person, her clarity. But as I began, “Hello Mrs. Falluci, I’m—” she cut me off. I remember she talked slowly measuring her words. Rueful, angry, like I was trying to steal something. “I know who you are, and why you’re here, young man.” She spat the words. “If you think I would ever let my daughter see—” she hesitated, searching for the perfect summary— “a no good . . . back of the tracks . . . white trash Irish boy like you . . .” She leaned in and peered over her glasses. “Do you even have a family?” she continued rattling, “Riffraff . . . runaway . . . never amount to anything.” I lowered my eyes and began to measure myself.I studied my church shoes trying to see myself in their reflection. For the first time, I felt alone. Alone in the world. The old woman took a deep breath, “I know boys like you,” she hissed. “You’re as common as the cold.” As common as the cold. That was the last thing I was . . . cold. I felt the spark in me start to burn. “There’s only one thing a boy like you wants from a girl like my daughter.” And staring at my shoes I heard myself say in a loud steady voice, “That’s right.” It wasn’t my voice anymore. It sounded like who I might become. Far older, surer, certain of something in me that was sleeping far beneath who I was back then. I slowly leveled my gaze until her eyes met mine. And I heard my voice crack from something deeper and heavier than I knew was in me, like it was lifting a weight for the first time. “That’s right,” I repeated. “There is only one thing I want . . . her heart.” And I could hear those words echo through me and through her as well. Like a bell. Shock flooded the old woman’s features. To her it was as if a monkey had sung the Hallelujah chorus. We stood in silence for a long moment. The wary old Italian woman and the boy with gasoline in his mouth, a bell in his head, and a wolf at his heart. I could see a memory sweep across her features. This old woman had gasoline in her as well. And in an instant, that blaze, forgotten in her, was near again. Finally, tenderly, she whispered, “I see.” She looked at me, nodded with sad and knowing eyes, and once more said to herself, “I see.” Then she touched me on the shoulder like she was seeing me, who I really was, for the very first time. “All right,” she whispered. “You have my permission.” And then very slowly, she closed the door. I left, went back to my car on the hill, popped the clutch and heard the engine cough. I drove back to the school and promptly got detention. I took Kenny’s seat. I didn’t care. I had seen something in myself I did not know was there. And I felt it in me now, the nearness of it. It was as though I had changed from what I merely appeared to be into who I really am. Transformed, as we all are, by what I felt. When I told Allie about Kenny she threw her arms around my neck and let out a small cry and kissed me on the cheek. I felt like the Buddhist monk on the news. Then I whispered into her ear, “I talked to your mother and if you want, we can go out Friday night.” She reached down and grabbed my hand and squeezed hard. I remember thinking that I wanted her to never let go. Now these many years later, in a way, she hasn’t. Back then all I wanted was who I might become. And now some nights all I want is to remember who I was. So when every bit of that person seems like he has been swept away in the days, her arms still remind me who I am. And when all I can feel anymore is the separateness of living, the solitude of it all, the shadow of its loneliness, I can still feel the nearness of them. That summer we got close, as close as two sixteen-year-old hearts can. We were breathing each other in . . . exhaling and inhaling . . . siphoning what we could from the feeling for each other. We were filling our hearts with some kind of tender octane and praying we wouldn’t explode. So of course that meant trying to find a way with our arms and legs. But it was as innocent as summer rain. It wasn’t about skin between Allie and me. It wasn’t about arms and legs or lips and mouths or even love, though I suppose that’s what we called it then. It was about the nearness. The nearness of another heart, the nearness to an answer for the hidden equation we all carry, the nearness to a solution that might someday offer a way to feel less alone. Allie’s mother would stand by the door inspecting her daughter when we would go out. The old woman would take a marked quarter and put it in her bra. She would lean close and look down her nose and say in a soft voice, “I’ll be waiting up, dear, and heaven help you if that twenty-five cents isn’t there the moment you step through the door.” I was careful with that quarter all summer long. I treated it like the only token that would work in Heaven’s turnstile. But in late August, the night before she was ready to leave for college, we stayed out past her mother’s curfew. I remember she looked into my eyes like she was trying to see beneath them, deep into the sum of all I was and what, in time, would become. Trying I suppose to divine the equation that could bring Heaven closer. She put her arms around me like she was trying to memorize me, like she knew it was the last time she would ever be so near to love’s simple and perfect calculus. That night, many hours later, she finally squeezed my hand and fell asleep on my chest. Somewhere near dawn I reached for the quarter and half asleep dropped it into the darkness beneath my car seat. I couldn’t reach it and didn’t want to wake her, so I fished two dimes and a nickel out of the ashtray and dropped them in place. That night on a hill, for the first time in a year, I decided to turn the key. The world had changed and maybe this had changed with it. The ignition caught and the engine roared to life. Then I woke Allie to drive her home. From the driveway I saw her mother asleep at the kitchen table, waiting for her twenty-five-cent toll. Allie didn’t say a word. She looked at me the way a girl looks at a place she knows she will never return to, but will want to every night just before she dreams. Then she tenderly kissed me on the cheek and slowly closed the door on our time together. That was the last time I ever saw her. As I passed the restaurant I decided to swing through. I turned off my lights and looked at the row of new Cadillacs lined up in the muddy lot. We all burn up a little at a time. That night I burned away that first kind of hope, the kind that whispers everything will be easy and sweet, that happiness and success will not demand sacrifice and sweat, and that love will not always be chained to loss. And after all that burning, I was left with another kind of hope, the kind that whispers what you endure changes you. Slowly, it makes you greater by what it demands you burn away. If you can just endure the burning long enough to reach the light. Maybe it was the knowing I would never see Allie again. Or maybe it was the memory of Kenny’s bruised up face, his standing up in the headlights, his hand in mine from that hospital bed. Or maybe it was all the gasoline I swallowed that finally found the spark in me. I took a length of hose and went from Cadillac to Cadillac emptying the tanks. I let the gas fill the puddles and the mud until there wasn’t a drop left in any of them. And then I whispered to those empty Cadillacs, the mud, and the world, “You can be the dark. I’ll be the day.” When Sal walked out at daybreak, he lit his inevitable cigarette and threw the match into a puddle. People rarely go out in a blaze of glory. It’s almost always a series of small explosions. But not that night. That night the gasoline I spat out of my heart finally found a way to erupt. It was in all the papers the next day. They blamed a nat gas leak. I knew better. It felt like justice to me. It still does. That fall I drove away forever from that part of my past, leaving Allie and Kenny, the mobsters, and my innocence behind. I sold my car to a guy that had a battery and could park it anywhere he wanted. I didn’t need a hill anymore to start. The spark in me was steady now and I was full of some new kind of gasoline. Before I sold it, though, I found that old marked quarter still waiting in the dark under the seat. And I saved it. Then I bought a train ticket to Elsewhere. Trying, like we all do, to get nearer to a sweeter clearer life. The travel section kind my mother so hoped for. It has been many years now but some nights when I look into a mirror, I still see a glimmer of that boy, dirt dumb, iron stubborn, the runaway with a bell in his head and a wolf at his heart. I still see the bruises on Kenny’s face, still feel Allie’s arms around my neck, still hear the howl of a train, still taste the gasoline, still smell the sweet die-too-soon day-old roses. All of it. All of it so near. And now, too, some nights I see in myself the same bone tired and beat up. That reaching for something unreachable I saw in my father. I was always bad at math, but I finally discovered, as we all do, some undeclared arithmetic. It adds love and then longing, it multiplies what you feel and divides what you fear, and ultimately it subtracts and sweeps away part of you. And by some great mystery, the remainder is somehow larger. And now I feel that new kind of hope, the fireproof kind. I feel it using the trying and failing, the sacrificing, the burning away and the enduring. I feel it changing me, slowly, in the only way that any heart can become greater than itself. Everything discovers its own math. Everything is broken first, then changed. Kenny was broken and changed. It took a year but he recovered. And though he would always walk with a limp, he limped to Wall Street, where the reckless defiance that his father beat into him was a virtue. His love of risk, that standing up in the lights when you know you might take a beating, made him a fortune. Sal was broken and changed, too. He recovered from the explosion but he was never the same. He too would always walk with a limp, just like Kenny. Strange how that is. You give a beating and it comes back circling around at you. The mob guys discovered their own math. The IRS eventually came around and found two sets of books. Those mooks ended up in Ossining counting the years. The restaurant got closed down, then plowed under. There’s a McDonalds there now. The Chinese bar that counted on being Casablanca got sold a couple times until it eventually became a community center. AA has meetings there now, where I drank my first beer at sixteen. I saw the old Chinese man once many years later. I asked him if he ever thought about that year. He smiled sadly and whispered to me, “We’ll always have Paris.” Angela and the other mob girls that counted on their beauty grew old, then moved to Atlantic City. They learned to count cards. Forever trying to hit 21 at the blackjack tables and in the ladies’ room mirrors. And the Cadillacs, so clean and fast, so full of undriven and uncounted miles, are all spare parts now. Speed and beauty never last. Allie counted on her math, as well. She got a scholarship to Princeton. I still hear her whispering that all she ever wanted was to find the equation that could bring Heaven closer. In a way she did. She ended up working for NASA, using her certainty to draw the stars nearer. And me, I learned no matter how you want them to, some things will never add up. There was never any way Her plus Me would ever equal Us. I can see that now. I am still the back of the tracks boy listening to the call of Elsewhere. Still scraping my fingernails against some hard-to-reach happiness, still haunted by the scent of wilt-too-soon day-old roses. Still bad at math. But there are some things I’ve learned to count on. I count on the spark and the gasoline I still feel circling round in me. I count on the bell in my head and the wolf at my heart. But above all I count on the nearness. The nearness of memory, the nearness of that first kind of love and that first kind of loss, the nearness of a kind of pain that gets driven into you but comes twisted up with a kind of beauty that stays near forever. Now sometimes there are things that I wish were not so near to me. Things I have lived into myself grip my heart in ways that leave it struggling sometimes to beat. The far-off life I wanted back when I was sixteen is now sometimes too near. Like Charlie Rich’s voice, it is beautiful but sad. It stays close. The wolf at me has never let go. I don’t suppose it ever will. But at those times, some nights in the dark, I can still feel a woman squeeze my hand and whisper, “It’ll be all right. Just lean in.” Years later, on the way to one more Elsewhere, listening to a country station late one summer night, I heard that old song again. Charlie Rich was singing once more in the darkness. And I thought of that year and of Allie. I thought of her arms, and of her certainty, and of the mysterious geometry in us all. I found a pay phone but all I had was a few dollar bills—and that old quarter. I took it out and felt its edge of memory. Then slowly I dropped it in the slot and dialed her old number. It rang and it rang and a voice came on saying that the line was disconnected. And I felt that old ache once more at the edge of me. Once more I could taste the gasoline in my mouth and feel the bite of a wolf at my heart. Some things get near and though always just beyond our reach, stay near forever. They circle back around us only when we need them. And that is how it should be. I still hear a bell, but when I think of her now all I hear is the echo of it. The line went dead in my ear. And above, the stars seemed close, like Heaven was suddenly near. I saw my reflection in the phone booth’s glass. I saw the sixteen-year-old and the man he had become. Both broken and spent. And at last changed. I gently laid the receiver back in that payphone’s cradle. And the coins fell back to me. Two dimes and a nickel.