Flynn - Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir

(1989) Please , she whispers, how may I help you? The screen lights up with her voice. A room you enter, numbers you finger, heated, sterile almost. The phone beside her never rings, like a toy, like a prop. My father lifts the receiver in the night, speaks into it, asks, Wheres the money? asks, Why cant I sleep? asks, Who left me outside? The phone rings on a desk when he lifts it, the desk somewhere in Texas, someone is always supposed to be at that desk but no one ever is, not at night. A machine speaks while my father tries to speak, it doesnt listen, it only speaks, my fathers face reflected dimly on the screen.

Any card with a magnetic strip will let you in, all the street guys know this, or learn quick. Its never night inside this room, the lights hum a deafening white. My father stands at the desk, filling out deposit slips Five hundred to savings, twenty-five thousand to checking, all cash then puts the slips in an envelope and tosses it into the trash. Drive past and its like a window display, a diorama Late Twentieth Century Man Pretending to Be Banking brought to you by the Museum of the Homeless. The people who enter, those with money to withdraw, most of them dont even glance at my father, dont give him a second look. Dressed well, clean, his graying hair long and swept back from his foreheadjust like them, doing a little banking after midnight, on his way to an after-hours club, a late dinner, a lady waiting in the car, that car, by the curb, the engine running, the heat blowing on her legs while she listens to the radio A little honey in my pot , or, Baby its cold outside . Skid is curled beneath the desksemiconscious or out cold, hard to tell, his boombox cranked up full, he holds it tight to his chest like a screaming child. My father hums. The lights hum. The couple at the automatic teller kiss, the machine clicks out a small pile of bills, my father bends to his deposit slip, Six hundred and seventy thousand, cash , he puts it in an envelope, licks the envelope shut. The couple stand by the door, still kissing, like they have no place better to be, like this is the most romantic spot in the city.

Others find their way to the ATM after midnight, after the last Dunkin Donuts closes. They rattle the magnetic door to get my fathers attention, but unless he knows them hell feign sleep or pretend hes absorbed with his banking. After midnight its hard to find an open lobby, a dry place to enter, and for some its hard to scrounge even so much as a magnetic card. My father knows Beady-Eyed Bill, another harmless weirdo, unlatches the door. The Beady-Eyed One talks out of the side of his mouth, glancing over my fathers shoulder to scope whats coming. He fears hes being watched, and inside this room who can say hes not? Someone behind that wall is making a goddamn movie of his life.

Alice, hunched by the trash, swears people come in at night and carve their initials into her flesh. She holds an upturned palm to Bill accusingly, asks, Whos J.L.? The scratches on her hand do look like the letters J and L, this is true. Bill glances at my father conspiratorially. Alice glares at Bill. And which Bill are you tonight? The one in the gray slacks, or the one that snuck in last night and branded my hand? My father, finished depositing his cash, curls up on the ceramic floor, turns his face to the baseboard, tucked below the window so the fake police wont see him. Phony sheriff stars painted on their little jeeps, if he can stay below their line of sight it might buy ten minutes of sleep.

In Boston the bars close at one. The next wave of revelers, more gregarious than the earlier crowd, bleary and headed home, push their way inside. Sometimes they give you a hassle, sometimes they flip you a few bucks. A little lit, sometimes they try to start up a conversation, sit on the floor next to you, offer you a drink, want to know your name. You seem like a regular guy, howd you end up here?

Where? my father asks.

His father, my father claims, invented both the life raft and the power window, though sometimes it is the life raft and the push-button locks on car doors. Or some sort of four-gig carburetor that saves gas . In this story my fathers family is rich, with gardeners and chauffeurs during the Depression. His grandfather owned a roofing company that had the contracts for Faneuil Hall and the Boston Museum of Fine Artsbig public works projects that kept them flush while the country struggled. Look inside the grasshopper weathervane on the roof of Faneuil Hall and you will see my great-grandfathers name, Thaddeus, which is also my brothers name. My father tells me this, but how to get inside this grasshopper he doesnt say.

If you asked me about my father thenthe years he lived in a doorway, in a shelter, in an ATMId say, Dead , Id say, Missing , Id say, I dont know where he is . Id say whatever I felt like saying, and it would all be true. I dont know him, Id say, my mother left him shortly after I was born, or just before. But this story did not hold still for long. It wavered.

Even before he became homeless Id heard whispers, sensed he was circling close, that we were circling each other, like planets unmoored. I knew he drove a cab, maybe my mother told me that, though she said almost nothing about him, except that it was better he wasnt around. I even knew what kind, a Town Taxi, a black and white. In my early twenties, after I dropped out of college and moved to Boston, I would involuntarily check the driver of each that passed, uncertain what it would mean, what I would do, if it was my father behind the wheel. I knew he lived in a rooming house on Beacon Hill, Id heard about it a couple years before they evicted him, before he moved into his cab, leasing it twenty-four hours at a stretch, before he blacked out on a vodka jag, hit someone or something , before they took his license away. The day he was evicted was the first face-to-face I had with him as an adult, the second time in my life I can remember meeting himhed called on the phone, told me to get over to his room with my truck. It was the first time Id heard his voice on the phone. Two months later he appeared at the shelter where I worked and demanded a bed.