Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [103]
I didn’t know. So I’d brew tea and open one of my books and keep reading, hoping one of these dead intellectuals could tell me.
FOR THE first time since I was fifteen and began to change my body with weights, I had no place to train. If there was a barbell gym in Lynn I couldn’t find it, and even though I was working with my body all day long all week long, sweating and breathing hard for so much of each shift, it wasn’t enough. My chest muscles felt smaller, my shoulders and arms too, and when I flexed my upper back, it didn’t flare as much as it used to. Despite all my training, I had never become big, just hard and fit, but now whatever muscle I’d built was atrophying. I felt vulnerable, like a knight who has slipped off his steel-plated armor and gone back into the world without it. I was no longer the small, soft boy Clay Whelan and the others had beat up, but a cool irrational fear welled in my gut that if I didn’t find a gym, I would slide back into being that boy all over again, and as soon as I did, that’s when they’d come for me.
EVERY SATURDAY I’d drive forty minutes northeast to Haverhill. I’d meet Sam Dolan at the Y and he and I would work out together with rusting black iron in a dank concrete room. He was still so much stronger than I was, bench-pressing well over 300 pounds now, but I’d missed my friend, and it was good to be with him again, and for over two hours we’d push and pull and press and curl.
Sam had graduated from Merrimack College and was working as a reporter for the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, something he saw himself doing for years. He’d always liked reading and writing, and now he got paid to do both. He still had his old room at his parents’ house on Eighteenth Avenue, but he was engaged to marry Theresa the following August, and sometimes he’d stay over at her apartment just off Lafayette Square. Theresa worked at AT&T, which used to be Western Electric. She was kind and quiet, and she had long brown hair and a lovely face and when Sam met her at a house party, he was drawn to her right away and knew early on where they were headed together. They already had plans to one day own a house and have kids.
After our workouts and a shower, Sam and I would drive across the river on the Basilere Bridge to Ronnie D’s. The winter sun would be down, the sky casting a purple light over the brick mill buildings up the Merrimack, broken ice floes wedged hard against the granite piers beneath us. Upriver was the iron trestle the Boston & Maine would take into Railroad Square, and beyond that the bridge Jeb and I had run across three years ago. My muscles had that pleasantly flushed and tired feeling, and I was looking forward to some cold beer and two or three bar hot dogs, but as we drove into Bradford past its neon-lit fast food shops—Mister Donut, then McDonald’s, the car dealership across the street—there was an emptiness somewhere behind my ribs and sternum, an airless quiet that told me I was standing still when before, in Texas, I’d been running forward.
But I liked Ronnie D’s. I liked how crowded and dimly lit it always was. The only light came from amber lamps in the walls of the wooden booths and from behind the bar, and that’s where Big Pat Cahill worked slow and steady tapping off glasses of beer, pouring shots of blackberry brandy and peppermint schnapps, ringing up purchases on an old brass cash register beneath the painting of a nude woman reclining on her elbow, her belly and breasts exposed, a blanket draped over her hip. Pat had a long brown beard and hair he tucked behind his ears. His voice was low and stony, and he wore black T-shirts all year long, and at closing when the lights would come up, the bar crammed with drunk men and women in a smoky haze, another bartender would yell, “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here!” This was a line people ignored, but then Pat would bellow, “Everyone the fuck out! Now!” And we’d drain our drinks and beers and head for the door.
By nightfall, the place would be full of people I’d known and not known for