Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [153]
THREE WEEKS later I’d gotten back in the mail four of the stamped self-addressed envelopes I’d sent to Boston and New York City. Each of them came with a form letter, a note really, no more than three lines long. Thank you for your interest in our magazine, but unfortunately this piece is not right for us. Sincerely Yours. Only one of them had a name beneath that, and it came from an inked stamp, a scrawl of letters I couldn’t read.
When the fifth one came I didn’t open it right away. It was a manila envelope with my story in it, and I felt little about this, which told me I hadn’t expected much in the first place. But I knew I’d send it out again. Why not? I was done with it.
I was checking my savings passbook. I had enough to gas up and drive two thousand miles east, to stay at a cheap place along the way if I had to, but there wasn’t enough for first and last month’s rent once I got there, and I didn’t want to crash at Pop’s place, or Jeb’s, or Sam and Theresa’s. It was late spring, early summer. I saw myself in Boston, maybe working in a halfway house, doing some kind of good while I lived alone and taught myself to write more honestly. I wanted to find a job at night so I could write all day.
Before I could leave, though, I’d have to work here longer. There were more jobs I could do for Christof. I’d trailed a diamond thief for him once, a tall black man in a brown suit I followed through the streets of Denver for two days. I watched him walk into one jewelry store after another, trying to switch real diamonds for zircons. I’d logged what I’d seen, passed it on to Christof and got paid three hundred dollars.
I picked up the fifth manila envelope and opened it. Clipped to my manuscript was a long typewritten letter. At first I thought it was a detailed criticism of why they wouldn’t even think of publishing my story. But there were adjectives of praise, a few editing suggestions, and at the bottom of the page what they, Playboy magazine, planned to pay me for this story: two thousand dollars.
It was hard to imagine having that much money in my pocket, but my fingers were trembling and my feet were air, and I was running down the motel hallway to the pay phone to call someone, but who? Who?
I pushed a dime into the slot and pressed 0. A woman answered. She had the voice of a lover, and I asked her to make the following call collect to this number, and tell him I’ll pay him back later. Tell my father I can pay every bit of it back.
15
I WAS LIVING ACROSS the river in Bradford Square in a one-room apartment above a fish market and a shoe repair shop. My apartment’s heat never seemed to turn off, so I kept my windows open and could smell shoe polish and damp leather, fresh fish and the cool water of the lobster tank, car exhaust and the Merrimack, a smell I now associated with home. Two doors down from me was Ronnie D’s bar, and on Friday and Saturday nights I could hear the bar noise out in the streets. Sometimes they’d keep the door propped open, and there was the din of talk and laughter, the jukebox thumping out a tune, a man shouting at a game on the TV. At last call, just before one in the morning, the regulars stood on the sidewalk out front smoking cigarettes or a joint, drunk and brain-happy and not wanting to go home. Some nights I was down there with them, standing with Sam and Theresa and maybe a woman I’d met. Pop would be down there too, looking for a party to go to next, or breakfast, or the Dunkin’ Donuts across the river that he and one of his friends called “Dizzy Donuts” because they’d walk in there between two and four in the morning to sober up on crullers and coffee, flirt with the waitress under the flat fluorescent light.
But on this night I’d stayed in, and now it was after last call and I