Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [156]
Donny hung up and kissed his mother and went out and partied one last time. He found his boys and drank vodka shots and cold forties. They smoked blunts and snorted lines and washed it down with more vodka and beer. They did this in an empty warehouse down by the water. They were celebrating. But that night, Donny told his counselor, he knew when to stop. That night he was going home, and then he was going to clean up. From the inside out. For Frankie C. For their mother. For himself.
When he stumbled home, his mother was crying on the sofa. Her hands were over her face, and the phone receiver was still in her lap. The TV was on. Donny turned it off. “What, Ma? What? What happened?”
And it was like your whole life laughing at you, Donny said. “Like I had no right to be happy for one fuckin’ night, just one night.”
She told him the news and he was screaming, pulling over the bookcase of her knickknacks, kicking them across the floor and stomping on them. He kicked the TV, the stereo, ripped it off its stand and threw it across the room. Her screams were in the air with his now and so was the recliner he heaved onto its side and began kicking till its legs broke off, and he picked one up and whipped it at the glass window his brother would never stand at ever again; he wouldn’t sit here with him and Ma smoking and watching a show; he wouldn’t sleep in the back room; and he wouldn’t be shooting hoops with his little brother for God had been shanked, and now Donny’s mother was quiet, her face gray, and she was pressing her palms against her chest, and she was dead before Donny was even finished breaking all he needed to break. She was gone and he’d done it to her, and why wouldn’t he live in the streets after that? Sleeping under bridges and in dumpsters. Hustling his body. Dealing in whatever could be dealt. Getting drunk or high whenever he possibly could.
The night I found Donny C., I was sitting in the front room sipping weak coffee. The overhead light was kept on twenty-four hours a day and it shone on donated furniture and a linoleum parquet floor that was dusty and needed to be swept and mopped. I’d just made a round of the rooms upstairs and everyone was asleep, the boys and men in rooms facing Main Street, the girls and women in the back. The main job of the overnight counselor seemed to be to keep residents from walking off, and to keep them from fucking. Three of the five women upstairs were gay. A week earlier, one of them, a pale, dead-eyed girl from Lawrence, told me she probably wasn’t gay but after all that had happened to her, well, she was now.
There were no shades or curtains over the windows in the front room. Across the empty asphalt lot was the back of the police station, a security lamp shining down on three cruisers. I’d brought a book with me and was looking for a place to sit when I heard out in the kitchen the tink of metal on metal. I put down my book and coffee and listened. There was the sound of a stifled giggle, like a man laughing with two hands pressed over his mouth. Somebody must’ve crept down the rear staircase and was stealing food from the fridge or cabinet, maybe one of the three wise men, and that’s what I expected to see when I stepped into the kitchen.
Donny C. stood shirtless in boxer shorts crying as quietly as he could, his eyes squeezed shut, a butcher knife pressed to his throat just beneath his Adam’s Apple.
“Donny?”
He shook his head, didn’t look over at me.
“Donny, what’re you doing, man?”
I stepped closer and he glanced at me, his eyes unseeing. In the dull light that shone from under the stove’s vent I could see where a tattoo had been burned off his shoulder. His face was streaked with tears and he was shaking his head. “I’ve had it. I’ve fuckin’ had it.”
“Come talk to me, Donny.”
He shook his head, the blade still pressed to his throat. “No, I can’t do nothin’ no more.”
“Let’s sit and talk. Bring the knife with you if you want.