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By Root 680 0

an eggplant purple, the trim sage. Fastened to the door casing was a shiny brass mailbox, red flowers spilling over two window boxes screwed under the sills. Across the street, instead of cars sitting on blocks getting worked on by Larry, there was a low white fence and a green lawn and a toddler’s swing set and sandbox. A black Saab was parked in the paved driveway. All the houses on the street looked bigger and brighter, and farther up, where the Jackman School had been and where I’d seen Cody Perkins beat Big Sully down, the condemned brick building was gone and now there were swings and a jungle gym and a long slide down onto fresh chips of cedar. There was a basketball court too, its smooth surface used by men who’d been moving their families into the South End for years—orthodontists and realtors, accountants and software engineers and college teachers. The whole town had changed because of this: Market Square was no longer littered with abandoned cars and sprouting weeds; its brick mill buildings had been completely refurbished, every brick scrubbed and repointed, every window and slate roof made new, and on the street level were clothing boutiques, food and wine shops, a record store, jewelry store, and a bookstore. Restaurants and pubs stood on every half block. Hanging from each lamppost were potted flowers, and tourists would stop and have their picture taken beside one.

The lumberyard was gone, so was the Hog Penny Head Shop. Big leisurely boats sailed up the river from ports off Maine, Boston, Hilton Head, and Florida, sleek white boats you could live on but docked here long enough for its owners to take a stroll through this town people actually wanted to come to.

I knew this meant the poor people who’d lived here before had been forced out, that what happened to Newburyport was known as gentrification. Part of me missed the tall weeds on Fair Street the drunks used to live in, a lot that was now the new Salvation Army building, but it was as if what had happened to Newburyport had happened to me too. Instead of fighting guys from those old streets, they kept showing up in my dream world on the page, men up against it who only know one or two ways how to get free, both of which can hurt other people or themselves.

Some early mornings, after locking up the pub, I’d sit on my trailer’s stoop with a beer and watch the sun rise over the dune across the street, a blooming lip of orange that would send me to bed. I’d sleep, then make coffee, then get to work on the novel I was trying to write. It was set in a milltown, and the main character was a boy living with his single mother, his two sisters and brother. There was no money and the neighborhood was run-down and dangerous, and no grown-up seemed to ever be around or in charge. In one scene, the boy dreams he and his family are in the bed of a pickup truck that’s hurtling down the long hill of Main Street to Basilere Bridge and the Merrimack River. The boy’s father is there in the truck bed with them. He has a dark trimmed beard and his arm is around his young girlfriend and he’s drinking and laughing, and the boy’s mother is back there too, his brother and sisters as well, but the truck’s cab is empty, no one driving it, and no adult seems to notice or care as the truck barrels down the hill for the slow-moving, dirty river. My character wakes up, pulls on his leather, then walks down into the avenues looking for a morning high.

I knew this was as autobiographical as it could be. I also thought I’d been writing long enough that I was aware of the creative dangers of basing fiction so closely on one’s own life. Wasn’t the biggest danger that I’d confuse the facts with the truth? That I’d feel compelled to put everything into my novel just because it had happened? And if I was aware of this danger, wasn’t that enough to guard against doing this?

But what I wasn’t seeing was a more obvious problem, that I was too emotionally close to this story to write honestly about it; a part of me felt sorry for that boy I’d been, and I was angry at his mother and father