Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [23]
It was the kind of thing that happened in the avenues. To get to them I just had to follow Suzanne down Columbia Park across Main Street to Seventh Ave, a narrow hill street of tin-sided houses behind chain-link fences. They had no driveways and on the sidewalk or at the curb would be a battered station wagon or Pontiac LeMans with no hubcaps, a Duster with a sandblasted hood. Plastic children’s toys would lie on the cracked concrete among cigarette butts and empty nip bottles, and on their sides here and there would be shopping carts for when the car wouldn’t start and the welfare checks came in and usually the mothers and wives or girlfriends would push the carts a mile and a half away to DeMoulas and load up with cans of Campbell’s soup, eggs and milk, bags of potato chips and cases of Coke and Budweiser, bottles of Caldwell’s vodka.
Halfway down Seventh Avenue was a cluster of yellow apartment buildings, two rows of them three-deep back from the street, each three stories high. The ground around them was packed dirt worn smooth and there was a gravel parking lot scarred from rain and in the back of it, up against a field of weeds, was a green dumpster I’d never seen empty; it was full of babies’ diapers and old mattresses, dozens of beer bottles, pizza boxes, damp condoms and instant coffee jars and plastic shampoo bottles, a broken chair or torn lamp shade, a kitchen knife with no handle.
At night the apartments were lit up and loud, the windows open in the summer, no screens in them, maybe a fan blowing, the constant drone of TVs and radios, kids crying or laughing, a woman or man yelling, someone from another apartment shouting to shut the fuck up! Someone was always calling the cops, and there’d be one or two cruisers pulled up to the curb, the door open, the cab’s light on, the dispatcher a static voice in the air.
I don’t know when Suzanne started going down there, but I knew why. It’s where you’d go to cop some brown mescaline, orange sunshine, or THC. It’s where you’d go to buy an ounce of Mexican gold or a tab of four-way purple blotter acid or to sit in a dark hot room full of teenagers and grown men and women and take the joint passed your way and mooch a free hit. It’s where everyone else went, to the building farthest back from the street.
There were no young families in this one, just men in their twenties and thirties who earned their rent by collecting it from everyone else, two or three going from door to door on the first of each month demanding cash. Some of them were with the motorcycle gang the Devil’s Disciples, and they had long hair that fell down over the devil’s insignia of their black leather jackets. They wore heavy motorcycle boots and faded oil-spotted jeans and dark T-shirts. A lot of them had beards or mustaches and they carried folded Buck knives in leather pouches at their hips. In the plywood half-wall of the top porch were three holes in a close grouping from a .38 or .45, and from that apartment there was always music blaring—Black Sabbath, Electric Light Orchestra, Alice Cooper, Led Zeppelin, and the Allman Brothers. There were always three or four motorcycles parked in the dirt or mud, and day and night people came and went.
We smoked every morning at the bus stop too. It was on the corner of Seventh Ave and Main Street right next to Pleasant Spa convenience store, a gray vinyl-sided box with dusty plate-glass windows advertising Marlboros and Borden’s milk and Ajax. The owner was short and fat, his fingers brown from tobacco, a smoking cigarette forever between them or his lips. He called us punks and fuckin’ assholes. To the right of his store were wooden steps leading to the apartments above, and that’s where twelve or fifteen kids waited each morning.
Some of them lived down in the avenues, some on the streets across Main, but we all looked the same: there was Glenn P., a heavy kid with wire-rimmed glasses and thin brown hair. He wore a faded army jacket, the inside pockets usually holding cash and the dope he sold, mainly THC or joints at a buck apiece.