Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [48]
Cleary and I hadn’t been there since we’d gotten kicked out and beat on, but there were enough people we would get lost in the crowd and the noise and the smoke. It was too crowded, though, too loud, too smoky, the windows open to let in the winter air, the radiators steaming and too hot to touch. Then Billy G., a scrawny, sunken-chested collector who had a room one story below, he took a syringe and drew blood from his thin white arm and started shooting it at whoever was closest. One girl, a frizzy-headed Dominican, ran screaming into the bathroom, Billy G.’s blood dripping off her chin, and that’s when Cleary and I left.
Close to Pleasant Spa and Columbia Park, beyond the stone steps of the Jewish temple, a man was walking toward us on the sidewalk. We’d been watching him come from a long way off. He had hair that fell past his shoulders, his hands inside the pockets of his jean jacket. He wore heavy work boots and was walking fast, then he was under the streetlamp and I could see his hair was red, scruff on his cheeks and chin.
Cleary poked me in the arm. “That’s the fuckin’ van guy.” Cleary picked up his pace. “Hey! ’Member us? You owe us ten bucks.”
Everything always seemed to happen so fast, like a fuse was forever lit and you never knew when a bomb would actually blow. The man had Cleary on his back against the granite steps of the temple, one hand around Cleary’s throat, a big fist raised high over his shoulder. “You want to die? Do you want to fuckin’ die tonight?”
There was something wrong with his voice, something jagged and wired about it, and I thought he might be high on angel dust or some kind of speed. His raised fist was poised in the air where I could have just reached out and grabbed it, yanked his arm back, done something to him after that, anything. But I did nothing. Cleary said nothing. And soon the man was walking away from us down Main Street, his big hands back in his pockets, Cleary sitting up and rubbing his back.
Now, a year later, my body changed, my friends shooting pool not far away, the same man was walking in with his friends after hockey and his eyes caught mine, and I said, “Where’s our ten bucks?”
I could feel my heart against my sternum, but I felt strangely calm, almost confident.
“Fuck off, kid. I don’t even know you.” And he brushed past me, looking back at me over his shoulder like I had just wronged him deeply. He looked away to order bowling shoes at the counter with his buddies, and I stood there staring at him. I believed he didn’t recognize me, but there was a nagging itch that I should go up to the counter and do more, a slowed-time feeling a fuse was lit inside me, its low flame sparking at its own pace, but this wasn’t the one.
I walked back to my friends, and I could feel something coming farther down the road I just barely sensed I’d been training myself for all along.
LIFE IS what happened between workouts. When I wasn’t down in the basement on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons working first my chest, then shoulders, back, and arms, ignoring my legs because I never wore shorts, even in the summer, then I was thinking about workouts, reading Muscle Builder magazine I now subscribed to, eating a lot of eggs and tuna fish, so much my mother began to complain about the cost. I began to think of getting some kind of job.
By the spring of 1976, I could bench-press just under 200 pounds; I could do deep parallel-bar dips with 40-or 50-pound dumbbells hooked to my training belt. I could do rep after rep of wide-grip chin-ups, pulling myself so high the bar touched my chest. As the weather warmed and the snow melted, the streets smelling like mud and rotting leaves and twigs, I left my leather jacket at home and began to go out in a T-shirt; I had muscles now. They weren’t big, not nearly as big as Sam Dolan’s, or even Jimmy Quinn’s, but enough that people glanced at my chest and upper arms, took in my shoulders. There was the feeling that a good thing was happening to me, that all my hard work