Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [51]
IT WAS a Saturday night in July, the place filled to capacity, and the kitchen was a loud, steaming machine of cooks calling out orders, the sizzling of hot oil, the swinging of the kitchen doors, Charlie spraying down the dishes before they went into the washer. There was the hollow clank of pots Sam was scrubbing out back, the chatter of the waitresses as they loaded their trays, some of them balancing three full platters of food up one arm, and the busboys were wheeling in carts of dirty dishes and were so backed up I had to move from the rear of the machine where I was unloading it to the front. The busboy had already run to his station to go set up recently cleared tables, and there were two full carts of food-streaked dishes, glasses, cups, and silverware, and I grabbed plates and bowls and began scraping them clean, sliding them into plastic trays and pushing them onto the belt for Charlie to spray.
“Slow down, kid.” His voice came from behind the rack of plastic trays, and I could only see his waist and hands as he sprayed down the dishes I’d just pushed to him.
“I can’t, we’re backed up.” I dropped a salad bowl into the loaded tray, then shoved it under the rack onto the belt and a hot sting shot across my arms and chest, water dripping from my elbows, the scalding water Charlie Pierce had just sprayed at me, and I was rushing around the corner to get him, the head cook dropping a sautée pan and jumping between us, another cook there too, then an older waitress with gray hair in a bun, Charlie saying, “I’ll kill him. So help me, I will take that kid’s life. I will take his life.”
The head cook sent him outside to cool off. He put Sam in his place at the machine, then he turned to me and said, “And you, hothead, calm the fuck down.” In seconds the kitchen was back to normal and I was pushing loaded trays to Sam, my heart still going, and even though Charlie’s words were in my head, I wasn’t afraid.
After smoking two or three slow cigarettes out on the stoop, Charlie came back in and relieved Sam, and we worked the rest of the shift without a word to him or from him.
Five years later, standing in my father’s small campus house he shared with his third wife, I saw a photograph of Charlie Pierce in The Boston Globe. It was a mug shot, and he was looking into the camera with the same expression I’d seen before, as if he’d been deeply insulted and couldn’t we all see that? I read the article below him, learned that he lay dying of cancer in prison and was confessing to over thirty years of murdering children. He was telling the police where he’d buried two bodies in Lawrence, one of a ten-year-old boy he said he’d raped and killed the summer of 1976, the summer he worked with us at Captain Chris’s Restaurant down on Water Street overlooking the brown and swirling Merrimack River.
IN THE seventies, the only gyms were the ones we read about in Muscle Builder magazine, iron gyms in Southern California where the professional bodybuilders trained. There was the Y down near GAR Park, but the dues were expensive, and besides, from the outside it was a cinderblock box with few windows and looked like a prison, the only other place where I’d heard men regularly lifted weights.
Connolly’s Gym was down near Railroad Square, a few blocks north of the river on Grant Street. It was on the first floor of an old shoe factory that must’ve been turned into a store at one time because there was no front wall, just floor-to-ceiling windows looking out onto Grant and an empty lot surrounded by a tall chain-link fence. On the other side, weeds had grown up between cracks in the asphalt, and there were a few empty oil drums, a stack of mattresses, an upside-down shopping cart.
Sam and I went down there hoping to see a weight-training gym like the kind we’d only read about, but when we walked into the hot open space, the carpet blue and commercial-thin, the walls whitewashed