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By Root 803 0

their doors open, the jukebox already playing in one, “Bennie and the Jets.” It was a warm morning, the sun shining on the iron trestle and its hand-painted peace sign and Fuck U and neon-orange cross. Cars drove by as I carried Pop’s wooden Marine trunk to the side of the bus. Once he’d heard I was leaving town, he gave it to me, the trunk he’d used as a young lieutenant on the USS Ranger off the coast of Japan. Inside it were my clothes and Dingo boots, a dictionary and a few back issues of Muscle Builder magazine. I set it on the sidewalk and the driver heaved it into the belly of the bus, and I was surprised at how many people had come to see me off—Pop and Peggy, Mom and Bruce and Sam Dolan, Marjan and her mother and brother and sister. Two days before, because I was moving away, her mother allowed us time alone together. Marjan and I held each other most of the afternoon, and she kept saying she couldn’t believe I was leaving, why was I leaving? And holding her, I didn’t know why but I was. It was the expression the others seemed to have too, surprise that I was leaving, or maybe not that, but that I’d found a way to leave without really involving anyone else, or even telling anyone about it. It was like working out, how I found it or it found me, a private thing that saved me, something I did alone under the ongoing lives of my own family.

My mother had tears in her eyes again. It was a weekend, and she wore jeans and a light blouse and she looked young and beautiful as she stood beside her boyfriend of nine years. She wiped under both eyes with her forefinger and Sam hugged me hard and patted me on the back, and my father’s girlfriend Peggy held me and kissed my cheek, then Pop said into my ear, “I’ll miss you, man.”

I kissed both cheeks of each member of Marjan’s family I’d come to love, and I held her last, could smell the shampoo in her hair, could feel how completely she let me hold her.

She whispered, “I still can’t believe you’re leaving,” and her voice broke and how could I have missed that she loved me? How could I have missed that they all did?

PART II

RIVER, FIST, AND BONE

10

TWO YEARS LATER, I was back from Texas living in a third-floor walk-up in Lynn, Massachusetts. It was a town southeast of Haverhill, a town of welfare projects and brick tenements, Cambodian and Latino street gangs, the smell of the ocean blowing in over the barrooms and alleyways and strip malls. There was a saying, “Lynn, Lynn, the city of sin, you don’t come out the way you went in,” but I lived contentedly alone in two rooms with no furniture and nothing on the walls, the front room echoing my footsteps each time I walked over its cracked linoleum floor to the kitchen where there was a gas stove and a small table and chair. In the back was the bedroom, and I slept there on a yoga mat my mother had made and upholstered for me years earlier. It was foam an inch thick and I laid it on the floor and put two work boots into a pillowcase for a pillow, covered up each night with a sleeping bag.

I did not own a telephone or TV, a radio or record player, and each night after working construction with my brother Jeb, I lay on my foam pad or sat at the small table in the kitchen and read Max Weber, E. F. Schumacher, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin. I was twenty-two years old, and I’d become a Marxist. That’s what Texas did to me, took my hatred of bullies and bullying and institutionalized it. In Austin, I’d drifted into the social sciences where you could learn a little about a lot, but all I seemed to find was story after story of U.S. imperialism, how we had a long history of supporting dictators and Big Business at the expense of men, women, and children just trying to eat and live and be free.

I listened to lectures on Third World politics and economic policy and the fight against communism. But it looked to me like a simple fight against the poor by the rich, the strong against the weak, and I walked the campus in a constant state of outrage and grief, so much of the world’s history the story of