Constance stood, snatched the airborne bat. The knob slid toward her fist and I remembered her stint on the freshman softball squad as she rocked her hips and swung into the bat guy's head. He screamed, but did not let go of Michael Florida's throat. Charles Goldfarb shouted. Constance bashed the bat guy on the elbow and his grip popped loose. Michael Florida rose, spun out, a practiced wrestler's escape. Many of us, maybe, were secret jocks. Michael Florida pounced on the bat guy, pressed him into the table shards, tugged his arms behind his back, bound his wrists with a leather belt. Michael Florida, more than anyone, would also be practiced in the swift removal of his belt.
Now Purdy waved the pistol at the two economically motivated, mostly non-violent invaders.
"Go," he said. "Get out of here. Run. Nobody's seen your faces. Just run on out of here."
"What about Jamie?" said one intruder to the other.
"Fuck Jamie. He's my cousin, and I say fuck him."
"They'll kill him."
"Don't be stupid," said Purdy. "We won't kill anybody. We want to graduate on time."
"There's nothing here," said Jamie's cousin. "We got nothing."
"You have everything," said Purdy. "The only important thing. Leave with it now."
"Wait!" called Jamie, started to thrash.
Michael Florida cinched his improvised truss. Billy Raskov stood, kicked Jamie in the kidney.
"Shit!"
It was craven, but at least Raskov had bare feet, and anyway I hadn't been cracked with a used end table.
"Billy," said Constance, pulled Raskov off.
"Leave him here," said Purdy to the other two. "You guys deserve better."
The deserved invaders nodded, bolted for the door. I watched them through the window fly down the street, weave off under streetlamps.
Michael Florida sat on the bat guy until the police arrived.
Charles Goldfarb, who had been sitting in stunned lotus on the sofa, rose, paced, cursed, smoked.
A lot happened after that, testimonies and court appearances and a hung jury and vague threats, never made good, from townier parts of town. That summer the newspaper reported the bat guy had been shot dead outside Star Market. He was a local boy named Jamie Darling. He'd drawn down on some cops with an unloaded revolver. I think the term "suicide by cop," like "home invasion," came later, but that's what it was.
A lot happened even after all the stuff that happened after, but years later I couldn't remember most of it, at least not the legal and ethical intricacies that entertained us for many stoned hours back then.
What lingered was that frozen feeling, the paralysis, the unnerving awareness that came with it, my real-time curiosity about the nature of my cowardice, as though I were already beyond any possibility of action, just wanted to ascertain, in the moment of my acquiescence, whether I was going to ascribe it all to moral failure or grant a kinder, chemical explanation. Of course, the bat guy had a gun. Nobody ever blames you for freezing in front of a gun.
But it was still the bat that scared me.
The biochemical states of Maurice and Billy and Constance also intrigued, and then, of course, loomed the indelible fact of Purdy and Michael Florida, the aristocrat and the outcast, hurling themselves over the coffee table like some heroic tandem from the mendacious mythopoetry of another age, one of whistles and human waves and the Maxim guns ripping away. You had to either have everything or have nothing to act in this world, I mused then, to make the move that will deliver you, or cut you to pieces. The rest of us just cling to the trench's corroded ladder, shut our eyes the way I remember Bernie used to shut them, squeeze them hard, call it hiding.
Of course, this feeling, this hysterical read on agency's dispensations, was a lot of what Maura used to term, with the full-bore Midwestern irony she'd somehow absorbed near Brattleboro, Vermont, "hooey," or what Claudia might have deemed a crock of absolute shit.
Still, a final tally, a statistical breakdown of this moment, did exist.
Future Apocalypse Guru: Smidgen of composure, ineffective diplomacy, intractable whininess.
Artistic Provocateur: Ineffectual response to threat, admirable behavior under physical duress, unseemly and gratuitous assault on downed invader.
Larkish Frankfurtian: Frightened retreat into walls of self.
Marxist Feminist Who Fucked: Initial paralysis, subsequent display of courage.
Semi-Brain-Damaged Crystal Tweaker: Valiant and focused response to threat.
Ruling-Class Brat: Remarkable bravery and tactical leadership in face of threat.
Home Invaders: Bold initiative, bad intel, poor battle management.
Painting's New Savior: Utter cowardice, experienced as bodily paralysis in conjunction with what he would later describe, in an effort to steer the conversation away from actual events, a "bizarre floating sensation."
But no matter my conversational machinations, I knew the truth. Nobody ever mentioned it, of course. It meant not much. Physical bravery probably held the same value in our milieu as skill at parallel parking: a useful quirk. But the box score stayed in my wallet, or the wallet of my heart, so to speak, a smeared and origamied scrap to remind me how little I resembled the man I figured for the secret chief of my several selves.
Eighteen
How sick and marvelous an age this was, wherein I could boot up my desktop with a couple of names or notions in mind-Todd Wilkes, William Moraley, indentured servitude, technological advances in prosthetics, toosh dev-and plug them all into various amateur encyclopedic databases. How fucked and wondrous to siphon off such huge reservoirs of community-policed knowledge, funnel it directly into my head. Every man a Newton, a Diderot. Even now I skimmed an article about Diderot for no reason. Bernie was asleep, Maura just a few feet away on the sofa with her laptop and headphones. She might as well have been in French Guiana.
All was peachy and near utopic until I rose for a beer. At that moment the knowledge just disappeared, tilted out my earhole. I'd have to start again, or else concede my memory palace was a panic room. It would be good to exile some items and sensations, some people, even, but how to cull? I could not spare one hamburger or handjob. I wanted to recall all the cigarettes I once smoked, those afternoons I did nothing but sit on a bench and smoke cigarettes, interview myself for major art magazines. I did not want to lose the acoustics of past lovers, the grunts of Constance, Lena's clipped whinnies, or even the tremolo moans the touched-out woman on the sofa used to make. What else? Which stray events did merit deletion? What about the time I demonstrated my karate kicks to the girls in Mrs. Ardley's Chem I, felt a hot, fierce squirt in my underwear, knew I'd soon begin to stink?
What about Jolly Roger, my progenitor, the cad denied heroic measures? Could I Augean the whole heap of him away?
I'm not certain who called him Jolly Roger first, maybe one of my mother's brothers, maybe Gabe, the office machine salesman who thought there was something morose about my father, that quality I usually took for the quiet of the sneak, but the name fit for more than one reason. Jolly Roger was perhaps an emotional pirate. The treasure was your trust. Also, maybe the sneakiness did stem from sadness. There were times we'd watch television, my father and I, Roger back from his office in the city, or just returned from one of his trips, sitting in his armchair with a drink, and I'd hunch on the rug to watch his handsome moods, the flicker and drift of his face. The play of his eyes and his lips beat out any cop show or even the old Abbott and Costello movies he favored, each twitch and grimace another secret I would never know, a rye neat in a hotel bar, a cutting glance at a meeting, a winter beach somewhere far from his family, the surf's cold froth lapping the feet of a lover. You couldn't say he lived parallel lives, because that would imply he had a home life. Our house was more a transit lounge.