Sabbatical [1]

“Human consciousness is marvelous, it really is, but it’s also burdensome, overly intricate, tedious. It’s like a big, expensive piece of exercise equipment, a Bowflex. It’s advertised as the end-all be-all, the solution to everything. But you’re never sure if you’re using it right and you don’t take the time to read the instructional material and eventually it ends up being functionally decorative. And then one day when you realize what a waste it was and that you would’ve been better off with something much more primitive, something that didn’t take so much concerted, misguided effort, y’know?”

“What the fuck is he fucking talking about?” Mel yelled angrily and threw up his hands in disgust. His droopy bulldog face was even more scrunched than usual, appalled by such a lack of decorum.

“He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about. He’s in fucking shock, look at him!” Phil reached out and slapped me hard across the face. I didn’t feel it. “Take him and help him get cleaned up. And get rid of those clothes.” He looked me over, shook his head, and walked back out to the front of the bar.

Mel and Tom each grabbed a shoulder and steered me to the washroom. It was all-white and the tiled floor was slightly concave with a steel drain in the middle. It was designed especially for gruesome occasions like this one. As they shoved me in I looked down. My shirt was soaked through with blood, pants too. I could feel it in my shoes, my heels pressing it up from under the gel inserts with every step. It was almost like grape stomping.

I could hear the squeak of blood on rubber.

“Strip.” Tom pointed a fat bratwurst finger at me. I blinked and started unbuttoning my shirt. It was heavy and slick and as I fumbled to get it off the gravity of the situation struck me and I began to claw at it. Jimmy’s dead. I ripped the shirt open and sent buttons flying like shrapnel.

“Jesus Christ. Jesus fucking Christ!” This is Jimmy’s blood. Jimmy’s dead. Jimmy’s dead and I’m covered in his blood. I struggled with my wet pants and had to sit down to get them off. Mel and Tom were smoking cigarettes and laughing at me. I got them off and stood up, nude.

“Good god Freddie, can’t you trim that shit? It’s like a bird’s nest down there” said Tom.

“You get a girl down there she might as well be flossing her fucking teeth,” Mel laughed his high-pitched hyena wheeze.

I looked past them, saw Jimmy get hit, saw him in my arms as he coughed up blood and his eyes went dead. Jimmy’s dead, I thought, fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

A bar of soap hit me in the chest and I caught it.

“We’re gonna go burn these,” Mel said, holding up the garbage bag which had my clothes in it, “clean up and we’ll bring you something to wear.”

I nodded. They walked out and the door shut heavily behind them. I tried to force my mind to go faster. Should I run? No, fuck no, I can’t run out the back door of the Ballast naked. Breathe, slow down and breathe. Jimmy’s dead. No more Jimmy. No one to cover your ass for you. No one to do the talking for you. No one to vouch for you. Your guide is dead Dr. Livingston. You are on your own.

I went to the sink and ran the water, lathered the soap and scrubbed the dried blood from my skin. I looked at my face in the mirror. You can do this. Act professional. “What the fuck have you gotten yourself into?” I said. “I don’t know but I’m fucking in it now aren’t I?” I fired right back, indignantly.

I tried to smile, tried to capture that wry, self-mocking smile that was once Jimmy’s. It didn’t work; I looked demented. I washed off and Mel came back in. He tossed me a towel and hung some clothes over the hooks by the door.

“Get dressed and come out front.”

I nodded, trying to compose my face into a mirror of Mel’s stoicism. He didn’t stick around for it though and the door closed on me again. I looked back in the mirror, trying again to mimic the look: an effortless scrunching of the face, the eyebrows flat and knit together — a look that promises judgement while temporarily suspending it. I thought mine was a decent reproduction and I did my best to maintain it.

I put on the suit that Mel had left. It was Jimmy’s of course. He always left one or two of them here at the Ballast in case he needed to change between outings with his dates and his wife, Wendy. I stretched my arms out. The suit was big on me but very nice, very chique. Everything Jimmy owned was nice.

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and ran my hands over my hair — the way Michael does in Godfather before he exits the bathroom and kills Sollozzo and the police chief. I am in control, I told myself. I am smooth. I am the Buddha himself. I made my way out to the front of the bar, thinking about my stride, taking tight, even footsteps. The ‘Closed’ sign was up and all the lights were off. Late evening sunlight came through the windows and reflected off the polished, dark wood table-tops. Dust motes hung loosely in the fat beams of light that cut just through the crust of the establishment, encasing the whole bar in an ethereal gold haze.

It kind of looked like the way they sometimes do flashbacks in sit-coms, fuzzy edges to show the dumbfuck audience that we’ve shifted into first-person and departed from the main storyline. For a moment I wondered if that’s what was happening, if I was having a schizoid episode and some pivotal memory of Jimmy was gonna play out right now in defiance of reality. But nothing happened. I just stood there like an idiot.

The cat stretched out on one of the window sills, one eye half-open and watching me. Phil, Tom, and Mel sat hunched on their elbows at one of the tables farthest from the windows, a bottle of bourbon perched equidistant between them. They didn’t look up as I came over but Phil pulled an empty stool out for me. I sat.

There was an empty glass in front of me and Phil poured a large drink of the bourbon into it. Nobody else moved so I took that as my cue and drank. It was good bourbon but it burned in my empty stomach and I fought to keep my composure.

“Jimmy was one of us. He was like a brother to me and we’re gonna find out who did this to him.” Phil looked around the table, making eye contact with each of us in turn. “But that being said, we all know that he could be a son of a bitch, not to mention the biggest pussyhound that I’ve, personally, ever met.” Mel and Tom nodded to indicate these were facts not opinions. I nodded too.

“So, before anybody goes doing anything stupid let’s consider the possibility that Jimmy fucked with somebody above his, and our, fucking paygrade. Let’s consider that a similar fate could await any of us if we take this too fucking personally.”

Everyone nodded and Phil picked up the bottle and topped everyone off. He raised his glass and we all drank. I held back a dry heave.

“Now I want to talk to Freddie for a minute, to ascertain what he might be able to recall. Mel, Tom.” Mel and Tom got up quietly. They walked to the front door and stepped outside.

Phil turned to me. “Alright kid, we’re gonna walk through this thing step by step. Close your eyes and go slow. What did you see?”

I did as he said. “We were walking back from the card game. On Frink street. They shot from behind. They could have come from the..”

“Kid I’ll draw the conclusions here alright?” Phil spoke sternly but not angrily.

“Okay, yeah. They shot from behind. I think he was hit at least three times, all in the chest. I turned around and grabbed Jimmy and held him. He was kind of slumping, there was, in his mouth there was a lot of blood..” I trailed off, then caught myself. “I got a glimpse of them as they jumped into a car, a white escalade..”

“They were black?” Phil sounded surprised.

“No,” I said, “at least the shooters weren’t. They were white, dressed like G-men y’know? Black suits, black shoes, sunglasses. That’s all I noticed.”

Phil nodded slowly before speaking. “You handled yourself well, and by that I mean you didn’t do anything stupid. You didn’t stick around for the cops and you didn’t call anybody blabbing your fucking mouth off.”

I nodded, grateful for my actions to be interpreted as intelligent rather than as the resultant compound formed by the chemical reaction of adrenaline and panic.

“Go home, get some rest, and come back here tomorrow. If the cops or anybody else comes by or calls you keep your mouth shut and you call this number.” Phil handed me a card that read ‘Robert Dungaree, Attorney at Law.’

I nodded and mumbled, “thanks Phil.” I got up to leave.

“Kid,” Phil looked up at me, there was a glimmer of compassion in his stonewalled eyes. “You know Jimmy always liked you, he told me one time you were ‘a natural born hustler.’ And as far as he was concerned that was the highest compliment you could give a man.”

I smiled, suddenly ennobled by this unexpected praise. “Well, you know, he played pretty fast and loose with the truth.”

Phil smiled too and then his face morphed back into its standard countenance: an uninterpretable contortion that established its own frontier between smirk and sneer.

“Yes he did.”

I walked outside. Mel and Tom ignored me. They stood silent, hunched over like gargoyles, billowing smoke and warding away evildoers. It was hard to tell whether they were taking it all personally, not that it mattered. They were going to do what Phil told them. Shit, for that matter they were probably gonna feel what Phil told them. Jimmy never interacted too much with the muscle. He didn’t really like being reminded that the enterprise was dependent on such inelegant means. It was like looking up a magician’s sleeve; it ruined the magic.

No doubt there would be more muscle than Mel and Tom before long. Mercenaries drawn from the ever-growing pool of unemployed veterans, immigrants, even the occasional moonlighting cop. Everyone loves the smell of sweet, manicured and banded, under-the-table cash.

I stood at the bus stop for a few minutes but I was too jittery to stand still. I felt like I had just finished an exam after staying up all night popping adderall. The pavement was finally cooling off but along my back rivulets of sweat were turning into rivers. I started walking. I needed to approach this systematically.

I’m safe. I’m fine. The question is: what next? Phil told me to come back in the morning. What’s going to happen? The question gave me a sudden attack of paranoia. I slowly tilted my head toward the shop windows to my right, no one right behind me. I walked a little farther until I got to a bench. I sat down and fumbled slowly in my pocket for my cigarettes, watched a heavily tattooed couple go by, what looked like a homeless guy, a man in a blue suit. Are they following me?

In response I reminded myself of my utter insignificance in relation to Jimmy. I had no reputation. No one was going to waste a shot on me.

I needed food. Bourbon and an empty stomach were leaving me slow and indecisive. I walked a couple of blocks over to a by the slice pizza joint and got two fat sicilians. It was a small place, no tables, just 30 square feet of linoleum standing space and then a counter and a severe looking Italian man who was what you might call the opposite of a conversationalist. I gorged myself, my brain distracted temporarily by the Holy Trinity of bread and cheese and tomato. I finished and dabbed sauce from the corners of my mouth. As I went to throw the used napkin away it was momentarily transformed and I saw a tiny scale model of my shirt covered in Jimmy’s blood.

I didn’t kill Jimmy. I didn’t have anything to do with it. But I do feel guilty, because I lied to him. I used him.

I’m not a bookie. I’m not a knockaround guy. I’m a PhD candidate in Sociology. I specialize in studying the culture of criminality. Three months ago I went to my academic adviser and I told him I couldn’t do what I was doing anymore. I had been interviewing and observing federal prisoners for over a year for my thesis work and it wasn’t going well, something wasn’t right.

“The whole thing is just so fucking contrived,” I said. “My subjects are contaminated. My work is useless.” Dr. Gruyer’s silvery, tufted eyebrows shot up like a pair of squirrel tails, their owners having just heard a flutter of wings, the imminent approach of death. In my experience with academia it’s rare to be faced with the kind of candor that I was ready to lay down with one foot out the door.

“Jeremy, the department loves your work. It’s provocative. It’s engaging. It’s already funded through the next academic year!” It was like he hadn’t heard me. He thought I was just another stressed out, overworked, underpaid university lackey. Not that I wasn’t.

“It only appears that way on the surface,” I slumped back in my chair, pressed a palm against my forehead in weary frustration. “But it’s fundamentally flawed.” I felt claustrophobic in that little office stuffed full of books, desk overrun with papers. It was informational overload, the whole goddamn school, the whole goddamn system of academia was trapped in the hyperreal bubble of its own devising.

Gruyer leaned back, pressing his hands together at the fingertips. Is there anything more titillating to the learned than a fundamental flaw? “Go on then, I’m listening.”

“The individuals in the prison population don’t have the same mentality as they would outside their bars. Their self-definitions are obfuscated by the state. Sure, they’re still criminals, but none of what they say can be trusted because all their reasoning fits into the narrative of their current predicament, i.e. prison.” It had been days that those words were swarming around my head, days and hours and eternal minutes in which I tried to worm my way out from under this pathological realization which seemed to infiltrate my entire life, my very being.

“Well, I understand how that’s not ideal. But I think you’re forgetting the significance that recidivism rates play in your study. The vast majority of subjects are going to commit a crime again. You know all this, you’re just frustrated. Thesis work is arduous, it feels never-ending, but you’ll get there.” He smiled warmly, offering compassion with the implicit caveat that I give up trying to give up, that I become one more certified hack — compromising everything and pursuing a handful of slightly original half-truths so that I could be welcomed with open arms into an elite intellectual society whose pretentiousness was so incredibly unwarranted. I wanted to vomit all over his desk. Instead I took a breath.

“Dr. Gruyer, the problem is that my work underestimates the elasticity of the self. The same individual in the prison and outside of it are not the same individual. The man in prison doesn’t know the mind of the man outside. He can’t tell me jack shit about the man on the outside. The man on the outside is being filtered through the rationalizations of the man on the inside and it’s happening on an imperceptible level. There is a correlation between the two but that’s just a general pattern, a guideline. What I want, what I told you my study would be, is an ethnography about criminal culture. What I’m getting is a shadow play.” I was on the edge of my seat, leaning towards him and putting great emphasis on each word to convey the severity, the sheer disastrouness of this issue.

Dr. Gruyer leaned back in his chair, his brow furrowed, dragging down his wispy widow’s peak. The many lines of his wrinkled face seemed to deepen. “I see,” he said. He stared out the window, not at anything in the courtyard, but into the sidereal, into what I hoped was the same window of disillusionment that now occupied my foreground.

I leaned back, satisfied that I had communicated the problem, that he recognized it now.

“Well,” he spoke slowly, his voice tired and reluctant, “that doesn’t mean you have to quit. Sometimes we have to finish a project that doesn’t work to make it to the next one that will. Happens to the best of us.”

“Or,” I paused. He looked up and I met his eye. “Or, I tweak it.”

And so we had tweaked it, and in the process perhaps we had also tweaked the definition of a tweak. I was to take a ‘sabbatical’ during which I would try to graft myself into some opening of the criminal underbelly. It would be unfunded, for obvious reasons. I told Gruyer I had savings I could live off of but in truth I had planned to live off untaxed criminal earnings so as to better acquaint myself with the lifestyle. I wanted to be real. I wanted to be gritty.

And now I’ve fled the scene of a homicide, covered in blood and guts and god knows what else.

When I started working with Jimmy my cover story was that I had come to town to lay low from some heat back in Brooklyn. That I just needed some temp work to keep myself afloat. Phil knew all this, and I could probably go to him and tell him that this was all too much, that the last thing I needed was this kind of heat, this kind of exposure. And he would probably be pretty understanding about it. Plenty of guys would be in line for my job and it doesn’t take much to do it. Basic math skills and some propensity for facial recognition, a touch of subtlety doesn’t hurt either.

But I realized now I wasn’t going to do that. You’ve got to understand, before I met Jimmy my life had been a desperate search for significance. I always had the feeling that life was so goddamn important and that if I could just figure out why, or find something that distilled some aspect of that import, that I could be contented by that.

That theory went unrequited for so long, until I met Jimmy and he showed me what absolute garbage it was. Everything Jimmy did was significant because he imbued it with significance, because he lived in the absolute here and now. Was he hedonistic? God yes. But he was no misanthrope, almost the opposite. He wanted everyone to be happy, just not at the expense of his own happiness.

I learned how to be happy watching him. I learned how to embrace the significance of my being. I learned how to stop sifting through life like it was an archaeological dig and just live it. I loved Jimmy for what he taught me. He was the older brother I never had. He had kept me well. And I’m not going to just walk away and pretend that none of this ever happened.

I’m going to find out who killed Jimmy and I’m going to put a bullet in them.

Or maybe three.