14. 84

Eighty-four. That seems to be the number that seperates this block from all the others. Or anyone who’s lived a life or died a death that intersected with mine in any way.

I’ve never known a man who’s lived to that age. On this block, the boys all seem to embark upon their paths—never by design—at the age of thirteen, or sometime around then. You know which ones will “make it”—that is to say, get out of this place—and which ones will die here, whether physically, mentally or emotionally. About that age, the few who know how begin to prepare themselves for life after leaving. A few are guided—always by women, it seems.

But most start moving toward the commands of the immediate gratifications this block has to offer. It comes when a boy first handles, however clumsily, his capability of ending someone else’s life—or his own. Something that would’ve been nothing more than a physical scuffle only a few days earlier lands somebody on a table. If he’s conscious, the murmurs of men in gowns melt into the black cones of the victims—and the ones making assesments of, and pronouncements about, his condition.

The ones who return—well, some, anyway—make plans to die or leave. Or, perhaps, they live as if they had the proverbial three score and ten coming to them. Some women live to such an age; so do some men—though none of the young men realize that these survivors to thirteen plus three score and ten found another place, another way.

Thirteen, then three score and ten. No man who’s ever lived on this block is aware of those two stages or lengths of a life span. A few men and a few more women get to live both—but no man, it seems, endures beyond them if he’s from or on this block.

Long after I left, I learned that Judaism has a ceremony that’s like a second bar mitzvah for men who live to be eighty-three: three score and ten years after the age of thirteen. I didn’t know about it growing up: Why would Adam’ve told me? He wasn’t the only Jewish man on this block, although this was also something I didn’t realize until long after I’d left. I wouldn’t’ve cared anyway, since I never planned to practice their religion, or anyone else’s, the moment I had the liberty to make that choice.

In fact, I never expected to live long enough to reach any Biblical or other milestone. I didn’t even think I’d live as long as I have: long enough to reach this moment, the last one I’ll spend with my mother or anyone else on this block: the last time I’ll live as the person who lived among them. The boy among dead and dying men; the boy who grew old. Which is the reason why, I realize now, mother had to keep me at home, in the house, until I left.

Eighty-four still seems very, very old to me, even though I’ve since met men and women who were older. Actually, it’s the age at which one can say for sure that someone has become, or will be, an old man or woman, not simply another who’d withered or fallen, and died. The first person I met who’d accumulated that many years was the owner of a gas station near Vivian’s old town. After we were driving back to her place, she told me how old that man was. I wanted to go, to take one more look at someone eroded but not corroded, a bit stooped but still standing and walking.

Now I know what I would want to know from him. How had he made it? That might seem like the most banal question in the world—unless you’re from this block. Every man who’s survived on this block, however briefly, did so by subduing in any way necessary for victory in a fight with to the death with another man. Of course I include Coach Tigler, Moon and Jack; I include me. In order to live long enough to make the transition I’m making, I not only had to vanquish a man; I had to kill him in order to render him nothing more than a name and a set of dates and other statistics.

At eighty-four, one is no longer a statistic. Or even a name. One becomes, finally, like the seacoast in Vivian’s old town or the mountain in another: one who has the lines of the succession of storms and sunshine that no other has experienced. Nothing anybody builds around those places ever fits quite right, like the clothes on old people. One’s belly shrinks or swells; another’s shoulders sag or neck bends: simply buying a coat in a different size won’t protect them from this year’s torrents. But somehow they survive. Like the man at the gas station. Even though it’s been years since Vivian even spoke to me, let alone since we drove by him, I don’t doubt that he’s still around. But I’m not sure how I could talk to him or whether he’d want to talk to me. Or what I’d do now with his answer to that question.

13. The City We Never Knew

 

Once in a great while, I get into a conversation that leads to the question, “Where are you from?” I answer with the name of the city in which this block is located. It’s probably the most untrue, or at least the most inaccurate, thing I say to anybody.

I only know this block. As for the city, it’s one everybody in the world’s heard about and quite a few’ve vistited. Unless you come from this block, you know more of this city, or at least what people think about when they hear its name, than I do. Or ever will.

No one who began or ended up on this block has any interest in seeing all of the famous edifices, monuments or other preserved specimens outsiders see through the windows of buses and the viewfinders of cameras. Some might say it’s like having no interest in the house once you’ve been in the boiler room.

You don’t swear off or hate the city the rest of the world knows. You just never see it, unless work or have some other reason to venture into it. Knowing that the city has the biggest or most famous anything in the world doesn’t mean much when you’re living or dying on this block. Especially if you’re a woman, or among women.

Someone once said there’re deception, theft and death behind every great fortune. Someone else said that to make omelets, you have to break eggs. To build the bridge that connects this city to the rest of the world, a whole series of blocks—like this one, I’ve been told—were destroyed, edited off maps: obliterated from the face of the earth.

And what of those plazas and towers that stretch across and above the narrow, shadowy blocks of the city? Or of this block—the name of this street? Behind every name there is at least one death. And more often than not, there’s bloodshed, intrigue, chicanery or some other rupture in what people call “the social contract,” whatever that is.

None of the violence ends when the death certificate, the checks or the documents that certify possession are signed. The generations born and unborn continue to give, willingly or not, their voices to the others that roil in the cauldron of unending death. The ones who escape this fate—and I’m not sure that I have—do so only because they had no other choice.

Nothing’s been named for anybody who’s ever lived on this block. Yet they—we—die in the name of those who leave monuments to themselves. And those landmarks, like the pyramids or the cathedrals in European towns, cast shadows over their communities from which nobody escapes. Everybody in those towns or nations gives his or her life to build the church or palace or to win a battle. And nothing and nobody’s the same again, ever.

So, while I know nothing about the city in which this block is located, this block is the one thing I haven’t been able to go without thinking about since I left it. I know the lives that were lost or destroyed while I was living here—including my own.

12. Fate and Hunger

Foregone conclusions. Fait accompli. Perhaps the only one, or at least the first one, is the knowledge that they exist. And that each of us has a different time, place or way of learning about them—except, of course, the ones who come to comprehend them at the moment of their death.

Me, I learned about inevitability, about marching with fate, one cool, damp, overcast Sunday afternnon. In those days, I always knew what day of the week it was because I was expected to. That’s how it seemed, anyway: someone decided I had to be in a certain place at a certain moment. Or I knew by way of other people that it was Sunday because they were going to and coming from church. And the store down the block was closed.

People walk differently when they’re drawn by the impossibility of taking a different step from the ones they’re taking. They don’t walk like people who are doing what they “have to do,” such as when they’re going to work or the dentist. On Sunday afternoons, at least on this block, there is only the repetition of fate: people going to have lunch or dinner, or fights, with those people they’re bound to see: family members, in-laws or their equivalents or substitutes.

Really, they’re not any different from people who’re spending the overcast afternoon indoors because it rained in the morning. They’re drawn by the momentum, the inertia of destiny, like amusement park rides that continue to run even when nobody’s on them.

It was on such a Sunday afternoon that I learned that some things couldn’t be stopped or steered any more than the forces of life—or death—on this block.

I think there’s always a moment—I’d’ve called it a decisive moment but for the fact that I don’t believe in a humanoid god—when a person begins the deperate run from this block or takes the first steps in the march to death.

I was chopping onions for the huge bowl of salad that would accompany the two big pans of lasagna she was making even though none of her friends or neighbors was coming over that day. They decided they didn’t want to go out in the rain, even after it stopped.

But we made that big Sunday dinner anyway, even though neither of us got hungrier on Sunday than on any other day of the week. Or at least not hungrier enough that either of us noticed. There’d be leftovers for the rest of the week, at least. Not that I minded: I’d rather eat my favorite foods—and I’ve never eaten anything that’s more satisfying than that lasagna-- a few days after they were made than something I don’t like as much fresh off the stove.

But leftovers weren’t the reason my mother went ahead and made that big dinner anyway. She didn’t eat much of them herself. And I couldn’t’ve, even if I’d wanted to. So I didn’t know what the reason was, but leftovers weren’t it.

She’d’ve made that huge Sunday meal, or something else just as voluminous, no matter what. She always had and, I realized that day, she always would.

She always did. After I left this block, she’d always tell me what she was cooking whenever we talked. For a long time I wondered whether she was trying to entice me back, but I realized that she knew I wasn’t coming.

She was going to make those meals, no matter what. Before she had me in her kitchen, and long after she knew I’d never be there again, she cooked. We—or she—‘d eat them, or whatever portion we could, whether or not we were hungry. That’s what we and everybody else on this block did in the presence of a big Sunday meal.

Hunger is the reason to eat; the hunger of several people is the reason to cook a big meal. I realized that was how I’d live—it’d be my philosophy of life, if you will. Talk when there’s someone to talk to, broadcast when you’re trying to reach a lot of people. It’s not a matter of what you’re trying to say, or whether you have anything to say just as, really, almost anything will do when you’re really hungry. Of course spinach and mineral water are better for you than hot dogs and soda, but you don’t think about that when you’re truly hungry: that is to say, when you’re not thinking about the vitamins or other substances your body breaks down when…I was going to say, when you no longer experience hunger, but I realized for all I know , there may be more of the same after death.

Mother cooked, no matter who was or wasn’t there. Adam talked—to me, to anybody who’d sit still for a while—even though he didn’t have anybody to talk to. They died on this block. So did Moon, the football player who attacked me, when he got into a fight with a guy who wasn’t perceptibly gay, hadn’t stolen his girlfriend (whether or not he ever actually “had” her or not) and hadn’t looked at Moon the wrong way because, well, he hadn’t looked at Moon the wrong way and thus couldn’t be accused of a provocation.

Of course, on that gray mirror of a Sunday afternoon when I learned about fate, I couldn’t yet know what propelled Adam to his death or what he’d share with anyone who’d died and would die on this block. I knew only that I wasn’t going to die, at least not there or here. I couldn’t. I didn’t know why—I just knew I wouldn’t. That knowledge terrified me as much as—possibly more than—knowing that I’d have to make a choice not to.

I didn’t know how or when I would leave her kitchen—or this block—for the last time. I knew only that I would. For that matter, I knew that I wasn’t going to spend much more time in school, even though I had no premonition that Moon, Jack and Tigler would attack me.

I only knew that mother was going to make her dinner. That some people were spending the day indoors because it’d rained in the morning. And that the rides in the amusement part would run whether or not anybody was there to ride them.

And—I didn’t know how I knew this—I could never be a man, not even a young one, on this block. Not a woman, either. So I wouldn’t’ve been able to stay in the kitchen, with mother, for much longer.