The Subsect

Chapter Two: The Land of Steady Habits

ABOVE the diner, the hardware store's office had been converted into a studio apartment. However, unlike the diner, which wore the trappings of the hardware store like a threadbare mourning shroud, the second floor fairly bowed under the weight of history, a Castle Elsinore where the ghost of J.'s grandfather drifted in from stage left, plucked his natty Italian briar from its pipe stand on the coffee table, and slid white king's pawn to king five on the chess board set up next to the stand-he was the type of player who preferred a good land rush over diddling around in one's own territory, e.g., setting up a fussy King's Indian Attack like some folks.

Once, while hunting for a pen, J. found an old leather pouch filled with the vanilla Cavendish tobacco his grandfather had smoked in his uncle's roll top desk. Out of curiosity, J. wrapped the tobacco into some rolling paper and took a few test puffs, but it had gone stale years ago and left his throat raw and stomach queasy for hours after.

Two armchairs and a heavy leather sofa squatted around the low square coffee table, oversized refugees from J.'s grandparents' home-J. couldn't imagine his uncle ever going out to shop for a living-room set. While J. lived there, on and off, for the next two years, he often dozed off reading on that couch and woke up in darkness to the dull roar of his uncle's snore rattling the window frames from across the room, his own head propped uncomfortably against a hard throw pillow, with grandfather's vintage acrylic Boston College blanket (Go Eagles!) tossed over him and his book resting on the coffee table, bookmark carefully inserted between the pages where it had fallen open, spine up, on his chest, dropped by somnolent fingers. At the time, even this small act of charity-the blanket, the bookmark, the pillow-on the part of J.'s uncle, carried out under cover of darkness, so to speak, rankled him. It seemed J. was to be deprived of all choices, even those regarding his own discomfort. If this sounds ungrateful, well, gratefulness had always grated J, anyway.

DOZENS of photographs shingled the apartment walls: historical black-and-white photos of, e.g., Give 'Em Hell Harry clutching a copy of the November 3rd Chicago Daily Tribune over his head with a manic gleam in his eyes or Jackie Robinson stealing home on Yogi Berra in Game One of the '55 World Series or a team photo of the '46 Boston "Ted" Sox mingled with more prosaic shots of family-album-type fishing trips of J.'s uncle hoisting pendulous, rainbow trout, flounder, salmon, et al., while seated in a canoe or standing on a dock or riverbank. Wall-mounted piscatorial replicas posed in frozen arches and undulations among the framed photos, mouths agape, eyes marble bright. One made of latex rubber even used to sing "Don't Worry, Be Happy" as it flopped back and forth on its faux-wood-grain plastic plaque; its dying batteries transformed the tune into an unsettling basso profondo dirge.

Fiberglass rods, nylon monofilament spooled lines, a wicker creel, rubber waders, life preservers, even a set of oars, huddled in trippable distance of the front doorway. On the opposite side of the door, stalagmitic plastic sports trophies from his uncle's childhood-mostly for baseball, track, and bowling-crowned a wooden display cabinet that held signed baseballs, Spalding gloves, and more trophies under glass.

During J.'s inventory of his uncle's apartment, he noticed the curves of an acoustic guitar peeking out in the space between the display case and wall. After tuning it by ear, he ran through the few simple songs he knew: Iggy Pop's "The Passenger," some Ramones numbers, Elvis Costello's cover of Sam & Dave's "I Can't Stand Up for Falling Down," Bowie's cover of Them's "Here Comes the Night," et al., wincing as the steel strings dug into his soft hand. J. closed his eyes and pressed harder until the pain filled his mind, until nothing of him was left but the bloodless-white tips of his burning fingers.

SAY your mother dies when you're just a little kid. Cancer. By the time you're a teenager, you realize that when you recall her in your mind's eye, her portrait has been cobbled together from photographs and illuminated with the flickering bulb of your recollections; that there might not be one primary, pure, unadulterated memory left of the woman who gave birth to you-not even the smell of her rose-scented soap, which, through time and overuse, had petrified into the rememberance of the memory of the smell of her rose-scented soap-that you'll never know for sure what she actually looked and sounded like when she was a living, breathing, walking, talking, stereoscopic human being.

Say at the start of your senior year of high school, your dad gets sick. Cancer. Your uncle drives your dad to and from the hospital in Hartford for tests and more tests then treatments and more tests and more treatments. You take some time off from school to help run the family store. The store sits across the street from your school. Every day, you look out the window and see your classmates come and go. Sometimes, friends stop by the store after classes to say "hi" and see how you're doing, but they don't know what to say, and you don't know what to say, and as the days and weeks pass by, they stop by less and less and eventually stop stopping by altogether. You try not to look out the window, to busy yourself stocking shelves or taking inventories or sweeping the floors or organizing the stockroom or helping the occasional customers. You try not to think about the college applications to UConn and B.C. in your desk drawer, about the athletic scholarship offers (partial, but still) that you had to turn down once you realized you wouldn't be returning to school for the rest of the year (or ever, but you don't know that, not yet).

Say you take a galvanized steel trashcan and a ponderous equipment bag lifted from the school gym out to the woods by the lake on the outskirts of town, prop the can at an angle against its lid, and hurl screaming four-seamers and downshifting three-fingers and plunging split-fingers and swinging two-seamers and diving forkers into the can, which booms thunderous applause through the trees in response to each pitch. You throw pitches until your dripping sweat turns the dirt beneath your feet to mud, your arm falls off, your hand melts to the bone.

Say the cancer kills your father. But not before the immense weight of responsibility-for him, your sister, the store-has slowly but thoroughly and utterly crushed you over the course of the three years from diagnosis to funeral. You discover that being crushed is not the same as being broken. Being crushed, you are still whole but denser, airless, and harder to knock down thanks to your new lower center of gravity. You build a memory palace bricked with the totems of your father's belongings and make your home there, a child's elegant solution to the impossibility of endless mourning.