I ’m yawning and falling asleep at this Christmas gathering with my in-laws, who are rural folk with red hands and faces, and the green of well-deserved prosperity in the beef market more or less rounds out the picture of Christmas cheer. Toaster-ovens and three-speed power drills are sitting under the tree amid the crumpled wrapping paper, and everyone’s a little bit fatter this evening after eating Mother Flynn’s ham and turkey with all the trimmings. I’ve got a glass of scotch in my hands and will soon be wanting another. When I hand Leo my glass he’ll say, “That sure evaporated quick,” and I’m drunk enough that I’ll be able to say, “Wait till you see what happens to this one!” We all love one another and I’m even willing to forgive the Thank You for Not Smoking sign that Mary Ann hand-lettered and taped up in the mudroom. Mary Ann is my sister-in-law, and she drove Leo out to the well house with her fear of cancer years ago. Sooner or later she’ll drive me back to Chicago, but I’m there in spirit already.
They were just talking about the new pastor at the United Church of Christ and his ambitions to erect a house of worship out on Highway 30. They asked me my opinion. The death of Christ (the second one) hasn’t reached them up here and far be it from me, at this point, to be the bearer of bad news. But Christ is dead and gone and this time it’s for good. I was a little boy when I found out about it and I haven’t told a soul, but a lot of people down here where I live seem to know it now. I sat on it as long as I could. You might say that’s been my true occupation all these years, which explains why I sidestep the issue when people ask me what I do. It always spoils such things as Christmas gatherings for me and I’m beginning to resent it. Do you hear that, God? I resent it!
I mean, I was a normal little boy up to the age of eleven. I was in the Scouts and I hated girls and I loved baseball. When my buddies on the block wanted me to come outside, they’d stand in front of our screen door and chant, “Miiii-key!” Life was unfolding as it should. There was a Saturday morning when Dick Parsons and Roger Molyneaux came over to my house and did the chant while fat December snowflakes fell all about them. I remember looking out the window and watching the snow come down and knowing in my bones, with the intimate accuracy of one who truly cares, that the snow was moist and good for packing. I could already feel my mittened hands dig into a drift along the fence and in the same motion form a ball and wing it hard as I could into the back of Roger’s neck just to get things started. Hell, we were tough and had even smoked cigarettes on the sly once or twice. School was out as of yesterday for a glorious two weeks, and God, to commemorate the event, gave us good packing snow right off the bat.
I remember rushing down to the landing in my stocking feet and standing in the slush and opening the door and yelling, “Hi, guys.” It was a lazy morning and I hadn’t even had breakfast yet. When I heard my mother yelling I figured that’s what she had on her mind to bug me about. Hell, I’ll eat snow for breakfast, I thought, but I told the guys to wait and went up to see what she wanted. Then she proceeded to remind me that Aunt Suzanne was coming over in half an hour and we were going downtown to Christmas shop. This was something that had been planned far too long in advance, to my reckoning, and my heart sank like the battleship Arizona. Aunt Suzanne was driving down from her spinsterly home in the far western suburbs specifically to pick out — and this was the term my mother tactlessly used — a “new outfit” for me. I kicked my feet and tortured my thighs with my fists and even permitted a few hot tears to boil over. I argued that I didn’t need to be along for that, but my mother, lousy collaborator that she was, closed herself off to reason. Aunt Suzanne, with those half-glasses that hung from a chain and gave her eyes a slanty look, was going to be allowed to play Jap fighter pilot no matter what, and shoot down a terrific day.
I told Roger and Dick the rotten news and they didn’t even interrupt their impromptu snowball fight to listen. Roger lobbed a hunk of snow over my head — perhaps it was his idea of showing sympathy — and it exploded against the side of the house and poured down all over me. Then they went off to gorge themselves with fun while I turned sullen. Not that I minded going down to State Street, really. It was seedy enough, despite the department stores, to offer me little bits of knowledge that would help in growing up. My counterattack would have to be, somehow, to ditch the adults as soon as I could and make the most of the day.
Aunt Suzanne arrived on schedule and blessed my heart and blessed my mother’s heart and swiped the hair out of my eyes with her long, dancing fingernails that were painted red, and off we went. The snow was falling nice and thick and I managed to nail a few stop signs before we reached the train station. I have to admit, it didn’t take me long in those days to come back from a disappointment, and by the time we got off at Washington I was full of the perks and ran ahead of my custodians down the lethargic escalator. I can’t remember a time when Chicago didn’t excite me. Even today, jaded and all-knowing though I am, I will still fall into a reverie at the sight of an unexpected alley and a row of fire escapes. My heart still quickens when I see a raunchy neon sign pulsating its message into the dusk, or the sun going down in gaudy splendor behind a power substation. Don’t ask me to explain this. I dream in urban landscapes, the more tightly packed the better; and what I love about the city, the feds and the lawyers and the bankers have long been conspiring to destroy. The jokers who run this country, with their double-breasted self-assurance, with the hair manicured around the rims of their noses, can smell the abstract smell of money but they can’t smell life.
Not that I was thinking anything of the sort that Saturday morning when I was eleven. I suddenly realized I had the better of the bargain after all. Roger and Dick might be busy ambushing traffic on Harlem Avenue, or goofing around by the railroad tracks, but they were stuck in Oak Park. I was in Chicago and I might see a one-legged beggar or an insane person or a drunk. You never knew. I ran down the escalator and waited impatiently for Mom and Aunt Suzanne. “Where does that boy get his energy?” Aunt Suzanne said, and clamped her long nails around my elbow. Then, “Be careful of the traffic.” The two women started gabbing about all the things one had to watch out for downtown, such as purse snatchers and kidnappers and sailors.
“You remember Lucille Kalbfleisch, don’t you?” Aunt Suzanne ran on. “She was chairman of the Altar Guild before they moved to Denver in the spring. Well, she was down on State Street, I believe it was just last Christmas, and had to use the restroom in one of the stores. I can’t remember which one. Anyway, she went into that bathroom and there were two men in there just lying in wait. Well, I tell you, they made her give them her purse but that’s not the half of it. After they had emptied it out they wanted Lucille to take off her clothes! Can you imagine?”
My mother shuddered or gasped or did something appropriate, and I just kept listening. I was trying to imagine Lucille Kalbfleisch naked, whoever she was. “Well, Lucille isn’t exactly a pushover,” my aunt continued, “and at that point she started screaming, and luckily her husband, who was out there waiting and probably glancing at his watch, came running in and wound up getting his shoulder cut open. That’s right, one of them had a knife, and Lucille said she thanked her lucky stars it wasn’t a gun. But the men got away and never were caught. With all the policemen down here, it still isn’t enough. You just can’t get enough protection.”
Both women grasped the implications of that quick enough and clutched me a little tighter. Even eleven-year-olds can get their throats slit, Aunt Suzanne might have said, though she didn’t. I realized I had my work cut out for me if I was going to have any chance at all to run around. In my wisdom I decided to relax. The term for me in those days, with my cowlick and my tennis shoes, was irrepressible. I knew I was irrepressible, though I had never heard of the word, and I knew that irrepressible children gave adults fits. And when adults have fits, no one has a good time. So I listened to the el screech around the corner. I looked at the man selling roasted chestnuts and saw that he had a gold tooth. I stared into the angelic, frozen faces of the women who wore black capes and rang little bells. Aunt Suzanne put a dime into the kettle standing next to one of these women, and Mom did the same.
“What do they do with that money?” I asked.
“They buy food for the poor people.”
“Who are poor people?”
“They’re people less fortunate than you or I.”
“Where do the poor people live?”
“Some don’t have anywhere to live. Some of them have to live in the park.”
“Why are they poor?”
“Come on. We’re going into the store.”
I felt their grip on me growing looser and knew that if I kept bugging them with questions I might have a chance to shake free. Not that I was all that calculating. I really did wonder who, or what, poor people were. I imagined them as a separate species, much as badmen or cannibals. But I didn’t have a fix on what they looked like, or what they actually did that characterized them as poor. Aunt Suzanne’s leg disappeared into the revolving door of Marshall Field’s and I ran after her. I threw my shoulder into the door until it made a sucking sound and began to move. I emerged inside the store and felt my forehead turn red from the heat. “Come on, young man,” said Aunt Suzanne. “First we’re going to buy you some underwear.”
“Do poor people wear underwear?”
“Lord have mercy, Michael, where do you get these questions?”
“I just wanted to know.”
“Well, for heaven’s sake, I don’t know if they do or not. I suppose some of them do. I suppose what they wear is pretty ragged.”
“Do those ladies with the bells pick out their underwear for them, or do they buy it themselves?”
“They get their underwear from charity, you inquisitive little boy. They certainly don’t buy it at a store like this.”
“What’s charity?”
“Charity is giving away your old underwear.”
Well, I went on like that all morning and I think I wore the poor gals ragged. I’m as frayed as the cuffs of a poor man’s pajamas, Aunt Suzanne might have said, but didn’t. They bought me three new sport shirts and six pairs of socks and a belt with a Wyatt Earp buckle and a bunch of other junk and then they shopped for all the other relatives they could think of. I had pretty much had it myself. I didn’t make it out of their sight once. Finally my mother suggested that we go have lunch. So I bolted down a hamburger and fries and then had to sit there while they lingered over their cottage cheese and lettuce and ordered more coffee. This plainly wasn’t fair, not in anyone’s book. All they were doing was gossiping. They weren’t including me in the conversation even as the recipient of a moral lesson. The sighs with which they had dropped into their chairs told me that neither of them planned to move for quite some time. I figured they needed some reminding that I was still out there in left field. “Can I have a dime?” I said.
“That’s the most normal question you’ve asked all day,” said Aunt Suzanne.
“What do you want it for, honey?” said my mother. “A dime won’t go very far in a department store.”
“I want to put it in the kettle to help feed the poor people.”
“Oh, you are the sweetest little angel,” said my aunt, pinching open her coin purse. “Here you go.”
Then I was dodging table legs and running toward the door before either of them had a chance to realize I had eluded them. My mother called to me to hurry back and I said I would and then I was lost in the throng, clutching the dime. I was thinking of running across the street to the place that sold popcorn balls, or maybe buying some chestnuts. But mostly I just wanted independence. Your breath comes sweeter. I ran out of the store and right past the frozen lady ringing her bell and then I pulled up short. God was watching me, even if my mother and aunt weren’t, and He had allowed me to get away. I owed Him one. But it was too simple to toss the dime in the pot and go back up to the gossip. I would hold on to the dime for three minutes, maybe, while I pushed my way anonymously and importantly through the crowd of shoppers. I felt a little bit like Rick Casares or Jimmy Brown or one of the great all-pro runners, and as those men did on many an occasion, I suddenly found myself in the clear.
In my heedlessness I had managed to squirt past all the elbows and hips and shopping bags and stood alone next to a little alley where the trucks drove in. I remember looking around and probably stretching or holding my mouth open to catch the snow, something to commemorate the achievement. The snow had let up some and the sun was peeping through. Yes, I remember looking around and then I saw a man leaning against the side of a building. He was tucked back on the alley side and sort of blended into the grayness that surrounded him. He was hatless and wore a long overcoat and one of his shoes was tied together with binder twine, like they use at the post office. I knew at a glance that he was a poor person. I took a step toward him, very likely with the intention of giving him my dime and thereby doing good directly, but I instantly regretted it. The ghost of Lucille Kalbfleisch, lying dead in her girdle in a women’s washroom, flashed before me. But it was too late. The man looked up and brushed the dark, greasy hair out of his eyes. We made eye contact and he held me in his stare. I wanted to run as fast as my little legs could carry me, but I couldn’t even back up. I could only move slowly toward him. I don’t know what I thought I was doing. Maybe I thought he knew I had that dime, and he wanted it. Well, he was certainly welcome to it. I moved slowly toward him.
I stopped when I was about five feet away and I started to tremble. The man refused to release me from his eyes and I knew that he didn’t want my dime. His face was surprisingly young and he had a scar running across the bridge of his nose. Did he smile? I couldn’t tell for sure. His teeth were black and twisted and several of them were chipped. His hold on me was shattered momentarily when he began to cough. He coughed violently and held his hand to his mouth. When he finally stopped, he looked at me again. He withdrew his hand and I gazed at that same perplexing expression on his face. It was a smile, I decided this time, or a half smile, exceedingly faint. I couldn’t have duplicated it if I had wanted to. Now his lips were bright red and it took me a second to realize this brightness was blood. He had coughed up blood.
Instead of being repelled, I was absolutely fascinated. Nor was I afraid any longer. Something was happening between me and this poor person and I didn’t have any idea what, but I walked a little closer. I wanted to touch him. I remember reaching my hand toward him in a tentative way — the hand that was still clutching the dime — but drew it back when his body started jerking with another coughing fit. Blood mixed with saliva ran freely down the corner of his mouth and smeared over his cheeks and chin when he wiped his hand across his face. Then the half smile reappeared and he glanced up at the sky. I looked up too. The snow was still coming down lightly and I watched a flake emerge from the whirlwind midway up the side of the building and melt on the man’s cheek. Another one caught on his eyelash. The man lifted up his arms and staggered forward, toward me. I held both of my arms out in self-defense and caught him as he started to fall. I pushed him back toward the building and he slid down along the bricks until he was in a sitting position. This made him just about my height.
From this vantage point I had a better view of him and I realized that his face was beautiful. Not the kind of beautiful they’d ever print in a magazine or show on TV — no cute, turned-up nose or curly locks of hair, nothing like that. Everything about the man was rawboned, hideous, and close to death. But he was beautiful and I touched him on the cheek in a red place where the blood had smeared. He gripped me just under the shoulder with his horrible hand and I saw the knuckles turn white. His eyes were liquid now, a bright brown, almost black. I can still conjure up those eyes any time I close my own. As I sit here at my in-laws’ house three feet from the gas heater I can see those eyes boring up at me from my glass of scotch. And I can relax only so far before I start to feel the grip of his hand under my shoulder. He held on like death.
Somehow the knowledge of his identity passed through to me in the moment I stood there locked to him. It passed through his knuckles and into my skin. It burned out at me through his eyes. He opened his mouth and tried to say something. He wasn’t smiling any longer; all his features were twisted with intensity. He opened his mouth and some funny words came out and I tried real hard to understand him but he didn’t make any sense. His voice sounded like the scraping of leather against rough cement. There have been times when I’ve dragged my feet in someone’s basement and have heard his voice. And what I think he said to me, though it wasn’t until much later that I learned there was such a word, was Yahweh. He repeated it. Yahweh. And then some more blood came up and he hugged me like a grizzly bear, pulling my face to his breast. He kissed me on the forehead and then he fell over and he was dead. The el screeched around the corner. Some pigeons scattered from their roost. The snow just about stopped falling. Horns honked and a wholesome choir belted out “Walking in a Winter Wonderland” on a distant loudspeaker. I was still clutching my dime.
I think it was the sounds coming back to me that snapped me to. I was sitting in the slush with a dead man and I started crying. But I wasn’t crying for a dead man. Not a dead man. Something undefinable welled up inside me, something vast and formless and unredeemable. I had cried with longing before, like the time I wanted my mother to come to my bedside when we were visiting relatives in Ohio. It was like crying for my mother magnified by as many stars as there are in the sky.
If I had been permitted to sit there crying for as long as necessary, I could have figured the whole thing out. Never had my mind grasped the melancholy of humanity’s plight so fully as at that moment. I looked up and saw the indifferent sun moving westward across the city. I looked down and saw the hand of Christ lying outstretched in the snow. I saw the dark hairs on his wrist. I saw the scabby knuckles. I knew, somehow, that it was important for me to continue crying. As long as the sobs welled up and shook my rib cage . . . somehow . . . there was still hope. I forgot that I was crying. I thought that I was singing. I sang to the crowd of people that gathered. I sang even louder to the policeman who pulled me to my feet and brushed the snow off my pants. Only when he led me by the hand to a little office somewhere did the tears begin to dry, to become forced. And when the man in the blue uniform asked me if my name was Mike Meyers and I said that it was, I knew that it was all over but the shouting.
Everybody was tremendously understanding. Dad drove all the way downtown to pick us up. I slept on the way back home. I slept for a long time. Then I had a slight bout with pneumonia but it was nothing serious and nobody got worried. It pushed my Christmas vacation back a little further — some vacation! — and I was treated like a hero when I returned to school. All the kids wanted to know about the dead bum. I don’t even know how the news leaked out, but it was common knowledge that I had been there when a bum died in that little alley that runs between State and Wabash. I made up a bunch of lies. I told them what they wanted to hear. My sojourn into selflessness didn’t last very long. My parents, concerned about the effect my experience might have had on my impressionable mind, sent me to a psychiatrist. I told him what he wanted to hear. He pronounced me psychically fit and in a short enough time the whole thing was forgotten. In a lot of ways I managed to become pretty normal again.
My life has never equaled the secret that I knew. For many years I had a vague sense that it never really happened. But every time I drifted too far from those eyes, my upper arm began to throb. He was grasping me all over again. What was I supposed to do? I learned to live with it. Going to church, I must admit, became a pretty riotous occasion. Where before I used to squirm and go out of my mind for that interminable hour, I now sat silently in the balcony with my parents and paid attention to what was going on. I didn’t participate, mind you, but I paid attention. I noticed the cracked nail on Mr. Constantine’s right thumb when he handed us our bulletins. I noticed the way the ushers methodically moved the collection plate up and down the rows. I heard the knees collectively pop when we all had to stand. I heard the pews creak, indifferent oak that they were, nurtured by the indifferent sun. I used to love listening to two hundred people recite the Lord’s Prayer in unison. I waited for them to reach the line, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Those last three words — “trespass against us” — would reverberate off the walls like a thousand cubic yards of freon gas suddenly being released. “. . . trespass against us . . .” Every Sunday the congregation let the air out of the balloon of faith. I liked that, perverse bastard that I am. I found comfort in it. “. . . trespass against us . . . trespass against us . . .”
Ah yes, I see that my glass of scotch has indeed evaporated. Leo’s grinning at me. He knows what I’m after. Perhaps I’ll ask him to come out for a smoke with me. The men are all talking now about the guy who just got elected governor. The women are swishing around and I can tell they’re about to ask us if we’re ready for pie and coffee. If I want to smoke I’d better do it now. My father-in-law is sure to ask me to say a prayer. If you smoke in the cold it’s supposed to be worse for your lungs. Who cares? I know he’ll ask me to say a prayer. Damn him. I don’t wear my collar when I come up here on vacation. Once a minister, always a minister, right? Here, here! Praise be to God! Bless this coffee! Bless this pie! Rub-a-dub-dub, thanks for the grub! Aaaaaaa-men!
Greg Mroczek, a subscriber from Boston, recently sent us a tattered, yellowing copy of this story, which he’d been saving for years “because it touched me somewhere deep.” Thanks to Robert Koehler and to the Chicago Reader, where this story first appeared, for permission to reprint.
