The Mysteries Of Pittsburgh

I turned from him and walked down to the riverside and stood in weeds and rusty cans. I was hot, overcome by a feeling of brute sleepiness, and I was two hours late for my foredoomed rendezvous with Phlox. I saw that I'd been mistaken when I thought of myself as a Wall, because a wall stands between, and holds apart, two places, two worlds, whereas, if anything, I was nothing but a portal, ever widening, along a single obscure corridor that ran all the way from my mother and father to Cleveland, Arthur, and Phlox, from the beautiful Sunday morning on which my mother had abandoned me, to the unimaginable August that now, for the first time, began to loom. And a wall says no; a portal doesn't say anything.

'I'm not your friend?' He crunched into the grass beside me. An old, yellow flap of newspaper wrapped itself around his boot.

' Cleveland, do you realize what you're asking me to do? Do you appreciate the misery this means for me?'

'No. I can't,' he said. 'You never let me.'

I looked at him. He almost smiled, but his eyes were fixed on me, unblinking, his forehead wrinkled. Then he started over to the motorcycle. I followed with his broken eyeglasses, and he fit the parts together as well as he could.

It is true, I know, that I failed to permit Cleveland any real sense of the world within me, which was, and is, a world of secrets (but that is putting it too grandly, for it was only a world of things that I could not-no, that I needed not to say), and I regret this failure all the more now, when I realize that he-oh, Cleveland-five times opened wide to me the doors of his strange world. Five times that summer I rode Cleveland 's motorcycle, my head squeezed into the banana-yellow helmet that had once belonged to his little sister. Each time, as we set out, I would clutch the metal bar behind me, but he drove, of course, like a maniac, threading his way among speeding cars, running down yellow lights, even hopping briefly up and off the sidewalk to avoid tie-ups, and I always finished with my hands more securely upon his hips, and would shout and laugh into his helmet. It was at these times, these five quick, alarming times, my fists full of hot black jacket, my helmet clicking against his, that I felt most linked to him, most understanding. I knew why he did the things he did. There would be nothing but his wide back, his laughter, and Pittsburgh whirling past, each of its trees a short hiss. The speed and the roar and the nothing that isolated us were more exciting, more true and intimate, than anything I ever felt that summer with either Phlox or Arthur; there was no shadow of sex to mar or deepen it. There were only laughing fear and my hands, like so, on his hips. We were friends.

He took me to his house so that we could shower and he could change his torn clothes, dig up an old pair of glasses. If I have not already described Cleveland 's own abode, it is because the first time I saw it was that day, when everything seemed new and newly foreboding, when I was filled with giddy fear and with curiosity. Arthur had already made me a little apprehensive of what he called the Casa del Fear, by alluding darkly to its ever changing roster of inmates, its collapses and minor fires, strange animals, dunes and towers of unwashed clothes and dishes. 'It's not a house,' he had said, 'it's an implosion.' It sat in the middle of a small wood in the middle of a Squirrel Hill city block, a forgotten place gained by a narrow, cracked drive that was barely visible from the street. It might have passed for haunted, had its exterior not been decorated with tricolor giant wooden cutouts of Felix the Cat, Alice the Goon, Beany and Cecil, Mr. Peabody and Sherman, Ignatz Mouse and his flying brick. But it had gables, a queer, peeling turret, an iron fence, its shutters dangled crazily, and there was something vaguely human about its visage.

'Who owns this place?' I said, unscrewing my head from the helmet as we climbed off the bike.

'No one knows.'

'Ah.'

'Every month, on the first night of the full moon, I leave the rent money in a little paper bag at the end of the driveway. In the morning it's gone.'

We climbed the steps of the house and crossed the creaking porch, went through the living room. Paperback books were piled everywhere, on tables, on the floor, in corners, and I glanced at their titles, an eclectic assortment that ran from the true stories of famous murders to Knut Hamsun, from diet books and horoscopes to Vonnegut and comic books. I supposed that all this odd variety represented the many and multiform roommates and previous occupants of the Casa del Fear.

'Have you read all of these?'

'Of course. Why else would they be here?'

'You bought all these books?'

'I don't buy books,' he said.

This was before I knew about Cleveland 's magical coat of many pockets, which inexhaustibly brought forth cigarettes, canned goods, books and magazines, and the occasional rubber snake or chattering wind-up dentures plucked from a variety store. Perhaps the greatest single miracle that Cleveland ever performed was to have run through his mother's considerable legacy in six years without ever purchasing anything more expensive than his motorcycle.

We cleaned ourselves up, and while he changed I wandered the halls, looking into the bare rooms, each with a stereo and a mattress. None of the evil roommates appeared to be home, although traces of them, visual and olfactory, were everywhere. Some of the bedroom doors were padlocked, others were torn from their hinges and set tilted against a wall. I stepped into one room and stared absently for a few moments at a poster that promoted a rock-and-roll band, before noticing that it depicted a garish Aztec sacrifice atop a pyramid-the heart, bereft of its body, lovingly rendered. I was thinking that I had to call Phlox, and the thought of Phlox was so appealing that I almost decided just to go to her, to sneak out of the house and let Cleveland head downtown alone. Perhaps that would have been an even more foolish thing to do, although it is difficult to see how. In any case, he stuck his head in the door.

'Okay, Bechstein.'

I turned. He had on round white-rimmed glasses that made him look rather fey.

'All right.' I sighed. 'Just let me call Phlox.'

But there was no answer; so we went downtown, which was my fourth time on the back of Cleveland 's motorcycle.

17. B and E

On the way downtown, I considered the possibility that I might end up once again in the ill-starred Italian restaurant. It would have made, at least, for a kind of gruesome symmetry. But my father, as it happened, was in his hotel room, with several other men. Dimly we could hear them laughing as we came down the worn plush in the cool, faded hotel corridor. My cheeks tingled from exercise and anxiety. And then Cleveland astonished me: When I stopped at the numbered door and for a last look of encouragement turned to face him, he drew a necktie from the pocket of his leather jacket and began to loop it around his shirt collar. The tie was gray-brown, with an intricate pattern of unusual squares and ovals.

'Rattlesnake,' said Cleveland.

Another round of guffaws from the other side of the door. I waited, so as not to cause an ominous, abrupt cessation of laughter; when I heard the final sound of my father clearing his throat, I knocked. After the several seconds that it took them silently to discuss and to delegate, a man opened the door, one of Them. I tried to look into the room, but there was a white vestibule-a bench, a mirror, and a gladiola in a vase-and nothing else. The man, in shirtsleeves and suit pants, had a pale face and an uncool haircut. He recognized me, and I wondered how many times I had seen him before. He smiled and stepped out into the hall, shutting the door behind him.

'Hey,' he said. 'How do you like that? It's Joe Bech-stein's boy.' He shook my hand. 'Jimmy. Jim Breezy. Last time I saw you, you were a kid. Say, Art, listen.' He put his hand on my shoulder and pulled me a little toward him, and a little away from the door, then he looked over my shoulder and seemed to notice Cleveland for the first time. 'This a friend?'

'Yes; right. It is good to see you, Jimmy.'

'Say, Art, listen-your dad's kind of busy right now, you know, he's talking to some people. So. He's busy.'

'Oh, no.'