literary genius I turned out to be, huh? I was just getting started on my afternoon drunk when a man walked over to my booth.
“Yer Weiler, then? Would ya mind if I pulled in the snug next to ya there?” He didn’t wait for an answer.
His charming introduction aside, his voice lacked any hint of the disarming lilt Americans associate with an Irish brogue. On the contrary, there was menace in his alcohol-thick voice and a distance in his stare that stretched light years. At about five eight with a pot belly, sandy hair going thin and gray, a rough and ruddy complexion, and bad teeth, he was utterly unremarkable: a laborer or lorry driver, not an assassin, certainly.
I offered him my hand. “What should I call you?”
“Whatever ya fancy.”
“How about McGuinn?” I said, picking a name out of the air.
“Good a name as any.”
We drank to it.
He said, “I hear ya’ve been to the North looking for a story.”
“And you have one?”
“We’ll see about that, lad,” he said. “Come ’round the churchyard at St. Nicholas half ten and we’ll chat.”
The meeting with McGuinn all those years ago, that’s what I was thinking about when the doorbell rang.
It was late. Then again, late was a relative concept. Back in the day, I’d just be firing up the engine about now and the brittle blonds with their vampire complexions and C-note nostrils would just about be rising from their cocaine coffins. These days, “late” was defined by the local news. And local news doesn’t get more local than in a place like Brixton. The bell rang again; my laptop screen still displaying the sum total of my literary output over the last decade-plus: seven first lines of a book never to be written. I figured I’d better get the door.
I trudged down the stairs and through the vestibule to the front door. In spite of having rented this big old house on Spruce Path for the past six years, I felt a strange unease in the place. I was an apartment rat by temperament. House-living fit me like a fat man’s coveralls. I was lost in space. Around Brixton there were more synagogues (one) and mosques (one under construction) than rentable apartments. The closest rentable apartments were over the state line and if I’d been willing to pay state income tax, I would have made the move and done the daily commute. But at the whopping salary of $37,400 per annum, I could afford neither the luxury of more taxes nor the extra gas. Besides, what I paid per year for a three-bedroom house with a garage on a few acres would just about pay the security deposit for a one-bedroom in Chelsea.
I pulled back the front door.
“Renee!”
The St. Pauli Girl stood on the porch dressed in low-cut denim skin, a midriff top, and a brown hoodie. Her navel was pierced-a small silver cross dangling on a short chain. Her nipples asserted themselves in the chilly night air. She stared directly into my eyes, her rapid breaths visible in the moonlight. Without a word, she kissed me softly on the mouth. I might have said something vaguely romantic if I could have separated my thoughts from my desire.
“Aren’t you cold? Would you like to come in?”
“Shhhhh,” she said, placing her index finger across my lips. “Thank you for saving me.” She handed me a slip of paper. “Please come.”
I stood there, frozen, watching her retreat down the porch steps. I listened to the crunch of her footfalls, the slamming of a car door, tires spitting up gravel. I followed her taillights until they became red pinpoints darting through the trees like deer eyes. When I lost sight of her car, I looked down at the piece of paper. Somehow I couldn’t quite focus.
Four
I thought I was lost.
Given the lack of nightlife in Brixton, you’d think seven years here might have afforded me more than adequate opportunity to chart every square inch of this green and unpleasant land. I suppose had I gotten a personality transplant somewhere along the way, I might have been willing to explore the corners of purgatory. Frankly, I was more interested in contracting malaria than exploring the Brixton environs. Part of me knew I should’ve been grateful to have a teaching job, any teaching job, and that there was no less writing talent here than most anywhere else I’d taught, but all I had for the place was a bellyful of resentment.
I was in exile and complicit in my ignorance of Elba. I knew how to get to and from school, to and from the five local restaurants, to and from the multiplex in Stateline. I also used to know the to-and-from for Hendricks Motor Court-a motor court! How fucking quaint is that?
About a year ago, I got this silly notion in my head that I wanted Amy back. I had always wanted Amy back, but she wouldn’t have me back. That much was clear the day after the divorce. I’d burned bridges between us that had yet to be built. It dawned on me during a rare moment of clarity that I wanted to be worthy of Amy’s respect and that sleeping with other men’s wives wasn’t the way to go about it. I wanted to be worthy of Amy’s respect even if she would never know it. So I stopped smoking, cut way back on my drinking, and tried-rather too successfully-to keep my dick in my pants.
Before coming to Brixton, two bouts of detox and rehab had pretty much cured me of my coke habit. Blow actually proved easy to stay away from once I’d put some time and distance between me and the rock. A smoker with a chest full of cancer can spend the rest of his days lighting one half-smoked cigarette with another, perspective being beside the point. My dependency was different because when I came out the other end, I had the thoroughly mixed blessing of getting to survey the scorched landscape of what had once been my promising life. It was nearly depressing enough to make me start using again. But no, I had myriad ways of punishing myself without sliding back down into that particular hell.
I wasn’t as lost as I thought I was, and kept checking the invitation the St. Pauli Girl had delivered me. I hadn’t made a wrong turn after all. That too was a change. Till I got to Brixton, I was defined by my wrong turns. Then, when I came over one last hill I saw a cluster of squat buildings on what had to be the flattest stretch of land in the county. At the bottom of the hill, the road sign let me know I was getting close.
While the letters RSVP were nowhere to be found on the piece of paper Renee had slipped into my hand after she kissed me, I couldn’t quite imagine that I’d been invited to anything but a party. It didn’t really matter. With the way the St. Pauli Girl had kissed me on the porch that night, I would have come even if it were a cockroach rodeo. That simple little kiss had been the object of my obsession for several days now and there were limits to how much self-denial I was willing to put up with in the name of Amy’s unknowing respect. From the moment that Renee had walked into my classroom, she had been testing those limits.
The old industrial park was about as welcoming as a clenched fist. The six-building complex was strictly Warsaw Pact chic: drab, impersonal, desolate. This place was nowhere in the middle of nowhere. I didn’t want to perseverate on the implications of that for me.
I put my car in first gear and rolled into the old industrial park, listening for any sign of life. Mostly I heard the
