Boys of Life Read online

  BOYS OF

  LIFE

  Copyright © 2016 by Paul Russell.

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or online reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published in the United States by Cleis Press, an imprint of Start Midnight, LLC, 101 Hudson Street, Thirty-Seventh Floor, Suite 3705, Jersey City, NJ 07302.

  Printed in the United States.

  Cover design: Scott Idleman/Blink

  Cover photograph: iStockphoto

  Text design: Frank Wiedemann

  First Edition.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Trade paper ISBN: 978-1-62778-172-5

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-62778-173-2

  BOYS OF

  LIFE

  PAUL RUSSELL

  To the memory of Karl Keller

  Robert Mapplethorpe

  Pier Paolo Pasolini

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My thanks to Harvey Klinger, my agent; Arnold Dolin, my editor; and Matthew Camicelli, assistant editor. To Ann Imbrie, James Lewton-Brain, Catherine Murphy, Steve Otto, Bob Richard, Harry Roseman, and Michael Somoya, early and encouraging readers of this manuscript. To Matthew Aquilone, Christopher Canatsey, and Karen Robertson. To the late James Day, mentor, master-reader, friend. Especially to Tom Heacox. And finally to my lively and constant companions of Barhamsville, Abby, Darrell, and Sugar Baby.

  Even if their adventures were sometimes so cruel as to be revolting by our standards, if they were obscene in such a grand and total way as to become innocent again, yet beyond their ferocity, their eroticism, they embody the eternal myth; man standing alone before the fascinating mystery of life, all its terror, its beauty and its passion.

  —FEDERICO FELLINI

  THE FIRST TIME I MET CARLOS REICHART I WAS standing in the Nu-Way Laundromat folding up a bed sheet, which is probably a strange way to meet the one person who’s going to ruin your life.

  It was September, and there was this light drizzle coming down past the windows of the laundromat. The fluorescent lights made everything look even more depressing than usual—concrete block walls painted yellow, these blue and green palm trees painted over the yellow. The concrete floor and the stale heat smell that comes from dryers.

  The Nu-Way was the only laundromat in Owen, Kentucky, and doing laundry there was one of the things I hated most. The clothes in the washers went round and round, and in the dryers too. In two weeks there you’d be back again, washing the same clothes over and over. That was exactly what your life was.

  I remember hearing on the radio, years later, about some tropical depression out in the Atlantic that was being upgraded into a storm. We were making a movie on this estate in the Hudson River Valley, and Seth Rosenheim, Carlos’s cameraman, made the joke, “That’s what happened to Carlos—a tropical depression upgraded into a storm.” What it suddenly made me remember, though—those words tropical depression—was the Nu-Way Laundromat: maybe the clothes spinning in the dryers, and those green and blue painted palm trees that were supposed to cheer the place up but only made it more depressing. Or maybe because I met Carlos on a day when it was raining and somewhere, some ocean, it really was the season for tropical depressions and storms.

  I was tugging bed sheets out of the dryer, stuffing them back in the plastic garbage bags I’d brought. When I looked up, this man was staring at me. He was sitting on the wooden bench that ran along the windows in the front of the place, and he had a little spiral notebook in his lap, the kind you buy for school. He must’ve been writing something down, only he’d stopped and was looking around. I guess he’d seen me because he was staring, and when I glanced up we were looking right at each other.

  I expected him to look away, but he didn’t, and for some reason I didn’t either. But then I did, I went on folding those sheets. I had this feeling he was staring at me the whole time, and when I looked back at him it was true, he hadn’t moved. It was this questioning look, like you give somebody when you think you might’ve seen them before, or you might know them but can’t remember from where. Only he looked like he knew exactly who I was. That’s what I felt—here was somebody saying, Oh, I know exactly who you are even though I’ve never seen you before. Like he’d been waiting to meet me for a long time and he’d known he would—he just didn’t know when or where it would happen and now here it was.

  Maybe I’m making all that up, but I don’t think so.

  There wasn’t anybody but us in the laundromat. I hadn’t noticed him till I noticed him staring at me. He was maybe forty years old, not gone to flab anywhere but tight like the head of a drum. With his high cheekbones he looked like he might have Cherokee blood in him. His black hair was combed back from his forehead, and he was wearing this black long-sleeve shirt buttoned all the way up to the collar. His eyes were black too, crazy glittery eyes like country people sometimes have, and that thin hard hollowed-out face. Only he wasn’t any country person. He was definitely somebody from somewhere else.

  I kept on folding sheets, but he was starting to bother me. I felt like he was studying me, but when I looked up again he’d gone back to writing in his little spiral notebook. Just then, he looked up right when I was looking at him—it was like I was the one who’d been looking and not the other way around, and he’d caught me.

  There was something about those eyes, more like some animal’s eyes than a person’s—some really smart animal that’s always on the lookout, the way you see hunting dogs go on the alert. Like even here in this laundromat some keen sense of smell in him was sniffing out things other people wouldn’t pick up on.

  I pretended I was trying to see past his head to something passing by on the street. All of a sudden he came bolting up at me from where he was sitting. I must’ve looked surprised—he sort of raised his eyebrows in a friendly way and sailed right past me to the washing machines, where he started pulling out clothes and tossing them into the dryers. He probably opened up fifteen washing machines, nearly every one in the place, and threw his stuff across into that many dryers. I had to laugh—each time I thought that must be all of it, there was still another washer for him to open and pull clothes from. He stopped loading the dryer and looked at me. What’s so funny? was what that look said.

  Before I knew I was going to say anything, I said, “You got a pretty big family.”

  “You might say that,” he said. “You got a pretty big family yourself.” He was looking at the stack of laundry I’d piled up—with my mom and my brother, Ted, and my two little sisters, there were five of us. “You married?” he asked me.

  “Do I look old enough to be married?” I said. I was sixteen.

  “Around these parts,” he told me, “sure. Don’t you people marry when you’re about twelve years old?”

  He had this sharp accent, and I knew then he had to be this total stranger to Owen. Nobody in Owen ever talked that way. It sounded sort of snide. I couldn’t know at the time that was just the way he was with strangers; you’d never guess it, but he was this shy person really.

  “Hey, just kidding,” he said. “Don’t you hate doing this stuff?” He took in the whole room. “I mean, isn’t it the worst?”

  “It’s pretty bad,” I told him. “But you really do have a lot of clothes. Using up all the washers in the place.”

  “See,” he explained, “I’m doing laundry for a bunch of people.” “That’s nice. How’d you get suckered into that?” I wanted to pay him back for that line about my being married.

  He looked at me with a kind of odd look.

  “S
uckered?” he said.

  “You know, doing everybody else’s laundry for them.”

  “Just think,” he said, like it had any kind of connection with anything, “we’d never’ve had this stimulating conversation if I hadn’t brought all their laundry in here.” “Yeah, right,” I told him.

  I’d finished putting my laundry into garbage bags, but since it was still raining outside I hopped up on a washing machine to sit and wait for it to stop. I wished it wasn’t raining because I sort of wanted to be out of there. I was afraid this guy might talk to me some more, and I didn’t really have anything else to say to him.

  And I guess he didn’t have anything else to say to me either—he finished shoving everything in the dryer and then went back to his bench and started writing in his notebook again. From where I was sitting on the washer I couldn’t really see him. Not that I wanted to, but something kept getting the best of me and I’d look over my shoulder to where he was. But he was never looking up at me, which I was glad for. He just kept writing in that notebook.

  I couldn’t figure out what he could be writing, and I sort of wanted to ask him, but I didn’t want to start us talking again—so I sat there trying to be as blank as I could and watched the rain, listening to it drum the roof and wondering if it’d take long to get a hitch back to the house, or whether I’d have to walk it in the dark. The more I thought about all that, the more depressed I got. Like everything else, it was something I seemed to be doing all the time with no stop to it.

  I wondered where he could be from, what reason he was stopped in the Nu-Way Laundromat with more dirty clothes than practically the rest of the town put together. There was something I liked about him, the way he sat there writing in that notebook and never looking up at me even though I knew he knew I was still there—some kind of lonely feeling I got looking at him, some queasy kind of loneliness I knew from when sometimes I’d lie on my back on the ground and look into the sky wondering if it ever had an end to it and knowing it didn’t. It nagged at me, this feeling, which was why I kept glancing over at him the way I did. Like maybe I could surprise something and then I’d know what it was I was looking for and not being able to find.

  Part of it was, to be honest, I was just bored sitting there waiting for the rain to be over and watching the whole row of dryers with their loads spinning behind glass and the rain just kept on and finally the dryers came to a stop.

  They’d been stopped a minute or two and he hadn’t made a move. “Your stuff’s all ready,” I told him.

  “Thanks,” he said. “You can go now.” He started tucking stuff away into garbage bags.

  “It’s raining,” I told him. “I don’t want to get wet.”

  “Smart kid. And I see you’re into the garbage bag fashion statement too.”

  “It’s just that I have to walk. It’s easier to carry that way.”

  “Yeah sure,” he laughed. “I know a garbage bag buff when I see one. Where do you have to walk?”

  “A ways,” I said. I thought maybe he’d offer me a ride, but he didn’t, he just concentrated on stuffing his bags full of clothes. Okay, I thought. I’m out of here. If he sees me walking in the rain he can get the point, or if he doesn’t, then fuck it. But I didn’t go. It was still raining, and I just sat there watching him stuff piles and piles of clothes into his garbage bags, probably fifteen in all, till finally he was done. He looked over at me and grinned this tight grin, like something was paining him. “So,” he said with that sharp accent of his, “you want to help me stow these in the van? Since obviously you plan to sit there all night.”

  “I’ve done worse,” I told him.

  “Yeah? I want to hear about it.”

  I shrugged.

  “No really, I do.”

  “How about giving me a ride home instead?”

  We were lugging the bags out to his beat-up orange VW van in the parking lot. He opened up the back. “Careful,” he said, “don’t just go slinging things around. You’ll break something.”

  “What’s all that stuff?” I had to ask. The back of the van was totally full of junk—worse than some handyman’s station wagon. “Equipment,” he said. “Cameras and whatnot.”

  “You take pictures?”

  He made some sound like “anngh.”

  “It’s this movie project,” he said. “All these clothes, they’re for my crew. They go through them like diapers. I was the only one not hung over today, so here I am.”

  “A movie project,” I said. “Like what kind of movie project?”

  “Like a movie movie. Like we’re making a movie,” he said as he piled the last bag on. It made a pretty impressive heap. “I’m Carlos Reichart,” he told me all of a sudden. “I’m not famous, so don’t pretend you’ve ever heard of me, because you haven’t. Now hop in and let’s go.”

  The front seat was as filled up with junk as everywhere else in that van—pieces of paper torn out of a spiral notebook and tools and empty beer cans and Barbie dolls missing an arm or a leg.

  “Excuse the mess,” Carlos said. “I didn’t exactly expect to go ferrying local youth around town.”

  “You never know,” I told him. It got to me, the edgy way he had of talking—but at the same time I felt pretty easy with him. It was strange. I wasn’t sure if he was pulling my leg about making some movie—but that was okay, he was still the most interesting person right at that moment that I knew in Owen.

  “But let’s talk about you,” he said. “What I’m always curious about is other people. People who live in little towns and carry their laundry around in garbage bags. I don’t know anything else about you except that. I’d like to, though. Maybe I’ll write a movie about you.”

  “Some movie that’d be,” I told him.

  “Well, you never know,” he said. “But right now—where’re we going? Where’s home? Or we could go somewhere and talk. Surely you don’t have to go home and cook dinner too? But are you hungry? What time is it? I have no idea of what time it is, but I haven’t eaten all day—I’m starving. That pizza place serves takeout, doesn’t it? What’s the drinking age in this part of Kentucky? Ten? Eleven? We could get a six-pack and takeout pizza and live it up in the back of the van.”

  It almost made me laugh—he sounded like he was afraid if he stopped talking I might say something, and then everything’d be ruined. Like I might bolt in between sentences. I never heard anybody like that before, and I guess it interested me.

  “Sounds okay,” I said, not knowing exactly what I was okaying out of all those things he said, but definitely excited by the prospect of some beer. I knew my mom wasn’t coming in till late—it was a Friday, and lots of Fridays she was out all night. And my little brother, Ted, could take care of my sisters fine. He definitely had sense enough to heat up something or other from a can.

  We picked up a pizza and two six-packs and then drove a ways out of town to where the road turned off to Tatum’s Landing. You could put boats in the river there if you wanted to—there was this concrete apron that sloped down into the water. With night coming on, and the rain, nobody was out there.

  When we’d climbed over all those garbage bags full of laundry, his and mine both, into the back of the van, Carlos said, “Pretty cozy, huh?”

  “Well, at least it’s different,” I told him, which it was definitely that.

  I downed those first couple of beers like no tomorrow, which he did too, and then once we were both on our way to relaxing, he started asking me questions again. Did I go to school, what was it like at home, did I have a lot of friends? He kept watching my face the whole time he was talking, the way nobody ever watches you. He kept asking me questions. I guess I was sort of flattered.

  “Yeah, I go to school,” I told him. “It’s pretty feeble. I live out on Route 27—back the other way out of town.” Like Carlos could care less or anything.

  “A farm?” he asked, like that was what he wanted it to be.

  “Nah,” I had to tell him. “It’s just
this trailer. It’s me and my mom, and I got a brother and some sisters. It’s okay, it’s better than this house we used to live in that was falling down at the time.”

  “And where’s your dad?”

  I sort of had to laugh—I guess I never knew what else to do. “My dad,” I said.

  I hadn’t talked to anybody about my dad in a long time—it wasn’t something any of us ever talked about.

  “I’m just this stranger,” Carlos told me. “Don’t say anything you don’t want to.”

  “No, I got no secrets,” I told him. “I don’t care.”

  “Good—if you don’t, I won’t,” he told me, again looking at me like he did all the time. I remember wondering at the way he kept looking.

  “There’s these two theories about my dad,” I told him.

  “Theories?” Carlos asked.

  “Depending on who you talk to,” I told him. “One theory says he’s laying out in the Wahrani swamp.”

  “What?” Carlos seemed really alarmed.

  “Yeah. Where he got knocked off by some of Mr. Hodge’s men for getting himself involved in this liquor running scheme over in Christian County. See, it was a dry county back then—six years ago. So that’s one theory. But then this other theory goes, my dad just up and left one day. My mother thinks he’s in Louisville living it up right now.”

  “And what do you think?” Carlos asked.

  “I don’t think anything. I was just this little kid back then. All I know is, my dad used to beat up on my mom a lot. Or he’d go lighting into one of us.”

  “What do you mean, lighting into you?”

  “Well, if she wasn’t around. You know, at night. He’d go asking us where she was, and it didn’t matter what we said, he’d still light into us. So we just always made stuff up.”

  I had to laugh—suddenly I was remembering something.

  “What’s so funny?” Carlos asked. He was taking all this in, like it was serious stuff—which I guess it was.