Chapter 24

Catch 22

At last on the street, the finance-administrator led the way again, around the corner where a Cingular Wireless shop did a lot of business with the neighborhood drug-dealers, past Kelly’s to Kiley’s.  Kelly's, besides being a big bar, was a restaurant where prostitutes got themselves wined and dined before springing their profession on the johns.  As poor as this neighborhood was, it had a lot of commerce.

It was on the walk up Old Colony Road to Kiley’s that the finance-administrator told Bob and Lev about the back door of the other bar, and let them know a little more about the culture there as well.  Obviously he’d paid a lot of attention.

“Sorry, Bob,” said the finance-administrator.  “A lot of Irish revolutionaries used to hang out at the end of the bar where John Quinn was.  I don’t know what happened to them, but none of them go there much anymore.  Assassins, terrorists, people like that.”

“That’s alright,” said Bob.  “Nice people there.  How about Kiley’s?”

“A few murderers,” said the finance-administrator.  “But not much political.”

Bob strode on like Fred Astaire, using his putter like Fred Astaire’s canes.

“So Jamie,” said the finance-administrator.  “I heard you have a penis ring.”

“Who told you that?” asked Jamie.  “Did Tio tell you that?”

“No,” said the finance-administrator.  “Shirley told me.”

Neither Jamie nor Tio responded further, and Bob and Lev didn’t so much as laugh.  The five of them walked silently the rest of the way to Kiley’s, except when Jamie stopped to express sympathy for a cat lying dead in the gutter, and the finance-administrator spoke up, whatever, whyever.

“You know,” said the finance-administrator, “I just thought of something.  You know that Bobby back there with kidney cancer?  Well, there was another Bobby working part-time for l’amore di Santa Clara doing things like sweeping and mopping, and he had to go through dialysis daily besides having some other physical and mental problems, and he showed me what a little despot that Kate Plate is.

“Like Ari, she shuts her door a lot, always when she’s counseling employees in her responsibility as a human resources specialist, except for Bobby.  Him, when he was out sick more than she thought was good for l’amore di Santa Clara, she loudly berated with her door wide open.  Everybody on that admin. floor could hear that.

“Why didn’t anyone do anything about it?” asked Jamie.

“I don’t know,” said the finance-administrator.

 Kiley’s was a keno bar.  It’s main business was sucking money out of poor people trying to get rich by gambling away what little income they had.  Most of the customers sat quietly at tables, scribbling on their little keno cards with their little keno pencils and watching their chances on televisions hanging from the barroom ceiling.

The finance-administrator walked into the bar, and the others followed.

“Hi, Peggy,” he said to the barmaid, a young woman smiling at him.

“Hi, Bill,” she said.  “What can I get for you and your friends?”

“Two bottled Buds, two bud drafts, and a Heinekens, please.”

“You got it,” said the young woman, quickly going to work.

“Peggy won four-million dollars in the lottery a few years ago,” said the finance-administrator, motioning to a table near the bar.  “Do we want to sit down?”

“My husband won four-million dollars in the lottery,” corrected Peggy, as she moved quickly about behind the bar, gathering the beer they’d ordered from her.

The finance-administrator looked back at her left hand.

“She’s usually wearing a big diamond engagement-ring,” he said.

“There’s your chance,” said Jamie.

“I don’t think so,” said the finance-administrator.

“I’ll buy,” said Tio, returning to the bar to accept the order as the others sat.

“I’ll get the next one,” said the Finance-administrator, looking around.

At a table nearer the back of the barroom, in a section stepped a little higher than the section before the bar, a thin bald man with several front teeth missing sat with some people looking more able to do conventional business. The finance-administrator looked at him and back to Lev and Bob, before speaking again.

“That guy spent five years in Walpole Prison,” said the finance-administrator, loudly enough for the man to hear him.

“You again,” said the thin man, not grinning or smiling.

“He’s going to kill you someday,” said Jamie.

“Maybe,” said the finance-administrator.  “Maybe not.”

“How do you know he was in prison?” asked Bob.

“He told me,” answered the finance-administrator.

“Where?” asked Lev.

“In here,” said the finance-administrator.

“Why?” asked Bob.

“I don’t know,” said the finance-administrator.  “Maybe he wanted to impress me.  Maybe he wanted to scare Jamie.”

“You don’t seem afraid of much,” said Bob.

“Allah’s will,” said the finance-administrator.  “Or yea though I walk.  However one says it, that’s the way I feel.  Cowards die a thousand deaths.  Etcetera.”

“This place sucks,” said Bob.  “All these people wasting their lives wishing for something they wouldn’t know what to do with if they got it.  At least those people at that other bar talked with one another

“I agree,” said the finance-administrator.  “I can never drink more than one beer in here.  I just stop here on my way to Whitey’s, so I won’t be too sober when I get there.  But I can’t finish a beer in most Boston bars.

“You finished a few in Remington’s,” said Lev.

“That’s because we were talking about something besides sports or each other’s Saabs or how much money each of us is going to make than the other or what rich or famous people condescend to speak to us or how smart we are, having gone to Harvard or someplace we can argue to be better, or less pretentious.  In New Orleans, I spent most of my spare time in bars, and I had a reputation for being one of the most interesting conversationalists in the Quarter.  But, in Boston, I almost never went to bars, until I found the one we just left.  Those people are just trying to get by.

“A little like Remington Bosworth, they’re just looking for a job, a way to be worthy, important.  Remington’s seems to me to be a fitting name for a bar, referring to mass production of firearms so that people can kill each other more cheaply, and so feel their power over others more cheaply, while philosophers say paradox is rare.

“Mark Twain, in his effort to say what I’m trying to say, said:  ‘And you are but a thought--a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!’  So, what do we do?  Quit?”

“So we’re going to Whitey’s?” asked Jamie.

“I don’t have a problem with that,” said the finance-administrator.

“I don’t have a problem with that,” said Tio.

“They have bottles of Rolling Rock for $1.50,” said Jamie.

“I don’t have a problem with that,” said Tio.

“I like the bars in New Orleans, too,” said Lev.  “Do you like Molly’s?”

            “Which one?” asked the finance-administrator.

            “At the Market,” answered Lev.

            “It’s one of my favorites,” said the finance-administrator.  “Do you know Maggie?  The barmaid who drew that portrait of Yeats behind the bar?”

            “Sure,” said Lev.  “But she doesn’t work there anymore.  She opened a gallery of her own and took that portrait with her.  Just left a print.”

            “Good for her,” said the finance-administrator.  “The other Molly’s is more like Whitey’s, but darker and smaller.”

            “The Molly’s on Toulouse Street, just off Bourbon,” said Lev.  “Do you know Maya, the barmaid there?  Tall thin graceful black woman?”

            “Sure,” said the finance-administrator.  “She worked at Kagan’s before legalizing gambling forced it closed, the punk bar on Decatur Street.

“Maya, I think, is a national landmark.”

            The walk to Whitey’s was past a public housing project now defunct.  In darkness of its defunctness, Tio said he had to pee and did it behind a big steel telephone-switchbox, while we others waited.

            “This really pisses me off,” said Jamie.

            “He should have done it before we left the house?” said Bob.

            “Tearing down this housing,” said Jamie, looking at Bob and then at the finance-administrator.  “My brother Georgie still lives in Liverpool, and he lives on the dole better than I do here with my business.  You don’t know what the rent is for the dump Laurie and I live in.  This country sucks.”

            “Love it or leave it,” said Bob.

            “I love my wife,” said Jamie.

            “Take her with you,” said the finance-administrator.

            “She won’t go,” said Jamie.  “She’s afraid of flying.”

            “So here we are in the dark,” said Lev, “pissing and moaning.”

            “You don’t understand,” moaned Jamie, now pissing behind a tree.

            “I understand,” said Lev, “that the American Henry James wrote about how much more complex European mentality is than American mentality, and I understand that the complexity is all bologna.  The complexity of the English and the French is in their making excuses to feel sorry for themselves and to hate other people, while Americans and Russians mainly just try to get along.  Dostoevski is more popular in England and France than I am, because he promotes pitying dirt-bags because their feelings and failings are more complicated than honest people’s.  Americans don’t like me because my books are too long, and they’re so long because I repeat myself, trying to explain the obvious.  Try to explain how blue is the sky.”

            “I don’t read,” said Jamie.  “I’m a sex maniac.”

            “Yeah, right,” said the finance-administrator.  “Why don't you have any kids?  You told me shaving pubic hair is sexy, and you’re too lazy to go on the web enough to check out porn.  If you like mounds of Venus shaved to look like refrigerators, don’t you like tits made of silicon?  What’s the difference between silicon-chip sex and silicon breastfeeding?  Well, I guess it’s all natural, since silicon comes from sand.”

            “Sure,” said Jamie.  “Do you think I’m stupid?  In my business, you have to know the difference between latex and Mylar.  You can’t take latex balloons into hospitals anymore.  I know that stuff.  I’m an engineer!”

            Whitey’s, on West Broadway, had a big pool table.  And it had unfinished wood floors and a long mahogany bar, but it was no fancier than the other bars this motley crew visited that night.  Like the bar on Dorchester Street, it had no sign out front or anywhere else indicating its owner's name, maybe because its owner was Whitey Bolger.  There, the five musketeers sat at the tables behind the pool table, and the finance-administrator brought the Rolling Rock from the bar.  He sat down, but he quickly stood back up and put quarters on the pool table.

“We’re playing for twenty dollars,” said one of the players.

“I don’t have a problem with that,” said the finance-administrator.

He left the quarters and sat back down, and a small dark-haired woman came and tapped him on a shoulder.  The finance-administrator looked up at her and smiled.

“Hi, Donna,” he said.

“Long time no see,” she said, also smiling, at all at the table, hardly showing that she also was missing a few front teeth, and she returned to the bar.

“You’re up,” said the pool-player.

“Did you win?” asked the finance-administrator.

“Yeah,” said the pool-player.  “You got twenty bucks?”

“I’ll hold the money,” said Donna, leaving her barstool again.

The pool-player and the finance-administrator each handed Donna a twenty-dollar bill and turned back to the table.

“Rack ‘em,” said the pool-player.  “It’s my table.”

“He’s no hustler,” said the finance-administrator in an undertone to Lev.  “He talks too much, and he worries too much.”

“Don’t you worry,” said Bob.  “I’ve still got my putter.”

The finance-administrator stayed just a little ahead of the pool-player and sank the eight with one ball left on the table.  Donna fairly leaped from her barstool and handed the two twenty-dollar bills to the finance-administrator, grinning.  She shook his hand, and so did the pool-player.

“Good game,” said the pool-player.  “Play again?”

“I don’t want to push my luck,” said the finance-administrator, and he sat back down with the rest of the musketeers and resumed drinking Rolling Rock, after telling Lev he’d never been in a pool situation so amateurish.

“I haven’t played much pocket-billiards,” said Lev.

“Excuse me, Mr. Kid,” said Bob.  “But it’s getting late in the evening, and I have to ask you a question I know Lev would like to ask as well.  In your wandering since that sheriff killed you, what do you think you’ve learned?”

"That’s easy,” said Billy, returning his stick to the rack.  “I even have the words.  Guns blazing, swords swiping, ways to die.  Cancer rotting, pills poisoning, drugs dragging, how to die. The best way to die is alive, standing up or sitting down for what you feel in your heart.  The worst way to die is failing faith by feeling sorry for yourself.  Your self is good God, whom you know in your heart.  It’s that simple, I think.”

The finance-administrator leaned his chair back against the wall, but suddenly he stood again.  He picked up his beer and strode to the bar and sat on a stool beside a beautiful young woman with wild black hair and a visage as Greek as Aphrodite.

“Hi, Kelly,” said the finance-administrator.  “Why aren’t you shooting pool?”

“I was,” she said, “but I can’t afford to lose twenty bucks.”

“Don’t lose,” replied the finance-administrator.

“That’s easy for you to say,” she answered.

“Hey,” said the finance-administrator.  “Want to go to a big society function?”

“A society function?” she said, looking at him with obvious interest.

“Yeah,” said the finance-administrator.  “You know I work for L’Amore di Santa Clara, and they’re having their annual fundraiser next week at the Fairmont Hotel at Copley Square.  It’s a lot of rich people showing off how generous they are to poor people.  Free champagne reception, and dinner in the grand ballroom.”

“What day?” asked Kelly.  “What time?”

“I don’t know,” said the finance-administrator, pulling from a pocket the invitation he had received at work that day, and handing it to Kelly.  “Here’s the invitation.  You tell me.”

She took it and opened it and read it.  She read the date and time aloud.

“I can do this,” she said.  “It sounds like fun.  I’m good at mingling.  I have a black dress I can wear, but it’s full-length.  Will that be alright?

“Anything you’re in will be alright,” said the finance-administrator.  “Where can I pick you up?  I mean, where can I find you?”

“Here,” she said.  “Meet me here.”

“Alright,” said the finance-administrator.  “I’ll be here a half-hour before that time.  We can have a drink before we go.  So we won’t be there too early.”

“Alright,” she said, and she offered the invitation back to him.

“Keep it,” said the finance-administrator.  “So you won’t forget.”

“I won’t forget,” said Kelly, and she stepped from her stool.

“Leaving?” asked the finance-administrator.

“Yeah,” she said, tucking the invitation into her purse.  “I have to go to work in the morning.  I have a new job, and I don’t want to get too messed up.

"Oh," she said.  "My mother calls me Ned.  I don't know why."

The finance-administrator watched her graceful walk, past the pool-table and on out the door to West Broadway, before he returned to his table.

“Whoa,” said Jamie.  “Did I just see what I think I saw?”

“She’s half your age,” said Lev.

“I didn’t ask her to marry me,” said the finance-administrator.  “Anyway, if L’Amore di Santa Clara fires me, it looks like I’ll go out in a blaze of glory.  Beautiful, isn’t she.”

“That’s a nice note for closing the evening,” said Bob.  “I’m at the Park Plaza.  I guess I can get a cab out front to there.”

“Me, too,” said Lev.  “I have to be in New York tomorrow.  It’s been a pleasure meeting you gentlemen.”

“I’m going to Shenanigans,” said Jamie.  “How about you, Tio?”

“No problem,” said Tio, and he looked at the finance-administrator.

“I’ll walk you there and take a taxi home,” said the finance-administrator.

From there, Lev told me, he went on to New York.  Everything’s always early for ghosts, since they don’t have to sleep and can get anywhere they wish to go on less than a breath of air.  His little submission now was to see how homeless people are treated in homeless shelters.  He had seen the revenue side.  Now for the expense.

He spent the rest of that night wandering the streets of Manhattan, talking with anyone else he found on those streets after the bars closed.  He found most of them to welcome conversation, as had the patrons of the bar on Dorchester Street.  But he found few of them able to articulate their needs.  Winning the lottery was a common goal.

“Nobody every said life is supposed to be fair,” many of them said.  “So you have to sneak and steal.  You have to hustle like a politician, if you want to get what you want.  The only other way is to win the lottery.  And what’s the chance of that?”

“What would you do if you won the lottery?” asked Lev.

“Hell, I don’t know,” was the most common answer.  “I’d think of something.”

“I’d shoot it up my arm,” was another popular answer.

Upon the rising of the sun between the skyscrapers, Lev made his way to the New York City Homeless Haven, near the World Trade Center.  Persons with whom he had spoken in the night had told him where it was, and they said it was the biggest homeless shelter in the city.  They also said it was the oldest they knew of.

“You can get lunch there.”

“You can get clothes there.”

“You can get med’s there.”

“You might be able to sleep there, but I wouldn’t.”

“Why not?” asked Lev.

“They’ll think they own you,” was the common answer.

Waiting for morning business hours, Lev talked with persons who had slept there that night and were now turned out to fend for the day, and maybe to sleep there again that night, if they wished to, and were lucky.  Beds were too few for all that were willing to obey the rules for a night of clean sleep, out of the weather.

“I heard they have too many rules in there,” said Lev.  “Is it worth it for supper and breakfast and a night’s sleep inside?”

“The game in there is easier than the hustle out here,” was the common answer.  “And I’m tired, sick and tired.”

So Lev tested the game.  He went inside, when the doors opened in midmorning, and he told the first staff-member he saw that he thought he must be crazy, and that he needed some help.  He said he needed some professional help.

“Sit down,” said the staff member, after wanding Lev for weapons.  “I’ll have to call upstairs.  We get a lot of crazy people here.”

Lev sat in the fiberglass chair with chrome-plated legs the staff member indicated, and he listened as the staff member called upstairs.

“I’ve got a guy down her who says he’s crazy and needs professional help,” said the staff member.  “Just a minute.  I’ll ask him.”

“What makes you think you’re crazy?” asked the staff member.

“I don’t know whether I’m crazy or they are,” said Lev.

“He says he doesn’t know whether he’s crazy or they are,” the staff member said into the telephone and waited for a response, before he looked at Lev again.

“He looks like some old crazy Russian or something,” he said.  “I don’t know.”

Again he didn’t look at Lev as he waited for the response.

“Okay,” he said.  “I’ll send him up.”

“Up those stairs,” he said to Lev.

At the top of the stairs was a room full of empty fiberglass chairs with chrome-plated legs.  A small desk stood near the stairway at an end of the last row of chairs, and a little black woman sat at the desk.  On the desk were a telephone and a two-way radio and an open issue of People magazine, which the woman was reading.  A few seconds after Lev emerged from the stairway, the woman looked up from the magazine.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“The guy downstairs sent me up here,” said Lev.

“Have a seat,” said the woman.

As Lev sat in the chair nearest him in the front row, the telephone rang.

“Yes,” said the woman, answering the phone.  “Yes, he’s here.  Okay.”

She rose from the desk and put her hands in the pockets of her slacks.

“Go through that door,” she said to Lev, nodding to a door in front of him.

Lev went through the door into a short hallway with several doors leading from it.  One of the doors was open, and a man emerged from it and motioned to Lev to go through that one.  Lev complied, and the man followed him and motioned for him to sit in still another fiberglass chair with chrome-plated legs, beside a desk against a wall.  The man sat behind the desk, in still another of those chairs, and looked at Lev.

“What can I do for you?” the man asked Lev.

“I think I must be crazy,” said Lev.

“What makes you think that?” asked the man.

“I’ve been reading newspapers,” said Lev.  “The president of the United States got a head-job from an intern in the Oval Office, a 21-year-old female intern.  And, after the whole nation found out about it, the National Organization for Women supported him, and so did the National Education Association.  And the president’s wife says it takes a village to raise a child.  It seems to me it takes a world.  So I must be crazy."

“Mm hm,” said the man behind the desk.  “Go on.”

“I thought that was enough, but there is more.  Barbra Streisand sings like a bird and complains about victimization of women, but she sings ‘Happy Days’ to support that president.  I loved to hear her sing that song when she was that intern’s age.

“Then, speaking of Barbra Streisand, there’s what’s going on in the Holy Land.  Barbra Streisand is Jewish and said in Madison Square Garden that we’re all different and that it’s crazy to think we should all be the same, and the Holocaust was the worst thing that ever happened to any people because too few people agree with that.  But other Jewish people are saying that Palestinians don’t have a right to their homes.  And the United States government, under that president and others, supports that.

“And Christians support it, too.  Christ said that the thing second in importance to loving God is loving one’s neighbor, but Christians say Jews have a right to kill Palestinians and destroy their homes and take the land for their own homeland.  Oh, and both Jews and Christians say they believe in the Ten Commandments, which command against such stuff."

“Mm hm,” said the man behind the desk.  “Go on.”

“Okay.  Then there’s the pedophile Christian clergy.  Christ said that Heaven is made of children and that to go there we must become like them, presumably referring to their lovely innocence.  Then those priests do that to them, and all I read in the newspapers about how the Catholic Church responds is calling it a crisis in the church, not a crisis in the children.  I haven’t read of one priest saying he’s sorry or wrong, and the law prevents charging church leadership with responsibility, even if it’s proved.

“The church dumped the Archbishop of Boston for his complicity, but he’s still a cardinal of the church.  And he’s never said he’s sorry for his part, and the church replaced him with someone who spent his early days in the church in the same parish in the Dominican Republic, and they say it’s because he’s good at conciliation.

“Conciliation.  The Catholic Church doesn’t need conciliation.  It needs reformation, purification, revolution, cleansing.  It doesn’t need another kiss on the Pope’s ring, worshiping the golden calf.  It needs honor of spirit.

“At least that’s how I see things, and so I must be crazy, because I’m alone.  The poor should be lifted, not solicited to support the church in its corruption.  The children should be honored as the ideal spirit of the poor and everyone else.

“But maybe it’s vocabulary.  Maybe we do all this through reason through our education, through abstraction as Hercules killed Antaeus.  Casey Casum, the host of the playing of America’s Top Forty tunes each Sunday morning, tells us to keep our feet on the ground but keep reaching for the stars.  Hercules killed Antaeus by lifting Antaeus’ feet from the ground, but he turned him into a constellation, for our watch.

“Abstraction, rationality, weird!  How do we use the term ‘anti-Semitic’ to mean disliking Jewish people while most Semitic persons are Islamic?  How do we use the word ‘Catholic’ to refer to the Roman Catholic Church as though Rome were universal, universal being what our dictionaries says ‘catholic’ means?  How do most humans claim reasoning as their superiority to beasts, while few of them know what they’re talking about?  And the mess doesn’t stop with the craziness we call religion. 

“How do we use the word ‘gay’ to refer to homosexuals, as though heterosexuals aren’t cheerful?  How do we use the word ‘marriage’ to refer to the relationship between Clingon and Heather Rhododendron, and not to refer to loving unions of two men or two women?  How do we use the word ‘sportsmanship’ to refer to wife-beating and spitting on umpires in the big leagues, while we send a 12-year-old boy to jail for spitting on a policeman?  How do we call such ball-players role-models, and how do we call Clingon a president?  Apparently, he can’t preside over his own zipper!”

“What I hear you saying,” said the man behind the desk, “is that you resent other people’s success, while you are struggling from day to day to stay alive.  We have many people here with lives as difficult as yours.  You are not alone.”

“Whatever you’re hearing,” said Lev, “what I’m saying is that, either all that stuff I just pointed out to you is crazy, or I am.”

“I understand your hostility,” said the man behind the desk.  “What is it that you would like us to do for you here?

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