Mick Read online

  Mick

  Chris Lynch

  Contents

  Part One

  Oughtnotta

  Who Are You?

  Motherballs

  What’d I Say?

  Part Two

  What Have You Done, My Blue-Eyed Son?

  If My Fist Clenches, Crack It Open

  Toy

  Welcome to the Hotel Toxic

  The Line in the Sand

  Spillover Burn

  Preview: Blood Relations

  A Biography of Chris Lynch

  Part One

  Oughtnotta

  “YO MAN, SUL, YOU died again this morning,” I told Sully. I was telling him that all the time. “Twice, even.”

  “Ya, I know it. It’s this town, this town is killer on us poor Sullies. Gotta get out of this town before we’re a lost breed.”

  I can’t help it. I read the obituaries. I read for famous people because when famous people die it’s like people I know are dying. I read for old people, like ninety or a hundred years old, just to find out what these people did with all that time, since, myself, I don’t know what to do with my time if it gets to be three o’clock on a Saturday and it’s raining out. So a hundred years is some time to fill. I read for creepy diseases and for violent deaths and for the names of people I know.

  Like Sully. There are about three hundred million John Sullivans in this town and one of them croaks nearly every day. Most of them are, like my friend, John J. Sullivan. John J. Sullivan, Jr., John J. Sullivan III, just dead, all over the place. Supposed to be an Irish thing, this reading the death notices, the Irish Sports Pages and all that. I don’t know.

  We walked up to Baba’s house. Baba, as in Baba O’Reilly. As in “Teenage Wasteland.” It’s a song. Hey, it’s better than his real name, which is Ryan. Ryan O’Reilly, now that’s pretty stupid isn’t it? Anyway, it’s accurate, the Teenage Wasteland thing. But Baba’s okay. He’s got some attitude, but Baba’s okay.

  “C’mon up, I gutta finish eatin’” Baba yelled down from his kitchen window. He says “eatin’” like it doesn’t have a t in the middle. EEE-in.

  “Well hey,” I said as we walked up the creaky staircase, “we get to come up for a quick peanut butter-and-steroid sandwich with Baba.” We don’t know that Baba takes ’roids, he just looks and acts like someone who does, even though he says he doesn’t. He bit somebody on the head once just for asking, so we don’t ask.

  “Stay away from the peanut butter,” Sully said, stopping me on the stairs and looking very serious.

  “What?”

  “I said don’t eat the peanut butter in this house.”

  “Why not?”

  Sully started to say something, gagged, took a deep breath and a swallow, then spoke. “Listen, I’ve been there. I’ve seen things. Just don’t eat the peanut butter, all right? Tell me you won’t eat the peanut butter.”

  “I won’t, I won’t eat it,” I laughed, but he had me a little nervous anyway. “Pretty health conscious for a dead guy, Sul.”

  When we walked into the kitchen, there was hulking Baba eating, of course, a peanut butter sandwich. I couldn’t look at it. I looked at the rest of his pre-workout training meal, laid out in front of him on the table. He had twelve different bottles of megavitamins, lined up like toy soldiers. After each bite of sandwich he dumped a few pills from a bottle into his hand, popped them, and chased them with Tang.

  “Want some?” Baba said, his food-filled mouth wide open.

  I covered my mouth with both hands.

  “How can you eat like that right before exercising?” Sully asked. “I’d get sick.”

  Baba laughed. “I like not bein’ all digested when I work out, and havin’ all them vitamins in there making my belly all jumpy. It makes me angry. It makes me mean. That’s good.”

  “That’s good?” I asked.

  “That’s good, Bones.” Baba is the only one in the world who calls me Bones. Because I’m not skinny. It was just the only response he could think of when I named him Baba. “Mean is good. Mean is strong. Gotta be ready, y’know. Gotta be ready.”

  “What do we have to be ready for, Baba?”

  The conversation was somehow getting him fired up. He always found something to get fired up about. He started pouring pills madly into his mouth, swallowing them dry. “Anything,” he garbled. “Gotta be ready for anything. Everything.” He smiled a knowing smile and winked, as if Sully and I knew too. We didn’t.

  The three of us went to the gym, like we do a lot. Baba hit the Nautilus machines like an animal, never breaking stride from the time he left his kitchen table till the time he lay flat on his back to bench-press a couple million pounds. He could press almost three hundred pounds on Nautilus, which was about like Sully hanging off one end of a bar and me off the other while Baba jerked us up and down.

  “Enough of this diddly shit,” Baba growled after five minutes of the machines. He stomped over to the free weights, his real workout, sucking on his water bottle.

  “Spot me, Mick,” he called. So I left the treadmills, where Sully and I were running side by side.

  “What are you gonna do if he can’t get it up, Mick? Lift it for him?” Sully said as he ran on without me.

  “Nah, he just needs somebody to wave their arms and scream help help, which I can do.”

  Baba grunted, sipped his water, and pointed at the big round steel weight plates. I loaded them on, forty-fives, twenties, tens, and he pumped them. I looked right down into his face as he forced the weight up another time and another, his face purple, long, green wormy veins bulging out of his neck. Sucking that air in as the weight returned to his mountainous chest, blowing the weight back up again. Sitting up, he did his military presses. Standing, his curls. As I stood behind, no longer with any purpose other than to hang around and admire him, I did just that. We both faced the wall of mirrors as Baba curled the wavy curl bar up to his chin, his lip making the same snarl every time, a twitch only curling gave him. I compared things. His forearms were roughly as thick as my calves, calves I do a lot of work on I might add. His biceps, my thighs. His neck, my waist. He had reddish brown hair all over his body and, at sixteen, already a receding hairline.

  “Why do you pump so much, Baba?” I asked; I don’t know why. He never gave a decent answer to questions about himself. But he was so intense about it, and didn’t play football or hockey or anything that would make it make sense.

  He abruptly dropped the weights to the floor with a clang that got us some looks, from guys as big as Baba. Dropping the weights like that is a big no-no around here. A religious kind of thing.

  “Feel that,” he said, bending his arm and offering me one of his biceps about the size, shape, and firmness of a ten-pound canned ham still in the can.

  “It’s big,” I said.

  “It’s gutta be bigger,” he said, and went back to work.

  “Oh,” I said. “Baba, I’ll be back in awhile. I’m gonna do some other stuff.”

  “Go,” he said. “Wimp around.”

  I met Sully at the butterfly station, halfway through his Nautilus routine. We usually lift together, but since he started without me and since Baba was making me feel kind of like a fly, I bagged it. I pulled on some gloves and smacked around the heavy bag instead. Shortly, Sully joined me, bouncing on his toes and batting the speed bag to the beat of the music filling the room, some boring but steady Guns ’N Roses thump that every musclehead in the place seemed to know all the words to.

  As I rapped out a good tom-tom beating on the heavy bag’s ribs, Sully tapped an effortless, seamless rhythm on the speed bag, practically floating as his weight drifted perfectly from his right to his left and back, no pausing in one spot, but no herky-jerking either. His sound was like when there are twenty guys
in a gym all dribbling basketballs at once.

  We stood out, I realized when I stopped for a blow. As I stood hunched with my hands on my knees and Sully’s drumming behind me, I couldn’t help but notice that nobody in the gym was doing quite what we were doing.

  It was a pretty decent gym for a neighborhood place. Had three treadmills and three Stair-Masters, a couple of rowing machines, life cycles all over the place, all great cardiovascular stuff. And all basically unused. Time after time we would come in here and Sully and I would be the only ones to touch any of the best equipment.

  Weights. Weights and more weights. This was not a health club, it was a weight club. The hugest people you ever saw came here to get huger. Guys with big round bellies and round red faces who looked just fat until they squatted under the bar and started to pump and the roly-poly arms bulged into something sculptured under that flesh. Four different arms sported the Notre Dame fighting leprechaun tattoo, and countless others had tiny crosses tattooed in the webbing at the base of their thumbs. Smallish ratty guys, the place always crawled with the smallish ratty guys, crew-cut and scarred, with veins up and down their arms like they were running over the skin instead of under it. Sinewy, flat-chested guys desperately trying to pack something fearsome onto the small rack of bones they were born with, usually succeeding, as one compact monster after another jerked the bar over his head and held his weight and a half for five or ten seconds with his dense muscles fairly popping through his skin.

  High fives and forearm smashes. Guys who wouldn’t say hello on the street walked by each other as they strutted all puffed up from a big victory over the bench press toward the dumbbells, and slapped hands, punched fists, nodded righteously at comrades in fat leather weight belts. As if they were now somehow on the same team.

  So when Sully and I were running the treadmills or slapping the bags around making noise, we got a lot of looks. Because the idea here was not to get a well-rounded workout—I saw a guy once lifting with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth—it was to get bigger, bigger, bigger bigger. I think we were allowed to stay only because we came with Baba, and because we did mix in a little weight work here and there.

  But the looks we got were nothing compared to what the black guy got. When he walked in, carrying no bag, just to try the place out, everything stopped. I mean everything. Huge stacks of plates clanged together as somebody dropped a Nautilus bar in mid-lift. The rat spotting for the bear-shaped giant on the bench tapped him on the shoulder and when the bear sat up both of them just stared. Fifteen or twenty guys, their shirts torn, sweat rolling down their necks, fingerless gloves on, stood or sat, and stared. Absolutely motionless. Including Sully and me.

  I saw a million black guys a day, so it wasn’t like a novelty or something. And it wasn’t like it was a lily-white neighborhood, either, since you could open the door to the gym and throw a rock in one direction and break the window of a black guy’s house, throw it in another and hit a Puerto Rican’s. It’s a mixed neighborhood, but not mixed up, you know? Like checkerboard squares. This street is white, the next one is black, the next one after that is Spanish. Sully said it one time, that it’s like fudge ripple ice cream—it’s all in one box, but it ain’t exactly blended.

  The thing, though, that I didn’t even think about, that I knew but didn’t know until that black man walked in the door, was that the guy in that house there and the guy in that house over there, they could live there. But they couldn’t come in here.

  It wasn’t that it was a restricted club or anything. But I just don’t know why he’d come. Why he would want to. Because it wasn’t his place. I wouldn’t want to go to a place that wasn’t my place, y’know. Maybe he just didn’t know.

  But he had to have noticed the way every single eye followed him, how nobody but him did a lick of working out, how somebody assumed a stand at every station on the Nautilus, and at most of the free-weight spots, refusing to budge, so that he had to settle for a few sit-ups on the incline bench and some triceps extensions with what weights were left scattered.

  Sully went back to hitting his bag first, then I did too. We didn’t stop watching the guy, though, and our punches shot out louder than ever in the stillness. Even the headbanger thrash music coming out of the speakers seemed like nothing more than a breeze wafting through.

  He was just looking, anyway. Giving it a test run, the way anybody does when they’re thinking of joining a club. They should have just left him alone; he would have gone home and told his friends about the place, then they would have told him about the place, and everything could be put back normal. But they couldn’t let it lie. First to move was Baba. He got up off the weight bench and made a gracious sweeping gesture with his hand to offer it to the guy. The black guy nodded. He didn’t smile or anything, but his face lifted somewhat. He took it as an invitation, and lay right down on the bench, with all the weight on it that Baba was lifting even though this guy weighed probably forty pounds less than Baba.

  I knew what Baba was thinking. Not that it’s cold fusion to figure out what Baba’s thinking. But he figured that guy couldn’t lift the weight. Baba himself even acted as spotter for the guy, and I knew then that something good wasn’t going to happen.

  What Baba hadn’t planned on, though, was that the guy pressed the weight. Pressed it right up. Not like it wasn’t hard or anything, but slow and steady and perfectly balanced. Great form, he wasn’t no rookie. Then he brought it down to his chest to do it again.

  Baba and the muscle boys stood with their mouths hanging open, which, again, is not that unusual. But it meant something for a change. Almost without moving, a bunch of them pulled in tighter around the guy. And he noticed. They weren’t coming to study his form. He got edgy, broke the concentration that made it possible to lift impossible weight. His right arm started going up a little ahead of his left, and there he was cooked. The weight shifted, his right foot came off the floor as he struggled to balance the load, but the whole thing began to sink back down on him.

  The music got louder. Somebody was hitting the button. Hitting it, hitting it, juicing it until the walls were ringing with metal, the sound blasting out like the cap off a hot radiator.

  “Spot me,” the guy called, signaling Baba to help him.

  Baba folded his arms, looked straight down on him, and smiled. “Sorry, man, can’t hear you with the music.”

  The man now knew where he was. He didn’t ask again. He closed his eyes, took three deep breaths, and when he opened up again, the resolve, the control, the focus was there again. Slowly, and remarkably, the bar began rising off his chest. Three inches up, five. A short pause as he struggled to push it through the halfway point, then he broke it, the weight was up.

  But not. Just as the man’s elbows were about to lock, Baba reached out his hand and began to push. Down. The man fought back, sweat bubbling all over his face. But it was no use. Baba applied more pressure, and more, as needed and then some, until the man was pinned and gasping, the weight bar lying heavy with the help of several hands now, across his collarbones.

  Baba dropped to his knees and breathed right into the guy’s face while the others held him down. “Maybe you don’t know, but maybe you oughtnotta come here. You understand me, muthuh?”

  The man did not respond. The weightlifters leaned harder, until the load included all the weight plus nearly all the poundage of two huge guys. Still, the man did not respond, other than to drop his hands from the bar. His eyes fluttered shut like he was passing out.

  Laughing, they removed the weight from him. Slapping his face, happily, Baba and one of the others half revived him and helped him to the door. Once there, they gave him a shove and sent him staggering across the parking lot. He didn’t know where he was, just like when he arrived.

  Baba strutted back to the deafening roar of whoops and screams. High fives and forearm smashes all around. He stopped short, raised his arms, and sang a screechy chorus of “God Bless America” joined by everybody in th
e place.

  Even Sully. Even, after a glare from Baba, me. I wasn’t sure if I loved this America so much right about then, but I was sure I loved it better than I loved a punch in the head.

  Then they all went back to pumping iron. Harder, faster, meaner than before. Nobody talked to anybody else, but everybody laughed, a lot, at nothing. They were like a scary race of muscle-bound ’droids pumping and laughing, barking and spitting, out of control.

  Sully didn’t laugh, and neither did I. We never seemed to be able to muster up the same kind of spirit those guys had.

  Who Are You?

  “COMIN’, MICK?”

  It wasn’t really a question. My brother doesn’t usually ask me anything. Thought I might answer anyway, though.

  “No, I’m not coming.”

  “Put your damn jacket on. You’re comin’.”

  So I put my damn jacket on. Blue dungaree, like always. If it’s seventy out, I wear the blue dungaree. If it snows, the blue dungaree.

  “Where’s your green? Where’s your goddamn green? And your hat?”

  “I don’t like to wear hats, Terry. They make me feel like I need a shower and I have to keep scratching my head.”

  “Don’t gimme no lip. Go back in there and put on the green and white striper. We gotta get goin’.”

  Where we had to get going to was Terry’s bar. Not that he actually owned the bar, not quite, anyway. It was just the place where he spent most of his time and all his money. Saw him one time walk in there with his paycheck, sign it, and hand the whole thing right over to the laughing bartender. The bar, a place called Bloody Sundays, has a reputation around the city as sort of the Hard Rock Cafe of Irishness, which means that on St. Patrick’s Day, which was tomorrow, the place is rotten with politicians and priests scarfing up the free boiled dinner, telling total crap stories about themselves and spending ten times the cost of the meal on gassy draft beers.

  So what they do, to show their appreciation for the regulars like Terry, who eat their other three hundred and sixty-four suppers there every year, is they put out the free corned beef the night before St. Pat’s. That way they can say thanks to their slushy, loyal clientele. That way they can protect their roots rep as a down and dirty neighborhood bar. That way they can get the heavyweights started drinking like maniacs twenty-four hours early. St. Patrick’s Eve.