Good Neighbors(21)

“Okay. You’re fine,” he muttered.

He went back up, found his phone, and got a patchy connection. Left a voicemail for Fred Atlas, the guy who lived in Maple Street 130. “Fred! Let’s do a movie night. Malverne’s showing The Conversation. Gert says she’ll bring the kids to your place and keep Bee company… I know you got shit going on, but it’s good to get out. You can’t say no to Hackman.”

After that, he popped on his analog radio. Reception was terrible since the hole, so streaming didn’t work. All he got was live local access, in which two talking heads argued about the looming stock market crash.

He picked up all the clothes. Wiped down the bathroom sink. Got a new load of laundry going, and folded what was in the dryer. Left the piles in front of the kids’ bedrooms. He’d grown up keeping house for both his divorced parents. It came second nature.

In the kitchen, he collected the cereal-crusted dishes. Slugged some more juice, then decided on something better, and stuck his entire head inside the freezer door. Ice made white steam as he reached his shoulders in, too.

He wasn’t usually so hung over. Most bartenders at Arlo’s regular downtown joints knew his special drink—the Mermaid Avenue: ginger ale, rocks, and club soda with a twist, made to look like a vodka tonic. Most bartenders. But not all of them. Last night Oscar Heep, head office manager for Bankers Collective, had insisted on a hole-in-the-wall Irish pub on Pearl Street called The Full Shilling. Arlo wound up matching the red-nosed alkie beer for beer. Five rounds passed as slow and excruciating as an ether-less tonsillectomy on the Western Front.

“Sing a few bars of ‘Kennedys in the River’ for me!” the sot cried as soon as he found out who Arlo used to be.

So Arlo sang. More than a few bars. But not that song. The other song. His favorite. “Wasted.” The whole three-minute-and-forty-second shebang.

The Full Shilling patrons had watched. Once they’d realized that they were in the presence of Wild Arlo Wilde, chart-topping, Rolling Stone–sanctified lead singer of Fred Savage’s Revenge, they’d swayed.

I can still see it.

Bet you can’t.

On your coffee table

next to the lamp.

Saturday morning,

watching Super Friends.

Ming zaps Batman, Robin runs.

Blackened spoons on the floor.

I use them to eat stolen Apple Jacks.

Irene knocks. You nod.

It doesn’t mean “come in.”

I can still see it.

Bet you can’t.

The brown couch

and shut windows.

The girl you told me to call Mom.

The places I looked out

through a broken window

and didn’t know were better.



Sad and drunk, he’d been thinking about his pop, and everything else that had gone wrong in his life, when he finished that first refrain. So he’d pulled out his Hohner 64, and punched it home:

Firestar blasts Iceman

the first time I get high.

And I’m nine years old.

Nostalgic for something

that never happened.



The twentysomething yuppie bankers in thousand-dollar suits, and the Irish bartenders with put-on brogues, and even Oscar had clapped. Arlo’d been tight by then, lights spinning, sound reverberating in all the wrong ways, like the walls were acute angles, closing in. “I keep my soul in there, you fucks,” he’d mumbled, not that anyone had heard. Not, frankly, that it had meant anything, other than that he’d been feeling sorry for himself.

“Sing ‘Kennedys in the River’!” they’d shouted, at first in noisy bursts and then all together at a quarter-beat, “Ri-ver! Ri-ver! Ri-ver!”

Arlo closed his eyes through the chanting and he pretended he was back at that old dive on Orchard Street, right before the band got signed. When the whole world had seemed like something small and easy to conquer, and the guitar in his hand had been his ticket out.

Then he gave them what they wanted, and sang “Kennedys in the River.”

The night ended when Oscar refused to sign on the dotted line for a new fleet of printing suites, even at the deep discount Arlo offered. “We tightened our belts this year, so I can’t. But I think you’re sexy. You’ve got that rugged thing going for you. Maybe we could get together sometime, when it’s not about work?”

Arlo handed the prick his business card, shook his clammy hand, and said, “You told me you needed new printers. I’m a salesman. I sell printers. That’s what I do to put food on the table for my family. My wife’s knocked up and I’m late on my mortgage. When you want to buy some fucking printers, you let me know.”

He waited an hour at Penn Station with the rest of the late-night punks and sad-sack businessmen for the 3:06 a.m. train to Garden City, then walked the mile home from his stop, listening to the echo of his footsteps on eerily empty suburban streets.

Less than five hours later, Arlo jammed his shoulder inside the open door of his freezer, rubbed his face against a cheap Western Beef frozen steak, and thought about how nice it would be to have a win. He didn’t want to go back in time. He wasn’t that same guy, and he didn’t think it would be all that fun anymore, staying out with the band, shooting white gold up his arms in Horseshoe Bar’s grimy toilet room, eating runny eggs, staggering along Avenue D.