boston

For a few months, in 1985, Kirk and I were in Boston. Starving. Well, probably not medically starving, we did have the olives and slices of lemons we stole from the garnish tray whenever we could. Altogether, I’d say we ate every two or three days.

When we first arrived in Beantown we were eating pretty regularly. This was partially due to the fact that YMCA on Huntington Avenue gave you a breakfast voucher to their cafeteria every day; one egg, any style, toast, and coffee. So every morning, with the $35 room that Kirk and I split, we ate. And it was a great beginning to the day. But you can only stay at the Y for two weeks so we had to move on. Later, when breakfast had to be removed from the budget, we would miss that voucher and would actually taunt each other with the chant — one egg —any style—toast and coffee.

The shoeboxes of food my mom gave us at the Greyhound bus station in Oneonta, NY, oh man, they were long gone; the ham sandwiches on croissants, the plastic jugs of Kool-Aid, (frozen to keep them cold longer), the apples, the crackers, the pepperoni, the boiled eggs, the cottage cheese containers filled with macaroni salad. All gone.

Now in Oneonta, yeah it was my idea to leave. I admit it. But it was Kirk’s idea to go to Boston.

“I’m taking off,” I said as I looked out of his apartment window that looked down on Market Street. “Come with me.”

“To Binghamton? Why?”

“Because there’s nothing for me here and there’s nothing for you either.” I said. “C’mon, it’ll be a blast.”

And I made it sound like the beginning of a film. As if we were two desperados. Two beaten men who would head out to make their fortunes and leave the place that had mocked them behind. Me? I was nursing a seriously broken heart and damaged ego and didn’t want to be around when school started back up again. And Kirk had flunked out last semester and couldn’t re-enroll until the spring semester anyway.

“I’m taking a semester off. I’m leaving. So come with me.”

“Maybe,” Kirk flipped the channels until he got to an episode of MASH. “But not to Binghamton. If we’re gonna go, let’s go.”

And we toyed around with different locales. Chicago. Miami, we even thought of L.A. But once we landed on the idea of Boston, Kirk was sure that this was the place for us.

“Boston?” I asked.

“Yup. That’s where we need to go.”

So, Boston it was.

We had taken the seven-hour bus ride from Oneonta to Boston a week before, to scope everything out — to see how difficult jobs and apartments were to find — and by mid-morning of that very first day, at our very first interview, we both walked out with two jobs in our pockets. And not just any jobs; for two college kids from the sticks, they were dream jobs.

Kenmore Square is the intersection of Beacon Street and Commonwealth Avenue and was the heart of Boston nightlife. It was behind Fenway Park and Boston University and Narcissus was a huge nightclub where students from Harvard and B.U. came to spend all their money. And Kirk and I were hired to be two of their newest employees.

The place was huge and actually held three clubs in one: Narcissus, Celebration, and Lipstick. But Narcissus was the gleaming, Studio 54 jewel of the crown.

Since it happened so quickly, Kirk and I went to the club that night to see if the crowds really did bring pockets full of tips for their favorite bartenders, as we were promised. And they were.

“Well, my friend,” Kirk clinked his beer glass to mine and screamed over the sound of a thousand college kids. “We are gonna to be rich.”

We were ecstatic. And as soon as we got back to Oneonta we tossed everything into a few bags and jumped the next bus to Boston.

Finding an apartment was the first challenge. With all the fees added up between first and last month’s rent and the security deposit, we would need to come up with $3,200. Which we didn’t have.

We were earning a little bit of money, but the challenge was that there was a pecking order at Narcissus and we had not earned the plum bartending slots yet. Because we worked during the day, Juno scheduled us for a lot of corporate parties and band things where we worked the service bar and our tips came from the waitresses who were supposed to give us a percentage. Which they never did.

And because there were so many bartenders at Narcissus, if we worked a night, Kirk and I would come home with $35 to $45 each — hardly the $100 a night we were hoping for. The good news was that the work was easy and the place was completely mobbed; we only had a few feet of bar space to cover.

Unfortunately, what money we were earning was going straight into Terry’s hand. He waited behind the door where we lived, and would pop out like a sentry as soon as our feet hit the wooden landing.

“Well?” Terry scratched his chest through his Talking Heads t-shirt and held out hand — like we had tried to sneak out of a window a thousand times before this. And without words we’d hand over the forty bucks — or however close we could get to it. If Kirk and I were both working that night, our combined tips would make it with a few bucks to spare. But if just one of us was on that night, we’d be short, unless we saved from a night when we did both work.

Forty dollars would get rid of Terry until the next day, since that’s how much the room cost per night. Thirty-five dollars would lead to a tirade on how he wasn’t a bank and we were the most worthless rags he’d ever met.

I don’t know if rags was a Terry phrase or a Boston one, but he was the only one that we ever heard use it and he did so  often.

By October we knew we had lost a lot of weight — each time we got dressed it seemed like we had shrunk a pant size — but when the junkies on Washington Street took interest in our new ultra-thin frames, probably thinking we might have a connection or a hit to share, we knew that food had to become a bigger priority.

That’s why the envelope was such a big deal.

The envelope — and I can still see it after all these years — Kirk had found on High Street. It was in the shape of a small paper rectangle and had Asian lettering on it and since we were pretty close to Chinatown, this made sense. Inside the envelope was a bright red foiled liner and a small card. The card had more lettering, stuff we couldn’t read, but inside of the card, pressed between the thick paper folds, were two crisp ten dollar bills.

Kirk kept punching my shoulder. “We could of walked by it,” and he continued to punch me all the way to a Burger King, where we ordered two Whopper meals. We dove into the burgers and could only finish about half before our shrunken stomach’s gave in.

“I know what’s for dinner,” Kirk smiled, as he wrapped his leftover sandwich back in the foil. And we sat there for a long time. Happy. Happy because not only did we have a meal, but we actually had the next one covered too.

From the remaining money we bought crackers, peanut butter, and beef jerky — stuff we could easily hide from Terry, since food in the room was forbidden and he checked regularly.

We had a certain routine, Kirk and I. Northeastern University had bought a huge apartment building near us and was converting it to dorms. We went exploring one day and found that the laundry room was never locked and within the room was an ironing board and iron. So every day that we had to work, we would stop there and iron our black pants and white shirt before getting on the train to Kenmore Square — we didn’t have an iron and had been yelled at a few times for coming in with wrinkled clothes.

There was this very cute girl in the dorms with red hair that we would see every now and then. She never paid much attention to us but when Kirk went alone to iron his clothes, he would always come back telling me of how she stopped to talk to him and flirt. But then when we went back together, she ignored us again. Kirk was like that. The nights I didn’t work, he would come back with stories of how the owners would buy him shots and pretty bartenders would hit on him. And then when we worked together, we were invisible.

That’s why the shooting probably didn’t happen. Looking back it doesn’t matter if it did, but it most likely was made up.

It was the second week of November and I was off for the night but Kirk was working. He came home excited. He told about how there was a robbery and a guy shot one of the bartenders. Then the shooter came back behind the bar, robbed the cash register and then headed out — only to be shot by cops before he hit the street.

The story probably didn’t happen. But I never had a chance to verify it. The shooting was my excuse. I was going back to New York.

Kirk was sitting in the chair by the door as I threw my clothes into a bag. He looked at me with a mixture of fear and pain as I said goodbye. From Brookline, I walked to the bus station where I used my last $22 — my half of tomorrow’s rent — to get a ticket to Schenectady where a friend picked me up and took me the remaining two hours to my parents’ house.

And I left Kirk there. Alone and broke in a city that didn’t want him.

There are two kinds of bad decisions. There is the mistake. And there is the regret.

A mistake is a miscalculation. An error. Bad data and bad calculations.

But a regret is when a moral or ethical line has been crossed. When you have the chance to do the right thing and you don’t. And most regrets come from the wrong answer to one simple question. Do I stick, or do I run?

A life filled with mistakes is not a bad life at all. It’s one of excitement and energy and fire. But one with regrets will weigh you down because regrets don’t have shelf lives and their backup batteries never run dry.

I never saw Kirk again. I have no idea what happened to him, since I transferred to Cortland the next semester. I do know that he didn’t have any family — his mom had died when he was young and his father a few years after he graduated High School.

So here is the question. How hard would it have been to get us both to my parents’ house? To get us both someplace safe until we figured out the next step? How difficult would it have been to have thought of my friend even a fraction of the amount that I thought of myself?

Probably not very. It most likely would have taken the same energy it took to leave him behind.

The irony that Narcissus is the Greek god of self-love, isn’t wasted here. And neither is the fact that I have very few good memories of Boston — most likely because it represents the ugly parts of myself that I want to forget. But I would like to think if this happened today, thirty years later, that the man I am now would react differently and show just a little bit of loyalty and grace.

I’d like to think so. But I’ll never know.

Because that’s why they call them regrets.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1993/7/6/narcissus-fuit-or-the-death-of/

BY:

evdemorier@aol.com

Everett De Morier has appeared on CNN, Fox News Network, NPR, ABC, as well as in The New York Times and The London Times. He is the author of Crib Notes for the First Year of Marriage: A...


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