knew there was more to it. He could feel it—something in the fabric of the world had just torn.
THESE DAYS , MARV HAD to pay for it.
After his half hour with Fantasia Ibanez, he left and headed home. He met Fantasia once a week in the room at the back of the whorehouse Betsy Cannon ran out of one of the old wardens’ mansions on the top of the crest in The Heights. The houses up there were all Second Empire Victorians and had been built back in the 1800s when the prison had been the main source of work in East Buckingham. The prison was long gone; all that remained of it were the names—Pen’ Park, Justice Lane, Probation Avenue, and the oldest bar in the neighborhood, The Gallows.
Marv walked down the hill into the Flats, surprised at how warm it had gotten today, up in the forties and holding into the evening, the gutters all gurgling with streams of melted snow, the drainpipes voiding gray liquid onto the sidewalks, the wood frame homes sporting pimples of moisture, like they’d spent the afternoon sweating.
Nearing the house, he wondered how he’d become a guy who lived with his sister and paid for sex. This afternoon, he’d gone to visit the old man, Marv Sr., and he’d told him a bunch of lies even though the old man had no idea he was even in the room. He told his father he’d taken advantage of the hot market in commercial real estate and the limited supply of liquor licenses in this city and he’d cashed in, sold Cousin Marv’s Bar for a mint. Enough to get his father in a real good home, that German one over in West Roxbury, maybe, if he greased the right palms. And now he could. Once all the paperwork was signed and the money released by the bank—“You know banks, Pop, they’ll hold on to it until you resort to begging for your own money”—Marv could take care of the family again, just like he had in his heyday.
Except the old man hadn’t accepted his money back then. The old man was fucking annoying that way, asking Marv in his broken Polack (Stipler was an Americanization, and not a very good one, of Stepanski) why he couldn’t work an honest job like his father, mother, and sister.
Marvin Sr. had been a cobbler, his wife worked in a Laundromat for thirty years, and Dottie pushed paper for Allstate. Marv would sooner sell his dick to science than work a coolie career for coolie wages the rest of his life. Wake up at the end of it all and ask, What the fuck happened?
Yet for all their conflict, he loved the old man and, he liked to hope, vice versa. They caught a lot of Sox games together and held their own in the 50 Tenpin Bowling League once a week, the old man a deadeye for picking up the 7–10 split. Then came the stroke, followed a year later by the heart attack, followed three months after that by the second stroke. Now Marvin Stipler Senior sat in a dim room that smelled of mold, and not the kind of mold you found in wet walls but the kind you found in people as they neared the end. Still, Marv held out hope that the old man was in there somewhere and he was coming back. And not just coming back but coming back with a glint in his eyes. Lots of stranger things had happened in this world. Trick was to not give up hope. Not give up hope and go get some money, put him in a place where they believed in miracles, not warehousing.
In the house, he grabbed a beer, a shot of Stoli, and his ashtray and joined Dottie in the small den where they had the TV and the Barcaloungers set up. Dottie was working her way through a bowl of Rocky Road. She claimed it was her second, so Marv knew it was her third, but who was he to begrudge the things that gave a person pleasure? He lit a cigarette and stared at a commercial for motorized floor sweepers, the little fuckers buzzing around some toothy housewife’s floors like things that turned against you in sci-fi movies. Marv figured pretty soon that toothy housewife would open a closet, find a couple of the little robot saucers whispering their
THESE DAYS , MARV HAD to pay for it.
After his half hour with Fantasia Ibanez, he left and headed home. He met Fantasia once a week in the room at the back of the whorehouse Betsy Cannon ran out of one of the old wardens’ mansions on the top of the crest in The Heights. The houses up there were all Second Empire Victorians and had been built back in the 1800s when the prison had been the main source of work in East Buckingham. The prison was long gone; all that remained of it were the names—Pen’ Park, Justice Lane, Probation Avenue, and the oldest bar in the neighborhood, The Gallows.
Marv walked down the hill into the Flats, surprised at how warm it had gotten today, up in the forties and holding into the evening, the gutters all gurgling with streams of melted snow, the drainpipes voiding gray liquid onto the sidewalks, the wood frame homes sporting pimples of moisture, like they’d spent the afternoon sweating.
Nearing the house, he wondered how he’d become a guy who lived with his sister and paid for sex. This afternoon, he’d gone to visit the old man, Marv Sr., and he’d told him a bunch of lies even though the old man had no idea he was even in the room. He told his father he’d taken advantage of the hot market in commercial real estate and the limited supply of liquor licenses in this city and he’d cashed in, sold Cousin Marv’s Bar for a mint. Enough to get his father in a real good home, that German one over in West Roxbury, maybe, if he greased the right palms. And now he could. Once all the paperwork was signed and the money released by the bank—“You know banks, Pop, they’ll hold on to it until you resort to begging for your own money”—Marv could take care of the family again, just like he had in his heyday.
Except the old man hadn’t accepted his money back then. The old man was fucking annoying that way, asking Marv in his broken Polack (Stipler was an Americanization, and not a very good one, of Stepanski) why he couldn’t work an honest job like his father, mother, and sister.
Marvin Sr. had been a cobbler, his wife worked in a Laundromat for thirty years, and Dottie pushed paper for Allstate. Marv would sooner sell his dick to science than work a coolie career for coolie wages the rest of his life. Wake up at the end of it all and ask, What the fuck happened?
Yet for all their conflict, he loved the old man and, he liked to hope, vice versa. They caught a lot of Sox games together and held their own in the 50 Tenpin Bowling League once a week, the old man a deadeye for picking up the 7–10 split. Then came the stroke, followed a year later by the heart attack, followed three months after that by the second stroke. Now Marvin Stipler Senior sat in a dim room that smelled of mold, and not the kind of mold you found in wet walls but the kind you found in people as they neared the end. Still, Marv held out hope that the old man was in there somewhere and he was coming back. And not just coming back but coming back with a glint in his eyes. Lots of stranger things had happened in this world. Trick was to not give up hope. Not give up hope and go get some money, put him in a place where they believed in miracles, not warehousing.
In the house, he grabbed a beer, a shot of Stoli, and his ashtray and joined Dottie in the small den where they had the TV and the Barcaloungers set up. Dottie was working her way through a bowl of Rocky Road. She claimed it was her second, so Marv knew it was her third, but who was he to begrudge the things that gave a person pleasure? He lit a cigarette and stared at a commercial for motorized floor sweepers, the little fuckers buzzing around some toothy housewife’s floors like things that turned against you in sci-fi movies. Marv figured pretty soon that toothy housewife would open a closet, find a couple of the little robot saucers whispering their
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