on day two. Others slipped out during the night. A quiet desperation seemed to settle over everyone, even the counselors whose curses and taunts now rang softly in our ears. Sometimes they let us sit in the auditorium for hours in silence.
After dinner the third day, Ramon led me and half a dozen other new people to the administrative wing. Ramon started in on his plea for information. Halfway through his spiel, Ramon began pacing the hall in front of us as he spoke. He seemed exasperated. I decided I couldn’t take it anymore. I would tell about the porn magazine.
I raised my hand.
“You fucking guys are all brand new—,” Ramon said.
I waved my hand.
“You haven’t been here long enough to know shit.” He ran his hand over the shiny skin of his head.
Ramon looked at me with bloodshot eyes. He chuckled with a derisive snort. “Jesus fucking Christ.”
I lowered my hand.
“What the fuck?” He hiked his pants. “What do you want?”
Tongue-tied, I shrugged my shoulders and said nothing. Rockford was a madhouse—of this much I was certain. In my desperation to avoid jail and get into treatment, I had signed on at an asylum.
Days after the lockdown ended, I piled into a van with Mike and a few others to go downtown to a public clinic for physicals and blood tests, a standard procedure for all new clients.
We drove into Manhattan and were dropped off in a public park nearby the clinic to wait for it to open. Homeless people wandered the park in the early morning light: some rooted through trash, while others pushed carts, or rested on sodden sheets of cardboard laid on the bare, wet ground.
“What’s up with all these hobos?” I asked. “They’re all over the place.”
Mike cut his eyes at me and scowled.
“No seriously,” I asked. “Why does New York have so many hobos?”
“Stop saying hobo, motherfucker,” Mike said. He was sitting on the back of a park bench, with his feet on the seat. He blew into his cupped hands for warmth and then looked at me pointedly. “Wasn’t you in the homeless shelter?”
“Yep,” I grinned. “I was a hobo my damn self.”
Mike snorted and shook his head.
“They ain’t hobos, man. They homeless people,” he said. He sounded irritated. He looked wistfully at the locked door of the clinic. “They got homeless people in Pennsylvania, too,” he added. “They all over.”
A pigeon fluttered down, landing on the concrete sidewalk. I watched it peck for crumbs as I shifted my weight from foot to foot. Hugging my crossed arms to my chest, I watched my breath turn to steam.
For a while, no one said anything. The pigeons cooed.
“If I got thrown out of the house,” I said, almost in a whisper. “I just slept on the couch over at Bud’s, or sometimes up at Mary and Frank’s. . .”
In late February, I took the train back to Pennsylvania alone, to appear in court. Arriving in Harrisburg on Sunday afternoon, I phoned my motherin-law from the train station. She listened as I asked to speak to her daughter, and then without saying a word to me, she cupped the receiver with her hand. I heard muffled voices and seconds later Maryanne answered.
“Can I see Joey?” I asked. “I’m only in town for the night.”
She told me she was staying with Jack now, and that I was welcome to come and see Joey, but that there could be no trouble. She stressed the word trouble.
I took the bus to Jack’s. The sky had gone dark purple, bringing the street lights up. The moon shone. To avoid walking past my mother’s house, I climbed the concrete steps on Fourth and Swatara. Bethlehem Steel’s dark stacks loomed even darker in silhouette against the night sky—straight and hard, like the cold iron bars of a prison cell. From Jack’s front porch, I could see my mother’s house and her car parked in the vacant lot up the street.
I wasn’t welcome there.
At the door, Jack smiled and waved me inside. Joey came storming out of the dining room, screaming in delight. I had only enough time to drop my bag and make some hurried hellos, before he dragged me into the dining room to show me his birthday toys. Jack came into the dining room. He was about thirty-two, five years older than me, with a deep voice, workingman hands, and blonde hair in a crew cut.
Joey’s blue eyes sparkled. The dining room floor was littered with toy cars and trucks. He sat across the room from Jack and me, and waved vaguely in our direction. “Dad! Dad! Hand me that car.”
I held up a little blue ‘69 Camaro. “This?” I asked.
“No!” Joey happily shook his shorn head. “My other Dad.” Jack rolled a Ford wagon over to Joey, who grinned ear-to-ear, and sent it roaring down the plastic track. With his light coloration, I noted ruefully that Joey looked more like Jack’s son than he did mine.
Maryanne came down from upstairs, asked if I were hungry, and then darted into the kitchen. Jack wandered into the living room to watch TV. I followed Maryanne into the kitchen. She stood at the countertop, deftly assembling a sandwich. Thin, blonde, determined. Sandwich made, she turned from her task, shoved the plate into my hands and immediately headed for the other room.
“Wait, Mary—” I said. I was whispering and not even sure why.
“What?” Maryanne asked impatiently, her voice flat. She looked up at me with one eyebrow raised. There was an awkward pause, which I didn’t know how to fill.
“He calls him Dad?” I asked.
“Tim,” Maryanne said. “I do not want to hear the shit.”
She tilted her head sweetly, and then left me standing in Jack’s kitchen with a bologna sandwich and some potato chips.
I went into the dining room and raced cars with Joey. Later on, he showed me his room, with which he seemed delighted. Too soon, it was time for me to go. Maryanne asked if I were going across the street to visit my mother.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “No.”
“You should go,” Maryanne said. “She wants to see you.”
“Doubtful,” I mumbled.
“No. I called her,” Maryanne said. “She definitely wants to see you.”
“You called her?” My voice rose. Having someone else make the call for me hadn’t even occurred to me, but knowing Maryanne had called seemed somehow unimaginable—Maryanne and my mom had never been close.
“What did she say?” I asked, alarmed.
Maryanne slowly enunciated:
