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Our Own Graves

Patrick Fealey

    It’s a feat to stay in beer when you are poor. Somehow we maintain the morning routine. I wake up and go over to Tony’s. Sometimes the door is locked, which means he is asleep, but more often he is awake, shaving himself for the first time today. He has a heavy Italian beard and shaves twice a day.
    “You’re shaving again? Who do you think you are?”
    “The most clean-cut felon you’ll ever know.”
    His room is meticulously maintained and is always clean, in contrast to my room, which is much smaller and cannot house my guitars and amplifiers, books, clothes, and dust. I have a one-foot wide path along the bedside. Bukowski once said show me a man with a clean kitchen and I will show you a man with a terrible personality. There are no dirty dishes in Tony’s sink and his bathroom is spotless. Luke, the oldest of us in his sixties, has almost nothing in his room. Most noticeable is the baby marijuana plant growing in the window, which has a sweeping water view of Newport harbor. Tony feeds a frantic mob of seagulls bread out his window. My window shows an Irish bar down on the street and the towering old courthouse, which was once the first Capitol building in the state. Newport had once been the Capitol of Rhode Island.
    I drink coffee in my room and then we gather at Tony’s where he is usually drinking coffee with Luke. And then our stomachs twist and grumble with unsatiated addiction. Beer. We must get beer. We pool resources and take the elevator down to the lobby of the Section 8 hotel and step into the light. I wear sunglasses, Tony and Luke blink at the morning streets. Our feet take us two blocks to Bucci’s. Bucci’s opens earlier than any liquor store in town and it’s the closest walk. We go in and Tony talks to Mrs. Bucci while Luke and I browse for the cheapest beer we can find. The refrigerators are hip-high and open to the air and you look down at the beer and dig for the coldest. Usually it is Shiltz or Pabst. We pour out our quarters and one dollar bills onto the counter and Mrs. Bucci counts it up unaffected by our currency. Into my backpack the beer goes and we hike uphill to the historic cemetery, the largest in Newport, where the huge black iron gate is always unlocked.
    The cemetery has one main drive that stretches from the street a long distance to the back, where there are woods. We pass hundreds of marble and granite stones on our way. I note the one synthetic stone, which is coming apart in veneers. We have two drinking spots. One is about two thirds into the cemetery behind a tall shrub. This place is good because patrolling cops cannot see us. The cops recently began patrolling the cemetery because of vandalism committed by other cemetery drinkers who throw bottles against the stones and tip them over. Tony, Luke, and I never desecrate the place except for pissing on the governor’s grave at the far end of the cemetery, our other spot. It is out of the way because of its distance from the entrance. It is partially hidden by pine trees. Here we drink and sometimes Luke will smoke a joint while Tony and I shoot heroin.
    “A hit?” Luke says.
    “Sure,” I say.
    I hand the joint off to Tony and it comes back to Luke.
    I roll up my sleeve. Tony shoots into a vein on his thumb.
    “Yeah .  ”
    “I don’t want to hear it,” Luke says.
    “It’s your own fault,” Tony says.
    “It’s not anyone’s fault,” Luke says.
    “You blew it,” Tony says.
    “I’m trying to get better, methadone has stabilized my life.”
    “You’re nodding half the time. You have no right to bitch about us.”
    “Sure I do.”
    “Bitch,” Tony says.
    Tony and Luke drinking in the cemetery with me, society’s bums until you step up to our informed disregard. We have degrees and we’ve had careers and wives and children and women and we are experienced and we have graduated to sitting on the grass and stones with beer and marble and the ones who’ve made it out. Drinking in the cemetery is not like drinking in bars. Our beer is cheap and it is quiet and there are only friends. I always have the feeling that the dead appreciate our visits, except for the governor.
    Tony is a painter who also writes and he can talk to everyone but his ex-wives and children whose mother has alienated them from him. Tony says the mothers have turned his kids against him, but he does not pay the child support the state is after him for. Luke was a major drug dealer who flew marijuana into the states tons at a time on C-30s. He recalled the Coast Guard chasing them before they landed on isolated airstrips in Florida and quickly unloaded the dope into a gutted Winnebago and headed north on I-95. That was the 1970’s and remains his legacy.
    Luke once had $500,000 buried in his basement and a house on an island. Then his girlfriend of 12 years, in her thirties, contracted cancer. He got his home care nursing license and took care of her until the end. After her death, he quit selling drugs and started in on crack and lost his house and all his cash. I tried crack once with him and felt what the fuss was about. It’s a brief ecstasy which I cannot understand how the poor can afford. They say it is cheap, but cheap buys you a taste. The chase bankrupts you. There is a man in our building who blows his entire social security check the night he receives it. Six-hundred dollars in one night on crack and then he bums cigarettes off me for the month. Eventually I had to charge him a quarter per cigarette. One time I was in the elevator and I didn’t have any cigarettes, but noticed a pack of Marlboro reds sticking out of his pants pocket. I asked for one and he hesitated a long time, like he wasn’t going to give me one, but then his crack-addled brain must have recalled how many cigarettes I had given him and he gave me one.
    Luke had been the driver for mob boss Raymond Patriarca, who was a conciliator between the New York mob families when they had problems. He also took care of the hits. Luke used to drive Patriarca home to watch the soap operas every afternoon with pounds of marijuana in the trunk. If he had ever been pulled over, Patriarca would have had him executed. Luke said that when Patriarca died, he had two tractor trailer trucks full of cash.
    By all counts, age had mellowed Luke out and he became friendly and generous. He always had more money than Tony and me because he had served in the Army as a supply sergeant in Germany during the Vietnam War and received a monthly check from the Veterans Administration. He told stories of all the things he stole and smuggled out of the supply depot and sold in Berlin with a partner. He made a lot of money during Vietnam. He did not have a driver’s license because he had been convicted of driving under the influence three times. He would eventually die of hepatitis C and liver cancer.
    One time Luke stole some heroin from me, which methadone blocks, but he shot up anyway. I used connections to get him into great housing on the island where he had once lived. He wanted to get in there because it was a full-sized apartment; it was in the same neighborhood he and his girlfriend had lived. The place originally had rejected him because of his criminal record. I told the director, a friend’s mother who I knew well, Luke was a changed man and I had never seen him do anything illegal.
    “I am making a deal with a grower in Arizona,” he told me while I was visiting.
    “For what?”
     “You know. Dope.”
    “You’re getting back into the business? Now? Here?”
    “It’s one-hundred grand street value. I can make a lot of money.”
    “After sticking my neck out for you, you make a marijuana deal?”
    “I’m not going to sell much out of the apartment. I’m using my old connections.”
    “You sonofabitch. People will know when they see people coming and going. You just wrecked Sirje’s trust in me.”
    “You knew how I am.”
    “I didn’t know you would betray me.”
    “I can’t help if I betrayed you. I need the money. The money is too good. And this is what I do.”
    “Betray people?”
    “No. I sell drugs.”
    Luke’s old distributors were not as faithful with bringing in the money because Luke could no longer act as enforcer. He no longer had a gun and he couldn’t make rounds because he couldn’t drive and didn’t have a car. John drank too much during this period because he was so stressed. One night he called to tell me he had fallen drunk on the street near his apartment. “I’m on my back and I can’t get up.” A lot of the dope and money vanished. He wound up bringing in $60,000, which the grower accepted without killing him. He had betrayed me without a second thought. As he was dying he went into dementia. I didn’t say anything to him about it, but mentioned it to Tony and he told Luke what I’d said.
    Afterwards, Luke refused my calls.
    “This is Paddy. Can I talk to Luke?”
    “Hold on a minute.”
    “.  ”
    “He doesn’t want to talk right now.”
    It took him two weeks to die and he talked to Tony.
    While Luke was alive, he was in love with a girl in prison. She was from the island and he knew her. She was young and plausibly beautiful. After her boyfriend rejected her, she went to his house, a clapboard colonial that was on the National Historic Register, and burned it to the ground. Drunk, she spread gasoline throughout the first floor and lit it. She received a seven-year sentence, but got out in less than four. During her prison stay, Luke mailed her money and she called him every day on his dime. Tony was furious.
    “She’s just using you,” Tony would say.
    “She’s good at heart,” Luke said.
    “She burned down a house. She’s insane.”
    “They had little proof that she did it.”
    “No, she just had motive and when they arrested her she reeked of gasoline. She’s using you for money.”
    Luke rarely responded to Tony’s bitching.
    Luke asked me to go to the library and find a prison closer to her children in Florida, who were living with their grandmother. She wanted me to help with her transfer. She was manipulating him and now he was putting pressure on me. Luke wanted to be her boyfriend so badly that he harassed me into going to the library and finding a new prison. I found her a new prison. They refused to transfer her.
    “You’re being a fucking fool,” Tony said to him.
    I was sick of their arguing and told Tony to lay off.
    “But Luke, you are being such an idiot for this cunt. You think she really loves you?”
    She was released and she did not visit Luke once for the rest of his life. After he died, she posted such sorrow on Facebook.
    “Where were you when he was dying?” I wrote.
    Tony was a small-time criminal whose offenses were the worst. He was five-foot eight-inches tall and strong. He had been in many fights. He did not get away with his crimes and had been thrown into prison more times than I can remember. The law had labeled him a cop-hater because he had assaulted two cops. I was in many courtrooms supporting him. Only as a reporter who went to court twice a week had I been in courtrooms more. He had beaten up girlfriends, had the children he didn’t support. He had DUI’s and had crashed cars and motorcycles drunk. He was busted with heroin. He was serious about his work in his early years, serving in the ward of a maximum security mental facility. He skillfully navigated and directed convicted psychotic murderers for 16 years, leaving four years before retirement to pursue an education. He got into Auburn where he was a star history major, with a minor in anthropology and showed talent in creative writing. Education did nothing to stop his crimes. He was accused of rape. He beat down a girl right in front of me in the cemetery. So what did I find redeeming in him? Villon comes to mind, the criminal poet. Other than art I did not see much good in him.
    Me? I won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Journalism in 1996 and showed up wasted the night of the ceremony and a bottle of Jim Beam somehow fell out of my jacket and hit the wood floor with a loud crash in the middle of the host’s long speech. The entire press corps turned to look at me, including my publisher. They saw the bottle on the floor beside my feet. I was never fired, but I had been labeled. They didn’t call me “old school.” They took the masses approach and called me the indefensible label: an alcoholic. What I remember about that night is that I was sitting next to a rabid recovered alcoholic who had a twisted sense of humor and I suspected he may have pulled the pint from my pocket. I later asked him about it and he said nothing. I quit journalism at 29 and began writing novels, short stories, and poems, which were immediately accepted by prestigious magazines and left me destitute.
    Said Barbara to Tony in the cemetery: “You are distracting Paddy from his writing.”
    It wasn’t a problem for me.
    “What about my writing?”
    “I don’t care about your writing,” Barbara said.
    Tony ran for her and kicked her in the shoulder. She fell backwards onto the ground.
    Tony left her there.
    She got up.
    It was time to leave the bone yard. I walked back to the building.
    My buzzer rang. It was Barbara. She was crying. I went down to the lobby.
    Her eyes and cheeks were purple. Someone had beaten the hell out of her.
    “Who did it?” I asked.
    “Some kids in the cemetery,” she said.
    “Some kids?”
    “No. It was the cops.”
    “The cops beat you up? Why?”
    “I don’t know.” She was crying.
    “Who did it, the kids or the cops?”
    “The cops.”
    “That doesn’t make any sense.”
    Barbara was sleeping with Tony and me. We were both aware of this. Tony would get greedy and not leave when it was to be my time with her. He’d get tense with jealousy when she’d come near me.
    I was the most unlikely of the “three amigos” because I had had a stellar career and had never been arrested. Well, I’d been handcuffed and thrown in the backs of police cars, but always the charges were dismissed. I was drawn to Tony and Luke by their high intellect and humor, as well as a similar world-view. We were for simplicity and we were against obscurification, which is what society runs on. The fact that they were criminals played in my mind, but I did respect outlaws. I had always been one when I was a professional. I was just more sophisticated in my approach.
    We’re sitting here in the grass, leaning on marble, the sun on the living and the dead evenly, when Tony stands up and goes to piss on the governor’s grave.
    “The governor is thirsty.”
    There are other governors buried hereabouts, but this one is convenient. Ivy grows up through his grave. The ivy is in a rectangular shape stretching from the stone. I suspect it was planted and is maintained. He had been governor one-hundred years ago. I never consider his possible accomplishments, only that his grave is 15 feet from where we are drinking cheap beer and it feels good to piss on a politician. Anyone who thinks he can tell others what to do is deluded and egotistical and I met plenty as a reporter. Life is not a piece of shit, as a famous comedic acting troupe once sang. Man is a piece of shit, reeking, twisted with ambition and lies, the master of unnecessary death who constructs forgiveness scenarios for himself. Our religion might be none at all, but we have seen and done enough to retire to the bone yard while alive.
    Tony met a schizophrenic in a mental hospital while detoxing from heroin. He went to hospitals to detox because they gave him benzos to ease the transition. I did it the hard way, at home, with nothing to comfort me. So Tony and this woman became a pair. They moved in together up in the city. Tony said he had never had a girlfriend who gave head as frequently as she did.
    “She loves to do it.” She inspired him to write a great poem called “Oral Delivery.”
    Tony visited Luke and me when things were going badly with her. Otherwise we never saw him. When he came to us he was angry and anxious and we did not have a good time. He enjoyed attacking Luke, as always. She was a violent psychotic who pushed him over his already minimal tolerance. He beat her up and got his three counts and almost went to prison forever, but she changed her story because sometimes she loved him and his monthly check and drugs more than she loved her ex-husband. Tony served 30 days. When he got out we went to the cemetery and he got a call from her. He sat under a pine tree talking while I waited for an hour.
    “You’re talking to her?” I said when he came back.
    “I told her we can’t meet yet,” Tony said.
    “You’re going to go with her?”
    “I don’t know. We’re just meeting.”
    “Christ. I thought you were through with her.”
    “I am.”
    “She put you in jail.”
    “I know,” he said.
    “So why are you going to see her?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “I’ll drink to your freedom today, but you’re going back.”
    “Don’t underestimate my back-bone.”
    “You can’t trust your bone.”
    After Luke moved into the apartment I had arranged for him, I was left without my friends. I visited him by bus and continued to go to the bone yard and evade police. I shot morphine and wrote poems and sat on a glassy horizontal gravestone. One morning the cops walked by my shrub, only the sides of their faces and hats visible. They were talking and did not see me. When they were far enough past, I split the bone yard and seldom returned. Tony and Luke were gone; the cops were patrolling more than ever before.

lines from the bone yard

i saw a monarch
landing on a sunny leaf
he didn’t stay long

the seagulls know it
what is it the seagulls know?
they know they’ll scream it

shelley was off course
i named a boat after him
the neighbors burned it

sidewalk cigarettes
they hold and humiliate
resigned to the street

the dead cannot see
the dead cannot move about
i sit with eyes closed

the sun dries the grass
the crickets chirp like it’s night
it’s night in england

young men cut the grass
they make homes for granite
the roots move the stones

i found a SAG card
it was lying in the street
i couldn’t smoke it

i have no money
in case there was any doubt
i have many pens

buddah looks solemn
but i say it’s a beach day
come’on buddah, chicks



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