Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn Read Free Book Online

the size of air, or water. A map the size of the world.
    It could have just been a job, a paycheck, relatively well-paying for unskilled labor. For some of my co-workers it was, some make a career of less. But I didn’t think working with the homeless would be my career. I left several times, for a month or six, only to return, start again, back in the Brown Lobby. I didn’t care so much about the money, I had other ways to make money. But I kept returning. At the shelter no one asks where you come from or why you ended up there. The woman I went home with didn’t ask why I wasn’t trying for something more—a nice car, a real apartment. No matter what I’d say it’d only be half believed anyway. After eight hours her clothes and her hair smelled just like mine. Everyone’s here for a reason , Joy says, looking at a well-dressed, seemingly put-together guy who claims to be temporarily in a tight spot. She gives him a bed, and by the end of the week the police carry him in, legless and swinging.

two

fire
    (1960s) I crawl toward my father’s face as we lay on the grass beside a whitewalled tire—a snapshot, an artifact—evidence that at some point, at least once, I was an infant in his arms. The father as ship, as vessel, holding the child afloat. But there was a parallel father as well—the drunk, the con, the paranoid. The father as ship, but taking on water, going down.
    When I was six months old my mother gathered us up and left. The truck came while Jonathan was at work and moved us, back to Scituate, one town over. It’s a complete mystery to me why she’d leave. I wasn’t drinking, I never drank, not when I was working . This is his version. She never spoke about that day, not to me. What I remember is that every six months for the first five years of my life we moved, but all within the same town, like we each had one foot nailed to the sidewalk. For a while we stayed on the couch of a woman my mother worked with at a restaurant. This woman’s husband lived in a wheelchair, the house all ramped and railed. We slept upstairs, in a hallway, between rooms, out of the way. We were getting on our feet, looking for a place. My mother’s parents lived in the same town, she must have left us with one or the other, some nights, just us kids. Our mother wouldn’t have stayed with them, not too often. Twenty, twenty-one, she wanted to make it on her own. Not even a high school diploma, she held two or three jobs, in bars and restaurants, in convenience stores. A certificate from hairdressing school, but the only hair she cut was ours, my brother’s, mine. Bottle-blond sometimes, she wore a wig sometimes. Once she got her own room she’d line the wigs up on styrofoam heads on the thrift store bureau she’d painted blue. Until then we rented rooms, we rented houses, we crashed with co-workers, with friends, each a rathole, a sty, each a step down. I couldn’t help out, my hands useless, not sized for anything in that world. I played with a little stuffed monkey (“Jocko”—expensive, imported, my father charged it to my grandfather, mailed it to me on Christmas), I entertained her as best I could. I’d explain the games I invented, the fort I’d built out of blankets and chairs, how the cat was now my prisoner. “Whatd’ya want me to do,” she’d say, “stand on my head and spit nickels?” When I misplaced a mitten or a Matchbox she’d barely look up from whatever she was doing, just matter-of-factly point out “If it was up your ass you’d know where it was.” I loved these expressions, playful and surreal.
    Five years of this, of piecing together lousy jobs, of roaming, and she had enough. She took a job at the bank, as a teller, so we’d have insurance ( bluecrossblueshield ), so she could get a loan, a mortgage. She could still work nights and weekends in bars, in restaurants. The Bell Buoy. Pier 44. The Ebb Tide, with its unintentionally tragic name. For a while she woke up at five to open