Lucky Us by Joan Silber Read Free Book Online Page A

too far back or too far ahead. I had to quiet myself so that I wouldn’t get eaten up with bitterness. I couldn’t think about Steve or how I’d gotten fucked over or why a lot of people weren’t here and I was. I had to learn to still my thinking.
    W HEN I CAME out, I went back to the hotel where I had lived before, to a room as small as the one I’d first had. I had lost a lot of weight and it took awhile for my prison haircut to grow in. People who knew me before were spooked at the sight of me, although they tried to be hearty.
    My parole officer was in Brooklyn, and I got the habit of walking over the Brooklyn Bridge for my appointments. It was a cold and windy walk, in that first season, but beautiful, with the light glinting on the water and the roaring traffic noise like an enclosure. I felt best on those walks.
    My parole officer was so impressed with my fondness for the out-of-doors that he got me a job for the Parks Department. Wearing the uniform humiliated me and I was afraid of seeing someone I knew when I was paintingbenches or cutting grass in Prospect Park.
    It was Maureen I didn’t want to see. As it happened, she showed up one night in the hotel bar, on the arm of some jerk in a leather vest. She was the same, maybe sleeker and brighter, and she made a big fuss about me, for the guy’s benefit or out of sympathy; everyone knew my whole goddamned story. I was glad enough to be hugging her (“look at you, what a trip,” she said), and I let the two of them buy me drinks all night, which depressed me later.
    This did make me get myself out of the park, where I still worried that she might pass by. I found a job in a store that sold water beds. I was always good at sales, which is odd because I haven’t ever cared whether anyone bought anything or not. Even when I was looking at hundreds of kilos of marijuana, I didn’t care when it got sold. I let people dicker over the price and then if we couldn’t agree, I peddled my papers elsewhere, with no hard feelings. I was never in a hurry. They liked me at the water bed store.
    J UDY, A WOMAN I was with for a long time, wanted me to move to California with her. Yvonne, who came later, thought I should go back to school. I loved thesewomen and I gave them a hard time. What did I want? Women kept thinking it was their job to find this out. It wasn’t true that I wanted nothing. I had my enthusiasms and obsessions. I had disappointments and losses. Things happened to me. I had a life. But it is true that I lived it without depending on anything turning out well.
    When I got out of prison, the entire country seemed weirdly sentimental to me. All the constant insisting that things were going to get better, that it was necessary and admirable to believe this. No provision was made for things getting worse. It was as if no one had thought anything through.
    And all that emphasis on
feeling
. I couldn’t watch TV, not the talk shows and not even the family comedies or the eleven o’clock news. The screen was full of people with distorted expressions, emotions bursting out of them. I thought it was all just petty bullshit run amok, tiny passing matters drawn large.
    P RISON TOOK A lot of my vanity from me, which is unusual for a young man. In the camera store, where I ended up staying for so long, I used to notice that I was different in this respect from the guys I worked with. I’d see them preening around, pushing for their places in thesun, and I’d feel like an old fart, compared to them.
    And then I
was
an old fart. It seemed to happen in a matter of weeks—I knew that couldn’t be so—as if I’d gone from being young to being middle-aged without passing through anything in between. All of a sudden at the store I was surrounded by these rollicking young creatures who were the sales staff. I’d see the girls cracking each other up over some customer’s foolish outfit, I’d see