RADIO TEETH

Occasionally I felt compelled to remind Morris of his mortality. Within the year I would drive him to the hospital and leave him there, and, thinking of it now, I was aware of that, even as we spent the winter within earshot of the same two or three radiators, as if nothing would ever happen. I didn’t even know he had a mother, or at least a living one. I thought I could drag him out of his hole and make him look moral for a second.

We had been sprawled on the dingy couch in his apartment in front of three newly emptied pizza boxes, an ash tray, and an archaic radio set with a hole punched in one speaker. It was tuned to one of the channels he liked, on which men poured vernacular lingo over unintelligible blues pieces in a confidential tone, as if over a bar table in the middle of the night. Mothers came up. Jimmy Reed did that kind of thing to us: random mnemonic comments that I usually started to keep myself awake. He mentioned his own in present tense and I leapt on it.

“You’ve got a mother?” I asked. He looked at me sidelong,

“Yyyyeah? You think I crawled out of a drain?”

“Where does she live?”

“Six miles east of here.”

“You never said.”

“Did I need to?”

And then I fought him about it. The fact that I knew him well made me justified in being disgusted.

“You’re visiting her. Next … uh … Sunday.” I quipped as I left. He swore at me.

We drove a car he had borrowed. I had the address folded into a sales receipt in my pocket, and I copied it into the map in my phone as he tried to start the engine. He knew where we were going, I was sure, but I didn’t trust him to admit that. I can’t remember why I let him drive, but it was probably because he wanted to feel control, and I sensed his vulnerability. It was half-past ten at night. He pulled out wordlessly with a lurch and pulled onto the main drag headed around downtown. The oily streetlight glare from outside outlined the lower half of his bloodless head: cords of tendon stretching around the knobby infrastructure of his trachea, the backbent jaw lines and lipless slice above his chin, through which his teeth glinted as he snarled inaudibly at cabs and dogs and people on crosswalks. His skin had this pasty batwing luster, some balance of greasy and chalky, a membrane straining over his carbon-paper skin. He ate an entire package of microwave-bacon out of his lap as we swerved within our lane, seats almost tearing off the chasse.

I had been drawn to Morris the way I had been drawn to espresso and German Opera: for the very reasons that made him repellent. He was the hardest possible person to like; unclean, ugly, impolite, quiet, calculating, solitary, critical, caustic. I wanted to like him because it was the ultimate challenge of taste. Because his entire aspect had PISS stenciled on every side of it and I wanted to adapt to that hardest of possible standards, because I knew no one else would ever make the effort. When I had met him he was eating a can of tuna with his fingers in the back door of the corner mart that sold 300 types of cigarette and beers and snack mixes with names that you forget.  I went back for him after he haunted me for a week, maybe two, mostly because I couldn’t seem to dismiss the memory of how long his neck was: two or three times his share of vertebrae, I swear. But then he was blocking every doorway with an unlabeled can and a faceful of bones, a hasty montage of bleached black and blackened white, so thin that it appeared his flesh had been carved away and all the cartilage had ventured to the surface. He was disintegrating. I came back for him. He was restocking tins of peanuts inside, and he was rude to me. I came back.

Effort, it seemed, was enough that he kept me around, as if it amused him. Friendship is the wrong word for whatever held us together: at best we were floating in the same jar of formaldehyde under the same sealed lid, even if our labels were different. We liked staying up through the night and sleeping until the rest of the world got off. We liked the radio: my Carmina Burana and his Jimmy Reed, a tolerance I would never see again. We liked eating like animals and walking through flaws and being mutually rude to one another. He reminded me constantly that he was not a good person. I went at him like an old car that would require nothing beyond hard work and he taught me to live with any number of vices.

We passed the Grand Union where we bought groceries. When we weren’t standing outside of buildings while he smoked or listening to the radio on the couch in his greasy two-room flat he and I were most often grocery shopping. I thought for a long time that he had other people living on the same bill and that it made sense for us as quasi-friends to buy food together. It wasn’t until I found out he lived alone that I even realized there was something wrong with him; I had always assumed that by being unnaturally skinny he was just inveterately freakish, a designation I had probably made because I liked it. It was better for me to have a freak on hand than a sick person. I was foolish. He bruised as easily as a mushroom. He couldn’t walk more than five blocks without gasping. He ate his paycheck. All of it. And yet the underlying fissures of his nose were visible and when he spoke the space between his upper and lower teeth oscillated perceptibly through what were supposed to be his cheeks. His eyes were piscine, outset and pale, hanging over his cheekbones rather than sinking inward as they were supposed to. His body was lost in his clothes, present only by faith to anyone but him. But when the rain caught him without a jacket the fabric of his shirt weighed down and clung to the the fleshless skeleton that held him together. It scared me sick, even after I knew him.

Half an hour later we parked at an empty depot and lead one another down the block to a crumbly building with a number instead of a name. The foyer was tiled with institutional squares of white and green. A woman with broken nails looked up the name I gave her in a folio and sent us up a stairwell in the back, its steps steel-edged with sagging treads and yellow tape on the risers. Morris’ half-eaten lungs failed him after the first flight, and he coughed and dragged himself up the next two stories as quietly as he could. I should have made him climb stairs more often. But perhaps that would have made things worse.

We broke out onto a hallway sandwiched between tortured imitation-brick linoleum and a matrix of plumbing, wiring, trusses and insulation. It was lined with numbered doors and wallpaper with primitive chrysanthemums on a mustard background with peeling seems.

“You put her away in here?” I whispered, “What?” Morris looked down at me; made me remember how profoundly ugly he was. I had forgotten.

“Yeah. It’s well thought of,” he grunted. And – hell – I didn’t argue. But as we walked its length I contemplated what depth of moral destitution had to befall a son before he put his mother away in a place such as that. A son with money to spare, and, loathed as he would have been to address the matter, a sense of humanity. I wanted to think so at least.

He found her room midway down the hall on the right. For a moment we both stood there: he stared at the peep-hole under the number 243, and I stared at his back and, suddenly, wondered how I would have compassion for the receding flesh around his jutting shoulder blades when they were connected to his mind. His head turned on that uncanny neck to glance at me.

“I’ll wait out here?” I muttered.

“Yeah. Thanks.”

I stood behind him as he knocked, sharply, and from inside there came the sound of a Zimmer frame grating over scarred linoleum. He twisted the knob and pushed the door open. A wizened and tiny old woman had her own hand on the inside knob. She looked up at him through a stream of cigarette smoke and grunted, “I was already up.”

For the moment the door was opened I felt my conscience pulled as if by a vacuum into her apartment: the acrid cigarette smoke, the low light reflected off the garish printed wallpaper and the heady smell of moth balls and menthol and things heated up in cans.

“Hello, Mother.” said Morris.

He stepped in and closed the door between us. I looked around at the half-lit corridor and stepped to the side, setting myself next to the wall-mount telephone, out of the way. Through the thin wall I heard him light a cigarette almost immediately. They spoke without awkwardness, though I couldn’t grasp the words over the guttural hum of the air conditioner and the elevator cables and a radio playing somewhere in the recess of another scant room down the hall. I thought of Morris’ beaten couch and the radio on the table in front of it, and the ashtray between the two. It could have been the same radio; the same hazy room where a couple of thin souls were draped over a salvation-army sofa, staring at it. Why did we stare at the radio, he and I? It sat there by itself like it thought it was a television, and we just stared at it. At the glowing red light on the power button and the violent hole on one side, like we couldn’t hear the music without giving our eyes up to a stagnancy we already understood. I thought of it then, until I could remember with the same clarity the filter tips smoldering in the ash tray and the smell of grease and Morris’ starving feet on the table. I thought that we had probably left it running. That I should have shut it off. 

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