ASYLUM, Part I
I got my first shift on the bar on a Saturday. The tips were bad and the lunch rush was thin, mostly construction workers who ordered Miller High Life, because I had to bend to the bottom shelf of the beer cooler and give them a good view of my ass. Not to mention the other few customers, who had their own reasons for drinking before five p.m. I had started out as a waitress. Getting behind the bar was considered a promotion. If I kept everything clean and well-stocked, the night bartenders were more inclined to slip me shots in juice glasses when I waited tables.
Before lunch, the place was empty and I scrubbed the sinks and wiped lip prints off the wine glasses. Everything in the bar could always be cleaner. I didn’t have much experience as a waitress in the first place. But I’d needed a job—my parents’ generosity extended to art school, but not a semester off. A bartender, Sheila, had vouched for me. Sheila would have vouched for almost anyone, though. We didn’t have to be polite; brusque service was considered part of the atmosphere. We had to be fast, keep drinks on the tables and turn them quickly, and we had to take care of the regular customers. There were three kinds of regulars. Old guys who remembered Brady himself, the kids who worked in the bookstores and boutiques around Harvard Square, eating late dinners before hitting last call at the Highland, and every now and then, a PhD or professor who confused squalor for charm. When lunch was over, the afternoon emptied out, and I sat at the end of the bar and did the crossword with the busboy, Nelson.
There were three busboys: an uncle and his two nephews from Haiti. To each other, they spoke Creole, which occasionally rang the bells of my high school French. One of the nephews, Rene, was almost useless. When we tipped him out at the end of the night, we gave him less than we should have. Rene called us all Mami so he didn’t have to remember our names, made us frappes with whipped cream and cherries, and built little houses with packets of soup crackers instead of bussing tables during the dinner rush. His brother, Nelson, was new, not just to the bar but to the country, and needed an explanation for everything. He was pretty, like a boy who’d grown tall without ever reaching puberty. We gave him the standard ten percent of our tips. He was eager and knew the most English.
“Doctor,” Nelson said, pointing at 23 across, the clue for which was “Medicine man.” Nelson liked crosswords, he thought he could learn something. He wanted to take classes at Bunker Hill.
“Nope,” I said, bending over the paper. “Shaman.”
“What’s shaman? I thought doctors did medicine,” Nelson said, frowning.
“You’re right. Good guess. A medicine man is different than a man who practices medicine, though.” I twirled the pencil between my fingers and tapped the metal bracket of the eraser against my teeth. I didn’t want to let him down by giving him a poor translation. “You know about Native Americans?”
“I know,” he said. “People who lived here before the Pilgrims.”
“Right. In every village there was a man who was sort of like a doctor, but he also had special powers.”
“Powers?” Nelson squinted like he wasn’t sure he was following me. “Like a president or an engine?”
“Like magical powers. They could make medicine, right, but they could do other stuff, too. Like scare away evil spirits and go into a trance and talk to the dead.” I wasn’t sure if shamans spoke with the dead. But I figured Nelson would get the drift. I got up to set out the candles. Dusk fell earlier every day and they were supposed to be lit by dark.
“I know that,” he said. “We call it houngan. My uncle is like that. It is like, um—” When Nelson was uncertain of a word, he screwed up his eyes and snapped his fingers. “Like a priest.”
“Francis? Your uncle who works here?” I said, arranging spotted glass dishes on a tray and stabbing at the left over wax with a butter knife. The candles were like little plants. They required re-potting each day and constant attention to keep the flames in bloom in the draft from the door.
“Yes. Do you know a little about Ayiti?” Nelson was excited to be able to explain something to me. “Haiti I mean.”
“Not really.” I waved the soda gun over the tray of dishes, splashing a little water in each one.
“My uncle supported a bad man for president.” Nelson looked at me like the words he needed were written on my face. “All the houngan supported this man. But he made a lot of mistakes. The president was made to leave the country and the people went very mad. The people burned the houngans. Uncle came here to be safe, to work.”
I set a fresh white votive in each glass. I wondered about all the things Nelson knew and didn’t have words yet to tell me.
“On his days off, he works at our home. People give him money to pray for them.” He looked over my shoulder then.
“Are you a houngan?”
“No.” Nelson smiled. “I am a Catholic. Voodoo doesn’t work in this country.”
He and his brother called their uncle Tonton, and we called him Francis and gave him the largest percentage of our tips. He hardly spoke, but he knew when the keg needed to be changed and always laughed when he thought we were making jokes. Francis was the only employee who was ever allowed a shift drink. He got a single finger of Beam after closing, and only on Saturday nights. I was already thinking of that drink as I spaced the candles evenly across the bar and set one in the center of each table. I was working a double, waiting tables that night. I needed the money, but I needed something to look forward to at the end of all that, too.
During the week, Brady’s closed at one a.m. We rushed through our side work and ran for last call at the Highland Hotel. The bar had a grandfathered license to serve liquor until two every night. As other bars around Cambridge closed, drunks and their servers collected in the lobby, driving the out of town guests back to their luxury suites. The girls who worked at the Highland had blown-out highlights and even tans. They came around the bar to hug customers. Across the street at Brady’s, we wore pigtails, sneakers, and muscle shirts, and told our drunks don’t touch.
That night was slow for a Saturday. The shift dragged in the middle and made us even money—not enough to get excited about but not so little that we had a right to complain, either. There were nights when you’d feel expectant and full, like something good was coming, and it would come out of you. Those were the times when nothing happened. It was the dullest days that twisted into new and shining shapes. At the end of the night we sagged, wrapped our legs around the silver stalks of barstools to stay upright. When the manager, Mike, turned off the juke, our ears rang. He counted the bricks of cash on the counter. Sheila and I shared a cigarette.
“How were your sales?” Sheila peered at a long ribbon of receipt paper.
“Okay.” I said.
I had rung up eight hundred dollars of hamburgers and beers. Sheila propped her face heavily in one hand with her elbow on the bar. I knew she’d budged a few Pabsts from the cooler. When Mike grunted our release, we went to her place and called the Flahertys.
Mark and Brendan Flaherty were not related. Brendan took the money and cut the lines, which he called “gaggahs,” and Mark carried the vials. They both had short dark hair in weedy patches on their chins and gelled back on their heads. Brendan was sleazy and sly, with pretty eyes and a smile that could snag you like a nail. Mark was the sidekick. He was dumb and looked it, baby-cheeked and thick-necked like a steroidal ball player. During the day, they made deliveries for Doherty’s Variety. The Flahertys’ wares were exactly what I was trying to take a sabbatical from by ditching school for the semester and moving across the river. But that night, I supposed that I deserved a little indulgence, after fifteen hours on my feet making rent.
On Sheila’s stoop, we lit each cigarette off the last. Waiting for the Flahertys had that effect. Their black boat of a car pulled up, the windows shuddering with music. Mark climbed out from behind the wheel and Brendan slid out the passenger side window, his t-shirt hanging from his pocket. “Yeah, baby!” Sheila called to Brendan’s smooth chest. He turned and dropped trou, revealing a hard, pale ass that I was not sorry to see. On the stoop, a rooster slept in a cardboard box, feathers puffed against the cold. A window screen had been set on top like a lid, with a note: PLEASE DONT TOUCH, CALLED MSPCA.
“The fuck?” asked Mark, as Brendan put his clothes back on. “There a farm around here?”
“Animal sacrifice,” Sheila said. “Devil worshippers live on the first floor.” We’d studied the floral curtains for further clues and found none.
In Sheila’s apartment, we sat on a loveseat and two unmatched arm chairs with our knees pressed against a round wooden coffee table. Brendan clicked a straight razor on a glass picture frame, laid flat like a tray. Inside the frame was a newspaper photograph of baseball players humping each other, from the night the Red Sox broke their curse.
“Big night at the bar, girls?” Brendan swung his eyes around the room, deciding which of us got the first gagger. “Belmont, you look like you need this the most,” and he slid the frame toward me. Belmont was the next town over, where I’d grown up, and what Brendan had decided to call me when we first met. Mark handed me the c-note he’d been rolling tight. The Flahertys insisted on using big bills, the theory being that they were handled less and thus less dirty. Sheila and I were not above using twenties. Singles were usually too soft.
“Thanks.” I passed the frame to Sheila, who nodded and pursed her lips. This was the same expression she used to acknowledge a drink order when she was already pouring. I saw Mark look down her shirt as she bent over the tray. She always said half her tips were for her tits.
“That fucking bar,” she said, leaning back on the couch. “It reminds me of this TV show from when I was a kid. There’s a guy on a train, and it goes through a tunnel and he looks around and all the passengers look like skeletons. Then they’re in the light again and everything is normal. And then in the next tunnel he looks down, and he’s a skeleton, too.” She looked at me and said, “You’re not a skeleton yet.”
“Tales from the Crypt,” said Mark. He kept one eye on her collar. “You guys hear about Seven Hills?”
“The condo deal finally go through?” She pulled her flat silver church key out of her back pocket and cracked a beer.
“They break ground next month.” Brendan grimaced around his cigarette. “The development company’s based in Connecticut, so you know they won’t use local guys.”
“God knows I wouldn’t pay a mill to live in a fucking former loony bin.”
“No shit. We used to sneak up there to party in high school.” Mark said. “Scared the crap out of us.”
Seven Hills State Hospital was a rotting crown on a rise of land shared by three towns. It had been empty for fifteen or twenty years, the peaks and spires looming into the nightmares of the kids who grew up around the hill. A developer had been after the land for almost as long as it had been abandoned. The view of the gleaming Boston skyline, and the blue plane of ocean beyond it, was worth enough to outweigh superstition.
“What’s the inside like?” asked Sheila.
“There’s shit everywhere,” Mark told her. “They just up and left everything. Furniture and stuff, but also suitcases and medical tools and files and shit like that.”
“Is that legal?”
“Guess it was at the time.” Brendan began tapping the glass again. “You know they just kicked a lot of people out. Funding cuts or some shit. People thought institutions were inhumane, so they threw them on the street.” He paused. “Sometimes, old patients come back.”
“Please,” Sheila rolled her eyes. “Urban legend.”
“For real, girl. I remember it in the police blotters when I was a kid. They’d even find patients back in their old rooms.”
“You guys are so full of shit.” She bent over the coffee table again.
“I bet if we went up there right now, we’d find a few loonies wandering around.”
It was a dare. What could we do but act on it?
NEXT WEDNESDAY: ASYLUM, Part II
