The Grass is Always Greener on the Other Side of the Tobin Bridge (part one)
Boston Outsider / Humor
For five years during the 1980s, when the People’s Republic of Cambridge still clung to a vestige of socialism, I lived in a rent-controlled, 1.5 room studio apartment just east of Harvard Square. It was cheap, and I didn’t own much of anything, so it wasn’t a bad arrangement. One Saturday night, as I sat in my tiny abode watching “Twilight Zone” on a New Hampshire UHF station, I got a call from my friend Buddy Feeney, who lived in Revere.
“Hey, Jimmy,” Buddy said. “I've got a big favor to ask. Would you mind if I stayed at your place for a while?”
“Shit, Buddy,” I answered. “You’ve seen how small this place is. Are you having problems at home again?”
“’Problems’ isn’t the word,” he replied. “If I stay here much longer, you’re going to be reading something awful about me in the Herald.”
“All right,” I said. “Just for a week or so. And make sure that somebody knows where you are.”
Buddy arrived the next night, toting a small suitcase. I gave him my visitor parking card so that his car wouldn’t get towed, and he settled in. After using the bathroom, he came back in the main room with a big smile on his face.
“I just took a piss with the bathroom door open,” he said gleefully. “I haven’t done that in eight years!”
“I’ve been pissing with the bathroom door open for quite a while now,” I said from my perch on a folded futon . “And it’s no big deal. Maybe I’m just jaded.”
“Listen,” Buddy said as he sat on a moth-eaten loveseat. “I know you think I’m a jerk for being here instead of with my wife and kids. You’ve seen Dragoslava lately. She’s still a hot little number after having three children, but life with her has turned into one, big pain in the ass. She and her relatives are the only Zaglavakians this side of Chicago, so my in-laws use my house as their own personal ethnic club. They come and go as they please, playing accordions and drinking plum brandy. And when they run out of plum brandy, they help themselves to my beer.”
“Call up ‘National Geographic,’” I laughed. “They can go to your house and film a special.”
“It’s no joke,” Buddy said, lighting a Marlboro. “You know what it’s like at Easter? A priest with a beard three feet long comes over and stinks up the place with incense. It’s supposed to be an exorcism. The whole tribe goes in the back yard and roasts a pig, and at the end of the night they dance around dressed like garden gnomes while Dragoslava’s grandmother lights firecrackers.”
“Don’t you remember?” I asked. “I was at one of those parties. The roast pig was delicious.”
“The pig tastes wonderful until you find out how much you’re being porked,” he replied, not cracking a smile.
I decided not to give any lectures about the sanctity of the marriage bond. The next six days passed smoothly. Buddy worked the night shift at UPS, and I worked days at a health insurance company, and we barely saw one another. Saturday evening rolled around, and I wondered when I should broach the subject of Buddy’s checkout time. At about six o’clock, I asked him if he wanted to go to the Square for a couple of beers.
“All right,” he said, enthusiastically. “Brewskies in freaky Cambridge!”
I brought Buddy to Whitman’s, a little watering hole that I often visited on J.F.K. Street. On the way there, as we were walking along Mass. Ave., a man in an Uncle Sam costume rode by on a unicycle.
“What’s with that character?” Buddy asked. “July Fourth was three months ago, and Halloween isn’t for another three weeks.”
“That guy always dresses like that,” I said calmly.
“You know, Jimmy,” Buddy answered. “You belong in this neighborhood.”
When we got to Whitman’s, about a half dozen regulars were there. Buddy took a stool to my left at the bar. Duke the bartender saw me and got a Budweiser out of the chest, and I told me to make it two. Duke was his natty self, dressed in a white shirt and striped necktie, and as usual he was flouting Commonwealth of Massachusetts law by drinking a Ballantine Ale as he worked.
An old-timer named Red came in and sat on Buddy’s left, ordering a straight shot of Mr. Beantown rye, cheap whiskey from the bottom shelf. He told people that he drank rotgut to express his solidarity with the working classes, but it was really because he was always broke. Red started telling Buddy stories that I’d already heard a hundred times before: about how he’d been a union organizer, how he’d served in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, how he’d once had a girlfriend in East Berlin. Buddy ate it all up, and he bought Red a couple of shots of good stuff before the old raconteur made his exit.
“You’ll have to excuse me, comrades,” said Red. “I have to go home and write my column for the Daily Struggle.”
“Hey, a real commie,” Buddy beamed after Red left.
“A real commie?” I asked. “A real barfly is more like it. Didn’t you notice that he switched from Mr. Beantown to Old Granddad after you started paying?”
Before Buddy could answer, a scruffy regular called Jerry the Poet, seated three stools to my right, stood up and treated us to some verse. Holding up a shiny, new nickel, he recited:
“Find a nickel.
What the fuck?
All the day you’ll have good luck.”
“Hey, watch the language, you bastard!” Duke yelled, and the room exploded in laughter. A bespectacled sot named Lenny, who always sat at the far end of the bar near the men’s room, offered some literary criticism.
“That piece is rather derivative,” he said, pausing to take a puff of a huge green cigar. “There’s a poem that’s almost identical to that, but it’s about a penny.”
Buddy, all the while, was enjoying himself immensely. After the seventh round of drinks, he got around to the matter that I had been avoiding.
“You know, Jimmy,” he slurred slightly. “The week is almost up, and I know that your apartment is too small for two people, even with us working separate shifts. How about if we get a two bedroom place together?”
The whole week I’d been wondering if Buddy was having marital problems because of being in love with someone else. But it turned out that he was in love with something else, in love with born-again bachelorhood, in love with idea of being footloose and fancy-free.
“Let’s talk about that when we’re sober,” I said. I excused myself to use the bathroom, and on the way back to the bar, I got on the payphone and called a certain Brookline rooming house, asking for Paulie Gomes, a friend who was a would-be actor and borderline lunatic.
“Paulie,” I said, when he got on the line. “I have a little job for you.”
(to be continued)
jim@onlineoffbeat.com
