Lenny had not been home when the fire started. He had been eating chicken wings and drinking dollar drafts at the National Club, a bar he frequented over in Erie’s Lower West Side. When he returned he found the house burning, a giant bonfire against the night sky. The firefighters informed him that it was beyond saving, that their only concern was to keep the fire from spreading. And so he stood there with his neighbors and watched his house burn.
“You have a place to crash?” I asked.
“I’m staying with Tiffany, out in Wattsburg.” Tiffany was Lenny’s sister. She had four kids by three different guys, and pretty much lived off the child support when the fathers actually paid it. Also, she grew pot behind her aboveground pool, a little piece of insider info that Lenny and I had occasionally abused. She’d gotten the house from her first divorce. I had only been inside once, but that was enough. Tiffany didn’t have any pets but the place still managed to smell like cat piss and Lenny told me the sound of children crying was continuous, like a soundtrack that never ended. Plus, Wattsburg was the sticks and Lenny worked in town.
I tried to think of something to say. “At least you weren’t in there.” The blackened lump of the brick fireplace stood precariously like the primitive altar of some ancient tribe. “At least you’re alive.”
Lenny’s face tightened in contemplation, as though he was considering, for the first time, his possible fate. His expression changed, the thought evaporating in his fury. “If I ever find the fuckers who did this,” he said, “I’ll burn their fucking house down.”
Above us the sun was falling in the sky. A line of clouds stretched above it, their underside a brilliant orange. The air had cooled and felt good as it mixed with the heat that still seeped from the wreckage. A little ways down the street from Lenny’s was a basketball court and I could hear the birthing of a pickup game: the hollow dribble of the ball, the rattle of the chain link fence that surrounded the court, the shit-talking already in full swing. I did not ask, but I knew that when I arrived Lenny was searching for anything that had survived the fire. Near the edge of his driveway was a small pile comprised of what he’d found: a remote control, a single candlestick, some of his parents’ old vinyl 45s, hopelessly warped by the heat, and a pair of white Chuck Taylors yellowed by smoke. What remained of his life in a stack that anyone would have mistaken for trash. I put my hand on his shoulder. A breeze sent tiny pieces of ash dancing through the air like confetti. “You’ll get through this,” I said. “Better days will come.”
Lenny looked at me with his sad, dead eye. “That’s what you keep telling me.”
After I left Lenny, I drove west across 26th Street past the off-ramps of I-79. A little farther on, the road widened and was flanked on both sides by a gray blur of abandoned warehouses and factories and then the shimmering oases of used car lots, their countless strings of tiny flags blowing furiously in the breeze like trapped kites. I took a right on Peninsula Drive. The after-work traffic had thinned out and with the roads almost empty I could go as slow as I wanted. The sun was nothing more than a thin crescent of orange above the blue of Lake Erie. I drove into its blinding glare not bothering to lower the visor. I couldn’t get the image of Lenny covered in ash out of my head. We’d been friends since the third grade, playing basketball together, sleeping over at each other’s houses, stealing cigarettes from his sister’s purse. At first my parents treated him like another son, but by the time we reached high school they’d begun to dislike him. After graduation, Lenny took the job working for his brother, and I got accepted to a small college in Pittsburgh. It meant we wouldn’t be hanging out much anymore, and although he didn’t come right out and say it, I knew my father was happy. Pittsburgh wasn’t far, just a hundred mile shot down I-79, but it was the first time I’d be living away from Erie, something I was pretty excited about. My parents helped me move down. While my mom was busy filling a dresser with neatly folded laundry, my father asked me to take a walk with him. We went down to the quad, a concrete courtyard surrounded by trees and benches. All around us the campus was alive with freshman carrying suitcases and boxes, trying their best to look cool in spite of the overeager parents trailing them.
We sat on a bench and my father straightened the collar of his blue Oxford. He was wearing beige khakis and white tennis shoes. He had been the first in his family to go to college and was now a well-regarded professor of American History at a Catholic university downtown. Khakis and tennis shoes were as casual as he got. The sun reflected off his bald head and his large eyebrows sloped in toward each other like they always did when he was thinking something over. Finally, he placed one of his big hands on my shoulder. “You’ll do well here,” he said, as if he had made up his mind and all that remained was to convince me. “This is a place where you can really thrive.”
I had never been much of a student, never excelled at sports or art or music, but my father’s faith in me had always been resolute. The worse I did, the more I disappointed him, the stronger it seemed to grow, as though he knew at any moment I would discover some ambition or talent hidden deep within and prove to the world that I was not just another fuck-up. My father, having always believed this to be the case, would be the first to congratulate me.
“Just study hard,” he said, shaking me by the shoulder.
“I will,” I said, trying my best to sound like I believed. The complex where I lived was a group of single unit apartments built together in one low brown line, in the fashion of a cheap motel. The name of the place was Lakeview Vistas, although you could only see the lake on a clear day and even then it was just a thin strip of blue, out of place against the normally steel-gray sky. A concrete foundation ran along the front of the apartments and was used as a sort of makeshift porch. People set up small propane grills on top of card tables or arranged cheap mismatched patio furniture in front of their doors. I was somewhat of a hybrid between the complex’s manager and its handyman, a position I fell into after failing out of college. I only lasted a semester and a half in Pittsburgh. Before long I was skipping class, spending entire days loafing around my dorm, high or hung-over or both, the kind of days where taking a shower could be viewed as an accomplishment. The job at the Vistas had seemed a wonderful stroke of luck to me after moving back home. My duties mainly consisted of collecting the rent checks and doing simple miscellaneous repairs. In return I received a free place to live and a small monthly stipend, not much but enough for food and beer. My parents were not as thrilled. When I came home I told them that the classes were too hard, that my professors didn’t like me, that not everyone was cut out for college. But none of these reasons seemed to appease them in the same way they calmed me. My father insisted that the situation was temporary, that I was just taking a little time to get back on my feet before reapplying to school.
A couple of the tenants stood in the parking lot smoking and I nodded at them as I walked past. Most of the people who rented at Lakeview Vistas were transitory. The place was a revolving door for deadbeats and shit-heads and much of my job involved reminding people that their rent was past due, until finally they disappeared in the middle of the night, leaving me to plaster over the holes they punched in the drywall. Because of this I tried not to talk to anyone too much. Getting to know the other people who lived there only to have them leave unexpectedly made me feel like everyone else was moving on to bigger and better things. It made me feel stuck, and while I had agreed with my father, telling myself repeatedly that my time at the Vistas was limited, that it was just a stepping stone, three years had passed and I had begun to feel as much a part of the place as the ruptured blacktop of the parking lot or the outdated ice maker in the lobby that coughed out its crystal cubes like a slot machine.