Dark End of the Street

Jon briskly twisted the yellow scarf against her neck and cried and babbled to himself, like the cooing of a baby, and then hummed a song that she’d heard before.

“Wise men say, only fools rush in,” he sang, almost as if a lullaby.

She heard her voice box crack and she fell to her ass with a squish, the broken, filthy writing on the wall around her bringing no comfort. Her hands felt wet, touching the dead hairs and urine and dirt and she cried looking at a single sentence scratched into the bathroom wall with a key: PRIDE GOETH BEFORE DESTRUCTION, AND AN HAUGHTY SPIRIT BEFORE A FALL. PROVERBS 16:17-19.

The last thing she heard was Jon singing directly and softly into her ear, “ ’Cause I can’t help, falling in love with you.”

Chapter 51

THE MEMPHIS MENTAL HEALTH INSTITUTE was everything you could hope for in an insane asylum. The building had to have been designed sometime in the late ‘fifties or early ‘sixties with its cold white brick and blocked institutional architecture. Very boxy and utilitarian at eight stories. Gave off the same homogenized blandness of those flickering science films that I had to watch in junior high. Everything had that same washed-out feeling. The magnolia trees along the sidewalk seemed dirty and dying. The volleyball nets behind a long row of chain link were wispy and brown, the sidewalks pale and sun-bleached.

I thought about calling Charity Hospital when we got back to U’s office. Last night, Loretta’s condition had been upgraded to stable. I just wanted to make sure that change continued. I wanted her away from hospitals and soulless dwellings and back home where she belonged.

All around me, I felt like I was being watched. Workers watching my eyes to see if I was coming in to stay. Faceless people who peered from skinny little windows in the building. As U and I walked along a broken sidewalk, the 8:00 A.M… cold made me put my hands in my pockets.

Someone had slapped a flyer for a new rap album on the institute’s metal sign. OUT THA FRAME, the words read, blowing in the wind. U started laughing as we passed. I didn’t get it. It was cold. It was earlier than I’d been up in ages. I was white.

“What’s that?”

“Means you’re crazy.”

I looked at him.

“You know, not quite thinkin’ in the lines.”

“Ah-ha,” I said and winked at him while shooting a gun made out of my thumb and forefinger. “Got it, G.”

“Don’t do that. Somebody’ll think you’re serious.”

“Clyde’s pretty out tha frame. Isn’t he?”

“From what you told me, out the frame, out his mind, out this universe.”

“When they were grabbing him back under the bridge, he told one of the handlers that he rode the candy beams of the galaxy highway. But then again, who hasn’t?”

“Sometimes I forget who I’m talkin’ to, Travers.”

Some orderlies took us outside to the volleyball court where we sat at what looked like an old dinette set surrounded by four mismatched plastic chairs. The ground was bumpy and filled with rocks. Grass grew in yellowed splotchy patterns. U and I didn’t talk, just yawned and shuffled in our seats feeling the calm that filled the vacant space as sunlight started flooding through the chain-link fence. We were outdoors but I felt like we were in a basement or cavern, the bluish-gray sky simply a painted ceiling.

Within a few minutes, they led Clyde – drawn face and shaky-legged – out to the table situated in the ragged void. We were so exposed and in the open, I felt like we were having a tea party on the fifty-yard line. I smiled up at him, but he didn’t seem to notice. Didn’t seem to remember the fight, or the day, or who he was. This was going to be a huge waste of time.

As I watched him slump into his chair and stare into a far corner of the building where he now lived, I tried to focus on who he’d once been. I tried to think about the Apollo, the sessions at Bluff City, and that brilliant sharp voice on Dark End. Those words seeming to come through the wind and my imagination and memories. A phonograph needle catching a man’s soul came to mind.

But all I saw was a withered old man. He was just plain beaten. Any brilliance had been stripped away like water eroding the side of a mountain.

He wore a blue gown under a thick bathrobe and paper shoes. His fine hair seemed like feathers blowing against a rock.

“Clyde?” I asked. Just a knock on the door.

His gaze didn’t leave the vacant corner where he stared. It wasn’t a place you stared. You stared into the sky or a parking lot or at a nice-looking woman. You didn’t stare at beams supporting an ugly building or damned old washing machines collected in rusted heaps nearby.

His eyes didn’t wander.

“I’m a friend of your sister’s,” I said. “Loretta. What happened, Clyde? There were men looking for you. What did you get yourself into?”

I felt like I was talking to a second grader.

I put my hand on his back. I wanted to establish some kind of link, but instead felt foolish and manipulative.