Tom Foran Clark

As snow had fallen that morning, Boston in the afternoon on New Year’s Eve was brown and wet. Snowdrifts curbside were smudged black from the exhaust of vehicles swerving recklessly amid long chains of double-parked cars. In all of Boston, for just my tiny dark blue Geo Metro, I could find only one single, solitary unmarked, unmetered parking space not in front of a fire hydrant and not in front of a driveway -- a spot by a high fence not part of, but near to, Fenway Park.

I deftly parallel parked, got out, and started walking. Boston’s raw weather was biting to the bone. I put my head down. Looking up, I had to shield my eyes from glaring haze. Cars sprang at me like sharks. Boston drivers seemed to have some sort of radar out for people walking, on the prowl for fresh pedestrians. I quickly got the drift of this. Soon accustomed to their antics, I began weaving my way through the labyrinth of gravely streets using car hoods as walking sticks. I strode amid the glass and concrete skyscrapers, peering into cheerful storefront windows still filled with seasonal ornaments -- glistening gold, bristling green, bloodstirring red.

I went around making inquiries, trying to get a lead on the whereabouts of Kieran Porter. The address I had for him, 15 Reaper Street, led nowhere. There was no Reaper Street in Boston. I found a 15 Roper Street, but not a soul in the boarding house there, or in the neighborhood, knew anything about my remarkable friend. So I kept walking, describing Kieran at length to random strangers, hoping eventually something would click. Believe me, if any of these people had ever seen my friend, if only once, they’d have known him from my description. Six-foot-three, Kieran Porter was as pale as a mime in whiteface, always wearing black clothes never ironed, talking incessantly.

At dusk, I got an idea. I took the subway to Cambridge -- to Harvard Square. I walked up Massachusetts Avenue to Central Square, asking about my friend and Reaper Street all along the way. Several people knew the place -- an existent house -- a grimy, blistered tenement at the top of which lived Kieran.

I coiled up a dark winding staircase, arriving out of breath at his garret door. I could hear him murmuring and pacing within. At the first touch of my light tap, the door sprang open. “Hail, Sisyphus!” Kieran cried out. “It's Gene, the Oregonian. However did you find me! Well, isn't this just the Goddamndest thing! I never expected you'd actually show up! Come in -- come in." He shook my hand. “By God, Gene Kantor. Well, you made good your parting promise -- you’re here. It wasn't at all clear you’d come. I thought I'd maybe left you on a sour note. You don’t often meet someone hitchhiking who becomes a devoted friend. Everybody else, well, you know -- promises, promises! The water off the melting ice caps could make their way here sooner than some people. But here you are here, so I won’t explain. Can’t you close the door?”

I closed the door. I knew that Kieran somehow, somewhere along the way, had been short-circuited, his memory scrambled, his brain fried. Not everything Kieran said made sense. And yet he still remembered we’d met hitchhiking. It was amazing what got through.

He looked terrible, like a death-mask version of his former ghostly self, more haggard and pale than when I’d first stopped to give him a ride. His self-cut beard, patchy, shorn with gardener’s shears I knew, was now gnarled and knotted. He was dressed, as I’d expected he would be, entirely in black. I noticed he had on the same black ancient mariner’s pea-coat he’d been wearing on that lonesome road out in the west when first we'd met, us catapulting eastward across this big, free country amid vast golden summer grainfields going everywhere -- in Colorado, if I remembered rightly.

His room was like a tiny sub-zero meat-locker. When I began visibly to tremble, Kieran asked if he could take my coat. When I declined, he began himself to shake and shiver, saying, “I was only kidding, Gene!” Then he said, “Of course you’ve come to help me? You'd heard I’d succumbed to the killer doldrums?”

“I came because we're friends," I said. "I wanted to stay in touch. I’m interested in what you’re up to.”

“I'm up to the top of this garret!” Kieran said, laughing, his whole body jiggling with pleasure at his own irony, him reaching to the ceiling. I remembered now how he’d sat in the passenger seat of my little Geo, jiggling and bouncing, talking non-stop, delighting in his own careening scree of words. “I tell you it was not one week ago that I was on the floor,” he said, now laying down on the dusty wooden slats, crossing his arms like a corpse in a casket. “The winds were out of my sails -- I was beached, flattened, gutted, corkscrewed, goner than Melmoth the Wanderer, lost in no-man's land, and downhearted.”

“I see.”

“You see,” Kieran said -- with irony, I knew. I remembered now how he got almost sardonic sometimes. “How could you see, Gene? Were you here? Standing behind me? In my mirror, staring at me? Tumbling down the stairs after me when I fell? Taking the punches when the punks jumped me? You strip off those masks you wear, and then I’ll tell you that you’ve earned the right to tell me that you see!”

“It was you who told me, ‘concealment is everything’.”

“When every other masquerade is over! You and your partial recall, Gene. What is it with you, anyway? What I said was, 'concealment’s everything when nothing’s left behind the final mask that’s stripped away.' Is this ringing any bells? Then -- and not before. ‘Pessimism is a human mask; in the authentic is always optimism’ -- that’s what you told me.”

“It’s true.”

“Oh yeah, the truth. You told me all about the truth -- the beautiful, eternal, optimistic Divine Mind imprinted on the cosmos. Gene, the truth is spinal meningitis, solitary confinement, killer bees, ragweed allergy, blistering cold, avalanches, earthquakes, frostbite, hemorrhoids. God is not what you call the Divine Mind, imprinted on the cosmos, beautiful and peaceful. You and your peace and justice! -- I’ll give you peace and justice.”

“You don’t have to prove anything to me.”

“You think you can ring the gong on New Year’s Eve and all is well, the world is new, and that’s the end of it? I wish I could open up your head and pour authentic justice in. Everybody knows nothing. A Doctor Okinawa Abe I knew told me I suffered from Shinkeishitsu -- like I would fall for that! He told me to go roller skating, do finger painting, take hikes! I told him to take a hike. You too, Gene.”

“I could use some fresh air,” I said honestly, feeling cramped and short on breath in Kieran's shrinking room. “It's New Year's Eve. Let me take you out to dinner."

We first went for a walk along the pebbled banks of the Charles River, sitting at the end of a dock where, against the easy, lapping lull of its waters, Kieran pressed on with his fervent almost frantic monologue. In Kieran’s company, the Boston skyline seemed to rise from the river's gentle shores like fierce pinnacles and terrifying shards of glass.

Suddenly Kieran was throwing rocks at ducks. I got up and walked toward the esplanade over the Charles. To my surprise, Kieran followed. We went to the middle of the walkway, then turned back to Cambridge again.

Just prior to midnight, we went into a low-lighted English-style tavern with artificial Tudor beams where noisy revelers were on the verge of their midnight uproar. Kieran said he wasn't hungry -- at least he made it clear he wasn't going to eat -- and he wasn't going to stay in this desolate place among these stammering idiots. He asked a waiter for whiskey to go -- for which I paid big bucks. While the waiter went to get it, Kieran stuffed his coat pockets with mints, matches, business cards, and pennies on the counter.

We took the bottle back to Kieran's dismal room, where he drank, lurched to and fro, shivered, and declaimed. "I suppose I'm supposed to be happy some complete total stranger I met hitchhiking should happen to think of poor Kieran on New Year’s Eve?” he said, disgusted, pinching the big winged flanges of his hairy nose. “Go waste your charity on somebody else, loser."

I tried to focus on the joyful noise of the New Years' celebrants in the background.

"Where were you when the punks jumped me, Gene? Where were you when I fell out the window? Take a hike! You owe me, Gene. I don’t owe you anything. Where’d you park your car?"

“In the Fens, by Fenway Park.”

“Why not Cambridge?”

“You’d written Boston. Your address.” I showed him his own note.

“You walked from Boston all the way to Cambridge? What are you, crazy?” Don’t even bother to answer that. I’m going to bed.”

Happy New Year. It was now half past midnight. I was of two minds -- stay or go. Finally, I laid down on the cold, narrow wooden floor. I had to ask myself, what did I really know about Kieran Porter anyway? I knew he was originally from somewhere in Connecticut. I knew he’d been in jail for housebreaking, petty larceny, and so on. He’d also lost his driver’s license many times over, I knew, for drinking and driving. I knew he was probably an unredeemable scoundrel who’d maybe never clean up his act -- but it was exactly people like him who most needed friends like me, I figured. Love the stranger as thyself.

I heard Kieran tossing and turning, talking to himself, audibly upset at my having chosen to stay. He’d covered himself with a heavy, musty woolen blanket. Some of its itchy dust -- or lice or fleas or bedbugs -- had got on me and, after that, I also tossed and turned.

It was around half past three in the morning when Kieran gave up on my leaving on my own initiative. He jumped out of bed, threw his blanket at my head, mumbled, "The lambs and lions will lie down together maybe -- but not on my watch," and ran out the door, barely stopping to open it. Then he came back in the room, muttering, “Got to get out of here -- got to get out.” He placed his big feet, in his ragged stinking black socks and shoes, on my back. "I don't want you here," he put it to me, jumping up and down. "Get out."

"Are you sure?" I double-checked, standing up to face him. I peered deep into his beady, calculating, unrevealing eyes. I knew how spontaneously Kieran could say or do a thing or, as quickly and as whimsically, say or do the opposite. That was just Kieran's way of doing things.

"Out!" he screamed.

So that was that. Pulling myself together, I said “I appreciate you” and reached to shake his hand -- which he refused.

That's how it happened I was out at four in the morning, crossing the bridge over from Cambridge into Boston, both cities eerily empty at that hour, while it was still dark out, on New Year's Day. I pulled my stiff winter coat closer against the arctic morning chill, and traced my steps back along the Charles River to Copley Square, the Common, and the Public Gardens.

For a long while, until sunup, I alternately stood next to and sat on a bench under the weeping willow trees by the waters where I knew the swan boats floated in the summertime. Then I wove my way back into the narrowing corridors of stately homes and dreary tenements packed tightly together into neighborhoods circling the legendary baseball field where once there had been only swamps.

Snow flurries now alighted. The first morning cars ventured out, their headlights blinking on amid the swirling white. Nearing Fenway Park, I saw Kieran -- now I knew he was insane -- in my dark blue Geo. Contrasted against the falling snow, the car looked black. Kieran Porter -- lunatic! -- sped away. I checked my pockets. Not only had he pickpocketed my wallet, but also my house and car keys. I thought, my God, what a way to make a living. It was clear he wasn’t going to let me track him down a second time.