A Bright Soothing Noise

The Dancer

91 The Dancer Little Jimmy surveyed the mirrors on the ceiling, the spotlights above the runway, the horseshoe shape of the bar. Everything was cleaner and brighter than he imagined. A semicircle of tiny tables, each set with three chairs, zigzagged all the way around the room. He put his arms behind his head and stretched his long legs out between his two extra chairs. When the waitress passed, he pulled his feet in and like a schoolboy raised his hand. He ordered a margarita, then loosened his collar . Little Jimmy was six-four, and though this had been true five years already, it seemed his very bones were a lie. He had been five-three until his last semester of high school, when he was eighteen, so the growth had come too late. Despite his outsized limbs and hands and head and feet, he was still Little Jimmy Rose in his neighborhood in Stapleton, in his mother’s kitchen, and in his heart and soul. He avoided looking up at the mirrors, to see how he dwarfed his table. When the waitress returned with the drink, he said, “What time do they start?” “Hold your horses, cupcake,” she said. “Any minute.” He said he would run a tab and she looked him up and down and said, “Screw.” So he dug in his shirt, attempting to hide that he had a hundred dollars in various denominations folded in each 92 A BRIGHT SOOTHING NOISE of his various pockets. He tried to pull out only the seven singles he needed for the drink but as he extracted them a whole lump tagged along and fell out over the table onto the floor. “Careful with your money, darling,” she said and left him bent down under the awkward little chair. By the time he settled in again and the drink washed away the blush that poisoned his face, he went back to savoring what he had in his pockets: twenty-five singles (minus seven), five fives, five tens in his shirt, the same configuration in his pants and two fifties in his wallet . Three hundred minus seven. That ought to do for the night. In the far corner an emaciated creep, watching everything but Jimmy, was ugly-handsome with his string tie and pocked face. He looked too physically weak to matter, leaning with his elbows on the bar as he smoked, so Jimmy’s attention was absorbed by the drink in front of him, the salt around its rim, the small circle of his table. For a minute Jimmy reflected on the day, and might have congratulated himself if he knew how. He imagined what Mr. Steen would say in the morning, once Mr. Steen saw what Little Jimmy had pulled off. He dismissed a long painful reverie then, or a short one, considering the relativity of time when a synapse misfires. “Ha!” he said almost out loud, against this new idea of himself— Little Jimmy with Money—and saw the too-small boy in a white shirt and blue tie against the fence in the yard of St. Rita’s School. The youngest in his class, weak with his fists and wit, too freckled , too pale, too dirty blond, he had been the target of schoolyard derision, a mouse of a boy with five older sisters and hyperactive bowels. He was no one’s favorite, not even his mother, who feared the judgments of his father. He wore his shirts two or three days at a time and often felt dirty next to the others, especially the tall Italian girls in their kilts, knee socks and immaculate green vests. He had his fights—he wasn’t without a temper or valor—but almost always lost, even against the girls. The Dancer 93 Once, in the neighborhood, a gang of teenagers he admired and envied, even loved in his lonely, furtive way—Mike Brosnan, Paulie Rocklyn, Johnny DiStefano and the rest—poured a bucket of piss they had been filling all week over his fresh crew cut. Once they stripped him naked and drove him in back of Rocklyn’s Camaro out to the docks where they forced him to inhale from a cigar until he puked. They left him there, tossing his clothes into the harbor before they drove away. He hid until it was dark and ran three miles, keeping close to the weeds, or down...