Christopher Barzak - Plenty

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Plenty

By Christopher Barzak

28 May 2001

Although I hadn't seen my friend Gerith in years, I wasn't surprised to receive a

letter from him, asking me to come home. Gerith had been sending me these

requests every year or so after I left Youngstown, most of them chronicling the

misfortunes of the old neighborhood where we grew up. From Gerith's

descriptions, not much had changed for the better. Each day the city

disintegrated a little further. People who had once been important to us

disappeared without warning. Often he would ask about my life now that I no

longer lived there. Are you okay? he wondered. Are you happy? And each time I

would answer: I have a secure job, I live in a great city, I have a girlfriend who

loves me more than I love myself. I have plenty.

No matter how I answered them, though, Gerith's letters filled me with a sense

of guilt. Whenever one of his letters arrived in the mail, I'd put it in the pocket of

my jacket for a while and forget about it. Then, after I got up the nerve to read

it, I'd sit down and laugh or cry with nostalgia for the old neighborhood. Even

though I'd spent most of my life trying to escape Youngstown, the place was still

my home. Gerith's letters reminded me of that.

This time, as always, I hoped Gerith would allow me to finally make a clean

escape. I wanted him to tell me that the South Side had received funding for

rebeautification, that the shelter where he worked had enough food and beds,

and that life in general was an eternal flame of mercy and generosity.

Instead, his news left me reeling: "Mrs. Burroway has died, David. The funeral is

Saturday. I hope you'll come home for it."

Immediately I had a vision of houses, stripped and gutted, left behind by the

dead.

I'd already made plans for the weekend, so I spent a few minutes unmaking

them. There was the financiers' dinner on Friday, and on Saturday I'd promised

to meet Karen for lunch. She'd been wanting to speak to me about our

relationship. I called her answering machine and canceled our date. Then I

phoned the office and explained that an old friend had died. The boss was

generous, asked no questions, and told me to be careful if I planned to drive all

that way. I packed an overnight bag and left Chicago for Youngstown.

There was another reason for going home as well. I'd been keeping a secret for

far too long, and now I needed to tell someone about it. The secret involved a

small amount of magic, although these days magic is not something in which

everyone can afford to believe. There is a suspicious absence of miracles. But

sometimes impossible things happen when no one is looking.

It happened in Youngstown, during my last year of college. Fall arrived early that

year and spattered the few trees on our street rust red and wax yellow,

cinnamon brown and orange. The leaves were a welcome relief from the sight of

our crumbling surroundings: boarded-up warehouses, empty storefronts with

cardboard covering the windows, and walls tattooed with strange but banal

graffiti. I remember the Market Street bridge in particular, and the words YOU

HAVE CROSSED THE LINE scrawled on both sides of it in black spray paint. I

passed under that banner each day, as I walked to and from school. It bothered

me no end. I wanted to know what line. And who, exactly, had power over the

geography of my life?

Gerith and I bought a house together that year. We'd finally decided to cut the

umbilical cords that tied us to our parents. Both of us had grown up in that

post-industrial shell of a former steel town, a place steeped in a depression that

no one knew how to relieve. In the end, most people affected indifference to the

situation. No one in our town wanted to be re-educated for alternative careers.

Instead, they'd spend their unemployment checks on the lottery and whiskey.

We felt the world owed us some obscure inheritance. This strange psychology

had been passed down by our parents and grandparents, who actually did lose

their jobs during the seventies. We were children of the dispossessed who

wanted to be the dispossessed.

The house we bought was an old Victorian on Chalmers Street, and it cost us

only six thousand dollars. Houses were cheap in Youngstown because most of

the city was a ghetto. The only profitable business nearby was the university.

Our house had two floors, a basement, an attic, and a front porch spread wide

and deep as a cave. There was a turret that rose out of one corner of the roof

-- we thought we had our very own castle.

After using what money we'd saved to buy the place, Gerith and I were broke.

We'd both won grants and taken out loans to pay for college, so that left us with

a little extra cash each quarter, but that money never seemed to arrive at the

right times. For the first few months we had electricity and water but no

telephone or heat. When the autumn chill grew strong and the wind rattled our

windows, we wrapped ourselves in the afghans our mothers had crocheted for

us.

Whatever other luxuries we did without, the one that hurt most was food. We

ate peanut butter sandwiches and ramen, drank tap water that tasted of

chlorine, and sometimes splurged on a packet of Kool-Aid. On our kitchen table

we kept a wooden fruit bowl that was always empty. After a few months, my

taste buds began to deteriorate.

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