The Box

Duane Funches came in from the thick, swampy night looking like so many others that I’d seen before, and I placed him almost immediately in one of those many boxes one has in their mind that house a certain kind of person. He was a black man, tall and thin, with a baseball cap and white whiskers in his splotchy beard. He smelled ripe and musty and carried a white plastic garbage bag that was straining against the contents inside of it.

He sat down next to me, near the corner of the counter, and ordered a pint of beer and “a shot of vodka. A double shot of vodka,” he said. The bartender seemed less than impressed with him, a look of complete ambivalence on her face, like Duane had just stolen something from her. I talked with my friend for a few moments while Duane fumbled through some items he’d placed on the bar. Something stirred in me and I knew I had to talk with him. I was curious about him. I wanted to know who he was.

For a few moments, Duane sat with himself, even though he was right next to me. He spoke to himself in a low voice and then lit a long Newport cigarette. I asked him how he was doing and he sprung to life almost immediately, like I’d just plunged a shot of adrenaline into one of the thick veins that snaked just beneath the chalky skin on his skinny arms.

“Oh, man, I’m good, I’m good,” he said, in a voice that started high and ended low, the ashes from the cigarette falling like snow onto the bar. I asked him where he was from and he began talking angrily about Chicago. “It’s fucked up there, man. Gang bangin’, gangs, all that shit.” Then he placed his face next to mine and whispered: “You know they even got gangs of homosexuals? Yep, five, six of them, they’ll jump your ass and fuck you up.”

“On Halstead Street? Boystown?” I said.

“Fuck yeah, man,” he said. “You know I ain’t fuckin’ around,” he said.

Duane is from “all sides” of Chicago; “Northside, Southside, Eastside, Westside,” he said. There, apparently on “all sides,” he told me he worked the third shift, cleaning the floors at Burger King, Subway, Quiznos and other chain fast food joints.

He didn’t much like to talk about Chicago – I could tell. He wasn’t in that city anymore for a reason, I thought. He ran away, got out, came to Kalamazoo to see his sister and brother-in-law. He wanted to start something new, even at 53-years-old.

“Look at this,” he said, pulling a soaking wet wad of papers from a pocket in his light blue coat that hung from the back of his chair. He placed the wad on the bar and I went through it, finding a Greyhound bus ticket to Chicago. He was to leave on August 10 on the 1:25 p.m. bus. He never got on.

We shook hands and I could feel the heaps of heavy calluses that circled around his right palm. They were working hands, the kind that aren’t nice on the eyes, but are functional for the person whose arms they are attached to. He didn’t want to talk much about what those hands had been doing since he got to Kalamazoo, but I could sense it involved a lot of loneliness. I decided not to press.

My friend gave Duane a taste of his Guinness. Duane was impressed. He’d never tried the stuff, but being a “connoisseur,” as he called himself, he gave a running commentary of the goodness of the drink. “It’s got taste. It’s got class. It feels good in your mouth,” he said.

“It stays with you,” I said. “Hell yeah it does!” he said matter-of-factly.

I don’t know why, but I asked Duane if he liked Marvin Gaye. He did, a lot. Duane seemed to like everything, well, except for the City of Broad Shoulders.

I felt an urge to touch his back, to run it up and down just to make him feel somehow safe, at home. It felt like the back of a dying man, thin from the chemotherapy or the unwillingness to eat anymore. His scapulas felt like dull knives. I put my left arm around his shoulders and we sang together.

“Ain’t no mountain high, ain’t no valley low, ain’t no river wide enough baby…”

“Mother, mother, there’s too many of you crying. Brother, brother, brother, there’s far too many of you dying…”

We laughed together, and I could look deep into Duane’s mouth. I could see what life had done to his teeth, the edges of which were a dark brown, like he forgot to brush them after eating a big brownie. As he laughed, tiny drops of saliva spewed from between his teeth, landing on my left arm and the left side of my face. I didn’t care.

A Michael Jackson song came on and Duane got up to show my friend and I “a few moves.” He stood just behind us, and flapped his arms ever so slightly, nodding his head to the beat. He had mad rhythm, and had for his whole life, I thought.

He slapped me on the back. “Chris, we’re brothers, you and me,” he said. A waitress stood nearby, fumbling with something on a table. “Hey, you know what?” he asked her. “Me and this man are brothers.”

“Yeah, brothers from another mother,” she said. He laughed again.

“Can I have some of that big baboon booty sliced real thin,” he said to the bartender, who wasn’t quite able to make out what he said. Duane laughed, like an 8-year-old would when they just got away with a joke on an adult. At that moment, he seemed at once completely innocent, almost childlike in his antics and sincerity. He just wanted to laugh with someone, have them acknowledge him, make them know that he was a man, a human being, a soul.

“If the whole world stopped spinning tomorrow, we’d all be gone,” he said. “It don’t matter who you are. You got one shot, just one shot.”

My friend and I had to go. Off to another establishment on one of the ever waning nights I was to have in this city.

“We got to go, Duane,” I said. “Got to work in the morning.”

His face changed and I felt a little guilty about the work comment because it wasn’t true. I felt like I owed this man complete sincerity, because he was giving it to me.

“Oh, no, Chris. Now I’m going to be all alone here, just by myself,” he said. “I’m going to be sad.” I knew that he was not lying. His eyes got long and looked misty. He seemed like a little boy who was about to be abandoned.

“I’ll see you around, man. I will,” I said. “Give me a hug.”

We embraced and Duane spoke softly into my ear.

“I love you Chris, I do,” he said. “I love you, too, Duane,” I responded.

I meant it.

My friend and I walked out of the bar and into the night’s thickness, made that way from a recent thundershower. I looked up at a streetlight and enjoyed how the amber glow was all fuzzy from the humidity that hung in the air like a blanket.

Then I thought of Duane. I took that box out of my mind and I crushed it, then threw it in a dirty dumpster in the back of the bar.