Alex's Story

I met Alex when we sat next to each other in Mrs. Sears’s class in sixth grade. He was the first person I’d heard speak with a Portuguese accent, and he pronounced “gerbil” in such a way that it took me a few tries to realize he was talking about the pet rodents he and I both kept. We talked about the joys and challenges of being a gerbil owner, how if you held them – which you absolutely wanted to do because they were so adorable – they’d bite you on the finger.

Alex was effusive about his love for gerbil Tutu. He regretted having to keep him in a cage, and was considering setting him free in his room. I advised him against it. Mine had gotten out, gnawed through the wires on our stereo, then was attacked by our cat. He survived, but his foot was badly injured in the scuffle, and he literally chewed it off. You don’t want to see that, I told him. There’s nothing cute about a gerbil when he’s chewing off his own foot.

I lost track of Alex after sixth grade. The kids at Nathan Bishop Middle School tended to segregate themselves after class, the white kids all hanging out in one area, the black kids in another, and the Portuguese kids another still. Though one day the teachers went on strike, and when we arrived that morning, we were told school had been canceled. I spotted Alex romping on a hillside where all the white kids normally hung out. “Billy K!” he shouted, doing a somersault. “Isn’t it great? We’re free! I hope they never come back.”

Ten years later I had an apartment on Wickenden Street, which ran through the southern end of Fox Point, which had been the Portuguese corner of Providence my entire childhood. As a kid, I had been advised against venturing there alone, but I had place there now, and it was fine. One summer day I was walking home after my lunch shift at the BBQ place I worked near Brown University, lost in thought as usual, when I heard, “Billy K!”

There he was, sitting on a plastic lawn chair on the sidewalk by a chain link and in front of a driveway to a duplex. His left foot was in a cast, his neck and arms and legs looked puffy, and his belly poked out between his T-shirt and the top of his shorts. As he shook my hand he glanced left and right. There was something about the weight he’d put on and his stoic expression that if I hadn’t known him in middle school, I would have thought he was ten years older than I. He asked me what I was doing down here, and I told him about my place.

“You be careful, Billy,” he warned, glancing left and right again. “There’s guys down there that would cut your throat as soon as look at you.”

“Seriously?”

He nodded, and shifted in his chair. When we shared a table in sixth grade, he always leaned forward when he spoke, almost touching my nose with his. Now his attention seemed to never leave the street, and he wouldn’t meet my eyes longer than a glance. He reminded me of a mafia don from films, owning his space with quiet and distant brooding.

I pointed to his cast. “What happened to your foot?”

He shrugged. “Broke it. So, what are you up to, Bill K?”

I never knew how to answer this question. I wasn’t really doing anything. I was waiting tables and dreaming of the life of a writer. I told him I wrote.

“Oh, yeah? Me too.”

“Really?”

“I met this lesbian chick from Brown. Showed her my story I started. She wants me to be a writer.” He snorted. “She kept telling me I needed to finish it. Finish it! Finish it!” He shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know, Billy.”

“What don’t you know?”

“I don’t know why I should bother. Who’d read a book from a guy like me?”

“Don’t say that. Just finish it. You like it?”

“Yeah, I like it.” He looked skyward for the first time, paused, and then recited, “In a morning when you feel the heat from the pavement and you can smell the street like it’s alive and all around you, you wake up and you don’t know what the day will be but you know you’re alive and that’s something. That’s how it’s starts.”

“That’s really good, Alex.”

“It’s about this guy who deals, and has to put up with all the bullshit, and who dreams of something more. It’s about living on the street. It’s about real life.”

I nodded. “Sounds like it. How does it end – do you know?”

“Yeah. There are cops looking for him, and he’s at this stoplight, and he can see a cop car near behind him, and even though the light is red, he says, ‘Fuck it,’ and guns his car through intersection and just takes off. That’s how it will end.”

“I like it, Alex. Hope you finish it.”

“Yeah. Well, you take care of yourself, Billy.”

I told him to take care of himself as well and headed down the street to my apartment, back to my own life and my own dreams of freedom.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual coaching and group workshops.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com