Brian Dunn – on being shot while trying to escape.
Brooklyn, New York
January 2, 2001
Derek,
My morning begins normally enough. I’m running late (no surprise), because Aidan got up early and decided to run around the apartment with an industrial-kitchen-sized pepper container. I wrestle it away and offer to show him a video of “Frosty the Snowman” that his grandfather checked out of the library for him – this to keep him busy while the wife and baby sleep – and I slip out the door. Out in the hallway, I hear a woman frantically talking on the phone in the doorman’s cubicle. As I head to the entranceway, I pick up various pieces of information: Charles Dunn (no relation), a guy in his fifties or sixties, has collapsed outside. The woman, a neighbor whose name I don’t know, recounts this as she moves about. “He’s still breathing,” she tells me.
I step outside and there he is: face down on the street, dressed in a dark suit, arms at his side, a black wheeled travel bag on his right. He had just stepped off the curb, his body a straight line and pointed toward the open trunk of a silver limousine. On the curb are two more bags: an overstuffed leather bag and a carry-on. A guy in a gray suit holding a briefcase is nearby, appraising the situation. 911 Lady runs out and says “Don’t touch him! The paramedics are on the way!” Nobody moves to touch him and he just lies there. 911 Lady knows him a hell of a lot better than I do: he had a pacemaker installed last year, she says, and he had triple bypass surgery a few months ago. “Somebody’s got to tell his wife,” she says, and looks at me. I’m not sure where his apartment is, though I know he smiled at my kid when he refused to put on his papier-mâché crocodile mask on Halloween and gave him candy anyway. “It’s on the second floor, near the stairs,” she says and she’s off again. With visions of giving every old lady on the second floor a stroke, I head for the stairs.
Charles Dunn: a stocky, affable guy, old New York, with a nice-guy smile that doesn’t come too easily. Half the time, especially when the doorman helps with the sorting, I get his mail. A painter who rented out a storefront in transition down the block for a month to sell his watercolors – landscapes. More than a little talented, but not my style. Felt a tad guilty not buying one at the time. Always saw him walking with his wife, but, oddly, not often next to her.
I knock on 2-C. The woman at the door is wearing a long T-shirt for a nightgown. She looks older than her husband, gaunt, with a first-cigarette-of-the-morning pallor. “You’re Charles Dunn’s wife” – suddenly I’m a cop – “You need to come quickly. He’s collapsed in front of the building.” I say this like she’s got all the time in the world. She puts a hand to her mouth, then, “I knew it, I knew something was wrong.” I head down the stairs, with the wife (Mary, I think) in tow. We emerge onto the street and Mary declares: “He’s dead,” in a flat-toned voice, the slight quiver of her face and right hand the only tell-tale sign of fear. 911 Lady is trying to comfort her. The briefcased bystander and two other men – one another suit-and-tie guy, the other a white guy in a multi-colored Rasta-style skullcap – are around the still face-down Charles and look like they know what they’re doing. I don’t. I consider leaving, but then 911 Lady, whose medical expertise I’m beginning to doubt, declares that someone should get a blanket and I beat her back into the building. I fill in the wife and move quickly past Aidan, happily watching Frosty and his new friends march down the street. “Thumpity thump-thump, thumpity thump-thump…”
Outside again, the guy with the Rasta skullcap has taken charge. The suits are at his head and shoulders; Rasta Skullcap is at his feet. “We need another person at his torso to help flip him over.” I put the blanket down on the trunk of a car (the limo is gone; never saw the driver) and get down by the torso. “We’ll flip him over on three,” says Skullcap guy, “One, two,” and we turn him, slowly. A woman behind us gasps at the sight of him: he’s broken his nose on impact; from the way his arms were positioned, whatever knocked him unconscious cold-cocked him with no warning, and his face took the brunt of the pavement. The nose is shoved in and over to the right. It is bulbed W.C. Fields-style, and absurdly I realize I’ve never seen a nose right after it has been broken before. Dried blood is Rorschached over his face; one eye is half-open; the lid is no longer a smooth curve but looks jagged. The dark pupil is nickel-sized and stares at nothing. I move for my blanket, but one suit throws his jacket over Charles’ chest; the other covers the rest of him with a tan trench coat. A fire truck turns down Lincoln, followed by an EMS ambulance. The firemen hop out and take over.
I carry my blanket back inside my apartment. “What’s going on?” Aidan asks from the couch.
“A man fell down outside and daddy was helping him until the firemen came to help him.”
“What’s going on?”
“Oh. Um, Sally is really cold, so Frosty is telling Hocus Pocus to tell the other animals to build a fire so she can get warm.” I grab my bag and my book and I’m out the door again.
I get halfway through the lobby, where Mary is being comforted by 911 Lady and an elderly gent. He’s in a dark suit that he bought twenty pounds ago but he still looks rather dapper. The fire truck and EMS ambulance are both still outside. Mary’s clutching a pack of unfiltered Pall Malls and a Bic lighter. “He told me he was leaving me today,” she says, and I stop. “I was in the shower and he told me he was leaving me. I had no idea. He said he was going back to Arkansas. He said he had a ticket. A 10:30 flight.” She’s locked herself out of the apartment.
They bring in his jacket, a top-coat-length red down coat that he wasn’t wearing when he collapsed. It must’ve been over by the curb with the rest of the luggage. She checks the pockets: no keys. Maybe they’re in the suit. Maybe he didn’t bother taking them. The old gent volunteers to take the luggage to his apartment. He looks about ten years older than Charles and the black suitcase and its leather companion look stuffed to the gills so I volunteer to help. They’re worse than they look. The wheels don’t work on the travel bag and the poor son of a bitch must’ve stuffed fifty years of clothes and memories into both of them.
In the elevator the old gent hits six and tells me, “In ’86, one morning, I was playing ball – you familiar with the neighborhood? Down at the playground on Fourth Street and Fourth Avenue. No? Well, my wife was hit by a bicycle. Right in front of the building. Lucky it wasn’t a motorcycle. Never the same. Anyway, Charlie ran all the way down to tell me. And you know how big Charlie is.” We’re off the elevator. “He’s my best friend, Charlie. Saw him in church yesterday. Seemed fine.” It’s the conversational tone that gets me about the whole thing, as if old Charlie’d pulled this before and it was no big deal. I struggle to haul the luggage deep into his apartment. It looks like it hasn’t been renovated since the old guy moved in. On a table is a blood pressure gauge. I stuff the luggage in a corner so he won’t be tempted to move them and we’re off again. “He wrote a book on watercolor technique last year. Terrific book. He taught painting in Arkansas. Maybe he had a girlfriend there.” We get downstairs and Mary is gone. The fire truck and the EMS truck are both still outside. I grab my bag and book and head out the entranceway. 911 Lady is standing there. I pat her on the shoulder and tell her she did a fine job. “You too,” she says, and I’m off.
Later the wife calls with the bad news. I’m not surprised. I wasn’t placing any money on old Charlie Dunn because of the condition his condition was in and the nasty dramatic closure of it all. I barely knew the guy or his wife (she of course of the present tense) and everything is conjecture, but… You’re Charles Dunn, two heart operations over the last year and a half under your belt, a pacemaker and a zipper on your chest to remind you of your dance with the reaper in the mirror every morning when you shave, wondering how much more you’ve got left. You taught painting, which you love, down in Arkansas. Maybe there’s a woman in the airport in Little Rock waiting, maybe not. Maybe it’s just the idea of doing what you love and being with people who respect you for it that’s got you shoving your socks in a suitcase. You’ve got to do it this way; either you keep moving or you lose the nerve. You don’t want to discuss a done deal. The wife’s either the anchor or the chain and whatever reason you had for staying has long since melted away. So you tell her and you’re out the door down the elevator and through the lobby. You wait in front of the building for the limo to pull up. It stops and the trunk opens up automatically, that big old abyss you’re not supposed to look into, and you step off the curb. Maybe you think of landscapes and Little Rock. Maybe it’s just the luggage and where the hell is that driver, but bang, you’re dead, shot by a guard in the tower just as you were clearing the wall. Two steps from the old life to the new but you don’t make it. Wotan lifts a finger and you stop and you fall like an unhinged door, kissing pavement and the world goodbye with lips you stopped feeling a second after you stepped off the curb.
Anyway, that was my morning. I sit here like you sit there and I watch the tower and time the spotlight and I think about making a break for it. We all go tomorrow. Pass it on.
As always,
Brian
