Paid To Trespass, part one

He went where he didn’t belong

Paid to trespass, pt 1

In the summer of 1995, I was paid to trespass. That is, I was paid to read the water meters on the outsides of houses in my small town of Pottbridge, NY. I carried around a backpack full of books—binders, really—where I’d write the water usage of residences for that quarter.

This is not going to be an intricate analysis of the technicalities of the job. I have forgotten all about that over the decades and I don’t care to reconstruct it. What I’m going to tell you doesn’t require that kind of research. But what I write here is all true. I write that knowing the risk I take, knowing somebody could read this true story I have hidden for decades and that it could incriminate me. Of course I care, and yet something in me needs to get it out, needs to get it down on paper. Maybe I’ll have it printed, maybe I’ll burn it, I don’t know. My moods are so changeable these days I don’t know what I’ll do from one day to the next.

I was eighteen that year and I’d dropped out of college once, disastrously. I won’t go into that except to say that I was an extreme disappointment to my family, particularly my dad as he’d helped to pay for a year of wasted time and I was living under his roof. “You’re going to get a job and pay me back,” he said to me in my room which was in the basement of his house. That was one of the few times he talked to me that May after I came home in disgrace.

All this stuff about “all kids deserve to go to college” is bullshit. College has the capacity to serve as an unnecessary unmasking of the worst traits in a young man. And then the aftermath was much, much worse, as was the case with me.

I don’t remember much about the water meter reading job except that it was one of the duties of my summer employment with the Pottbridge Dept of Public Works. I also poured concrete sidewalks under the supervision of Tom Regent, the superintendent, my boss. Regent was a mean son of a bitch and a taskmaster, whose ear had been shorn off in a car accident he’d lived through working as a toll booth operator for NY State. A drunk college kid had decided he wasn’t going to pay the toll and drove what he thought was between the toll booths but was instead straight into one. Tom Regent luckily didn’t die like the young punk but he lost his ear. Me and my buddy Jason Stark, who worked there too, learned not to make fun of his ear whatsoever in his presence or he’d work us to a psychopathic level of unforgiving heights.

We also weed-whacked the much overgrown, neglected public spaces in the village, a “park” that had been left to the elements since the elder Bush administration. I would come home covered with sweat and vaporized weeds, green juice. Then my father would angrily make me mow the lawn and I got greener. My sneakers looked like salad bowls by the time I was done with the day and went out with my friends.

We drove the village truck all over the place and picked up brush around the village. People went berserk on their properties, finding brush all over and putting it out by the side of the road for us to pick up. It was a cantankerous old man thing, a spiteful hobby of humorless jackasses and fascists with chainsaws. Heaps of branches and twigs got piled in the back of the truck and they would often fall off in the middle of traffic and we’d have to retrieve it while honking cars blew by. We’d take the brush to a pile not far from my house on Hellenic Avenue, behind an enormous pile of gravel, to be burnt with a flamethrower Regent had, somehow. This was the same pile of gravel behind which I’d go parking with my girlfriend Colleen during those hot summer nights.

This isn’t really my story. It was the meter reading job that got me into the other side of Pottbridge, the side I had no idea about. The sinful, crazy side hiding behind the surfaces. Trespassing’s what set the tone within me for what followed. It was a solo job, a break from Regent and Jason and any other company. In your normal life, you walk down sidewalks and drive down roads but you don’t know what it’s like to be on someone else’s property, with hardly anybody’s knowledge. To see their flagstone paths and pergulums and topiary gardens intended just for their eyes only. Stacks of firewood, fire pits no one but family friends were invited to.

In the binders in my backpack were written  notes, clues really, about where to find the meters. Hidden away under shrubberies loaded with spiders. Sometimes the simple three-letter word DOG, written by some prior meter reader (never knew who that was or why they couldn’t do it that summer) warned me that I was to watch out for a canine adventure and be ready to run.

I always got the readings. This happened over a two or three day period that summer. On the last day, in a cul de sac on Brown Street, where I’d never been in my whole sixteen years of living in Pottbridge, on a hot day, I was in a backyard looking for the water meter and couldn’t find it. There was a large pool that looked very inviting with a lounge chair and an umbrella. I saw a tall, cool drink on a side table and an abandoned, overturned paperback book. I don’t remember the name except that it was by Dean R. Koontz, one of my favorite writers as a kid. Suspense novelist. The book looked lurid. A cigarette was still going in a clear ashtray.

I did something I shouldn’t have done. I looked around, saw no one, went over to the lounge chair, and got a closer look at the book. I’ve always been a curious guy, to a fault, especially about printed things. I was definitely away from my proscribed duties. I peered at the drink. A tall glass, with ice and lime slice. It looked like some kind of gin and tonic. I licked my lips. I lingered over the scene when a voice said, “Hey.”

It wasn’t a mad or outraged voice.

I looked up to see a woman standing in the sliding glass doorway. She was in a bikini. I think it was green but my memory across the decades might be faulty. But nobody could forget her body which was ripe as a cluster of grapes. She had black hair, down to her elbows. My friend Dom DeNucci would have described her as “stacked up to the ceiling.”

“What are you doing?” she asked.

Just then, faster than any weather coming on I’d ever seen before then or since, it started raining, hard. I mean it came on without warning, or at least I hadn’t noticed any clouds rolling in. It was like bright sun, bright sun, bright sun, then downpour.

“Holy crap,” the woman said, hiding in the doorway of the dark house. “Could you get my drink and my book? I don’t want them to get ruined.”

I did it.

“Bring them inside.” She stood aside.

“I should just give them to you and go,” I said, just outside the door under a narrow overhang that barely kept me dry.

“Get in here before you get soaked.”

I went inside, shaking the rain out of my hair.

“Just put those on the counter, I’ll get you a towel.”

We were in a dark kitchen. No lights were on in the house. The only light was from the windows, suddenly overcast. It was humid like a greenhouse, everything looked sticky, but the storm had brought some cool breezes into the house through the old screen door. She had disappeared down a hallway for a long time before coming back with a towel with MYRTLE BEACH written on it.

“I’ve never been there,” I said. I was dumbly trying to make conversation. She made no effort to cover herself up at all. She grabbed her drink and took a sip, smacking her lips and sighing afterwards to make a show of thirst being quenched, eyeing me up and down. “What were you doing?”

“I’m just reading the water meters in the neighborhood.”

“Water meters, huh?” She was grinning like she’d caught me peeping and was dangling me over a cauldron.

“Yeah, they do it every so often.”

“I’ve seen them come around before but I don’t remember seeing you before.”

I told her I was just working there or the summer and I showed her my badge which was supposed to be for ID in case a resident got suspicious.

“How do I know this isn’t out of a Cracker Jack box?” she asked. Her eyes were like a dark blue that was still very sharp, like I have since seen in a National Geographic magazine once when they were talking about Indian dyes. Indigo.

It started thundering out before I could answer. “Wow,” she said. “You can’t go out in this.” We looked out the screen door together. The swimming pool surface jumped with fat falling raindrops.

“So what’s our meter read?” she asked.

“Oh I didn’t get it yet.”

“You hadn’t read the meter yet but you were checking out my Dean Koontz novel?”

“I’m sorry. I was being nosy.”

“You’re lucky I don’t call your boss.”

“Please don’t.”

She looked at me with a playful predatory expression I hadn’t learned the true dimensions yet. “Look at your face. I’m just teasing. What’s your name?”

“People call me Okie. My last name.”

“Like in The Grapes of Wrath?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve never heard that name before around here.” She moved into another room adjoining the kitchen, no doorway just a large arch, what looked like a living room. “Where do you live?”

“Hellenic Avenue.”

“Funny how you can live in the same town as someone and it’s like other people a few blocks away might as well be on the moon. Have you ever heard of the Berensons?”

“No.”

“Harry Berenson, my husband. I’m Belinda. Sit down, you’ve probably been walking in the hot sun all day.”

I hesitated. It was really coming down.

“If you go back out there, you’ll get struck by lightning and the village will never get its meter readings,” she said, snickering before taking another pull from her drink.

“Okay,” I said.

“I hope our reading isn’t too much expensive. I take a lot of long, hot baths. A lot. Sometimes every day.”

“That might do it. Where’s your husband?”

“I don’t honestly know, Okie. I haven’t seen him in a day or two.”

“Would he be okay with some strange guy sitting in his living room talking to his wife?”

She gave a single low, throaty laugh. “Are you very strange?”

“No, I’m totally normal.”

“That’s pretty boring.”

“What am I supposed to say?”

“You’re supposed to say, ‘Miss Belinda, why don’t you get your ass up and make me a drink since I’m not going anywhere?’”

“Drinking on the job?”

“Think of it as refreshment. Taking a break on a long hot day.”

I thought about it. I’d like to say I really hesitated, as if it was a debate inside me, but the thoughtful, hesitant face was just for show.

“I’ll take a drink.”

“Beer?” She was getting up and I got an eyeful.

“I’ll have whatever you’re having.”

“Gin and tonic?”

“Sure.” I’d puked my guts out on gin many times but that’s because I was a degenerate who didn’t know how to drink it before.

“A small one. You’re busier than me.” She went in the kitchen and into the freezer for some ice. I heard the crunch. “No, Harry could be anywhere. He could be in New York City or he could be pulling in the driveway right now.” I got up and looked out the front window. Nothing but sheets of rain. “I don’t honestly know. And if he doesn’t care, I don’t care. Know what I mean?”

I nodded. I started looking at her bookshelves which were groaning with paperbacks.

“You’ll have to recommend a book to me,” I called out.

She came back in the living room with my drink, handed it to me. It was cold and I put it to my lips. She held out her glass to clink. We touched glasses like old friends.

“What do you like to read?” she asked. We stood side by side looking at her books. At no time did it seem weird to her that I could see every inch of her standing there.

“Horror, mainly,” I said.

“This is good, coincidentally.” She held up the Koontz novel.

“I’ve probably read it already.”

She made a ponderous, accepting face and went back to her chair.

“Hey, can I ask you a question, Okie? Do you know someone named Cherie DeNucci?”

“That’s my friend Dom’s older sister,” I said.

“Does she live by herself?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“I’ve just heard about her, is all. I heard she gets around.”

“Dom doesn’t talk about her much.” The gin and tonic was cold and the carbonation and lime killed some of the pungency of the alcohol.

“How old is she?”

“I don’t know, 25, 26?”

“Guys like her?”

“Alright, I guess.”

“How old are you?”

“I’m 18.”

“Going on 40,” she said in a sly voice. “You know what they say about 18-year-old boys.”

“Same thing they say about 35-year-old women?”

“You have no idea about it do you? So cheeky. You’re on the clock, don’t forget. Got a girlfriend, I imagine.”

“Yeah.” Once the word left my mouth I thought about reeling it back in but it was too late.

“What she do?”

“Works at the video store next to the Big M.”

“Really. The cute one with the red hair?”

“That’s her.” I felt like I was apologizing for an embarrassing family member by even talking about Colleen.

“That’s cute,” Belinda said. “You make a good couple. I can see it.”

“She’s alright,” I said, taking a drink.

“I bet if she heard you say it in that tone of voice she’d slap the drink right out of your mouth.” Then a quick smile from her.

It stopped raining. It had been a quick burst. I thanked her for the drink which I’d only drank maybe a quarter of. “I’ll just drink it next,” Belinda said. “It’s just about time for a refill.” She shook her empty glass, ice rattling.

I was halfway down the block when I realized I’d forgotten my backpack with the meter reading binders in it. I know it sounds improbable. Like how could you forget that. But it’s true, I swear. I went back to the Berensons and rang the doorbell. No answer.

I opened the door. Right away I could see through the house to the sliding glass door and the back deck by the pool, and I saw that Belinda was out there. I got my backpack, and something like the lingering over her book and drink earlier, before the storm, came over me, and I didn’t leave in a mess of nerves.

She was on the lounge chair putting on lotion. She didn’t take her top off but had rolled it down, taking the straps down off her shoulders to put on lotion and get a more even tan. The sun had come back out. She had sunglasses on and was smiling and kind of murmuring to herself. I wondered how much of our conversation in the living room she was replaying to herself.

Before I left I grabbed a random book off her shelf and took it with me, putting it in my backpack. When I got home from work that evening I looked at the book. It was Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying.