Lennie Martin

It’s not as if I was stupid and couldn’t learn. I just didn’t want to. ‘Lennie Martin, you have no willpower. You have no drive. You’re lazier than the laziest couch potato rotting in the dampest cellar in town,’ said my teacher. I never set much store by her opinion, but she was right about this. I dropped out of school and gave work a go. I scrubbed the concrete forecourt of Kobielski’s car showroom and dragged myself across fields yanking potatoes out of the earth. Sometimes I helped the Arab with his vegetables. We piled up crates and cleaned apples and melons with a soft cloth until they shone like the ones on the pub fruit machine. I never stuck at anything for more than a few weeks. Back then, I was convinced I had no staying power. Actually, staying power was pretty much the only thing I did have in life.

I was living in a basement at the time, right behind the church. I didn’t plan on staying there long, and I kept my things in a wooden crate so that when I got the chance I could carry them to a better apartment with minimal effort. The room was tiny and damp. The damp crept into my bones, and sometimes in the morning I was so stiff I could hardly get out of bed. Often I would lie under the blanket for hours with my knees pulled up to my chest, waiting, I don’t know what for.

As soon as I had any money I would spend every evening in the Golden Moon, sitting at that counter pockmarked with cigarette burns. When you glanced in the mirror behind the bar, a row of gloomy faces stared back at you. There were always three or four men sitting there, playing cards or listening to records on the jukebox. We didn’t talk much, and I think that was how we all liked it.

I remember one evening in winter. I’d spent the whole day hacking ice a centimetre thick off Kobielski’s forecourt, and I was sitting at the bar, dog-­tired. Beside me sat a man I only knew by sight. We were staring out of the window at the street, where snow was whirling in the light from the streetlamp, and all of a sudden he started telling me about his life. He said he had certainly had his chances, but he had just lacked courage. ‘You take your eye off the ball just once, and before you know it it’s all over,’ he kept saying. He said it without bitterness, without any discernible expression on his face or in his voice. And perhaps this was what bothered me. Suddenly I no longer had any idea why I was sitting there or what I even wanted from life. I was filled with anger of a kind I’d never felt before. At this man, at myself, at life in general. Perhaps I’d just had too much to drink. In any case, I interrupted him and said, ‘I’m going to smash my head in.’