Say That To My Face
David Prete
The story of Joey Frascone, a boy from Yonkers, NY and his eccentric Italian-American familyJoey Frascone is a young kid growing up in tense, violent, racially divided Yonkers, New York in the Seventies and Eighties. His childhood is marked by four different homes, rotating sets of parents, and a whole bag of confused emotions. There are crushes on older girls to comprehend, new boyfriends and girlfriends his parents bring home to contend with, a serial killer on the loose in the neighbourhood, and a whole cast of violent, aggressive Italian-American uncles and cousins that Joey is desperate not to turn into. As he gets older, Joey's teenage dreams pull him away from Yonkers, towards the excitement of New York City, away from his family, but he is still, in many ways, just a handsome, charismatic kid trying to make sense of his world.Complete with a cast of sassy women, psychotic men, love-lorn teenagers, Say That To My Face has all the colour, charm, violence, nostalgia and schmaltz of an episode of The Sopranos. But Joey Frascone is the hero of this book and male and female readers will fall under his spell in equal measure.
Say
That
to
my
Face
F I C T I O N
David Prete
FOR MY SISTER
Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divining, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Contents
Cover (#u0806154f-4712-5227-baf2-2736a1ad8099)
Title Page (#uce859a17-5a20-5cc6-830e-af8c5324d9d3)
Dedication (#ubb95c986-4919-5e0a-81d5-a50098188e52)
No King, No Puppy (#uf3b23c04-d694-585d-98ca-551d6c55d1ac)
Not Because I’m Thirsty (#u1961a429-3889-5ec2-ba8c-c6d520769199)
The Biggest, Most Silent Thing (#ua9a9fb9a-b27f-5811-ad42-5892978c51b2)
Four-Foot-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Self-Respecting Neapolitans (#litres_trial_promo)
Bleachers (#litres_trial_promo)
After We Left Yonkers and Before We Came Back (#litres_trial_promo)
The Itch (#litres_trial_promo)
Green (#litres_trial_promo)
Say That to my Face (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
NO KING, NO PUPPY (#ulink_c40feca0-33c5-5f22-9c6f-00820fcb73d3)
This was the part of the ride I loved the best. It was my part. When I got up to a good speed and pulled the skid brake, it made the back wheels of my Big Wheel lock and kick out to one side, which sent me into a spin and then a stop. If I got scared and tried to stop the spin with my limbs, chances were I’d get hurt: I could scrape up my feet or tip myself and go shitcan-over-teakettle onto the pavement. Either way, if I tried to stop what it was I had gotten myself into, I’d end up face-ass down on the street.
At four and a half, as I would fall asleep, I’d remember the rides I took that day. I could feel the motion of the skids playing themselves over in me as I lay in bed. Like spending the whole day in the ocean and that same night still feeling the waves going back and forth in my body as if the tide got stuck there. I’d hear the sound of the plastic tire grinding against the asphalt and feel my eyes watering from the wind. It was simply the best thing that ever happened to a kid since the beginning of kids. That’s what I thought about in my fifth year when I would fall asleep.
The other thing I would think about was why there were four different homes in which I was falling asleep.
WHEN MY PARENTS were married they lived in the Bronx. When they got divorced it was decided that my mother, my sister and I would move a few miles north, into my grandparents’ house in Yonkers. My mom was twenty-one years old and broke. Her parents’ house was small, so my sister, my mother and I shared a bedroom. It was a converted attic with a pitched roof and a crawlspace behind one of the walls. Just big enough for three beds and three dressers. The one decorative touch was an almost-life-size poster of Robert Redford playing the Sundance Kid. Our mother hung the poster directly over the headboard of her bed. We lived in that house with our grandparents from when I was one year old until I was six.
The address was 15 Verona Avenue. Verona Avenue was a long and steep hill. The bottom of the hill intersected Central Park Avenue, which was a major six-lane roadway that ran through all of Yonkers. During a hard rainstorm the water would come down that hill and overflow the gutters. That’s when my sister and I put plastic bags over our sneakers and splashed around in what all the adults were cursing the city about.
After dinner, before we would go to bed, I’d get up on my grandfather’s lap. Everyone knew what that meant. My grandfather would yell playfully but really loud, “Get the hell outta here! Now I gotta scratch his back?”
I’d play like he really wasn’t going to. “Ah, Gramps, come ooooooon.”
Then he’d slap me on the back and shake his head at me as if to say, Look at the prince here, sit me on his lap and scratch. We had a pretty smooth routine.
My grandfather was the best back-scratcher I ever knew. The guy was a butcher. He worked with his hands. He understood the force of cleaving and the subtlety of carving. He had thick heavy fingernails, which he kept very well. They were perfect for our routine. He had his clipper and nail buffer (not a file, a two-sided nail buffer), which he kept on his nightstand right next to the whetstone he used to sharpen his butcher’s knives. He took as good care of his nails as he did all of his tools.
There was also a paved walkway that ran from the front of the house all the way to the back, eventually connecting to the back patio. Hugging this walkway was a fence that separated my grandparents’ house from their neighbors’. This walkway was a long enough strip for me to get some pretty good speed on my Big Wheel and hit some nice spins. If ever I rode to the front of the house my mother would yell, “Stay away from the street!” then mumble to herself, “That Big Wheel scares the shit out of me.”
The house at 15 Verona Avenue was where I would fall asleep during most weekdays. House Number One.
If I wasn’t there on a weeknight, it was because I went with my sister to sleep at House Number Two—Aunt Marie and Uncle Ernie’s place. They had two daughters, our cousins, Dina and Vicky. They were not our blood relations. They were self-declared family, friends from the Bronx who were so close they needed to be deemed Aunt, Uncle and Cousin. My mother and my Aunt Marie had known each other since grade school. They got married about the same time, had kids about the same time and moved not only to the same neighborhood in the Bronx, but to the same block. We lived at 2224 Grace Avenue; they lived at 2216 Grace Avenue. Some nights, if we were playing at the other family’s house and we happened to fall asleep on their couch, our parents would just leave us there until morning. We got breakfast no matter where we woke up. I guess they were better than family. When we moved to Yonkers, my mother would drive us down to the Bronx and Aunt Marie and Uncle Ernie would take us in for the night. This happened about once a week. Our grandparents’ house didn’t lack love, but nonetheless my sister and I often gravitated back to Grace Avenue. Maybe we were leaning toward a type of normalcy or honoring a need we felt for some kind of completion. They had a house with a mother, a father and two kids. We couldn’t get enough of it.
House Number Three was actually an apartment. It belonged to my father. And then there was his girlfriend’s apartment. My father saw my sister and me on weekends. That was the custody agreement. Saturday nights we either slept at his apartment in Port Chester (another suburb about twenty minutes from Yonkers) or we would go to his girlfriend’s place, where my sister and I would crash on a pull-out couch. House Number Four.
I HAD TROUBLE sleeping at that age regardless of where I slept. I never wanted to go to bed for fear that I would miss something. I remember lying in bed hearing adults talking or a newspaper turning or the television and I thought, I gotta get out there. What could they possibly be doing? There is definitely something goin’ on.
The other thing that would keep me awake was the sound of my parents’ voices. The ones that my mind recorded from when they were still married. Not conversations. Fights. And not the words they used to fight with but the sounds they produced while they were fighting. Theirs was not an amicable breakup. There’s a thing that happens to a person’s voice at the peak of rage. Vocal cords no longer become a free channel to express emotion. Vibrations become impeded and grate against the inside of one’s throat. This is what I knew to be the sound of my parents’ relationship ending. When that recorded noise would keep me awake, I would try to replace it with the sound of my Big Wheel. A plastic tire rolling over cement. This worked for me sometimes.
Even after I fell asleep, I didn’t easily stay asleep. I would often wake up in the night, usually from nightmares. And sometimes figments of my dreams would float around the room. This was terrifying, and the only way I knew how to snap myself completely out of the dream state was to run. I would run into the bathroom, down the stairs or out into the hall. Once I woke up and started running from something and crashed right into my mother’s bedpost. Nose first. My mother sat me up on the bathroom sink with a wad of toilet paper on my nose to stop the bleeding. “What the hell were you doin’?”
“Umm … I couldn’t sleep.”
“So you figured you’d run into a couple of walls? Knock yourself out?”
She made me laugh. This, she was good at.
Of the four different places I slept, there was only one constant: my sister Catherine always slept right beside me. She was either in the same bed as me or in the bed right next to mine for the first six years of my life.
There was a moment in the mornings, after my sister and I woke up and before we opened our eyes, when we weren’t sure which one of the four houses we’d woken up in. (If you’ve ever fallen asleep in your own bed with your head where your feet usually are, woken up and were so confused as to why your window was now behind you, then you get the picture.) So what my sister and I would do was keep our eyes closed and try to guess. We would try to listen for someone’s voice or try to smell where we were. There was always one place out of the four where we secretly wished to be, but it was never the same place every time. It depended on our mood. And sometimes, when we really, really wanted to be in one place and woke up someplace else, it was a drag. Oh, damn, I’m here? I wanted to be there.
IN 1975, WHEN I was four and Catherine was six, our mother, at age twenty-five, had a job at a department store. She worked weekends and some weeknights. That way her days could be spent with her children. The couple of weeknights she had to work were tough for us. I remember us crying a lot because we didn’t want our mom to leave. Our grandparents were great people, but we were already one parent short.
Not only was our mother young, she was also pretty. On weekends she would go to the beauty parlor with her friends. She always wanted to be attractive for herself, but since the divorce, and for the first time in her adult life, she also had the intention of being attractive for other guys. She started dating a few years after she and my dad split.
She brought a man to 15 Verona Avenue whose name was Raymond Canalli. He was a well-dressed guy who drove a new Cadillac Coupe de Ville and apparently was in the contracting business. Ray had pudgy fingers with three big rings. Which gave his hands a look of wealth and therefore security. I liked them. I liked them when they were holding my grandmother’s silverware at the dinner table and I liked them when he patted me on the head. One night, from our bedroom window, my sister and I watched my mother walk Ray to his car. Ray had one hand on our mother’s back. I liked that, too.
Our mother never stayed over at Ray’s place, nor did he ever stay at our grandparents’ house. Even dating was a bit tricky.
Catherine and I used to tie one end of a jump rope to the partition fence. While one of us turned the free end, the other one would jump through. One night, while my mother was out with Ray, Catherine was at the fence turning the jump rope and I was sitting at the iron table on the back patio with my grandfather. He was drinking a beer and I asked him if I could have some. He had a little more than half a beer left and gave it to me. Catherine said, “Joey, come jump with me.” It was a beautiful summer night; I was drinking beer with my grandfather and had my elbows on the table; I was feeling very grown up. Playing jump rope with my sister would’ve interfered with how cool I was. So I just sort of shrugged one shoulder at her, said, “Maybe later,” and finished the warm can of Miller High Life. It didn’t agree with me. Later on that night, I wound up in the bathroom throwing up, with my grandfather sitting on the edge of the bathtub watching me. With my head in the bowl, I heard my mother come home from her date and my grandmother yelling from the kitchen, “Your father gave him a beer, now he’s throwing up in there!”
My mother came into the bathroom and, having assessed the situation before she even put a foot in the door, slapped my grandfather on the back of his head, slapped me on the back of my head, and walked out shouting, “I’m gone for four hours and my son winds up knee-deep in bile?”
My grandfather laughed at that. My mother screamed some more from the kitchen. “It’s funny? It’s so goddamn funny that I’m twenty-five and I can’t go out for one night without coming back to this? It’s funny, right?”
My grandfather stopped laughing. I was wishing that I had jumped rope that night and my mother was probably thinking she shouldn’t go out to dinner for a while.
AFTER ABOUT SIX months into the relationship with our mom, Ray started showing up with presents for everyone. A couple toys for us kids, an expensive piece of jewelry for our mother. Then, one Wednesday night, in the middle of August 1975, Ray Canalli brought over a little something for the house. Like two television sets. One was a twenty-one-inch color TV for the living room and the other was a portable black and white number that we could watch outside on the back patio. A big color TV? For my sister and me? It sent our heads spinning. But the portable one? Now, that was something special. Plenty of people had regular TVs, but having one you could watch from your back patio? That was something to be contested. And that was exactly what Catherine and I felt on our grandparents’ patio, with our bowl of popcorn, watching our New York Yankees play on our brand-new portable television set—we were something to be contested.
That night, I woke up and, standing before me in our room, a witch was sharpening her cats’ claws on a whetstone. It made sounds that should’ve come off a chalkboard or out of a blacksmith shop. Two hateful and unyielding forces grinding against each other that sent my four-year-old ass running. When I got halfway down the stairs, I heard some kind of clanging noises and voices ahead of me. I stopped, trapped between two scary places. I looked back up the stairs. The entrance to our room was foggy and dark. The witch wasn’t following me, but I still didn’t know what those noises from downstairs were, so I wasn’t going anywhere. I dropped to a stair and held my blanket up to my mouth. I froze. Then the clanging in the distance began to sound familiar—ceramic cups hitting against saucers, maybe. I recognized the voices as my mother’s and Ray’s, coming from the kitchen. As my mind cleared, I realized they were just talking and sipping coffee. It was nothing.
“Ray, what are you doing?”
“Drinking coffee with you. What are you doing?”
“Trying to raise my kids right.”
“And you are. Look how happy they were tonight.”
“They were happy because of the TVs, Ray.”
“Yeah, and if a little TV can make them that happy, do you have any idea what a house of their own and swimming pool could do for them?”
Did he just say … swimming pool? Now I was awake. I poked my head around the corner.
“I’m not worried about what those things could do to them.”
“Are we gonna start with that now?”
“Yeah, we’re gonna start with that now. I don’t see you for ten days. I don’t get to ask where you were or what you were doing. Then you show up at my parents’ house on a Wednesday night with a dozen roses, a black eye and two TVs that don’t have a box or a price tag between them.”
“Why you wanna price tag? You wanna take ’em back to the store?”
“What store would that be, Ray?”
He laughed.
“You’re a shady guy, Ray.”
“That’s why you like me. Admit it.”
“I’m not gonna like you so hard the day they start shoving your meals through a slot.”
“Tough girl here.”
“That’s right.”
“No one is gonna be shovin’ my meals through a slot.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know that.” He punctuated that by knocking his rings on the table.
“Then I don’t know that.”
“I’m tellin’ you.”
“But Ray, you don’t know. You don’t, you don’t and you don’t.”
“I know how I feel about you. That’s what I know. Do you know how I feel about you?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know how you feel about me?”
“Yeah.” She was looking down at the table.
“Do you?”
By her chin, he brought her face up to meet his. Looking right in his eyes, she said, “Yes.”
“So, then?”
My mother stared at her boyfriend longingly, then a smile broke out on her lips. Ray smiled with her. She started shaking her head.
Ray said, “So whaddaya wanna do?”
“What, are you gonna walk me down the aisle wearing concrete boots?”
There was a pause. Ray grabbed her hand and leaned in closer. “Whaddaya wanna do?”
“I wanna drink my coffee.”
Carefully, I walked back up to our bedroom and stood at the side of Catherine’s bed.
“Rin, wake up.”
She was used to this. “What?”
“Ray wants to buy us a swimming pool.”
“Who said?”
“He did. I just heard him say it to Mommy.”
“Where would we put a pool?”
“In the backyard?”
“Is it small?”
“I don’t know. But you know what? You know what I think? I think it’s gonna be one like they have at Sprain Brook Park, only smaller.”
Up until then Catherine could’ve had this conversation in her sleep. But now she cleared the covers off her head and propped herself up on her elbows.
“A concrete pool?”
“Yeah, a concrete pool.”
“He said that?”
“Yes. He said a concrete pool.”
“No way.”
“Yes way! A CONCRETE POOL!” I started punching her mattress. “A BUILT-IN, CONCRETE POOL!”
“Shhh! Stop that. What else did they say?”
“I don’t know, but that would be the best thing ever.” The excitement was too much for me. I jumped on my bed and started beating my face into the pillow. “That would be the best.”
I pulled the covers up to my chin and held them tight. My eyes were darting all over the room and my heart was all over my chest. I looked over my mother’s bed and I struggled in the dark to make out Robert Redford’s face and hat.
THE NEXT DAY, my mother and Catherine were in front of the bathroom mirror. My mother had just washed Catherine’s hair and was now combing it out. I was pushing a Matchbox car along the rim of the bathtub watching them. Catherine said, “Mom, are you going to marry Ray?”
My mother said, “I don’t know, sweetie.” She was being very careful about how to answer questions on this subject and continued, “He’s a really nice man, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, he is.”
“What makes you ask?”
“Well, if you did marry him, would we get another house?”
“We probably would. But like I said, I don’t know if Mommy will marry Ray.”
“If we got another house, would I have my own room?”
“I wish you could.” Her carefulness slipped away for a moment.
“And would Joey have his own room?”
Whoa. Hold on a second. This was the first I ever heard about having to sleep alone. A horrifying idea that my mother seemed to like.
“Um, yeah. I guess you could both have your own room.” She drifted into a fantasy about it, then caught herself. “But listen to me, Catherine, that’s not what’s important. What’s important is that we all stay together. Me and you and Joey. Whatever happens, the three of us have to stay together.”
That night, my sister and I were jumping rope by the back patio light. Inside, we could hear our mother turning the pages of a magazine. I spoke to my sister in a whisper.
“Rin?”
“What?”
“Do you think Mommy and Ray will get married?”
She kept turning the rope even though I’d stopped jumping. “I don’t know. Do you want them to?”
“Umm …” Now that she asked, I wasn’t sure. I needed her opinion. “Do you?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t know anymore.” She was sounding very old for her age.
We heard a car pull up to the front of the house and the kitchen chair our mother was on slid on the linoleum floor as she stood up. Catherine and I went inside. My mother spoke through the screen door. “Ray, it’s kinda late.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry. I saw the light on.”
I scrambled to my mother’s legs and said hi to him. He said, “Hey, buddy Joe. Look what I got for you.” He pulled out a miniature car. “Joey, this is a 1954 Porsche. James Dean used to drive a car like this. You know who James Dean was?”
“No.”
“He was the coolest movie star there was.”
My mother said, “Come in for a minute,” and opened the door. I grabbed the car as if it were my first meal in a week.
“What do you say, Joey?”
“Thank you, Ray.”
I started to drive the car all over the living room as Ray produced a can of bubbles for Catherine. Mom said, “Joey, don’t wake up your grandparents.”
“How’d you like that movie the other night?”
“You drove over here just to ask me how I liked the movie we saw last week?”
“Yeah. That, and I thought maybe you could do me a favor.”
“What?”
“What night did we see that movie?”
Our mother was getting a little annoyed. “Um, Wednesday. What’s the—”
“Are you sure it wasn’t Tuesday?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talkin’ about the movie we saw last Tuesday.”
“You’re not being cute, Ray. What’s the favor?”
“I was thinking—here’s the favor part—if someone was to ask you what night we saw the movie, do you think you could tell them—”
“Someone? Who is someone?”
“Joey, didn’t me and your mother go see the movies last Tuesday night?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s a good answer, Joe. If you tell ’em nothin’, they ain’t got nothin’ on you.”
My mother cut him right off. “Joey, take your car and go upstairs. I’ll be right there to put you to bed. Catherine, go with him.”
I said, “Why?”
“Upstairs.” There was the tone we didn’t argue with. Catherine and I got halfway up the stairs when we heard our mom hiss at Ray. “Outside.”
The screen door shut. Catherine and I could still hear them.
“This is not fuckin’ funny, Ray. Who the hell is gonna ask me what? And why?”
“Look, look. Sorry I ever said anything about it. I didn’t think it would be such a big deal.”
“A big deal? You come in here, try to turn my four-year-old son into an accessory, and now—”
“I did not.”
“You asked my son to lie for you, and now all of a sudden I’ve got ‘someone’ who might ask me ‘something’ about where you were last week. Where are they gonna ask me this? Are they gonna show up at my job? Are they gonna come here? To my parents’ house? Where my children live, to ask me?”
“It’s probably nothin’.”
“It’s already somethin’ and I don’t want it. And another thing, these kids don’t need another guy to come and go.”
“That’s not me!”
“Oh, no?”
“No.”
“Then tell me the truth, Ray. Tell me the God’s honest truth, even if this thing is nothin’, and it’s probably not—”
“It is nothing.”
“Even so, even if that’s so, there’ll still be somethin’ else, won’t there? Won’t there, Ray? You’ll have to leave the country or go to jail—”
“I won’t.”
“You don’t know that. And what will happen to us? Tell me the truth right now. What will happen to us? Will anyone be able to protect us?”
“Whaddaya want me to say? That I’m sure about how the rest of my life is gonna work out? Nobody can say that. Nobody really knows what’ll happen to them. And forgive me for makin’ this example, but didn’t you think you were gonna be married to that guy forever?”
“Go on.”
“Maybe we don’t know nothin’ for sure about what’s gonna happen to us. All I can tell you is that I know how I feel and I know what I wanna do. Don’t you see what I can give you?”
“Raymond, look at me and tell me that if you made a mistake it wouldn’t come down on all of us. Tell me that right now.”
He took a long time to answer. “I can’t.”
“Then neither can I. I can’t do it.”
There was silence. Then the soles of Ray’s shoes moved against the slate stairs and my mother said, “Raymond, don’t.”
A little more silence.
“I love them so much, Ray. I love them so fucking much I can’t stand it sometimes.”
“I know the feeling.”
Last thing Catherine and I heard before we ran up the stairs was Ray’s car door slam.
THE NEXT DAY, Catherine and I were in our room with our mom, packing up clothes to bring to our father’s for the weekend. I just blurted it out: “Mom, are you and Ray gonna get married?”
Catherine looked at me as if I were going to get in trouble for asking that. Our mother sat on my bed and said, “Me and Ray are not getting married.” We were silent. We knew there was more. “Also, I don’t think Ray is gonna be comin’ over to the house anymore.”
Catherine said, “He’s not?”
“No, he’s not, Catherine.”
Then I asked the question that our mother was dreading. “Why?”
She couldn’t explain it to us. She couldn’t explain to us why Ray wasn’t coming back. She couldn’t explain to us why there had been a divorce. She couldn’t explain what brought people together, then led them apart. In that moment—sitting on a bed in her parents’ converted attic, at twenty-five years old, with her two children—she had no idea why. She grabbed my arm. “Oh, sweetie”—her eyes got still, she seemed to be looking inside herself for more words—“I didn’t want him to.” Then her head dropped and her face distorted into extreme sadness. It happened as fast as you could tilt a hologram and see a different picture. Her head landed in her hands. My sister and I had that stunned silence that kids get when they see their parents fall apart. We might as well have just watched a car crash. We stood there not even blinking, in awe of a crying mother. Then we heard the beep of a horn. She took a deep breath, wiped her nose on her forearm and said, “There’s your father. Don’t keep him waiting.” I climbed up on the bed and gave her a kiss goodbye, then Catherine did the same. Our mother picked up our bag and followed Catherine and me down the stairs. From behind the screen door she watched her children get into her ex-husband’s car and drive away.
THAT NIGHT WE slept at our father’s girlfriend’s house. I asked Catherine where she thought Ray was. She didn’t know. We were trying to figure out a few things: why we had come so close and now had nothing to show for it but two television sets, and what was going to happen now. Sometime during the conversation I started to cry. Catherine tried to get me to think of my Big Wheel, but I just cried harder. Our father heard me and came into the room. He was puzzled and looked at my sister.
“What’s the matter with your brother?”
“He can’t sleep.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.”
Then he asked me, “Joey, what’s the matter?”
“I can’t sleep.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.”
My sister chimed in, “Tell him to think of his Big Wheel.” She was trying to help him help me. She was smart.
“Your Big Wheel? What about your Big Wheel?”
I didn’t answer.
My sister said, “He likes to think about his Big Wheel. It helps him sleep.”
Realizing Catherine knew more about this than he did, our father said, “You wanna think of your Big Wheel?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, how does your Big Wheel go? What does it sound like?”
I said, “It sounds like … I don’t know.”
My father started to make car sounds. Honking horns and everything. My sister rolled her eyes. She knew this wasn’t going very well.
“Come on, Joey, how does a Big Wheel go? Does it go like this: brrruuummm. Or, vruuummm. Or like, beep-beep.”
I just stared at him. How, as a four-year-old, could I say, It sounds like the merciful palm of the Lord, soothing all my unspeakable childhood angst and misery. Can you make that sound, Dad?
“How does it go, Joey?”
“It just goes.”
I was dismissive enough about it that my father knew he had to change gears.
“Hey,” he said. The timbre in his voice changed. He pushed my sister and me closer together. “You guys know Credence Clearwater Revival?”
“No. What’s that?”
“It’s a rock and roll band and they have a song about Big Wheels.”
He had my interest. I said, “They do?”
“Yeah, they do. I’m not kiddin’ you.”
“How does it go?” I asked.
“Here. It goes like this.”
With his head hovering over mine, he started to sing, a soft ballad rendition of “Proud Mary.” He didn’t quite hit all the notes, but he knew every word. He sang about how I shouldn’t lose sleep worrying about how things might turn out. And about how there was a river somewhere with people who knew how to live. They all rode big wheels. If you went there, it didn’t matter if you were poor or sad or alone because these river people were happy to give. And there was a fiery woman there named Proud Mary. The chorus of the song played like a mantra in my head and faded me out to sleep. Big wheels keep on turnin’ … big wheels keep on turnin’ … big wheels keep on turnin’.
THAT SUNDAY AFTERNOON, Catherine and I came back to Verona Avenue with a firm agenda. “Mom,” Catherine said. “We want to sleep at Aunt Marie and Uncle Ernie’s tonight.”
“Listen, I wanted to talk to you kids about that.”
That sentence was death. There was a certain tone our mother used when she was about to spring bad news on us. As soon as we heard it, we tried to cover our ears with our shoulders.
“Catherine is going to be starting kindergarten in a few weeks …”
And there was the other tone. The everything-is-going-to-be-all-right tone that not even our mother believed. This was bad. “… and that means that she has to be in school in the morning. And Uncle Ernie has to go to work and Aunt Marie can’t drive all the way up from the Bronx and take you to school, sweetie. So you kids can’t sleep over there anymore.”
I said, “Can’t they sleep over here?”
“No, they can’t, Joey.”
This was really friggin’ bad. In three days, we lost a potential stepfather, a swimming pool and four immediate family members. Not to mention two houses—the dream home Raymond was going to give us, and the one Aunt Marie and Uncle Ernie already had given us.
That night, before dinner, I took my Big Wheel out for a ride. I spun out a few times along the side of the house, but that wasn’t helping me out of the state I was in. I rode to the front of the house and sat there on my low-rider plastic tricycle. I stared at the street. My eyes defocused on the asphalt. For a moment, my mind became empty, until a green car came down the hill of Verona Avenue and broke my stillness. I watched it the whole time it idled at the intersection. When the light changed, it took a left on Central Park Avenue and I followed it with my eyes until it was out of my sight. I looked up the hill it had come from, looked back at my grandparents’ house, stood up and carried my Big Wheel four house-lengths up the hill.
As soon as I got on the seat, I started to roll down the hill. I wasn’t ready for that. I tried to stop the front tire from turning by jamming my feet on the pedals. And I did stop it. But the decline was so steep, I started to skid down the hill anyway. This, I couldn’t stop. I looked to the bottom of the hill and saw the cars going by on the avenue. Holy shit. I started to pedal in order to stop the skid, but soon I couldn’t keep up with the speed of the wheel. I took my feet off the pedals and that’s when I understood the power of gravity. The wind got loud in my ears. I looked down. The pavement was a gray and black blur and the pedals were rotating as fast as pistons in a car engine. My eyes were tearing. From the wind, I think. And when I crossed the last driveway before the intersection I pulled that brake harder than I’d pulled anything in the past four years and sent myself into a spin of more than two complete revolutions before I stopped.
In my dizziness, I could see my mother running at me. The traffic light behind her turned red, and made her hair look like it was in flames. I thought the ride I just took was scary, but I didn’t know the true meaning of fear until I looked into her face. The only questions she had for me pertained directly to my sanity. “Are you crazy? You almost got yourself killed!” With one hand she held the Big Wheel off the ground and with the other hand hit me on my ass. The slaps came in conjunction with the words she emphasized. “HOW could you DO such a STUPID THING?” She dragged me into the backyard. “That’s it! You’re not riding this friggin’ thing ever again! You hear me? EVER!”
I sat on the walkway crying, as my mother went into the house and then returned with a rope. In pure horror, I watched her tie my Big Wheel to the fence that separated the houses. “And you’re never goin’ in the street, either. OK? Now get off the floor, clean yourself up and get in here and eat dinner!” Then she slammed the door.
My sister, who had been watching this whole scene from the patio, decided it was better to say nothing and slowly went in the house and sat at the kitchen table. I couldn’t stop crying. I looked over to my favorite toy. Not only had she tied it up, but she left it lying on its side. It looked like an injured animal about to die in captivity.
That night, we sat through the quietest dinner in our family’s history. There was no yelling about how much room the neighbors’ cars were taking up on the street or about how we needed to finish chewing before we spoke. Or about clogged gutters. There was no talk about how good the food was or if we wanted more. And there was no back-scratching afterward. When we finished, Catherine and I watched TV on the patio until our mother came outside and said, “It’s time to go to sleep.”
I lay in my bed for a long time listening to the adults coursing through the end of their night. Catherine knew I was still awake.
“I’m sorry I have to go to kindergarten,” she said.
“It’s OK.”
“I don’t wanna go.”
“You’ll have fun.”
“I don’t know.”
A LITTLE WHILE later, I woke up and saw a king flipping a gold coin in the air. He caught it and slapped it on his wrist like he was calling heads or tails. He pointed to the window. I went to it and looked down. There was Ray standing on the back patio holding a puppy. I turned back and caught the last moment of the king’s robe as he left the room and started down the stairs. My mother was asleep in her bed. I grabbed my blanket and went down the staircase. At the bottom, I turned left toward my grandparents’ room. Through their doorframe, they looked like a Dr. Seuss illustration—stick legs and two bulging stomachs under a cover. In the hall was a pair of shoes with nothing in them. In the kitchen, dinner dishes were on a drying rack, looking like they were about to move by themselves. The only background noise was the hum of the refrigerator.
I walked out the back door, onto the patio. There was no Ray, no king, no puppy. Just my Big Wheel still on its side. I went over and stood it upright. I lay down next to it, put my head on the seat and pulled my blanket over me. I was tired. I wanted to sleep. But I wanted something more. What I really wanted was an all-inclusive sleepover party. And when I shut my eyes, I saw everyone I wanted to invite. A picture came to me of my dad singing to me. My mother was giving me a bath and my grandfather was carving a turkey. My grandmother was dumping pasta in a colander. I saw my Cousin Dina on a swing and Vicky was trying to tie her shoe. Aunt Marie and Uncle Ernie were at their dinner table and Ray was driving in his Cadillac. Catherine was sleeping right beside me. Also, there was a swimming pool.
I don’t know how long I had been asleep. My body jumped when I woke up. I didn’t open my eyes. I could tell it was still dark. An occasional car drove down Central Park Avenue. It was summertime and it was quiet. The patio smelled of dampness. The pictures of my family were still appearing in me. I felt the plastic seat of my Big Wheel under my head. I kept my eyes closed, but knew exactly where I was.
NOT BECAUSE I’M THIRSTY (#ulink_c01046fc-3eec-59a5-94fa-c724232c6dfa)
The theory is this: The way in which we tried to get the attention of the first person we ever had a crush on is the way we continue to do it for the rest of our lives. However creative, desperate, blunt or devious our young tactics were, we don’t give them up.
My tactic? Pretended I was a superhero. Pretended I had enough superpowers to rescue people from the ordinary world, that I came from a place better than earth, where superhuman things are a way of life. A faraway place, where magical powers are realized and saviors are born. Who wouldn’t fall in love with someone from that world?
So, that’s what I tried to convince the first girl I had a crush on—that I was different than the rest. That I had powers no one she knew would ever have.
When I was twenty-six I told my girlfriend about this theory—that as adults we still try to win lovers with our childhood tactics—and what my tactics were. “Yeah,” she said, “that is what you do, isn’t it?”
But I don’t want to talk about that. I want to talk about the year I was in the second grade. The year there were regular kickball games up the block and a crazy guy going around New York killing people. I want to talk about the first girl who let me be a superhero.
EVERY NIGHT IN front of the Gallaghers’ house, a kickball game would start up. A group of neighborhood kids gathered there after dinner and, in place of doing homework, played ball. The kickball season began in early spring and ended when we started having to run the bases with our hands in our pockets. My sister Catherine and I walked the five doors down to the Gallaghers’ and played until dusk, when our mother would call us home.
Mr. and Mrs. Gallagher didn’t run the kind of house in which the neighborhood kids were invited inside all the time. We didn’t even know what the inside of their house looked like—never got closer than the curb. Mr. Gallagher would only pop his head out the front door every so often to tell us to keep it down because his wife wasn’t feeling well and she was trying to sleep. I don’t ever remember actually seeing Mrs. Gallagher. But the manhole cover in front of their driveway was the best natural home plate on the block.
Rory Gallagher had long brown hair. Of the five Gallagher kids, she was second youngest. She stood with hands on her waist and her bony hip kicked out to one side. She also had a habit—which she didn’t pick up from her older brothers—of spitting. With a low growl she would collect the saliva in her throat, then hock it onto the street, two feet from where you were standing. It got so we didn’t mind. The only time Rory ever caught grief for this was when she spit on the street during the kickball games. If someone fielded a ball that had rolled over one of Rory’s saliva patches, they wouldn’t try to get the runner out; they would run after her and try to wipe the ball on her.
I once got my nerve up enough to ask her why she spit all the time. She claimed she only spit after she ate chicken cutlets for dinner, because she hated the aftertaste.
It was Rory’s attention I was trying to get.
BATMAN WAS A superhero who was also human. When he was a little kid, Batman’s parents were murdered. To avenge their murder and fight crime of all kinds, Batman developed all the strength and skill of his mind and body beyond traditional limits. He didn’t get an overdose of gamma radiation or get bit by a spider in a lab experiment, nor could he breathe underwater, turn invisible or assume different miraculous forms. Yeah, he could scale walls and kick bad-guy ass like the rest of the superheroes, but ultimately, he was just an ordinary man making the best of what he had, fighting for his cause.
Every so often during the kickball games I would have to run back home when I heard the Batphone ring. A call from the police commissioner saying there was a problem the cops couldn’t handle without me. I’d run back to the game and announce that I had to get to an undisclosed location immediately to fight crime. I’d apologize to Rory for having to leave, but demonstrate a superhero’s generosity by leaving my own kickball behind so the game could continue without me. In that case my sister would bring the ball home and I wouldn’t catch hell from Mom for losing it. And it wasn’t easy to part with my ball. I was six. It was my ball.
There were times when I was able to handle the crime situation over the phone. In which case I would walk back up the street, assure everyone that everything was going to be all right, and I’d finish out the game.
When it was time to go home, our mother belted out our names from the front stoop like an ocean liner’s horn wailing during a launch. And if you missed the boat, you were in trouble. If you missed it during that particular kickball season, which started March of 1977, you were in an extraordinary amount of trouble.
YOUNG GIRLS WITH shoulder-length brown hair. That’s who we were told he went after.
“Under no circumstances do you kids go out when it’s dark out. Do you hear me?”
“How about if the ice cream man comes?”
“No. There’s ice cream in the refrigerator.”
The first murder happened in July of the previous year. Initially it was just another homicide, a story that took up a tiny space in the newspaper. But March 8, 1977, marked the fifth attack. By then he had gone after nine people. Then it drew a lot of attention. Sketches of him were on TV, in the paper, posted in Laundromats and on telephone poles everywhere. He looked as plain as anyone’s father. Except he scared the shit out of us.
“Mom, does he only go after people in the city?”
“They don’t know. He goes after people in the Bronx, where we used to live, and that’s only ten minutes away from where we live now. I want you to listen to me. If you see a yellow or a cream-colored car with a man in it, I want you to run away from it. You run home and you tell me. Do you understand?”
They were shot in parked cars, on their front porches or walking home from school. The cops knew it was the same guy because they were able to confirm all the bullets came from the same kind of gun—a .44-caliber revolver. That’s how he got his first name, which all the kids in my neighborhood called him: the .44-Caliber Killer.
“They said he hates women. And you know how the cops know he’s gonna do it again?”
“How?”
“Because his gun holds five bullets and he only shoots four of them. He keeps one for the next time.”
“That’s not true.”
“That’s what my dad said.”
“No, he keeps one bullet in his gun in case someone tries to run after him and catch him, then he can shoot them, too.”
He started to leave notes for the cops, poems about pouring lead on girls’ heads until they were dead, cats mating and birds singing. He also left drawings with circles and arrows and crosses that looked like the insignia of demonic worship. He called himself “the monster” and signed the notes with his second name: Son of Sam.
My sister once walked around the house with yellow guck in her hair and a cellophane bag over it for about an hour. Then my mother leaned her backward over the kitchen sink and washed the guck out. When my sister lifted her head up, her brown hair was now blond.
My mother was very excited. “Oh, look how pretty. Come look at yourself.”
I followed them into the bathroom. Mom sat Catherine up on the sink in front of the mirror for a second opinion.
“Catherine, it’s so pretty. You look like a movie star.”
Catherine touched her hair the way a kid fumbles with a new toy, not sure how it works.
“Do you like it, sweetie?”
My sister smiled. “Yeah. I like it a lot.”
WHEN I ASKED my mother how Mrs. Gallagher died, she told me she was sick with cancer. I was in the second grade; Rory was in the fifth. It happened in April, only a month after the fifth Son of Sam attack.
After the funeral, family, friends and people from the neighborhood went over to the Gallaghers’ house. It was the only time I ever saw it from the inside. For us kids, having to sit quietly in their strange house with a group of adults, in our nice clothes, with no game going on outside was the most disorienting part of the whole day. What I really wanted to do was poke around in their kitchen and bathroom and definitely get a look at Rory’s room.
I think I was the only one who noticed Rory walk up the stairs. I followed her. All the doors that lined the long hallway were closed; the daylight couldn’t get in. Rory opened the last door on the right and went in. I knew I was in a place I probably shouldn’t have been, but curiosity coupled with my crush kept me going. The power to turn invisible would have come in handy. I peeked in after her. The room had a huge canopy bed and two layers of curtains on the windows. Against the wall was a vanity covered with makeup cases and bottles of perfume like my mother had in her room. Also, there were bottles just like the ones my stepfather kept his asthma medicine in.
Rory opened a dresser drawer and was kneeling in front of it, her hands kneading through the clothes. She looked confused. She searched through the drawer as if what she wanted was there last time she checked. She took a green sweater out and held it up by the sleeves, but still wasn’t satisfied with what she found. Maybe Rory believed that she couldn’t have been brought to a scary place such as this earth only to be left unattended, and was convinced that folded up in that sweater she would find a perfect explanation for all this. She examined the whole thing, then reached inside and carefully read the label.
I forgot I was trying to be unnoticed and said, “What’s it say?”
My voice or my presence didn’t startle her. She seemed to know I was there the whole time. She turned her head to me; the sweater was draped over her lap.
“It says you can’t wash it.”
BETWEEN THE FIVE children in mourning and parents who were afraid to let their children out of the house, our kickball games really slowed down. A few of us would still gather in front of the Gallaghers’ house but felt we didn’t have the right to the playing field unless one of the Gallagher kids joined us. When they didn’t come out, we just stood around, bounced the ball around for a while, then reluctantly went back home way before the sun went down. And when one of them did come out to start the game, it was never Rory. She stopped playing altogether, and without her around there wasn’t much crime for me to fight.
From the street I would look up, trying to figure out which window was hers. I had visions of flying into their house, swooping down, grabbing Rory off her bed and taking her to a safe distance above all the lunacy. If I really was a superhero I could’ve gotten Rory out of the house, caught the Son of Sam and somehow saved Mrs. Gallagher’s life. I didn’t even know what a .44-caliber revolver or a cancer cell looked like, but they were the same—two invisible monsters that snuck up on people and killed them. Surely Batman must have had some kind of weapon that could beat both of them. But, pretend as I did, I couldn’t stop either one of them.
RORY HAD A kid sister named Kerri who was in my grade. To me, the most interesting thing about Kerri was that she had a sister named Rory. Kerri only waited a week to come back to school after her mother died and right off the bat there was an incident. I walked by her and accidentally bumped into her desk. Her crayon slipped out of the lines and she lost it.
“Look what you did! You ruined my picture! I’m sick of this! First my brothers and now you! I’m sick of it! Do you hear me? I’m sick of it!”
It was like I had accidentally knocked a knife off a table and didn’t catch it for fear of getting cut. I jumped out of the way and let it fall. I had a feeling it wasn’t about her picture, but I didn’t know what else to do. Mrs. Johnson said, “OK, Kerri that’s enough. Why don’t you sit down now.”
She didn’t even wipe her nose or her eyes until a drop landed on her picture.
Outbursts weren’t Kerri’s only form of grieving. A few times she just got really quiet and said she wasn’t feeling well. She’d go to the school nurse and her father got called at work to come pick her up. Mrs. Johnson explained to us that she thought Kerri wasn’t sick, but rather she was upset about her mom. That I understood.
The thing that didn’t make sense was the water fountain.
The class was silently staring into workbooks, trying to solve three-digit subtraction problems, when I went to get a drink. Bent over with my mouth near the faucet, I felt someone come up behind me. I turned around; it was Kerri. She was standing uncomfortably close but wasn’t looking at me. She had her eyes on the fountain. I wiped my mouth and stepped around her cautiously, not sure if she was done throwing tantrums.
Two days later, same thing again. Got up right behind me, stood close and still didn’t look at me.
I couldn’t see why the girl who, weeks before, chewed me out in front of everyone now needed to stand so close and put her mouth to the same faucet right after mine.
The third time I wasn’t even thirsty. I only wanted to see if it would happen again. By the time I had my face over the faucet, Kerri was behind me. Mrs. Johnson announced—so everyone could hear—how she’d noticed that every time Joseph got up for a drink, Kerri did also. When all the heads and giggles pointed in Kerri’s direction, Mrs. Johnson asked if Kerri was really thirsty. Kerri answered her question by sitting down.
In the second grade, we didn’t expect to have to deal with adults who couldn’t see it was uncool to publicly embarrass a kid who lost her mother a month ago. Nor did we expect in the summer ahead of us there would be a citywide blackout, that Elvis Presley would die so young, that a bomb threat would evacuate thirty-five thousand people from the World Trade Center or that the Son of Sam would turn out to be a twenty-four-year-old guy named David who lived in our neighborhood a few blocks from where we played. How could we have conceptualized evil as a quiet guy who worked at the post office, rented the studio apartment down the street and lived among us? Fifteen years earlier he attended our elementary school, was taught by the same teachers, sat at our desks and drank out of the same water fountain. As grade school children, we had no idea that we were months away from those kinds of thoughts.
WE THOUGHT IT was him.
Kerri and I tried to play as if the water fountain incidents never happened. Catherine and I pushed our curfew. The sun was setting. We stopped the game for the car coming down the street. When it got close, we saw it was cream-colored, then we saw there was one guy in it.
Some kids took off and ran through front yards, between houses. Some screamed. I couldn’t run. I fell backward, put my forearms in front of my face, not wanting to see or be seen. When I peeked out from behind my arms, he was halfway down the block; my sister was through our front door. It was time to run home, but not without my ball. I ran to Kerri, who was on the sidewalk, her whole body wrapped around the kickball.
I said, “Give me the ball,” and tried to pry it from her. She rolled over and wouldn’t let me grab it.
“Come on!” I said.
She wasn’t giving it up. On top of her, I tried to get my hands between her stomach and the ball. She was fighting me. I rolled her on her back—she was laughing. Not a good time for a game of keep-away, I thought. I tried to punch the ball loose but never meant to knock the wind out of her. She held her ribs and cried. I said I was sorry, but she didn’t even look back as she ran to her house. Someone had been yelling for her to get the hell inside. The screen door slammed behind her, then Rory appeared behind it. Her hair was gone, cut straggly, close to her head; it looked like she’d done it herself. She yelled at me, “Get out of here! Go home!”
My mother grabbed me by the back of my shirt and didn’t let go until we were in our house. She yelled at me for not running home like my sister and wanted to know if I knew how to listen.
Nowhere. From now on, after dinner, we were to go nowhere.
I went into my room, closed the door and slammed the ball against my dresser; my lamp fell. I thought about the smile on Kerri’s face while she wrestled me for the ball. Kerri Gallagher likes me? I grabbed the windowpane, tried to look up the block and only saw the streetlights come on. Kerri Gallagher likes me.
THE NEXT MORNING we ate our cereal without talking as the radio played the news in the background. When it was time to go to school, we were handed our lunch boxes.
We stepped outside. It felt as if an overnight snowfall had covered the entire neighborhood in three feet of silence.
When we pulled up to school, Catherine and I leaned over the front seat to kiss our mom goodbye. She waited until we walked in the front door to drive away.
Kerri spoke to no one. During lunch hour she was sitting on a bench next to two other girls who were making finger puppets out of lined paper. I didn’t have it in me to go over to her. Only when we were all making our way back into the school was I able to walk up next to her and ask if she was OK. She didn’t even answer me.
We all sat at our desks and were told to get our math workbooks out.
I didn’t want to do anything Mrs. Johnson said. It made no sense why she had embarrassed Kerri yesterday. It made no sense why the cops couldn’t catch the .44-Caliber Killer or why parents yell at their children when they’re trying to protect them or why we had to solve three-digit subtraction problems again.
While they all had their heads down, I went for the fountain. I drank, then turned back around. No one was standing close to me. Everyone still had their heads in their books. I went to the closet and poked through my lunch box. Mrs. Johnson asked me what I was doing. I told her I broke my pencil; I was just getting a new one. I opened my lunch box and took off the top of my thermos—the part that doubles as a cup. I went to the water fountain and filled it up. Walking toward Kerri, I was terrified that Mrs. Johnson was going to embarrass the hell out of me, too. I fought the urge to look to the front of the room to see if she was watching. Kerri was hunched over her desk, intent on her arithmetic. It happened so fast. I don’t remember walking back to my desk. Kerri never looked up to see if anyone saw it. She only slid the cup closer to her with her left hand and kept writing with the other. She kept it near her like she was going to save it for when she really needed it. I never noticed it before, but when she leaned over like that her hair was long enough to reach her desk.
THE BIGGEST, MOST SILENT THING (#ulink_067495a1-8c2e-575b-8b21-2d2ba355ee5b)
I can’t cook yet, she says. I hang out in the kitchen because I like food and because my mother always asks me to keep her company. I’m eight; I know how to cook. Maybe it’s an Italian thing. She turns the radio on to an oldies station and some guy is singing about taking his girl away into the moonlight, throwing her eyes into the sky, loving her in some deep moment of bliss forever and ever. Maybe it’s a fifties thing. She says, now I can cook, rubs her palms together and grabs me by the waist. Let me show you how we used to dance when I was a kid. You put your hands here like you’re leading, ’cause that’s how the guys did it, but really you’re gonna follow. Just follow me. You just kind of rock back and forth, that’s right. She sings along and hums when she can’t remember the words. She says, you know what I want for Christmas this year? I want a special gift. What? I ask. I want you to write a poem about me. A poem just about me. Then she says, oops, we can’t let this burn. She reaches to the stove and pushes the escarole around in the pan, her right hand still around my waist.
THE NEXT NIGHT, my mother asks me to go with her to pick up my sister from religious instruction class. I say it’s too early to go and she says she wants to drive slowly because the roads may be icy. On our way out the door we run into our neighbor Gloria, and my mother asks her if she had a nice Thanksgiving. Gloria went to her sister’s in Philadelphia and, she says, she’ll be going there for Christmas as well. My mother says, that’s nice. Three years ago, Gloria’s husband took off without notice and wrote her a letter explaining where he was and who he was with and served her with papers two weeks later. I am quiet. She says, hi, Joey. Hi, Gloria. Mom tells Gloria to stop by if she needs anything.
Mom says, give me your arm, Joey, there’s ice on these steps. They need salt on them. I told your stepfather to do it, she says, but who knows with him. She asks me if I’ll put some salt down when we get back and I say, yes. As we walk down the stairs, she sticks to my arm and tells me how sorry she feels for Gloria being alone during the holidays. I can relate to her very well, she says. Of course I can. She’s had two last names and I’ve already had three.
During the drive, she asks me if I’m excited to go to my father’s house for Christmas Eve. I say, yeah, and she wants to know what Patty, my stepmother, cooks for Christmas Eve dinner. I say, fish and things. Is it good? she wants to know. I say it is.
We pull up to the Catholic school twenty minutes early. We sit quietly in the car. My breath turns to vapor out the window. Mom tells me she’s cold and can I roll the window up a little. I leave it open a crack. She says the church looks like the one in the Bronx she and my father went to when they were still married. And that was the beginning of the history lesson. It dated back before I was born, when Mom and Dad weren’t having a good time. When, my mother tells me, my father wasn’t always nice. When he wasn’t nice to her. She tells me how he used to yell at her and hit her and how he started dating Patty while they were still married. I always figured it was that way. There had been many innuendos and opinions thrown around the house that weren’t intended to land in my ears. This is the first formal sit-down on the subject. I feel like the kid in class who’s terrified to get called on. I just take notes, ask no questions and try to be invisible.
When the history lesson is over, she brings us in to the present by talking about my last report card. It left a lot to be desired, she says. The kids start coming out of the Catholic school and Mom says we’ll talk more about it later. She starts up the car and I can see my sister Catherine walking toward us. I think maybe we can talk about the apostles on the ride home. My mother says, Joey, can you roll up that window, please, Mommy’s cold.
Later, I get the talk about the report card. My mother has trouble understanding why my sister does so well in school and I don’t. The thing is, it doesn’t occur to me to be a good student when my sister already is. That’s her calling. Why should I do that? There’s no reason for two people in one family to play the same part.
My mother tells me that no one is going to come along and just give me good grades. Or give me anything else, for that matter. She wants to know how I think the family eats around here and how I get clothes to wear. She says, what do you want to do when you get older? I tell her I want to be a baseball player. And what if that doesn’t work out? she says. Then what? What are you going to do then? I say, I don’t know. She says I have to know because life isn’t a game. I say, I don’t know, OK? I don’t know what I want. Then she explodes. Don’t say that. It just kills me that you could say that. She looks like she’s going to spit. You sound just like your father.
I GO OUTSIDE to throw salt on the front steps. I see Gloria’s TV on and I watch my breath turn to steam again. I wrote a poem once, when I was six. In the first grade I went on a school trip to the Museum of Natural History. The intention for most of the first-graders (at least all the boys) was to see how much trouble they could cause. But something in me didn’t want to. The museum didn’t feel like the kind of place where we should’ve been causing trouble. I thought, Don’t fuck around. See if you can learn something. Go somewhere and learn something. It was the first time a thought like that had ever occurred to me. So I went to the butterfly exhibit and learned how they camouflage themselves. They hold the top part of their wings—the bright, colorful side—together so only the underside of the wings shows. The underside is covered with browns and grays, which allow them to blend in with dirt and branches. They become invisible in their own surroundings. They hide their beauty for safety. This is known as crypsis. I took a Magic Marker and wrote “crypsis” on my arm and covered it with my sleeve.
Then I saw the blue whale they have on the ceiling. It was the biggest and most silent thing I’d seen. All the other big stuff I knew was so damn loud—our house, the school, my parents’ divorce, dinner. Even my mother’s new marriage was loud. My stepfather was a very low-key individual. The longest conversation I ever had with him went like this: What time’s the Yankee game on? Seven o’clock. When my mother would fight him, he would never fight back, so she would have to fight herself. She’d lock herself in the bathroom, yelling at my stepfather through the door. She’d scream about the life he had promised her and how good things were supposed to have been and how it was all bullshit. That’s how she fought him. He never screamed back. The loudest thing I ever heard my stepfather say to my mother was, “No, I’m not like your ex-husband. I don’t beat you.”
That was really loud.
So I wrote a poem about the blue whale on the ceiling at the Museum of Natural History. The poem said that the biggest thing I ever saw was also the quietest. Mom hung it on the refrigerator. Also, I took my blue Magic Marker and I drew a picture of the whale on the bottom of my kitchen chair. Then I would lie on the floor and look up at my picture, so the whale could be over my head, just like they had it at the museum. Also, no one else would see it there.
When I come back in the house, the report card discussion continues. She says, Joseph, I know you’re a smart kid. I know you can do very good in school, that’s the only reason why I get upset, OK? She throws a hug on me and my head lands in her stomach. She plays with my hair and asks me if I’ve locked the side door. I say I have. See, she says, and holds me tighter, poor Gloria, she doesn’t have a man around the house anymore. It’s scary. God forbid someone tries to break into her house at night, what’s she gonna do?
LIKE EVERY SATURDAY morning, our father comes to pick my sister and me up at our mother’s house and then we stay with him for the weekend. I sit in the back and my sister in the front. He drives a Volkswagen Bug and the gears are tight, which makes for a jerky ride every time he shifts. It’s not something that’s happened to me before. I’ve never peed my pants in my mother’s car. But I feel it rising up now as soon as I get into his car. This Saturday morning, I get a tender feeling below my stomach when we stop at the light. It gets worse when he starts to drive, then he throws it into second, the car jerks and it happens. My sister notices first and says, Daddy, Joey needs help.
My father looks at me in the rearview mirror and says, what’s the matter, Joey? You OK?
When he realizes what’s happened, he stops the car, gets a towel out from under the hood and spreads it out on the seat next to me. He says, Joey, it’s OK. You’re not hurt. It’s OK, Joey. Sit on this now and we’ll put on different clothes when we get home. That’s all. It’s OK.
When we get back to his place, my stepmother cleans me up. I wear my pajama bottoms while I wait for my jeans to dry. I walk out of the bathroom to the living room, where Dad’s sitting in an armchair.
Come here. Sit with me, Joey. Sit with your old man.
He lifts me up. My father has hands that feel solid as two pieces of teak furniture. My butt lands on one arm of the chair and my feet on the other. He goes, sit here on the big chair like a man. There we go. You feel better?
Yeah, I say.
See, no big deal. He drags his thumb across my neck. It feels as big as the barrel end of a baseball bat. What happened to your neck? he wants to know. You wrestling with someone?
No.
Then who grabbed you?
I say, someone in class. I was hoping he would drop it there.
Who? he asks.
Kerri.
Kerri? Oh, yeah? This, he is very interested in. Kerri who?
Gallagher.
Huh. An Irish girl. Is she nice?
Yeah.
He says, you like her? I smile. He pokes me in the ribs with a finger. I’m sure she’s very nice. She cute?
I think I’m not supposed to tell my dad how cute I think girls are. So I keep it shut and hope he puts this subject to sleep.
Aaaah, Joey, he says. Girls … they’re different than guys. If only women understood that, less marriages would go into retirement. Patty, she understands. I’ll tell you something, it’s like this—you like this girl Kerri, and maybe there’s another girl that you like also. Right?
Um … no.
No? No one? I shake my head. Well, someday there will be. And you’ll find yourself trying to understand why you like them both, you’ll start to feel a lot of things and you’ll get confused, but let me tell you, it’s simple. There are some things that guys need that ladies do not. And this is the whole difference between them. A guy needs the kind of thing he can keep his feelings out of. And this is the thing that your stepmother understands what many women—I don’t mention names—don’t understand, and that is why a lot of marriages go south. You know what I mean?
He continued.
Look, a guy needs the kind of thing that he can keep his feelings out of. And I don’t think women can do that, they’re too emotional. A woman can’t fall down an elevator shaft, for instance, dust herself off, then have sex with you ten seconds later. If they don’t feel it, it’s not gonna happen. Period. But guys can get into a plane wreck and lose limbs. Two hundred fifty dead bodies floating in the ocean, sharks are eating the survivors and in the life raft as the helicopters are coming, the guy will hit on the stewardess. And this is true. Some women don’t understand how we could do a thing at a time like that. If the stewardess is hot, then we can do it. It’s simple. So what, she may have lost a limb. We’d still do it. Even in the face of death. They think we’re just pigs. Let ’em do their claptrappin’. I’ll tell you the truth, son, we’re not pigs, we’re just different.
The only thing I’m sure of is that his lips are moving and sound is coming out of them. Sharks? Helicopters? Pigs with no arms? He could be conjugating Cantonese verbs into Sanskrit, for all I know.
He goes on.
And this is what Patty understands that many women do not. She doesn’t judge. And who should? Who should be able to judge a thing like that? It’s not the kind of thing … Your Grandfather used to say, “He who casts the first stone who lives in glass houses … you shouldn’t do it.” Your stepmother understands that we’re different. You understand, Joey?
What if you like only one girl? I ask. Then what?
Then that’s OK. It’s OK if you like only one girl for now. I mean, you’ll see. There will be plenty, is all I’m saying. Someday you’ll have your own place, you’ll have your own stuff …
My father gets introspective. It’s unfamiliar to me. When he comes out of it, it’s hard for him to look me in the eye. He speaks slower and deeper than he has been. Joey, he says, when you get older—sometimes I think, probably, you might think of me and you’ll say, “You know, my dad was a real jerk-off when it came to certain things, but then other things he was OK with.” I hope.
Now he tries to lighten himself up.
Don’t tell your mother this, he says, but secretly I can’t wait for you to get older so we can get dressed up and go out—you’re gonna look sharp. Always look sharp, Joey. It’s important. You see, my father, your grandpa … he used to go out alone. And I think we can do better than that.
There is a heavy pause.
We all work with what we have, he says.
Another one.
You know how to listen, Joey. It’s a good thing to know how to do.
He grabs my arm and pulls at what little muscle is there and says, Jesus, look at you. When did you get so big?
I try to figure out how to break away from those hands. It seems he wants to be friends, something I think parents aren’t supposed to be. I understand the way dogs feel when they want to walk one way and their leash is getting pulled the other.
I say, I’m hungry. Can we have lunch now?
Sure we can. He calls to the kitchen, Patty, can you fix the kids something?
She says, I got ham sandwiches.
He says to me, you like that, right?
Happy to have a destination, I say, I love ham.
He kisses me on the top of my head, lifts me off the chair and as I head for the kitchen, one of his palms catches me square on the ass.
THERE’S A RUNNING joke in my mother’s house. For years, she’s been talking about this mink coat she’s gonna buy herself. We say, “How’s the mink coat fund comin’, Ma? You save enough to buy the claws yet?” She says, “Yeah, you watch. The day I get that coat I’m gonna be laughin’ hard. You watch.” She works nights at a department store and her husband delivers bread. Where does a mink coat fit into that picture?
But this night, December 17, 1979, she calls us on our joke. We’ve just finished dinner. My sister, my mother, my stepfather and myself linger over empty dishes and I pick olives out of the salad with my fingers. Our mother says she has an announcement to make. Announcement? My sister and I make faces and validate each other’s confusion. We hardly ever have anything to talk about in this house. Who makes announcements?
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