Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (6 page)

(1970)
Weekend mornings, after or before my paper route, my mother, still in her bathrobe, drives me to the Harbor, sends me in to get her coffee while she waits in the car.
Cream-no-sugar,
I tell the woman behind the counter, the code my mother taught me, and she nods comprehension. This is the same coffee shop my mother worked in as a girl, where she met my father, though she never tells me this. As she pulls away I tear a little “v” in the lid for her. We drive past St. Mary’s—the lot filling up early, a funeral, high mass. Offhandedly she says,
That’s your grandfather’s funeral
. At first I’m confused, sickened—
Dead?
But I quickly figure out it’s not the grandfather I know, not the one I see all the time, the one on First Cliff, though I’d never considered I had another grandfather until that moment.
Of course
, my
father’s
father, he’d also be my grandfather, though I never met him. We must have walked past each other on Front Street countless times, I suddenly realized, stood in line together at the one supermarket in town. My mother must have known what he looked like, but she never pointed him out, never mentioned him at all. It was complicated enough for me to keep track of her own parents, the grandparents I knew, divorced and living in the same town. My brother and I were warned to never mention one to the other, even as we drove from breakfast at Grandma’s to lunch at Grandpa’s, never to say where we were headed or where we’d just been. And now this other grandfather pops up, dead. He must have lived in the house on Second Cliff, I reckoned, we would pass it on our way to the real grandfather, my mother’s father. I knew it was the house my father grew up in, it must have been pointed out to me at one time, but I never went inside. I’d merely glance toward it as we passed, imagine someone at a window, watching me. It was near the water but not on the water, nicer than our house on Third Cliff but not as nice as my grandfather’s house on First Cliff.

First second third. Three two one. Elevator, going down.

My father wouldn’t have been at his father’s funeral that day any more than I would have—he wouldn’t have dared the Breen boys and more jail time. I don’t know if this second unattended funeral occurs after my father’s second marriage breaks up, or even how he got married again with a warrant hanging over him. This was when computers were the size of rooms, not something to hold in your hand. Easier to get lost in a room. Maybe you could just drift north into another state, maybe the courts weren’t as aggressive as they’ve become in tracking down deadbeat fathers, with their posters on subway walls, a picture along with his name and how much he owes.

(As it turns out, my father wasn’t in hiding at all. He was living on Cape Cod, writing theater reviews for the local newspaper. Not hard to find. In the past year he named Richard Gere the best young actor on the Cape for his work in
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
at the Provincetown Playhouse.)

An hour or so later that same day I pass the church again, this time on my bicycle—the funeral just ending, a long black line of cars leaving the parking lot, headlights on, snaking their way to the graveyard. I’m riding beside my best friend, and I tell him, in the same offhand tone my mother had used,
That’s my grandfather’s funeral
, and he looks at me as if I’m insane.

By the time I’m nine I know the world is a dangerous place. I’ve heard whispers about razorblades in apples, about Charlie Manson and his family. But no one is offering any clear information. Lately I’ve been studying horror movies on tv, my favorites being
The Creature Double Feature
on Saturday afternoons. But even better is when my mother’s latest boyfriend takes my brother and me to see zombie and mayhem movies at the drive-in—
Scream and Scream Again, Bloody Mama
—the more gruesome the better.

One night, walking through the Harbor at dusk with my grandmother, where we’d gone to buy yarn for her crewelwork, we stop at the musty bookshop run by Isabel and Rose, the spinster sisters. I thumb through a new edition of
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
while my grandmother scans the murder/romances. She likes her books fat and lurid. I’ve never bought a book before, but for some reason I have to have this one. Under a streetlight outside I try to read the first page, but know instantly I’m over my head—I can decipher maybe half of it. When I get home I try again, then put it aside, knowing I’ll be able to read it in a couple years, if I apply myself in third grade. I’ll pick it up again in fifth grade and read it through in one night. That same year I’ll memorize Poe’s “The Raven,” and draw coffins and bloody curved daggers in my notebooks. I want to be a writer, a horror writer. This is before I learn that my father considers himself a poet. I’ve only met him once that I can remember, the day he appeared in my grandmother’s driveway with his second wife and my half-sister.
This is your sister
, he said,
say hi
. He looked like the Cowardly Lion, his wife looked like Cher. My half-sister was a swaddled infant, indistinguishable from her blanket.
Hi
, I said.

There’d always been books around our house—my mother and brother were voracious, compulsive readers. Henry Miller’s
Sexus
was hidden in my mother’s lingerie drawer, alongside her gun and painkillers. She bought the gun the year before to protect herself, but she never said from what. The painkillers were for her migraines, which kept her in bed some days, all day. A family story was that my brother was found reading the newspaper as a toddler, before he’d uttered a word, and to see him, all those years, with a sci-fi book hidden in his lap at the dinner table, his head bowed, it seemed possible. In my grandmother’s attic were stacks of books salvaged from her marriage, only accessible by tightroping along the joists between the pink insulation. Forbidden and dangerous, I spent hours up there, poring through these treasures, looking for answers.

In the early 1970s, when I was eleven or twelve, my fascination with horror led me to the occult. The new bookstore in town had an entire section devoted to Anton LaVey and Alistair Crowley—real live warlocks, with shaved heads and scary beards. I’d sit on the floor reading them for hours. One afternoon I looked up and realized I was alone, that the cashier had locked up, gone to lunch, forgotten me. The door opened from the inside, I looked up and down the street, looked back at the register, gleaming and stuffed with cash, decided it was a sacred place, that I wouldn’t take anything, because I wanted to be able to return, and after the supermarket I knew how hard it was to go back once you crossed a line.

Within a few months I moved on to mysteries. I preferred Sherlock Holmes to Agatha Christie, because in his world even the tiniest bit of dust was a clue. I convinced a friend that the best way to spend our summer afternoons was to write our own. We collaborated on a story about a murder set in Scotland and Egypt, the two most exotic locales we could imagine. In a couple years I moved on to Vonnegut, and I convinced another friend, Warren, to collaborate on a science fiction novel, to which we added pages daily. By the time I was sixteen and my father wrote me for the first time and I learned that he called himself a writer, I was already on my way, though perhaps part of me latched on to the chance to outdo him.

The summer I bought
Jekyll and Hyde
a distant cousin I’d never seen before or since appeared at my grandmother’s with some other vague relatives one Sunday. Corey was a little older and had no fingers on his right hand, just little knobs where they should be. Not even a thumb. I knew not to stare, offered to take this cousin for a walk. I was a good kid. We circled the house, I glanced at his hand when he wasn’t looking, thought how hard it must be—how did he work a button, hold a spoon? Why didn’t he wear a glove? I didn’t mind walking with him, we wouldn’t run into anyone I knew, not on my grandmother’s lawn. Already I knew where to position myself in relation to those less fortunate—not to stare, not to treat them any differently, not to even mention what’s right there in front of us. I’m compassionate, kind, considerate, brave, somewhat clean—a walking, talking Boy Scout oath, whatever, fine by me, just as long as I’m not confused with the freak. Each year they lined us up in the elementary school cafeteria, to be measured and weighed, and though I’m chronically skinny at least I’m always average height, thank God for that. Between my mother’s rotating cast of boyfriends, and being nominally Protestant in an Irish Catholic stronghold, and the food stamps, and the frayed clothes, I’m already teetering painfully close to not fitting in, anywhere.

As we wandered my grandmother’s yard I showed him the hose, how you could hit the upper windows with its spray, I showed him the path into the woods, and how I shimmied up the gutter pipe to stake out the roof. This might have been a mistake, because I realized too late that he’d never be able to follow me. I led him to my grandmother’s pear tree, which she bought and planted herself just a few years earlier. I had helped dig the hole, held it upright while she tamped the dirt back down. A spindly thing, slow-growing, with just one small hard pear, the first, dangling from a branch. We were told to let this pear grow, my grandmother checked it every day. I told Corey how proud she was of her lone pear, and he stared at me straight and defiant, like he was angry with me for some ungodly inscrutable reason, he stared and reached his hand out to this pear, forcing me to look right at it, my mouth dropping open a little. Then he smiled and gripped it with his palm, pulled it free. He threw it into the street, then turned and walked back into the house.

Twice in the 1970s Scituate will be written up in
Time
magazine as the second most alcohol-consuming town, city or r.f.d. zone in the United States. A sidebar, no explanation, folded into a larger article on the scourge of sniffing glue or drunk driving. The first is some seaside Steinbeck hole in California no one’s ever heard of. In Scituate every other business in the small string of stores we call the Harbor is either a bar or a package store, “package” being puritan code for “liquor.” From an early age you cannot help but wander the aisles, gaze eye-level into the amber. The mothers, though drinkers themselves, warn their children of the dangers, the risks. My mother says it’s in our family, says it will destroy my muscle tone, says she will throw me out of the house. On drives through the neighboring towns she points out the bars my grandfather can no longer enter—that one for swinging on a chandelier, that one for throwing a drink in the owner’s face. She tells the story of learning to drive one snowy night in Montana, underage, her father sloshed in the backseat with a drinking buddy, instructing her to just keep it between the rock face and the drop off. Alcohol is the river we sit on the banks of, contemplating. Sometimes we watch ourselves float past, sometimes we watch ourselves sink. My grandmother, the one divorced from this grandfather before I was born, the woman who looks after my brother and me when my mother’s at work or on a date, calls ahead to the package store for her half gallon of Turner’s Special Blend, sends me in to pick it up. An electric eye bongs as you break a light beam upon entering, I take to jumping over it to surprise the man behind the counter. Dimly lit, aisle of amber, aisle of clear, Turner’s is cavernous, a crypt. Each real bottle has its own promotional bottle—plastic, dusty, oversized—lined up on a shelf along the back wall. The iconic Jim Beam, a massive Jack Daniel’s. When my grandmother comes to dinner at our house she always carries her own jar of Turner’s Special Blend. She knows how much she needs and doesn’t want to be caught short. My brother remembers her at Christmas one year, an especially weepy time for her, when she put her hands around his neck and murmured,
My little angel, you wouldn’t be so hard to kill
. And though he knew it was only the whiskey talking, he also knew that the whiskey talked daily. In fifth grade I write a report that I spent the weekend skiing in “Vermouth” with my grandfather, that “Vermouth” was a beautiful state. My teacher did not correct this—maybe we were all skiing in a state of Vermouth.

(1971)
Travis, just back from Vietnam, is renovating the house next door. The war’s an unending muddle. My mother bakes a blueberry pie, puts it in the window to cool, invites him over for a piece. Thirty-one, divorced ten years now, she makes a good pie. Travis is twenty-one and still looks like a Marine—his USMC tattoo, his fatigues—albeit freaky, bright-eyed, his hair going wild. Not a hippie, but drifting toward hippiedom. Trigger-hippie, you might call him, as he’s armed to the teeth, having smuggled out his M-16 and various sidearms. They begin seeing each other and, as per usual, he begins renovating our house. My mother likes a man who’s good with his hands. Skipping school one day, I’m lingering around the house alone when he pulls into the driveway, lets himself in to work on a dead outlet. I hide in my closet, hear him talk to my dog as he works, and what he says sounds insane. He tells my dog that in ’Nam he ate better-looking dogs, that over there a dog would never get so fat, that all dogs knew enough to run the other way from him instead of rolling on their backs, waiting for the knife to slip in. He tells my dog about the villages he burned and the people he killed and that not all of them were soldiers. About bulldozing a tunnel and later finding out it was filled with kids. Through the cracked closet door I can see him holding my dog’s ears and crying and I don’t dare breathe. A few months later my mother stands me in the kitchen to tell me she’s going to marry him.
That’s a mistake
, I say. She nods that she knows but says she’ll marry him just the same, and she does, and they’re happy, for a while. He’s fun to have around, in a frenzied sort of way. If we want to go fishing he takes us down to the Harbor, tells us to wait on the loading dock and goes off to hot-wire someone else’s boat. We go out for the afternoon, catch a few fish, and he drops us off again. We knew the boat was stolen, even though he said it was a friend’s. We knew there’d be trouble if we were caught but we went anyway. His impunity thrills me, I mistake it for fearlessness, though years later he will admit to being afraid all the time. When he decides to put an addition on our house he takes me down to the lumberyard and I see how he pays for a couple sheets of plywood and a few two-by-fours, how he takes the slip out to the yard and backs up to a stack of plywood and has me get on the other side of it so we can load the whole pile onto his truck, until the springs sag. We jump in the cab and he slams it into drive and with the first jerk forward all the plywood slides out onto the ground. We get out and reload it, his entire body now coiled energy, waving off an offer of help from the guy who works there. That weekend we double the size of my mother’s cottage, the second and last house she’d buy, all of us and a few of his friends furiously hammering, desperate to finish quickly because Travis never bothered to get a permit. The last thing we do that Sunday night is paint the whole thing yellow, so it will blend in with the rest of the house. It will take two years to get around to shingling it, and only then when the yellow is peeling off in sheets.

In Vietnam he’d been a mine-sweeper, the guy who cleared the path, made it safe to put your foot down. Usually he was good at it, but sometimes he’d screw up, and when he did someone was blown to pieces. After being in-country for a year he signed on for another hitch, but caught some shrapnel a few months into it and was shipped home. In the States he became a color guard in Washington, standing at white-gloved attention at high-level events. But he’d landed back in the “world” with a short fuse, and when a car full of hippies honked at him at a traffic light that had turned from red to green Travis got out and pistol-whipped the driver, pulled him right through the car’s window. Half an hour later, when the police found him, he was in a fast-food joint eating a burger, having forgotten what he’d done. He got off, but then Kent State happened and they ordered him into the basement of the Pentagon, “full combat gear, the whole nine yards.” He refused. He knew he’d be sent to college campuses, and was terrified that he’d have to kill more kids. They locked him up in Bethesda for six months, shot him full of thorazine, gave him an honorable discharge, cut him loose. A few months later he was at our dinner table.

I liked to play what were called “practical jokes.” I had a spoon with a hinge, a dribble glass, a severed rubber hand. I’d leave booby traps around our house, usually a piece of thread strung across a doorway as a tripwire, one end tied to a broom or the racks from the oven, anything that would fall and make a racket. I don’t think I knew that Travis had spent his time in Vietnam checking for trip-wires—I don’t know if knowing would have stopped me. I would set the trap and maybe it would catch someone and maybe it wouldn’t. One night Travis took the racks and tucked them between my bottom sheet and the mattress. I came in later that night and crawled into bed. Why I didn’t notice the racks right off I can’t say, but hours later I awoke from dreams of torture.

Midafternoon one Saturday Travis comes home after digging sea clams with a buddy. Leaning on pitchforks knee-deep at low tide, they’d each managed to kill a case of beer before noon. He dumps the clams in the sink and tells my brother and me to circle around, he wants to show us his photo album. For the first few pages he’s a teenager, cocky beside hot rods, girls sitting on the hoods, one with her arm draped over his shoulders. The next page shows him at boot camp, Parris Island—crewcut, sudden adult. The next shows Vietnamese women dancing topless on tables, and on the next page a village is on fire. Corpses next, pages of corpses, bodies along a dirt road, a face with no eyes. As the stories of what he’d done unreel from inside him, my brother stands up and walks into his room, back to his wall of science fiction. I look at the photos, at Travis, look in his eyes as he speaks, somehow I’d learned to do that, like a tree learns to swallow barbed wire.

Years later, when I track him down, he shows me another photo, one I hadn’t seen or don’t remember—him on a dusty road outside Da Nang, a peace sign dangling from his neck. The reason he signed up for a second hitch, he tells me, was so that he could go into villages ahead of his unit, ostensibly to check for landmines and booby traps, but once there he’d warn the villagers to run, because if they didn’t he knew there was a good chance they’d be killed by his advancing soldiers. Then he’d set off a couple rounds of C-4, radio in that it was still hot, smoke a joint, watch the villagers flee.

The night he showed us his photo album, after the house went quiet, I crept into the kitchen for a glass of water, the sink still full of sea clams, forgotten. Under the fluorescent hum they’d opened their shells and were waving their feet, each as thick and long as my forearm. A box of snakes, some draped onto the countertop, some trying to pull themselves out.