Brooklyn Noir (13 page)

When he could talk again, Dad asked, “You think the guy who wrote
Hi Scummy
was pissed off at somebody who drives under that overpass-thing every day? To make sure the other guy really gets the message?”

“How would Scummy know the guy’s handwriting? And would Scummy know to look up there for a message?”

“Hmm. Smart one. Good point. Also, how would Scummy know that
he
was the exact
Scummy
that the
Hi
was meant for? ’Cause for sure there’s more than one person who takes this route and fits that description.” He paused, changed tone, adding a grim voice to his voice. “That’s if we used words like that, Beth. And we don’t. Those words aren’t allowed, so we don’t use them.”

“Oh,” I said, earnestly. “What about words like
Dummy-fuck-o?”

“Beth! Brat! Enough! You know the rules about words.”

“Rules schmules!” I waved away his admonition. Laughter was lots better. “What about this? Maybe the person who wrote… that thing… that
Hi…
is mad at the drivers.”

“All of ’em? In every single car?”

“Well, not mad, exactly, he just thinks they’re, you know, that they’re scummy!”

“What did you just say?”

“Scummy!” I hooted. I hollered. I spat a few spit-bubbles out my mouth, not on purpose, but a couple hit him, which was nice. “I can say that! You can’t stop me! I’m Scummy! You’re Scummy! Everybody’s so Scummy, Scummy, Scummy!”

He tried to paste his
I-am-stern-and-strict
face onto his face. “Cut out the crap, Beth! What did I just—?” Mid-scold, he gulped, gagged, as he tried to swallow back laughter, quacking glottally at the precise moment he was trying to play the part of an
I-know-what’s-best-for-you
type Dad—“What did I just tell you?”

“You told me not to say
scummy
But you also said
crap
and before that you said
scummy
a million-zillion times, so you can’t be mad. Nuh-uh. The rule is phony baloney. Like you.” He gunned the engine again, and we went quiet, listen-ing to the Olds’ hum, meandering on small streets toward wherever he and I were headed, that night, that summer.

Then, I
Eureka!-
ed. Out my mouth, before I knew it was coming, I shouted, “But maybe it might be a nice thing! Think about it. Maybe the person who wrote
Hi
to Scummy isn’t a mean Dummy-fuck-o. Like it’s the opposite. Maybe he and Scummy are bestest best friends, and Scummy doesn’t mind. It’s only a bad name if it hurts Scummy’s feelings, but Scummy likes him, so he likes it, he likes his name, so it’s nice to be Scummy.”

Dad shook his head hopelessly. “I’ve been around a lot longer than you, kiddo, and I’ve heard all sortsa nicknames, but I never heard anyone call a good buddy Scummy. Nice try. Close, but no cigar.”

My hands fluttered up dismissively, then flopped in my lap as I kept myself from sighing, “Some people just don’t ever get it.” I twisted, faced him head-on. “Dad, will ya use the noodle God gave you? This guy went to a helluva lotta trouble. He walked on those highways, with the cars and trucks zooming by. Look! There’s no road shoulder. He must of been scared.”

“You got that right. He was shit-scared.”

“But we don’t use words like that, do we?” I inquired, all innocent. He reddened. I let him sweat that one out a minute, then continued, “This guy climbed up the walls, and he had to tiptoe around those No Pedestrian Traffic signs just to hang upside down, like bats do, off that overpass. It’s high up there, especially to be upside down, and the bricks are crumbling. That’s scary.”

“Well taken,” he said. “Go on. Argue your point.” His gaze burned a dimple into the side of my face.

“I’m tellin’ you. All that
tsuris?
Why bother with it? To say hi to some scummy stranger-type of person who wasn’t his friend? It doesn’t make sense. Not unless he likes Scummy.”

He added, in his dropped-register,
this-is-cautionary-so-pay-attention
tone, “But Beth-Bug, a lotta times people like things that aren’t so good for them. Especially small people like you.”

“You call me
Boll Weevil
all the time. A lot of people think boll weevils are icky and gross, and they would say you’re being a big Dummy-fuck-o by calling me by a bug-name, but we know you mean it nice. Same with Scummy. Personally, I think Scummy and his best friend have these private names. Scummy likes being Scummy.”

Leaning in toward the windshield, my father peered at the sky through the streaky, dirty glass. Refusing to look at me, he smiled. Then he tried to quash the smile by contorting his face, cranking his jaw around to set his lips in their
man-who-means-business-no-kidding-for-real
arrangement. Then his whole face relaxed, forfeited its struggle against its own mouth, and he smiled like he was the man who’d invented the light bulb. He touched my cheek. “And you, Boll Weevil. In my book, I’d have to say that
you
are one terrific allrightnik.”

You

We stayed stopped at the Stop sign for longer than a Stop sign mandated legally. He was staring ahead of himself, into the middle distance. Then his face changed, dropped, and he stared at his lap. His smile faded, his eyed looked darker and more heavily lidded than they had moments before, and the car’s temperature seemed to fall fifteen degrees. He was thinking, I could tell, and it wasn’t about anything good. “What now?” I asked. “Am I in trouble?”

After an empty pause, he spoke absently. “Nah. It’s just… I just still think it’s not a very nice thing to call a friend.”

“Uh-duh-uh,” I muttered. “Guess what? Just because something’s not very nice doesn’t make it wrong.”

Some thirty years later, I was still alone and without plans to forgive myself for something I’d said in a conversation we’d had when I was six. After work and school, first grade—we both “knocked off,” as he put it, at 3 p.m.—I hung around him in the living room while he read the paper. Then he made dinner, such as it was. That unforgivable evening, he cooked up a vat of “Jewish Spaghetti.” I never knew what inherently Jewish characteristic was discernable in these pale, overcooked noodles—People Like Us called them
noodles
, not
pasta
—that he boiled and smeared with a sugary, gummy, aggressively orange sauce—as orange as laboratory signs indicating the presence of radioactive biohazards—spicelessly dotted with sticky, translucent tiles of onion.

Jewish Spaghetti was disgusting. Jewish Spaghetti was nearly inedible. I loved Jewish Spaghetti. I loved how one small bowl of Jewish Spaghetti became seventeen oil drums of Jewish Spaghetti in my gut. A gift that kept on giving.

As we chewed and chewed and chewed, I ruminated on my teacher’s introductory lesson—hurled at us first thing that morning, right after she took attendance—about the dizzying, fearsome procedures involved in telling time. The devices: sun dials, hourglasses, wristwatches, atomic clocks, mechanical clocks. The standards: Greenwich mean, Tidal, Atomic, Geologic, Standard, Coordinated universal, Ephemeris. The calendars: solar, lunar, Babylonian, Egyptian, Hebrew, Muslim, Julian, Gregorian, Worldsday, Buddhist, Persian, Coptic, Chinese. The Maya Great Circle.

Not even to mention the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research headquartered in Tucson, Arizona.

Topping it horrifically off, the Metric System and New Math were hurtling respectively across the Atlantic and through deep space toward Public School 276. I wasn’t smart or good enough to keep up with it or figure it out. Dad, who was unquestionably not when I got him, couldn’t help me. I could only try to tattoo facts on my memory, to remember without understanding.

Suspiciously, I asked him, “Are you old?”

“I’m a little old, but not too old. Like you’re a little young, but not too young.”

A suction grabbed at whatever lived between my ribs and started draining it out. “If you’re a little old now, then soon you’ll be a lot old. When you’re a lot old, you die, right? Isn’t that what happens?”

“Yeah, that’s how it goes. I won’t be a lot old too soon. That’s much later. I’m not planning on dying any time soon.” I coughed. With my fork and fingers, I shaped and reshaped orange spaghetti spirals, not piles of the pasta, but plain, wormy lines of it, flat on my plate. Then I worked on spirals within spirals, still two-dimensional. I gulped. I gulped hard.

“Lookit. C’mon now,” he cooed. From the spirals on my plate, I made and unmade a maze. He slapped his big hands on the table. “Look at me, Beth.” I couldn’t look at him. I concentrated. I complicated my noodle-maze. It looked maze-like. It was crap. Its twirls nauseated me. If I, who’d created this, couldn’t find a way—not one workable entry or exit point—to get myself into and out of the maze, then no one else could lead. Just going in circles and more circles. Round and round forever. Like clock-hands. Like fears. “I said, look at me. Listen good. We got Jewish Spaghetti to eat. Food to mess with. Bridges to climb. We got a lotta living to do before I do something stupid like that.” I ditched my fork, busied my orange fingers making braids, then helices.

“But Daddy, when you die will you be died forever?”
Aniline blue. Dyed forever.

“That’s what dying is, kiddo. But I’m not planning on doing that. Not for many years. Not for the foreseeable future.”
Later. A little old. Soon. A little young. A lot old. Too soon. Not too young. Much later. Any time soon. Forever. Many years
How many years made
many years?
And
foreseeable future?
A foreseeable future wasn’t possible. Unforeseeable was the future’s crux. Unforeseeability made the future
the future.

All this shape-shifting, fake-out doubletalk. Time couldn’t be told. There was no reason even to bother trying to tell time. Time did not listen.

“Aw, Baby Beth, don’t cry. You’re killing me. Seeing you miserable? That’s what’ll be the death of me.” I wiped my face with the quicker-picker-upper I’d used as a napkin, did the usual little-kid shit, whimpered, sniffled.

I really didn’t want him ever to die. And I didn’t mean to kill him.

“Not for nothing, don’t’cha think it’s kind of hard to be so serious and sad when you got stripes of tomato sauce going down your
schnozz?”
I slid my index finger down my already sizable nose, and it came back greasily orange. Still inconsolable, I reached my index finger across the table, and striped his nose with my sauce. He stuck three of his fingers into my maze and war-painted my cheeks, which my face’s controlled ache told me were
dimpin
—the gerund form of a verb he invented just for me, its infinitive form,
to dimp
, referring to the sudden appearances of my dimples while eating or sup-pressing a smile. I poked a finger into my plate, stirred until my finger was slick with sauce, traced creepy-smiley-clown lipstick around his mouth’s perimeter. He stood, opened the fridge, handed me a can of orange soda. “This’ll make you feel better.” I drank some, cheered up a little, then a lot. Then all better.

I was so saturated with relief and unruly joy that my lips and tongue could almost taste the blood connecting me and my father. I was a balloon-skin about to burst into bits with the force of detonating affection and hope, hope, hope. I barreled toward him, bounded up into his arms, beaming, bobbing my cocksure head, shouting with unadulterated confidence: “You’re right! You’re not going to die any time soon. I just know it!” I spilled out of his arms. I wanted him to see how happy I was, now that I’d figured it out. “Nope!” I jigged a hippy-hoppy succession of leap and skips that he’d called, since I’d been a baby, Beth’s Dance of Sudden Elation. “I was being crazy, all wrong, before. Now for sure I know that you’re going to live at least another two weeks!”

Guilty as charged.

The good news, when we buried him, was that for the first time in twenty-four years, as his dead body dropped lower and lower, groundward, down, down, down, he had no fear at all. Burying him was the opposite of going up to work. Supine in his coffin, the cheapest my mother’s boyfriend’s money could buy, he descended, disappearing toward the world’s bottom, groundward, instead of climbing to its top, rising up and above, skyward. Sharper, closer to the surface of feeling even than grief, were the bones of my rib cage, truly a cage now, except the heart it was constructed to incarcerate, mine, had turned to nothing. The cage’s new inmate was Zero, the nothing that most definitely was something, an absence more present than my hands in front of me.

After the burial I packed my knapsack with my few things and moved into my mother’s house. I wasn’t going anywhere. Even while primed in a permanent state of cat-like readiness, I was solidly
placed.
I was keeping vigil. I was staying; I was staying vigilant. I assumed the position, like a long-distance runner poised to bolt at the sound of a gunshot that wouldn’t fire a second too soon. Fast and forward. No promises would be made, fulfilled or not, at 617 Flatlands Avenue, where I’d live with the mother who’d let me go. Where I’d live with the simplest fact—
no one was ever going to help me ever
—and where I’d live with the impenetrable tangle, the un-unravellable knowledge-knot that my mother had never wanted me around, but there I was, living with her as she resigned herself to living with me in a house attached on both sides and jam-packed with no-Dad and no-cry and plastic-covered furniture, exponentially accelerating my development into the little waste of sperm that I was.

And am.