KooKooLand (38 page)

We turned on the TV and watched men walk on the moon and felt like we were flying high right up there with them.

The next day, Virginia had changed her mind about everything.

“I'm going back on that pill,” she said. “I don't give a flying you-know-what what Wayne says.”

“Thank God,” I said. “I thought I'd lost you to the pod people.”

“I wish we could go to Woodstock,” she said.

“Let's do it. Let's run away,” I squealed.

“Sure, dummkopf, we'd get about as far as you and Tina did,” she said.

Virginia went back to Wayne. She went back on the pill, but not fast enough. She found out she had a bun in the oven right before she found out Wayne had his orders for Vietnam.

The day she told me, she cried like a baby.

I wasn't sure if she was crying because Wayne was going to Vietnam or because she had a bun in the oven. I don't think she was sure either.

V
irginia moved back to Manchester when Wayne went off to Vietnam. She rented an apartment with money YaYa gave her. The apartment was on the top floor of a dirty-white triple-decker. The floors sloped so bad that if you dropped a jawbreaker it would roll from one side of the room to the other. There was a porch that had been a big selling point before Virginia rented the place, but once she signed on the dotted line the landlord said he wouldn't use it if he were her and claimed no liability if she used it anyway and it collapsed.

But Virginia loved the place. It was the first time she'd ever lived on her own. She scrubbed every inch of the apartment and decorated it with stuff she found at a North End thrift shop. She made curtains out of somebody's old tablecloth, and tablecloths out of old curtains, and everything looked cool, like in a magazine. Once in a while, when she was puking her guts out, she remembered that a kid was growing inside her and that her private paradise wouldn't be private very long. But usually she just tried to forget about that part.

She got a black cat from an animal shelter even though black cats were supposed to be bad luck. She told Jimmy the people at the shelter had screwed up and said the cat was a boy when it was really a girl. She told Jimmy the cat's name was Cyn, short for Cynthia, but it was really Sin.

Jimmy hated Sin and Sin hated him.

Several times a week Jimmy would stop by the crooked apartment to check on Virginia and make sure she was dressing like a Greek crone, not like a hippie or a whore. Sin would hiss at him and Jimmy threatened to shoot her right between the eyes. Virginia said the cat was a sweetheart with everyone else, so it must be something about him. She said maybe he reminded Sin of someone who had once tortured her.

But it turned out Sin was temperamental because she was in the family way just like Virginia. She soon gave birth to a whole litter of little black girl kittens. Jimmy vowed to drown them all in the Merrimack River, but I didn't think he was serious. After all, he was crazy about cats. On the other hand, he
was just plain crazy, so who could say? Fortunately, Virginia found homes for all the girl kittens so we never had to find out if Jimmy meant business.

Around this time, Susan also got herself a cat. She named him Hank 'cause he was a little wild and a little crazy. She returned to medical school with the cat, determined to become a doctor once and for all. But she still felt lousy and the doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong.

Finally, Susan figured it out herself.

“She's only half a doctor, but she knows more than those half-wits,” Jimmy told me. He said Susan had something called lupus. I asked what it was and he said it was a disease where the body went berserk and attacked itself like in a horror movie.

“So, she's dying?” I blurted out, miserable.

“Nah, she's not kicking the bucket. They got stuff they can give her. But there ain't no cure.”

“Could I catch it? Like if she hugs me?” I asked, feeling my chest constricting.

“Don't be a numbskull. It's not a goddamn virus. You get it or you don't and they don't know why. It's the luck of the draw.”

Susan had gotten Norris Luck. Maybe she had caught it
from me
?

After that, she had to leave medical school again. She returned to New Hampshire to try to get better. I didn't see how being around mean ole Hank could make anybody feel better, but I knew better than to say that.

Jimmy started to think he was sick again, too. He got the Yankee doctor to check
him
out for lupus. Then, MS, Lou Gehrig's disease, and his old standby, the Big C.

Jimmy's headshrinker kept insisting Jimmy's aches and pains were all in his head, so Jimmy finally said “frick you” and quit seeing her. On the drive back home after his last visit, he was elated. He said the headshrinker was probably a dyke anyway, since she wasn't married, and a dyke couldn't tell him anything about being a man. He told me
I
could be his headshrinker from then on 'cause the only thing headshrinkers did was listen and nod while they were picking your goddamn pocket and I could do the listening and nodding just fine and save him some dough in the process.

“Hell, you know me a helluva lot better than that goddamn dyke. And you're a whole lot sharper too. I been wasting my time with that numbskull. So, whaddaya say, Doc?”

He laughed and threw his arm around me.

I can do it, I suddenly thought. I can make him better.
I'm
the only one who can. It's all up to me.

For the next few weeks, Jimmy acted like I was his best buddy. He told me his troubles, which I mostly knew already—everyone was out to get him and life sucked—and I told him he was smarter than Einstein, tougher than Dempsey, and the best duck hunter on the planet. I said he could even be a great trumpet player if he picked it up again.

I buttered him up like a piece of burnt toast.

“You're the best goddamn medicine,” he said. “Better than goddamn Librium.”

He said he only needed someone like me to believe in him to be the man he always wanted to be.

And I believed him.

Until the man he really was showed up again.

We were at the movies. It was a picture Jimmy had been dying to see, called
Take the Money and Run
. Jimmy had been crazy about Woody Allen for years. He was always corralling me to watch Woody do his comedy act on every talk show he was on.

“Pay attention,” he said, half-joking, as the lights went down. “You might learn somethin'.”

The movie grabbed me right away. Woody played a guy who wanted to be a musician but stank at it and became a petty criminal instead. Jimmy and I both cracked up through the whole thing.

After it was over, I felt giddy. I threw my arms around Jimmy. It felt great that I had a father who took me to such a cool movie.

In the lobby, Jimmy puffed on a cancer stick and checked out the movie's poster.

“He's a goddamn genius, like Chaplin,” he said.

“The part where he wrote ‘gub' instead of gun on his holdup note, that was a riot,” I added, still laughing about it.

“Woody Allen's a four-eyed Jew who couldn't fire a gun if his life depended on it,” Jimmy said, so loud other people turned around and glared.

I stopped laughing.

“But mark my word, that little kike's goin' far.”

I turned red and wished that I could go far—far away—or better yet, he could.

V
irginia turned twenty-one and soon after gave birth to a boy. When she went into labor, Wayne was still in Vietnam and Shirley and YaYa had to work and everybody said I was too young to be there, so Virginia was all by herself at the hospital. But the kid popped out like nothing after only three hours. The doctor said he was surprised since Virginia was so petite. He thought he'd have trouble yanking it out. He said she was one lucky lady.

“Figures,” sulked Virginia in her hospital bed. “It's the only thing in my stupid life that's ever come easy.”

She named the kid Dustin, after Dustin Hoffman, because she had a crush on Hoffman like I did and because she'd never heard of anybody else with that name. She figured at least her kid would be special his whole life in some way.

They sent her home from the hospital with a baby blanket and a box of diapers.

“Well, you did it. You had a brat, you screwed up your life,” said Jimmy when he saw his first grandchild. “Congratulations, dummkopf. At least it wasn't a girl.”

He said Dustin was a stupid name and insisted on calling him Dunce-tin.

Virginia cried for weeks after having that baby.

Between crying jags she wrote Wayne ten-page letters telling him how happy she was and how coochie-coo cute his baby was because every day someone or something reminded her that Wayne could be blown up at any second and her last letter might be the last good thing he ever saw.

Like Virginia, Dustin cried all the time. After a few weeks of Dustin's blubbering, Virgina got so sick of it she gave his bassinet a shove. She didn't mean to do it so hard, she really didn't. The bassinet went sailing down that slanted floor like a bullet. I caught it right before it smashed into the wall. Virginia and I were horrified, but Dustin just started giggling. Virginia learned he had a little daredevil streak just like her and fell in love with him right then and there and vowed to try to be a good mother even though she wasn't sure what that meant or how to do it.

Before long Dustin was sleeping through the night, with Sin curled up next to him licking him like he was one of her long-lost kittens.

Virginia continued to write to Wayne all the time and noticed a big change in his letters. He no longer knew what he was doing over there or what he was fighting for. He'd sailed on a river of blood and now he wanted to jump ship. He finally decided war, all war, was wrong and asked to be reclassified as a conscientious objector. Wayne's change of heart didn't go over too well with his superiors. They didn't believe that people could change their hearts or their minds. They made him stick it out.

But he was a lucky so-and-so. He managed to finish his tour of duty and come back home.

Virginia acted like she was happy he was home, but really, she wasn't. She'd gotten used to living with a boy and liked it better than living with a man. The difference being she could tell a boy what to do instead of having men always telling her what to do.

Before long, Wayne had grown out his balding, stringy hair and sprouted a bushy mustache and was smoking pot all the time. He wasn't sure what he wanted to do with his life. He took up painting—not house painting, picture painting. The pictures didn't look so hot to me, but what did I know? I'd never been to a museum or done any artwork outside of a coloring book.

At first, Virginia dug the new Wayne. At least they were sort of on the same wavelength. At least he didn't want to kill people. But after a while it became clear he was on a frequency that none of us could tune into. He talked a mile a minute but always ended up at a dead end.

Against my better judgment I asked Wayne to teach me how to drive. Jimmy had refused to teach me—he said getting into a car with a female behind the wheel was a suicide mission. But Wayne said he'd been on plenty of suicide missions and it didn't faze him. He took me out in Virginia's clunker, a Pontiac she'd bought from a guy who knew a guy who knew Jimmy. The car broke down all the time and once caught on fire, but for the moment it was running OK. On my first lesson, I was scared but did pretty well. Wayne barked orders—left, right, left, right—and I followed them. At one point he asked what my biggest fear about driving was. Going on the highway, dummkopf, I answered. Before I knew it, he had directed me right onto the highway. Once I saw what he had done I screamed and begged him to take the wheel. He just grinned at me. I eased off the gas until we were only going ten miles an hour. Other drivers started blowing their horns at me.

“Faster! Step on it!” Wayne barked.

I didn't follow his order.

He stomped his foot down on mine on the accelerator. The car shot forward like a bullet.

“We're going to die!” I shrieked.

“So what?” Wayne replied. “We're all going to die someday.”

“You're crazy!” I screeched.

“That's a relative term,” he said, keeping my foot pinned to the gas.

I white-knuckled the steering wheel and did my best to swerve around any vehicle that came into my path. Somehow I managed to avoid hitting anything and barreled off at the next exit. Wayne finally lifted his foot off mine and I pulled over, shaking like Shirley's wringer washer with an unbalanced load.

“See? You faced your worst fear and lived,” he said.

I punched him on the arm and made him drive the rest of the way home.

When we got back to the crooked apartment I told Virginia what had happened and we agreed Wayne had more than a few screws loose.

She tried to get him to see a headshrinker even though it hadn't done much for Jimmy, but he said there was nothing wrong with him. He said he was saner than when he first went into the Marine Corps.

In a sense, he was right.

How I managed not to crash that afternoon, I'll never know. Maybe those summers driving bumper cars at Old Orchard Beach had paid off. Or maybe God was looking out for me even though I had given up on being a good Catholic a long time ago. Or maybe, like Jimmy said, I was just a lucky so-and-so.

All I know is I passed my driving test with flying colors. And even Jimmy, when he was finally brave enough to get in a car with me, had to admit I was pretty good behind the wheel.

“You drive like a goddamn man,” he said, beaming, as I took a corner fast enough to make the wheels squeal.

It was the biggest compliment he'd ever given me.

A
s I made my way through high school, I managed to keep up the sham that I was living with YaYa and Papou. When I finally started to make friends, I told them my grandparents were sickly and that's why nobody could come over to my place. My friends' parents took pity on me and invited me to their North End homes for family dinners where they used a separate fork to eat salad and no one sucked the eyes out of the fish.