Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls (2 page)

It was winter and I was in New York, killing time before a movie. Week-old snow lay moldering along the curbs, and I was just noticing all the trash in it when I heard a man yell, “Citizen’s arrest!” I guess I knew that such a thing existed, but you never hear of anyone taking advantage of it, so I assumed it was a joke—a candid-camera type of thing, or maybe a student making a movie.

“Citizen’s arrest!” the man repeated. He was standing in front of a grocery store called Fairway, on Broadway and 74th. Neat, pewter-colored hair covered the back and sides of his head, but the top of it was bald and raw-looking from the cold. The man had a puffy down jacket on, and as I moved closer, I saw that he was touching the shoulder of a teenage boy, not gripping him so much as tagging him, claiming him.

“Citizen’s arrest. Citizen’s arrest!” I wondered what crime had been committed, and, judging from the people around me, many of whom had stopped or at least slowed down, I wasn’t alone. Something silver had dropped to the ground, and just as I saw that it was a Magic Marker, a couple ran out of the store—the boy’s parents, I assumed, for they raced right to his side. “Citizen’s arrest,” the man repeated. “He was graffitiing the mailbox!”

I expected the parents to say, “He was
what?
” But rather than scolding their guilty-looking son, they turned on the guy who had caught him. “Who gave you the right to touch our child?”

“But the mailbox,” the man explained, “I saw him—”

“I don’t care what he was doing,” the woman said. “You have no right touching my son.” She made it sound like a sexual thing, like he’d had his hand up the boy’s ass rather than resting, weightless, on his shoulder. “Just who the hell do you think you are?” She turned to her husband. “Douglas, call the police.”

“I’m two steps ahead of you,” he said.

Watching him dial, I thought,
Really? This is your reaction?
If I were thirteen and I’d been caught graffitiing a mailbox, my parents would have thanked the man and shaken his hand. “We’ll take it from here,” they’d have assured him. Then, in full view of the crowd, they would have beaten me—not a couple of light stage slaps but the real thing, with loosened teeth and muffled pleas for mercy. And that would have been just the start of it. Not only would my allowance have been cut off, but if I ever wanted freedom again, I’d have had to pay for it: every hour outside my room costing me a dollar, which is like, I don’t know, seventeen dollars in today’s currency.

“But how do you expect me to work if I can’t go outside?” I’d have wept.

“You should have thought about that before you defaced that mailbox,” my father would have told me, this while my mother held my arms behind my back and he hit me with a golf club. In the balls.

Never would they have blindly defended me or even asked for my side of the story, as that would have put me on the same level as the adult. If a strange man accused you of doing something illegal, you did it. Or you might as well have done it. Or you were at least thinking about doing it. There was no negotiating, no “parenting” the way there is now. All these young mothers chauffeuring their volcanic three-year-olds through the grocery store. The child’s name always sounds vaguely presidential, and he or she tends to act accordingly. “Mommy hears what you’re saying about treats,” the woman will say, “but right now she needs you to let go of her hair and put the chocolate-covered Life Savers back where they came from.”

“No!” screams McKinley or Madison, Kennedy or Lincoln or beet-faced baby Reagan. Looking on, I always want to intervene. “Listen,” I’d like to say, “I’m not a parent myself, but I think the best solution at this point is to slap that child across the face. It won’t stop its crying, but at least now it’ll be doing it for a good reason.”

I don’t know how these couples do it, spend hours each night tucking their kids in, reading them books about misguided kittens or seals who wear uniforms, and then
re
reading them if the child so orders. In my house, our parents put us to bed with two simple words: “Shut up.” That was always the last thing we heard before our lights were turned off. Our artwork did not hang on the refrigerator or anywhere near it, because our parents recognized it for what it was: crap. They did not live in a child’s house, we lived in theirs.

Neither were we allowed to choose what we ate. I have a friend whose seven-year-old will only consider something if it’s white. Had I tried that, my parents would have said, “You’re on,” and served me a bowl of paste, followed by joint compound, and, maybe if I was good, some semen. They weren’t considered strict by any means. They weren’t abusive. The rules were just different back then, especially in regard to corporal punishment. Not only could you hit your own children, but you could also hit other people’s. I was in the fifth grade when someone on our street called my mother a bitch. “I wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary,” she said to my father. “Just driving Lisa home from her doctor’s appointment, and out of nowhere this boy yelled it out.” Four months pregnant with my brother, Paul, she lit a cigarette and poured herself some wine from the fifty-gallon jug beside the toaster.

“What boy?” my father asked. He had just returned from work and was standing in the kitchen, drinking a glass of gin with some ice in it. Before him on the counter were crackers and a rectangle of cream cheese smothered in golden sauce. “Oh no, you don’t,” he said as I reached for the knife. “This is for me, goddamnit.”

“But can’t I just—”

“You want an after-work snack, get a job,” he said, forgetting, I guess, that I was eleven.

“So who’s this kid who called your mother a bitch?” he asked. “Give me his name so I can go talk to him.”

I said I didn’t know, and he looked at me with disappointment, the way you might at anyone who was woefully unconnected. “Well, can’t you at least guess?”

“Beats me.” No one on our street had reason to hate my mother. It was likely someone just road testing his new curse word—a little late too, as our end of the block had discovered it months earlier. “It means ‘female dog,’” I’d explained to my sisters, “but it also means ‘a woman who’s crabby and won’t let you be yourself.’”

The day that someone called my mother a bitch was not remarkable. My father returned from work, like always. He had his drink and his fancy snack. When my mother announced dinner, he took off his jacket, stepped out of his trousers, and took his seat alongside the rest of us. From the tabletop up, he was all business casual—the ironed shirt, the loosened tie—but from there on down it was just briefs and bare legs. “So I understand from your mother that someone called her a not very nice word this afternoon,” he said, turning to my older sister. “You were in the car with her. Any idea who it was?”

Lisa speculated that it was Tommy Reimer, not because she got a clear look at him but because it happened near his house.

“Tommy Reimer, huh?” My father looked across the table to my mother. “Isn’t that one of Arthur’s boys?”

“Oh, Lou, let it go,” my mother said.

“What do you mean, let it go? A kid who uses language like that has got a problem, and I’m going to see that it gets fixed.”

“Maybe I misunderstood him,” my mother said. “Or maybe he thought I was someone else. That’s it, most likely.”

“I’ll be sure to clear that up when I talk to him,” my father said, his cue that the subject was closed and that now we would move on to something else. When her children were grown and gone from the house, my mother would eat late, often by herself in front of the TV, hours after she had served our father, but back then, like most every other family on our street, we had dinner at six. On this particular night the sun was still out. It was early September, and though I don’t remember what we were eating, I can clearly recall cringing at the sound of the doorbell.

Oh God,
I thought, as did everyone else at the table. For when it was dinnertime and someone came calling, it was always our father who insisted on answering the door and on telling whoever it was, very firmly, that it was not a good idea to interrupt people while they were eating. It could be a woman from down the street or maybe one of our friends. It might be a Girl Scout selling cookies or a strange man with a petition, but when that door was flung open, everyone on the other side of it wore the same expression, a startled, quizzical look that translated, in that gentler, more polite time, to “Where are your pants, sir?”

Lisa had left school early that day. A classmate was supposed to drop off a homework assignment, and worried that it might be her, she jumped up and ran into the other room, calling, “That’s okay, I’ve got it.”

My father raised himself and then sat back down. “You tell whoever it is that we’re eating our supper, damn it.” He scowled at my mother. “Who the hell drops by at this hour?”

We all strained to hear who our visitor was, and when Lisa said, “Oh, hi, Tommy,” our father leapt up and ran to the door. By the time we got there, the boy, who was one grade behind me, was pinned against the redwood siding of our carport. My father had him by the neck, raised off the ground, and his little legs were flailing.

“Dad,” we called. “Dad, stop. That’s the wrong boy. You’re looking for Tommy Reimer, but this is Tommy Williams!”

“It’s who?” In his work shirt and underpants, he looked powerful but also cartoonish, like a bear dressed up for a job interview.

“Lou, for God’s sake, put that boy down,” our mother said.

My father lowered Tommy to the ground, where he doubled over and gasped for breath. He was a chubby kid, and his face, which was freckled and normally pale, was now the color of a valentine.

“Hey, son,” my father said, so sweet suddenly, so transparent. He put his hand on Tommy’s shoulder. “You all right? Want some ice cream? How about some ice cream?”

“That’s okay,” Tommy croaked. “I think I’ll just go home.”

“Actually, no,” my father said, and he guided the boy through our open door. “We’d like you to stay for a while. Come on inside and join us.” He turned to me and lowered his voice. “Find some ice cream, damn it.”

If there’d been anything decent in the house, anything approaching
real
ice cream, it would have been eaten long ago. I knew this, so I bypassed the freezer in the kitchen and the secondary freezer in the toolshed and went to the neglected, tundralike one in the basement. Behind the chickens bought years earlier on sale, and the roasts encased like chestnuts in blood-tinted frost, I found a tub of ice milk, vanilla-flavored, and the color of pus. It had been frozen for so long that even I, a child, was made to feel old by the price tag. “Thirty-five cents! You can’t get naught for that nowadays.”

That this was my thought while my friend sat, red-throated as a bullfinch, at our dining room table speaks volumes about that era. Even if Tommy had escaped captivity and run back home, it’s not likely his parents would have called the police, much less sued and sent us to the poorhouse. No angry words would be exchanged the next time his father passed mine in the street, and why would there be? Their son hadn’t died, just gone without oxygen for a minute. And might that not make him stronger?

On opening the ice milk I saw that it had thawed before its last freezing. Beneath an inch of what looked like snow, the texture was wrong, too slick-looking and so hard it bent the spoon and came out in slender, translucent chips. It took everything I had to chisel out a bowlful of them, but in time I did. Then I carried it in to Tommy and set it before him on the table. It was strange, him faced with dessert while the rest of us were still working on dinner. For a minute he just sat there, staring down and blinking. My father chose to interpret this as an expression of wonder. “That’s right,” he said. “It’s all for you. I’m sure we can even find some more if you want it.”

Tommy looked at us, seven sets of eyes, watching, and he reached for his spoon.

“There you go,” my father said. “Attaboy. Eat up.”

Of the many expressions we Americans tend to overuse, I think the most irritating is “Blind people are human too.” They are, I guess, but saying so makes you sound preachy and involved, like all your best friends are blind—which they’re probably not. I, personally, don’t know any blind people, though the guy I used to buy my newspapers from had pretty bad cataracts. His left eye had a patch over it, and the right one reminded me of the sky in a werewolf movie, this pale blue moon obscured by drifting clouds. Still, though, he could see well enough to spot a Canadian quarter. “Oh no you don’t,” he said to me the last time I bought something. Then he actually grabbed my hand!

I pulled it back. “Well, excuusssse me.” Then I said, “I think it’s a-boat time I take my business elsewhere.” Normally I say “about,” but I wanted him to think I was Canadian, which could have been true if I was born a couple hundred miles to the north. The son of a bitch half-blind person. I’m through defending the likes of him.

Number two on my irritating expression list is “I’ll never forget the time…” People say this to me, and I think,
Yawn. Am I ever in for a boring story.
Take this Fourth of July party, the one thrown every year at the apartment complex I live at. I went last summer, and it was me, this guy Teddy from two doors down, and a woman from the ground floor all standing around the pool. The fireworks had ended, and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, Teddy looks down into the water. “I’ll never forget the time my five-year-old daughter drowned,” he told us, all mournful, as if it happened that week and not an entire year ago.

The woman from the ground floor put her hand on his shoulder. “Oh my God,” she said. “That is the saddest thing I ever heard in my life.”

I, meanwhile, was standing there thinking that you should never say never, especially in regard to what you’ll remember. People get older, and you’d be surprised by what they forget. Like, for example, a few weeks back I called my mother to wish her a happy birthday, her eightieth. “I bet you wish that Dad was still alive,” I said. “That way the two of you could celebrate together.”

“But he
is
still alive,” she told me.

“He is?”

“Well, of course,” she said. “Who do you think answered the phone?”

Here I am, just turned fifty, and I forgot that my father isn’t dead yet! In my defense, though, he’s pretty close to it. Healthy enough for the moment, but he doesn’t do any of the stuff he used to do, like give me money or teach me to ride bikes.

There are things you forget naturally—computer passwords, your father’s continuing relationship with life—and then there are things you can’t forget but wish you could. Once, for instance, when I was in the third grade, I saw our dog Pepper chew the head off a baby rabbit. I mean right off too, the way I’d pop the lid from an aspirin bottle. That, I can recall just like it was yesterday, while my first child being born—total blank. I know I was in the delivery room. I even remember what I was listening to on my Walkman, but as for the actual kid coming out—nothing. I can’t even tell you if it was a boy or a girl, but that’s natural for a first marriage.

The Walkman, though, I’ll never forget its weight and the way it fit into my jacket pocket. Now, of course, it would be like carrying around a brick, but at the time it was hard to imagine anything more modern. When the first iPod came out, I recall thinking that it would never last. Isn’t that funny? It’s what old kooks thought when the car was invented, only now the kook was me! I held on to my Walkman until the iPod shuffle was introduced, at which point I caved in and bought one.

I got remarried as well, but it only lasted until the iPod nano, which the child from that marriage—a boy, I’m pretty sure—threw into the toilet along with my wallet and my car keys. Instead of fishing it all out and getting my hands dirty, I left that wife and kid and moved to where I live now, the apartment complex I mentioned earlier. I thought of replacing my nano, but instead I waited awhile and got an iPhone, which I specifically use not to call either of my ex-wives or the children they tricked me into having. It’s a strain on the eyes, but I also read the paper on it, so take that, newsagent—I’m the half-blind one now, and you’re out of a job!

The iPhone 2 led to the 3, but I didn’t get the 4 or 5 because I’m holding out for the 7, which, I’ve heard on good authority, can also be used as a Taser. This will mean I’ll have just one less thing to carry around. And isn’t that technology’s job? To lighten our burden? To broaden our horizons? To make it possible to talk to your attorney and listen to a Styx album and check the obituaries in the town where your parents continue to live and videotape a race riot and send a text message and stun someone into submission all at the same time?

Doing it all while driving is illegal where I live, so I’m moving to a place where freedom still means something. I’m not telling you where it is, because I want it to remain unspoiled. I’ll just say it’s one of the few states left where the mentally ill can legally own firearms. They used to be limited to muskets, but now they can carry or conceal everything a normal person can. If you don’t think a mental patient has the right to bring a sawed-off shotgun to the church where his ex-girlfriend is getting married, you’re part of the problem. The truth is that crazy people—who are really just regular people but more misunderstood—have as much of a right to protect themselves as we do.

Live with liberty, and your imagination can soar. If I had been born in the state I’m moving to, there’s no telling who I might be by now—an oral surgeon, maybe, or perhaps the ruler of the whole U.S. countryside. Other kings would pay me tribute with livestock and precious gems, but deep inside I don’t think I’d be any different from who I am today: just a guy with a phone, waiting for the day when he can buy an even better one.