Why We Suck (8 page)

    Seven hundred potatoes

    Six boxes Gorton's Frozen Fish Sticks

    Two large bottles ketchup

    

    Place fish sticks in flat pan in oven. Turn knob up as far as it will go. Place cabbage and potatoes in large pot of already boiling water. Wait twenty minutes. Take fish sticks out while middle seems to still be frozen. Pour ketchup over them until they disappear beneath a sea of red. Wait another hour for flavor to evaporate from cabbage and potatoes and they are soft to the touch. Make sign of the cross. Serve.

    

    We never went hungry. We never were at a loss for drama and the men were absolutely never ever allowed or expected to cook or clean up. Our job was to shovel and bang nails and fix flat tires and kill mice and rats and giant insects. We played football and baseball and hockey right there in the street. No helmets no shin guards no crying. You got hit with a puck or a stick or a bat or a ball you walked it off and kept on playing.

    Everyone had scars and broken bones and some kids even had strange dents in their heads and some kids stuttered and other kids lisped and some had weird walks-everyone had something wrong with them and nobody's parents could either afford to get them fixed or had the time to even do so. You sucked it up and kept moving forward. You couldn't do your homework you flunked out quick and went to work pumping gas.

    It was the natural order of things-the food chain in action-the way God meant things to be. Those who could run faster got ahead quicker and the weaker links in the chain got eaten by the enemy.

    Shit-I was late for work right after school one day so I ran across the street against oncoming traffic and got nailed by a Buick right on my left ass cheek-and if you think I have no ass now just imagine how small it was when I was fourteen years old. It was basically all bone. Anyways-the good news was I bounced right back up and the traffic came to a stop-including my bus-and I not only made it to work on time but I had no desire to sit down for the next two weeks.

    And like I said before-that was when the front ends of automobiles were still made out of steel, not these pussy-assed plastic bumpers they have now.

    I wasn't the only one, by the way-lots of kids got hit by cars and half the time the drivers were drunk. EVERY adult was drunk back then. It wasn't against the law to drink and drive. And there were no cupholders in cars-so if you wanted to drink and drive you had to be able to balance the goddam beer can or whiskey bottle and drive at the same time. Come to think of it-that's how they probably gauged whether or not you were too drunk to drive back then-if you dropped your drink-time to get out and walk.

    And there was no rehab in those days-none at all. If you were Catholic, you had Lent-forty days at the tail end of winter when you could give up anything in service to Our Lord Jesus-who supposedly spent forty days in the desert with the devil whispering sweet little nothings into his holy ear. As a sign of your devotion to His noteworthy struggle, Catholics are meant to conduct a fast from one of their favorite things-food, sex, candy-whatever you might find enjoyable and hard to stay away from. Believe me, most Irish Catholic men spent that month and a half on the wagon. Jesus resists the temptation offered by Satan-the Irish resist Bushmill's and Budweiser. I'd call it just about even.

    My brother Johnny got clipped by a drunk driver while he was delivering papers on his bike. He was in the hospital for a couple of days and then he came home. But for those two days? There was extra potatoes and meat for everyone else. The food chain in action. There were no airbags no seat belts no helmets no Ritalin no Adderall no special ed classes no learning disabilities no tutoring no nothing-you had to be a REAL retard to be considered a retard. Talk therapy in those days consisted of my mother saying "That homework better be done by dinnertime or you are gonna have to deal with your father!" Everybody got hurt and stabbed and shot in the face with BB guns and bitten by dogs and slapped by their parents and fed shitty food-no one was smart or good-looking or gifted or unique. The toys alone would kill or maim you.

    One time I was cutting through the alley between Tommy Mullaney's building and ours when I heard my brother shout "Hey faggot!"-his usual way of saying hello. I looked up to see Johnny and his best friend Cliffey DeCoursey down at the other end of the alley with a brand-new toy in tow-a bow and arrow. Not a TOY bow and arrow, an actual, real live bow-and-arrow set you would use to go hunting for venison. Now, Cliffey DeCoursey's parents deciding to give him a real bow and arrow as a birthday present would-in this day and age-be either the foundation for a record-setting lawsuit by my parents or the beginning of a foster child investigation or both. But in those days it just made Cliffey and every other kid in the neighborhood think they were cool. Anyways, one millisecond of a nanosecond after I heard the word "faggot" and stopped and glanced up-which probably says something about my own self-esteem-my brother let the arrow go and I am telling you THUNK! that's how quick the arrow stuck itself in my skull. Two inches above my right eye-I still have the scar. Cliffey went one way and Johnny the other and I was left standing there like some kind of horrifying William Tell Overture.

    I climbed the alley fence and ran up the three wooden flights on the back of my building-the arrow still in place-and ran into the kitchen where my Uncle Jerry put down his beer and yanked the thing out of my head-at which point I started to howl and he said "It's out goddammit yer fine so shut up!" My dad said I didn't need stitches but my mom went into a what if he's brain damaged now and he's not that bright to begin with monologue so he and Uncle Jerry drove me to the hospital where they did the usual here's a piece of candy because this is gonna hurt like hell routine and they sewed me up and then we drove home fast because it was close to dinnertime and my father got really pissed because no one could find my brother or Cliffey and my dad and Mr. DeCoursey had to go house to house and building to building looking for the two escapees until they finally found them an hour or so later hiding in the basement of Tommy Spencer's building which led to a very entertaining and rare double ass-kicking up the entire block, which I watched with relish from our third-floor window.

    And after dinner that night, in the living room while we were watching TV, my father sat down in his favorite chair while I sat on the floor and we both watched the Red Sox game on the TV. He handed me a bowl of ice cream and he had his own, and after a couple of spoonfuls he very calmly and evenly taught me the moral of the story by saying this:

    Hey Dinzo.

    Yeah, Dad?

    The next time your brother-or anyone else for that matter-calls you a faggot?

    Yeah.

    And you look up to see that your brother-or anyone else for that matter-is shooting an arrow at your precious, pink little Irish face?

    Yeah.

    You know what I want you to do?

    What?

    Duck, goddammit-duck!

    It was always your own fault-you were supposed to learn how to survive no matter what the situation was. Boys will be boys will be boys-we were expected to shoot arrows and throw rocks and God help us if we ever got our hands on REAL guns because every stick or twig or baseball bat we could get our mitts on became a PRETEND gun in very short order.

    My son Jack had a friend in grade school-nice kid. His parents were very politically correct and had made up their minds not to preordain any kind of stereotypes onto their daughter or son by buying her dolls or him trucks-you get the idea. So one Christmas-which wasn't really Christmas in their house, it was Christmas and Kwanzaa and Hanukkah and some other bullshit holiday all combined into a two-week celebration that might as well have been based on Seinfeld's fictional Festivus-Jack's buddy asked for one of those giant air-pumped water guns that looks like a plastic AK-47 on steroids. Instead, they sat him down and had a long discussion about nonviolence and the life's work of Gandhi and Martin Luther King and blah blah blah and on Xmas/Kwanzaa/ Festivus morning the poor kid woke up to find an incredibly expensive and intricate balsa wood creative design workshop his parents had imported from Denmark. When I dropped Jack off with HIS air-pumped AK-47 plastic water gun on steroids, both kids looked extremely disappointed. But to their credit-they had a great time that afternoon. Because the first thing Jack's friend made with his Danish balsa wood design center was the biggest, badass balsa wood AK-47 you have ever laid your eyes on. They pretend-shot at each other and the kid's environmentally overconcerned, tiny carbon footprint-pushing, organically soaped-up and shampooed parents all day long.

    These half-wit parents today think they can legislate every single tiny dangerous detail out of the protected lives of their dainty little children. What they can't manage to keep away from the kids on their own they will beseech the rest of society to outlaw, banish and reform.

    Bad language on TV shows, Janet Jackson's left nipple during the Super Bowl-bullies, mean girls, brawlers and all the other badasses need to disappear.

    Personally-seeing Janet Jackson's left nipple on TV wasn't anywhere near as offensive to me as the four million ads for Viagra and Cialis and all the other "how to get a hard-on" pills that rolled out every other minute during the same game OR Janet's co-star Justin Timberlake and his next-day "I didn't know nothing" protect-his-own-skinny-ass-and-leave-the-girl-hanging defense. Chivalry? He not only never heard of it-I doubt he even knows how to spell the word.

    One brown tit sent everyone running for moral cover while the phrase "an erection lasting longer than four hours" was pummeled into the formative brains of our tiny, little children.

    I love tits. Real tits. Big tits, small tits, perky tits, floppy tits-I don't think it's possible for American kids to see ENOUGH tits. And what are we afraid will happen if they do? One of the first things our kids ever saw-after the birth canal and the face of the doctor who delivered them-were two juicy, chock full of mother's milk tits. Tits that brought them nothing more than comfort and pleasure and nourishment and fun. As far as kids are concerned-tits are the best. Tits and candy. As a matter of fact-before they discover cupcakes and other sources of man-made sugar-tits ARE candy. Never mind all the cartoon violence and cutesy, idiotic Teletubbies-there should be a channel on TV that is all tits all the time-TIT TV. In France, Africa-half of the goddam planet, for God's sake-women sunbathe topless and no one even thinks twice about it, but here in America-during a full three-hour broadcast of organized violence between grown men hopped up on illegal drugs and human growth hormone-we are desperately afraid that our sons and daughters might see a fleeting ever-so-quick GLIMPSE of a pop star's teat.

    We suck. We suck really really bad.

    By the way-if the tits don't kill our kids, the bullies will.

    Let me tell you something about bullies-we need them. They teach your kid how to survive. How to plan a trip to school that includes every available navigational option so he doesn't have to run into the kid who wants to kick his ass.

    Mean girls teach your daughter what it will be like in any workplace full of women she ends up dealing with later in life-the jealousy and envy and catfighting and backbiting. It is an early education. Why? Because that's the way girls are.

    Boys? Boys will beat the living crap out of each other for one reason and one reason only-because they are awake.