My brother and I helped my aunt put together tables for twenty. We set the plates, napkins, and silverware. We brought in platter after platter of food. Our father sat at the head by two grotesque hams. He carved them gravely, pausing to complain about the quality of the knife, saying he’d be better off with a chisel. Aunt Abbey reached into a watering can and offered him an icepick. He smirked, which meant that he wanted to laugh, but wouldn’t.
We started eating, just the four of us.
Then the back door opened. In came the Achy-Breakies on a wildness of whooping and stomping and clapping and ballyhooing, all of them rushing to be the first to the table, all of them dressed as thrift-store approximations of cowboys and truckers and hillbillies and hoboes. They spilled themselves into their seats. They hit their personal fifths of whiskey, a brand called Jackpot. Aunt Abbey, interested, passed the bowls of sides and the ham platters. The artists served themselves. Every one of them was talking to him- or herself, fully committed to a one-way conversation. The dining room became a chamber of monologues, the voices overlapping, layering, crowding up. My father ate angrily. Next to him, a spray-tanned man stashed food in his overalls. My brother tried to talk to a fake-bearded man in a Roy Rogers T-shirt who was going through the pictures in a wallet, every image eaten by burn-holes. The man next to me yahooed—all of the artists interrupted themselves to yahoo back, their shouts one shout, miraculously harmonized. This head yahooer was Uncle Lech. He wore a filthy white cowboy hat and a filthy white western-wear shirt and filthy white chaps. His mustache, more massive than ever, shined like a dress boot. He monologued with virtuosic speed and variation, bending his voice through multiple accurate-sounding imitations of regional American accents. It was stunning. He recounted his childhood in Dead Man, Illinois, and Truck, Kentucky, and Rear End, Missouri, and Conjugal Visit, Tennessee, and how his mama ran off with a gang of other mamas to steal the devil from the government while his papa stayed home and cooked himself dead to feed the family but a lot of good that did what with his twelve brothers getting killed twelve ways on accident on account of bum farm equipment and his twelve sisters getting killed twelve ways on accident on account of bum school equipment not to mention the ninety-nine vehicles his ninety-nine dogs had been run over by in a day. He jumped onto his chair. “America bless God!” he screamed, and he raised his bottle like it was a spear. The artists raised theirs in a violence of cheering and clinking. Uncle Lech chugged; he coughed and spluttered—he dropped the bottle, it shattered—he covered his mouth with one hand, and with the other, drew a revolver. The barrel’s red rim marked it as a replica. He sprinted outside. My brother, sitting by the window, hand-visored the glass to look out into the night. “He’s a-puking,” he reported. “He’s a-pointing his gun at his puke.” Five shots exploded—astoundingly loud, much louder than the artists had been—and everyone quieted. My father stood, holding the carving knife. My brother ducked. The revolver smashed through the window. It kicked across the table and hit the floor, spinning. The smell of gunpowder hacksawed through the smell of the hams.
“Blanks?” said my brother, hopeful. His shirt collar twinkled with glass.
Aunt Abbey grabbed the gun before my father did.
“Give it to me,” he said, his voice shrill.
With their faces matched in fury, they’d never looked more related.
Instruments appeared, harmonicas and jaw harps, mandolins and banjos, a jug, a washboard. The artists played—a low, mellow, lonesome melody.
My father held out a hand. In his other he still gripped the knife. He mastered his voice: “Now.”
She went to the broken window and listened to the yard.
“Or else,” he said.
She left through the back door, opening the revolver as she went, emptying spent casings into her apron.
My father put down the knife. I saw him feel everyone’s eyes on him—he straightened, but tightened—and I was overrun with guilt, not only for being a member of the audience, but for feeling bad for my father, for pitying his pathetic threats—“Now”—“Or else”—which he wouldn’t follow through on, which he couldn’t even make specific.
My brother nodded to the music.
“We don’t have to stay,” I said to my dad.
He picked the knife back up. He stared at it, like he couldn’t remember what it was for. Then he stabbed it so savagely into the table that the blade snapped. It slashed a check mark across his palm. Blood wicked his face.
55
Stanley Hears Artists in the Hallway, Again
“My dad took a cab to the hospital,” I said.
Manny layered his bundled shirts and slacks into his roller bag. “An incident, then, in which the audience suffered real injury.”
“He did it to himself.”
“And have your uncle and his artists executed dangerous acts against one another, as part of a performance?”
I said that it was possible that they had.
Manny demanded an example.
I asked him what example he had in mind.
There was commotion in the hall: panicked footsteps, heavy voices.
Manny leaned over to watch the door.
“Stanley!” shouted a man, worried.
“I want to tell you what I don’t want to tell you!” shouted another man, farther away, furious.
One of them pounded the wall to a different unit.
One of them paced, stomping with every step.
“Where’s Stanley?” said the worried man.
“Is Stanley there?” he said.
“What happened to Stanley?” he said.
“I want to hear you!” shouted the furious man. “I don’t, I can’t!”
Something ceramic shattered.
“I can’t do what I want to do!”
Another sudden smash, bigger.
Footsteps crushed and kicked broken pieces.
“Okay, Stanley,” said the worried man, at the end of the hall. “You are you; I am I. I am sorry.”
He said something else.
It sounded like: “Let’s talk.”
“Be like me and don’t be me!” screamed the furious man, close to the door.
He attacked the door with object after object, ceramic, glass, ceramic, busting them, the pieces spraying and scattering, and then he beat the door with what sounded like his fists and his feet, screaming scrambled words, his scrambled words becoming howls, his howls becoming croaks, his croaks becoming raw.
Then the rasp of his ruined voice.
Shredded breaths.
A cell phone rang, a default ringtone.
“Stanley,” said the worried man.
A second cell phone rang. The ring the same.
“Not Stanley,” said the worried man.
The two men crunched away.
Manny uncovered his ears.
I felt like I’d been placed in a vise.
The space at the center of myself that wasn’t me began to change.
“Christmas Eve!” Manny said.
He’d been speaking, waving.
“A Christmas Eve performance!” he was saying.
“Injury to artists!” he was saying.
56
Stanley Remembers a Christmas Eve at Uncle Lech and Aunt Abbey’s
All week the temperature had wavered into and out of the double-digit negatives, the air so cold that when you breathed it, it slapped your lungs and you lost your breath. At my aunt and uncle’s, however, we found the temperature leaning hard into a very dry 90 degrees. The radiators hissed and clanged insanely. My father shoved his coat at my aunt and said, “What a waste.”
“I suspect it has a purpose,” she said.
He scoffed.
“There are purposes beyond utility, you know.”
“Wasteful ones.”
“The end point of all utility is waste.”
“Beer!” said my brother, handing everyone a can from his twelve-case.
We sat down to one t
able set for the four of us. We ate cheesy potato pancakes and pork gołabki steamed in bacon grease, Busia’s recipes. By the time we finished we were sweating, especially my father, who refused to take off his sweatshirt, under which, I was sure, he wore a long-sleeved shirt, a T-shirt, and an undershirt. He was the kind of man who kept his condo at 59 degrees. He believed that “the inside needs to match the outside”—that the transition from one environment to another, temperature-wise, should be as short and as close as you could stand it, whether winter or summer. It spared the body needless shock, he said.
He killed three beers in the time it took me to drink one.
When my aunt brought out makowiec and butter cookies and coffee, we heard the artists file in through the front door.
After the Easter episode, my dad had insisted that the artists be forever barred from all future family gatherings. My aunt couldn’t arrange that—it was Lech’s house, too—but she did promise to confine the artists to other areas of the house, to keep them away from the dining room. My dad didn’t like this, but he agreed.
He never once threatened to not show up.
“Those dinners we always do,” he said.
To my brother, this was a sign of our dad’s fearsome love for his sister.
To me, this was our dad saying to Lech: You can’t fuck up my family.
Either way it made us love him.
That night, the artists assembled in what sounded like the living room. A speech began, steady, measured. We couldn’t make out the words, but it didn’t take long to discover what they were up to: they were “filibustering” the bathroom, blocking it with their bodies, so that everyone had to relieve themselves outside in the cold and the wind, with the exception of my aunt, who they addressed as “The Speaker of the House” and let through. My father tried the bathroom upstairs. “Locked,” he said when he returned, but by the way he sat down, he made it clear that he’d pissed all over something that belonged to Uncle Lech. My brother laughed so hard he had to push himself away from the table. My aunt changed the subject to the time Busia tasted my aunt’s take on the family potato pancakes recipe, when Busia had spat it out into a napkin, said to my aunt, “You are a fraud,” and hobbled to the kitchen to make her own batch. “No one can say that she lacked principles,” said my aunt, happily. I studied the expression of pride on my father’s face: it was forced, its edges tense. A vengeful piss meant that my father had been played by my uncle, manipulated into lowering himself to his level, a thing that to my knowledge had not happened until right then. I stood up to go outside. My brother followed. While other yards shined with Christmas lights, my aunt and uncle’s had been decorated with campaign signs and miniature American flags. It was so windy that our piss-streams whipped and waved, so cold that the splashes iced. “I’ve never seen Dad this satisfied,” said my brother, delighted.
This annoyed me. “He’s ashamed of himself.”
“No way!” he said. “Every man longs for the day when he can justifiably piss on someone else’s valuables.”
“I don’t disagree, I just don’t see it in this case. I don’t see it in Dad.”
“You’re not looking closely enough, that’s all.”
“I’m looking very closely.”
“At your wee-wee?”
“Yes.”
“Stanwee is awways wooking vwewy cwosewee at his wee-wees.”
We zipped up. I went with him into the hall to watch the artists. Not because I believed in his interpretation, but because my disappointment in my father was peaking and I didn’t want to be near him until I could hide it. The artists all wore conservative black suits and skirts, their ties and blouses red, white, or blue. They stank, a fund-raiser-in-a-locker-room blend of armpits, crotches, deodorants, colognes, and perfumes, all of it fermenting in the jacked-up heat. Every face dribbled sweat. Uncle Lech stood at the center of his artists, his hair and mustache trim, styled. He filibustered about bootstraps: their available sizes, colors, material composition percentages, load-bearing capacities, production costs, profit margins. A man acting as aide continually handed Uncle Lech large bottles of water, which he gulped down. Others drank them too. The labels read DIET WATER and featured crisp images of obese bald eagles. The eagles came in several variations, but every design was an offensive anthropomorphic stereotype of race, religion, or subculture. The bottles were dropped when empty, and as a result, everyone stood and shuffled on crackling plastic, crunching the bottles, sending them skittering. A huge-sounding bell donged. Uncle Lech stopped. He solemnly requested water. It was given. As he drank, he pissed his pants—piss darkened his crotch, piss ran over his shoes, piss spattered the floor. He dropped his bottle. Everyone else immediately pissed their pants and dresses. The smell was instantaneous: foul, dizzying, animal. A chain of puddles and channels crossed the floor. Only one artist didn’t follow through, a birdlike man with a face so boring that it was unforgettable. I recognized him but couldn’t remember his solo acts. The other artists objected, calling him a terrorist, and commanded him to do his duty, to e pluribus unum. He raised his hand, as if taking an oath—his skinny forearms poked out of his sleeves, revealing a series of tattoos of portraits of early American presidents—and he said, weakly, “My American fellows,” but was cut off—the artists closed in, their soaked clothes smack-smacking. They stripped him. When they stepped back he wore only a sleeveless T-shirt and American-flag boxers. The colors on the flag were in the wrong places. He walked out the front door and into the killer cold, barefoot.
There was a moment of what appeared to be unscripted disagreement.
A pair of artists moved for the door, their minds made up.
Lech stepped in their way. He pressed his back against the door.
One of the two artists, a squashed old man, put forward a quiet plea, while the other, a very tall young woman, raised her voice in outrage. The conversation was in Polish.
Lech said nothing and stayed put.
The two artists turned around, made for the back door, and hurried out. Their wet footprints twinkled.
57
Stanley Tells Manny the Truth
I didn’t retell the Christmas Eve incident to Manny—of all the stories about my family that T had told him, he knew this one the best.
“The artist’s exile?!” he said.
“Into the elements?!” he said.
He was seething.
I said, “If it was real, it was dangerous. I don’t know.”
“You insist on ignorance!” said Manny.
He left the bedroom for the bathroom.
I was sitting on the bed, playing with the dress shoe.
My own head started to hurt, a dumb pinch down the middle. I thought about how Torrentelli had encountered the pissing politicians project at a gallery in Pilsen. It sounded similar to what T had said about Country-Western Country: a multimedia collage in the style of a museum exhibition, a code-numbered series of items that documented the “filibuster” through pictures, audio, cell-phone video, and artifacts, such as the customized water bottles, the piss-stained clothes, and a desktop computer containing “sensitive state secrets” that had been “compromised” (pissed on) by a “hostile agent.” There were also fake newspaper articles profiling the “congress” members. Torrentelli had remembered reading one clipping from the Chicago Tribune, possibly real, that mentioned how a nearly naked man had been found on a Rogers Park side street, dead of exposure.
“Art is what we are!” chanted a woman in the hallway.
She was at the door.
The doorknob rattled.
“We are what we see when we re-see ourselves!”
A ring of keys jingled.
“Fly home now,” whisper-yelled a second woman, next to the first.
“Re-see yourself!” said the first woman.
Keys chunked in the lock, one after another. None of them worked.
“Wait,” said the first woman.
“I’m leaving,” said the second
, heartbroken.
“These are wrong.”
“I’m leaving you.”
“This is a mistake. These are mistakes.”
“I’m leaving you now,” she said.
She sounded terrified.
The floor in the hallway creaked.
“Is that you?” said the women at the same time.
There was a scuffle—the sound of broken bits of ceramics and glass—then the thump of a tackle, and a high scream.
Then an awful pause.
Then two high screams—one was sustained; the other stuttered and restarted, restarted and stuttered; both moved away, as if the women were dragged to the staircase, where the screams were snuffed out.
I’d been standing, holding the shoe like a hammer.
The space at the center of myself that wasn’t me turned, surged, pushed.
Manny returned from the bathroom with his pouch of toiletries.
“My suspicions are confirmed,” he said, remaining calm. “At best, we are participants.”
“That’s the one thing I’m not,” I said.
“At worst: fellow artists.”
I said that the only actions I’d taken had been to disengage from the project. I listed everyone and everything I’d ignored, including what I hadn’t already told Manny: the made-up man at the airport with the picture of me on his sign, the made-up man at Kutná Hora with the picture of me on his newspaper, the sequence of pictures of me that’d been exhibited on the background of my laptop, the artist who had walked up the staircase and entered a unit and launched the coordinated opening and closing of doors, the first envelope, the mug shots in the first envelope, the buzzers in the lobby that’d all been labeled with my name except for one, the chalk outline of Barton, the chalk outline of Torrentelli, the planted purse, the chalk outline around my laptop, the email sent from my account to my account “by me,” the made-up woman made up to resemble the made-up man, the second envelope, and just now, the artists in the hallway—the women who were meant to be my mother, the men who were meant to be my father, the women who were meant to be my aunt.
The Made-Up Man Page 12