by Rob Sedgwick
It had been six months since our last load.
“Where’s Jim?” I asked Jordan.
“Oh, he left.”
Jim was always there when we were moving a load.
We dug into the truck.
The boxes had been ripped open and some of the pods were spilling out. This was never the case. The boxes were always airtight.
“Why are the boxes open?”
Every cell in my body knew something was horribly wrong.
“It doesn’t matter, just get the boxes out!”
Against all my better judgment and the yelping in my stomach, I wrapped some tape around the first box. I didn’t even want to touch it. Then we wheeled it to the elevator. Upstairs, I yelled at Tybalt to shut up, to stop being so excited. I never yelled at Tybalt. I hated myself for doing that, but I was in a deep panic. I ran down the twelve flights for the second load. The elevator took too long.
We tilted the second ripped-open box onto the hand truck with no tape, just balanced it to keep the dozen or so twenty-pound pods in place, wheeled it from the street into the lobby, and then…
The fate lady sang her ass off.
11
Always jump in the middle in the middle in the middle in the middle in the middle of the bed.
Keep your eyes looking down.
Or you might fall down.
Bad thing about it when your mother comes in and says get off the bed.
The bed.
The beeeehhhed.
Three kids bouncing free form on the bed circa 1970. Mister Magoo and F Troop on TV. I always had a thing for Wrangler Jane. Daddy’s not here too much anymore. Mom’s dating. She’s dating priests. She’s dating rabbis. She’s dating Bob Hirschfield (great bald guy). She’s dating Louis Begley (sweet guy).
She’s always giving us little lessons. When she drives us around the city, she teaches us about driving: “Always assume everyone else is an idiot.” She makes me man of the house, and I have to have my eye out for who’s going to cut the mustard and pay the bills.
When Mr. Ben Heller walks in, I know he’ll do both. Charming in the beginning, stern now and then, but basically pretty terrific: a man’s man. Lots of muscles. He even has big muscles in his hands. We always call him Mr. Heller.
I figure he and I can share the load of Mom; I don’t think I need the help, but I probably do. I’ve been in her bedroom a lot these days, getting her up in the morning and flexing my new nine-year-old muscles in the bathroom mirror. I ask her if she notices them. I want to be impressive to her, but I also hope these muscles can protect us if anything bad happens. I haven’t a clue how to fight, I’m just hoping I can. I hoard my money for emergencies, count out one hundred pennies, wrap them up tight in aluminum foil: that’s one dollar! I do it again and again and again. I lock the rolls of pennies in my toy safe.
Mr. Heller knows how to fight and slap-boxes with us. Nikko’s better than me. We go in turns. His reflexes are faster; he’s more on balance and smoother than I am. This makes me angry. When it’s my turn, I wade in enraged because I am without talent. I get hit constantly. Nikko is too young to notice this, but even if he did, he’d be too sweet to say anything. He stutters all the time, especially in front of people he doesn’t feel comfortable around. I protect him ferociously. He knows this is more important than sports.
When we get a little older and start to play football, he runs with the grace of Hugh McElhenny. I run like a garbage truck going downhill. But Ben teaches me to throw the football better than anyone. My mother says it’s impossible, he can’t throw a ball, and that’s that. He has too much of a learning disability, poor small motor skills, neurosis. He’s had all the tests.
Ben says, “Bullshit. A boy has to know how to throw a ball.”
It will take a while, but when I finally get it, I really get it. I can hit a receiver in full stride at fifty yards away, a frozen rope. Because of Ben, my arm is a cannon. He calls the learning disabilities “bullshit.”
—
It takes like ten connecting flights to get to my grandparents’ house on the remote island of Tobago. The doors are just closing when we get to the last plane, but they won’t let us on. Mom, with her three young children in tow—Nikko, Kyra, and me—pleads with the woman behind the desk to let us on, but the woman is busy talking to a friend and doesn’t want to be disturbed. Mom is beside herself and drags all three of us out onto the tarmac to sit in front of the plane so it can’t leave. She yells and cries. She shakes her fists at the plane. I’m embarrassed. She’s overwhelmed. I tell my mother I don’t think this is a good idea. She screams at all three of us in a way I know I must remember forever: “All you three kids have in this world are each other! You stick together!”
We have to move so the plane can take off.
A day later, when we arrive at my grandparent’s estate in King’s Bay, my grandfather bullies my mother, pillar to post, about her separation from my father. He admires my father because he is so tall and handsome. My grandfather is short and handsome. And Jewish. My father is a high-end WASP. Socially, he breezes around like a Kennedy. My grandfather really admires the WASP part and takes my father’s side in the separation.
My father doesn’t even take his own side in the separation, but it doesn’t matter what anybody thinks. To my grandfather, this is just another issue he has to be right about in his kangaroo court. He browbeats my mother. He tells her she doesn’t know how to raise her own children, that he can do it better than she can—and then he threatens to do so. She feels abandoned and horribly alone.
My grandmother just has cocktails and backs up my grandfather. Even though he’s having liaisons behind her back like the world’s running out of women. She’s the only one who doesn’t know this.
I know something bad is happening, but I don’t know what it is.
I keep my distance.
Mr. Heller arrives in Tobago to rescue Mom. This angers my grandfather, but there’s not much he can do. Before you can say Jack Robinson, we leave King’s Bay. Nikko, Kyra, and I are lolling around casbah style on beach chairs on gleaming sugarcoated sand, ordering Cokes at the Turtle Beach resort in Tobago courtesy of Mr. Heller. We get served on the beach. I can sign for them. What’ll they think of next? I want to say, “Be off, my good man,” to the waiter, but I’m only nine, so I just think it instead. It’s the fanciest place we’ve ever been. Or seen. We even get our own rooms. We can order whatever we want, whenever we want, and just sign for it. We squint in the brilliant sunshine.
Life is but a dream.
He registers as Mr. and Mrs. Ben Heller and Family so the hotel doesn’t think we are all living in sin. We are told to call him “Ben,” not “Mr. Heller,” because he doesn’t want the management to get nosy. When we’re doing flips into the pool in front of everybody at the hotel, we scream, “Look at me, Mr. Heller! Look at me, Mr. Heller!”
Back in New York, we still have our own place, but Ben’s there a lot. It’s the time of Ali/Frazier.
God, I want Frazier to win.
Ben’s for Ali. “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee,” he says.
It’s a point of contention between us.
Mom comes running into the apartment screaming. “I just saw Cassius Clay skipping rope in the park! My God, he is the most beautiful thing you ever saw! And he was talking to all of us when he took a break from skipping rope, and so charming, my God could he skip rope. He’s like the wind, and sooooo sexy.”
I don’t know how I instinctively know Ali has crossed Frazier, but I do. I don’t know why I instinctively know he takes three punches to get in one, but I do. The fight for many reasons takes on huge implications for millions of people. Me included.
On March 9, 1971, I crack open the apartment door, knowing at ten years old that the result would be on the front page of The New York Times. There, triumphant, a
rms in the air, the righteous Frazier had prevailed. A colossal victory.
—
Years later, my brother-in-law, Kevin, and I get tickets to go see the Knicks at the Garden. Our usual seats are at half court on the floor, but this being Michael Jordan’s return to the NBA and a month after 9/11, we’re relegated to seats under the basket. Kevin looks over and says, “Robbie, I think Smokin’ Joe is in our seats.”
Before the players are introduced, Joe Frazier’s attendance is announced and the crowd explodes for his victory that happened thirty years ago. He stands up, walks onto the court, and starts pumping left hooks. Those hooks could still take out Jordan, his team, and the Knicks all within three minutes. They could knock down city walls.
At halftime, I barrel straight up to him to shake his hand. Because he is the former heavyweight champion of the world, his grip is limp. The greater a fighter is, the softer the handshake.
“You’ve always been one of my idols,” I tell him, doing my utmost to hold back a gush of feelings. He keeps talking to whoever’s interviewing him. I say it again. He pays no attention; he doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter. To me he is the embodiment of courage and the ability to overcome great difficulty, difficulty that ordinary men cannot bear. Pictures of him and Ali together hang proudly in my apartment. Smokin’ Joe, fierce, noble, magnificent, a Philadelphia fighter, one of the greatest heavyweights of all time.
The city of brotherly love has had a statue of Rocky Balboa since 1982.
Not until 2015, four years after his death, was there a statue of Joe Frazier.
—
Ben Heller reads everything. Proust and Ford Madox Ford are two of his favorites. His athletic resume reads like Jim Thorpe’s: semi-pro football; ranked squash; a long game in golf that matches the pros; thwacks a softball four hundred feet; and when he boxed for the first time, he accidentally broke the other guy’s ribs.
In the Army, his calves are so big he needs special boots to accommodate their muscular girth. Stationed in Kansas during WWII, a family has him, a Jew, to a party and guest after guest sneaks behind him to look at the back of his head for horns.
My sister asks him about Hitler. “How can one man be so entirely evil?”
“I don’t think any man is entirely anything,” Ben tells her. “I think there are different levels of fear.”
Before our first dinner at Ben’s, Mom does her best to warn me about how big the apartment is and all the artwork.
I want to be perfect for my mother in social situations. I usually am. It always gives me a headache.
We arrive at Ben’s apartment building on Central Park West. A butler opens the door. I had never seen a real-life butler before. The butler takes our coats. The foyer is as wide as a superhighway. Wood with fine vertical-grain paneling adorns the walls.
When we start living here, I’ll run my nails through the panels to clean them.
We walk into the living room. I haven’t been to many at the age of nine, but I know a museum when I see one. This is a museum. I stand in front of some big African sculpture that looks straight ahead and not at me. A little rude, I think. I would have made more of an effort with guests.
I sneak into the butler’s room. My god! Cable television (this was 1971), an electric typewriter, a desk carved out of stout oak that weighs as much as a bathtub, his own stereo with records. This smokes our Close ’N Play. I don’t have a desk; our TV is an old black-and-white one that can fit in a breadbox, with the rabbit ears that need aluminum foil to get a decent picture. Not that we’d ever wanted for anything, but this was a different league.
I say to the butler, “Nice joint you guys got here.”
Mom always says “joint” to make things less formal, more intimate, like you’re in cahoots. She got it from her parents. They got it from The Thin Man and William Powell.
“I would prefer if you didn’t call this place a joint,” says the butler.
Back in the living room, the first painting that looks down on me is the biggest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I am told it is Blue Poles by Jackson Pollock. I just see scary blotches, splotches, and globs of taffy-thick paint that make no sense at all. But underneath those globs are hair webs of paint. Very delicate. And underneath that, some other blue galaxy that must go on forever. It is as big as a small swimming pool, and I get stage fright in front of it. I’m asked, “What do you think?” I don’t want to say something stupid, but I have no idea what to say. What’s to say? It’s a huge gloppy thing that I don’t understand.
“I don’t know what to say. I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
“That’s all right. What do you feel?”
Here goes nothing. “I feel like the paint is thick like custard. Some parts I want to chew.”
“That’s terrific,” says Ben. “I haven’t heard that before.”
I feel as if I’ve earned a kind of respect.
Two years later, it is sold to the Australian government for $2.1 million and is hoisted out the window with a pulley system. Front page of The New York Times.
Wowie zowie!
Then I am led to some cloudy painting that’s even bigger than the custard painting. I have to look way up. It’s three different clouds in a row, up to down. There are a bunch of them in the living room. I am told they are paintings by a man named Mark Rothko. They make no sense at all. They make the whole living room feel even more like a crypt than it does already.
A couple of years later, I have gotten so used to being around art I begin to trust my own opinion. I tell Ben that I don’t know why, but I can see Rothko is every bit as great as Rembrandt. He agrees.
In the dining room, there is some big Renaissance painting of a chick with one boob hanging out. She looks at me like I have no idea what’s going on.
An invisible bell summons the butler from the kitchen. Later, Mom will take to ringing an actual bell, but now there is a button under the carpet that Ben presses with his foot, and mysteriously (because there is no sound) the butler enters to whisk the plates away. In a James Bond movie, it would be the button that opens the trap door to the pool of man-eating sharks.
We three are used to being able to get up from the table to scamper and leap about willy-nilly. There will be no willying or nillying here. This dining table is not conducive to a groovy time.
Ben speaks. People listen. And he does all the speaking.
When I get nervous, I rub my palms up and down my thighs, so however wet my palms get from the tension, they dry quickly from the rubbing. I bob up and down like Smokin’ Joe.
“May I be excused to go kiki?” I ask Ben.
“No,” says Ben. “From now on you ask, ‘May I please be excused to make a bowel movement?’” Would I have to say bowel movement when I go kiki from now on? How humiliating. The words sound embarrassing and mucousy. I hope he forgets this, because I never want to say bowel movement ever again.
They decide to get married. Mom is all girlish fake smiles at her good fortune that she is not quite comfortable with. She will be the lady of the house; we will be rich; we will live amongst high art, wall-to-wall carpeting, and cable television with remote controls. Two maids. But she also goes back to school immediately, because she has to work or she will go insane (“I want my own money,” she says). Up until now, she has been a speech therapist for actors. Actors would come into the apartment trying to mimic her lovely speech. She always sounded great, like the final and refined version Wendy Hiller in Pygmalion. She would stand straight as a board. Now she intends to work with children with learning disabilities.
As little children, what can we possibly say or do about their marriage except go along for the ride? Even if I object, how can I object? I’m too young. And what would I be objecting to? Money? Security? Protection? It makes sense. They’re both grown-ups; he’s a man, she’s a woman (in distress, no less), and he�
�s just the powerhouse guy with hairy, powerhouse forearms to rescue her.
But that’s my job.
I am now out of a job.
The wedding is at Ben’s best friend’s property in East Hampton. The estate is Gatsby grand. Nikko, Kyra, and I are never invited to swim in the magnificent, custom-designed grotto swimming pool. The pool is comprised of many little individual pools situated around a big main pool. It is multi-leveled and blends effortlessly with the meticulous green landscape of ferns, pines, and scrub bushes. Various mini pools babble at its highest level before cascading into the main pool. From up on high, the water spears down and plunges the surface, creating a quaint, burbling waterfall. It churns and froths like bubbling poison. But the poison looks delicious, a dream of what it is to be rich. I’m aching to swim in that pool, to eat fine food, to float in that froth without a care. To loll around weightless and sing “Tiny Bubbles.”
At the wedding, I guzzle every drink I can grab. I get bombed. A ten-year-old drunk. I blab to anyone and everyone who will listen, “I am in the greatest shape known to man.” Kyra gets hives. Nikko falls off a tall stool in the bathroom, smashes his head, and has to get stitches in the emergency room.
Welcome aboard.
Moving into Ben’s apartment on Central Park West is the tipoff. Ben’s daughter Patti is leaving for college. Nikko and I are taking her room. She’s all bouncing and smiles, in a hurry to get out of there. I look up at her. Why is she so happy to be leaving?
We find out.
At our existence, Ben suddenly snaps: “Stop being so loud! Jesus fucking Christ!”
To our being kids, he screeches: “Stop running around! Son of a fucking bitch!”
His shrieks are high terror shrill if we want to see Mom: “No, Goddamn it! She’s busy with me now!”
When I am asked to help him move a Rothko, or a Pollock, or a Barnett Newman, or whatever priceless painting—most of them are at least twice to three times my size—they are almost always too gigantic to fit through the doorframe.