Original Love

by J. J. Murray

  And that’s when Peter Rudolph Underhill was born…

  I can’t write anymore. I’m getting too wired. All the tea, the brown sugar, Stevie Wonder, the memories.

  To wind down, I surf the Internet for news of the outside world—much of it about the recovery efforts at Ground Zero—and decide to search once again for Ebony.

  I’ve been looking for her online for five years now, without much success. Most people are anonymous online these days, using strange mixtures of numbers and letters for screen names. I’d plug in “Ebony” at the AOL or Yahoo member directories and watch the screen fill with possibilities. Two years ago, I came across an “Ebony Mills” living in Jamaica, Queens, found her phone number in the online White Pages, and gave her a call:

  “Hello?”

  I was so excited. “Is this Ebony Mills?”

  “Yes, who’s calling?”

  I couldn’t tell if it was Ebony or not since I was calling long distance. “Hi, this is Peter, Peter Underhill.”

  “Um, Peter who?”

  “Peter Underhill. From Huntington.”

  “From Huntington.” She had paused. “And you’re calling because…”

  “I want to see you.”

  “You do? Man, I don’t even know you.” Click.

  I haven’t called anyone named Ebony Mills since.

  And I’ve always been afraid to take the next step once I had a list of all those screen names: sending an e-mail.

  Until now.

  I reduce my search on AOL to all females in New York using “Ebony” somewhere in their screen names. That leaves me fifty or so in the state. I remove anyone not on Long Island—I can only hope she’s still here—and have forty-four e-mails to write. Yahoo only yields six more, so it’s an even fifty e-mails to send before I can sleep again.

  After adding all these Ebonys to a temporary address book so I can write one letter and shoot it off to the entire group, I freeze.

  I have no idea what to write.

  I have been writing my ass off all day, and I can’t write a few sentences in an e-mail to a group of perfect strangers—one who might be my Ebony. If I were Ebony, would I be offended if someone shot off an e-mail bomb like this to so many other people? I can’t get too specific. Ebony would be pissed if I shared our business with the world…but then again, I already sort of have done that with my novels. Hmm. Short and sweet, just keep it short and sweet. I type “In search of Ebony Mills” in the subject line.

  “Here goes nothing,” I say as I type:

  If you are Ebony Mills who once resided in Huntington (Huntington High class of 1981), please reply as soon as possible.

  If you are not this particular Ebony Mills, my sincerest apologies.

  Peter Rudolph Underhill

  I hesitate a long time before clicking on the “send e-mail” button, my hands as sweaty as the day I first held Ebony’s hand. What if all this is a waste of time? “Love is never a waste of time if it’s done right,” Toni says in Ashy. But am I doing this part right? “Boy,” Bonita says in The Devil to Pay, “there ain’t really a wrong way to make a move…so make it.”

  The little bell in the computer sounds, warning me that I’m about to be bounced off the Internet unless I do something.

  I click the “send e-mail” button. A moment later, “Your mail has been sent” appears on the screen.

  I clean out my in-box of all the junk mail, several trying to sell me Viagra at discount prices. I’m not that old yet. Then…I wait, watching to see if the little mailbox icon shows up on my screen.

  Nothing happens for half an hour. What time is it? Oh, it’s only 4:30. People aren’t home from work yet. I turn off the CD player and turn up the volume on the laptop so I can hear “You’ve got mail!” I only plan to relax a few moments on the couch, settling my head deeply into a throw pillow.

  And I promptly fall asleep.

  5

  I wake up yawning with the sunrise and casually look over at the laptop. It’s on sleep mode, the green light blinking. I reboot, set it automatically to sign on to AOL, and head to the bathroom to piss away half a gallon of Earl Grey.

  I know I’m setting the unofficial world’s record for longest piss when I hear, “You’ve got mail!”

  I race from the bathroom, my pants still unzipped, and click on the “get mail” button. I have twenty-seven messages!

  I double-click the first one:

  Fuck you! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

  I get seven versions of the above, five that say “kiss my ass,” one that says “kiss my black ass,” and thirteen messages that say one way or another: “No, I’m not Ebony Mills.” All are unsigned, and only one adds: “I hope you find her.”

  The last message is another “I’m not Ebony,” but it intrigues me:

  I may not be who you’re looking for, but I might know the Ebony you’ve been looking for. Write back!

  Destiny (Ebony31582@aol.com)

  And say what? How much more information does she need to know? And why is someone named Destiny using “Ebony” in her screen name? I reply with:

  I knew Ebony Mills in Huntington from 1976-1981. We attended R.L. Simpson Junior High and Huntington High together. She used to live on Grace Lane, a couple blocks from where I lived on Preston Street.

  Peter

  I send the e-mail into cyberspace, then take a much-needed shower, leaving my dark hairs all over Henry’s tub. I’m only here to write, not to clean.

  When I get out, I look at a full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door and analyze what forty years can do to a body. More salt than pepper in my hair. Wrinkles winging from my eyes to my receding hairline. Ear hair. Zits I’ve never been able to outgrow on my forehead and chin. Pores as big as pencil points. Gray nose hairs I can’t trim fast enough with a pair of fingernail clippers. Hairy legs except for my naked knees and ankles where years of pants have erased their memory. The single hair on my chest that grows up to six inches long before I notice and pluck it. The hair that grows on top of my nose. My teeth a series of root canals, caps, and cavities. Rainbow veins wherever I look. Mysterious bruises that take months to heal. Freckles that become moles. Toes gnarled from hitting bedposts late at night, one missing a nail.

  I am not a pretty man.

  I borrow Henry’s white bathrobe and slippers—he must go through lots of bleach—and return to the laptop.

  No message yet.

  Reduced to drinking instant coffee, I wolf down several slices of white bread slathered with strawberry jam. I dial Henry’s office and leave a message for him to call me immediately. When I’m writing, I don’t like any interruptions, especially the phone. The TV has to be off, only seventies music playing to inspire me.

  “You’ve got mail!”

  Though it’s probably my daily headlines from the Times, I rush over anyway.

  But it’s from Destiny:

  I know your Ebony Mills! We used to work together. Unfortunately, I don’t know exactly where she is right now (sorry). She’s even unlisted in the phone book. I wish I could help you more!

  Since I think she’s still currently online, I try to Instant Message her using her screen name, Ebony31582:

  I only have to wait a few seconds.

  Seaford is just a ferry ride and half an hour in a car away from here! And Ebony still makes jewelry? She used to make dozens of those friendship bracelets, the ones you were supposed to let rot off your wrist, way back when.

  I breathe a heavy sigh of relief, though I really shouldn’t. It isn’t as if I’m going to rekindle our romance twenty years after the fact. That kind of romance only happens in the movies. I feel like an awkward seventh grader asking the next question:

  I stare at the screen for several minutes waiting for her reply, but Destiny is really gone. I try to IM her again, but “Ebony31582 is not currently signed on” flashes on the screen. I write her a quick e-mail:

  Destiny:

  Please feel free to reply or IM me anytim
e. I’ll probably be online off and on all day today.

  Peter

  Instead of painstakingly editing what I wrote yesterday—my usual procedure—I press on as rosy fingers of red sky steal across the bay.

  Chapter 2

  For Peter Rudolph Underhill, life with Dave and Hel Underhill was a trip, a gas, and plain outta-sight.

  But Peter would be lying if he said that. Life with Hel and the Captain was a bad trip that ran out of gas long before Peter was born, and Peter spent most of his childhood playing out of sight.

  By myself. Being an only child was rough. I had no one to play with or to boss around or to blame. I had no one ahead of me to take the brunt of my parents’ first attempts at parenting, no one behind to protect. If something ended up broken, I had to have done it. If something went missing, I was responsible for finding it since I had obviously lost it. There was no suspense at Christmas, no hand-me-downs, no fights over the last cookie, no giggling when a sibling got punished instead of me—and I got punished by spanking often. It wasn’t exactly spanking; it was more like lashing or flogging. “Spare the rod and spoil the child,” the Captain would say, his Bible open in front of him, a thin belt in his hand. “This is where it says in the Good Book that I can hit you.” I’d bend over a chair, my buttocks exposed to the world, and I’d have to count out the lashings: ten if I had only talked back to Mom, twenty if I hadn’t done my chores to the Captain’s satisfaction, and one time thirty for “borrowing” change from his coat pocket. The Captain ran a tight ship, all right, and a major part of that ship involved God.

  Out of sight mainly meant church. Peter grew up in the Methodist church that baptized him as an infant, chastised him as a sinner until he repented at the ripe old age of four, and confirmed him as a member at twelve. Sunday school, morning worship, then the night service. Wednesday night prayer meeting. Friday night youth night. Five services every week.

  Peter learned that God was not like his father, though God was indeed the “Captain of his soul,” that He was Peter’s heavenly Father with a capital F who would smite him for disobeying his parents. Peter prayed for his salvation every time he attended church, afraid that he would go for a long swim in the fiery lakes and rivers of Hell with a capital H if Jesus wasn’t in his heart when he died. Peter accepted Jesus as his Savior with a capital S so often that He with a capital H was getting frequent-flyer miles to Peter’s soul.

  Peter was just never sure of his salvation, mainly because Reverend Epson’s son, Ian, smoked, had green teeth, and dressed like a member of the rock group Kiss. Ian wore high platform shoes, and sat in the front row with black and white greasepaint smeared on his face, sticking out his tongue at the little choir behind Reverend Epson. If a pastor’s son was such a hellion, then who was Peter, the son of the Captain and Hel, to get into heaven?

  In between church and school, Peter stayed inside at home and tried to be good.

  But that would be a lie, too. Peter did everything in his power to get out of that house, but the Captain wouldn’t let Peter “mingle among those heathen out there.” Instead, Peter was stuck with a thundering father who cursed him and drank heavily and read from the Bible, and a cloudy mother who nursed him and drank more heavily and kept everything “shipshape for the Captain” while secreting away a small fortune in change and small bills in Campbell’s Chicken and Stars cans in the pantry. “For a rainy day,” she once told Peter.

  “Those heathen” were the Underhills’ many neighbors, none of whom were really heathens to Peter. They were the Melting Pot Players, appearing daily and nightly outside the balcony-seat window of Peter’s room. They were always more entertaining than the three channels on TV.

  Peter used to watch his neighbors from his bedroom windows, wishing somehow that he and his family were more like them. Like the Tuccis next door, who spoke Italian and sat in lawn chairs smoking and drinking wine and laughing and talking with their hands and fighting. Or like the Hites across the street, whose old grandmother spoke only German, who used to cook out every nice day and ate bratwurst and wieners and drank beer from tall glasses and generally got fat together. Or like the Steins, who used to throw block parties with music and lights strung between trees over which they sometimes played volleyball while sipping Budweisers and coming out of the house with just-baked cakes and pies. Or the Mathers, whose father worked in New York City on a TV game show that featured a huge maze, who were always out in the street playing kickball and basketball and kick-the-can and street hockey and curb-to-curb football, sweating together as a family.

  Peter’s father simply never went outside unless he had a “damn good reason.” He built a huge deck anchored to the slope behind the house to “raise the value of the house,” a house, Peter later learned, that had been creeping inch by inch toward that sandy slope and could one day tumble into the woods above Huntington Harbor. The Underhills ate out on the deck once. Once. Other than tending to the grungiest red and pink geraniums ever planted in the gaudiest white plastic planters on the front porch, the Captain did nothing to the yard except cut it once a week, never bagging or raking up the clippings and clumps, because “it’s good for the soil if you let it all rot.”

  Peter saw his first Fourth of July fireworks shows from his bedroom window, wishing that he were rocketing over Huntington Harbor like the Apollo astronauts who were always doing something outta-sight on the TV. He spent most of his childhood in his room, cleaning, making his bed until pennies bounced off it, doing homework, reading books like Sounder and The Bermuda Triangle, building model ships and getting high off the glue fumes, and staring out into the woods behind his house, woods that sloped right down from the backyard deck past a dance studio to the sand and rock shore of Huntington Harbor. Peter was only a ten-minute walk from the water, but he could only go to the harbor when the Captain wanted to play sailor every weekend.

  Other kids—like Eddie Tucci, Eric Hite, Mickey Mather, and Mark Brand—could stroll through Peter’s woods past the “Cave,” an old concrete cistern covered with graffiti, and disappear into the trees any time they wanted, coming back up the hill laughing and munching on Dolly Madison cakes or chewing on beef jerky or sucking down RC Colas in tall bottles that they bought at Milldam Bait and Tackle. Sometimes they wore baseball uniforms, other times matching football jerseys. They had freedom that Peter could only dream about. Each one of them was living a boy’s life; Peter only had a subscription to Boy’s Life.

  “And then Mom left,” I whisper. “She freed herself, and that freed me.”

  Peter would never be one hundred percent sure why his mother left, since he hadn’t spoken to her since that day in December 1975, and he hadn’t even gotten so much as a postcard, but one thing Peter knew for sure: Hel hated each and every sinew of the Captain’s salty, seagoing guts.

  Peter had seen and heard the signs well before her departure. But because he was a child, he didn’t understand the sarcasm in his mother’s voice when she said, “We can’t possibly start the day without the Captain’s hot cup of damn Joe,” or “Everything is just hunky-fucking-dory, Petey.” He didn’t notice all the ingredients she bought at the pharmacy that she stirred into the Captain’s whiskey sours—“Just a little something extra special to help the Captain sleep.” He didn’t see the splotches on her face as bruises—just as gobs of makeup.

  Christmas Eve 1975, another Christmas Eve service at the Methodist church. Dripping candles, wilting poinsettias, whining carols, never-ending prayers, Ian sticking his tongue out, the familiar reading from Matthew. Peter was twelve. During a guitar and flute performance of “What Child Is This?” his mother rose from the pew, kissed him on the forehead, said, “Be good, Petey,” and left the sanctuary.

  “Woman always has to go to the head,” the Captain growled. He never lowered his voice, even in church, for he was always at sea, and this particular Christmas Eve he was swimming on a half-dozen whiskey sours. “She never could learn to hold her piss.”

  And that
’s the last time Peter ever saw his mother.

  The next morning, after finding no Campbell’s Chicken and Stars cans in the pantry, Peter opened his gifts, and his father said nothing.

  Nothing.

  One day she was there, the next she was gone. Peter didn’t like God much for that, but he wasn’t going to tell Him. He had been praying for more freedom, for more excitement in his life, for something other than what he was experiencing every day. He wanted to tell God that He had missed, that His aim was off, that He was throwing too many breaking balls out of the strike zone. Though Peter was the one who prayed for the gift of freedom, his mother got to open that gift, and Peter became the Captain’s favorite Seaman Recruit to kick around from that day on.

  Luckily, Peter knew where his mother had hidden the sleeping pills, the ones she used to crush to a fine powder and later slip into the Captain’s last whiskey sour of the day. Peter found that using a rolling pin was fairly effective and quieter than using the little hammer his mother had used, so he filled a plastic bag and emptied half of it into the Captain’s third whiskey sour the day after Christmas. The Captain was three sheets to the wind and out like the lights on the Christmas tree within twenty minutes.

  Once Peter started powdering the Captain’s morning cup of Joe, he was finally free to roam the neighborhood…

  Henry would want more back story here. He would say that I’m only scratching the surface, like the gulls outside my window swooping over the bay and dipping their wings into the foamy crests of waves. He would ask: “How did your mother’s leaving make Peter feel at the time? Won’t the reader find it hard to believe that it was ‘business as usual’ on Christmas morning without Peter’s mother there? And wouldn’t Peter’s father react in some other way than saying ‘nothing’?”