Everything Matters!

by Ron Currie Jr.

  Uncle Rodney sees me looking at his wrist and says Yeah you got me. I’m just a few floors up, on the adult unit.

  This doesn’t make sense because Uncle Rodney doesn’t have a problem like me. I don’t know what to say.

  Uncle Rodney says Yeah well I figured I was here getting my nose fixed anyway. He laughs, but I don’t laugh with him because I don’t know what’s funny. Hey, he says, if you want me to take you to that Red Sox-Royals series you’ve got to get better first, and I can’t rightly expect you to get better when I’m setting such a shitty example myself, right?

  He smiles that tight-pain smile again. I still don’t say anything. Him mentioning the game we’re supposed to go to gets me thinking about the only game I went to at Fenway Park with Dad, when we sat in the right field roof box and how the stairs were so steep going down to the seats that every step felt like falling. How I’d never seen anything so big and green and the way the sun shined down over the left field wall. How the hot dog guy came by yelling Yo Hot dogs! and Dad ordered two for each of us and we ate and I shared a napkin with Junior and I dropped one of my hot dogs when some guy bumped me after Freddy Lynn hit a home run, and how Dad said to the guy Hey watch it scooter, and the guy said something back, and Dad stood up and looked at him and then the guy shut his mouth and drank his beer. It makes me want to cry, thinking about that. Everything makes me want to cry in this place.

  Uncle Rodney’s smile goes away. But really, he says, you know I was thinking about you and how I don’t have any kids of my own and you know I think of you like my son, Rod. If I hadn’t been so fucked up myself I might have seen something was wrong with you. There are other things, too, other reasons I’m here. I’ve hurt a lot of people and it’s time for me to start behaving like an adult, finally. You’ve made me see that. You can take the credit.

  I feel like there’s something I should say but I still don’t know what it is. Looking at Uncle Rodney as he’s talking is sort of uncomfortable, especially when he stops talking and looks at me like there’s something I should say. So I look away from him, around the dayroom. On one side is the counter and sink and the refrigerator with the sign on the door that says NO CAFFEINATED BEVERAGES ALLOWED. On the other side Gary Nale is watching TV, and Woodworth (Call Me Woody) Evans is playing checkers with the occupational therapist, whose name I can’t remember. It looks like a game of checkers but what it actually is is a way for the therapist to test how Woody’s brain is doing.

  Shit, kid, I don’t know why I’m laying all this on you, Uncle Rodney says. Telling you all about my problems when you’re stuck in here. He leans back in his chair and touches his nose again. I guess we’ve just always been more like friends—I mean I never felt like much of an authority figure or anything. When I was your age I’d go around the bars with my old man and shine shoes, finish people’s drinks, pick a pocket every once in a while. We were more like buddies than father and son. Partners in crime. I guess that’s how I’ve always felt about you. So I need to keep reminding myself that you’re a kid and there are certain things I can’t just out and say.

  Uncle Rodney leans forward again, and his voice gets all low. But there is something I think I should tell you, he says. I don’t know if you’re ready to hear it, but with everything that’s going on I feel like you should know.

  Across the room Woody uses a king to take the occupational therapist’s last checker. He raises his arms and celebrates as she writes in a notebook. I guess he doesn’t realize that they try to let you win.

  It’s about your ma, Uncle Rodney says. Hey, listen to me. Are you listening?

  I look back at him. Yes.

  She’s a great woman, Uncle Rodney says. I want you to understand that. I’m not saying she’s a bad person. Obviously we live different lives. I’ve never really been into the God thing, but that’s fine, she’s my sister and I love her. And she loves you very much, too, kid. But you know, she’s human, and she’s got a problem, and considering where you and me are we definitely can’t be judging her for it, but you need to know.

  Until now I’ve just been sitting here waiting and listening but now suddenly something clicks and I think I know what Uncle Rodney’s going to say and I don’t want to hear. I thought I was grown up and tough but it’s only taken five days for me to know I’m not and I don’t think I can handle this. But still I don’t say anything.

  See the thing is, Uncle Rodney says, your ma is a drunk. An alcoholic, I mean.

  I look at him.

  I know it’s hard to believe. But think how good you were at hiding it. No one knew, right? You were using every day and no one knew. Well your ma’s the same way. She drinks vodka so no one can smell it, just like our ma, your mémère, used to do. It’s not too hard to hide it if you want to, is it kiddo?

  And I want to tell Uncle Rodney, No, you’re wrong, don’t talk about my ma that way. I want to tell him to fuck off and get the fuck out of here and don’t ever talk to me again. But he’s my uncle, my godfather, and I’m not supposed to be willful because that’s what got me stuck in this place to begin with. Here the adults talk and I listen. That’s how it works if I want to go home. It started with Dad. He said You’re going to the hospital, and I listened. Then with Rosemary, who said No more, Rodney knows everything, you work the program and you’ll be fine. I listened. Claire, the day attendant, who told me no one is allowed to have forks or knives and you can eat everything with a spork that you can with a fork, and though that isn’t really true I listened and didn’t argue.

  But this is different. It’s hard not to say anything. I love Uncle Rodney and I’m really glad to see him because I’m lonely here but who does he think he is? What does he know? He doesn’t live with my ma. He doesn’t see her every day. Just because his family was all fucked up when he was a kid doesn’t mean my family is. Even if it is true, why does he think I need to know? I can’t do anything about it. It doesn’t make me feel better about where I’m at.

  Uncle Rodney’s sitting there watching me, waiting for me to say something, and I want to stand up and say these things and punch him in his dead nose. Knock it right off his face. But I can’t, if I want to get better and go home and see my friends and play ball again. If I want to go to Fenway and cut wood and hunt turkeys with my dad again, I can’t.

  So I don’t. I don’t say anything. Uncle Rodney goes on talking and I just kind of make these noises, not saying Yes you’re right or No you’re wrong, just little noises so he thinks I’m listening. What I’m really doing is wishing he would leave. Every minute he’s still here I get more and more upset.

  Uncle Rodney keeps talking but it’s all blending together, the only thing that I can make out is every once and a while he says Your ma. It sounds like blah blah blah Your ma blah blah blah blah Your ma. I don’t know why that’s all I can hear, but I’m starting to feel weird now and all I want is to see my ma, more than I ever have in my life. My legs are hurting me real bad and I’m getting a feeling between my eyes that’s not good at all. I can hear my heart beat in my ears. The light through the windows is weird, like it’s bent or something. And I keep thinking I want my ma, that’s all I think over and over and it’s kind of embarrassing because it’s not like I’m four years old, besides which it never mattered to me much before whether or not she was around. But now that’s all I want, I have to admit it even though it’s embarrassing because it’s about honesty here, I want my ma and I don’t care. Then the light starts to go away and I hear Uncle Rodney say Hey somebody help us over here and then it’s nothing and when the light comes back it isn’t bent anymore, it’s normal like light has always been. What’s different is me, my brain isn’t working right somehow and nothing makes any sense. Uncle Rodney is gone and my ma is here, sitting next to me with her hand on my face, and I see that somehow I’m in a bed all of a sudden, with a tube in my arm and wires stuck on me, and there are a couple machines beeping and with things on their screens that look like the graphs we did in math class in scho
ol. For a minute I think maybe they lied to me because like I says they told me the only withdrawal that can kill you is alcohol but here I am with all these tubes and wires and machines and it looks to me like maybe I almost died. I should be scared, but I’m not. I feel really mellow and it’s something to do with Ma’s hand nice and cool on my face, and her voice. She’s talking to God like she does, asking him to help me and I’m sure there’s no way he could say no to her. For the first time since I got here I don’t want any drugs at all. I listen to Ma praying and I know what Uncle Rodney said isn’t true. And I know I’m going to be okay.

  Love

  At this stage in your life, just short of adolescence, the Polish army of your emotional self has fallen to the Nazi war machine of your intellect, and your relationships with most people, even your brother and parents, are cool and slight though not entirely without love. This is as you prefer it. You’ve developed an aversion to physical affection, and the people in your life are aware of this aversion, and respect it, even your mother, whose proclivity for PDAs is legend and has only gotten worse over the past few years, growing in direct proportion to the drinking she thinks no one knows about. Now she merely transfers your share of hugs, kisses, and clothes-fiddling to your brother, a double-duty he does not find the least bit oppressive, even though at fifteen he’s reached an age when most normal boys shy away from physical affection from their parents. Rodney, of course, has not been normal for quite some time, and he bears your mother’s attentions with the same dazed good humor that has been the hallmark of his personality since his “episode” in rehab. The doctors have all along referred to Rodney’s brain injury as an “episode” or “incident” because, quite simply, they never could figure out exactly what went wrong. It will be a few years before scientists discover, through the use of the new ECAT 931 PET scanner, that prolonged cocaine use can cause permanent blood flow deficits to certain areas of the brain, even after the cocaine is removed. In Rodney’s case these deficits were exacerbated catastrophically by a sudden spasm of several intracranial blood vessels, which damaged the portions of his brain responsible for attention, memory, concept formation, and mental flexibility. The episode, however, left him still quite functional in other ways, in particular on the ball field, and this in large part is what has the doctors puzzled. He has trouble remembering to put his pants on after his underwear, but can spray 97-mph fastballs to all fields effortlessly. His case is so unusual and baffling, in fact, that for a couple of years now your father has had to rebuff, with increasing firmness, the overtures of research scientists determined to study Rodney.

  You, meantime, are left to the solitary existence you prefer, a life beyond touch, wherein one eschews all physical contact to minimize the pain of inevitable loss. You move through your life like a ghost, semi-present, barely displacing air. When you sit at a desk in school it appears to observers that you’re somehow resting not on the seat but rather just above it. Similarly, whenever you manipulate an object, such as taking an apple from the à la carte line or opening a bathroom door, the object seems to move without the benefit of any actual contact with your hand. The other kids think you’re a Jedi or something. This sort of creepiness does nothing to improve your popularity, though it goes a long way toward discouraging the physical abuse that eggheads normally suffer, when early-onset puberty has enabled a small percentage of the boys to distinguish themselves with the first hints of biceps and body hair. These physically prodigious boys, for reasons only nature understands, are most often the least prodigious intellectually, and to compensate for this have a tendency to throw their weight around, so to speak. Except that in this case even the most ambitious bullies at the junior high want nothing to do with you, and venture little more than insults hurled across crowded between-period hallways.

  It might surprise you to learn you’re not much more popular among the teachers than the students. This becomes easier to understand when you consider that you’re eight times as smart, exponentially, as the smartest among them, and moreover that they are keenly aware of this fact. Teachers are underpaid, and often do as much babysitting as teaching. They are expected to make a classroom of forty students behave, but the limits of their authority to do so are a joke, and are recognized as such by even the youngest troublemakers. The only thing they really have going for them is that they know more than their students. That’s it. And when you take that away from them, whether you intend to or not, they’re not going to like you very much. You have taken this away from the teachers at your school, and they do not like you very much, and they do not try very hard to pretend that they do.

  Mrs. Harris, who in title is the Gifted and Talented teacher but who in actuality has sort of become your private tutor, is the exception. She’s secure enough in her own intelligence not to be threatened by yours. And though she is not your equal in terms of raw smarts, she is sharp enough to recognize that you are still just a child. A strange, morose, prodigiously talented child, but a child nonetheless, requiring attention, encouragement, discipline. She provides all three.

  It is not coincidence, then, that Mrs. Harris is and has been the object of your life’s first crush. It helps that she is thin and boyish, a physical type you will find yourself drawn to your entire life. Her dark brown hair is cut in a short pageboy style she appreciates not because it is reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn, but for its practicality and ease of use. She has eyes like chocolate truffles, and is the only person you know with good teeth. She favors neutral-colored blouses that reveal almost no skin and long tweed skirts, the rough fabric of which sends little electric thrills through your body on those lucky days when it catches the fine hairs on your arm.

  Trust us when we tell you that this heady, baffling cocktail of physical and emotional reactions is a crush. It is the reason you haven’t yet decided to forgo school altogether. It is the reason your stomach hit the floor, as though filled with rolled coin, on the day Mr. Harris came in to drop off Mrs. Harris’s lunch, forcing you to accept the actuality of his skinny, bespectacled existence. It is the reason that her image, always hers, comes to you on the nights you wait for Rodney to be asleep, so you can do to yourself that thing which you discovered by accident only a few weeks ago, when your underwear rubbed against you in a way that, if you were a cartoon character, would have produced a big shining lightbulb in the air above your head, that thing which feels so good that sometimes you’re convinced you’ll lose all control and pass out and wake facedown on the floor, with a sticky belly and your pajama bottoms around your ankles.

  All of it—the whole sweaty sick-stomached mess—is attributable to crush.

  The power of crush, though, daunting and impressive as it is, cannot hope to compare to that of love. You realize this, instantly and for all time, when Amy Benoit enters the G&T classroom on a Tuesday in January.

  She is, at first glance, homely. Her hair has a violent natural curl exacerbated by the shortness of its cut, resulting in a dreadful rusty brown ’fro. Smatterings of pimples stand out on her cheeks and in the hollow beneath her bottom lip, the result of a premature and persistent tendency toward oily skin; for most of her early adolescence she will look as though she’s taken a load of birdshot to the face. But there is something remarkable about her homeliness, or rather something remarkable beneath it, strong hints of genuine beauty waiting for an opportunity to emerge: her eyes, sea-glass green and simmering with intelligence; the precocious swell of her hips; her long, delicate hands, still elegant and appealing despite the fact that the nails have been gnawed to the quick. These are what you notice. These are the features that scream out to you the moment she walks through the door, a transfer from the Catholic school across town.

  There’s something intangible, too, one of those ineffable qualities that people who are truly in love most revere in their partners. It’s the cool way her eyes take in the contents of the G&T classroom, the way she walks in without any of the self-consciousness usually displayed by someone entering
a room full of people she’s never met. She has a regal bearing, you think, but that’s not quite right either, because there’s no hint of arrogance in the way Amy comports herself. She’s self-possessed, that’s it. Absolutely self-possessed. She sets her bookbag on the floor and sits at the desk adjacent to yours. She looks up, and when her eyes settle on you, you feel like a bird that’s just flown into a sliding glass door.

  The two of you stare at each other for a long silent moment.

  “Hi,” she says finally, and like that you are done for, sunk, finished. This is love, and we don’t need to explain the difference between love and crush, because you are now and forevermore fully aware of that difference, in both its vastness and its details.

  It should be mentioned that you and Amy are not “soul mates,” nor are you “meant for each other” or any other such romantic nonsense. At this moment, as you sit gawking at her, there are 4.9 billion people on the planet. One needn’t be a statistician to surmise that there are tens of thousands of people with whom you could fall in love and live an equally happy life. Whom you take out a mortgage with is mostly an accident of geography and economics, and has nothing to do with destiny. Consider, for a moment, what might have happened if Amy’s father hadn’t recently bailed out on her mother and fled to the West Coast to drink in anonymity, thereby making private school financially impossible. The two of you could have easily lived and died in this town without ever having said hello. Not destiny. Happenstance.

  Amy smiles, revealing teeth that came in perfectly straight without the aid of braces. “This is the part,” she says, “where you say ‘hi’ back.”

  “Hi,” you say, still too stunned, mercifully, to be embarrassed.

  She laughs a little, not unkindly, and turns away as Mrs. Harris comes to her desk. The two of them talk quietly while you look on. When they’ve finished Mrs. Harris introduces Amy to the class and receives a half-dozen murmured hellos in return.