by Adam Resnick
As fate would have it, the first birthday party of third grade turned out to be Karen’s, in October. To my knowledge, it was the first time she’d ever held such an event. The entire class was invited; I was just part of the head count. Still, I had never wanted to attend anything more in my life. I’d already decided it would be there that I’d confront her about last spring and what we’d seen at Eddie Hoke’s house. The photograph had put us both under some kind of spell, like characters in a Grimms’ fairy tale, and I needed to save her as much as I needed to save myself.
The party was noisy and crowded, and my plan seemed doomed from the start. I was alone in the kitchen, hiding from musical chairs, when the moment unexpectedly arrived. Karen walked in, giggling to herself about something, and opened the refrigerator. When she closed the door, she saw me lurking in the back corner of the room next to the cat bowls.
“Can I talk to you?” I said.
She stood motionless, holding a bottle of Wink soda. After a moment, she shrugged her shoulders. Finally! We were communicating again. I had to choose my next words very carefully. I had to take her back in time, before everything had changed, before we saw what we saw. Did I detect a hint of that old crooked smile creeping across her face?
“Kaaaren! Time to open presents!” It was the spiky voice of her grandmother calling from the living room. There was a brief stillness in the kitchen. Karen regarded me for a moment with a faint look of pity, shrugged her shoulders again, and hurried out.
As a chorus of “oohs” and “ahhs” filled the air, scraps of wrapping paper fluttered aimlessly through the Milojevich living room like dying birds. The final present was the largest, and Karen tore into it fiercely, shredding the Peanuts-themed paper until only a portion of Violet’s scalp remained. Her eyes grew wide, and the squeal she emitted was pure and joyful. She lifted herself from the floor and raised the box high in the air, like Moses revealing the tablets. Behold! Barbie and Her Magic Horse, “Dancer”!
My gaze fell on her smile. It was perfect, without a trace of imbalance. Then up the stairs she went with her treasure, trailed by a parade of eight-year-old girls in crinkly dresses.
I was left alone with the boys. David Kitmer was smearing icing under his nose, pretending it was snot. Other kids followed suit. Karen’s grandmother lit up a Kent. And the safety switch in my head finally tripped off, suspending electrical activity in my brain. That would be my present—the greatest gift of all.
• • •
Many years later, when I was in ninth grade, the Hokes relocated to San Diego. By then, I rarely thought about Karen Milojevich or that long-ago Easter party. The whole matter had been nicely tucked away in the back of my mind, a little annuity guaranteed to fuck me up in ways I’d never be able to identify. So I was surprised by the incredible buoyancy I felt as I watched the moving van pull out of the neighborhood. It was in there somewhere probably, riding along in a box marked PAPERWORK: JERRY’S OFFICE—DO NOT OPEN. Maybe when the truck crossed the Arizona border, that peculiar woman would finally stop sucking—just long enough for the horse to kick his way out and run into the desert.
Booker’s a Nice Guy
My mother wanted me and my brother Mike out of the house. It was a typical Sunday, when the toll of having six children—all boys—brought her nervous system to the brink of collapse. Though she was generally a saint in every regard, you could always tell when her mood had shifted and “Bad Joyce” arrived. Doors and cupboards would begin to slam, and her soft voice would be replaced by something a good deal sharper.
On this particular morning, she was set off by what I’d intended as a simple rhetorical question: “Aw, who ate all the Frosted Flakes?” Suddenly the house shook. “I don’t know and I don’t care!” she thundered. “I’m not buying that crap anymore! From now on, the sweetest thing you’ll find in this house is a graham cracker!” The graham cracker threat was as frequent as it was hollow, but it was an indicator that the house had officially darkened. The situation deteriorated when my brother Mike walked in rubbing his belly, empty cereal bowl in hand, and announced, “My oh my, ain’t dem Frosted Flakes like sugah.” The standard donnybrook ensued—shouting and brawling and rolling around on the floor as chairs toppled and frightened pets ran for their lives. Mike, who was bigger and a few years older, always had me pinned before I could execute my fantasy move: burying a steak knife in his heart. My father entered the kitchen, separated us, and dispensed with the obligatory “Don’t make me knock your fucking heads together,” but my mother had had enough. “Dump ’em in the woods,” she decreed, her way of requesting that we be dropped off at the Green Hills recreation park, located in the dark thickets off Route 443. (Not as ominous as it sounds: lots of Jews.)
The car ride to the park began unremarkably enough and with a minimum of conversation. I don’t recall ever saying much inside my father’s car, because it was difficult to remain conscious. Once the Pall Malls were pumping and Bert Kaempfert started oozing from the 8-track player, slipping into a gentle coma was routine. To this day I maintain my dad had stumbled onto a formula that might be of interest to both hypnotists and anesthesiologists. Fortunately, being groggy was usually a blessing when you were in his presence. Merv was a take-no-shit kind of guy. He was tall, built like a block of concrete, and had three basic settings: angry, brooding, and wound-tighter-than-a-gnat’s-ass. So it was imperative that you remained perfectly still and quiet in his presence. One errant sneeze would send his shoulders into a startled hunch, followed by an explosive “Jesus Christ! What the fuck’s wrong with you?” And lord help the boy who got a case of the giggles, the kind that couldn’t be stifled no matter how hard you tried. For this, Merv always offered up the same riddle, delivered in the soothing timbre of a nursery school teacher: “You know what happens to people who laugh too much, don’t you?” Heavy beat. “They end up crying.” It was a clever little saying and a useful learning tool. It taught me to equate laughter with violence, and permanently wired me to distrust even the slightest flicker of pleasure.
Yet there was an undeniable soft side to my father. When he wasn’t being provoked, or avenging a perceived slight, or leaping from the car to kick some motorist’s ass, or menacing a stranger for yanking a dog’s leash too hard (“How’d you like me to wrap that fucking chain around your neck?”), he could be a real pussycat. This was never more evident than on the ride that day to Green Hills.
Enjoying an open lane and a rare light mood, he pulled out the Bert Kaempfert tape and replaced it with the more life-affirming Al Hirt. The skull-piercing trumpet stabs of “Java” began to ricochet through the car, jolting my brother and me from our hazy sojourn on Queer Street, sponsored by the good folks at R. J. Reynolds Tobacco. The timing of our revival would prove to be unfortunate.
It remains a point of debate as to who saw him first. He was walking along the shoulder of Linglestown Road when our car flew by so fast his gray work shirt billowed and his cap nearly blew off. Mike and I were suddenly wide-eyed and screaming: “Hey, it’s Booker! Dad, go back, go back! It’s Booker!”
“Who the hell’s Booker?”
Booker was the friendly janitor at James Buchanan Elementary School. All the kids loved Booker. He was the only adult in the entire school who didn’t treat us like assholes. He did cool things like let us help him get the ladder from the storage closet to get the kickball off the roof or inspect the dead mouse lodged in the motor of the cafeteria milk machine. When we dragged him into the girls’ locker room after school one day to find out what the hell was inside that powder blue vending machine on the wall, his answer—“Supplies for the teachers”—was so dull and honest that we promptly lost interest. Man, did we love the guy. The fact that he was colored made him even cooler. We hung on his every word and gesture. And, boy, could he whistle! Booker belonged on television.
“You gotta give him a ride, Dad!” we implored. “He’s a nice guy!”
My father didn’t hesitate. He made a screechy Jack
Webb U-turn and a moment later the big Delta 88 was pulling up alongside Booker.
“Hey there, Booker,” my dad called out as the electric window lowered. “Need a lift?”
“Well, if you don’t mind, thank you,” came the reply.
Mike and I were delirious, cheering from the back of the car as our hero slid into the passenger seat next to my father. This was the kind of thing you dreamed about.
“Where can we take you, Booker?” we shrieked. “We’ll take you anywhere! You wanna get ice cream? You wanna go bowling? You wanna come to our house?” My dad shot us a look in the rearview mirror.
Booker rubbed the back of his neck and said, “Well, I was hopin’ to get downtown to the hospital to see my sister.” Harrisburg Hospital was far in the opposite direction, so I wasn’t sure how Merv would respond.
“Don’t worry, we’ll get you there,” my father assured him, clearly satisfied with the boundaries of the mission. He turned up “Java” and we were on our way. It was seamless.
As we negotiated the anemic landscape of Susquehanna Township, Merv talked of his own sister—my aunt Lucy—who, he said, had also been hospitalized recently with a condition that required her to consume two and a half gallons of water a day:
“I’d visit her a few times a week, Booker, like clockwork. That can be better than all the water in the world. Don’t let these doctors bullshit you.” Booker nodded.
“How’s everything with your sister?” Merv asked. “Nothing serious, I hope.”
Booker replied, “Oh, she jus’ work in the lunchroom.”
My father solemnly knocked on the vinyl dashboard a few times and said, “God bless her. Let’s keep it that way.”
Mike and I were getting a little annoyed that Merv was hogging Booker. We had a few things to talk about ourselves—urgent topics that came tumbling from our mouths as we gripped the headrests and leaned into the front seat.
“Hey, Booker, remember the time you needed that bucket? And you asked us to get it for you? And we went and got it, and then you gave us some candy from the teachers’ lounge?”
Merv disliked rapid, unfocused chatter. Like most things, it made him tense.
“And the time the praying mantis was on the wall in the art room, and Mr. Dunn tried to get it off with a hanger, but it jumped down and you caught it in that mayonnaise jar, but its head fell off—”
“Okay,” Merv said, “we understand.”
“—and the time Mrs. Weihbrecht asked you to wash her car? And you made that face, and she said, ‘Don’t make that face at me,’ and you said something back to her, and she turned all red and tried to get you fired?”
“Boys—drop it.”
“And what about the time Matt Strohecker took a shit in the bathroom sink! And you chased him out with a mop! And he fell and hit his head on the—”
“Shut the fuck up!”
The entire car shuddered as if we’d encountered a wind shear. “The man’s off work—let him enjoy his weekend, for Christ’s sake!”
He turned to our passenger. “Sorry, Booker.”
Booker just chuckled and said, “Aw, them’s good boys. Heh-heh. They okay.”
He turned around and smiled at us, flashing a gold tooth and pushing his cap back to scratch his forehead.
That was the moment my brother and I realized that the gentleman in the front seat with my father wasn’t Booker. Booker didn’t have a gold tooth. Nor was he missing a tiny piece of his lower lip. In fact, this man looked nothing like Booker. He seemed nice enough, that’s for sure, but again, not Booker.
It’s difficult to describe the wave of fear that overtook us. Merv’s temper could be triggered by anything that caught him off guard or reasonable human error. Things like accidentally dropping your fork at the dinner table, shuffling a deck of cards, or petting the dog too loudly (yes, it’s possible). So it was safe to assume that if he discovered Mike and I had put an unfamiliar black man in the car, well, it wouldn’t be ideal. Our fate now rested in the hands of the enigmatic pilgrim in the front seat, and we prayed that the words “Why you keep callin’ me Booker?” never rolled off his tongue. From this point forward, as far as we were concerned, the guy was Booker. He had to be.
The good news was, “Booker” wasn’t saying much. Merv continued to do all the talking, choosing topics, I assumed, he felt would be of particular interest to our guest.
“You may not know this, Booker, but I played second-string varsity halfback my sophomore year at William Penn. Then I found basketball. That was my real game. The guys on the other team used to piss in their pants when they’d see me. I got every fucking rebound. You hear me, Booker? I owned the backboard.”
I could see the back of Booker’s head bobbing in polite agreement.
“Yeah, I had those rednecks trained like cocker spaniels. They only had to fuck with me once and, I can assure you, they didn’t fuck with me again.”
My father swore around everybody. Children, kings, or clergy, it didn’t matter. He exploded into this world untethered from decorum and was incapable of communicating any other way. If you gave a team of speech pathologists five years and fifty million dollars, they’d never be able to get Merv to stop saying “fuck.”
“Yeah, I used to swat those fucking hillbillies around like they were horseflies,” he continued. “Christ, when we played Steelton, it was a free-for-all. They’re not civilized in Steelton. Bunch of drunks. Townies, we called ’em. I fell into the bleachers once and a lady beat me with a metal crutch. Real Okies, you know?”
A small chuckle came from Booker. “She really give it to ya, huh?”
“Ah, fuck her. We were unbeatable. I was out with a sprained ankle for a month and we lost every game. See, I owned the fucking backboard.”
We stopped for gas at the Arco station on Sixth Street. While the attendant filled the tank, my father instructed Mike and me to run inside and get a few Cokes.
“You want a Coke, Booker?” he asked.
Booker replied, “Naw, it’s that pop that took half my teeth by now. Heh-heh.” Merv didn’t quite know how to process that information and was further flustered when Mike followed up with “So how many should we get?”
“Just get the goddamn Cokes!” he barked.
My brother and I dragged ourselves from the backseat as Merv let out a frustrated sigh, remarking to Booker, “These fucking kids move like Stepin Fetchit.”
The Coke machine was out of order, but that was the least of our concerns. Inside the gas station, Mike and I were finally alone and could discuss our dilemma out loud. We were panicked and irrational, and things swiftly turned heated. Who was responsible for the mock Booker inside our father’s Oldsmobile? Mike blamed me, I blamed him, and in a fleeting moment of détente, we both blamed Al Hirt. I suggested we pull Merv aside now and confess, while we were safely parked, rather than risk a car wreck when he figured it out. Mike told me to keep my mouth shut. He wanted to roll the dice. So far, the fake Booker didn’t seem to mind being the real Booker.
We debated a bit more and then it turned cheap.
I called him a fuckhead, he punched me in the arm, and I tried to strangle him. Soon we were rolling around the gas station floor in a blur of blue denim and madras. I managed to pry off one of his Keds and launched it into space. It crashed against the metal venetian blinds and filled the small room with an oily cloud of dust that had us both coughing like coal miners. In short order, Mike pinned me under his knees, where all I could do was flail around like an upended turtle. Somehow I kicked over a display rack, and a torrent of road maps rained down on us. I remember having a brief moment to think, Wow, Delaware, before I suddenly rose into the sky, as if my spirit was exiting my body. Mike was promptly up there with me.
Merv had us both by the wrists like he was dangling a couple of ratty stuffed animals. A toothless mechanic with the name “Dud” sewn on his coveralls stood there cackling as he wedged a gob of Red Man into his cheek. “I put mine in the shed last Sundee.”
Merv shot him an annoyed look, the kind he reserved for interlopers and people who owned sheds.
We were swiftly propelled out the door. Mike got a kick in the ass as he walked toward the car. I was in the clear until I laughed, then got one too. “I can’t believe you guys came from my balls,” Merv grumbled. We heard that one a lot when we did something wrong. It was my dad’s version of an Atticus Finch moment, minus the porch swing and gentle wisdom.
Back behind the wheel, Merv turned to Booker as if he had the worst possible news. “Booker,” he said somberly, “the Coke machine was out of order. There are no Cokes. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.” His hand rested on our passenger’s shoulder. Booker, who didn’t want a Coke in the first place, took it in stride. “Tha’s all right,” he said. “The world done pretty good with water up to now. Heh-heh.” Merv chuckled and agreed. Then Mike and I joined in, laughing a little too hard in an attempt to keep the mood light. “Ha-ha!” I belted out, literally slapping my knee. “Water’s still the best drink in the world! Right, Dad? And it’s free too! Ha-ha! Water!” Merv’s eyes were quickly in the rearview, shooting me an urgent dispatch to cut the shit.
Booker glanced at his watch.
The sky was turning overcast as we journeyed south across Front Street, parallel to the Susquehanna River, leisurely making our way toward the hospital.
“I do two hundred and fifty push-ups every morning,” my dad informed Booker as he ignited another cigarette. “My doctor looks at me like I’m a freak. He gave me a stress test and I almost burned the fucking machine out.”
Booker’s shoulders had fallen into a mild slump—the posture of a man on a bus ride from Bangor to Corpus Christi.
“But I’ve always maintained my body,” Merv went on. “It’s my natural instinct. I remember once when I was a kid, I hugged my grandmother so hard I broke three of her ribs. See, I don’t know how to regulate my strength. If I hold a canary in my hand, I’ll crush it. It’s heartbreaking.”