Leave Out the Tragic Parts

by Dave Kindred

  She was tough and smart. For years she said, “I’m a survivor,” and she proved it daily. She had come of age during the Depression and believed that work was the answer to every question. In the 1950s at the Dixie Truckers Stop in McLean—I could see its roof from our roof—when no one else would serve dinner to African Americans, Mom waited tables for Louis Armstrong and his jazz band driving from St. Louis to Chicago on Route 66. “Louis left a $5 tip and said be sure to be at work next week because he’d be coming through the other direction,” Mom said. Twenty-five years later, at a state institution for the developmentally challenged, she did a heroine’s work with children and adults who needed a heroine every day. She called them “my kids.”

  A month before I sat with her in the nursing home, a doctor had pronounced her all but dead. She had the flu or pneumonia or a bad cold, something that left her weak. In two days in a hospital, she had become cadaverous, her face locked in the rictus look of death. I asked the doctor, “What’s going on? She wasn’t this bad when she came in.” Whatever the doctor said, I remember only four words: “… the end of life.”

  Somehow Mom left that hospital and moved into the Apostolic Christian Restmor nursing home. She had lived with Sandy the previous eight years, and we had dreaded the idea of a nursing home. Mom was assigned to a room with a woman she had never met, Lena Vignieri, age ninety-six. Lena, too, had been so weak during a stay in a hospital as to be seen as near death.

  Happily, Mom and Lena exceeded all expectations. In a picture taken with a Mother’s Day coming, the nonagenarians, both wearing happy red hats, were caught in a fit of laughter. Mom is on the left—Marie Magdalena Maloney Kindred Cheek. Her eyes are squeezed shut by whatever happy thought has lit her up. On the right is Lena Scardello Vignieri. Standing behind them are their daughters, Sandy Litwiller and Rose Mary Detweiler.

  On April 12, 2011, we thought Mom would soon be dead. Sixteen days later, at Restmor, she walked on her own for five minutes. She was not at the end of life—she was at a new beginning. For no reason other than it’s what reporters do, I made notes of Mom’s comeback in the nursing home:

  Mom now says she’s rolling around Restmor so much that “they’re always looking for me!” She moves the wheelchair with her feet. “I can do anything in this wheelchair that anybody else can do!” Voice no longer squeaky.

  A therapist checked Mom’s ability to chew her food and swallow. The therapist asked, “Can you cough for me?” Mom’s hearing, never good, wasn’t good this day either. “Oh, sure! I talk all the time!”

  Mom says Dad “never went to a dentist or doctor. He said God made him this way, he’d stay that way. Poor guy.”

  “Gotta go where life leads you.” Made a motion with her hand, like a fish swimming in a stream. “Wherever.”

  “Age is nothing, life’s what’s important.”

  “I’m still here, believe it or not!”

  Mom and Lena were hardscrabble tough. Both were daughters of coal miners. Mom worked in her mother’s tavern. Lena and her husband operated a tavern. Both women had lived lives they could not have imagined. They passed through the Depression. They survived World Wars I and II. They saw a man walk on the moon. Together, they gave birth to four children who gave them sixteen grandchildren, thirty-two great-grandchildren, and two great-great grandchildren.

  Neither woman could hear anything much under a shout. Mom refused hearing aids; she believed it wasn’t her problem (“People just need to speak up!”). Lena wore hearing aids but only occasionally thought to turn them on. Yet magically, they seemed to know what each other said. They communicated through a spiritual telepathy of winks and whispers, giggles and smiles, hand-holdings and kisses on the forehead. No one understood how it was done, or what caused it to be done, and we didn’t much care as we watched in wonder while these two frail, dying women gave each other strength. Lena made Mom laugh. And Mom saw it as her job to take care of Lena and be a heroine for all those really old people in the place, some of them older than her but none so old that they weren’t her “kids” needing her.

  At dinner that evening in the nursing home, she told a woman, “You gotta find a way to eat, you can’t just look at your food.”

  Mom demonstrated. “Like this.” With her right hand, she dipped a spoon into a bowl of creamed corn. Then she reached over with her left hand to grasp her right wrist. With the left hand, she lifted her right arm to bring the spoonful of corn to her mouth.

  “See?” she said.

  Mom’s years at Restmor were life-affirming. She laughed one day as she said, “Everybody asks me how old I am, and I don’t know.” Then she smacked her forehead. “I don’t have an area in my brain for that.” She knew the question was not about her age but her expiration date. “When I’m old enough to die,” she said, and she said it forcefully, “I’ll die.”

  She saw no reason to worry. She knew how to handle it. Until she was old enough to die, by damn she would live. For some, death comes on the dark wings of silence, fear, and sorrow. Not for Mom. In her dying, she would laugh and show her kids how to eat their corn.

  I wasn’t sure she remembered her great-grandson Jared. She had seen him only once, as a toddler. On May 15, 2011, I told her that he was in a hospital in New Orleans.

  “What’s he doing down there?” Mom asked.

  “He’s living on the road now,” I said. “He’s what they call a train-hopper.”

  Mom raised up in her wheelchair and said, “You mean, like a hobo?” Then she told the cheese sandwich story.

  Some coincidences defy explanation. Failing an explanation, someone long ago said, “Coincidence is God’s way of working anonymously.” If that’s so—and why not?—my conversation with Mom had taken us into coincidence territory. Maybe because I wanted it to be so, or maybe because it was so, I decided Mom’s story connected us all. Dad built our house along railroad tracks that reached New Orleans. She made cheese sandwiches for hoboes. I shinnied up to a rooftop because I was wired with a wanderer’s instinct. Trains rocked me to sleep as they would rock Jared to sleep. They promised to take us away from where we were to where we’d rather be, if only we knew where that place was.

  EIGHT

  Jared stayed at Christine’s a month before again answering the call for movement. By then, Puzzles was in jail for having leaped into the Mississippi for a morning swim. Christine wrote, “When Puzzles created chaos, he invoked Deities of fucking up. Trickster spirits, Bacchanalian excess, take no prisoners. He had public drunkenness and disturbing the peace attachments punctuating the map of America. At a gay bar he frequented, Corner Pocket, an old man, shook his head when he saw me with Puzzles, smiled, and said, ‘He’s a bad, bad boy.’”

  Out of jail, that bad boy gathered up the hobblin’ Goblin for a road trip. They hitched a ride to New York City, and Jared spent the summer of 2011 sleeping in a gazebo on the Coney Island boardwalk. There was a girl. Of course a girl, another girl, always a girl with Goblin, Goblin looking for love as if he’d never known love. She was tall, dark, and beautiful, Puerto Rican–French, nineteen years old. She called herself Solzy Twitch Leboy. Those words sounded so beautiful I never asked why she was called that. I didn’t care. It added to the mystery of a girl Goblin knew well when knowing girls well made him feel good.

  She had done a year of college before a drug habit ended that. “Instead of moving back home,” she said, “I got really drunk and curled up on the sidewalk out front of a Kmart on Astor Place.” From then on, she lived on the street. She was in Manhattan when she met two travelin’ kids up from New Orleans, Goblin and Puzzles.

  “Goblin asked me if I wanted to go to Coney Island with them,” Solzy said. “I said yes because I thought he was hot.” She also provided a new viewpoint on the facial tattoo that had caused his mother grief. “He was pretty awesome and definitely a flirt. He talked to every girl who passed by. I loved his eyes and his smile and that sick face tat. He was also hilarious. He always had people laughing. He w
asn’t afraid to sing songs that others in the group might make fun of him for. He did some silly Blink-182 songs for me. He wasn’t afraid to dance, make funny faces, and do silly voices. He had a happy essence about him.”

  Because she had at least a fraction of interest in what went on around her and knew she might want to know what she was like in those long-ago Coney Island days, Solzy bought a journal. When she had something to say, she wrote it down there, like this about the Jared/Goblin boy: “Our first night together, we made love in a playground in the sand. He mentioned a pain in his lower abs”—this was nine months after the surgeries in Arizona—“and I noticed a huge scar right below his belly button. I kissed it gently. We’ve been together every moment since then.”

  The gazebo was home. Tourists stopped by to take pictures of the sleeping beauties, not just Jared and Solzy but sometimes as many as a dozen kids piled in there. It had the look of a flea market, filled with stuff hanging from the edges, artifacts picked up around the island and carried home as memorials to an era. Solzy said, “We ‘decorated’ in a drunken state with whatever we could find,” which is how a painted carousel horse came to hang from the gazebo eaves.

  Late one night, it seemed a good idea to break into Luna Park, one of the island’s three amusement parks.

  “As we walked along the boardwalk,” Solzy said, “we weren’t particularly looking for a way in when we spotted a small fence that appeared easy to climb over.”

  Puzzles and his girlfriend, Kaitlin, were accomplices. “Puzzles was our tallest, so he made it over, no problem. Goblin and I laughed as Kaitlin tried to join him, but she was too drunk to make it more than two feet off the ground.”

  Once Solzy was in the park, she asked Jared to hop over the fence. He was still the hobblin’ Goblin, so…

  “He looked at me like I was crazy, shook his head no, and laughed that beautiful laugh of his. So Puzzles and I examined this ride that goes in circles really fast with music blasting. I climbed over the barriers and into one of the cars and waited for Puzzles to figure out how to turn it on.”

  Then she heard Goblin.

  “How you guys going to get off that thing?” he said. Adding, “Puzzles, you ever hopped off a train going as fast as this shit will once it’s turned on?”

  With the decision put in terms a train-hopper understood, Puzzles chose discretion, and the crew returned to the gazebo, safe from self-harm for the moment and laughing at the things kids will do under the influence of whatever substance they were into at the moment.

  SOLZY’S STORY

  Goblin wasn’t one of those guys that you had to be afraid of. He was a drunk you could have fun with. He was relaxed, he wasn’t afraid to be who he was. Like the way he walked. He still had the limp from his accident, and he wore these pants that were too big. So he’d be limping along, his pants falling down, him pulling ’em up. It was funny and charming.

  There were a lot of layers to him. We had a really deep conversation about children. He supposedly almost had a child in New Orleans—at least that’s what he heard, though I don’t think he believed it. One thing I admired, he was an addict who didn’t put his substance above you. He was a big drinker. Alcohol, alcohol, alcohol. He wanted his vodka. Vodka, his poison of choice. But he never put the substance above friends. Not many addicts would do that.

  We were both drinking all the time. We were both sick and didn’t know it. Kaitlin, my best friend, told me, “You guys are sleeping way too much,” and I thought, Nothing else I want to do, just drink and sleep. A lot of people confuse that behavior, sleeping so much, with using heroin. In our time together, I know Jared never did drugs, not at all, he was all alcohol all the time.

  That’s the thing, you’re an addict and you think you’re in control. Drinking, I was queen of the world. You think you’re in control, but the drug is taking control of you. You’re living for the next drink.

  Jared would wake up, vomit, usually some blood, feel like crap, and go make money to go to the liquor store for the next bottle. I never heard him say he wanted to stop. He just didn’t really care. It’s what made him happy.

  I said you didn’t have to be afraid of Goblin, and that was true, he was sweet, but like all of us he had his moments, like the day the shit really hit the fan with him and Kaitlin.

  They’d been at each other’s throats on and off since we got together. Kaitlin could be a little much to handle. Puzzles and I went for a walk and on the way back we heard Goblin and Kaitlin yelling. He was calling her annoying, and she threatened to punch him, after which Goblin charged at her and I jumped in front of him.

  I told him to calm the fuck down and that he knew better than to put his hands on her. It took him a couple minutes, but he finally seemed like he wasn’t going to knock her lights out. Kaitlin and I left for the other side of the boardwalk.

  The next morning, Goblin looked so sad. He gave me a hug and told me he missed me. I wanted to melt in his arms and just have him hold me. But I stood strong. As beautiful and as charming as he is, he almost hit a girl.

  Then, the morning after that, I woke up with horribly scraped knees. I don’t remember anything. Kaitlin told me that Goblin and I got into it and other people got involved. But I guess everything turned out okay because we were all back together in our cozy little gazebo and Goblin was curled up, snoring quietly, next to me.

  And the hurricane—Hurricane Irene hit Brooklyn the twenty-ninth of August 2011. Everyone had ditched us. The wind was heavy, and Goblin hated the rain, so he’d been bitching since Kaitlin tried to wake us up. I was too drunk and too tired to speak to her, so I just nuzzled into Goblin’s chest and continued sleeping until finally they moved us all off Coney Island and gave us a free train ride into the city.

  We weren’t going to stay in some homeless shelter, but holy shit, that night was out of control. So many people, about fifteen of us from Coney Island, all sleeping on the steps to this apartment building on Second Avenue. In addition, there were about twenty hippie punks sleeping on top of each other, with three dogs, and everybody trying to stay out of the two inches of water that flowed below the second step.

  It’s not the life for everybody, I know that. But I loved it. There’s nothing more freeing. The world was my home. And at the same time there’s nothing more mentally trying. It’s constant chaos. I got to where I wasn’t suicidal, but I didn’t care if I lived or died. So I got out of that life.

  Goblin was a soul that was meant to just keep going.

  Our time ended one day when he just said he had to go back to New Orleans. I saw him in New York sometime later. I didn’t say hi or anything. By that point, I was with my current fiancé, and Goblin was walking around downtown with two girls on his arms. I had to laugh, the cute little flirt.

  NINE

  As fraternal twins, Jared and Jacob looked enough alike to be brothers, both blond, blue-eyed, small, slight. But there was no mistaking which brother was which. The sweetheart Jared came with a baby’s face, open, round, soft; Jacob’s was a closed fist, giving away nothing, hard, with eyes full of suspicion. Jared’s default look was a smile, Jacob’s a scowl. Jared invited you in, Jacob closed you out. Jacob had stumbled through the mindless work of handyman jobs and flipping burgers. Jared earned $194.18 his first week at a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream shop before being fired for spiking his own milkshake with vodka. After high school, the brothers never again lived together.

  Jared found Michael Stephen in his Alexandria squat and then, under the influence of bottom-shelf vodka, wandered across the map never much caring where the trains stopped as long as they took him someplace different each time. Jacob lasted one semester at a community college. Then he floated between our place in Virginia and an uncle’s in California and a friend’s in Pennsylvania. He worked in a pool hall and he worked in a bar. He was paid in tip money and drinks, occasionally picking up a few dollars in nine-ball games. At twenty-two, it was his way of joining his lost brother. We wondered if they could ever
find their way into the light.

  I knew only that they rooted for each other.

  Late in 2011, shortly after Jared left Coney Island, Jacob’s wanderings brought him to his mother’s doorstep in Myrtle Beach. He arrived with an unusual touch of ambition. He wanted to go to school. He thought it would be neat to be an audio engineer. But Lynn had just learned about the Pittsburgh Institute of Aeronautics, a school that trained aviation mechanics. PIA was about to open a Myrtle Beach branch a half-hour from her house.

  Jacob liked the idea. He fancied himself a master of machines. He had done auto mechanic’s work alongside his dad and had rebuilt a twenty-year-old BMW coupe and driven it another ten years. For Jacob, the aeronautics school’s selling point was its report that graduates of its two-year program could count on landing a job with a starting salary between $40,000 and $60,000. Jacob had a girlfriend in Virginia. The promise of that kind of money suggested marriage, a home, and a family.

  Jared, for one, was impressed. When Jacob announced his plan to become a Federal Aviation Administration–certified mechanic, Jared said, “Wow! Then you can get a big-ass house and have a room for me and rooms for our friends.”

  Jacob understood that fraternal twins were no more alike than brothers born in different years, but he saw enough curious connections that he never totally bought into that idea of separateness. “I’d get into trouble at school,” Jacob said. “Like, the teacher would have us write what we did over the weekend and I’d always write, ‘We hung out, we walked in the woods, we went fishing.’ It was always ‘we’ instead of ‘I.’ Because we did everything together.”