This is during the early days of elementary school, so you’re barely tall enough to see into the coffin, which, in your mind, means you are face to face with some dead guy.
“Be quiet, you do know him. It’s Papa Harvey,” Grandma whispers and gives your shoulders a squeeze—a hint to lower your voice.
Debbie is pretty upset by the whole scene, but her reasons differ. She does know this man. He lived right across the street when Grandma Audrey was married to Grandpa Gene. You learn Papa Harvey was a portly man. Was. Lying there in his coffin, his face looks like a skeleton covered in papier-mâché, caked with as much makeup as you see on game show hosts before the advent of Botox. To get you to stop asking why he looks the way he does, Grandma puts her chin on your shoulder and says his eyes are glued shut and his lips are sewn together. At full volume, you ask, “Why is he wearing makeup? Boys don’t wear makeup,” and you get to spend the rest of the visitation on a bench in the foyer eating sandwich halves.
It turns out the last time you visited him was at the Nopeming nursing home, out in the woods. He was still Papa Harvey then, and Papa Harvey looked a lot like Papa Noel—minus the beard. But right then, lying in his coffin, he looks like T. Charles Kingman from Tales from the Crypt. Maybe it’s because the Nopeming nursing home started out as the Nopeming Sanatorium, and sanatoriums were meant for people with wasting diseases. Either way, Papa Harvey was allowed to waste away and die.
Grandma Audrey has no say in what you wear to the next funeral you attend, seeing as how it’s her in the casket. It’s the last time she manages to get the whole family together. But it is odd, as far as funerals go—seeing as how no one really cries.
A better way to explain it would be to say there were a whole lot of people sitting around in awkward silence. Auntie Harriet breaks that silence, saying, “I keep waiting for her to sit up and ask what the hell we’re all staring at.” A few sniffles are heard before the laughter comes.
The laughter breaks off when Grandpa Bub says, “I don’t think I’ll date again.” He always jokes in a dry, monotone voice, but he’s not joking. He’s in full deadpan. There’s no twinkle in either of his eyes. Neither corner of his mouth has a hint of a smile. He gets a few laughs, but no one is laughing with him. They’re laughing at him.
It’s the first thing he’s said all day. He’d recently learned how Grandma hadn’t paid their taxes in better than ten years. Aunt Bobbie made the discovery and put it together how Grandma Audrey thought Grandpa Bub would die first—due to his emphysema—and she’d move into a nursing home with what was left over from his life insurance money and pension.
At the funeral, you don’t say anything. And therein lies the tragedy of Grandma’s sudden stroke. You never got old enough to say what you wanted to. She gets the last word, as always.
After the processional and burial, everyone packs into Grandma’s living room and dining room and kitchen. It’s summer, so some are spilled outside, standing on the stoop and front yard smoking. You sit on a footstool with your back pressed up against the archway that separates the living room and dining room. And no one dares to sit in Grandma Audrey’s chair at the head of the dining room table.
Over the clamoring of charming stories about Grandma’s life and times, the neighbor lady, Candy—the beautician who cut your hair for free—calls attention to you. She says, “David’s so quiet. He hasn’t said a thing. Look,” she says, “he’s lost without Audrey. She was like a mother to him.”
You don’t respond. You cock an eyebrow, roll the back of your skull against the wall, look through the crowd toward her, listen to her yammer on about you, talking about you in third person.
You roll your head back and forth and look at the undulating chaos in Grandma’s house. You can’t help but think how pissed she’d be if she could see the place right then. Every room is the same when you take a lap through the house: down the hallway, through the kitchen, and into the dining room, where you whisper into Mom’s ear, causing her to nod. Then you talk over the crowd, across the table, and tell Dad you’re leaving, spending the weekend at your mom’s house. In protest, he says something about how he wants you to be with him, but you cut him off and remind him—and Candy—how you still have a mother, and you’ll be spending some time with her.
He doesn’t argue. He’s wounded. He pouts even. But no one is there to remind you all to not upset Richard, to not make Richard mad.
Mom’ll drive you to Grandpa Bub’s funeral the next summer, since you’re living with her. There’s a sprinkling of the grandkids there, along with some guys from the tool factory, and his surviving brother and sister. You can’t remember any dialogue exchanged during the visitation. It’s not that no one had anything to say, but you stood in the entryway, waiting for your dad to appear from the downpouring rain so he could pay his last respects to the man who raised both of his children.
You missed Grandpa Bub’s entire funeral service because Dad missed Grandpa Bub’s funeral service. This is how you learn you don’t have to honor your father as the Good Book says. It’s also how you learn Dad is illiterate in more ways than one.
BONES
DAD VANISHES WITHOUT A WORD on the regular. You’re not alone, though. You have Jerry Lee, of course. Your best friend lives three doors down, and his mom keeps the fridge full. There are other kids too, some your age, some a little older. There’s one other Indian on the block, but he’s always messing with turtle shells and talking about doing bad medicine for cash. But his wife is nice enough; she feeds you, too.
Next door to him is this biker, he has a kid in your class. There’s something wrong with him, and you regret saying “Hey” to him five seconds after you do so. His stepdad is this towering, lanky biker guy covered in tattoos. He keeps his hair in a ponytail, and his beard comes down to his chest. His glasses always slide down his nose, so when he looks at something far off, he looks over the tops of the frames, and it reminds you of a dragon peering at a piece of prey. Maybe there’s a stronger metaphor, but, see, there’s a tattoo of a dragon on his left forearm—one he put there himself. The details in the design came from him staring into a mirror while he ran the needle across his skin, so it is something of a self-portrait. To add to the image of a dragon, he lets out a huge billow of cigarette smoke when he tells you this for the first time.
And then there’s his voice.
To say it booms wouldn’t nearly cover it. He sounds like Charlton Heston as Moses, especially the part when he says, “Let my people go,” but he talks with the rhythm and abruptness of an idling V-twin. The rest of his arms are sleeved with spider webs and fields of skulls and women with bared tits and puckered lips.
He’s done a couple of tattoos for Dad. He covers up the giant initials RT and the cross Dad put on himself when he was a teenager. Now there’s a tiger and a waterfall on one arm, and a giant green dragon on the other, which makes him look like some sad sort of mix of Buddha and kung fu master.
Your late-morning conversations usually begin with him asking, “Where’s your dad?”
You’ll shrug your shoulders and scrunch up a corner of your mouth.
He’ll motion toward his front door with whatever tool is in his hand, seeing as how he’s almost always tinkering with one of his bikes. When he hears the squeak of the door hinge, he’ll yell out for his wife to feed you. She’ll ask, “Where’s your dad?” too, and shake her head with a mumbled “Fucking Richard” while she walks into the kitchen and opens the fridge.
He’ll come inside and fidget with a carburetor as you take down a sandwich and some chips and a can of pop, while Zeppelin forever whispers from some speakers you can’t spot.
Come to think of it, this is how you got the talk. It’s this guy who talks to you about sex. He says, “Man, the first time I had sex, it was fun, and it felt good, and then all of a sudden it was over, and there was this giant mess. And that was it. It never got any better, man.”
His wife hollers out, “Oh, shut your mouth. It’s
not like that at
all.”
He shakes his head no, hoping she won’t see.
She says, “You’re lucky I love you—saying shit like that.”
He says, “I’m in lust with you, Mimi!”
He tells you that you got to figure out the difference between lust and love.
She yells, “You want me to leave you?”
He yells back, “I’m just trying to get him to stop thinking about sticking his dick in Ron’s daughter until he learns the right way to use a condom,” and looks at you over the tops of his glasses again.
He was a Thunderbird—not an Animikii, but a member of the Thunderbirds Motorcycle Club. A one-percenter. Nowadays, they fall under the Hells Angels umbrella, if you can call it that. He talks about it like it’s his job. You don’t know what he does other than tattoos, but he feeds a wife and three kids, and you too, from time to time. He has to be doing pretty good at his job, right? Otherwise, how could he afford the Grand Marquis?
The Triumph?
The Norton?
The Harley-Davidson?
And the Honda 100 he taught you to ride on?
You only go up and down the street on the Honda, seeing as how it’s only the seventh grade and it’s a street bike, not a dirt bike. Man, once you figure out how to get through all the gears and open up the throttle all the way before the street ends, there’s no better feeling.
No, that’s bullshit.
Once, when you’re covered in oil and grease and halfway through helping him take an engine apart, some other Thunderbird comes up onto the sidewalk with his bike. The two of them talk, ignoring you, or the other guy doesn’t notice you until he does. When he does, he asks, “That your boy, Bones?”
“Shit, no. I wish. He’s the neighbor kid. My kid’s probably off with that other retard he’s always hanging around with—chasing the damn ice cream truck or whatever they do when they’re not playing with each other back behind the school. Mimi tell you about that shit? They found them jacking each other off.”
“I wish” is the thing that sticks with you for life.
Thirty years pass, and you’ll find yourself sitting in the VA’s waiting room. You’ll glance outside in time to see those eyes and that beard you have inked into your flesh. The clock tells you there’s enough time for you to take a stroll before the nurse calls you back, so you walk outside and up to the driver’s window of a van bringing the old-timers to their appointments.
Out of respect, you wait while he finishes talking to his dispatcher with the two-way radio before you ask him, “Are you John?”
He grins. He doesn’t even turn his head toward you. He sits there instead, smiling, like he’s waiting for you to deliver a punch line.
So you ask, “Is your name Bones?” This makes him turn his head to look at you—really look at you, the way people do right before they say something like, “I haven’t heard that name in a long time.” But he doesn’t say anything. He looks at you over the tops of his glasses, confused as to who you are. He doesn’t say it, but the expression written on his face sure does. To answer his question unequivocally, you roll up your left sleeve and show him the dragon he put over the top of the tiny cross and initials you put on yourself when you were seventeen, and that grin of his gets even bigger.
Everything said after will stay between the two of you.
SKATER FAG
PUSHING A SHOPPING CART AROUND the supermarket while smooth jazz oozes out the speakers is hard to picture Dad doing, but he does do it, right? It couldn’t have been you doing all the grocery shopping. Sure, Super America has a sprawling freezer section, and Dad sends you for odds and ends as well as movies on Friday nights.
One night, while walking home across the football field with a gallon of milk in one hand and a six-pack of two-ply in the other, you come upon a half-dozen kids ganging up on this one other kid with a side spike and a rattail.
He’s clinging to his skateboard like his life depends on it, or maybe he knows what will happen if they get a hold of it. They’re shoving him, calling him a skater fag. He’s not even trying to fight back. It would be stupid for him to try.
He’s smart.
He’s trying to make it to the break in the fence. Trying to get away.
There are two sets of brothers. Both big brothers sport mullets, but it’s called hockey hair here. The little brothers both have buzz cuts. They stand back and watch, echoing the last half of the last thing their big brothers say. The two other tough guys have their hair spiked as high as it’ll go. They both stink of Aqua Net from clear across the football field.
They’re all taking turns pushing him toward the biggest of the big brothers, the one with the biggest mouth.
None of them notice you watching from outside the glow of the streetlight until you sprint at the biggest brother with the biggest mouth and send him headfirst into the chain-link fence. Everyone watches him bounce off the fence and flop onto the turf of the football field.
Right then is when the other kid with the side spike and rattail makes a run for it.
The others scramble off into the darkness the way feral cats do when you flip open the dumpster lid back behind the house. Then it’s only you and the biggest brother with the biggest mouth, who you kick and stomp. You don’t punch or hit him. You can’t. You didn’t even bother to put the gallon of milk or six-pack of toilet paper on the ground.
A couple days later, you’re sitting out on the front stoop. The kid, who clung to his skateboard, it turns out, lives three doors down, is sitting on his own stoop. After a while, the biggest brother with the biggest mouth walks by with a split lip and a black eye and his left arm in a sling. He tries to give you a look, but he’s bruised so bad his sneer looks like a mix of that thing Elvis did with the corner of his mouth and someone smelling a fart.
His whole face quivers.
Once he’s out of sight, the other kid looks your way and asks, “Did you do that?” and you nod your head, so he walks over to you and holds out his hand and says, “I’m Jeremy.”
Jeremy is what you’d call a fixture in your life after that.
He is starting the sixth grade, you are starting the seventh. He lives with his mom, you live with your dad. He doesn’t have a big brother, and you don’t have a little brother, but now you each have a best friend. He teaches you to ride a skateboard, you teach him to stand up for himself. You take turns dumpster diving for last month’s issues of Guitar World and Guitar Player behind the gas station, searching for tablatures which you’ll hammer out over and again until your fingers become callused and your parents grow sick of the songs you try to play.
The concrete cube of a building the two of you live in is built on the cheap, so there are some pretty cool nuances. Like, if you close the bathroom door and yell into the toilet, Jeremy can hear every word you say and every note you pluck. When it’s raining, it’s how you practice and do your best to one-up one another. Not that Dad would let you take his guitar out of the house, or let Jeremy touch it.
The toilet telephone is how you learn Jeremy’s uncle is messing with the girl next door. She’s not old enough for him. But he’s old enough for prison. You don’t think about calling the cops. You think about kicking his ass. You’re jealous. She’s making out with him while you’re stuck trying to take a shit so quietly they can’t hear you through the wall.
Later that day, you go looking for Jeremy at his grandma’s house. Jeremy’s uncle says something about you being gay with his nephew, so you slam your left shoulder into his chest and land your right fist right where his jaw meets his left ear. He drops his beer and follows it to the floor.
It’s the last fag comment out of him. But he never says fag. He does this thing, this onomatopoeia, that sounds like a fart noise or a chuff, with a heavy eff sound to it. He and all of Jeremy’s uncles called you the Phttt Boys. Called. Past tense.
When Jeremy starts junior high, he starts fights, and you finish them. You toy with the i
dea of letting him get his ass kicked until some jock stalks you through the hallway calling you a skater fag, too. That’s when the light bulb comes on for you. When you square off with this jock, you don’t do anything but stand your ground. He pushes you backward, calls you a bitch, and leaves you there.
There’s no why for what you do next, it’s just what happens when instinct has to fill in the blanks.
He turns away from you to grab a drink from the fountain before heading to class, and you lift him by the back of his shirt collar and slam his face back down, breaking the porcelain basin, leaving it hanging from the pipe. He tells the nurse the stairs leading to the football field are slick and wet from the rain. And everyone watching figured out not to call you, or anyone else, a bitch nor a skater fag as long as you were in earshot.
The spring of the ninth grade comes, and Jeremy watches the bumper of a stolen ’77 Chevy Caprice Classic nail you right above the knee and send you spinning through the air before you bounce off the windshield and smash face-first into one of the concrete planters the city uses to pepper some shrubbery through downtown Duluth.
Jeremy comes with you to the emergency room, where he waits for the doctors to say you’re okay. While he waits, he fingers the driver for the police, who find the guy hiding in an alleyway. Jeremy is still there the next morning when Mom is finally allowed to come to the hospital.
Mom was at home when the hospital called. She was making pancakes, making breakfast for dinner, and can’t come to the hospital because the house is better than a half hour away. They might need to operate because your head is bleeding and your right leg and left arm are pretty well mangled, and they don’t know what they have to do to fix you, and they’ll need her permission to do anything involving cutting you open, so she has to stay by the phone.
As You Were Page 16