The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait

by Bailey, Blake

  “What’d it look like, Zwieb?” he said, a little out of breath.

  “What do you mean?”

  “ ‘Whaddyoo meeean?’ . . . I mean—you stupid little shit—what does my asshole look like when the stuff’s coming out?”

  I just stared at him. If I said anything he’d only mock me, and I’m not sure I really understood the question.

  “Down,” he said, pointing, which meant I had to lie supine while he farted in my face.

  “No! Leave me alone!”

  “ ‘No! No! Leave me alone! Aye-lie-lie!’ I said get down . . .”

  Naturally I struggled, but it was no use.

  Oddly or not, the more abusive he became, the more I wanted his approval. If he told me to do something I’d do it, usually, and not just because I feared some kind of reprisal. He’d taken to jumping off our second-floor balcony into the pool, which required a forceful push of the legs lest one hit the sidewalk or the fake boulders skirting the water. One day he and his friend Kent were jumping again and again, both of them naked, the better to flaunt their big wagging dicks and fresh growth of pubic hair for my benefit. They hectored me to jump too, until I stood naked and trembling on the balcony rail, clutching the rain gutter as I measured the distance below. “Better cover your balls!” Kent yelled, to which my brother added, “Your middle one too!” No sooner had I jumped—just clearing the rocks—than my brother clambered all the way up to the roof and ran soaring into the deep end. So much for proving my mettle.

  TO MAKE MY mother happy we moved back to the city in the summer of 1976. Nobody minded but me. Our new house was in the shabbier part of an upscale neighborhood, Nichols Hills, and I hated it: it was too small and ivy-smothered in a way that struck me as seedy; there was no pool. My father admitted in the car, as he took us to see the place for the first time, that he’d already bought it on impulse: a done deal. I thought he meant the big Tudor I’d picked out during an earlier house-hunting excursion, but no. I was dizzy with disappointment. As we parked in front of our new house and got out of the car, I said “Yuck!”—which struck my father from behind like a vicious little pebble: he’d made this move under duress, hastily accepting the first offer he got on our place in the country because his family was falling apart out there; his back stiffened, he paused, then walked on. It helped that my mother was ecstatic. “Mein häuschen!” she gushed, and wouldn’t let anyone paint the bricks or trim the ivy, until we discovered that the vines were actually pushing the roof off.

  I had nothing to do until school started. My brother had his learner’s permit and was allowed to drive my mother’s red Porsche 914, the kind with the motor in the middle for a low center of gravity, the better to take hairpin turns at top speed, as Scott did with or without a licensed adult. Meanwhile I got it in my head that a hamster would solve my unhappiness, rather the way Algernon had helped my brother before he got muscle tone and pubic hair. My mother reminded me that my last hamster, Amy, had died of neglect only two years before, and my brother was glad to elaborate on this.

  “Her tiny paw was thrust into the cedar shavings for a last, piss-soaked food pellet,” he reminisced, and imitated the way Amy had looked in her death agony: little bug eyes glazed, paw gnarled, her once-pouchy cheeks hollow.

  But I was only eleven then, I pointed out.

  “I was eleven when I had Algernon,” Scott said triumphantly. He turned to our mother. “You know why he wants another hamster? So he can give that poor bastard a funeral too. Remember the cigar box he decorated for Amy . . . ?”

  And so on. One day as we drove away from the mall, sans hamster, I began to sob over the injustice of it all. “Aye-lie-lie!” said Scott, leaning over the front seat to put his face in mine. “Aye-lie-lie!” So my mother turned the car around and bought me a hamster I named Perkins, whose running wheel squeaked all night, all night, until he turned up dead in the laundry hamper a few weeks later.

  MY SELF-ESTEEM WAS buoyed somewhat by my mother’s friends, who were mostly gay and thought I was cute—that is, precocious-cute as well as cute-cute. I laughed at their naughty jokes, or rather I laughed at their compulsive way of telling jokes, of being naughty, as if they had all the time in the world and nothing much mattered anyway. One of my favorites, Uncle Ronny, used to tell jokes that were almost dimwittedly silly, but I liked the relish with which he told them. I can only remember one, but it’s representative.

  “. . . ‘Can you spell the van in vanilla?’ ” he said, working up to the punch line of a long story about a customer in an ice cream parlor who couldn’t seem to accept that they were out of a certain flavor. “ ‘Can you spell the fuck in strawberry?’ And the guy says, ‘There’s no fuck in strawberry!’ ‘Well, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you for the past five minutes!’ ”

  Actually I preferred Ronny’s boyfriend, Uncle Paul, whose wit was more subtle and whose company was an easier, quieter business. Paul liked me too, and was perhaps the first adult (apart from my parents) who gave me reason to think I was special, or at least different in a promising way. As a little boy I liked to dance frantically to the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth (feuertrunken—“drunk with fire”—indeed), and that was a good thing, according to Paul, who also praised the simple but astute caricatures I liked to draw. He himself was the younger brother of a famous artist, and to this day I think Paul was almost as talented. Mostly, though, he was content to dabble. He went through a phase of making a campier brand of Joseph Cornell box, and one of these he gave to my mother: exquisitely arranged were a little ivory bust of Beethoven, a plastic pig, a five-pfennig piece, and a fortune-cookie slip on which he’d inked the following legend: “Beethoven pfucked a pig for pfive pfennig.”

  We were natural pals, and growing up I liked nothing better than spending time at his and Ronny’s trailer in the parking lot of a restaurant, Christopher’s, owned by Ronny’s white-haired, irascible dad. (Ronny had once married and sired a son—also gay—so perhaps his father couldn’t understand why the hell Ronny had plumped for this kind of life instead of that; on the other hand Ronny was a maître d’ par excellence, and rich old ladies would frequent Christopher’s expressly to bask in the moonlight of his flattery, so the arrangement was beneficial to both father and son.) Paul and Ronny were the best babysitters a kid like me could have. The restaurant was on the banks of a lovely pond, and during the day we’d sit fishing on the dock, or go to a dumb movie, or else they’d just let me run loose in the restaurant and I’d crawl around the plush booths in the bar and play with that fascinating soda gun with the lettered buttons on the back—this in the crepuscular saloon light of noon, in the cool conditioned air, while the soothing Muzak played and played. I was a kind of mascot for that quirky place. One of Paul’s many talents was calligraphy, and almost twenty years later—long after he’d broken up with Ronny and gone to Los Angeles to work for his brother—I went back to the soon-to-be-bulldozed restaurant and noticed for the first time, framed on the wall, the original invitations for the grand opening in 1968 (I was five), which declared in Paul’s florid hand: “Mr. and Mrs. BLAKE BAILEY request the honor of your presence . . .”

  As for the Arabs, they mostly disappeared after we moved back to the city in 1976—all but Walid, and he was generally drunk and simply sat on the floor like a skinny, scowling Buddha, listing to and fro. One time he was sober enough to help me with my homework—he was pursuing a PhD at OU, his nominal reason for staying in the States—and my mother took a picture of us sitting there with the book cracked open on our laps. Another time I ignored or didn’t see a sign (STAY OUT) taped to the door of my father’s study, through which I had to pass to take my morning shower. Inside, Walid and my mother’s friend Lenore were locked in a stiff coital embrace on the foldout couch, both hiding their faces as if that would render them invisible.

  My mother had always cultivated gay men, but now that we lived in the city again they came to our house in force. The more lurid aspects of these daytime gathering
s were concealed from me. I later found a cache of old photos that showed, say, Walid using our fireplace stoker to divert the fumes of amyl nitrate (“poppers”) spilled on Lenore’s shirtfront. I saw none of that. To my mother’s credit, the drugs were stashed and the zippers zipped in time for my return from school, and everyone would leave for the Free Spirit disco a few hours later, after a cordial drink with my father, home at last from work and wanting only to eat dinner and go to bed.

  Everyone who floated into the orbit of the local demimonde came to our house at one time or another—the actor Van Johnson, for example, who’d been a big MGM star in the forties and fifties and now was in town for a dinner-theater production of Send Me No Flowers. At the time I hadn’t seen any of his movies, but when I finally got around to it I was impressed: costarring in The Caine Mutiny with Humphrey Bogart, no less, the man gave a credible performance as a rugged but sensitive naval officer. Almost a quarter century after that movie, he padded out of a rented limo in our driveway, wearing some sort of eye makeup and calling my mother “Ruth Roman.” I was charmed, though he clearly preferred my brother, then at the peak of his adolescent beauty. When the celebrated actor took leave of Scott with a hug, he slipped a plump, liver-spotted hand into Scott’s pants and copped a feel. Scott expressed some token protest as the limo pulled away, though he was plainly rather pleased with himself. “I felt honored,” he admitted to my mother afterward.

  AS LUCK WOULD have it, our new house was a block away from a parochial school attended by one of my best friends from the country, Brian, whose parents were devout Catholics and didn’t mind the long drive into the city each day. My own parents, debonair atheists both, liked the fact that the school was only a block away. Toward the end of the summer I took the eighth-grade entrance exam while my brother made a point of walking back and forth past the open classroom door with his arms extended like the crucified Christ.

  Scott also got a Catholic education at Bishop McGuinness High School, where he soon had a girlfriend named Sally, who struck me as stupid but nice. Because she couldn’t keep her hands off my brother, he liked to find pretexts for bringing her into my room like a prize monkey. I had narrow beds arranged in an L-shape with an eight-track stereo built into the corner table, and those two would wrestle around to the music while I sat chastely abashed on the other bed. In fact I felt sorry for the girl: she gazed at my brother with a kind of vacant adoration that, I could tell, was already grating on his nerves; also her father was a third-rate shyster named Wayne who liked to be called Dr. Wayne because of his Juris Doctor. Sally’s fate was sealed by my father’s gleeful teasing: “Son,” he’d say to my brother, “I have this bad pain in my asshole. Next time you see Dr. Wayne, could you ask him to have a look?”

  I envied such dilemmas as a vulgar, stupid girlfriend who put out. I was unpopular at my new school and very depressed about it. I’d done everything wrong. At my other school I’d been the kind of audacious wit whom other seventh-grade boys tend to emulate and elect class president; eager to reestablish myself as such, I regaled my new homeroom with what I thought was a spot-on imitation of Linda Blair in The Exorcist. Nobody laughed; nobody had seen The Exorcist. My teacher was so embarrassed for me that he chose to ignore this sudden eruption of guttural profanity. Perhaps he thought I was nuts. In a flustered way he cast about for a change of subject and didn’t look at me the rest of the period. My next class was Spanish, where we were given a diagnostic quiz to determine how much of the language we’d retained over the summer. I’d retained nothing, since I hadn’t taken Spanish in seventh grade like the rest of my classmates; nevertheless, I gamely copied a few sentences from my neighbor’s paper. I hadn’t gotten far when our teacher, Miss Hernandez, asked if I was cheating.

  “No!”

  The woman snapped up my quiz. “Yo soy Mateo,” she read aloud (this appeared under the prompt “Tell us about yourself in Spanish”), and everybody laughed, including Miss Hernandez and Matt, the guy sitting next to me.

  I sat alone in the cafeteria that day. My old friend Brian, who was in a different homeroom, already knew of my disgrace and was pointedly avoiding me. I was aware of people murmuring around me, about me, and I could hardly swallow my food. Finally we adjourned to the playground. I was thinking I’d ask a teacher for permission to go to the bathroom, where I could hide in the stalls until the bell rang, when somebody called my name. It was Brian, surrounded by his smiling, waving friends. Elated, I trotted over.

  “See the top of the monkey bars?” said Mark Roach, the funniest kid in school. He pointed at the knobby apex and I nodded. “The first person to touch that thing in the middle wins. Ready? . . . Go!”

  We all clambered up. Galvanized by what I thought was some kind of redemptive crucible, I beat the others easily and slapped my hand on the knob. It came away sticky. The others were laughing as they jumped off the bars and ran away. They’d each taken turns hawking loogies on the top knob to see if I was really as lame as everyone said. I’d passed the test with flying colors.

  For the rest of that first month or so, my only friend was a kid named Weldon, whose claim to fame was twofold: (a) he had the oldest parents in school, older than most of our grandparents, and (b) he liked to hit himself on his shaggy, oversized head with rocks whenever people happened to be looking. We both collected comic books. Later I teased him mercilessly by way of distancing myself once I’d gotten more suitable friends, and because I suspected that Weldon and I were a pair of sorts, and I didn’t want to be a pair with Weldon. Not long ago I heard that Weldon had died, and my only surprise was that he’d made it all the way to forty-something.

  IN HIGH SCHOOL Scott showed promise as an actor, and perhaps his greatest triumph was his portrayal of the Hare in The Great Cross-Country Race. Grown to his final height of six-two, Scott looked like a lanky, long-eared marionette as he bounced around the stage on his big prosthetic Hare feet, mocking the Tortoise, who was played with a lot of comic lethargia by his best friend, Todd.

  I went to the cast party, I can’t remember why. Todd, who’d made such a lovable, folksy old Tortoise, lay on his back pouring vodka down his throat. Scott sat next to him on the floor, smoking, occasionally taking a swig from one of Todd’s bottles. Suddenly Todd blew puke in the air like a surprising geyser, spattering himself head to foot with half-digested finger food. He went on puking like that for the rest of the night, though never so dramatically as those first bursts. After that night, I rarely saw Todd completely sober outside of school; his eyes had a kind of nonscratch surface, and his mouth always hung open with quiet puzzlement. Tousled hair and all, he reminded me of Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter.

  For Scott’s sixteenth birthday he’d inherited the Porsche 914 from Marlies (who now drove a royal blue Cadillac Coupe de Ville), and one night he was driving with his usual lunatic abandon when he hit a slick spot on a winding road near the golf course and smashed sideways into a tree. My father had the car fixed, at great expense, and insisted my brother get an after-school job to pay for basic maintenance and build his character. So, for the rest of his time in high school, Scott worked as a busboy at one of the better restaurants in town, where a gay friend of the family was chef. Meanwhile he continued to crack up the Porsche every so often, claiming all the while that he was a superlative driver, the victim of rotten luck.

  LIFE WITH MY family was becoming a serious bummer for all concerned. Scott fought constantly with Marlies, who could hardly stand to be home without a cluster of buffering friends, though they too were beginning to pall. She compensated by spending more and more time in Norman, near the university, until finally my father bought her a one-bedroom condo there. For a while she was home maybe four times a week, then three, then for the odd weekend. By then I had a few more friends, and I stayed at their houses as often as possible.

  My brother’s comings and goings, more conspicuous when Marlies was around to wrangle with, became increasingly furtive. Mostly he holed up in his room with a friend or tw
o, their conversation muted by booming music. If Burck knocked on the door—lightly at first, then pounding to be heard—the music would suddenly gulp out and Scott would appear with a look of alert, almost comic solicitude, wide-eyed and nodding, a performance so bizarre that my father began to go his own way too. He and I still played chess now and then, or ate a sad frozen meal together, talking about anything but family.

  Once I snuck into Scott’s room and glanced at his bankbook (he liked to leave this out in the open as a token of his independence): from a peak balance of a thousand dollars or so, his savings had wasted away in increments of thirty or forty a week, and now hovered around two hundred. This in spite of the fact that he never bought anything but records that I could see. Another time I picked up the phone in my room (Scott and I had a common “children’s line”) and overheard him talking to his friend Pat, whom everyone called “Paht” because of the affected way he pronounced his a’s and because he smoked a lot of pot.

  “And then I stood up and it was like whoa—” Paht was saying. “I got the biggest rush, mahn, like you wouldn’t believe . . .”

  My heart was pounding when I put the phone down. I was still in eighth grade and didn’t know what “rush” meant in the druggy sense, but I could imagine. Another time I walked home late from a friend’s house and saw the light on in my brother’s window, which fronted a fairly busy street in our genteel neighborhood. I leaned over a hedge and looked inside: Scott was sprawled naked on the bed, alone, staring through slitted eyes at the ceiling, slowly plucking at his pubic hair.

  That year was the first and last time we were photographed as a family for our Christmas card, something my parents had always considered bourgeois. Perhaps they thought if we perpetuated an illusion of domestic serenity it would come true to some extent. Perhaps, too, there was a kind of curatorial impulse to preserve our little unit for posterity before the final wave broke and dispersed us. The photographer posed us under a tree in our backyard. I remember poring over the contact sheets a week or so later and finding something wrong with almost every shot: our two Saint Bernards, Gretchen and Bruno, kept lurching to their feet and turning their heads the wrong way; Scott couldn’t help but look moody and unpleasant, while I looked like a grinning idiot. Happily, a single photo was all but perfect: my parents were both beaming—aging well in spite of everything—the dogs were just so, Scott looked handsome and sane, and I looked as though I were caught in the midst of an orgasm, such was my almost frantic attempt to seem happy. The dogs too were smiling gamely, though Bruno was already suffering from the heart disease that would kill him within a month or so, and Gretchen followed close behind, and we didn’t have any more dogs after that.