I visited Damion every few weeks. Friends were puzzled. “Aren’t you angry?” they’d ask. Of course I was angry. But at one remove from that heat there was warmth, familial, paternal, and also the memory of who I had been at his age: acquisitive, ambitious, desperate. I remembered the women I’d betrayed in the full-bore pursuit of my appetites, the need to prove I was what I then believed was a man. I remembered the thieving and lying, not to mention the drug dealing: the scale on the kitchen table, the bricks of marijuana in the closet of my Bronx apartment waiting to be measured out in one-ounce baggies. Who was I to judge? I often sat across from him in the visiting room, leaning forward, our elbows on our knees, staring at his broken teeth where a cop had bashed him in the mouth, and I thought of my own belabored and erratic coming-of-age, of my son’s desperate flight from himself, and of my father’s young rage. It was never clearer to me that the difference between our lives had been determined by the color of our skins.
There may be moments in childhood when some veil or shield moves aside and that instant is imprinted, stamped with terrific clarity on a region of the psyche usually occluded. It may have nothing to do with the force or importance of the persons or event experienced; it may have more to do with the condition of the child’s consciousness: a lack or surfeit of sleep, hunger or satiety, anxiety or comfort. Who can say?
Discomfort with this puzzle leads some to a belief in fate, as if the soul is packing for a particular destination, its itinerary already known by some hidden faculty of the mind. I don’t believe that. Still, it would be untruthful to say it has never felt that way, as if a part of me has been carrying certain of these high-definition memories as equipment, a subconscious education, a tutorial prepared especially for me. In any case, it surprises me that this memory is so sharp.
The rain had stopped. Puddles in the gutters swirled with the iridescence of oil. I was holding my father’s thumb because his hand was too big, and he was taking me to the movies for the first time. It was 1954, I was five years old, and I had never seen a motion picture of any kind. We didn’t have a television, although I had seen one in the window of a repair shop up the street.
There was a sign outside the theater, a vertical neon scroll that said ALLEN. Just outside the glass doors my father dropped to one knee in front of me, took my shoulders in his hands, and looked me in the eye. “You’re going to be a good boy in there and do what I say. Right?”
I nodded.
“Yes, Daddy,” he said.
“Yes, Daddy.”
The carpeted lobby smelled wonderful, like caramel, like candles, like butter. The concession stand was a glass box of candy, along with something like an aquarium filled with popcorn. Some of the candy was “loose”: horehound drops, root beer barrels, and the licorice my father bought me in a little brown bag. “A box of Jujubes for me,” he said, “and a small bag of nigger babies for the young man.” He rubbed my head and beamed at me in that way of his when he was showing me off, which was why I had to be good.
We went inside and as we walked down the aisle the lights dimmed. I stopped to see if it was our walking that was making it darker, then hurried to catch up to my father. Dim yellow and purple fluted lights along the walls cast soft fans of color upward, and there were golden vines and angels decorating the frame around a maroon curtain. My father had mentioned to me that before our church was built, the parish, St. Francis of Assisi, used to celebrate Sunday Mass here. The vaulted ceiling, the art deco light fixtures, the gold leaf, the deep carpets all contributed to a sense of the sacred. My father wanted to sit near the front. I liked the way the seats flipped down to sit on them, and I enjoyed that the seat cushion would go whoomp when I sat down and that it sprang back up when I stood. I did this over and over again until my father grabbed my arm and pulled me down. The heavy curtain was opening. The manic Warner Brothers music came up and a cartoon began, Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck, probably. I can only recall eating my licorice and laughing with my father, watching the cartoon and seeing my father throwing back his head to laugh. I laughed with him, laughed whenever he laughed, laughed because he was laughing.
When the cartoon ended, the music changed, and my father’s mood changed with it. I tried to hold onto the hilarity we’d shared by recounting something from the cartoon, but he shushed me. The laughter was gone as quickly as if a faucet had been shut. The colorful cartoons gave way to a black-and-white landscape, and the sound of explosions. The music was dark and dramatic. I ate another piece of licorice and looked at my father for some cue how to react. He was slumped in his chair intently frowning at the screen, so I did the same.
Attack! was among the first Hollywood films to depict the grisly cost of war on particular soldiers. Two images from the film have stayed with me all my life. The first is of a tank crushing the arm of Lieutenant Costa, played by Jack Palance. Trapped in a doorway, the tank clatters loudly as he screams, his left arm smashed beneath the clanking treads. The other, from the end of the film, is Costa’s dead body, his eyes open and staring, his head cocked back, chin jutting toward the sky. Together, they seem to have formed a statement I may not have been ready for: the first image, of terrible pain, I understood, at least in miniature; only some months before, I had caught my fingers in a door, and the intensity of that pain had me screaming and hysterical and for a long time beyond the consolation of my parents. The second was wholly new, an image of horror that tore through the soft flesh of my limited understanding. I knew the word “dead.” I had some vague notion of what it meant. You went to heaven. But Costa didn’t go to heaven, he just lay there on his back, mouth open, and my stomach churned black licorice and threatened to empty itself on the seat in front of me.
Recently I watched a VHS tape of the film. What struck me watching the tank scene was how clearly fake it was: Palance’s arm buried in a hole in the ground, out of view, with the tank tread over it. But by then you’re so adrenalized and panicked by the previous moments when the tank closes in on him, trapped in a doorway, pounding his shoulder against the wooden door and yanking at the knob until it comes off in his hand, that the tank crushing his arm, or perhaps worse, is already in your imagination—you’ve already conjured it from the depths of fear: of entrapment, of the existential moment of no escape.
But Palance’s dead visage: even viewing it as an adult, even knowing it was an actor playing a part, did not dispel the stark horror of that death’s head.
What does a child know of special effects? Those are corpses, not sprawled actors covered in syrup. A child has no disbelief to suspend, willingly or not. Besides, every detail in a film is meant to override the suspension of disbelief, every moment, every word, gesture, costume, and shadow is meant to convince.
I was convinced. My whole body was convinced.
Before that day I lived in the dream world of childhood: I spoke to worms and bumblebees, birds landed on the backyard fence and cocked their heads so quizzically I understood their queries. My brother Bobby and I ate rose petals and onion grass, and we lay on our bellies on the concrete walk in the sun because it was warm and felt so good. We were creatures, and although there was certainly a difference between sleeping and waking, it is also true that in another sense we lived in a more or less continuous dream. Even our father’s rages, when he cursed and broke things and drew his belt from his pants and doubled it and forced us to submit to a “lickin’,” were experienced as nightmarish disturbances within that dream. I don’t mean to speak for Bobby, dead now forty years, and yet that was how it was with us then: born a year apart, we were not merely inseparable, we were hardly separate people at all.
It could be that we are all born into this dream, and that it is continuous and unending, even though soon, whether gradually or suddenly, we’re separated from an awareness of it.
We were having a party in the backyard for D’s first birthday. Veronica had done up the patio with a brightly colored tablecloth and about a hundred balloons she filled from a helium canister sh
e’d purchased. Most of the guests were my grandson’s family who live close by. Damion was in the county lockup awaiting trial on gun and drug charges. Veronica had been cooking all night and into the morning: curried chicken, shrimp, beans and rice, pasta with meatballs and sausages, salad, potato salad; and as if he knew something was going on, D had hardly slept.
By three in the afternoon the yard was filled with uncles, aunties, and cousins, a few neighbors and friends of ours, and a dozen kids racing around. One of the uncles had brought a bubble machine that sent thousands of bubbles the size of Ping-Pong balls wafting across the patio to the great delight of the littlest ones who chased and whirled and laughed. They couldn’t get enough of it, and the machine had to be replenished with “bubble juice” several times.
Kathi, whom all our guests that afternoon, no matter their age, called Grandma, had D on her hip, and although he’d been cranky, he was laughing as he swatted at bubbles, his grandma exclaiming whenever he popped one.
I was standing on the deck where a buffet, including birthday cake, waited under plastic wrap and aluminum foil. I was watching Kathi, marveling at her ability to so thoroughly give herself to her grandson and enjoy the other kids who were drawn to her enthusiasm—“Look at me! Watch this!”—jumping up and down around her. Only three days earlier, she had been diagnosed with “ductile carcinoma in situ,” or DCIS—breast cancer.
I try to remember the moment she told me. It must have been in the kitchen. Yes, I seem to recall hearing the news there. But this moment, her dancing around with the baby amid balloons and bubbles and leaping children, is the moment that stays with me. I’ve referred to my journal to refresh my memory of hearing the news, but there is no mention of that conversation per se; there is only fear and self-pity. I wrote as if I were being given the news my father received when my mother was diagnosed. I suppose I was primed to feel this way, and my fear of losing Kathi was terror commensurate with my love for her but, goddamn it, all I find written there is about me. I kept thinking I’m going to lose her; I’m going to lose her. Not once in those pages did I reflect on her feelings, on what her course of treatment would exact from her, or even on how I might make myself useful to her.
So the reason I keep returning to this memory of standing on the deck watching her is that it is kinder to me than recalling my selfish fear. But it is also true that the beauty of that moment pierced my numbing anxiety with a sudden, refreshed appreciation of her bravery. I have been witness to, and often beneficiary of, this courage for thirty years. I am not entirely joking when I quip to friends that by contrast I am a big baby, “You know me, if I get a haircut, I need to take a day off.” And even though, later, she will say that she always knew there was no need to worry, I can’t help but know how terrified and self-centered I would have been in her situation.
Veronica came out of the house with paper napkins, plastic knives and forks and cups. “It feels like rain. We’d better eat soon. Dad? Hey, are you okay?”
“Me? Yeah. Fine.”
“Don’t worry. You don’t need to worry.”
“I’m not. I know. I’m not worried.”
Evidently, I wasn’t very convincing. She made a face at me. Then she pointed into the crowd of kids where Kathi was pointing at me, talking to D, “Wave to Grandpa! Say, ‘Hi, Grandpa!’”
“Maybe we should take the food inside,” Veronica said. The wind was coming up, flapping the corners of the tablecloths. Somehow one of the balloons came loose and, after catching a moment in the leaves of a maple, soared higher and higher with the kids running up on the porch to see better as it gradually became a mere speck in the sky. Clouds were rolling in and it looked like rain.
“I want to do it!” yelled one of the boys, and he began tearing a balloon from a bouquet tied to the porch rail.
“Me too! I want to do it!” another boy called out. The younger kids had gone back to chasing bubbles.
The boys especially were riled up. Everywhere the balloons were fastened—to the deck, to the tables and chairs— the boys were tearing at the ribbons to free them.
“Hold on,” I said. “Hold on! Wait! Wait!” Pouts on their faces, some anger on the faces of a couple of the older boys; of course, they seemed to think, of course some adult would put a stop to this much fun. But I only wanted to slow things down. I knew this kind of energy; it threatened to sack the whole party and destroy the whole afternoon, especially for the youngest kids. “All right. Okay, listen up. You can each have one. One.”
Kathi was giving me a look that asked if I had utterly forsaken being a responsible adult. I could see in my mind’s eye the very Sierra Club photograph she was silently referencing with her loud frown—that pathetic Canada goose, starved, its beak clamped shut by a piece of a red rubber balloon. One of the girls pointed to the sky where the first balloon had all but disappeared. “It’s going all the way up to heaven!” she shouted, jumping up and down and clapping. She gave me an idea.
Earlier that afternoon, a couple of hours before the party, Damion’s father, Smithy, had arrived with a young woman about Veronica’s age whom he introduced as his girlfriend. “We are the grandfathers!” he shouted as if making a pronouncement. He hugged me, clapped my back. It was easy to fall into a boisterous familiarity with him; easy for me, anyway. Kathi came into the hall and extended her hand in a way that was gracious but discouraged his loud assumption of his place in our lives. She was mindful of things that we knew about Smithy, things the volume of his presence had momentarily driven from my mind. Damion’s mother was fourteen when he was born in Jamaica. Smithy was somewhere about thirty. Now here he was with this young woman who had yet to say a word or even make eye contact. At least she seemed to be of legal age.
Not long after Damion’s birth, his mother’s family sent her from Jamaica to the United States to continue her education. Damion was left with Smithy. I have since learned from Damion that he was beaten by his father, locked in his room in the evenings while his father went out, and made to carry his father’s gun in his backpack and stay within easy reach. When Damion was seven, he asked if he could please live with his great-grandmother. According to Damion, Smithy was happy to be rid of him.
Although I did not think the occasion granted him a plenary indulgence, as Smithy apparently did, I felt it was a special moment, an instance out of the ordinary, and I wanted to be welcoming. Besides, the rest of Damion’s family had not yet arrived, and I thought I should take my cues from them.
I needn’t have wondered about that. Not one of the women—not Damion’s mother nor his aunts nor members of his mother’s church—would be in the same room with Smithy. If he walked in, they would simply turn their backs, excuse themselves, and leave the room. But it would be a long time until any of them arrived. We moved into the kitchen.
“I have brought to you the famous kukoomba juice! I make the juice for all Jamaica!” He held up a plastic gallon jug of green liquid. “The juice of the kukoomba make you strong! Down there! Strong! I don’t need no Viagra. No!” He turned to the young woman who was standing just inside the doorway, looking at the floor. “Tell him!” She seemed to curl into herself and shrink. “Tell him, I say!”
“Excuse me,” Kathi said, moving to the young woman and taking her by the arm. “Come. Come into the living room where we can sit down and talk.” She asked the woman her name.
“Anything that is wrong for you, the kukoomba juice will cure it. Even good for the cancer. You try it. This I made special for you the grandfather. Try it!”
I went to the pantry for a glass. The juice was tasty, a clean fruity taste, sweetened with honey. “The drug companies, they want to shut me down. I make the juice for free, give it for anyone who is sick. I don’t take no money, so they want to shut me down.”
“Delicious,” I said. It was. I poured myself a full glass this time.
“Ah, because you are the grandfather. I will give you how to make it. I will teach you.”
Robert had come d
ownstairs and was standing in the doorway. I poured him half a glass. “Here. This is my son, Robert. This is very tasty. You’ll like it.”
“No. No, thanks. I’m good.”
“Robert. Smithy. Damion’s father.” They shook hands.
Then, as if I had just reminded him that he is Damion’s father, Smithy said, “I brought him up to be a good man. I have told him, ‘You have disappointed me. I taught you to do the good, not to do the bad. Why must you do the bad?’” In a transparent play for fatherly solidarity, he leaned toward me and said, “The young men, they don’t listen. You try to teach them, but they do not listen to their fathers.”
Robert was hanging in the doorway, and the look on his face asked, “Is this guy for real?” I was thinking of a five-year-old boy, walking next to his father, alert to his displeasure, staying close, with a pistol in his Flintstones backpack.
“First you need the good water. Spring water. In Jamaica the water is purest of anywhere, of any place. And then you must have the good kukoomba.”
“Where can I get that?”
“All the markets, they have the kukoomba. The best kukoomba from anywhere in the whole world is in Jamaica.”
“And you must make one gallon of water to five large kukoomba. This you must do right. And you mash the kukoomba with five tablespoons honey. Good honey . . .”
Love and Fury Page 7