“What do you mean, he took control?”
“With our parents gone, Alvin decided to raise Joe himself. He liked Joe the way he was and saw Joe’s mental challenges as a castle to be defended at all costs. I’m still astounded by the passion and energy he put into this project, especially for a boy of eight years old. He made it his life’s work to make sure that Joe was never officially diagnosed, never received any help, never changed, never grew up at all. He taught himself to write left-handed so he could do two sets of homework, and he even had a third handwriting for forging doctor’s notes. Of course, all this was only possible because our school was so terrible. High school was a lot trickier to pull off, because they weren’t in the same classes anymore, and so after two days Alvin decided they should both drop out entirely.”
“I think you’re messing with me,” said Julia.
“Do you know why Joe only eats pizza and cheeseburgers?”
“It’s just what he likes. It was a phase that stuck.”
“It was Alvin’s idea. In third grade Alvin got tired of being so skinny, and decided to only eat pizza and hamburgers for an entire year, to see if he could put on any weight. He didn’t want to do the diet by himself, so he convinced Joe to try it too. It didn’t work for Alvin, so he gave it up. But Joe couldn’t give it up. He’s been trapped in that diet ever since.”
“That’s ridiculous,” said Julia.
“You asked me why I hated Alvin. I’m answering your question. It’s because he ruined Joe. He’d always liked playing little mind games with his twin brother, making them switch names and so forth, but after we lost our parents it turned into an obsession. He was determined that Joe would never change, and it was impossible to stop him. Anyone who tried to interfere immediately became his enemy. One year I convinced the school psychiatrist to take a look at Joe, and even got him to prescribe some medication. When Alvin found out what I’d done he tried to kill me with rat poison. That’s how determined he was. And he always had a special hold over Joe. At a certain point it was just too exhausting to fight him. I had my own life to live.”
Marcus looked a little exhausted. He had barely touched his second beer, but he took a long swig now while he got his breath back. I knew he wasn’t nearly finished yet.
“I’ll give you another example,” he said.
I didn’t feel like hearing any more examples. I got up to go pee. The hallway to the bathroom was too dark to see, so I had to feel my way along the wall, and I guess Marcus had started some electrical work in there, because when I felt around the doorway for the light switch, there was only an open socket, and so I got a pretty nasty shock. There was a tiny buzzing sound as I stood there with my whole body twitching until I finally yanked my hand away. Then I just stood there in the bathroom in the dark, letting my eyes adjust, while I could still hear Marcus droning on in the living room about how terrible my education was. The bathroom was extremely clean, like everything he does. He told me once that every time he comes in here to use the bathroom he first takes off all his clothes and folds them neatly in a pile, to make sure they won’t absorb any smells, and then afterward he takes a shower. I can remember that his enormous gray cat was curled up in the bathtub watching me. As my eyes slowly adjusted, I could see the cat’s red eyes staring up at me and Marcus’s basketball team photo hanging over the sink, and I could see Alvin standing by the window. He was wearing this Hawaiian shirt and a white sailing hat.
“Hi Alvin.”
“Are you all right, Joe? You look like you just fainted or something.”
“I got electrocuted.”
“Listen, Joe. Do I look younger to you now?”
He did seem younger, all rested and tan. He sure looked better than the last time I had seen him.
“Definitely.”
“It must be the air and the ocean. The surf. The breeze.”
“So you like sailing?”
“It’s incredible, Joe. Yesterday we saw three whales swimming in unison along the coastline, just as the sun was setting.”
“Will you send me a picture?”
“You know I don’t believe in pictures. That’s why I’m telling you right now.”
“I still wish I could have gone with you.”
“No, you have to get past that. You have to start thinking of a way out of this prison. If you stay here Marcus is going to make your life a living hell. He’ll ruin you, Joe, and you know it.”
“Where else can I go?”
Alvin thought that over for a while. The cat was sitting in the sink now, staring at me.
“Why not Tennessee?”
“Really?”
“It seemed like an easy place to survive, when I was there. You already know one person who lives there. You can leave the dog with Marcus. It’ll be easier than taking care of you, so that makes it a good deal for him too, doesn’t it?”
“I guess when you look at it that way.”
“You have to get out of this apartment somehow.” He looked around at the bathroom and shivered. “This place gives me the creeps.”
I went over to the doorway and listened to see if Marcus was still talking about me.
“Joe was Alvin’s masterpiece,” he was saying. “A practical joke that has gone on for eighteen years. He created this impossible person who’s incapable of accumulating experience, and who can’t make any sense of anything that happens to him.”
I decided I didn’t want Julia to hear any more of this. When I looked back into the bathroom, Alvin was already gone. My body still felt tingly as I went over and peed in the toilet. When I went back into the living room, Marcus smiled up at me, like he hadn’t spent the last twenty minutes talking about how dumb I was. Julia made room for me on the couch, and I remember that she put her hand on my shoulder when I sat down.
“Our parents left us all a little bit of money,” said Marcus. “I set up an account for Joe, and he’s allowed to take out up to a hundred dollars every day. I think he gambles most of it. Soon it’ll run out, and then he’ll be forced to make some contact with economic reality, but probably not much. He’s got a strange knack for survival. He seems to find friendship and shelter wherever he goes. People like Joe. It’s easy to make him happy and he won’t ask you embarrassing questions. He buys what you’re selling. He doesn’t care what it is, or where you got it. And a friendship with Joe is like a badge of open-mindedness. Sometimes I catch myself showing him off, giving outrageous facts about him in a casual way, as if his situation weren’t strange to me. Just knowing him makes a person seem automatically more interesting. It’s like owning an exotic turtle. And he really is just like a small, blind turtle. He just crawls in whatever direction you point him.”
“What’s wrong with that?” said Julia.
“What’s wrong is that it’s tragic,” said Marcus. “I’ll give you one last example. While you were napping, Joe and I went down to the Riverside court for a few games of one-on-one basketball. He beat me soundly, almost effortlessly, and it was embarrassing and sad for both of us. Sad for me because I’m a NCAA scholarship athlete, and today I was exposed as a player of extremely limited abilities. But it was even sadder for Joe, because he exposed himself as something much, much worse. A player of unlimited abilities with nothing in the world to show for them. Such incredible potential, squandered for Alvin’s entertainment.”
“So I guess you must be pretty perfect,” said Julia. “What have you done with yourself that’s so special?”
“I’m glad you asked,” said Marcus. “With nothing but hard work, I’ve turned my mediocre basketball talents into a free college education. I’m finishing up a major in economics, with a double minor in Spanish and Chinese. Think about the fact that Spanish could be a majority language in this country within twenty-five years, that on this planet one out of every five of us is Chinese. Think about markets for a moment. Think what my skills will be worth to an expanding company.”
This is how I remember Marcus when I think abo
ut him, perched on the couch with his empty second beer, sweat beading on his nose, lecturing Julia so passionately.
“I’m not beautiful like my brothers,” he said. “And I don’t have any amazing gifts. But the turning point of my life was realizing how little talent is worth. That the qualities I’d always thought to be my faults, my plodding nature, my narrow-minded focus, my constant preoccupation with the future, were actually my greatest gifts, the secrets to realizing all my goals. It was so exhilarating when this finally dawned on me. It felt as if I’d memorized a long poem as a child and recited it every day for many years, and then one day discovered that the whole thing rhymed.”
Marcus looked at me and smiled. Then he took a handful of peanuts from the bowl on the coffee table. He cracked one from its shell and tossed it to me in a high, slow arc. Before I could think, I opened my mouth and caught it. Right away I wished I hadn’t, but I couldn’t help myself.
“Amazing,” he said. “You’re still hungry.”
“I don’t believe you,” said Julia.
“Which part don’t you believe?”
“You’re telling me Joe can’t read?”
“Of course I can read,” I said.
“We won’t embarrass him by asking him to read something.” Marcus laughed and looked at his watch. “I want to walk off this food before I do my stretching for the night. You can snooze on the couch until your flight. But Joe’s curfew will be ten o’clock from now on, so please make sure he has the dishes done by then.”
My bedroom had already changed a lot since the last time I’d slept there. Marcus had moved all his weights and exercise machines in there, and one of the walls was halfway painted black, and the whole room smelled like sawdust for some reason. I was already tucked into bed when Marcus came in to say goodnight and to lay out the new rules I’d have to follow if I wanted to keep living there.
“You’re going to build your life the same way I built mine,” he said. “By making an aggressive plan and then sticking with it.”
We were going to have mandatory study sessions, and I was going to eat normal food until I liked it, and no more gambling would be allowed at all, and a million other rules I’d never be able to remember. When he finished going through it all, he patted me on the shoulder in this really friendly way and said, “It’s good to have you home,” but I could tell he wasn’t quite ready to leave yet, because he started pacing in these very nervous circles around my bed.
“Listen, Joe,” he said. “I’m going to be starting a family sometime in the next ten years, and lately I’ve been thinking a lot about baby names. I realized that Alexander is really the only name I could ever imagine giving to my firstborn son. I always knew this intuitively, but not consciously, not until recently. If you happened to have a male child before I did, you wouldn’t steal my thunder, would you? You wouldn’t name him Alexander, knowing what that name means to me?”
“I doubt it.”
“I’m afraid I’ve got to make it another condition of you staying here in my apartment.”
“Okay, Marcus. I promise I won’t ever name anybody Alexander.”
“That’s terrific. I’m so glad that’s out of my way.” He patted my hair again. “Goodnight, Joe. Tomorrow we’ll get all your stuff out of the dumpster.”
It was good to be back in my bed, I’ll admit. Marcus had thrown away my favorite pillow, but I had packed my good pajamas and my bed still smelled like me. I was starting to drift off to sleep when Julia snuck in. Her palm was cooler than my forehead.
“Are you sleeping?”
“No.”
“I don’t like how he talks about you.”
“Like how?”
“Like there’s something wrong with you. I don’t believe half of the things that he says, and I like the way you are. Why does everybody have to grow up so fast? Marcus is one of these people who wants everybody to be the same. I think it’s pretty funny that he’s accusing Alvin of ruining you, when all Alvin wanted to do was let you stay how you were.”
“That’s what Alvin says.”
“He’s right about one thing. You’re pretty good company. What will happen to you here?”
“I guess Marcus is finally going to whip me into shape.” I tried to laugh. Julia was sort of stroking my forehead the whole time we were talking. She would start at my eyebrows and stroke all the way down to the back of my head. I couldn’t stop looking at her lips. “Or I could go with you.”
“I had the same idea,” she said. “I could probably get you a job at the hotel. I’ll be working there all summer, up until I leave for college.”
“All my clothes are in the dumpster.”
“I know it’s really bad, but I think you should just leave them. I really think we should just run away.”
She helped me find my shoes, and within two minutes we were sneaking out of the house together. Marcus came out of the apartment building in his bathrobe while we were getting into Alvin’s car. He didn’t seem angry, just very disappointed. I walked over to him to say good-bye.
“Running away again,” he said. “I shouldn’t be surprised. But for some reason I am. I thought this time would be different.”
“I know I can’t come back. I’m sorry, Marcus.”
Across the street Julia was starting the car. She waved at Marcus. He huddled in his bathrobe and wrapped it tighter around himself.
“How come nobody likes me, Joe? There are a lot of things to like about me. I handle all my responsibilities. Instead, this girl runs off with you. What’s wrong with me?”
“I don’t know. Good-bye, Marcus.”
“Goddamn you, Joe. When are you going to learn to act like a man?” Marcus suddenly got really angry. I had the feeling that he was about to punch me. “I’m so tired of you. Get out of here. Just get the hell out of my sight.”
But when I tried to leave he grabbed my arm and pulled me close, and I could feel him spitting on my ear, “One day you’re going to realize your actions have consequences. What will you do then?” Across the street Julia was starting the car. Marcus glared at her. I tried to pull my arm away. “That girl’s too complicated. She knows something she’s not telling you.”
“Good-bye, Marcus,” I said. “Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye.”
He went inside without looking back at me again. I walked across the street and got into the car. Julia smoothed my hair a little bit and said, “Lights, Joe.” I turned on the lights and we drove away from Marcus’s house, past the McDonald’s and onto Ventura Boulevard.
“Do you know how to get there?”
“East,” she said. “We just keep going east.”
Julia helped me find our way onto a wide, fast highway, where driving was even easier than on the city streets, and after a while I couldn’t taste Los Angeles in the air anymore, and we were cruising through an open desert.
“You’ll have to tell me when we reach someplace you’ve never been,” said Julia.
“It’s already happened.”
“You’re so full of surprises. You never mentioned being so good at basketball.”
“That’s because I’m not a show-off.”
“Why don’t you do something with it?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Like play in college. Or play on a pro team somewhere.”
“I can’t play with people yelling at me all the time. I always go on tilt.”
“That’s like the fourth time I’ve heard you say that. What does that mean?”
“You play poker. Alvin must have told you what it means.”
“He never taught me that word.”
That one stumped me for a while. I drove through the dark, empty desert for a pretty long time before I thought of a way to explain it.
“Poker is really hard and it’s always impossible to know what you should do,” I said finally. “But sometimes, even when you know exactly what to do, you go ahead and do the wrong thing anyway. You bet when you know that you’ll
probably lose.”
“Why would anybody do that?”
“Some people get all drunk, or get angry at the cards, or they start to believe in different kinds of magic. Some people just can’t remember they’re supposed to be trying to win.” This last part was something Marcus was always telling me. “Marcus never goes on tilt.”
“What about Alvin?”
“Sometimes. But in a different way.”
“What about you?”
“I’m usually on tilt.”
“I think I’d like to be on tilt for a while.” She rolled her seat way back so she was basically lying down. “We forgot about Max,” she said.
“That’s okay. Marcus will take care of him, for sure. He loves dogs, and it’s easier than taking care of me.”
“Listen to us, Joe. Listen to the way we’re talking. What would people think if they could hear us? When did my life become totally insane?” Julia bit her arm for a second, like she was trying not to scream. “I just realized I have no idea what I’m doing. Absolutely none.”
She closed her eyes and soon I realized that she’d fallen asleep. I drove all night and it was pretty easy except for this one place, climbing over all these mountains that I’d never realized were so close, when I got suddenly a little sad, because I felt like I was falling off a cliff away from Marcus, instead of just driving away from him. I wasn’t waiting for Alvin to come home anymore. I was off on my own. Even now, remembering that night, it still makes my chest thump to think of riding off like that with Julia in the dark. Alvin and Marcus were the only two people I’d known my whole life, and I had no idea when I’d see either one of them again.
Julia was sleeping and the sun was rising when the car suddenly broke so badly that I couldn’t drive it anymore. I had to pull off the road next to a whole bunch of corn growing next to the highway. Julia woke up pretty quickly.
“What’s happening?”
“The car’s broken.”
This One Time With Julia Page 6