Dad wants us to know our heritage. Tony and I are sponges. It makes me feel important, like a prophecy that must be fulfilled. As if there is danger in our very blood. We pepper him with questions: “Did you ever shoot anyone? Where did you get the checks? How much money was it? Wasn’t Donny in Vietnam? Was he part of it?”
“I never shot no one. But I been shot at a bunch of times. It was never that much money, just enough to get by. We weren’t very good crooks.” Pete was the oldest and the first to do time, mostly in the work camps like Viejas, the honor camps where you sweat in the sun laying asphalt all day. Dad is the comedian, who did his time in Chino state prison and also got in some trouble in Mexico. Wes was the only one who never went to prison. He became a schoolteacher and took care of Grandma Mary, moving her into his house when she could no longer work. Donny was the baby, “a real sweet kid before Vietnam fucked him all up.” Something happened to him there. Dad says they never knew what. But it was probably drugs.
Dad wrote Donny letters from jail while he was in Vietnam but he never heard back. He says that he got into drinking and had some wild nights in Saigon. On the day he was shipped back, he got into trouble because on his way to a transport plane something moved in his giant duffel bag. The MPs got suspicious and stopped him right there on the tarmac. When they opened it, there was a small Vietnamese woman inside. At least that’s the story.
“Stop exaggerating,” Bonnie says, smiling.
“Hey, I’m just trying to let these guys know where they come from. They got the gene. They need to know.”
Dad’s father, who he never really knew very well, owned a used-car lot down on Broadway in Lemon Grove. It was a small corner business with a garage where the boys worked sometimes, fixing up old cars just enough to get them “off the lot.” When they were off the clock, they built engines and put them into cars they raced to Tijuana and back. “Some of those vehicles were lowered so low you could push a pack of cigarettes down the street with the front bumper. That was the style, man.” I try to picture Dad’s curly-’froed head with a spit curl, his broad shoulders in an oversize suit with a wallet chain but it’s something from another world, like a character he played in a movie once that disappeared when the credits rolled.
The house in San Diego is overflowing with people. Pete is tall and thin, handsome with dark tan skin and a slender mustache like one of those actors from black-and-white movies we see on TV where everyone carries a sword. Donny has big muttonchops and a goatee and sleeveless flannel showing off his big arms. He shows up with Rose, his quiet Mexican wife and our cousins Cindy, who is about my age, and David, the baby. Donny looks powerful in his Padres baseball cap, a lazy cigarette hanging on the edge of his lips when he talks. He’s the loudest one in the group. He grabs me by the shoulders when I walk in and says, “Hey, bud. Your dad finally got you down here to hang out with your loco-ass family, eh? Bet you didn’t know you had all this insane shit in your blood?” He pulls from a can of Budweiser, occasionally pouring a little into the mouth of the baby David who he holds in his arms. “The brew is good for the heart. Builds strength.”
Wes is a large man who moves like a gentle bear. He’s soft-spoken, unlike his brothers who wail and laugh and tease each other. Grandma Mary has white hair, deep wrinkles, and a big Italian nose. She practically shakes as she runs up to me to squeeze me. “Look at these boys, oh!” she says. She clasps her hands, smiles and says, “So handsome!” Grandma has a magnet of Saint Peter on her fridge and candles all around the house, each for a different saint who she talks to when she prays. “I know we’re supposed to talk to a priest but I just talk to them anyway. I think they’re listening.” She’s Catholic. Donny says that means we’re Catholic too which is fine by me because all I ever knew was we were Dope Fiends or drunks. Catholic sounds much more respectable.
Great-Grandma Rossi is Grandma Mary’s mom. She sits in a wooden rocking chair next to the sliding glass door which leads to a deck, an ancient, thin woman with sunken cheeks in a black dress and a black hat. She doesn’t speak any English and keeps saying something in Italian that I don’t understand: “Oddio! Mio bellissimo bambinos!” She pinches my cheeks hard and hands me a piece of licorice. Dad says she’s ninety-seven years old and the “toughest old broad you’re ever gonna meet.”
They all love Bonnie. They hug her and say, “You hold on to this one, Jimmy. ’Cause if you don’t, I’m taking her.”
Grandma says, “You being good? This is a nice lady. You better be nice to her, Jimmy.”
Dad laughs. “I’ll keep her around for another week if she behaves.” Bonnie shoots him a smile.
The adults order sandwiches from the Italian deli for lunch and we drink sugar sodas and eat salami and cheese with red sauce on torpedo buns.
“Your dad ever tell you we busted him out of a Mexican prison?” Pete asks me.
“Oh, don’t start with that,” Grandma says. “They don’t need to know about that.”
The men ignore her. “You boys. Always so baaad.”
Pete cocks a thumb at Dad and says, “This smart guy right here was driving a car full of drugs across the border.”
“It was my friend’s car. I didn’t know it had drugs in it.”
“That’s what he told the judge!” Donny yells. “That Mexican judge didn’t even speak English and he knew bullshit when he heard it. Bullshit translates in any language. Bull-a-sheet-o!”
Dad shrugs his shoulders and says, “Well, it’s true. I didn’t know.”
“Anyway, they stopped him at the border and found a pound of crank—or was it pills? Anyway a big bag of drugs—in the trunk. Sentenced him to five years. That’s five years in a Mexican prison, which ain’t nuthin’ like these cushy cells they got at Chino or Folsom with people making wine in the sink and movie night every Saturday.”
“You would know!” Donny hollers. “They got a Jollett wing up in Chino with the name carved above the door!”
Pete ignores him. “So that ain’t easy time. The food alone. You can’t eat it. The Mexicans don’t give a shit what happens to you when you’re locked up.”
“It’s true,” Dad says. “There’s a sewer running right down the middle of the cell. They give you a little army kit with a metal fork that’s also a can opener and a small bowl with a chicken head in it. That’s lunch. The rolls are made of flour and sawdust. You can see the black bugs baked right into ’em. But I never bothered with it, because my cell had a window onto the street, so you could give money to a kid and he’d go to the taco stand on the corner and bring you back something to eat. It wasn’t so bad.”
Pete continues, “So I was the karate instructor for the police and I was asking around trying to figure out who we could pay to get Jimmy out, because we knew he wouldn’t last too long in there. We went and saw some abogados—those are lawyers—who told us to get used to it because there was no way they were going to release an American drug dealer caught at the Mexican border. So I told them, he’s no drug dealer. He’s just an idiot.” Everyone laughs, including Dad. He doesn’t care if he’s the butt of the joke or the teller of the joke or the audience for the joke, as long as there’s a joke.
“So one day,” Dad says, “some guy came in and just opened my cell door and walked away. I didn’t know why but after a few minutes I think well fuck it maybe he did it on purpose. When I get to the next door, the guard looks away and opens it. So I walk through that one too. I did this five or six times at five or six doors, not knowing if I’m about to be shot or what. Finally, I walked out to the street like it’s nothing. I walked all the way to the American border. Just standing there in my dirty long green wool sweatshirt and a three-week beard, stinking from that cell. At first they didn’t want to let me cross, until I spoke and they heard I was American. I said, ‘Yeah, I just got out of jail.’ So I borrowed a dime and called Pete and he and the old man came and picked me up.”
“We paid off a Mexican federal judge,” Pete says, his arm around Dad. “
It cost twenty-five hundred dollars to bust this numskull out. We put him in a car and drove the hell back to San Diego.”
“I haven’t been back since. I think I’m still wanted.”
Dad’s life seems like a series of near misses. He was almost killed in a motorcycle accident when his bike fell over on its side speeding down the highway. He jumped up on it and skidded right across the U.S./Mexican border. He was almost killed by a collapsing VW van as it smashed into a bridge. When he realized what had happened, he climbed out of the car which had folded up like an accordion, walked home and called the cops to report it as stolen. He had guns put to his head but no one ever pulled the trigger. He was shot at and stabbed. There were endless bar fights. Endless trials and cops and social workers and always, in the background somewhere, one or another doe-eyed woman hoping he’d just do the right thing, for once. He seems like something from one of those old pirate movies we see on cable TV at the apartment in Playa del Rey, swashbuckling, daring, a twinkle in his eye, one step ahead of the blade until he was busted and stood before a judge trying to talk down his sentence.
Wes pronounces our name “JOLL-ette” like “wallet,” even though Dad taught us to pronounce it “Joe-Lay.” Wes says that’s the way the old man said it and that’s the way they “say it in the old country” and that we probably lost an e at Ellis Island or something and Dad started saying Joe-Lay because his first wife, Susan, who he married when he was sixteen years old in a shotgun wedding, liked the way it sounded. All we’ve ever known is Joe-Lay though, so that’s what we say. Anyway, changing your name to impress a girl sounds exactly like Jollett behavior.
We have a half brother named Vince we’ve never met. Dad told us about him but since we’ve never seen him, he seems like one of those bits of folklore, one of those stories they tell. There’s Dad riding on a fallen motorcycle as it skids across the Mexican border. There he is in a stalled plane at two thousand feet with Grandpa Howard trying to restart the engine. There he is with a son at sixteen years old who we don’t even know. I wonder if he sees Dad differently, if he resents him for leaving, for all the birthdays he spent alone with a father in prison. It strikes me how a man can be all these things at once, in one lifetime: a prisoner, a drunk, a pirate, a fool filled with regret sitting alone in a dark cell, a pair of strong shoulders bouncing in the surf on a sunny day when you will live forever.
When we finally leave, when we are tucked into the backseat, having been educated, initiated into the world of Jollett men, Dad puts an Allman Brothers cassette in the tape deck of the Honda and begins to sing. He shakes his head, eyes squinted, pointing a finger in rhythm with the music. “You want to hear a smokin’ guitar? Listen to ’em wail,” he juts his face forward singing out into the freeway.
“You ever hear Fats Domino or the Big Bopper? Now those were songs.” He teaches us the words to “Chantilly Lace,” one line at a time, (she had a pretty face and a ponytail hanging down), making sure we get each syllable right. We practice until we can sing it perfectly, all three of us together, over and over again as we drive back from San Diego, knowing we are Jollett boys with danger in our genes, we are ramblin’ men, born for the jailhouse and rock and roll, rebels and outlaws who ride motorcycles to outrun the cops while the women sit home worried and crying and we sing at the top of our lungs:
That wiggle in the walk, and a giggle in the talk,
Lord, make the world go round round round!
CHAPTER 14
PLAY BOY
On the front of the baseball cap is the word *P*L*A*Y*B*O*Y* spelled out in large black letters. It’s as if it’s yelling at you, somehow blinking like those signs you see on the side of the highway at night. “No Vacancy” or “Cocktails ’til Midnight.” Tony got it from a bin at a swap meet we went to one afternoon the week before we left Los Angeles. Bonnie laughed when he put it on his head, standing there next to the bin in oversize green sunglasses, holding a Push Pop, which turned his lips orange in the sun. I think she thought it was a joke, “an eleven-year-old playboy, ha-ha,” so she bought it for him. It’s made of white cloth with a Velcro strap on the back. “Playboy” is a funny word. It’s like a challenge. A boy need only choose: he is either a “play” boy or a “work” boy. So when Tony put it on for the flight and wore it through the airport and on the plane and the stewardess said, “Who’s the little playboy in row twelve? Does the playboy want another Coke?” I felt as if he was simply announcing the choice he’d made. Play, it is.
When we land, we see Mom in the waiting area at the end of the jet bridge with her big crooked-tooth smile, her Birkenstock sandals. Her straight brown hair has grown long. I give her a hug and when she looks at Tony, she says, “Whoa, did you, uh, wear that on the plane?”
In the car on our way back to Salem from Portland International Airport she announces that Paul has decided to become a chimney sweep. It takes a minute to sink in since I don’t really know what that is, only that it is in a category of jobs with “lion tamer” and “blimp pilot” that don’t seem like things people do in real life. She says that it’s a man who makes sure all the chimneys work, that it’s a great career and there’s lots of opportunity because of all the wood-burning stoves in town. “It’s good he’s going to contribute because we could sure use the money.” She looks over at Tony, “So, um, that’s a new hat. Where’d you get it?”
“At the swap meet.”
“Do you know what it is?”
“Yeah it’s a magazine.”
“Do you know what’s in the magazine?”
“Sure.”
“And you’re okay with that?” She peers at him and he goes quiet, ignoring her, looking over the bridges and trees, the view of the city as we cross the Willamette River.
When we get to the house on Breys Avenue, I tell Mom I want to play her a song by Jackson Browne. Dad gave me his cassette tape of Running on Empty which I listened to over and over again on the Walkman he bought me at the swap meet. Jackson Browne is his favorite which makes sense to me since he sings about the road, the diners and truckers and women you meet along the way and it reminds me of Dad out on his bike on the highway, the way I remembered him when he was a blur on a motorcycle. I put the tape into the deck and press play in the living room for her to hear and go downstairs to unpack my bag. I can hear Jackson Browne’s voice filling up the house:
You take Sally and I’ll take Sue
There ain’t no difference between the two
Cocaine, runnin’ all round my brain
When the song ends, I come back upstairs and find Mom sitting on the floor with her legs tucked under her, one hand on the green shelf where we keep the stereo, crying. “These aren’t my values,” she whispers. “I didn’t raise you to have these values.”
“What values?”
“Drugs and Playboy magazine and just look at how fat you two got.”
I feel bad because I did the bad thing again and ate too much food in California and I’m confused because the song is about how drugs are bad. Jackson Browne is nearly dead as he sits in a room at the hospital and a doctor tells him it’s “impossible” that he’s only twenty-seven years old. “You look like you could be forty-five.”
I tell her it reminds me of the AA meetings, the way everyone has a story, how they hit rock bottom before they get better.
“That’s not the kind of story we tell. This glorifies drug culture.”
“He’s talking about how it will kill him.”
“Oh, right, and he’s so cool while he’s doing it. You can hear him snorting the drugs and laughing! You don’t hear about the families he’s broken or the children he’s left behind!”
“Jackson Browne? I didn’t know he had kids.”
“These aren’t my values.” She rocks herself back and forth, holding her knees. “I had kids so I could teach them my values.”
Tony comes upstairs with the hat still on his head, the big block letters lighting up the living room. *P*L*A*Y*B*O*Y*.
> “Why’s she crying? Mom, why are you crying?”
“Playboy?” She looks at him. “You like Playboy? A magazine that treats women like sex objects? As if their only value is their sex appeal to men and once that’s used up, once it’s gone, they are tossed aside like trash.”
“What are you talking about? It’s just the naked human body. It’s only natural.”
“That’s not natural.” She points at the hat. “That’s objectification. The photos in that magazine aren’t of strong women. They’re just bending over chairs and trying to look sexy. They may as well be show dogs. They might as well teach them to play fetch. What do you think women are?”
Tony shrugs his shoulders. “It’s only a hat, Mom.”
“I think you should take it off.”
“No. It’s my hat. I got it in Los Angeles. I want to wear it. You don’t get to decide what I wear.”
“I am your mother. This is my house. And you will not walk around in here with a hat that objectifies women. I’d like you to take it off.”
“You can’t make me. It’s mine.”
Mom stares at the ground as if looking into a deep pit. She whispers, “These aren’t my values.”
She gets up slowly and stands in the doorway. “Come here please.” Tony walks up to her. She looks down at him. Tony grew all summer and though she is still bigger than he is, his eyes come up to her chin so that the *P*L*A*Y*B*O*Y* letters reflect in her eyes.
They stand like that for a moment, staring at each other. She looks more worried than angry like she’s deep in thought. She says, “I’ll get you a new hat. Will you please take it off?”
“No. I like Playboy and I don’t see what the big deal is. Dad gets Playboy delivered to the apartment and Bonnie doesn’t even care. It’s just the human body.”
“Your dad is an adult man and gets to make whatever decisions he wants. I learned that a long time ago. You are my son and you live in this house and I make the rules. If you don’t take it off then you can’t go to Little League.”
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