Leonard is in the family garage, just where Mona said he’d be. Working on his hang glider. Mona told me all about the glider, and about the tattoo.
He got the plans for the glider off the Internet. Then Jake hooked into some chat rooms, trying to find out what everybody thought of these home-built glider things. According to Jake’s research, they’re a big mistake. But here’s Leonard in the family garage building one out of aluminum tubing, nuts and bolts, nylon mesh straps, and laminated polypropylene fabric.
Jake tried to find someone who had done the same thing successfully but was told they are all dead now. He was also told that if you are going to jump to your death, there’s no need to build a hang glider to take along. He hopes these are “in” jokes for chat rooms but suspects that even “in” jokes get their start in the truth.
Leonard’s faced away from me, looking so small and slight. Looking so bald, so monklike with his shaved head. I can see part of the tattoo. The top of the vertical beam of the cross. It rises just slightly up out of his collar. It’s so detailed, right down to the rough wood grain. I have a lot of ambivalence about the tattoo, but right at the moment I am dying to see it all.
He’s wearing his usual uniform: jeans and a plain white T-shirt. It offsets the color of his skin, which is somewhat magical in itself. Leonard is the color of coffee just exactly the way I drink it, with a generous splash of half-and-half. I can see the lump of his inhaler in his back jeans pocket. A beam of light sweeps down through the skylight in the roof and makes him look like the chosen one, which I often suspect he just might be. In that deep place where I believe almost nothing, I am tempted to believe that—a light, irritating tickle of belief. And the same beam of sun illuminates the weird silver skeleton of his craft-in-progress, nearly the length of the garage, and makes it look blessed.
I have to remind myself that I vehemently disapprove. This is the problem every time I see Leonard. I go in as a guidance counselor, come out as his personal cheerleader. Everything he does seems so right in person, and in proximity.
I just want to be left alone a moment to observe, but Moon Pie gives me away. Leonard’s strange dog. A big wire-haired monster of a mutt, brown and featureless, slightly reminiscent of an Irish wolfhound but nothing quite so blue-blooded in the end. He thumps his tail, and I am made, busted. Leonard turns around.
“Mitch,” he says. He always says my name like it’s exactly the name he has been waiting to say.
“Leonard,” I say and walk across his family’s garage like I am walking in a dream. Clap one hand down firmly onto his shoulder.
“Mona sent you,” he says. “Didn’t she?”
“She means well.”
“Duh,” Leonard says. “That rather goes without saying.”
Moon Pie’s wet nose leaves a cold smear on the back of my hand. “Well, just to take her side for a minute, what the hell are you thinking, Leonard?”
He drops his head back into the light. Closes his eyes. As far as Leonard is concerned, I’ve asked a serious question. I’m not sure he even understands the concept of the rhetorical. He is working hard on giving me the serious answer my serious question so richly and obviously deserves.
“Well,” he says, eyes still pressed closed in private prayer, “I’m thinking about Pearl. And I was thinking about you, just now. Right before you got here. And my eyes. I was thinking next time I see Mitch, I have to thank him again. For my eyes.”
“You don’t have to thank me for that anymore.”
“Why not? I use my eyes every day. What else did Mona tell you?”
“Well, about the tattoo.”
“They’re almost never fatal.”
“That’s not entirely true. Are you sure this place uses sterile needles?”
“Positive. Want to see?”
And of course the crazy thing is, I do. I’ve had Mona describe it to me at great length.
One of his many little adoptive sisters runs in. A scrappy, scarred ten-or eleven-year-old who worships Leonard, as they all do. Everybody who needs love runs to Leonard, who seems to shepherd an inexhaustible supply.
“Hi, Leonard,” she says. Eager and pleased. “Hi, Mitch.” More reserved. “Can I help?”
“Nope, sorry. Gotta scram, little twerp. I’m about to show Mitch my tattoo.”
“I wanna see it,” she whines, already aching with the unfairness of being excluded from this exhilarating adult event.
“When you’re eighteen,” he says. “Otherwise I’ll be corrupting you. You’ll go out and get a tattoo and who will everybody blame? Me, that’s who.”
“Awww,” she says, milking it a bit more.
Leonard tilts his head down. Gives her a look. “Fifteen minutes, I’ll take you down the block for an ice cream. If you scram. And take Moon Pie with you.”
Properly bought off, she runs out, holding the great shaggy beast’s collar, slamming the small side garage door behind her.
Leonard pulls off his T-shirt. He has not one hair on his narrow little chest. I have this horror that some of his theatrics might get him thrown in jail. It literally makes me sweat to think how he’d fare in there. Lithe, smooth, hairless. Slight. Innocent inside and out.
He turns his back to me.
The tattoo is bigger than I realized. It starts just above the spot where the collar of his T-shirt lies and continues down the middle of his back. The horizontal beam extends across his shoulder blades and just beyond his shoulder on each side. So he has to stand with his arms out to show it off just right.
The wood-grain detail is so frighteningly realistic.
With him standing faced away like this, it almost reminds me of performance art. Which is something like my opinion of the kid anyway. Performance art.
I have to remind myself that I am somehow supposed to disapprove of this.
I am here not to admire the boy but to convince him, once and for good, that his dead mother is not here on earth with him. That his dead mother is, in fact, probably not even dead. That it’s suicide to play these games, teasing at the edges of death as if he needed the practice. That if he loves me, he should love me right here, just like this, alive. And, also, I think I’m supposed to tell him the tattoo is foolish. I just can’t remember why or on what grounds.
“Leonard. You don’t…like…think you’re…Jesus or anything. Do you?”
“You know me better than that,” he says, still holding the pose. “So what do you think?”
“Well, it’s beautiful. Really, it is. I’m just thinking…I’m just wondering if you’ll still be glad to have it when you’re…You know. Thirty.”
He laughs. Turns around and takes the three or four steps across the garage concrete to me. Under the skeleton of his big dinosaur-bird craft. Still laughing. He touches my face as if I were his child, his silly paranoid child in need of comforting.
“Oh, Mitch,” he says. I am so foolish. I can hear it in his voice. “Mitch. I’m not going to live to be thirty.”
PEARL, age 17: safe
We got off the bus and there it was. The ocean. I had never seen such a thing before. My sweet little Leonard guy hadn’t neither.
This was the day my boy turned four.
A birthday is a very big thing. It should be big from the minute you wake up. It should be such a big thing—all day long—that you fall down into sleep that night all worn out from so much bigness. You get a present with paper on it, you can open that in just a minute. And then, depending on what’s inside, a birthday can sort of lose its shine. And then what do you got? No birthday. No big thing. So what I wanted for my sweet little boy was a birthday that would be big and last all day long.
Nobody should be able to mess with that, or make it not safe.
I had never seen the pier at Santa Monica but Rosalita had told me all about it. She said it’s a big amusement place, and then it’s a beach, all at the same time. She said it has a merry-go-round, and bumper cars, and an arcade where you can play Skee-Ball and win stuf
fed animals. Leonard didn’t have no stuffed animals, so this was good. She said you can eat corn dogs and Sno-Kones and hot pretzels, and if you look between the boards of the pier you will see the ocean. Way down there under your feet. She said when it gets dark they turn on these big lights that shine out over the water, and they light up the white foamy parts of the waves coming in.
I never seen a wave coming in and Leonard neither, so that is a big thing.
I saved a long time for this. I cleaned a lot of houses to make this day be. You better believe that. Nobody should fuck with a thing like that.
Leonard took off his shoes and ran down onto the part of the sand where it’s all wet and shiny, waiting for another wave to come in. When it did, it splashed up onto his shorts and curled all around his little skinny legs and he screamed. But it was good screaming.
“Pick me up, Mama,” he said.
And I did, but I also wanted to know why.
“So I can see where it ends.”
But even sitting up on my shoulders he still could not see the end of it.
See, that is a big thing.
We were on the sand with no towel but I don’t think it mattered. Leonard didn’t really have a thing to swim in, but he was in his boxer shorts and that worked out okay.
“You’re going to get burned,” I said.
“No, I’m okay,” he said.
I was thinking we could go under the pier for shade but he liked it in the sun.
There is something nice about how your skin feels when the sun dries that salty water right onto you. It smells and feels like the beach.
Three guys walked by and one of them was drinking a beer and he winked at me, and I gave him a bad look for that.
He called me a filthy name.
I won’t repeat it, but it’s not the kind of thing you call somebody in front of her little boy. I will just say that and no more.
“I got my kid here,” I said.
Because if I had said what I wanted to say, well, that’s not something you say in front of your little boy, either. I was thinking if he did one more thing to make our big day less than perfect I might feel like I wanted to kill him. I’m not saying that I would have. Just that I was starting to think things like that.
The guy just stood there looking for a minute. He was not real steady on his feet in that sand. A big guy. One of his friends had walked on without him. The other one who stayed was a red-haired guy, not so big.
“Come on,” the red-haired guy said and pulled the big drunk guy’s arm. “Forget it,” he said.
I think that’s exactly what happened. I think the big drunk guy was so drunk he forgot what he was going to say, and so they walked away.
I was thinking how to remember this day so that part never happened.
Leonard had his mouth open, watching them walk away down the beach.
After a while it got to be three or four or five o’clock and we were pretty burned and the sun was way over to one side. It was getting nice and cool.
We went up onto the pier and Rosalita was right. You can look down between the cracks and that’s the ocean. Down there. It makes you a little dizzy. It gives you this funny feeling inside.
We ate corn dogs and drank orange soda and then we had frozen Snickers bars for dessert. Leonard wanted to go on the bumper cars but I thought maybe not right after we ate. Maybe after a little while.
We walked around in the arcade and there were video games and driving games and Skee-Ball and on one wall was all the stuff you could win. I could see Leonard’s face light up looking at all those stuffed tigers and giraffes and elephants and dolphins and horses and rabbits and pigs and bears.
I counted what money I had left, but it wasn’t looking good for winning one. I would have to get every single ball in for fifty points and even then I wasn’t sure it would be enough.
“Let’s go ride the bumper cars,” I said.
The guy in charge didn’t want to let us on because Leonard wasn’t big enough.
I said he could ride in a car with me, but he was not supposed to let people do that. But I would not get out of the way.
There was a line behind me and I wouldn’t move out of it, and the guy behind us said, just let them go. He was mad at having to wait. So we got to go.
I rode with Leonard sitting between my knees. He was looking up at the ceiling. I think he was liking that electricity sound and those sparks from where the long poles on the backs of the cars touch the ceiling. Or not liking it, I don’t know. Maybe a little bit of both.
But the drunk guy from the beach, he was on that ride, too, and he kept bumping us head-on. You are not supposed to bump head-on. It’s against the rules. He was doing it just to be mean. And the guy in charge was not stopping the ride, either, to tell him. Maybe he was mad at me for getting on in the first place. I don’t know.
I steered up beside the stupid drunk guy and I grabbed him by part of his sleeve. He was so drunk he didn’t even think to knock me off him again. Not right away.
“Leave us the hell alone,” I said. I sounded like I would hurt him if he didn’t. I would have been scared of me, if I had been someone else hearing me say that.
Then we both crashed into a fat kid’s car and the ride was over. I figured that would be the end of that.
We played Skee-Ball as long as we could. I mean, as long as the money was there to play with. It didn’t go so good. In fact, it didn’t go as good as I thought it would, and I’d never had what you might call high hopes.
Trouble was, my little sweet birthday guy wanted to play, too. How could I say no? It was his birthday, and he had never played Skee-Ball before.
But I wanted to win him a stuffed animal so bad. But what could I say to him? I had to let him try.
The first time he rolled the little ball, it didn’t even go all the way up. After a few tries he rolled it real hard but never down the middle. Not for any points.
And I’d never played before, either. So I didn’t get any points at first, and then after a while I’d get maybe a ten.
We were getting low on money. We had to save enough for the merry-go-round and the bus back home. And we still only had one of those little tickets you get for playing good Skee-Ball. You can’t get any prizes for one ticket. Not even the little stupid ones.
The drunk guy was playing way down on the other end of that arcade, and his redheaded friend was playing right next to him. Where the other guy went I didn’t know. But they were good, and it pissed me off. I could see long strings of tickets hanging out of their Skee-Ball machines. At least they were leaving me alone.
But then the big drunk guy took out a cigarette. Only I don’t think you could smoke in there. You have to step outside.
On his way out he walked right behind me. And he touched me. I swear to God that stupid asshole touched me.
Put his hand right on my ass.
I just completely went off.
I spun around and went at him and I was slapping him in the face and I think I kicked him once or twice. He fell backwards into a pinball machine and almost knocked it over. I was yelling about it being my boy’s birthday, and how dare he go messing everything up like that?
He had this look in his eyes like he was going to come after me, but he never got to. Because his red-haired friend was there by that time, and also a guy who works in the arcade giving out change. And they held on to him and wouldn’t let him come do whatever he was wanting to do back to me.
The redheaded guy said, “Stop it, Don. Just stop it. She’s got a kid, okay?”
I turned around, and there was my little birthday guy, looking really scared. Why can’t people just leave you alone?
The man who worked in the arcade told the drunk guy to get out and not come back.
He left mad, walked off down the stairs to the beach, and I’m happy to say we didn’t see none of him after that.
The redheaded guy went back to the Skee-Ball machines and collected up all those tickets. There
were two big long strings. He came up to us again. I knew he was not the bad one, but I wanted us left alone all the same.
“Sorry about my friend,” he said.
I was looking at those long strings of tickets. It didn’t seem fair. My boy deserved them a lot more. Why should a good thing like that happen to people who aren’t even good people?
“You need different friends,” I said.
“Don’s not a bad guy. He just had a few too many.”
He had that freckled skin that people with red hair have. I bet he couldn’t spend too much time in the sun. He was older than me, but not old. Maybe twenty.
“Let me tell you about your friend,” I said. “You stand too close to him, some of that stink might start to come off on you.”
And I took my boy’s hand and we walked away.
We were going riding on the merry-go-round.
Leonard got to pick out the horse. He picked one that was a silvery color, with a blowing mane. Its neck was all arched back.
We rode on that one horse together, and it was one of the ones that go up and down.
I closed my eyes and I was pretending it was a real horse, and that my boy Leonard and me were riding up and down hills with the ocean right down the hill from us. Which I could see really good with my eyes closed. I could smell the real ocean, which made it easy to pretend.
Leonard was kicking the horse’s sides and telling him, “Go faster.”
There was music.
When I opened my eyes that guy with the red hair and freckles was there watching, and he had a stuffed giraffe. He had traded in all his tickets for that nice stuffed toy, I guess. It didn’t seem like the type of thing a guy would pick.
When the ride stopped we got off and he came up to us and tried to give the giraffe to Leonard. “For the birthday boy,” he said.
First I wondered how he knew that, about Leonard’s birthday, but then I remembered that I’d been yelling about it a lot.
Love in the Present Tense Page 4