by Lisa Lutz
At the age of fourteen, I was already about five foot six, just two inches shorter than my current height. I looked a few years older than I was, but still like a student—in wrinkled T-shirts and worn-out denim. There was nothing to notice or not notice about my appearance—long brown hair, brown eyes, no freckles or identifying marks. If I had taken entirely after my mother, I might even be beautiful, but my father’s genes have blunted my features and I hear the word handsome far more than pretty. Still, at my present age of twenty-eight, with the help of a best friend (who is a hairstylist) and a slightly improved fashion sense, I look all right. Let’s leave it at that.
Age 15: Uncle Ray asked me what I wanted for my birthday. I told him a bottle of vodka, and when he said no, I suggested he teach me how to pick locks. This is not a common activity in the arsenal of PI skills, but he taught me anyway since he knew how. (When my mother discovered this fact, she gave him the silent treatment for two weeks.) I would never use this skill on the job, but I’ve found many recreational uses for it since.
Age 16: A pretext call is getting information under false pretenses. This was where my mother was genius. She has acquired SSNs, DOBs, entire credit card bills, bank statements, and employment histories all from a single phone call that might go something like this:
“Good morning. May I speak with Mr. Franklin? Oh, hello, Mr. Franklin. My name is Sarah Baker and I work for ACS, Incorporated. What we do is locate individuals who may have lost track of some of their assets. We have discovered over a thousand shares of a blue-chip stock in the name of one Gary Franklin. I need to verify that you are the same Gary Franklin. If you could give me your date of birth and Social Security number, then I can begin the process of transferring the stock certificates back to you…”
While I consider myself talented in the pretext department, my mother is and will always be queen.
Age 17: I drove on my first surveillance. For a year after I got my license, my dad would practice with me on the road. The concept is simple—aggressive but safe driving. Never drop more than two cars back (if you’re working alone) and know your subject, anticipate where he/she might be going, so that you do not rely entirely upon sustaining a visual. This was my father’s area of expertise. Having worked vice for so many years, he had a feel for the road and an almost psychic ability to predict a subject’s next move.
As my dad taught me most of the on-the-road tactics, Uncle Ray taught me the off-the-road shortcuts. For instance, when you’re driving at night, it’s easier to maintain a visual on a car with only one working taillight. I still remember the day Uncle Ray passed me a hammer and told me to smash out the taillight of Dr. Lieberman’s Mercedes-Benz. That was a perfect day.
Age 18: the magic year in my employment with Spellman Investigations. Because most of our work relates to legal matters, it is important to have the investigator be of legal age. At eighteen, I could serve court papers, perform interviews, and begin accruing the six thousand hours of fieldwork required for my PI license. The only thing standing between me and my license was a criminal record. A thorough background check is done on all potential PI candidates. Everything that happened before I turned eighteen would be sealed in my juvenile record, but as my father reminded me, I needed to stay out of serious trouble after that.
Age 21: On my birthday, I took the two-hour multiple-choice exam and three months later got my license.
David, on the other hand, ended his career with Spellman Investigations when he was sixteen, citing its interference with his schoolwork. He would never work for my family again, although one day we would work for him. The truth was, the job didn’t interest David. He thought people had a right to privacy. The rest of us did not.
DO NOT DISTURB
It was the nature of the business: snooping, legally and sometimes illegally. Like an executioner, you harden yourself to the truth of your job.
When you know what you and your parents are capable of doing to pry into another person’s life, erecting highly structured fortresses to protect your own privacy becomes second nature. You grow accustomed to your mother asking your brother if you have a boyfriend these days and then following you, when you venture out, to get a look at him. You think nothing, when you’re sixteen, of taking three buses in opposing directions and killing an hour and a half to lose her. You install deadbolts on your bedroom door and instruct your brother to do the same. You change those locks twice a year. You interrogate strangers and spy on your friends. You’ve heard so many lies that you never quite believe the truth. You practice your poker face in the mirror so often that your face freezes in that expression.
My parents always had a more than passing interest in the company I kept. My father insisted that the boys in my life were directly responsible for my juvenile-delinquent tendencies. My mother, more accurately, assumed that I was the bad influence. As my parents theorized about my various relationships and their effect on my alcohol consumption and truancy status, Petra theorized about my habit of sabotaging relationships. She said I either chose men who were entirely inappropriate for me, or I tested their patience to the point where they had to break up with me. I told her she was wrong. She suggested I make a list and see for myself.
Like my lists of basement interrogations and unproven crimes, the list of ex-boyfriends1 is like a cheat sheet of my past. In the interest of brevity, I kept the information to a minimum: number, name, age, occupation, hobby, duration of relationship, and last words—i.e., reason given for termination of relationship.
LIST OF EX-BOYFRIENDS
As for Ex-boyfriends #6 and #9, I’ll get to them later. Some people you simply cannot reduce to the data that will fit on a three-by-five index card. No matter how hard you try.
Sometimes I create a list at the moment of the event. Other times, the list is formed long past its point of origin, when its significance ultimately becomes clear to me. Even if I were to do away with all the other lists, this one must remain, because this is the list that documents the end of my reign of terror in the Spellman household.
THE THREE PHASES OF MY QUASI-REDEMPTION
Lost Weekend #3
The Foyer-Sleeping Incident
The Missing-Shoe Episode
As you might have gathered, Lost Weekend #3 is part of its own separate list. Eventually, when the scraps of paper that contained my lists were transferred to a password-protected computer file, I created a spreadsheet so one (me) could easily cross-reference data that appeared on more than one list. As for the Lost Weekends, there were twenty-seven total. At least that’s the number I came up with. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were more that I didn’t know about.
OLD UNCLE RAY
I cannot tell you about new Uncle Ray without a fair profile of Uncle Ray before there ever was a Lost Weekend. One Ray means nothing without the other.
Uncle Ray: my father’s brother—three years his senior. Also a cop. Or was a cop. He joined the force when he was twenty-one, made homicide inspector by twenty-eight. His moral compass was highly evolved, as were his dietary standards.
He ran five miles a day and drank green tea before anyone ever told you to drink green tea. He ate leafy greens and cruciferous vegetables and read Prevention magazine the way Russian lit professors read Dostoyevsky. He drank exactly one whiskey and soda at weddings and wakes. No more.
Uncle Ray met Sophie Lee when he was forty-seven, and while he had always been a serial monogamist, this was the first time he really fell in love. Sophie taught elementary school and happened to be the only witness to a vehicular homicide Ray was investigating.
Six months later they were married in a banquet hall overlooking San Francisco Bay. I have little recollection of the night. What I can say for sure is that, at twelve years old, I drank more at Uncle Ray’s wedding than he did.
From all I could tell, Uncle Ray and Sophie were happy. Then shortly after their first anniversary, Uncle Ray, a man who never smoked a cigarette in his life, got cancer. Lung cancer.
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Within a month, Uncle Ray went into the hospital, had part of his lung removed, and endured a grueling stint of chemotherapy. He lost all of his hair and twenty pounds. The cancer metastasized. Uncle Ray began another spate of chemo.
The whispers in our house during that time were deafening. There was a constant hum of words, short phrases, and occasionally muffled arguments all unintended for our ears. But David and I are highly trained eavesdroppers. “Surveillance starts at home” we used to say. Over the years we discovered “soft spots” in the house, specific locations where the household acoustics allow you to listen in on conversations in an entirely separate location. David’s and my intelligence gathering resulted in yet another list.
Uncle Ray’s chemo wasn’t working
Sophie stopped visiting him in the hospital
Mom was pregnant
The pregnancy was an accident, David and I concluded upon comparing notes. After thirteen years of raising me, I was sure my parents were ready to call it a day. But new life is the only thing that softens death. And when it became clear that Uncle Ray was going to die, it was then, I suspect, that my mother decided to have the baby. It was a girl and they named her Rae, after the man who would soon be dead. But then Uncle Ray didn’t die.
No one could explain it. The doctors said he was within weeks from the end. It was as obvious on his medical chart as it was on his body. This was a dying man. And then he just got better. When the dark circles around his eyes faded and the flesh seemed to return to his cheeks, we still said good-bye. Three months later, after his appetite returned and he gained back thirty of the forty pounds that he lost during the vicious chemotherapy treatments, we still said good-bye. Six months later, when the doctor told Sophie that her husband was going to live, it was Sophie who said good-bye. She left him with no explanation. That is when the new Uncle Ray was born.
He started drinking, really drinking—more than one whiskey and soda at weddings and wakes. For the first time in my life, Ray could hold his liquor better than me. He started gambling, not friendly poker matches among friends, but high-stakes games with minimum bets of five hundred dollars in secret locations delivered through codes on a pager. The racetrack became his second home. The ponies were his new love. The only time I ever saw Uncle Ray run again was during halftime of a 49ers game when he ran out of snacks. His health food days were over. Mostly he ate cheese and crackers and drank piss beer by the case. He was no longer a one-woman kind of man. Uncle Ray would play the field for the rest of his life.
It could be argued that the new Uncle Ray was more fun than the old Uncle Ray. I, however, was the only person doing the arguing. Uncle Ray lived with us for the first year after That Fucking Bitch left him. Then he found a one-bedroom in the Sunset district just around the corner from the Plough and Stars pub. During football season, you’d find him in our living room watching the games with my dad. Uncle Ray would pile the beer cans next to his chair, forming a perfect pyramid—the base sometimes as wide as eight across. Once, my father commented to Uncle Ray on his new diet and nonexercise regime. Uncle Ray said, “Clean living gave me cancer. I’m not going through that again.”
THE THREE PHASES OF MY QUASI-REDEMPTION (AND LOST WEEKEND #3)
I was fifteen the first time Uncle Ray disappeared. He missed Friday night dinner, then Sunday morning football. His phone went unanswered for five days. My father dropped by Ray’s apartment and found a week’s worth of letters and flyers jutting out of the mailbox. He picked the locks to Ray’s apartment and discovered a sink full of moldy dishes, a refrigerator devoid of beer, and three messages on the answering machine. My dad used his more-than-ample tracking skills and located my uncle three days later at an illegal poker game in San Mateo.
Six months after that Uncle Ray disappeared again.
“I think Ray is having another Lost Weekend,” my mother said in muffled tones to my dad. This was the second time I had heard my mother refer to Ray’s disappearing acts by the title of the 1945 film, a cautionary tale starring Ray Milland. We’d watched the film in English class once. I can’t remember why. But I do recall thinking that 1945 debauchery didn’t hold a candle to modern-day depravity. That said, my mother’s reference stuck, and while I had no idea what truly went on during Uncle Ray’s first two Lost Weekends, by the third I was an expert. That brings me back to the list I mentioned earlier:
Phase #1: Lost Weekend #3
It was a weekend that lasted ten days. Not until the fourth day of Ray’s absence did we begin our search. The phone numbers, which my father amassed during the first two mysterious disappearances, were now typed, alphabetized, and filed neatly away in his desk drawer. Mom, Dad, David, and I quartered the list and began making inquiries. Several generations of contact numbers later, we learned that Uncle Ray was staying in room 385 of the Excalibur Resort and Casino in Las Vegas. Uncle Ray wasn’t like those dogs you hear about that get lost on a camping trip with their family and somehow manage to limp, starving and dehydrated, the three hundred or so miles back to their owners. Uncle Ray would be dehydrated all right, but he never seemed to find his way home.
My father decided to invite me along “for the ride.” David wanted to go, but he was in the middle of filling out college applications at the time. Any notions of a fun father-daughter vacation were soon laid to rest. The invitation to accompany my dad was my parents’ version of an after-school special on the evils of drug and alcohol abuse.
Dad banged on my door at 5:00 A.M. We were scheduled to be on the road at 6:00. I slept in until 5:45, when my father grew suspicious of my lack of noise and made some more of his own. This time, a deafening series of thumps followed by a guttural Get your lazy ass out of bed. I dressed and packed in fifteen minutes and made it to the car as my dad was pulling away. I jumped into the moving vehicle like an action star in a buddy film. The image was lost after I buckled up and my dad told me I narrowly missed the worst grounding of my life.
I slept the first four hours of the drive and then flicked through the dismal radio station options for the next two, until my dad told me that he was going to rip my arm off and beat me over my head with it if I didn’t stop. We discussed the open cases on the Spellman calendar for the final three hours. What we didn’t talk about was Uncle Ray, not for even a minute. We stopped for a quick lunch and arrived in Vegas shortly before 4:00 P.M.
Ignoring the DO NOT DISTURB sign, my dad banged on the door to room 385 of the Excalibur, I think even louder than he banged on my door that morning. There was no answer and my father managed to convince the hotel manager to open the room for us. A commingling of scents greeted us at the door—stale cigar smoke, flat day-old beer, and the sour, distinctive odor of vomit. Fortunately, the manager excused himself and allowed my father and me to take in this spectacle privately. Upon viewing the room, with its tacky winks to medieval times, Uncle Ray’s debauchery seemed a fitting homage to King Arthur’s court.
My father scanned the room, searching for evidence of Ray’s present whereabouts. He gathered a few scraps of paper from the nightstand, studied the refuse, checked the closets, and then headed for the door. In the foyer, my father turned and looked back at me.
“I’m going to find Ray,” he said. “You clean this place up while I’m gone.”
“What do you mean, clean?” I asked, needing clarification.
My father replied with the dry, even tone of a computerized voice, “To clean. Verb. To rid of dirt. To remove half-empty beer cans from window and dispose of appropriately. To empty overflowing ashtrays. To mop up vomit on bathroom floor. To clean.”
That wasn’t the definition I was hoping for. “Dad, they have this thing in hotels now. It’s called housekeeping,” I said in my own instructional tone. But my father didn’t like my response. He closed the door behind him and came back into the room.
“Do you have any idea how hard those people work? Can you try to imagine the kind of filth that they see, smell, and touch on a daily basis? Do you ha
ve any idea?”
I’m pretty good at not answering rhetorical questions, so I let him continue.
“Uncle Ray is our mess,” he said. “We clean up after him, whether we like it or not.” With that last sentence, my father stared at me pointedly and then left the room. I knew he was reminding me that my messes, too, had to be cleaned up. I was sixteen at the time, and although his lesson was not without some impact, I didn’t change. Not then.
Phase #2: The Foyer-Sleeping Incident
At nineteen, I wasn’t much different. Instead of going to college, I went to work for my parents. I moved into an attic apartment in the Spellman home that was refinished as part of my employment contract. While I was still an asset to Spellman Investigations, I continued to be a liability in the Spellman household. My list of misdeeds had lengthened in three years and many of my habits, like staying out long past midnight and returning home too tanked to find my keys, were now out of my parents’ control.
I don’t remember much about the night of the Foyer-Sleeping Incident other than the fact that I had been at a party and had to be at work at 10:00 the following morning. I walked up the front steps, searched my pockets for the house keys, and came up empty. In the past, when I’d locked myself out—as I mentioned, a common occurrence back then—I’d climb up the fire escape to my bedroom or shimmy up a drainpipe in the back of the house and knock on David’s window, which was closest to the ground. However, the fire escape ladder was not extended and David had left for college two years earlier, so his room window was locked. I weighed my options and decided that sleeping on the porch was more reasonable than dealing with my parents at this hour and in my state.