Don never wanted to live a stalled life: Suburbs, mortgage, kids, television. So he moved on. Moved on to high school graduation and gas stations and community college. Moved on to art school. Moved from class to class, party to party, drug to drug. Moving and moving and moving. Moving at the speed of sound: waves crashing beneath the Golden Gate Bridge. The speed of light: neon throbbing in the window as he rang up films of people feigning pleasure. Moved back home, then back out. Plowed through college a second time, won awards for his paintings and photographs, steady job, steady girlfriend, but there was always something. Something pulling him. Something else.
I feel like my brother and I have been sitting on opposite ends of the same see-saw. We listen to the same music, watch the same movies, but often at different times: He'll be in his Rolling Stones and Scorsese phase, while I'm headlong into The Coen Brothers and Bob Dylan. We read nonfiction, but he'll loan me books about larger-than-life explorers navigating through the Amazon or high-profile serial killers at the turn of the century. I'll offer memoirs about domestic issues or father-son relationships, books by Tobias and Geoffrey Wolff—two brothers writing about the same man.
Don tries to introduce me to new music, bands that are still making the rounds at small bars and clubs in Brooklyn. He makes me mixes of this unfamiliar music and FedEx's them to Boston. I open the CDs and check the playlists for bands I recognize, songs I know by heart. I put the CD in my desk drawer where it will remain, for days, months, sometimes years, unheard.
Until one day I decide to clean. I pop in one of Don's CDs for background music, songs that won't distract me. As I scrub around the bathroom floor, sponging up renegade bobby pins and strands of my hair and Vanessa's, I pause. I hear a song I recognize. Not a tune I know by heart, but it's familiar. I walk over to the computer and check the artist, the title, and try to place the song. But it can't be placed. It's new. Something I've never heard before.
29
BEFORE MY first interview with my father, my mother took me to Radio Shack and helped me pick out a new recorder. As we approached the register, she reached into her purse.
"No, Mom."
"I want to," she said, smiling. "I think it's a good idea."
That afternoon, her smile faded when I took out the recorder and sat with her in her garden. Hands caked in soil, she knelt on a thick foam pad beside a small metal sign: Gardeners Have the Best Dirt. She said she had nothing to say, that it was my father who should be talking. I knew that wasn't true. I knew from the hours and hours we spent on the phone over the years, as she talked about this sister or that brother, often the same family events again and again. These jumbled characters and plots seemed to have no origin or destination, like pollen in the breeze. At the end of these conversations, she'd apologize for "talking my ear off." She brushed the dirt from her hands and stretched her back. Then she began a story she'd told me before, but this time slower, and in detail.
But first, like my father's mother, she would interrupt herself and talk about her jobs, the ones she worked from home. Selling arts and crafts or Mary Kay beauty products. For a while, she sold weight-loss pills called Herbalife. I remembered the giant green pill box sitting on our kitchen table. Sometimes I'd lie awake in bed and listen to her drop each pill into its proper place.
She told me about nursing school and the public speaking course that scared her off. She used to tell me this story when I was worried about giving a presentation in school. I thought this was the only reason she dropped out but, in her garden, she told me about the months she worked at a state hospital, scrubbing bed pans and drawing blood. There was one man who liked to talk to her. He told her war stories, heroic sea tales from his time in the Navy during World War I. When she'd lean over to adjust his IV, he'd slip his hand up her skirt. She told him to stop. He'd cut it out for a day or two and then start up again. Eventually, she turned in her uniform and quit.
Then she told me about her father. I could see my grandfather shuffle across his living room rug in pin-striped pajamas, sleeves cut off just above his anchor tattoo. The anchor was the color of a vein, a red heart stabbed on the anchor's fluke. In the summer, the mercury in the red ink made the heart swell like a blood blister. Sometimes I had to fight the urge to reach out and pop it. He made his way across the rug and paused in front of the china cabinet. His knees cracked and popped as he bent down and retrieved a bottle of amber liquid and a small silver cup. He filled the cup once, knocked it back. Again, slower this time, sipping. He sucked air through his teeth, then looked at me and grinned. I grinned back as if we had just shared a secret. Though I'm sure my mother and father were watching, at the time I thought my grandfather and I were playing our own private game of charades.
My mother stuck her shovel in the dirt and began the story she intended to tell me from the beginning. Her twin brothers, Richard and Robert. Robert was wild, rebellious, liked to cut school and smoke cigarettes behind the supermarket. Richard, a quiet boy, ran track—a sprinter. He sat in the front of the classroom. Excellent penmanship. The steady hand of a calligrapher.
When Robert was fifteen, he cut class to hang out at a friend's house. Maybe Richard told him not to, maybe he didn't. "Depends who's telling the story," my mother said. "Richard always blames himself."
Robert and his friend played cops and robbers, stalking around the couch, beneath the dining room table, down the hallway, into the bedroom. Pow. Bang, bang. Pow. I got you. No you didn't. Yes I did. The boy's sister had a boyfriend. He was a real cop, fought real crime with a real gun. The gun went off and hit Robert in the stomach.
My grandparents received a call, from whom my mother couldn't remember. An ambulance took Robert to the hospital. He died an hour later. That night my grandfather stood in the living room, still wearing his postman's uniform. A ship unmoored, swaying with the tide. My mother pressed her ear to her bedroom door, listening to her father, to the man she said always had an answer, repeat over and over: I don't know.
The next day, my mother's sister got married. Robert's wake was the following day, and it lasted for two days and two nights. My mother's sister announced she was pregnant. My grandmother passed out tranquilizers. Robert was buried.
"Busy weekend, wouldn't you say?" my mother said, shaking her head. "After that, I don't know. Things were hard for grandma and grandpa. He was at the bar all the time and grandma kinda checked out. I think she was scared to get close to us, to let anyone get close to her. Richard had a very hard time."
Richard stopped sprinting. He trained for long distances. He took a scholarship and ran away. Headed south: Arizona, North Carolina, Kentucky, Georgia. Years later, my parents traveled down from Long Island to visit him. They spent the night at his house. His land was overgrown, and there was a rusty oil tank beside the shed. My father found a piece of PVC piping and attached it to the top of the oil tank to make it look like a beached submarine. They posed in front as my mother took their picture. On the back of the photograph, my father wrote S.S. Redneck.
My mother stood up and stretched her knees. She grabbed a packet of seeds off the deck and sprinkled them into the holes in the ground. I raised my recorder to her lips.
"I think Richard sort of absorbed Robert's personality."
I nodded and thought about the water displacement experiments I used to do in science class. Drop in a cube made of wood, then aluminum, then lead. Measure the volume until the beaker overflows.
My mother bent down and pressed a seed into the dirt. "All of Robert's stuff was boxed up and we never talked about him. Not until grandma got sick. I hardly knew the woman, Anthony. I talked to her more in her last week alive than I had my whole life."
Robert died while my father was in Vietnam. I imagine my father in his hooch: crew cut, dark green sunglasses, toned body pressing against his green uniform. Hands in his pockets, twirling Eisenhower's profile, the coin he'd rub as his "freedom bird" lifted off from Saigon six months later. The coin he held as medics rushed bodies across
Long Binh to the hospital. The coin he flipped as non-compliant American soldiers were escorted to the prison on the other side of the base.
Between the sick and the damned, he twirled a coin and prayed for luck.
One night, the red-alert sirens shocked him out of sleep. He left the coin in his hooch, rushed to the perimeter, gripping his M-16. Dropped to the dirt and took aim at no one, everyone. Squeezed his trigger and emptied a magazine of bullets into the dark.
My mother squinted into the sun. "I never wanted to limit you or your brother." She seemed like she was about to cry. Her tears snuck up on her. She breathed deeply. "Who am I to tell you guys what to do?"
30
NOT LONG AFTER my father's stroke, Don starts talking about getting him a tattoo for Christmas. I drive down from Boston and pick up Don at the train station. He tells me what assholes tattoo artists are and how they're elitists and you walk in there and before you even ask a question, before they even know anything about you, they assume you're some jerk-off who wants barbed-wire around your bicep or Yosemite Sam on your calf.
"What the fuck do you have to be stressed about, dude?" Don says to the windshield. "You're a tattoo artist. You got the coolest job in the world. Relax. And without customers, you wouldn't have shit."
"I know," I say. "I hate that. It's like you owe-"
"Owe them something! Exactly! Owe them something just for coming in."
Don used to talk about being a tattoo artist, and I think he may have been an apprentice for a little while, if not in New York, then maybe in San Francisco. But he hasn't mentioned it in years.
Don takes out a newspaper clipping of an eagle, the feathers red, white and blue.
"I can't believe this is what Dad wants," he says.
"Are you sure he really wants a tattoo?" I ask.
"He will after I get him a gift certificate."
"All right. Just asking."
"I know, dude. You already asked me."
I park beside the snow bank in front of Vintage Tattoo. Before my Honda rolls to a stop, Don pulls on the handle, but the door is locked. He pulls harder, swearing under his breath. I unlock it, but the door doesn't open because he's still pulling on the handle. I hit the button again and this time the door pops open.
"All right." He exhales. "Game face." He checks himself in the mirror and steps out.
My little silver Honda trembles as Hummers and Escalades zoom by, splashing the windshield with dirty water. I step out and Don is on the sidewalk with his arms spread like he doesn't know where to put them.
"What are you doing?" he asks.
"Walking. What are you doing?"
"Waiting."
"I can see that." I step into the deep footprints Don made in the snow bank, steadying myself as I cross over yellow pock marks and brown craters. I make it to the sidewalk and stomp my boots. Don watches me through the fogged glass. I follow his trail of melting snow inside.
We flip through the big black portfolio books full of basic tattoo designs. Don finds a page of Yosemite Sams, taps the plastic and nods. I smile and point to the wall of tribal tattoos and Chinese letters behind him. He shakes his head.
Don looks at the woman behind the counter.
"Are we gonna get some service here or what?" he says, not to me, not to her. His question seeps out of his mouth and disappears, like the incense burning on the coffee table.
"Did you ask?"
"No, I sat here like an asshole. Yes, I asked. She said she'd be right over."
I flip a page. "Well, then, she'll be right over."
"Yeah, well, when?"
A big bald guy with earlobes like janitor's keys jingles into the tattoo parlor and points at us.
"You my one o'clock septum?"
Don and I look at each other. "No, man" Don says. "We're waiting on some information about tattoos."
"Oh," the man says. "My bad. Sylvia'll be right with you."
"Thanks," I say.
All I can see of Sylvia is the back of her head. She's hunched over a shirtless young man. The girl who appears to be his girlfriend leans in the doorway, watching Sylvia cut into his chest.
Don holds up a page full of hearts that say Mom and Dad.
"Let's get 'em."
I laugh and shake my head.
"What? Come on, let's get matching tattoos."
"Yeah, right."
Sylvia's needle buzzes. Stops. Buzzes.
"Fuck it, I'd do it right now," Don says.
"Let's start with Dad's, okay?"
"Why?" he says, looking straight at me. "You said you wanted another one."
"I do." I flip another page and stare at each design. "But I'm not gonna just pick out something random."
The buzzing stops. "Okay, what can I do for you boys?"
Don closes the portfolio, tells Sylvia he's looking to get a tattoo for his father. He unfolds the paper.
"This is what he wants. I don't know if you can do it or not. If it's too detailed orwhatever."
Sylvia scrunches her face. "No, I can do this."
"Okay, cool," Don says. "Just that another place said they couldn't so that's why I said that."
"Is this your father's first tattoo?"
"Yes, it is." Don's voice goes up an octave and he drums a quick beat on the counter.
"When do you want to do it?" Sylvia asks, opening her planner.
Don grins. "Day after Christmas?"
Sylvia looks up. "I'm booked through February."
I turn toward the window and grin. Nearly an inch of fresh snow covers my car. A parade of plows and salt trucks roll by, their flashing yellow lights momentarily filling the tattoo parlor.
"February 3rd is my first available. It's a Wednesday."
"Oh, perfect," Don says. "He's off on Wednesdays."
"I'm supposed to start teaching in January," I say to Sylvia.
"What?" Don asks.
"That job I told you about."
Sylvia looks at me, then Don.
"Well, this is from both of us, dude," Don says.
Sylvia turns to me.
"I know that. But I'm saying if you want me there, it might have to wait a little while." Sylvia turns to Don.
"I understand that. And I'm saying we should both be there." Don turns back to Sylvia. "Got anything the first week in March?"
Sylvia looks at her book. "I could do March 3rd, it's a Wednesday."
"Not sure I can take off that soon," I say.
Don sighs. "Okay, fuck it, February 3rd."
Sylvia looks back at me for the last time and writes in her book.
"Guess you'll just have to see it when it's done," Don says.
I nod and give Sylvia a tight-lipped smile, though I want to scream, stand up on the counter and look down at Don and tell him that Dad's waited sixty years to get a tattoo. What's another couple of months? But I can't slow him down. I'm used to Don moving away from my father. That's the role he established, the one he played so well. Lately, Don is trying to get close, and I don't know how to act.
Aren't I the one who lingers in the past, digs through old photographs and watches videos of our summer vacations? The Don I grew up with barreled through the present, drove headlong into the future, leaving the past coated in dust. Since my father's stroke, I've seen a different side of Don—a desire, desperate at times, to create something tangible, something he can point to as evidence, proof that he and my father existed.
We don't talk again until we step outside. The dog piss and shit at the side of the road is covered with a fresh layer of snow, and the foot holes that helped me cross have slowly begun to refill.
"All right," Don says. "She turned out to be pretty cool. Man, I shoulda scheduled this earlier."
I pretend I can't hear him over the trucks roaring by, but it doesn't seem to matter because he continues to talk about how there are still some nice people left in the world and it all depends on our attitudes as customers and if everyone could just relax and be patient with eac
h other, the world would be a much calmer place.
*
I had recently left the temp agency. They offered me a "marketing position," which really meant handing out free newspapers on the corner. A friend of mine told me about a teaching position at a prison in Boston. As part of my graduate program, I had taught a few creative writing classes in a correctional facility, so I applied.
Today is casual Friday, which means I can wear a t-shirt and jeans. "Civilian" clothes, my students say. They wear the same uniforms as yesterday, unless they've changed units. Drug recovery is blue, kitchen is brown, re-entry is maroon. Green and beige do not have specific requirements, and guys who live in these units can sit in their cells all day watching TV. When I say I don't own a television, one of my students, Tito, looks at me.
"Get ya'self a Blu-Ray, man. Shit. They ain't gonna break ya' wallet."
I smile and shake my head. "It's not about the money, Tito. I just don't like it. It's a distraction."
Terrance, one of my larger students who used to frighten the hell out of me, speaks up.
"Man, I remember when I'd come home from a job. Kick off my boots, pour myself a tall glass of Wild Irish Rose, mix that shit up with some Hennessy, splash'a ginger ale-"
"That sounds awful, Terrance," I say. Tito laughs.
"What!" Terrance says, "You out ya mind, man. Let me finish my story. I mix the Wild Irish Rose with the Hennessey and the ginger ale, throw in a can of fruit cocktail, mix it all up and suck it down." He holds the drink to his lips and slurps.
"Shiiit. We all know where it's headed," Tito says. "You start pimpin' ya nasty-ass hoes, drinkin' that shit, passin' out to The Jeffersons."
The class erupts with laughter, even Terrance. Terrance is a big bald guy, mid-sixties, calluses and scars shaped like hands. On his first day in class, I asked him if he'd like some help with his reading. He looked at me, then picked up the excerpt from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest on my desk.
"This the one with Jack Nicholson?"
The Language of Men Page 22