"Yeah," I said. "Sort of."
"Either it is or it ain't."
"No, yeah. It is."
He held the paper as if weighing it in his hands. "All right, sign me up."
Terrance sits back in his seat, drumming his fingers on his book.
"Are we still talking about television, Terrance?"
"Yeah we are, if you let me finish. God damn. He musta got some last night, Tito. He's all feisty today. In his jeans and t-shirt."
"You and the ol' lady start the weekend early?" Tito asks.
"So I mix it all up, walk into my living room and take a seat in my nice leather chair. Flip on the tube and just relax. Now you tell me. You tell me what's so wrong with that?"
"Nothing, Terrance. Nothing at all."
"Well, then why don't you have a TV, man? Sometimes it's nice to zone out."
I shake my head. "I grew up in a house where the TV was always on. I go home now and it's still on. Dad comes home from work, watches TV. Mom comes home from work, watches TV. Is that living?"
The class is quiet for a rare second, but it doesn't last.
"They all lived out," Tito says. "Ya ol' man's tired. Ain't no thing."
"Hey, ain't we supposed to watch Cuckoo's Nest, today?" Terrance asks. "You been promisin' us a movie for months, man."
"I got it, I got it. And it hasn't been months, Terrance. It's been two weeks."
"Yeah, right. Sure feels like months."
I walk to the back of the room. The set is a TV/VCR combination, but there is a DVD player plugged in beside it. I feel old looking at this outdated equipment, like my parents must feel looking at a box of reel-to-reels. I pop in the DVD and press Play.
"1975," Terrance says. "The year this came out. Swept the Oscars, man. Took my girl to see it down at the Paramount. She was lookin' good, too."
I smile. "That's great, Terrance. Did she like it?"
"I don't remember and I don't give a shit. I liked it."
I skip through the coming attractions. "Well, as long as you enjoyed yourself. That's all that counts."
Terrance looks at Tito. "Finally, man. Finally he's making some sense."
"Rest yo' neck, killa. Movie's on."
I step back from the TV and take a seat next to Terrance, trying not to stare into the new camera in the corner of my classroom. The room must never be dark, so we watch the movie beneath fluorescent light, our faces glaring back at us on screen. Jack Nicholson walks into the dayroom in a leather jacket, jeans, and wool hat. He speaks to the giant Indian for the first time.
"Shiiit. Ain't he supposed to have red sideburns?" Tito asks, flipping through his book.
"You're right, Tito. In the book he does."
Tito shrugs and turns back to the screen and laughs as Jack Nicholson jokes with the patients. The Big Nurse begins the day's therapy session. Many of my students receive a steady dose of group therapy: AA, NA, Anger Management. Jack Nicholson and the patients sit in a semi-circle around the Big Nurse.
Terrance's belly laugh fills the room. "He look a bit like Ant, don't he, Tito?"
"Terrance, remember when we played the silent game?"
He looks at me. "Gettin' cute, now."
We return our attention to the movie, but my mind wanders. I remember how I used to bring in material I thought the students would relate to—hip-hop lyrics or articles on affordable housing and CORI reform. These lessons often drew blank stares. They had heard it all before. Listening is their full-time job: to officers, caseworkers, lawyers, teachers, guest speakers, parents, wives, girlfriends, children. I encourage them to talk.
Once, I was alone in the classroom with Terrance. He spoke more quietly than when he was around the other guys. I stared at his big, cracked hands as he gripped a pencil. We were reviewing long vowel sounds.
"After this bid, Ant, I'm gonna need a job."
"I thought you were retired."
"I am. But I still gotta earn." He asked me if I could show him how to fill out a job application. He also wanted to know what kind of words he should use in an interview. I pulled a blank application out of my filing cabinet and put it on the table. Terrance stared at it.
"Where do I start?"
I pointed to the blank line at the top of the page. "Start with your name."
*
"Well, who'd a'thunk it? Shy guy ends up teaching in the joint," my father says when I tell him I got the job. He wants to know if my students wear shackles in class or if any of them can make a knife out of a bar of soap. My mother asks if there are officers in the room with me at all times. I lie and say yes.
Some students are intimidating, guys who look the way movies tell you prisoners should look, like they spend all their time lifting weights and ticking time with chalk on their cell wall. But more often than not, the tough facade falls, and they pull me aside after class one day and whisper, "I can't read shit. You gotta help me."
Even now, after teaching there for three years, I'm still struck by how well-versed my students are in their different slangs, the languages they employ as pimps, drug dealers, arsonists, bank robbers. But when I call them up to the board for the first time, they don't say a word, their eyes locked on the blurry symbols inked into their hands.
*
The picture my brother took with his cell phone is small, but I can see my father's lips pressed tight, his eyes slightly closed. He wears a sleeveless shirt, tiny skeleton printed above his heart, as Sylvia, the tattoo artist, bends over his right shoulder. He leans against a black leather recliner, but I know that on the back of his shirt are two skeletons, one bending the other over a tombstone. The male skeleton wears a black bandana, the female a pink bikini. Above them, in white blockletters: The Boneyard.
Sylvia holds the blurry silver needle, etching the eagle head into the tan skin of my father's shoulder. An hour later, Don sends another picture, a close-up of the eagle's eye and beak. An hour later, another picture, the feathers red, white and blue. The last picture arrives and the eagle is finished. Above and below the eagle are black letters and numbers that did not appear in the newspaper where my father first saw the eagle. The bottom characters arc in a smile, the top in a frown: Vietnam/1970-1971.
*
In high school, Don gave himself a tattoo. He used a sewing needle and the ink from one of his sketch pens. A small star with a long, looping tail, just below his ankle bone. I glimpsed it in the mornings before school, as he shuffled to the bathroom like a zombie. If my parents noticed, I never heard them say anything.
A shooting star didn't seem to fit my brother's personality. A middle finger, sure. The cover of Pink Floyd's The Wall across his back, fine. But a shooting star?
It wasn't until years later that he told me the tattoo wasn't finished. He had plans to make a whole galaxy on his foot, turn the pale skin of his heel black with stars and comets and moons. He wanted it to curl up the side of his ankle, and his girlfriend at the time would get the same thing on her ankle, but it would be a little different, a few unique details since they were doing it freehand. I asked him why he didn't finish it. He shrugged. Perhaps it was too painful. Perhaps they ran out of ink. Perhaps the star got infected.
To me, the tattoo is a clue to my brother's secret life, the one set inside his smoky bedroom, in the woods behind the high school, within the four doors of his hydroplaning Volare. It hints at his unknown universe beyond our town, his life in San Francisco, a city that developed a mythic lore in my family. The shooting star is evidence of an unseen world, the dark landscape my brother moved through that my parents did not understand and of which I was too afraid.
Recently, I've gotten a better look at Don's tattoo, while we sit barefoot on the deck in the summer or rest our feet on the ottoman while we open Christmas presents. It's hard to tell which direction the star is shooting.
*
My father's tattoo was something he and Don could talk about. Don was knowledgeable on the subject and could speak at length about the healing
process, which ointments were the best, which sunblocks to use.
"Whatever you do, man, don't pick the scab. Or you'll fuck it up."
My father sat on the couch with his elbows resting on his knees, leaning in to Don's advice. I sat on the opposite side of the room watching Die Hard with the sound off, the closed caption scrolling across the screen. I often did this with movies I knew by heart. Sometimes there were discrepancies between the spoken and printed dialogue, and each time I caught one of these errors, I felt I had righted a wrong.
"So when are we going back for your next one?" Don said, re-tying the laces on his sneakers.
I laughed. My father shrugged. Then he rolled up his sleeve.
"Always thought it'd be cool to have a tiger over here." He outlined the image on his arm. "Like on a tree branch. Have'm stalkin' a rabbit or some shit."
I imagined my father covered in animal tattoos, like an illustrated map of the Brooklyn Zoo. Each animal posed exactly the way he wanted. I pictured his forearm lined with the profiles of all the animals he preserved in the basement. A visual showcase of his work.
Don and I looked at each other. "Really?" Don asked.
"Yeah. Think that'd come out pretty good." I watched him draw the image again, circling the location of the unsuspecting rabbit. He stopped, and the white outline stood out on his tan skin, then quickly refilled with blood.
"What about matching tats?" Don asked.
My father looked up from his arm. "Matching to what?"
"You and me. What if we get matching tattoos?"
Bruce Willis was about to jump off the roof of Nakatomi Plaza with a fire hose wrapped around his waist, but at the last second, the movie cut to a commercial.
"I hate it when they do that shit," my father said.
Don finished tying his shoes, stood up and went to the kitchen. He came back with a beer and leaned in the doorway to the living room. He stood the way he had when I was supposed to interview him. A controlled, eager expression that made him look like a little boy.
"So, what do you think?" Don asked.
"'Bout what?"
Don sighed. "What do you mean 'about what?' About getting matching tattoos."
My father laughed. "Think I'll let this one heal first."
31
MY CELL PHONE lights up with my brother's name. I don't answer. He sends me a text.
Call me right now.
"What's up?" I ask.
"Dad had a heart attack."
I sigh and ask when. My body feels as if it's sliding off the chair, just like it did on the bus six years ago, but I am not surprised. Each Winston between my father's lips burned like a fuse.
Vanessa offers to come with me, but I tell her I want to go alone. I'm more angry than sad. Don and I had recently talked to my father about smoking, a sort of impromptu intervention that went surprisingly well. Don didn't cut me off and attack my father, and I was direct and didn't back down. I told him I knew about denial and escapism, how we conform our lives around seemingly essential habits. He thought I was talking about how I quit smoking. As I gave him my speech, I thought back five years ago, of Vanessa waiting tables while I sat in the bedroom of our first apartment, searching for another image.
I grab my iPod, an extra shirt, and as I squeeze my feet into my boots, I lift my keys off the hook. The silver dollar that I bought in Vietnam sits in an old ashtray by the door. I haven't mentioned it to my father yet because I always seem to be waiting for the perfect moment. I slip the coin into my shirt pocket.
It's almost midnight on a Wednesday, and the Massachusetts Turnpike is dark, nearly empty. How quickly the night can change: one minute I'm watching an episode of Arrested Development, the next I'm in a cold car a half hour out of town. My iPod plays Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska, the album he released the year I was born. He recorded the songs on a four-track tape deck in his bedroom, alone. I let the full album play, something I haven't done for a long time.
Each lyric flows heavily through my body, settles in my right foot. Eighty. Ninety. A man dreams he is a child, walking to his father's house. Through the forest, trying to make it home before darkness falls. On the hill, his father's house shines like a beacon, ghostly voices rising from the fields. The path to the house is broken, unsteady, and the guitar is nearly silent. Just an echo of a voice—the boy running until the front door opens and he falls shaking into his father's arms. The man wakes from his dream, puts on his clothes and rushes out into the night. He walks the broken path to his father's house, but a strange woman answers and tells him no one by that name lives there.
Slow fade to a man standing over a dead dog on the side of the highway, poking it with a stick, as if the dog might get back up and run, but I don't see a dog, I see my father stopping on the way to work, scraping a raccoon off the pavement. Another droning guitar, but stronger, like an idling Mack truck. The quick harmonica like a head nodding; Bruce telling me we all have a "Reason to Believe." But as on every track, the guitar, the harmonica, the vocals fade, and by the time I drive past the turnpike's final exit and pull into a tollbooth, the car is quiet.
I hear what I want to hear. I extract lyrics—father, mother, brother, son, quiet—fish them like pyrite from a rushing river and sell them to myself as gold. All these stories, all these different perspectives talking to themselves, their questions answered only by their own echoes, their words unable to jump the track and speak to one another.
I'm not even out of Massachusetts before Nebraska restarts.
*
In neutral outside my brother's apartment in Brooklyn, I tap my horn. His kitchen light shuts off. He comes out the front door holding his iPod and an extra shirt.
"Damn, dude," he says. "You got here fast."
I smile. "When The Boss says drive, you drive."
He glances down at my iPod and sees the Nebraska album cover. "Oh, nice," he says. "That's one of those albums you gotta listen to the whole way through."
*
Not long before my father had his heart attack, Don invited us all to view his paintings at a gallery in Brooklyn. "Art" is not a word my father uses often and when he does, it's usually laced with skepticism. My father walked closely behind Don and pointed at photographs of plain brick walls or canvases splattered with paint.
"That's art?" my father said. "Shit, I could do that."
I watched him walk with my brother around the gallery. My father wore a black and white flannel shirt tucked into jeans, his razor-sharp goatee splashed in Afta's Arctic Breeze. He had recently bleached his white Reebok sneakers, and they squeaked when he stopped in front of a painting, sometimes drawing stares from the tan, thin couples wrapped in leather or fur.
He paused in front of my brother's painting of a half-erect penis.
"Nice johnson."
Don looked over his shoulder and shook his head.
"What?" my father said. "That's what it is, ain't it?"
"Just look at it, dude. No comments."
My father laughed and turned to my mother. "Am I missing something here?"
She smiled and shrugged. "It's very... realistic."
"So what's it supposed to mean, Don?" my father asked.
"Nothing. I don't know. Whatever you want it to mean."
My father pressed his lips together and nodded. A woman holding a tray of hors d'oeuvres walked by.
"Hey, honey, what does this mean to you?"
"Oh, Christ," Don said and walked away.
My father laughed and popped a stuffed mushroom in his mouth.
"Art or no art. That's a dick."
As Don and I pull onto the Expressway, I start laughing.
"What?" he says, pausing my iPod.
"Nothing."
"No, what? What's so funny?"
"I was thinking about Dad at the art gallery. You know, when he saw your paintings."
Don shakes his head. "Like he'd never seen a dick before. Kept trying to figure out the hidden meaning." Don laughs. The car is qu
iet for a moment, except for the tires humming over the bridge. Then Don hits Play.
*
We walk into the same hospital where my father was treated for his stroke, his varicose veins. Same elevators, same corridor, same Cardiovascular Unit. A re-run.
We walk into my father's room and he's alone, sitting up in his bed, reading Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men.
"Yo! What's shakin', fellas?" He goes to stand up, but tubes and wires keep him in his bed. "Shit."
"Easy, dude," I say. "I'll come to you." I walk around the rolling dinner tray, bend beneath the wires and stand up beside him. I don't so much hug him as press my body against his. Don does the same. As they try to hug, I stare at the book's bright red cover.
"Don't be eyeballin' my readin' material, boy."
"No, no, I'm not. That's a great book," I say.
"Just like the movie," he says, nodding. "Mom got me a few of 'em." He points to the stack of books on a chair beside his bed: The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Feelin' Lucky: The Life and Times of Clint Eastwood, and a thick colorful book titled, simply, Trucks.
"Those should keep you busy," Don says.
My father nods. "Don't know how long she thinks I'm gonna be here. Plannin' on rollin' out in a day or two."
"What's the rush?" Don asks.
My father looks at him. Me. Then pans the room, the skin around his eyes delicate without his glasses. "I ain't staying here a second too long."
The door swings open and my mother walks quickly into the room, holding a paper bag and a tray of 7-Eleven coffees, a dark stain in the bag's corner. She kisses us and leans over to kiss my father. Before she takes off her coat, she mixes my father's coffee and places the steaming cup on the tray in front of him. He sips. She places two scratch-off tickets beside his cup.
"Now you're talkin'," he says, digging through the pockets of his jeans, which hang in a clear plastic bag beside his bed with the rest of his clothes.
The Language of Men Page 23