Exes

by Max Winter

  “Whoa,” I said, and my face got hot and tight, and I remembered how in fourth grade I actually passed out once after the school nurse showed us a sex-ed video—it was the period part that did it. Kids drew bloodstains on my lunch sack with red markers, and we never even finished up the unit.

  The limo snuck onto an off-ramp and disappeared. “Something to tell the grandkids about, huh?” I said.

  Jake pulled the emergency brake back a couple clicks, then released it. He looked down and shook his head. But more to clear it than to scold me, I think. I didn’t take it personal. In the rearview, the traffic rippled in the smog, like a sitcom about to flashback. Sorry sometimes makes things worse. I hadn’t meant anything. It was just something to say, a figure of speech. Christ. Fully half of what I say means nothing.

  We couldn’t find a parking spot anywhere near the restaurant, and it was a long walk back to the car after dinner. The neighborhood was one of those no-man’s-lands you find between the bars and downtown. You know: a couple auto body shops, a strip club, maybe a storage place or two. At one point a white car pulled up alongside us, slowed down. Someone inside made wet noises. Then it drove off. For a minute I thought it was the same car as the one on the highway, but then I remembered that that car had been somewhere between blue and gray.

  My jeans chafed my thighs, and my shorts rode right up into the crack of my ass, parting and crushing my balls. I had to start losing weight. I felt like one of those fat river animals that get chewed up by powerboats. Manatees. Now I know the name because I looked it up on the Web when I got home, but I hadn’t known it then. Supposedly sailors used to mistake them for mermaids. Granted, I’ve never been at sea, but if you ask me, that’s one sorry-looking mermaid.

  We were rounding the corner onto the street where Jake had parked when that same white car came up behind us again. Another young guy with a crew cut leaned out the window and yelled, “Faggots!” I could hear him laughing, and then I saw a flash of green. Felt a quick, sharp smack to the side of my head. Heard glass shatter against pavement. Went down on one knee, clutched my skull.

  “Are you all right?” Jake asked, more than once, I’m guessing, because he yelled it more than asked it.

  “Yeah, yeah, no, I’m okay. I’m okay.” My head was ringing, and my eyes stung from what I quickly realized was too dark and too thick to be beer. In the streetlight the blood on my hands looked as brown as mud.

  “Fuckers!” Jake yelled. “You fuckers!”

  I held on to the curb and brushed glass shards from my hair. Jake grabbed the broken bottle or a different bottle and hucked it at them. It hit their rear windshield with a small, glassy burst. The car squealed to a stop and turned around. I squinted away blood and headlights and looked up to see Jake standing in the middle of the road. He burned around the edges in the bright white headlight. He screamed into the light. My knees kept folding under me. Jake ran toward the car, head up, arms pumping, as fast as ever. The car screeched to a stop. Jake banged on the hood and waved his hands like a homeless. It looked like a channel that only kind of came in, like scrambled porn. Guys piled out of the car, at least three of them. I shook my head and pushed myself up. I ran fatly over to Jake, hearing only my soles slapping concrete, and saw him go down. They were massed around him, hitting him in the face, on top of the head, kicking him in the sides and chest and ass, crushing his face with their fists. I didn’t know what I would do when I got there. I tried to get there. I heard a scream I felt in my nuts. We all stopped, like it was instinct. The circle of guys pulled back and came apart, two or three of them staring at their one screaming friend, who stumbled backward holding his right hand in his left. I looked at Jake, on his knees, who spat something onto the pavement, then reached down, picked it up, and chucked it the length of the block at least. I lost whatever it was in the darkness. “Get it!” someone cried. Before I could figure out what had happened, they were running after it, then grabbing it and jumping back into their car and speeding away. I looked down at Jake, who wiped blood from his face and said, “I bit off his finger.”

  “Oh,” I said. Jake vomited beer and crab and maybe blood onto the street. I put my hand on the top of his head to comfort him, but I didn’t know what to do with it once I put it there, so I just held on to a hunk of his hair for a while and moaned. I had no idea how to make a man feel better. Jake’s hair is thick like a dog’s, the lucky stiff. I shut my eyes and saw jellyfish made of light. A man-of-war stung me on the arm when I was six. I blacked out on the beach and was sorry the purple scar faded because it looked tough and I wanted something to show for my troubles other than a story from my vacation that no one would believe. It’s funny the things you remember, and when you remember them, and how little they have to do with anything.

  Back at Jake’s, the girls were watching the wedding video. We came in quietly and stood behind them, behind the couch. If they’d turned around when they said hi, they’d have seen Jake, his face swollen, his eyes wet, his broken teeth stained with blood, and his mouth crusted with puke. My head throbbed, and light hurt it. But we just stood silently and watched them watch the video. They were at the part where everyone was dancing. Except for me. I was just sitting and drinking, watching other people have fun. You could make out the back of my head just above the time stamp. From that angle I looked less bald than I felt, but every bit as fat. Then the camera zoomed in on Hannah’s brother. His jacket was off now, and you could see his little arm real clearly. He held it up with his good arm when he danced, tucking its three or four fingers under his chin so it wouldn’t flop around. He was pretty comfortable. Shit, why wouldn’t he be? He’d already had a lot of time to get used to things. I didn’t remember him dancing, though. I must’ve been pretty far gone at that point. The camera followed this brand-new brother to my oldest friend as he moved around the floor in great sweeping circles, dancing with all the ladies, one after another: his sister, the maid of honor, his mother, and, eventually, my wife. Kathy’s dress was black velvet with these knotted portholes where you could see her squeezed-together breasts. In the shiny velvet you could see the faint outline of her belly just beginning to swell. They danced together for a while, my unborn son no bigger than a baby chick inside her. They made tear-shaped loops across the parquet, and he spun her this way and that with his one good arm. I narrowed my eyes to focus. To try to stop the pounding. I watched the tiny tips of his shiny shoes catch the light, and hold the light, and let go of the light, and slide back and forth and back again.

  _____________

  I just want my son to do all right in this world, better than I have at least. As for Jake’s kid, I keep my fingers crossed.

  Kathy’s obstetrician was also a mohel—“I like to cover all the bases,” he had joked, but in a way that relaxed us—and he brought his own twelve-year-old son to the hospital with him when he came to cut Bob. They were both dressed in scouts’ uniforms, with badges and neckerchiefs and whatnot, because afterward they were on their way to a nature hike. I didn’t even know Jews could become scouts. The doctor’s son stood to his father’s right and watched him as he strapped my son to the restraint chair. The boy didn’t say much, but he looked at his father in a way that I don’t recall ever looking at my old man—at least not past eight—and like how I would want my son to someday look at me. He wasn’t smiling or frowning, just calmly paying attention.

  The procedure was over pretty quick. After, the doctor handed me a brown childproof bottle with my son’s foreskin in it. He told me it was a Jewish tradition for the father to dig a hole in his backyard and bury it. I thanked him and put the bottle in the breast pocket of my coat. When I got home, I put the bottle inside one of those little flowered gift boxes that Kathy likes me to bring home from time to time, and I stuck it on top of the mantel and more or less forgot about it.

  You know, I’d be lying if I said that any of this meant all that much to me at the time—Dr. Gottesman and his boy, the camping outfits with
all the merit badges, everything but the simple fact that it was all over pretty quick and that my son hadn’t cried much, which was all I really cared about back then. I actually hadn’t been all that keen on circumcision to begin with. It had been Kathy’s idea. “He should look like you,” she said. “For his sake I hope he doesn’t,” I joked. “You know what I mean,” she said. “This world’s confusing enough as it is. And they look like earthworms if you don’t. Ew.” Then I went online and checked what the anti-circumcision crowd had to say, and it didn’t take long to figure out they were nuts. One lady even said, “I only judge the act, not the person,” which is bullshit, because an act can’t exist without a person doing it, so if you’re judging, at some point somebody’s got to take the blame. I know you’re not supposed to make your mind up based on what kinds of people are on what side, but I just can’t get behind abstractions. People who pretend not to be judgmental are the most judgmental people of all—hippies, Christians, teachers—and to be honest, I wasn’t all that interested in washing my son’s foreskin every single night. Talk about the warrens.

  “Okay,” I told Kathy, “you win.”

  “Mark,” she said, “this is not a game. No one wins.”

  I yeah-yeahed her at the time, but now it’s starting to sink in. Like I said, I’m slow. I miss things.

  Yesterday was Bob’s first birthday. We had a few other toddlers over and let them crawl all over the place, which we’d spent the whole morning baby-proofing and making extra clean, meaning photo-shoot clean. Jake and Alex couldn’t come, but we understood. Weekends are short enough without all the extra traveling and crying.

  Before people showed up, while Kathy and I hid small, sharp, and toxic things, I found the foreskin bottle on the mantel and figured what the hell.

  Outside, it was cold and gray. I settled on a spot beneath our rhododendron, its leaves curled up tight from the frost. The ground was so hard I had to stab at it with my trowel, which eventually bent and would’ve broken off if I had dug any deeper. The foreskin was wrapped in bloody gauze and hard, like an old man’s toenail clipping. I put it in the ground and covered it up with dirt. Then I figured I was supposed to say something, but I more or less slept my way through Sunday school and couldn’t even remember what came after Baruch atah Adonai. Some kind of Jew I am. So I figured I had to come up with a prayer of my own. “Be a good man,” I said aloud, looking up at the sky, and right away my voice got small. I tamped down the dirt. “Be a good man,” I said again. “Don’t be afraid,” I said when the dirt was tamped down. And for a change I didn’t try to hold it in. I just let the tears fall down my face and into the ground where I’d buried a tiny, dead part of my son. I didn’t care who looked. Or how foolish it might’ve looked if they did: a fat man in wintertime, with his knees in the dirt and a bent trowel in his hand, weeping like a girl. “Don’t be afraid,” I said once more, for luck, and put the trowel in my back pocket. I wiped my hands on my pants. It was quarter past, and the guests were on their way. I was a mess, but it’s not like they’d notice if I took too long to change.

  (. . . . . .)

  A taco joint you could tell used to be an IHOP: Warwick’s Quaker Lane, Rhode Island’s longest just-like-anyplace-elseish stretch, is filled with these franchise ghosts. Late in the first semester of freshman year, my roommate—the endlessly midwestern Christian Whitman—and I went out for some all-you-can-eat fajitas at a now-defunct Mexican chain that’s since been an Allstate Home & Life, then a Hold Everything, and now a who knows what. About midway through our meal Christian looked up from his skillet and considered for a moment the huaraches and blanket tunics and bullfighting posters adorning the restaurant’s stucco walls. “We have a place just like this in ——ville/ton/Falls,” he said. “It’s called Chi-Chi’s.” I set down my knife and fork, pushed away my plate, and, into a napkin bearing the newly trademarked Declaration of Salsafication, wept.*

  *For the record, there are only three other times in my life when I have felt, in public, so suddenly, acutely, and inexplicably sad:

  Five years old, at a Hafkin reunion at a family restaurant in southern Florida, when, well into in our sixty-seven-minute wait for lunch (Father should’ve never bought me that stopwatch), Grandpa Ike noted to no one in particular that the restaurant was now in receivership. “Shame they couldn’t make a go of it,” he said. Beside him, baby Eli ate tartar sauce from its fluted cup with a knife.

  Seven, at a matinee of Rear Window with my aggrievedly unremunerated sister at the local revival house. Well into the film’s final reel, a rumpled dad walked in with his soon-to-be-let-down six-year-old son in tow. I asked Libby, “Did they make them pay full price?” And she said she didn’t think so, plus, “Wait! So what?” and, “What do you care? Freak . . .”

  Nine, and trick-or-treating along with Eli and our old man, as Libby—newly ashamed of her Pocahontas (or was it Tiger Lily?) costume—had backed out at the last minute. I was Frankenstein, and Eli was the monster we all call Frankenstein. Suddenly drafted into duty, our old man—nine o’clock drunk at six—had shot up from the den chaise longue, girded his loins with a bedsheet, affixed some Concords to his head with duct tape, and strapped on an apron. “Look,” he said through clenched jaw. “Jim Bacchus! Get it?” We didn’t, of course, and neither did the car full of sports fans that almost ran us over as we, hand in hand in hand, weaved our way down Angell, but that didn’t stop him from shaking his feather-duster thyrsus at them and shouting, “This has happened to every boy! It happened to me when I was your age!” I let go and hung back at what felt like a plausibly deniable distance, pretending to count my Mounds and Snickers, while Eli gripped our father’s fist.* “You’re not alone!” my old man shouted into the night.

  *He used to pull our hands from our pockets and squeeze. I yanked mine back every time, until one day he stopped reaching for it. But he grasped hard, and at odd angles, and sometimes it hurt.

  Kids will become friends or enemies for next to nothing: Oh, I don’t know. Legos go a long away. Taste is everything.* Every night after dinner, my old man and I used sit on the couch and pore through visual encyclopedias together. We held the book on both our laps and took turns pointing out our most and least favorite items on each page. Sometimes, when he wasn’t too far gone, we’d even get into why.

  *See again my freshman-year roommate, Christian, a self-described Jeffersonian Democrat. Paired via computer, we got along for as long as we did because we both liked Coke sans ice, LP covers that literalized their titles, and barker-like rock hits that welcomed their listeners ad nauseam. As we unpacked, we all but hugged.*

  *It was a good run. But midway through spring semester Whitman walked in on me busily copying onto a legal pad subtitles from a frozen frame of the French version of Three Men and a Baby. I was working on a paper comparing its cultural assumptions with those of its American remake.* The shaky but unmistakable image upon which I had paused just so happened to be a full-frontal shot of a micturating infant girl. Whitman froze at the door and I in my chair. I fumbled for the remote while he squinted at the screen, then at me, then back at the screen before excusing himself with a quick jut of his jaw and slam of the door. Campus Housing workers arrived the following afternoon to move Whitman’s few belongings—he kept what little he owned in a locked steamer trunk—to an undisclosed location at the far end of campus. One of the student workers, whom I recognized from intramural badminton, told me that Whitman had not only been moved to a single free of charge, but he had also asked for and received the perfect 4.0 mythically reserved for a suicide’s roommate.

  *I know, I know, but it was either this or a paper concerning Emma Bovary’s eye colors.

  Foster: A backwoods Rhode Island hamlet that singsongishly shares its underperforming school district with neighboring Glocester. Given their propensity to cancel school over what to the rest of the state seems little more than a light dusting, Foster-Glocesterites are considered a bunch of goldbricking ca
ndyasses. But I found out the hard way that this microclimatic effect is real when I was forced, in seventh grade, to extend an already overlong sleepover at the Chevaliers’—twins who, by the time we dug out on Monday afternoon, liked me even less than they had on Saturday morning, which wasn’t much.*

  *The sleepover had been their mom’s idea. They were new to Fox and needed a little push. From afar, I must have seemed a safe bet. But at some point early Monday morning I clogged their upstairs toilet. (Overnights are hard, especially when any combination of eggs, cured pork, and dairy has been consumed. Weekend breakfast at the Chevaliers’? Something called cheesy hamlettes.) The water cresting, I reached down into the clogged toilet bowl with a Charmin-wrapped fist and retrieved the turds. I then threw them and my rapidly disintegrating t.p. mitt out the second-story crank window and into the gutters of the semi-attached garage, where I figured they likely wouldn’t be discovered until late spring, at which point any memory of my gassy little visit would have been suppressed by all parties. Unfortunately, the older of the two stools rattled off the gutter’s edge and into the driveway, where it was found later that same day by either Marc or Eric (I never could tell them apart)—as, true to their Canuck roots, the twins proved not only enthusiastic shovelers but capable scatologists.*

  *Predicting sleepover/trayf-related constipation, I packed the jar of pickled beets at which my hosts would turn up their noses. At least there was no point in kicking myself for saying no thanks to their corn.

  TV killed what little imagination I might’ve had . . . : While our parents raised us in what they took to be a TV-less home, every night I spent a good chunk of the early a.m. in the closet under the stairs, watching muted static on a five-inch black-and-white the property’s previous owner had left behind. Grandpa Ike, meanwhile, kept color sets in every room but the john, the one place where he insisted on a little peace and quiet. So when spending Saturdays over at our grandparents’, no matter what the weather, Eli and I glued ourselves to Channel 56’s Creature Double Feature, which showcased back-to-back monster movies* and featured, as its theme music, a truncated version of Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s “Toccata.”