Lunchmeat

by Ben D'Alessio

  Boys aren’t supposed to lose their fathers before they become men. A few months ago, Mitch Farber’s father didn’t come home from work. He left a note saying he had been living a lie and couldn’t fake being a part of the family any longer. Paxton said it was because his father lost his job and all of their money.

  “It has nothing to do with money,” said Pierce Stone. “I told you already, it’s because he’s a big fag. Had a boyfriend in the Village this whole time. My mom said they’re running away to San Francisco together.”

  I don’t care how big Mitch claimed his penis was in the auditorium or that he “entered manhood” upon having a bar mitzvah—Mitch Farber was not yet a man.

  My father came lumbering down the creaking basement steps and I wanted to hop out of the La-Z-Boy recliner and stop him: Dad, you look too healthy, stop!

  “Hello, boys, what are you fidends up to?”

  No one was going to respond, so I took it upon myself to break the awkwardness: “Nuh… nuh… nothing, Dad,” I said between sniffles.

  “Oh, there’s a good game on tonight. Texas Tech and… uh… oh, one of those MAC schools. I forget which one… Maybe Bowling Green or Toledo.”

  As my father thought out loud, jumbling through his brain for which team from the Ohio-Michigan area was playing in tonight’s game—“Or was it was Kent State?”—my sister came burning down the creaking steps in a fury.

  “I’m so sorry!” she shouted, standing in the doorway next to Dad. “I’m so sorry, Karl and George, that your father is… is… is sick! It makes me sad…”

  Britney, pure innocence, would say exactly what we saw and felt, and without a moment’s hesitation. She would point out an old man’s hanging neck skin and compare it to a turkey, or when we played Irvington in basketball, say their cheering section was, in fact, entirely black. There wasn’t an iota of malice in any of it, only the unfiltered observations that would sometimes make me put my face in my hands and cringe.

  I’m not proud of this, but sometimes I wished she would shut up. “Don’t ever tell her to shut up,” my mother would say. “We spent years trying to get her to talk, and then years trying to get her to use her own words and not repeat those… damn movies.”

  But I saw it coming. Britney looked up at my father, a rare moment of hesitation to seek approval. But he was still jostling through the schools—“Akron? Eastern Michigan?”—and didn’t notice.

  “I’m sorry if your father will die.”

  “Britney!” I screeched, and looked toward Karl, whose face slumped toward the keyboard.

  “Vito, don’t yell at her. She doesn’t…”

  But I was already headed up the stairs and out the door, crying and screaming.

  I was a wreck at the wake, and honestly, I didn’t care. I didn’t even cover my face when the football team and coaches sat in a circle and tried to make small talk. I didn’t want to discuss finding ways to “get Summit next season” or possibly switching to a spread offense. I wanted to grieve.

  Karl didn’t speak much, but how could he? People would ask him banal questions like we were waiting in line for a movie ticket—mere fucking chit-chat. Don’t you see his father lying in the coffin over there?! It’s long and tawny and covered in flowers.

  At the funeral, Mr. G’s friends shared lighthearted anecdotes highlighting the man’s colorful vocabulary. But I cried there too, right into my Bible. I sat across the aisle from Karl and saw him pinch his eyes once or twice, but there still wasn’t any of the wet sobbing that covered my own face. I wanted to say “Karl, my champion, these tears are for you.” Sure, I loved Mr. G. He always treated me like family. But these weren’t just tears of sadness; they were tears of guilt. I glanced toward the hanging crucifix. What good comes from stripping a thirteen-year-old of his father?

  I’m so sorry, Karl.

  “The world is as dangerous as it is dark.” I heard my Mum Mum’s voice as if she were sitting in the pew behind me. “So sharpen those horns, little devil.”

  I didn’t need Algebra I or Earth Science—every time I heard “tectonic plates,” I imagined Teutonic knights—I needed “Discussing the Death of Your Best Friend’s Father with Your Best Friend While He Sits at the Computer and Refuses to Show Emotion 101.”

  “Hey… hey Karl,” I said from the couch. “Are the uh… the uhhh, Simpsons on tonight?”

  “They’re on every night.”

  “Oh yeah, right.”

  “…”

  “…”

  “Hey uhh… aren’t you cold? You want a shirt?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Hey, remember that time we traded shirts at school?”

  “When?”

  “At Glenwood. We were in the stall?”

  “Not really.”

  “Yeah, we weren’t in the same stall, we were in separate stalls. Total coincidence.”

  “…”

  “Yeah, I had stains on my shirt from lunch and Pierce Stone was making fun of me and you traded shirts with me because the one my mom packed was too small.”

  “…”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “That was like… seven years ago?”

  “Yeah!”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “Well… ya know… you really helped me out there, Karl. That really, like, helped me out a lot. So… so thanks.”

  “You’re welcome, Vic.”

  The summer before high school started, I went searching for Hell once again, and if the fiery gates were anywhere in New Jersey, they would be in warhammer-shaped Passaic County. Whether it was up in West Milford, Wanaque, or Bloomingdale, where you could spot cowboy hats in the stands during football games or a KKK rally if you peered deep into the woods, or down in the urban jungles of Paterson or Clifton, I was certain that Hell was in one of these towns; I could feel the hellfire in my bones whenever we crossed Montclair into Little Falls.

  “Why are we going to this backwoods-ass redneck town again?” asked Carmine, referring to West Milford.

  “Hell,” said Joey, driving the sedan.

  “I can’t believe you guys dragged me along on this. I believe in the Jersey Devil and that shit,” said Carmine.

  “The Jersey Devil lives down in the Pine Barrens. Everyone knows that,” I said, my fresh copy of Weird New Jersey splayed out on my lap.

  “Look at this kid. When’d you get so smart, Vito?”

  “Is there ever sunshine in this fucking place? I swear, it’s like, always dreary and shit in Passaic County. You were right, V,” said Tank, looking out the window as if we had drifted into a deep unknown. “Where are we going again? What street?”

  “Clinton Road,” I said.

  “It’s like they skip the summer up here,” said Sonny, who was arranging a potpourri of fireworks by size in the passenger seat.

  “Yo, you hear those fanooks (translation: fags) from Summit are starting their appeal this week?” said Joey, looking back at us in the rearview mirror.

  “You serious? Just now? That shit happened, like, years ago,” said Tank.

  “Cuz, I’d fuck those kids up if they were from Millburn, seriously,” said Carmine.

  The back of my neck itched. We had left for Clinton Road straight from the barbershop. We had all gotten the “Brooklyn,” a haircut where the sides and back are faded with waves of spikes on top. Everyone had it, not just the Italian kids, even though it was our thing first. We embraced the name “guido.” It was cool to have a vowel at the end of your name, and the Irish kids and Greek kids and Portuguese kids and Jewish kids would say the same thing my father said when discussing my mother’s lineage: “The Italian, it’s back there somewhere.”

  And if you had a sought-after name from Sorrento or Avellino and you didn’t wear a horn and gold chain, and you didn’t have a Brooklyn haircut, fresh
ened up every two weeks, and you didn’t have an Italian flag hanging outside your house next to your American one, and you didn’t have a miniature tricolored flag magnet on the back of your car to match the one outside your house, and you didn’t pronounce it rigawt and mozzarelle, and pasta fazool, and you didn’t take a hunk of bread to sop up the leftover sauce after a bowl of penne vodka or your classic marinara, and you didn’t introduce me as your cousin or cuz or general paisan, and you didn’t cross yourself upon hearing tragic news, and if you didn’t give my Nana a kiss on the cheek when she handed you a box of greasy cannolis… then we were probably already suspicious of you anyway.

  We hit Clinton Road as the sun set on the horizon behind the ubiquitous Passaic County fog. The rumor was that at night you could see little pockets of orange burst deep in the forest, either bonfires for Klan rallies or Druids or Satan worshippers. But the woods were so dense you couldn’t see five feet past the curb. Besides a house here and there, no one seemed to live on the road and there weren’t any streetlights either.

  “Okay, so it says here that if it’s dark enough and there aren’t any other cars on the road, a pair of headlights will begin to follow your car,” I read from Weird New Jersey.

  “Yo, fuck that. If I knew about this shit I would’ve grabbed my dad’s gun before we came on this fuckin’ trip,” Carmine protested. Joey stopped the car and turned off his headlights—I couldn’t see an inch past the car. I rolled down my window and listened to the serenading wildness of the thick wood. “Turn that shit on! That isn’t funny, dickhead.”

  “A truck will attempt to run you off the road,” I continued.

  “Yo, I thought this was supposed to lead us to Hell or some shit and we’d see the Jersey Devil, not run us the fuck into a river!”

  “Yo, Vito already told you the Jersey Devil is down with the Pineys!” shouted Sonny.

  “Oh fuck, what the shit is that?” said Joey, looking in the rearview mirror.

  Two headlights had appeared about fifty feet behind us, out of the unknown.

  Joey stepped on the gas and we tore through the woods as if the gates of Hell were slowly closing at the end of Clinton Road. I began to quietly pray to myself—Our Father, who art in Heaven—as the rest of the car simultaneously screamed “Fuuuck!” holding the note as it crescendoed to climax like an opera.

  In an attempt to eliminate the Hell fiend that had been gaining on our tail by the moment, Sonny grabbed one of the firecrackers, lit it with his Zippo, and tossed it out the passenger-side window. But in his moment of death-defying bravery—surely a moment that should be characterized by the better angels of his nature—Sonny had miscalculated (or downright neglected) the laws of physics. When the firecracker left his window, it made an immediate detour and pulled itself right into mine, landing at my feet like an insect that had grown tired and was looking for a free ride.

  I had never experienced the shell-shocking explosions of bombs raining down on my position—I had merely seen movies where those wretched souls were hunkered down in the putrid trenches of war-torn Europe—but at that moment, when that firecracker went off in the sedan next to my feet, I got a small taste of the skull-numbing eruption of conventional war.

  Tank and Carmine instantly ducked for cover. I cut my prayer short—on Earth as it is in Heaven—closed my eyes, plugged my ears, and curled up in the backseat. The firecracker burned pink, followed by an earsplitting explosion that filled the car with smoke. For five seconds—the longest five seconds of my life—we burned down Clinton Road as a hovering black mass of yelping fear.

  The smoke cleared and we pulled onto a rare side street as a white pickup truck sped by with teenage idiots like us hanging out the windows. We sat in silence for a few moments to catch our breath. My ears rang. My heart thumped.

  “You guys want to grab some food?” started Sonny. “I think there’s a diner not too far from here.”

  “Yeah, we gotta eat quick, though. Katie and them are comin’ over tonight,” said Joey. “We still need to pick up the alcohol.”

  Carmine might’ve been crying, but we gave him a pass.

  “Katie and them” was this group of girls from wealthy Westfield who, for some reason unbeknownst to me, enjoyed hanging out with us meathead slobs. Tank’s mom was spending the weekend with her boyfriend Roger in the Poconos, so we had them over Tank’s house for a soiree—homemade limoncello not included.

  It was one of those late August nights where your t-shirt and boxer shorts stuck to your skin like they were magnetized. I didn’t mind. I loved when the sun wouldn’t set until eight at night and the lightning bugs came out early, offering their illuminating services before it was completely dark, as if they hadn’t received the memo—an Essex County pastoral.

  I had had my braces removed a week earlier and felt like a new man—I started smiling again. Paxton had asked me if I wanted to join them in the City, but I turned him down. I had felt liberated not having to tiptoe around every conversation with Jessie or Julie (pick one) or Jenna Tisch. It was exhausting having to keep up with trends and fads and constantly having to go to the Short Hills Mall to shop.

  I just wanted to wear white t-shirts and jeans and put enough “glue” in my hair to catch lightning bugs.

  Carina had introduced us to this group of girls at a party in Westfield when she was still seeing André. No one liked him anymore because he got drunk and drove across one of the girls’ lawns at like four in the morning—he had an eighth-grade girl from Roselle Park with him in the car.

  Carmine told me that Diana was flirting with me at the party in Westfield, but I had gotten too drunk and distracted by a collection of antique globes to notice; Diana was seventeen, and by the summer before freshman year, I had been told over and over and over again that girls abandon you for the entire year. Not just girls at your school, but all girls in general, like the entire gender—as if they could smell the freshman on you. So I suppose my radar had been down as I ran my finger across a spinning Tropic of Cancer in the Westfield home library.

  Tank had his hand spread on the table, a steak knife clutched in the other, barely missing the web-lining between his fingers as he jabbed the point into the wood with robotic speed and precision.

  “Look at the kid go!” shouted Joey as he handed out beers to the girls, his new Saint/Sinner ambigram tattoo glistening with A&D ointment on his inner bicep.

  “So Vic, this is Diana…” said Carina, making it painfully obvious to Diana that we had been discussing her shortly before her arrival. “I think you two should do a shot together.” Carina poured out two overflowing shots of chilled raspberry vodka. The three of us clinked glasses and right before we downed the clear liquor, Diana gave me a wink.

  “Diana’s half Puerto Rican,” Carina said, getting another row of shots lined up.

  “The other half’s Italian,” she assured.

  “Were you born there? In Puerto Rico, I mean.”

  “No, I was born in Newark.”

  “Do you ever go back?”

  “Yeah, I was there last year.”

  The raspberry vodka didn’t do my stomach any favors—it was already hard at work breaking down a reheated meatball parm sub from Mia Famiglia’s—so I took our conversation to the elbowed pleather couches that lined the living room to avoid the next wave of shots. Diana put her hand on my knee and pulled herself in close. I knew she was waiting for me to ask her something, but I couldn’t get my mind off her connection to Puerto Rico. She broke the silence.

  “Hey, so how come Carmine and Joey and them call you Vito, but Carina calls you Victor?”

  The thunk thunk thunk thunk sound of the knife jabbing into the tabletop, incited by the cheers of my paisanos, distracted me from the half-islander (or technically full, if she was Sicilian) whose hand was moving closer to the part of my jeans that made it look like I had a perpetual boner.

 
I had heard her question, and although my communication skills with women were far from perfect, I did know that talking about your mother to a possible hookup was ill-advised.

  “It’s just a nickname,” I said.

  “Would you want to come out with me for a cigarette?”

  “I don’t smoke…”

  “Oh.”

  “But I’ll keep you company.”

  I wasn’t clueless.

  We sat on the rock wall that lined the driveway and she smacked the upside-down pack of Carolina Filters into the palm of her hand. Her teeth were small and crooked, but they were natural, unlike the color of her skin and hair. She had a shimmering stud in her nose, jet-black hair, and a fake tan that looked nothing like Suzanne Somers’. She was perfect Jersey gorgeous. My mother dyed her hair, had been doing it for years, but I didn’t tell Diana that—fighting back against any reflex to bring up my mom.

  Her cigarette lit up the driveway as if mimicking the lightning bugs that floated around the front lawn. Thirty minutes ago, I hardly remembered that Diana existed; now I felt the debilitating pressure of needing her to like me. I considered going back inside and taking a few more vodka shots with Carina to let loose and just see what happened. I saw it with lots of the guys; they’d get drunk and the alcohol acted like a paladin’s armor, growing stronger and thicker with each shot of Jägermeister, shielding them from the humiliation of rejection. “Oh my God, I got wasted last night. I barely remember anything” meant that your credibility couldn’t become the locus of criticism. “Dude, Sonny was all over Serena last night, and she just wasn’t having it.”

  “Nah, man, he was just shitfaced. He crushed like ten beers” was analogous to being dunked in the River Jordan.

  “Hey Vito, are you okay? You look upset.”

  “No, that’s just my face,” I accidentally snapped back.

  “Oh, sorry.”