by Mick Foley
“Andy, when am I going to meet your father?” Terri asked as she pulled into my drive. I had to think about how best to approach this subject. Honesty, as usual, was the policy I went with.
“Probably not tonight,” I said.
“How come?”
I looked at my dad’s silhouette in the window, moving up and down, up and down.
“How come?” Terri repeated.
“Because he’s exercising naked in the living room.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Wow.” She paused. “I thought my father was the only one who did that.” She burst out laughing, and I did too, although the idea of her father’s middle-aged balls would come back to haunt me at a later date in a most inappropriate fashion.
“Good night, Terri,” I said, and leaned over to kiss her, taking the initiative for the first time in our relationship.
She leaned back, away from the kiss, and extended her arm instead and said, “Let’s just shake on it, Andy.” A pause, and then another burst of laughter, followed by a meeting of lips. “Good night, Andy . . . you keep ice on that eye.”
I walked into the house and tried to keep my right eye out of view, and started climbing the stairs. “Hi, Dad, good night,” I said, wishing just a little that my swollen, closed eye was facing him so I wouldn’t have to see his penis brushing the shag carpet with each descent of his push-ups.
“Hold on, Andy,” he said with a voice that, judging by the slight slurring, seemed to have become acquainted with about its twelfth beer of the evening. “Eight, nine, ten.”
“Okay, Dad.” I stopped, but stayed in my surreptitious stance.
My dad stood up from his push-up position and cracked open another Genny. Sweat was pouring off his body, but he wasn’t breathing heavily in the least. I looked at his deck, saw that only two or three cards remained, and silently dreaded the encore performance that was sure to make its presence felt through the Sheetrock between us.
“All right Andy, tell me why you’re so late . . . and hey, tell me about your report . . . I’ll bet it was the only one that told it like it really was, huh?”
“Yeah, I think it was, Dad. My teacher was really, um, moved by it.”
“Great, great,” my dad said, “but hey, why so late?”
“Uh, I went to the movies with Terri.”
“Oh yeah?” he said in just such a way that I instinctively knew he had a follow-up question lined up. And I knew what it was. “You get any?”
I tried to get away without an answer.
“Come on, did you? You can tell your father anything.”
“Maybe just a little.”
“Hey, that’s great,” he said, acting, I guessed, as some dads would when their kids get accepted to Harvard.
“Thanks, Dad.”
“How much did you get?” he said, and I felt my face flush at the mere mention of this whole scenario.
Without really thinking, I turned just a bit, and my father took in the dramatic change in my face.
“Holy shit!” Tietam yelled out. “What the hell happened to you?”
“Just a fight at school, Dad, no big deal.”
“A fight? A fight with who?” Tietam asked as he stepped forward to inspect the damage.
“Well, I uh, I uh, read my report in class and the teacher—”
“That son of a bitch!” Tietam yelled. “That son of a bitch! I’m gonna settle this, Andy, goddammit, I’m gonna settle this.”
Settling this, I was pretty sure, did not seem to involve a mature and educated debate on the Emancipation Proclamation, but a physical confrontation that would be a mistake of epic proportions. Mr. Hanrahan had already left his mark on Antietam Brown number five. I didn’t think adding number four to his collection was something I wanted to be part of. So I tried to stop it.
“Dad, please, he—”
“Not now, Andy, not now. What’s his name, Andy, what’s his name?”
“Mr. Hanrahan, Dad.”
“Hanrahan, huh, Hanrahan?” my dad said as he found the telephone book and started tearing through it. “Haggerty, Handlelong, Hanrahan, there it is. Hanrahan, H. 272 Quaker Path. Son of a bitch!”
“But Dad,” I pleaded, “this guy is huge.” Hanrahan had to have had a hundred pounds on my dad, and deck of cards or no deck of cards, my father was going to get his ass handed to him. Apparently, he didn’t think so.
“That’s all right,” he said, grabbing the car keys off the mantel.
“He played in the NFL.”
Tietam stopped short and looked me in the eye, all semblance of wildness suddenly gone, replaced by the calmest of looks. “Even better,” was all he said.
“But Dad,” I yelled after him as he headed out the door, “you can’t go . . . you’re naked.”
He stopped and turned around. I hoped that he’d come to his senses, or at least come for his trousers. Instead he opened the door, still nude and still calm, and said, “Give me your pants and tell Mrs. Baskin upstairs that she’d better not wait.”
Mrs. Baskin upstairs? Mrs. Baskin? As in Clem Baskin’s mother? My dad was nailing Clem Baskin’s mother? I laughed to myself and gave him my pants, momentarily oblivious to the fact that my father was embarking on a suicide mission. After he left I walked up the stairs in my history-making underwear. Put on sweatpants and knocked on the door next to mine. “Excuse me, Mrs. Baskin.”
“Southern boy, is that you?”
Holy crap! She was the blonde with the red dress. The blonde with the red dress was Clem Baskin’s mom. The one who had stuck her tongue in my mouth, who had let me listen to her put on a show. The one who had licked my father’s ass. Suddenly I understood, if not completely agreed with, my father’s philosophy. I now owned Clem Baskin by proxy, because his mother had licked my father’s ass. I had the power.
“Yes ma’am, it’s me. Um, my dad had to leave, and he said not to wait for him.”
“Is that so?” she said, trying to sound defiant but instead sounding merely jilted.
“Yes ma’am.”
“Southern boy?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Call me Amanda.”
“Yes ma’am, Amanda.”
“Southern boy?”
“Yes m—Amanda?”
“Would you come in here please.”
My heart pounded fast. Pounded, yes, because Clem Baskin’s mother the ass-licker was requesting my presence, but pounded more so because my father’s room was off limits.
“Amanda, I don’t think that I should.”
“Just for a minute,” she said. “Promise. I won’t bite.”
“All right.”
I opened the door and made a quick survey of the room. Clothes and shoes were everywhere. What did he even have a closet for? Then I thought of the sound of the typewriter keys coming, it had seemed, from behind its door. I looked at Amanda Baskin. A pretty face peeking out from under the covers, her hair fanned out on the pillow, the scent of sex and rejection heavy in the air.
“Well hello,” she said, trying to sound sexy, and succeeding too. Then, as I moved closer into the light of the room, “My goodness, what happened to you?”
“I was fighting, Mrs. Baskin.”
“Amanda, please,” then, “Southern boy, you don’t look like a fighter to me.”
“Well actually, I just got punched in the face. Someone else did the fighting.”
“Well come here then, come here. Come here and let your mother take a look at that.”
I knelt down beside the bed and let my cavalcade of emotions fight it out for supremacy. Which one would win out? Disgust? Pity? Sexual arousal? Sexual arousal started to pull away. She touched my eye gently and I could smell the booze on her breath. Booze and my dad’s ass? Disgust took the lead.
“Oooh, that’s quite a lump,” she said, then paused, shifted gears, and spoke again. “Do you think I’m pretty?”
“Yes ma’am.” No hesitation in my answer.
“Call me Amanda.”
“Okay.”
“Tell me I’m pretty.”
“Right now?”
“Sure, right now, southern boy, tell me how pretty you think I am.”
I hesitated, and somehow realized I was being assigned the rather fragile task of ego repair. Pity made a charge for the lead now, although sexual arousal was hanging tough in the stretch.
“Amanda, you sure are pretty.”
“Do you think I’m beautiful?”
“Yes,” I said, “I do.” And at that moment she was.
“Tell me I’m beautiful.”
I didn’t know it then, but she was essentially playing a far more subtle version of Tietam Brown’s “Tell me what I’m doing to you” game. Planting her ideas in my head, trying to pass them off as my own.
“You are beautiful, Mrs. Baskin.”
“Amanda, please . . . Amanda.”
“I think you’re beautiful, Amanda.”
Pity dropped way back, and disgust had pulled up lame and had to be shot. Sexual arousal was now all alone and heading for home.
“Southern boy, your father doesn’t think I’m beautiful, does he?”
“I don’t know, Amanda.” Now pity was back, sexual arousal having slowed down considerably when the word “father” was said.
“My husband doesn’t think I’m beautiful either.”
“I’m sorry about that, Mrs—Amanda.”
“Did you like listening to me the other night . . . with your little glass up to the wall?”
Arousal sped up. Way up. “Um, uh, yeah, I did like it,” I said, my voice cracking just a little.
“Did you like the words I used . . . those bad words . . . did you like hearing them?”
“Yes.” I was still kneeling by the bed, and her mouth was only inches from mine. For a moment, I thought she would lean forward and kiss me, and to tell you the truth, I think I would have let her. Instead she turned away. Turned away and said, “I liked saying them too, liked knowing you were listening. Liked turning you on. But you know what I really like?”
“No, what?” I could only whisper, having been momentarily shocked by Mrs. Baskin’s admission.
“I like to be held.” I nodded. She paused and continued. “My husband hasn’t held me in years. Ignores me. Your father, he doesn’t ignore, but he doesn’t hold me either. That other stuff’s nice, and your father, he does it real well, but at the end of the night, I just want to be held, and your father . . . well, that’s just not his thing.”
“No, I guess not.”
“Andy,” she said, the first time she had used my real name.
“Yes . . . Amanda.”
“Would you hold me right now?”
I didn’t say yes, and I didn’t say no. I think I went into shock, and the next thing I knew, she was lifting back the sheets, exposing her breasts, saying, “Lie down with me, southern boy, it’s warm next to me.”
I think that I would have, had it not been for her breasts. A beautiful pair they were, too, round and real firm, maybe too firm, as if they were made of more than just flesh. And that’s what ruined it. Unfortunately for Mrs. Baskin, she had to compete with Terri— whose breasts, I had decided during the course of my split-second encounter, were definitely real. Mrs. Baskin possessed the second most beautiful breasts that I’d ever seen (which I guess also means they were the ugliest by process of elimination).
“Do you like them?” she asked.
“Yes ma’am, I do.”
“Tell me you like them, southern boy.”
“I better not.”
“Oh why?” she said, her sexy, hoarse voice betraying a little girl’s plea.
“I just better not.” I started to get up.
“Southern boy.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know my son?”
“Yes ma’am, I do.”
“Do you like him?”
“No ma’am, I don’t.”
“Did he do that to you,” she said, pointing to my eye.
“No.”
“But he’s not a good boy, is he, he’s not good like you?”
I thought of myself only days earlier, pleasuring myself to the thought of her, and wondered how good I really was. “No, I guess not,” I said.
“But you won’t tell him about this, will you? About any of this?”
“No ma’am, I won’t.”
“Do you promise.”
“Yes ma’am, I do.”
“Call me Amanda.”
“I promise, Amanda.” A promise that would cause me great pain to keep.
“Andy.”
“Yes.”
“Stay sweet.”
“Thank you.”
“And Andy.”
“Yes ma’am . . . Amanda.”
“Can I ask you for one favor . . . a little one.”
“Okay, I guess.”
“Let me give you a kiss . . . just one, I promise.”
I was scared half to death. Scared that she’d jump me, and scared that I couldn’t say no. Scared that I’d lie down and hold her and say and do whatever she bid me. I wanted to hold her too. Wanted to hold her and maybe magically transfer a little of my meager supply of self-esteem, because, sadly, Mrs. Baskin had none of her own.
I knelt down again and pursed my lips just slightly, but she took hold of my face and turned it, gently, ever so gently, kissing my swollen eye. Then, with her lips still on my skin, she said, “Tell me again . . . tell me I’m beautiful.”
I turned to look at her, my face still in her hands. A tear, I could see, had dropped from her eye.
“Amanda.”
“Yes, southern boy.”
“You are . . . beautiful.”
And with that I heard a car’s engine, and I looked out the window, expecting Tietam Brown’s Fairmont but seeing instead a late-model Lincoln slowly cruising past our house.
She left minutes later, and for a while I lay in my little bed wondering if I should have accepted her offer and kidding myself that I would have done it just for her instead of myself. I thought of her kiss, and her requests, and her breasts, and of the late-model Lincoln pulling away, looking out of place in the night on our quiet little street.
She was, I thought, the saddest woman I’d ever seen, and I had a strange thought about her breasts—that if I had breasts like hers, I’d be happy all the time. Then I thought of her blond hair, splayed out on the pillow, and her question about beauty, and I felt a strange sense that I’d just played a scene straight out of Of Mice And Men. Then I heard Burgess Meredith say something about “what happened in Weed,” and a quick Meredith retrospective ran through my mind. Quack-quacking as the Penguin, then yelling “Down, stay down” at Rocky, then putting poor Lenny out of his misery.
Then I thought about my day and how out of all the events—a first kiss, a first feel, a first punch from a teacher, not to mention Amanda—the one that seemed oddest was my father’s report. The clicking of the typewriter keys from inside his closet. Why in the closet? So I rose up and for the second time in my life, as well as the second time in an hour, entered my father’s room.
Tietam Brown’s closet was a library. Literally. A U-shaped walk-in closet that had been reconstructed into a genuine floor-to-ceiling library. Books were crammed into every available shelf, and large stacks grew like stalactites from the floor for the overflow of volumes the shelves could not contain.
A reading table sat in the middle of the closet with a typewriter, books on Lincoln, slavery, and the Civil War strewn about. I sat down in his chair and looked around, feeling, I imagined, the same way the detective who discovered the bodies in John Wayne Gacy’s crawl space had felt upon making that grisly find.
No light reading for Tietam Brown, either. Not a novel to be found. Instead the shelves housed books on subjects beyond my scope of understanding. American history, world history, psychology, physio
logy, religion, politics, and seventeen different titles concerning Japan. I wondered if just maybe this library had been left behind when Tietam moved in. Part of me hoped so. For considering the alternative meant opening my mind to the very distinct possibility that there was a whole lot more to Antietam Brown IV than met the eye, or met the glass held up to the wall next door.
I stood up from the writing desk and opened a few random volumes. A musty old book on human kinesiology, its margins filled with handwritten notes on almost every page. The Art of War, its cover falling off. A King James Bible. Passages were highlighted, pages were dog-eared. Stuck in the Book of Luke I saw a black-and-white photo of a much younger Tietam shaking hands with a man whose face I had seen before. Where had I seen it? The muscular arm answered my question. This was the guy who was feeding the poor. Eddie Edwards. The two of them smiling. I wondered why. And wondered how my father ever hung out with somebody like this man, who was so obviously decent. Or to look at it from a different perspective, why would a guy like him want to hang out with Tietam?
My father had thrown a wrench into the workings of our father-son relationship. A relationship that previously had been so simple. He exercised nude and talked about polished knobs, bareback riding, and the art of the deal. I dismissed him as a man with the emotional depth of a meat-loaf sandwich. Now he’d caused me to question all of this.
And speaking of questions, what had Terri meant with her diary brainteaser? Giving me a special gift while taking away something I’d had my whole life? Then it hit me. As if standing in my dad’s library had passed on a secret power of understanding by osmosis. Terri wanted something, all right, but it wasn’t Nat King Cole. She wanted me.
The thought lit an instant fire in my loins, but the sound of Tietam Brown’s ’79 Fairmont extinguished it in record time. I turned out the light and raced from his room, then looked out my window at a sorrowful sight.
He emerged from the car a beaten man. Limping, pausing every few agonizing steps to cough up a thick glob of blood. Part of me wanted to race down the stairs and embrace him, to help him. But part of me thought of his pride, the calm look in his eye when he’d walked out the door. Walked out to help me, and returned a beaten man. I lay down instead.