four | GRANDPA
It hit me one day. I realized that my mother wasn’t offended so much by Grandpa’s house as by its owner. The needed repairs saddened her because they reminded her of the man who refused to make them. Catching her glance in Grandpa’s direction, then seeing her sink into a bottomless gloom, I got it, though I assumed her problem with Grandpa had something to do with how he looked.
Along with his house, Grandpa let himself go to pot. He wore pants with patches, shoes with holes, shirts wet with his saliva and leavings from his breakfast, and he went days without combing his hair or putting in his teeth or bathing. He used and reused his razor so many times that his cheeks looked as if he’d been clawed by a wild cat. He was crusty, rumpled, sour-smelling, and one other thing that my mother could never tolerate—lazy. Grandpa had long since stopped trying. As a young man he’d lost or shed whatever ambition he’d possessed. When his dreams of becoming a professional baseball player crumbled to dust he drifted into the insurance business, enjoying a success that turned his stomach. How cruel of fate, he thought, to make him excel at a job he loathed. He got his revenge on fate. The moment he amassed enough money to generate a dependable income for the rest of his life, he quit. From then on he did little more than watch his house fall apart and make his family cringe.
We cringed that much more when he took his act on the road. Every day at dusk Grandpa would walk uptown to greet the rush-hour trains from the city. As commuters stepped onto the platform and discarded their final-edition newspapers, Grandpa would dive into one of the garbage cans and fish a newspaper out, intent on saving himself a few cents. Seeing him with his legs sticking out of a garbage can, no commuter could have imagined why that poor old hobo wanted that final edition in the first place—to check the closing prices on his sizable portfolio of stocks and bonds.
Grandpa had a photographic memory, an astounding vocabulary, a firm command of Greek and Latin, but his family wasn’t able to enjoy his intellectual gifts because he never engaged us in actual conversations. He kept us at bay with a ceaseless patter of TV jingles, advertising slogans and non sequiturs. We’d tell him about our day and he’d shout, “It’s a free country!” We’d ask him to pass the beans and he’d say, “Tastes good like a cigarette should.” We’d mention that the dog had fleas and he’d say, “Don’t tell everybody—they’ll all want one!” His private language was a fence he put around himself, a fence that grew a few inches taller the day he overheard one of my cousins urging the constipated dog to “do boo-boo.” Thus was born Grandpa’s signature phrase. At least a dozen times a day he’d say, “Do boo-boo,” which might mean hello or let’s eat or the Mets lost—or nothing at all. It’s possible that Grandpa talked this way to compensate for his stutter, rehearsed phrases being easier to say. It’s also possible, however, that he was moderately insane.
Grandpa had two passions, one a secret, one not. Every Saturday morning he’d come downstairs with his hair brushed, his teeth in, his clothes pressed and spotless. From the pocket of his blue pinstripe suit a lace handkerchief would rise like a fresh orchid. Without a word he’d get into his Ford Pinto and putter away, not returning until late, sometimes not until the next day. No one asked where Grandpa went. His Saturday rendezvous was like the cesspool, so obviously foul it didn’t require comment.
His nonsecret passion was words. For hours Grandpa would sit in his bedroom, solving crossword puzzles, reading books, gazing at a dictionary under a magnifying glass. He considered Shakespeare the greatest man who ever lived, “because he invented the Eng, Eng, English language—when he couldn’t find a word, he made one up.” Grandpa credited his etymological passion to his Jesuit schoolteachers, who, when they couldn’t make him memorize a word, beat it into him. Though the beatings worked, Grandpa believed they also caused his stutter. Priests made him love words, and made it hard for him to say words. My first example of irony.
One of the few tender moments I ever shared with Grandpa came about because of a word. It happened when he accidentally answered the phone. With his stutter and poor hearing he tended to avoid the phone, but he chanced to be walking past just as it rang, and picked up. A reflex, maybe. Or else he was bored. Unable to hear what the caller was saying, he waved me over. “Translate,” he said, shoving the phone at me.
The caller was conducting a survey for a consumer-research company. She rattled off a list of products, cars and foods, none of which Grandpa had ever used, driven or tasted. Grandpa offered his opinion about each one, lying merrily.
“Now then,” the caller said. “What’s the best thing about the town where you live?”
“What’s the best thing about Manhasset?” I translated.
Grandpa thought carefully, as though being interviewed by the Times. “Its proximity to Manhattan,” he said.
I relayed his answer to the caller.
“Fine,” the caller said. “And lastly, what is your annual income?”
“What’s your annual income?” I translated.
“Hang up.”
“But—”
“Hang up.”
I set the phone on the cradle. Grandpa sat in silence, his eyes closed, and I stood before him, rubbing my hands together, my habit whenever I couldn’t think of something to say.
“What’s ‘proximity’?” I asked.
He stood. He put his hands in his pockets and jiggled some coins. “Closeness,” he said. “For in, for in, for instance, I have too much prox, prox, proximity to my family.” He laughed. A chortle at first, then a raucous haw-haw, which made me laugh. We were both laughing, cackling, until Grandpa’s laughter became a coughing fit. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and hocked it full of phlegm, then patted me on the head and walked away.
After that brief exchange I felt a new emotional proximity to my grandfather. I started to get ideas about winning him over. Maybe I could ignore his faults, focus on his good points, whatever those might be. I just needed to climb over his linguistic fence. I wrote a poem about him, which I grandly presented to him one morning in the bathroom. He was lathering his jaws for a shave, using a beaver-hair brush that looked like a giant mushroom. He read the poem, handed it back to me and turned back to his reflection in the mirror. “Thanks for the pl, pl, plug,” he said.
Later I had a pang. Would befriending Grandpa mean betraying my mother? I realized I should get her permission before I went any farther, and so at bedtime I sounded her out, asked her to tell me again why we hated Grandpa. She tucked my atrophying security blanket under my chin and chose her words carefully. We didn’t hate Grandpa, she explained. In fact she hoped I could find a way to get along with him as long as we lived under his roof. I should continue talking to Grandpa, she said, even when he didn’t answer me. And I shouldn’t pay too much attention to the fact that she didn’t talk to him. Ever.
“But why don’t you?” I asked. “Why do you get so sad whenever you look at him?”
She stared at the peeling wallpaper. “Because,” she said, “Grandpa is a real-life Scrooge, and not just with money.”
Grandpa hoarded love, my mother said, as if he were afraid of one day running out. He’d ignored her and Aunt Ruth and Uncle Charlie while they were growing up, gave them no attention or affection whatsoever. She described one family outing at the beach when she was five. Seeing how sweetly the father of her cousin Charlene played with his children, my mother asked Grandpa to put her on his shoulders in the ocean. He did, but then carried her past the waves, and when they were out far, when she could barely see the shore, she became frightened and pleaded with him to let her down. So he threw her. Down she went, plunging to the bottom, gulping seawater. She fought her way to the surface, gasped for air and saw Grandpa—laughing. You wanted to be let down, he told her, oblivious to her tears. Staggering out of the surf, alone, my mother had a precocious epiphany: Her father was not a good man. In that realization, she told me, came a release. She felt independent. I asked her what “independent” meant. �
�Free,” she said. She looked again at the peeling wallpaper and said more softly, “Free.”
But there was one other thing, she said, which cut deeper. Grandpa had forbidden my mother and Aunt Ruth to attend college, and he did so at a time when there were no student loans or financial aid available, so they couldn’t circumvent him. More than his neglect, this was the blow that altered the trajectory of my mother’s life. She’d longed to attend college, prepare for some exciting career, but Grandpa denied her that chance. Girls become wives and mothers, he decreed, and wives and mothers don’t need college. “That’s why you’re going to get the education I didn’t,” my mother said. “Harvard or Yale, babe. Harvard or Yale.”
It was an outrageous statement for a woman who earned twenty dollars a day. And she didn’t stop there. After college, she added, I would attend law school. I didn’t know what a lawyer was, but it sounded awfully boring, and I mumbled words to this effect. “No, no,” she said. “You’re going to be a lawyer. That way I can hire you to sue your father for child support. Ha.” She smiled, but she didn’t look as if she were kidding.
I cast my mind into the future. After I became a lawyer, maybe my mother could pursue her long-deferred dream of attending college. I wanted that for her. If my being a lawyer could make that happen, I’d be a lawyer. Meanwhile I’d forget about befriending Grandpa.
Rolling onto my side, away from my mother, I promised her that with my first paycheck as a lawyer I would send her to college. I heard a gasp, or a gulp, as if she were fighting her way up from the bottom of the ocean, and then I felt her lips on the back of my head.
five | JUNIOR
Days before my eighth birthday there was a knock at Grandpa’s door and The Voice was coming out of a man in the breezeway. The sun was behind the man, shining directly into my eyes, which made it impossible to discern his features. I could see only the outline of his torso, a massive block of pale white muscle in a tight white T-shirt, set atop two bowed legs. The Voice was a giant tooth.
“Give your father a hug,” The Voice commanded. I reached up, tried to wrap my arms around him, but his shoulders were too wide. It was like hugging the garage. “That’s no hug,” he said. “Give your father a proper hug.” I stood on my toes and squeezed. “Harder!” he said. I couldn’t squeeze any harder. I hated myself for being so weak. If I couldn’t hug my father hard enough, if I couldn’t grab hold, he wouldn’t come back.
After a sidebar with my mother, who stole nervous looks at me the whole time, my father said he was driving me into the city to meet his family. Along the way he entertained me with a dizzying Babel of accents. Apparently The Voice wasn’t his only voice. Besides being a stand-up, he said, he’d once been an “impressionist,” a word that was new and beautiful to me. He demonstrated. He was a Nazi commandant, he was a French chef. Now he was a Mafia thug, now a British butler. Jumping abruptly from voice to voice, my father sounded like the radio when I turned the dial quickly back and forth, a trick that made me nervous even as it made me laugh.
“So,” he said, lighting a cigarette, “you like living at your grandfather’s house?”
“Yes,” I said. “I mean, no.”
“Little of both?”
“Yes.”
“Your grandfather’s a good man. Marches to his own drummer, but I like that about him.”
I wasn’t sure what to say about that.
“What do you not like about living at your grandfather’s?” my father asked.
“It makes my mother sad.”
“And what do you like about living there?”
“Its proximity to my mother.”
My father whipped his head toward me, took a drag of his cigarette, and stared.
“Your mother says you listen to your old man on the radio a lot.”
“Yes.”
“What do you think?”
“You’re funny.”
“Would you like to be a disc jockey when you grow up?”
“I’m going to be a lawyer.”
“A lawyer? Jesus, of all things. Why?”
I didn’t answer. He blew a cloud of smoke at the windshield and we both watched it curl up the glass and roll back upon itself like a wave.
I have only hazy memories of my father’s face that day. I was too nervous to look at him for more than a second at a time, and I was too captivated by his voice. Also, I was too focused on the speech I was about to deliver. I was going to demand that my father give me money. If I could choose the perfect words, if I could say them just right, I would return to my mother with a fistful of cash and we could escape Grandpa’s house and she would never again have to sing in anger or peck at her calculator. I rehearsed in my head, while taking deep breaths and steeling myself. It’s like diving off the high board at the public swimming pool, I told myself, closing my eyes. One. Two. Three.
I couldn’t. I didn’t want to say anything that would make The Voice disappear again. Instead I stared out the window, at the slums and liquor stores and snowdrifts of paper along the side of the road. We must be a long way from Manhasset, I thought, wondering vaguely what I would do if my father kept driving and never brought me back, and feeling guilty that this scenario caused a shiver of excitement.
We arrived at someone’s brick town house, which smelled of stewed tomatoes and grilled sausages. I was put in a corner of the kitchen, where I stared up at a row of enormous female rumps. Five women, including one called Aunt Fatty, stood at a stove, fixing lunch. After bolting several helpings of Aunt Fatty’s eggplant my father took me to a nearby apartment to meet his “gang.” Again I was put in a corner and told to amuse myself. Instead I watched my father and three couples sit around a table, playing cards and drinking. Soon they began to take off their clothes.
“You’re bluffing,” someone said.
“You’re right! Glad I wore my clean underwear today.”
“Glad I’m wearing any underwear today,” my father said, to peals of laughter.
My father was down to his boxer shorts and one black sock. Then he lost the sock. He studied his cards, crooked an eyebrow, made everyone gasp with laughter as he pretended to be in a panic about losing his last article of clothing.
“Johnny,” someone said to him, “what you got?”
“Momma, I ain’t wearing any clothes—you can see what I got!”
“Johnny’s got nothing.”
“Aw, shit, I don’t want to see Johnny’s thing.”
“Absolutely. I second that. Johnny’s out.”
“Wait!” my father said. “The boy! I’ll bet the boy!” He called to me and I stepped forward. “Look at this fine young specimen. Wouldn’t you rather have this nice little boy than a look at my manhood? Wouldn’t you rather have this fruit of my loins than my Fruit of the Looms! I’ll see your bet and raise you—Junior!”
My father lost the hand. His friends slid off their chairs, whooping with laughter, and there was some breathless discussion of who would pay for my education, and who would explain things to my mother when my father didn’t bring me home.
I don’t remember anything after my father bet me, which felt worse than if he’d beaten me. I don’t remember him sobering up, putting on his clothes, or driving me home, and I don’t remember what I said to my mother about the visit. I know only that I didn’t tell her the truth.
Some weeks later I was warming up the radio, waiting for my father’s show to start. I planned to tell The Voice about a troubling rumor that the Mets were going to trade my idol, Tom Seaver. Handsome, clean-cut, a former marine who was the ace of the Mets pitching staff, Seaver began his windup with his hands under his chin, as if praying, then drove his powerful body forward, kneeling on his right knee, as if he were going to propose to the batter. That the Mets might trade Seaver was too awful to contemplate. I wondered what The Voice would say. But the time came for The Voice and The Voice wasn’t there. My father had switched shifts or changed stations again. I took the radio to the stoop and slowly turned
the dial back and forth. Nothing. I went and found my mother and asked if she knew what had happened to The Voice. She didn’t answer. I asked again. Blank face. I asked urgently. She exhaled and looked at the clouds.
“You know I’ve been asking your father for years to help us,” she said. “Right?”
I nodded.
She’d hired lawyers, filed court papers, appeared before judges, and still my father hadn’t paid. So she’d made one last effort. She’d sworn out a warrant for my father’s arrest. The next day two cops handcuffed and dragged my father away from a live microphone while a stunned audience listened on. When they released my father from jail the following day, my mother said, he was insane with anger. He paid a fraction of what he owed us and failed to appear in court a week later. His lawyer told the judge that my father had fled the state.
My mother waited for all this to sink in. She then told me that within the last twenty-four hours she’d gotten a call from my father. He wouldn’t say where he was, and he threatened that if she didn’t stop dunning him for money, he’d have me kidnapped. Years later I would learn that my father had also threatened to put a contract on my mother’s life, and his voice was so menacing she didn’t dare call his bluff. For weeks she couldn’t start the T-Bird without her hands shaking.
My father didn’t want to see me, but he might kidnap me? It didn’t make any sense. I squinted at my mother.
“He’s probably just trying to scare me,” she said. “But if your father shows up at Shelter Rock, or if someone says he’ll take you to see your father, you mustn’t go with them.” She took me by the shoulders and turned me toward her. “Do you hear?”
“Yes.”
I pulled away and walked back to the stoop, back to the radio. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe my father was working at a new station, doing one of his funny voices so he couldn’t be recognized. I turned the dial, wiggled the antenna, analyzed each voice, but none was funny like my father, none was deep enough to make my ribs vibrate or utensils tremble. My mother came and sat beside me.
The Tender Bar: A Memoir Page 4