The Autobiography of Someone Else - 18

Harry and I began to hang out with Jim. Just another loser with a mother who knew our mothers. Is that not how lifelong bonds are formed? I sensed that Jim was interested in more than television and Atari and Star Wars and sports. He did like guns and swords and tanks. That was normal but he liked them more than me, more than most. In the library I’d look for race car books. There was one with black and white pictures of North American sports car races in the ‘60s, a book that was already old and nobody cared. Races that had faded deep into history, their results recorded but never re-examined, the names of the drivers forgotten by all but their descendants. Triumphs and Corvettes with roll bars winding up and down and through the fields. Men in white, short-sleeved, button-down shirts and their wives or girlfriends in long floral-print skirts sitting on the hilly lawns to watch. This is all I wanted. Jim came over to my house one day to build model airplanes. We began with a strangely ceremonial lunch, as though my parents had to check him out to be my girlfriend. For some reason Mom had severely undercooked the burgers. I gamely swallowed clumps of cool, mealy meat, its blood soaking the bun, dressed in pickle relish and Heinz Tomato Ketchup, as Jim excitedly explained why he’d prefer a knife to a machine gun in hand-to-hand combat. “A machine gun might jam,” he said. “With a knife, you can stick it in the other guy’s body.” I gulped my iced tea and the lemon wedge knocked my nose. My parents examined Jim with some concern. “Unless you have a bayonet on the gun. A bayonet is the best,” Jim exclaimed. “It’s like a knife!”

Shipbuilding

There was always this model ship on the shelf in my parents’ closet, its keel cradled in the felted holders of an elegant stand. A glorious warship but mastless, stripped of rigging or sails.

No one thinks it was there since the beginning of time but it was always there.

I asked my mom about it. I didn’t ask my dad. His side didn’t have scale replicas in the house.

“It’s your grandpa’s,” she said.

“Can I have it?” I asked, wondering why it wasn’t mine already.

“Sure.”

I took it down and put it on the bookshelf in my room. The rest of it—masts, yardarms, the boom that sticks out from the bow—was wrapped up in old newspapers and I took that too. There were no sails. Still I would restore this thing of beauty that time forgot.

I set upon the ship with plastic glue and sewing thread. I put the masts back in their holes and hung the yards where I thought they should go. It was hard to tie a good knot at the end of the smooth sticks and it was hard to get them to hang right, perpendicular. I fixed the boom to the prow with a big dab of cement. The surfaces didn’t really join, but they stuck together fine. I strung a black thread from the tip to the top of the front mast, and then another from the other mast to the middle of the stern. That’s what a ship looked like in my head. There were dozens of cannons strewn about on deck, with little pins at the bottom to stick them in place. I put one in each of the cannon ports and there were almost enough to go around.

When I was done I thought about my grandfather, dead long before my birth. He was a revered man, the beloved patriarch of a family riven by insanity, resentment and drink. It’s possible he would have loved me but he would not have been proud.

In the apartment where we lived after they sold the house my mom and dad slept on a mattress on a box spring in the living room. There was a fifth of Jack Daniels and two glasses upside-down on the bedside table—actually an old door on cinder blocks that held books, the stereo, the 12-inch, black-and-white family TV. Every night they’d have a nightcap like this was a motel and they’d bought the bottle from a liquor store on the other side of the highway on-ramp. But it was home.

Mom didn’t follow sports but she loved sports. The folklore of it, the mythology, traditions. The idea that people could get so happy about nothing at all. Or get so sad.

For the Super Bowl in 1979 we were at our neighbors up the street, the kid I’d been friends with all my life, Henry. The parents were having proper pre-dinner cocktails in the living room while Henry and I watched the game at the kitchen table. That was what went down in a house in a little college town with four grownups who didn’t give a fuck about football.

At a certain point my mom walked in and asked us who was playing. She didn’t even know who was playing on the goddamned day of the game.

“Cowboys and Steelers,” I said, with some idiotic pride, like I was in the know.

Without the slightest hesitation she said: “GO STEELERS.”

She knew, instinctively or through some convoluted experience, that the Dallas Cowboys were despicable and the Pittsburgh Steelers were worthy of love and support.

Until that moment I had no real idea of my own. I’d grown up without TV because this is how my parents chose to express themselves. To take their stand against vulgar American commercialism and conformity, dragging their children up alongside them. So today I was happy enough to watch any kind of flickering pixels on a screen, be they white and silver or black and gold.

But the moment my mom said that I knew she was right. One team is obviously, always, fundamentally, morally superior to the other. Cowboys suck.

So I rooted for the Steelers and they won.

It never feels quite as cold as when Spring starts and the heat won’t come on anymore.

Someone managed to spam my dream blog. A robot evidently, that somehow guessed the address to post by email. It reminded me of checking my mom’s email account in her apartment, after she died. Her inbox was contaminated with spam, like flies or vultures on carrion. Here and there were signals from the living—an old friend, a bit worried that they hadn’t heard back. Something related to work. The stream goes on and on forever I suppose.

All summer long Mom and Dad fought upstairs in the big old house in Woodstock, England, while we waited out the storm in the living room, drawing pictures, watching TV. One day a music video came on that I’d never seen before. The bass had this rubber-band thing going, mesmerizing. Electrifying. Suddenly we’re in some kind of make-believe landscape in pink and blue. A sad, boy-girly clown who appears to have a scar on his forehead sings plaintively. He’s joined by a chorus in vaguely religious garb, like Eastern Orthodox maybe, not Catholic. But they're weird. And boy-girly too. Like eunuchs in the court of an alien king. The clown shows us a picture of himself as a man trapped in a padded cell and suddenly there he is, sunlight streaming through the window bars. The chorus is murmuring something. It sounds reproachful, judgmental. He’s shivering and freaking out. Kicking, though I had no idea what that meant at the time. But I knew what it meant to be shivering in a padded room. Because all of us are kicking, all the time. Then he’s the clown again with the chorus of weirdos beside him, walking ahead of an earth mover, and a couple of them on each end are doing this asynchronous dance where they swoop down and touch the ground. It’s awful beautiful, what they’re doing. And when he sings “all time low” the person on the left of the screen, a female—maybe?—comes around and touches down in time to the music, indicating “low,” but like a princess picking a flower, and it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, the way she did that, and got right back up again, an indifferent gesture, but so graceful. Poignant. Then the clown’s on the beach and something’s wrong with his hand. He’s back in the padded room again. He’s waist-deep in the lake, his arms outstretched, singing, “I’ve never done good things, I’ve never done bad things, I never did anything out of the blue.” Out of the blue? And he sinks. And then the chorus comes around again and there they are all in a line, the bulldozer looming, and please do it again, please, and right on cue she does it again. All. Time. Low. He’s back on the beach, releasing a bird. Then he’s cowering in the corner of the padded cell again, singing something about his mother. Something she warned him about. And suddenly there she is walking with him on the beach, imploring him, trying to reason with him. But it’s too late. He just stares off into space.

You Never Take Candy from Strangers

There was a quick storm that left beads of rain on the office windows. There’s a hole in the sky up on the right where the sun was shining this whole time. But the clouds are moving fast. They cover it up. They let it shine again.

I can see 14th Street from here—from 26th. Just the intersection with Eighth. All the way Downtown the rising Freedom Tower glitters from behind a shroud.

I’m in an odd little annex to the main room on the floor. The 13th floor. 12A if you want to know the truth. There’s a glass partition between us in here and everybody else, as though we’re exhibits in a diorama, or they are.

In the front corner of our space two steps lead to a door that opens upon a strange space behind a parapet. A walkway, except it’s not for anyone to walk. There’s a gutter there, and two industrial air conditioners. It’s the sort of door that no one’s ever meant to open, leading to a place that no one’s ever meant to go.

It reminds me of being about five or six at JFK Airport. We were going to France. I was excited—as usual. The clean and modern, formal space. The candy stands and restaurants and bars. All the people walking by so resolute.

My mom and I ambled through the passageways, looking at the planes. There was ours, a TWA 707, in peppermint-stick white and red stripes in the sun. I saw a door that led to the graveled roof of the concourse below. A door you should not open. A door you must not open.

An old lady with lipstick on appeared. She leaned over me, saying what a cute boy, what a nice boy. She handed me a Jolly Rancher. I took it.

“What do we say?” Mom said.

“Thank you.”

And the lady was out of sight. My mom demanded it from me.

“Why?” I protested.

“Because you never take candy from strangers.”

The Autobiography of Someone Else - 11

I lay on my bed and stared up at the galaxy. My dark blue ceiling was covered with the constellations: Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, Orion, Gemini, Leo, Cancer and Cassiopeia. They glowed a pale green at night but somehow seemed more real when daylight filled the room and each star was revealed as muted and imprecise. My dad had painted them, painstakingly, with a National Geographic map for reference. My dad painted the stars.

This is what I did when my parents fought. I stared at the fake stars. I thought of the planets surrounding them, populated by howling beasts or, more often, some enlightened race: a world where death does not exist, with its glittering city of levitating streets and telepathic streams; everyone allied in the promotion of truth. I traced a route there in my imaginary spaceship.

My mother was a fury. Sometimes, suddenly, she would become extravagantly angry. Scream bursts of bitter, cutting invective between stifled sobs, pointing, trembling. The extreme amplitude of her rage, out of proportion to the here and now, made the true source of it seem far away in space and time. If she was yelling at my dad she was not his wife; she was every wife, punishing every husband who had ever lived for his selfishness, his profligacy, his laziness. If she was yelling at us she was not our mother; she was every mother, raging at every child ever born for its whining, its stubbornness, its ungratefulness, and not least the ravages it had committed upon her body. For its very existence, really. When you were on the receiving end of my mother's anger you got the feeling you were paying the price for some ancient and irredeemable sin. The sin of being, perhaps. The universe's fall at the moment of creation. It was a pure, abstract wrath; this had the curious effect of making it both more commanding and less personal.

I now heard her muffled shouts punctuated by the smashing of dishes on the kitchen floor. In spite of her enormous temper, it was unusual for her to break things. I somehow knew I had to exit my room and bear witness to this. My dad was pacing in the dining room, haltingly trying to reason with her, hands up in a gesture of pleading. My sister sat on the couch in the living room, body stiff, arms folded. Instinctively I sat with her.

"I'm scared," I said.

"Don't worry," she said. "Everything's going to be OK."

My parents would attend drunken bacchanals in the woods of Northeastern Connecticut, in the decade of the seventies. What else was there for a married couple, one of whom was a college professor and the other a homemaker, living in a split-level ranch on three acres, with four kids, one of whom was off to college doing God-knows-what, and one car, and nothing around them but the trees and the starry sky, to do?

In those days drinking was a sport. You were half a man if you didn't keep the pace. There's a story, my dad passed out under the piano. The way my mom told it, that was his M.O. To cozy up under the grand piano at a certain hour. Like it happened a hundred times. Maybe it did. Or maybe it happened once and became mythology. This is what Dad does when he's drunk. There was something, I have to admit, that rang true in that characterization of him, even if it was unfairly extrapolated from a single event. I could well imagine him checking out semipublicly like this, making a bit of a show of his resignation, a grouchy gesture of interior civil disobedience. Under the piano. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe that's not him at all. Maybe that's only him because that's the story that got told.

There's another story from those blurry nights: He saved some poor fuck's life who passed out face-first in a ditch of icy water. Some fuck from the English department or something, who was drunk as hell and went out to piss in the woods. "Has anyone seen whatshisname?" someone asked, through the haze of smoke and pretentious conversation. "Why, no," my dad said, or something, and he went out the kitchen door and looked around and found the fucker in a ditch, in the dark, breathing what could just about have been his last. My mom never hesitated to tell that story either, principled as she was, and she almost made it seem like both happened on the same night, or happened night after night - save the man, lie beneath the piano; save the man, lie beneath the piano.

But I'm pretty sure that's not the case.

It was 1975, I think, when my dad grew his beard. He was sitting there at the head of the dinner table, or was it the tail. I was sitting on the side to his right, as I always did, I suppose. He hadn't shaved and we took notice and somehow it was communicated that he was growing a beard, though I don't remember that he said a word.

In the summertime my mom would brew iced tea and we could have it with lemon and a little sugar. We drank it out of those smoked green or gold glasses, sculpted with thumbprint-sized indentations around the bottom half. With ice from the metal tray that frosted up around the handle and stuck to your fingers if you had no patience and tried to crack the ice before running it under water. The sun set so late, we left the lights off and let the sunset seep through the woods and through the picture window, through the kitchen window and the door.

Mom sounded chipper and alert on the phone today. Eerily herself. As though she'd popped right back from nowhere into our world of street sounds, errands and appointments. Yet she struggled for words to describe the mundanest things. I asked her what she'd been up to, right away regretting that I'd led her into this weird corner where she'd have to account for time spent in oblivion. "Well, I, I, I... you know, I've been – well – I've been... staring at the sky." She sounded resolute, almost pleased when she reached the end of the sentence, as though she'd not only remembered what she'd been doing but that it wasn't such a waste of time, all told. I made words of sanction and endorsement. She seemed to understand that Lis and Jake were visiting soon and what that's all about. "We'll have to, you know, um... cut... you know, cut cubes of meat. And make them, make meat sandwiches," she said. "Yes, Mom. We'll do that. We'll do what we like."

As she approaches death my mom likes to say she lives the life of Riley. I don't think I'd ever heard her say that before. But when I ask her how she's doing, what she did today. Does she need anything. "Boy, I'm just living the life of Riley." And sometimes she seems to forget the expression for a moment. She searches for it and is satisfied to finally find it. "I'm just, I'm just, I'm just... umm..." And here she'll let her voice trail off, the ellipsis landing on a period. "Living the life of Riley!"

We all went to the Café de la Musique, the restaurant with the terrace by the fountain in the Parc de la Villette, because Mom loves the place, though the food is not great. I got chocolate ice cream for dessert and though Mom does not order dessert she saw the ice cream on the table and thought it was for her and ate it with great, relish and of course I didn't stop her. She hesitated in fact, not knowing exactly if it was hers but her desire for it compelled her and she dipped the spoon in and ate some mouthfuls. I was reminded of the guy with Alzheimer's at Christy's house that one day, the sad and eerie sight of an adult lost to children's pleasures. The great silent unfortunate sight.

In the news today: Shark bit boy – shark killed girl.


My mother said, "I think it's about time I left this family." I followed her around pleadingly, waiting for her to change her mind. We were in the high-rise flat in the tiny French town where my dad took students on their junior years abroad. She seemed good and fed up. Naturally being the child I felt I was to blame. She went into the kitchen and took a pan down off the shelf, her gestures brusque and scary. She jerked the refrigerator open and got two eggs. Lit the stove and buttered the pan. Cracked the eggs in sunny side up – hsssshhh! hssssssshh! – and then she did something I'll not forget as long as I live. She took a little fistful of raw rice and sprinkled it upon the yolks. I'd never seen her cook anything that wasn't for us, so I wondered, Is this what she eats? Very soon she slid it all on a plate, a hot and runny mess. It seemed delicious somehow, crunchy grains drowning in flows of egg and butter. She ate it ferociously, oblivious to everything but her plate. I wanted some but knew better than to ask. This was her food.


Tonight was a hot and rainy night.

At the restaurant, out on the terrace with everyone, she was delighted that we’d decided to order rosé; she said again and again rosé is just perfect for weather like this and it was true, the heat. She gulped it with great pleasure and asked for more, which I poured for her. From time to time she became worried, a bit melancholy even, at the thought that it might be gone. Is there any more of that rosé? And yet there was, and I poured it, and she was happy.

She took the salt shaker and ground it for pepper.

She said, The great thing about Johnny Cash is he mixes the sacred with the profane. She said with a wag of her finger. Mark her words.

The meter read $12.90 at Lex and 96th, pretty red numbers in the prettier night.

As I ascended the stairs I spied a dog across the way, devouring tremblingly from its bowl. I watched it eat its fill and wander off across the polished floor. And this was echoed on the floor above: a solitary wine glass on a kitchen table, a little milky from the ghosts of someone's grip and the dusty liquid it had once contained.

Mom sounded good and elated today and it was sort of infectious. She said she knew she probably wasn't going to make it. I hastened to reassure her, not that she was wrong, not proposing some idiotic false hope, but telling her it was OK and we'd make the most of whatever time there was. It was heartening to hear her sound so philosophical, so willing to accept her fate, not bitter nor even withdrawn while in the midst of it – but strange. We were simply talking about her very own impending death.

I think I see a trickle signaling the coming torrent of sympathy. An e-mail from Seth. I see his name in my inbox, unfamiliar, and wonder if he's announced to a group that Sally took a turn for the worse. But he's writing about Mom, a perfectly pitched message, solemn and supportive and selfless.

Mother began dying today. Or was it yesterday? Who knows.

On the phone she's reluctant to say what she thinks, which is that she's really dying. She feels she must quietly concede there's hope, that she can make it through whatever's coming, but she's strangely absent in those moments. She feels guilty reassuring me but would feel guiltier if she didn't.

I turned into the kitchen and gazed upon the mountain of dishes I'd be doing in a few hours, most likely with my bath towel unfastening around my waist and the kids in the building across the way, clamoring at their cafeteria tables. Then I entered the bathroom and lifted the toilet seat to reveal its paint-peeled underside.

It rained ropes all day long and by the time I left work at a quarter past nine the sidewalk along Canal had receded under puddles ankle-deep and cold.


Mom has some kind of lump under her arm, or shoulder. Unbeknownst.

"Will you go to the doctor? Mom?" I asked.

"I won't go until after Lis's wedding. I don't want them taking me, you know, to the hospital and everything. Chemotherapy, you know. All that. Until after the wedding."

"Mom. That's seven months away. Lis's wedding. If it's nothing, you leave, half an hour, you leave the doctor just like that. If it's chemotherapy, it's. Chemotherapy doesn't take seven months."

"I know." She exhaled the word know, she didn't really speak it.

"If this is something you need chemotherapy. You. You can't wait. Will you go to the doctor please, tomorrow?"

"I'll go. I may not go tomorrow. But I'll go."

"You don't have to go tomorrow but you'll go, you'll go the next day."

"Well, I may not go the next day. But I'll go."