Drowning Lessons (25 page)

“Am I
right
?”

Uncle Nick swats the back of my head, taps my untouched ouzo glass. “I don't drink,” I explain to him for the hundredth time — as if it matters, as if anything matters to Uncle Nick but what
he
thinks.

He carves lamb, forks meat onto my plate. “I don't care if you're fat or thin, rich or poor, dumb or smart,” he says. “It makes
no earthly difference.” The combined smells of lamb and anisette increase my Sunday nausea. “No difference whatsoever.”

I await the aphorism, the one that invariably ties the knot on my uncle's dinner speeches. Uncle Nick has made a modest living, not to mention a name for himself, churning out aphorisms. He's written over two dozen — I hesitate to call them books — pamphlets? monographs? all with chrome yellow dust jackets and titles like
How to Lick This Old World and Everyone in It
. The pamphlets are packed with tidy Ben Franklinesque sayings.
“A penny saved is a penny scorned.” “If you can't stand the heat, buy an air conditioner.” “A fish out of water can't do much with a bicycle.”
A person could spend many hours trying to decipher some of Uncle Nick's more elaborate aphorisms. Still, they've earned him a decent living, not to mention all those plaques and photographs lining the walls of his wood-paneled Astoria den: him shaking hands with the president and
CEO
of Marcal Toilet Tissue Corporation, for example.

“A man without a purpose,”
Nick proclaims,
“is a chameleon on a scotch plaid.”

By George, he's done it! Satisfied with this conclusion, Nick rewards himself with another glass of ouzo, places the empty in line with four others ranged before the fire grate next to his snakeskin cowboy boots.
“Stinyássas!”
He drains his glass, then eyes my full one with a brave man's disdain for cowards. “Got that, loverboy?”

Does my uncle know I've bedded his daughter? A prickle runs up my spine. Ever since I arrived in New York, Uncle Nick has been pimping his daughter to me as if I'm the last man on earth, and maybe I am. Or maybe he just wants to get rid of her,
marry her off. Or maybe he sincerely thinks we'd be good for each other — incest and other small matters aside. Or maybe, just maybe, he just wants us to be
friends
.

Uncle Nick has my father's eyes, but none of my father's warm-heartedness. His daughter has the same eyes. When she and I make love, I close the blinds.

My search for red and gray wide-striped pajamas began this past Christmas and has since taken me from the disheveled, multicolored plastic bins of K-Mart, at Astor Place, to the vinegar-and-soap-scented oak cabinets of Brooks Brothers, at Madison and Forty-fourth. Uptown by subway, downtown by bus, crosstown on swollen, blistered, sweaty feet. Three months into my search I'm bruised but not beaten, tired yet hopeful, drawn but not defeated. Even, for brief shining moments, faintly optimistic.

Saturday — a day of dull, drizzly rain. I ride the no. 7 train from Sunnyside, where, in the graveyard-encrusted, workingclass muddle of Queens (zone of bars and cemeteries: a turf war between drunks and the dead), I rent a nine-by-ten room from a retired church organist named Filbert, who keeps a pipe organ in his vestibule and plays Bach to raise the dead.

But about Filbert I'll say as little as possible, having more important things on my mind, like the men's clothing store on Greenwich Avenue, in the Village. It came to me in a dream this morning, while dozing between snooze alarms.

“May I help you?” the clerk in the dream — his face its own caricature, poorly drawn — asked me.

“Yes,” I answered. “I'm looking for a pair of red and gray widestriped pajamas.”

“Red and gray
wide
stripes?” said the clerk, raising his thin eyebrows, squeezing into the word “wide” a whole eastern city full of snideness.

“That's right,” I said, slowly. “Red and gray wide stripes.”

“Wait here,” said the clerk.

And that's when I woke up.

I've seen paisleys, plaids, checkers, swirls; I've seen abstracts, geometrics, diagonals; I've seen winged horses, flying fish, golf clubs, chili peppers, hummingbirds, sunflowers, and tennis balls; I've seen bacon and eggs, doughnuts, coffee cups, stars and stripes, exotic fish and birds of paradise, trains, cars, ships, planes. I've seen smoking pipes, playing cards, woodwind and brass instruments, violas and violins, waterfowl, rainbows, puffy clouds. I've seen mandalas, spirals, stars, polka dots. I've seen pajamas of every color, every style, every pattern. I've even seen stripes: pink stripes, green stripes, red, white, and blue stripes, wide stripes and pinstripes — even red and gray stripes. But never,
ever
red and gray wide stripes.

The search goes on.

They're what he wore. My father. He wore them ragged, as a matter of fact, so ragged you could see the skin of his knees. Rayon? Silk? Plain cotton? I don't remember. But I do remember the faint smell of bourbon and unwashed vegetable bins burrowed deep into their fibers, musty and ripe. Though he died just over five years ago, it seems like so much longer, long before Astoria and Uncle Nick; long before Sunnyside and Filbert and his organ. Long before my obsession with red and gray widestriped pajamas took hold of me and made me its crusader-slave.
Something about the combination of those colors both grounds and disorients me, throws my world off balance while anchoring me to it.

They say that boredom arises from one's sense of detachment from all things, in which case a pair of red and gray wide-striped pajamas has become the least boring thing in the world, for me. For me those colors conjure a privileged, happy childhood. How many boys grow up with their very own private trolley car? My father built it from scratch in his spare time in our garage. Yellow with red pinstripes and varnished cane seats that flipped back and forth depending on which way it was going. The trolley ran on twin lawn-mower engines and had a brass bell I'd ring as we clacked along. We rode it up and down the wooded hill overlooking the brass-fastener and hat factories that dotted the landscape. My father wore his red and gray wide-striped pajamas. They were the closest thing he had to a conductor's uniform.

My father and I would watch the hat factories burn down. Some people wondered how he always knew when there'd be a fire; one man, a fellow employee at the Christmas-bulb-socket factory where he worked, even went as far as to accuse Dad of being an arsonist. But the fact is that when it came to predicting hat-factory infernos my father was possessed of a Promethean foresight. And insurance fraud was rampant.

We'd find the best vantage point up on our hill, then sit next to each other on trolley seats with dampened rags covering our mouths — since the hat-factory smoke carried noxious fumes from the mercury salts used as a block lubricant. More than once, the evening before the factories went up, he'd build a campfire, a tiny blaze to mirror the larger one at the bottom of the hill.
Then, armed with marshmallows en brochette, as quiet as monks, we'd wait.

The factories burned gloriously, with marmalade flames augmenting the dusk, spitting sparks where they licked utility wires. Once, when the wind blew the right way, burning hats flew through the air. One nearly landed on my head. “Now
that's
something!” my father said.

Another time, just a few weeks before he died, for the very first time my father gave me some advice. “Son,” he said while bobbing two marshmallows on a twig. “I've got two pieces of advice for you.” He kept his bourbon bottle handy always and drank from it now. “Fifty-eight years alive on this earth, and I've only got two bits of advice to give to you, my son. The first bit is:
want everything, need nothing
. That may not sound like anything useful, but believe me, it's
very
important. The second piece of advice is …” He chewed his lip, looked around. “The second bit of advice …” His eyes went blurry and lost their focus; he scratched the short, rough hairs behind his neck. “Son,” he said, “I'm sorry, but I forget what the second bit of advice was.”

By way of consolation he handed me the bourbon bottle. For the first time I tasted, along with his tobacco-flavored saliva, the burning amber fluid that was as much a part of my father as his skin, and which tasted to me like the hat-factory fire. The whisky carved its own path through my lungs, into my stomach. With metal-stained fingers he pried a braised marshmallow — its formerly white flesh caramelized to a perfectly even ocher — from the end of his twig and fed it to my open mouth. We went on watching flames — those of the campfire and of the factory blazing — letting their tongues do our talking for us. When two firemen arrived to ask us what the hell we thought we were
doing, my father smiled, slapped them on their sooty backs, and offered them marshmallows and bourbon.

I was sixteen when he died in the bathroom, straining and coughing on the bowl. He'd smoked like a burning hat factory all his life, until his pulmonary cells mutinied. I found him slumped against the cool tiles, blood drops flecking the front of the red and gray wide-striped pajamas, which hung from his shoulders as if from a wire hanger, he'd grown so thin. I sat on the floor near him, listening to the last chains rattle through his sacked lungs, then he was gone. I held him, the fingers of his hand in mine stained with powdered metal and nicotine. I smelled his earth-soaked mustiness, the tobacco of his hugs and kisses, the unwashed, vegetable-bin/bourbon odor of his flesh. His cancer soaked into my skin.

The trolley went up on cinder blocks in our swampy backyard. For a while I sanded and varnished the cane seats, polished the bell with Brasso, smeared moving parts with white grease, freshened yellow paint and red pinstripes. But the bell tarnished. Rust froze the driveshafts in their bearings; vines crept over the seats, strangling and finally splitting them apart. Two years ago, the day of my nineteenth birthday, carrying my father's ashes in a gray plastic box with a number on it, I arrived here, in New York, at the front door of my uncle's Astoria home.

Midafternoon. Greenwich Village. November. The air heavy under gray-bellied clouds. A sweet smell of honey-glazed peanuts tugs at my heart like leaf smoke. For a moment I'm at a loss: one of those moments when all existence slips out from under your shoes, when you forget to breathe, and heartbeats turn voluntary.

Then I remember my mission.

From outside the store looks pretty much as it did in my dream, but smaller, warmer, and infinitely sadder. The blue and white sign says “Minsky's Men's World.” I peer through plate glass. Slowly a precognition grows, swells, and settles in the spongy mass of my lungs. I feel outlandishly small: a barnacle on the back of a sperm whale. Suddenly the plate glass freezes into an iceberg, my body frozen inside it like a fly in amber. My heart decelerates. I can't breathe; I need to lie down. My father's whisky-moistened eyes shine through the frozen glass. I faint.

I know what Uncle Nick means when he says I need a kick in the ass. But it's not a kick in the ass that I need. It's what some people call ambition, and others call motivation, and others call God. Whatever — they're lucky to have a built-in “kicking machine” they can rely on, whereas people like me, we have to kick ourselves, or be kicked. When I hear the word “potential,” my first impulse is to lie down somewhere soft and go to sleep. And though potential may
seem
like a fine thing, stored up for too long it eats away at the soul. You go through life thinking there are other choices, and so all days are rented and not wholly owned. Like buying subway tokens one at a time, or hiring a hotel room by the hour, hour after hour, day by day, year after year.

And as for commitment, to me commitment is a burning hat factory you can never escape alive. Nor does my uncle understand that during my worst periods of floating, fainting is all that tethers me to this world. It has
nothing
to do with ouzo or spinach pie. It's just me and this whole red and gray wide-striped dream that some people call life.

I look up, see faces looking down, their eyeballs swollen with concern.

You okay, mister?

(A fainting perk: they call you “mister.”)

Fine, fine, thank you
.

But I'm still floating, swimming in inner space. The lifeline has been cut, and I'm drifting free of the space capsule, which grows smaller. Now they've got me sitting up on the sidewalk against the window display of Minsky's Men's World. I turn, look inside, my eyes dead level with a silk plaid bathrobe. I think:
I'm the chameleon
.

“May I help you?”

The real salesclerk at Minsky's wasn't at all like the one in my dream. He had a soft, neatly feminine face, a
kind
face — nothing pointed or severe — almost listless in its lack of distinct features.

“Pajamas,” I said, still woozy from my faint.

“We don't carry many,” he said with a sorry look. “I'll show you what we've got.”

He showed me the so-called pajama section, and right away my heart sank. There were no more than a dozen pair. All solids, no stripes. Not even piping.

“That's
all
?”

The salesclerk shrugged. He looked sincerely sorry.

But this is no time for hopelessness. Ahab had his whale, Shackleton his South Pole, Jason his Golden Fleece, the crusaders their Holy Grail. Off I march to Barney's, to Loehmann's, to Macy's, to Bloomingdale's, Saks, Lord & Taylor, Paul Stuart … Like a pig rooting truffles, I snort quickly through the discounted
bins at Filene's, then head uptown, to jaunt along Madison Avenue in the sixties, among fur-coated, imperially slim housewives with tucked chins and powdered noses, and gather in the thrilling bad taste of the rich.

Sunday, that most tyrannical of days, a day dedicated to dates with my cousin Marcia, my beloved, Uncle Nick's sullen little lamb. For almost a year Uncle Nick has been bribing me to take her out with me, slipping me crisp twenties in the shadowy recesses of his plaque-lined den, whispering to me, “Show her a good time, eh, loverboy?” And I try, honest, I really try. But Marcia has no manners. She's constantly sulking, telling me off with that soggy face of hers. She knows what her father's up to: she's no Einstein, but she's not stupid either.