Love and Fury (13 page)

Patchouli, incense, a strobe light at once disorienting and requiring a heightened alertness for its visual interruptions, the place was full of bodies undulating in sync with the strange music—no banjos here!—and the light show was continually changing both the color and contour of the walls and ceiling. Tommy, Brian, and I stood against one wall as if we were at a high school dance. The only dancing I'd ever even almost done was at the Y on Friday nights at a “hop” run by the CYO where, as a varsity athlete, my role was to stand along the wall with a toothpick and with a serious look on my face that I never seemed to manage to get right.

So I took up my position against the pulsing wall as if I were some kind of lifeguard minding the swimmers on a day of tricky currents. I was smoking my meerschaum pipe. I found that I was especially watching one young woman who seemed to be in masquerade, a pirate at a costume party: silk scarves that accentuated her every move, bangles on her arms, big gold hoops hanging from her ears. When I say that I found myself watching her, I mean just that—I'd been watching her, mesmerized, a long time before I was at all conscious of it. Maybe it's more accurate to say that I
lost
myself watching her.

All I am sure of is that I was lost.

I pushed off from the wall and into the throbbing room, moving through the dancers. Soon I was behind her. She was dipping down into a deep shimmy and moving as if she were trying to scratch her ears with first one shoulder then the other. I touched her, gently, to get her attention.

“Wanna dance?” I shouted over the music.

Maybe if I hadn't been so disoriented by the whole scene I would have understood that when she said, “What?” she was not asking me to repeat the question louder. When I did, she said something I'd never heard from a woman's lips: “Fuck off, asshole!”

This was not the CYO. I wasn't sure what it was, but I wanted it. I wanted to know women who danced like that and were tough enough to flash that kind of rage. I wanted to grow my hair and swing it around like so many of these guys. I wanted to grow a beard. Mostly I wanted to understand what was going on because I had just discovered, my naiveté plundered by a pirate goddess, that I was deeply and dangerously bored. I was at the end of a chapter of my life and only now knew it, as if I had turned a page expecting more of the same and found it blank.

I headed back to Tommy and Brian, who were changing colors, disappearing and reappearing, and blinking in the strobe. “I gotta get outa here,” I said. I would come back, that I was sure of, but right now I wanted to head back to my room and begin changing.

I visited my family in August.

The bus from Port Authority was late arriving in Allentown, and my father was parked at the curb, the motor running. What a shock I must have been to him with my pubic beard under my chin, my hair in a ponytail, my torn jeans and clunky boots. I opened the door and threw my ammo bag in the back seat. The frown on his face was all puzzlement and perplexity. He offered his hand. I grasped it with my right and reached with my left arm to surround him and pull him to me, and I kissed him on his scratchy cheek. His foot must have slipped from the brake to the gas and next thing we know—boom!—we've lurched forward into the bumper of a taxi idling in front of us. “Jesus Christ!” The cabbie, black, was at the window pointing and yelling, my father apologizing. When the cab driver continued, offering his opinion of my father's driving skills, I saw my father's face change. “All right, that's enough,” he said, “get back in your cab!” as if he were giving an order. I saw the cabbie's face change, too. He huffed, flared his nostrils, shook his head slowly, but quickly returned to his cab.

“Goddamn it,” my father said, backing up, shifting, pulling out. After a block or two he nodded toward the back seat. “So when did you start carrying a purse?”

By the time we got to the house on Thirteenth Street, my father had turned this into a funny story. “Did you see the look on his face? Poor nigger's just sitting there waiting for his next fare and—bam!—we're up his ass!” We were out of the car, my bag slung over my shoulder. He looked at me, smirked, and shook his head. “Wait till your mother gets a load of you. She's going to shit.”

The white wooden balustrade of the front porch, which had been missing a few balusters, had been replaced by two sections of black wrought iron. The railing up the front steps was made of pipes. The floor of the porch was green indoor/ outdoor carpet. Things were changing here, too, at home, as I still called it.

But even then, I knew that had I stayed I would have rotted in that house. That house of dying, of sorrow and anger, of violence and doomed love, of waiting, always, for death; that house of sighs and separate rooms and cases of beer and cartons of cigarettes, of phlegmy coughs and curses and apologies and the next day the same day, the same unchanging deadness, numbness all the pleasure one could expect, oblivion as relief and love reduced to duty, family ties reduced to staying the hell out of the way, becoming invisible, silent and reliable, no needs of your own, never mind desires. I never say that I left. I don't even say I got out. I say I got the hell out, I got the fuck out. I spit the words, defying the old guilt at leaving. I curse in order to touch once again for a brief moment the rage that propelled me the hell out of there, the fuck out of there, the selfish fury that afforded me a life.

I was teaching at a boarding school where I had learned, by observing not only the other “masters,” but the students, how to pass for middle class, a matter of dress, carriage, kinds of mixed drinks, brands of imported beer. Half my wardrobe was from Goodwill, the other half from clothes that graduating seniors left behind. I was all becoming and striving, trying to bootstrap myself into something like middle-class respectability, play-acting the young schoolmaster. I was more certain who I was not: I was not the boy who had been raped, whose brothers had died, whose father had beat him, a boy made of coal and steel and violence and trucks and shame. I was not him.

I was again, or still, learning how to be, who to be, a project that required the refusal of who I was. I was a showman in the classroom, alternately dancing across the front of the room, filling the blackboard, whirling to call on someone, or giving an assignment and then leaning by an open window, smoking my pipe. And in the evening, after dinner, I sat in the big, black leather recliner my father gave me when he bought a new one to put in the spot by the window, sat there as if strapped in it, the heavy rocks glass half empty of Tennessee sour mash, filling myself with dread.

Kathi and I, in an attic apartment above a boys' dormitory, were as yet only precariously married, untested. One day I came back to the apartment during a free period. There was a note for me tacked to the doorjamb:

Gone to buy baby food. Love, Kathi

I shook with excitement, joy, fear. I let out a whoop, and then another, dancing and swirling in the living room. I was going to be a father! I poured myself a drink.

During Kathi's pregnancy, I found myself revisiting every notion I ever had about being a man, asking what was worthwhile to bequeath to our son, and what I ought to uproot and discard, questioning everything, wondering on some level if my father was as good a man as I had always believed. More to the point, I questioned if I was a good man, or if I could become one, and I even wondered, at one point, if I was really my father's son: how could I, with so many questions, be the son of a man who seemed to have none?

Veronica and I are having tea in the kitchen while D watches cartoons in the living room. I tell her I have been thinking about the long arc of my father's life. I have a photo of him as a child before a 1928 Ford Model A with a horse and cart also in the picture. I mention how glad I am that he got to meet his great grandson.

“That was awesome, Dad. There was so much love in that house that weekend. It was just awesome. And you know what? I don't care what you think. Wait, I don't mean it like that, I mean I don't
know
what you think, but I can't help it; I feel like Poppop's got my kid's back. You know? He's not going to let anything bad happen to him. This is his boy. Maybe you think this is stupid.”

“No, no. Say more about that.”

“It's like the way I know that Grandma Dolly has always looked out for me. I've always felt that. I always felt like she had my back.”

She asks me if it is true that my mother taught my brother Joe to read by the time he was four. “Did she teach you, too?” I find myself instantly flooded with emotion: grief and gratitude, affection and rage, regret and yearning. “Yes. Yes, she did.”

It is a bitter irony that my mother is called Grandma Dolly—even by me, talking to either of my children—when this is in fact precisely who she never got to be. She would have doted on her grandchildren, especially on Veronica since over and over she had hoped for a girl. “But every damn time, they'd come with that little attachment,” she'd say, shaking her head and grinning, sometimes crooking her pinky to suggest infantile maleness. Sometimes, when grief returns like this, not with tears or simple sorrow but with a metallic taste like blood in my mouth, I don't know whether I am grieving for my mother who never had the chance to know my children or for my children who only know her as a constellation of anecdotes, responses to their questions. No doubt, grieving on behalf of someone dead is a kind of sentimentality since the dead, I feel certain, experience no pangs of regret. But that my children did not have her love and humor, her support and guidance, I count as a tragedy. And I believe that their beauty, their innocence, and their need might well have saved her from a despair that fueled her addiction. When I think of my mother smoking upward of three packs a day of unfiltered Chesterfields, when I recall her lighting the next cigarette with the butt of the last, the heavy glass ashtrays overflowing all over the house, I see the link between the words despair and desperation.

My mother didn't believe in kindergarten; she felt that she could give us a better start if she worked with us at home. I don't recall learning to read, only that I already knew how when I went to school, but I do remember her teaching Joe. She read to him sitting on her lap, and when he took his fingers from his mouth, slapped the page, said something, and craned his neck to look up at her, she lavished her praises on him, repeating something like what he'd said, pointing to the object and then the word in the storybook spread out before them.

“Do you miss him?”

Steeped in my reverie of my mother, it takes me a moment to understand that we are still talking about my father. In this brief moment of confusion, I miss both of my parents acutely and also my brothers Bobby and Mike. It is like the Auden poem: “A crack in the teacup opens/ a lane to the land of the dead.” I almost tell her this, but I don't trust my motive: I am a hair's breadth from self-pity, from remarking that most of my family is dead. “Sure, I miss him.”

“Poppop always made me feel special,” Veronica says, “and he's looking out for D. I can feel it.”

I would be harder on my father than I am if I didn't know what he means to Veronica. His legacy is complex, problematical—but his granddaughter's view of him is also a part of it.

I'm back in Allentown for the first time since my father's death. It's very odd because my brother, while different from our father in his ways, looks like a younger version of him, and he is sitting in the big recliner by the window. “Oh, and one more thing,” Joe says, “I'm trying to gather up things you might want to have. All those videotapes of your kids when they were little?”

“Oh yeah, I'd love to have those.”

“Well, that's what I'm trying to tell you: you know there was a period of time when, well, you know how he was, when the old man was into watching pornography and he would record it from the cable late at night and, well, he recorded over those tapes, some. You'll be watching Robert or Veronica swimming or playing soccer, and then all of a sudden—Whoa! There's a big vagina or some guy's dick or, you know. So I'm trying to edit them. I know a guy who can edit out that stuff and put it all on a DVD for you.”