Moonface (2 page)

Chapter Two
Charlie O'doyle'S Eponymous Ventriloquist Doll and the Debut Appearance of an Out-Ot-Tune Organ

I
t seems like Charlie's always been looking for his straight man. A buddy, a pal, someone to keep around. He says that entertainment genes run in his blood, but I blame his come-dic nature on religion.

Charlie's father was drafted during the Vietnam War in 1968, and when he came home, disgusted by the savagery of war, he converted from Catholicism to Quakerism so that neither of his sons would ever have to see combat. To this day, Charlie thanks his lucky stars for that decision, but he didn't always feel that way, because when he was eight years old, being a Quaker wasn't about being a conscientious objector. It just meant that he had to wake up on Sunday mornings to go to Quaker meeting.

Charlie figured out that faking illness was a whole lot better than sitting in silence on a wooden pew in an old brick house waiting for people to be moved by the spirit to speak. When his family took off for meeting, Charlie sat at home and watched TV. But it was Sunday, which meant that the cartoons weren't all that good. So, Charlie kept clicking through until he hit channel 45, where the TV station played old-time black-and-white movies. One morning, little Charlie O”Doyle sat up on his couch, ate sugar-free cereal, and watched Abbott and Costello arguing next to a hot dog cart. Bud was trying to get Lou to put mustard on his hot dog.

He insisted that mustard was made for the hot dog. Lou didn't agree. Bud slid the jar of mustard to him anyway. Lou slid it back, declaring that mustard made him sick. Bud conceded. But Lou? He didn't let it go, imagining a scenario wherein he eats the mustard, gets sick, loses his job, and is forced to abandon his wife and children. He poked his finger in Bud's face, accusing him for his family's future hypothetical suffering. Lou didn't back down either, raising his voice and pleading with Bud to please get his kids out of the future orphan asylum until, finally, Bud got annoyed, quit the chat, and waved off Lou before walking out of the scene.

Charlie was mesmerized, his mouth agape, as he watched the two men banter as if they were playing tennis with their words: the tall, skinny guy lobbing lines into the air and the short, fat guy slamming them down for winners. From that moment on, Charlie was changed, forever talking out of the side of his mouth like he had a cigar hanging from his lips, forever looking for someone to argue with about mustard.

His first attempt at finding a partner was to dally in the art of ventriloquism. The summer after he discovered Abbott and Costello, he asked his dear Aunt Wendy to buy him a ventriloquist doll. Somehow, Aunt Wendy found one and gladly obliged. It was a dangly wooden doll with a butt-cut hairdo and red painted-on freckles sporting a brown suit and a bow tie. Charlie named his doll “Li'l Charlie O”Doyle,” sat it on his knee, and tried to slow down his own fast-moving lips whenever it was Li'l Charlie's turn to talk. But, being the gum-flapper that he was, Charlie just couldn't control their speed.

The next year, for his birthday, Charlie asked his dear Aunt Wendy to buy him a pet mouse. She obliged again, and Charlie named it Sergeant Keyknob. He had big hopes of carrying his new partner around in his breast pocket and coaxing the sweet, furry critter out to do tiny mouse tricks for a crowd: doing loop-de-loops around Charlie's finger, creating the illusion that it was crawling into one of Charlie's ears and crawling out the other. But that didn't work out so well either, as Sergeant Keyk-nob didn't turn out to be a sweet critter at all, but a vicious little blood-sucking vampire-critter who would bite strangers” fingers any chance it got.

But Charlie's deepest desires always kept him looking for his partner, even if it meant running away from home, which he almost did one day when he was eight. He put on his maroon plaid suit and a clip-on bow tie, packed a hard-shelled suitcase with his stuffed penguin collection, and started out the door.

“Where are you going?” his mother called from the kitchen.

“I'm running away,” Charlie answered.

“But why are you dressed up in a suit?” his father asked, trying to hold back his laughter.

“Because I don't have a tux,” he said, with a wink before walking out the door and sitting out on the front curb all day. Until dinner.

For most of his childhood, Charlie grew up on the western end of Maryland in a sleepy railroad town that overlooked the Potomac. His family moved there after living in Baltimore, upstate New York, and West Virginia. Charlie was only eight when his father told the family that they were moving to a house that sat at the top of a hill and way down below at the bottom was a river. Of course, Charlie didn't imagine there'd be a town in there somewhere. No, he imagined that their new house sat alone on a mountain, and if he were to open the back door and start rolling down the mountain's slope, he'd roll right into the water. That's just how Charlie saw the world: as his own amusement park. Why couldn't he open the back door and dive right in?

Charlie says that some day in our childhood we probably met, both our families traversing the same highways all along the east coast in our respective station wagons. Charlie says that at some point, we must have crossed each other at an arcade or a candy shop. But I tell Charlie I would have remembered if I saw an eight-year-old kid in a suit and bow tie.

My earliest childhood memories begin in Queens, New York, in the fourth-floor apartment of a horseshoe-shaped building on Yellowstone Boulevard, a broad street that ran through the borough. My father was a young Filipino doctor finishing up a residency at a nearby hospital. My father, my mother, my brother, and I lived in a two-bedroom apartment with bars on the windows and a front door that was crowded from floor to ceiling with locks. While most people would complain about sharing a room with their brother, I didn't mind it. While my father was gone, spending long nights on-call at the hospital, my brother was the one I idolized, the one who could play stickball and run down the street so fast that I'd have to call for him before he went out of my sight. He'd fly down those alleys fearlessly, careening around Dumpsters and telephone poles. “Joel,” I'd yell, “waaaaait,” my arms cupped around the sides of my mouth, my voice ricocheting against the tall buildings that tunneled a side street.

While he was the strong one, and the fast one, I was the skittish one. While he was growing bulges in his arms and slowly becoming able to help my father lift luggage and groceries, my features were always more delicate: bony elbows and sharp shoulders. “Just like Olive Oyl,” my mother would say when she looked me over. “Maybe if you ate some spinach, you'd be stronger.”

I sat out many of those stickball games, and often I stayed out of school for a stomachache or fear of an impending stomachache. I blame that fear on my father's precautionary mindset that, while trying to keep me safe, instilled great worry in a young impressionable me. His scenarios always shot straight for the worst: “Don't laugh during dinner or you will get indigestion and diarrhea.” Or, “We'd better clean up that cut or bacteria will seep in and you'll get an infection. Then, you'll have to take antibiotics.” One summer I told him that someday, I'd like to get a summer job at the local Baskin-Robbins, where those pretty older girls wore pink polo shirts. But my father closed the subject immediately. “Scooping that hard ice cream?” he said, looking at skinny wrists. “Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.”

While I walked carefully through those early years in New York, my brother seemed untouched by my father's warnings. He threw his head back in total abandon and laughed at what seemed to be dangerous and confusing situations. I tried to follow his cues, tried to understand what was funny and what was not. For instance, according to my brother, Benny Hill, the fat, pasty Englishman in boxer shorts, was hilarious. I was a grade schooler, then too young to understand the innuendo between him and the other characters on his TV show—why he was an old man dressed in women's clothes, why the busty blonde behind him was scantily clad and hitting him over the head with a frying pan. My mother sat on our couch giggling with her entire body, pressing her hand on my brother's shoulder as if she could not contain herself anymore, as if she had to physically pass off the joy of the moment to someone else. I remember my brother trying to come up for air during those shows, laughter coming out of his mouth like horns blaring from a boat:
loud and then soft, loud and then soft
. But I sat still and watched.

But, then, one weekday afternoon, with the apartment windows open and the television on full blast, I heard Lucy's whiny voice on
I Love Lucy
. She cried like a baby one minute and squinted her eyes like a cunning mastermind the next. I sat on my parents” bed and watched as Lucy tried to keep up with a conveyor belt of nonstop chocolate drops. There she went, twisting her face and jerking her limbs as the belt turned faster, too quickly for her to hold the chocolate drops and wrap them in tissue paper. Panicked, she stuffed the chocolates down her shirt, under her hat, and into her mouth until her cheeks were full like balloons. Now that was funny.

I mimicked her antics in front of the mirror for the rest of the afternoon, pretending Lego pieces were the chocolates and sheets from a memo pad were the wrappers, then stuffing them into my shirt and under the Red Sox baseball cap I was wearing. Later that evening, when I tried to reenact the scene for my family, I stood in front of the dinner table and pretended it was a conveyor belt and that the popcorn shrimp were pieces of chocolate that I had to wrap, and I stuffed my face until my cheeks puffed out like a trumpet player's. I put them down my shirt and on top of my head.

“Ethel! Ethel!” I cried. When I looked up, my brother stared at me blankly.

My mother, so confused by the chaos, grabbed at my hands and said, “No, no! One by one!”

“You'll choke!” my father said.

Incredibly, I got out of my childhood unscathed. That is, until college, when it seemed that all my father's nightmares finally materialized. It began one day when Marsha, a big-breasted Italian girl, came into our dorm room and found me sitting on the edge of my twin-sized bed. She took one look at me and said, “Oh, my god, you're pregnant.”

This was the beginning of my freshman year. October, to be exact. Just enough time for me to center my Pearl Jam poster perfectly over my bed, just enough time for an enormous pile of laundry to accumulate in the corner of the room.

Marsha was looking at my ankles, which, once perfectly chiseled, slipping into slim flat shoes with ease, were now swollen like two boiled potatoes.

“I'm not pregnant,” I told her.

“If you don't think you're pregnant, then you should call your dad.”

I knew I wasn't pregnant, and I knew I should call my dad, but I just sat on the edge of the bed staring at my feet. Earlier, when I came home from sociology class, I noticed that the short walk was suddenly longer, that the hill that led from campus up to the dorm was suddenly higher, and by the time I reached the front door, I was exhausted.

Marsha knew that I should call my dad, because her dad was a doctor, and my dad was a doctor, and overprotective dads like ours—hers Italian, mine Filipino—would want to know this. I had always had little things like this going on—a stomachache or a cold sore that my father could fix. By this time, my family had already moved to the suburbs of Pittsburgh, where we were far away from the bustling streets of the city. My school was only a few hours from home, and when my parents drove me down to Baltimore that first weekend, my mother insisted that I take a crucifix, while my father pushed a plastic box full of pills and elixirs clearly labeled medicine into my hands. “Just in case,” he said.

I kept checking my ankles to see if the swelling went down. It didn't. So, I called my mother and told her that my ankles were swollen and that I didn't know why, and she snapped back, “
Ay!
I know why. You are drinking too much,
anak
. Stop drinking. It makes your ankles swollen, you know. It's a proven fact.”

I told her that I wasn't drinking that much, and that drinking did not lead to swollen ankles. “You don't know. You think you know, but you don't know.
Ay, anak ko!
” she said before giving the phone to my father, who had obviously been listening to the entire conversation.

“Do your ankles hurt? . . . How do you feel? Hot? Cold? Worn out? Do you have a fever? . . . Headache?” I answered no to all his questions, none of the symptoms he named striking a chord with me. Until he said, “Baby, are you out of breath?”

“Hmm, yeah,” I said. “I was out of breath on the walk home. It was weird. And it wasn't even that far.”

There was a long pause in his voice, the way my father pauses when he's turning something over in his head, like the time he couldn't figure out how to assemble our new mailbox post or like the time he got us lost in Washington, DC. Then he said, “Tonight, sleep with your legs up on a pillow. Call me tomorrow if they're still like this.”

When I did call him the next day to tell him that nothing had changed, that, in fact, the elastic in my socks had made deep pits into my fat skin, he said two words: “Come home.”

I heard the concern in his voice, but I didn't want to go.

I had recently gotten the attention of a particular boy in my philosophy class who was, for the most part, oblivious to my existence. There were other boys who were looking at me, too, I think. Also, I had done my first beer bong and keg stand, without spitting beer out of my mouth like an amateur. More recently, I had obtained a decent, authentic-looking West Virginia driver's license from two guys in the next dorm over who had bought a gold-colored blanket for a picture background and invested in a laminating machine. With a good ID I could get into any Baltimore bar I pleased within the five-mile radius of our sheltered campus, where the doormen—who were mostly seniors at my school—would take one look at the ID and then at my boyish hip bones and my fresh face and let me in anyway.