Naked (7 page)

He allowed me to mow the lawn only because he was too cheap to pay a landscaper and didn’t want to do it himself. “What happened,”
he said, “is that the guy slipped, probably on a pile of crap, and his leg got caught up in the blade. He found his foot,
carried it to the hospital, but it was too late to sew it back on. Can you imagine that? The guy drove fifteen, twenty miles
with his foot in his lap.”

Regardless of the heat, I mowed the lawn wearing long pants, knee-high boots, a football helmet, and a pair of goggles. Before
starting, I scouted the lawn for rocks and dog feces, slowly combing the area as if it were mined. Even then I pushed the
mower haltingly, aways fearing that this next step might be my last.

Nothing bad ever happened, and within a few years I was mowing in shorts and sneakers, thinking of the supposed friend my
father had used to illustrate his warning. I imagined this man jumping into his car and pressing on the accelerator with his
bloody stump, a warm foot settled in his lap like a sleeping puppy. Why hadn’t he just called an ambulance to come pick him
up? How, in his shock, had he thought to search the weeds for his missing foot? It didn’t add up.

I waited until my junior year of high school to sign up for driver’s education. Before taking to the road, we sat in the darkened
classroom, watching films that might have been written and directed by my father.
Don’t do it,
I thought, watching the prom couple attempt to pass a lumbering dump truck. Every excursion ended with the young driver wrapped
around a telephone pole or burned beyond recognition, the camera focusing in on a bloody corsage littering the side of the
highway.

I drove a car no faster than I pushed the lawn mower, and the instructor soon lost patience.

“That license is going to be your death warrant,” my father said on the day I received my learner’s permit. “You’re going
to get out there and kill someone, and the guilt is going to tear your heart out.”

The thought of killing myself had slowed me down to five miles per hour. The thought of killing someone else stopped me completely.

My mother had picked me up from a play rehearsal one rainy night when, cresting a hill, the car ran over something it shouldn’t
have. This was not a brick or a misplaced boot but some living creature that cried out when caught beneath the tire. “Shit,”
my mother whispered, tapping her forehead against the steering wheel. “Shit, shit shit.” We covered our heads against the
rain and searched the darkened street until we found an orange cat coughing up blood into the gutter.

“You killed me,” the cat said, pointing at my mother with its flattened paw. “Here I had so much to live for, but now it’s
over, my whole life wiped out just like that.” The cat wheezed rhythmically before closing its eyes and dying.

“Shit,” my mother repeated. We walked door to door until finding the cat’s owner, a kind and understanding woman whose young
daughter shared none of her qualities. “You killed my cat,” she screamed, sobbing into her mother’s skirt. “You’re mean and
you’re ugly and you killed my cat.”

“She’s at that age,” the woman said, stroking the child’s hair.

My mother felt bad enough without the lecture that awaited her at home. “That could have been a child!” my father shouted.
“Think about that the next time you’re tearing down the street searching for kicks.” He made it sound as if my mother ran
down cats for sport. “You think this is funny,” he said, “but we’ll see who’s laughing when you’re behind bars awaiting trial
for manslaughter.” I received a variation on the same speech after sideswiping a mailbox. Despite my mother’s encouragement,
I surrendered my permit and never drove again. My nerves just couldn’t take it. It seemed much safer to hitchhike.

My father objected when I moved to Chicago, and waged a full-fledged campaign of terror when I announced I would be moving
to New York. “New York! Are you out of your mind? You might as well take a razor to your throat because, let me tell you something,
those New Yorkers are going to eat you alive.” He spoke of friends who had been robbed and bludgeoned by packs of roving gangs
and sent me newspaper clippings detailing the tragic slayings of joggers and vacationing tourists. “This could be you!” he
wrote in the margins.

I’d lived in New York for several years when, traveling up-state to attend a wedding, I stopped in my father’s hometown. We
hadn’t visited since our grandmother moved in with us, and I felt my way around with a creepy familiarity. I found my father’s
old apartment, but his friend’s shoe store had been converted into a pool hall. When I called to tell him about it, my father
said, “What shoe store? What are you talking about?”

“The place where your friend worked,” I said. “You remember, the guy whose eye you shot out.”

“Frank?” he said. “I didn’t shoot his eye out; the guy was born that way.”

My father visits me now in New York. We’ll walk through Washington Square, where he’ll yell, “Get a look at the ugly mug on
that one!” referring to a three-hundred-pound biker with grinning skulls tattooed like a choker around his neck. A young man
in Central Park is photographing his girl-friend, and my father races to throw himself into the picture. “All right, sweetheart,”
he says, placing his arm around the startled victim, “it’s time to get comfortable.” I cower as he marches into posh grocery
stores, demanding to speak to the manager. “Back home I can get this exact same cantaloupe for less than half this price,”
he says. The managers invariably suggest that he do just that. He screams at waiters and cuts in line at tony restaurants.
“I have a friend,” I tell him, “who lost his right arm snapping his fingers at a waiter.”

“Oh, you kids,” he says. “Not a one of you has got so much as a teaspoon of gumption. I don’t know where you got it from,
but in the end, it’s going to kill you.”

My sister Lisa became a woman on the fourteenth hole of the Pinehurst golf course. That’s what she was told by the stranger
who led her to the women’s lounge. “Relax, sugar, you’re a woman now.”

We had gone unwittingly, shanghaied by our father, who had offered to take Lisa and me for a ride in the secondhand Porsche
he’d recently bought. His sherbet-colored pants should have tipped us off, but seeing as there were no clubs in the backseat,
we thought we were safe.

“Just a short little jaunt,” my father said. He folded back the car’s canvas roof and crouched into the driver’s seat. “Hell,
maybe we’ll just tool up to the fairground and back, drive by the correctional center and watch the guys in the exercise yard
— you both seem to enjoy that. Maybe we’ll go out to the highway and get ourselves some soft ice cream, who knows! Live a
little, why don’t you? You’re not going to experience a thing sitting in the house with your nose pressed up against the TV.
It’s a beautiful day, let’s smell the goddamned flowers.”

We shot past the prison so fast, I could barely make out the guards in their gun towers. Both the fairground and the ice cream
stand faded in the distance as my father regarded his watch and nervously tapped his fingers against the leather-jacketed
steering wheel. He knew exactly where we were headed and had it timed so that we’d arrive just in time for the tee off. “Well,
what do you know,” he said, pulling off the road and into the crowded golf-course parking lot. “I wonder if there’s some kind
of a tournament taking place? What do you say we take a quick peek? Gosh, this is a beautiful place. Wait’ll you get a look
at these fairways.

Lisa and I groaned, cursing our stupidity. Once again we’d been duped. There was nothing worse than spending an afternoon
on a golf course. We knew what was in store for us and understood that the next few hours would pass like days or maybe even
weeks. Our watches would yawn, the minute and hour hands joining each other in a series of periodic naps. First, our father
would push us to the front of a large, gaily dressed crowd. Robbed of their choice spots, these spectators would huff and
grumble, whispering insults we would pretend not to hear.

“They’re kids,” our father would say. “What do you want them to do, stand on my shoulders for Christ’s sake? Come on, pal,
have a heart.”

The big boys were playing that day, men whose names we recognized from the tedious magazines my father kept stacked beside
the toilet and heaped in the backseat of his Mustang. We’d seen these players on television and heard their strengths and
weaknesses debated by the bronzed maniacs who frequented the pro shop of our country club. These people chipped and parred.
They birdied and eagled and double-bogeyed with an urgency that failed to capture our imagination. Seeing the pros in person
was no more interesting than eating an ice-cold hamburger, but it meant the world to our father, who hoped their presence
might kindle a passion, inciting us to take up our clubs and strive for excellence. This was, for him, an act of love, a misguided
attempt to enrich our lives and bring us closer together as a family.

“You kids are so damned lucky.” He placed his hands on our shoulders, inching us closer to the front. “These are the best
players in the PGA, and here you are with front-row seats.”

“What seats?” Lisa asked. “Where?”

We stood on the grassy embankment, watching as the first player teed off.

“Lisa,” our father whispered, “go get it. Go get Snead’s tee.”

When Lisa refused, it was up to me to wander onto the green, searching for the spent wooden peg that might have been whacked
anywhere from six to twenty feet from its point of origin. Our father collected these tees as good-luck charms and kept them
stored in a goldfish bowl that sat upon his dresser. It was forbidden to wander onto the green during a tournament, so he
used us to do his legwork, hoping the officials might see us as enthusiastic upstarts who decorated their rooms with posters
of the masters working their way out of sand traps or hoisting trophies over their heads following stunning victories at Pebble
Beach. Nothing could have been further from the truth. No matter how hard he tried to motivate us, the members of my family
refused to take even the slightest interest in what was surely the dullest game ever invented. We despised golf and everything
that went with it, from the mushroom-capped tam-o’-shanters right down to the cruel spiked shoes.

“Oh, Lou,” my mother would whine, dressed for a cocktail party in her muted, earth-tone caftan. “You’re not going to wear
that,
are you?”

“What’s wrong with this?” he’d ask. “These pants are brand-new.”

“New to you,” she’d say. “Pimps and circus clowns have been dressing that way for years.”

We never understood how a man who took such pride in his sober tailored suits could spend his weekends in Day-Glo pants patterned
with singing tree frogs or wee kilted Scotsmen. You needed sunglasses to open his closet door, what with all the candy-colored
sweaters, aggressive madras sports-coats, and painfully bright polo shirts all screaming for attention. Highway workmen wore
such shocking colors so that motorists could see them from a distance. It made sense for them, but what perils did these golfers
face? There were no jacked-up Firebirds or eighteen-wheelers racing down the fairway threatening to flatten their comfortable
little four-somes. We were taught at an early age never to yell or even speak in a normal tone of voice while on the golf
course. Denied the full use of their vocal cords, these people let their outlandish clothing do the shouting for them, and
the results were often deafening.

“I don’t feel so well,” Lisa whispered to my father as we marched from the sand trap to the putting green on the eighth hole.
“I really think we need to leave.”

My father ignored her. “If Trevino bogeys this hole, he’s screwed. That last bunker shot pinned his ass right to the wall.
Did you see his backswing?”

“I’m concerned right now about
my
back,” Lisa said. “It’s aching and I want to go home and lie down.”

“We’ll be just another minute.” My father fingered the collection of tees in his pocket. “The problem with both you kids is
that you’re not paying enough attention to the game.

First thing tomorrow morning I’m signing you up for some more lessons, and then you’ll see what I’m talking about. Jesus,
this game is just so exciting, you won’t be able to stand it.”

We had serious doubts that it was exciting, but he was right when he said we wouldn’t be able to stand it. A tight man with
a dollar, our father had signed us up for our first lessons when we could barely hold a rattle. No, we could not have a nude
maid, but he was more than happy to give us an expensive set of child-sized clubs, which sat in the dark corners of our bedrooms,
the canvas bags clawed and tattered by our cat, who was the only one who seemed to enjoy them. He bought green carpet for
the living room and called us in to observe his stance as he sank balls into a coffee can. The driving range, the putt-putt
courses — he just didn’t get it. We didn’t want advice on our swing, we wanted only to be left alone to practice witchcraft,
deface fashion dolls, or sit in the privacy of our rooms fantasizing about anything other than golf. He had hoped that caddying
might provide us with a better understanding of the game. My sisters and I collapsed beneath the weight of his clubs, barely
conscious when he called out for a nine iron or a sand wedge. Caddying was a thankless job, especially in North Carolina,
where by mid-March the humidity is fierce enough to curl paper. Ninety-eight degrees on the second hole and we’d crumple to
the green, listening as children our own age shouted and splashed in the nearby pool.

The tournament dragged on, and by the time we reached the fourteenth hole, Lisa had begun to bleed, the rust-colored spot
visible on her white culottes. She was close to tears, sunburned and frightened when she whispered something into my father’s
ear.

“We’ll just get one of the gals,” my father said. “They’ll take care of you.” He turned to a handsome white-haired woman wearing
a lime green visor and a skirt patterned with grinning pandas. “Hey, sweetheart, I wonder if you could help me out with a
personal problem.” Like my father, this woman had followed these players from hole to hole, taking note of their every move.
She had come out that day to bask in the glow of the masters, and now a strange man was asking her to accompany his daughter
to the clubhouse and out-fit her with a sanitary napkin.