Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut (24 page)

One night, I came downstairs to say goodnight. He was sitting in the kitchen with his shoes off, and he looked unusually anxious. He was holding a pair of nail clippers. His toenails were ingrown and giving him pain. “It’s the age,” he said. He couldn’t reach down and cut them himself.

I thought, no problem, and got down on my knees in front of his chair. But I was not prepared for blood. As soon as I began cutting the toenails, blood started gushing from his feet. The skin under the nail cracked. I’m usually not squeamish at the sight of blood, but this was my grandfather I was cutting up.

“It doesn’t hurt,” he kept saying. “Please keep going.”

He’d asked my uncle to do this job a couple of Christmases ago. My uncle gave it a go, but the blood freaked him out too—this was his father, after all—and he only got one foot done before he had to beg off the other one. I knew it must have mortified my grandfather to ask my uncle for help with something this intimate, and I knew he was afraid I would say no. I steeled myself and forced myself through it. I kept telling myself, “It’s just blood. My grandfather’s blood. Blood that carried him across an ocean and is in my veins too and
okaaaay
it’s just blood. It doesn’t hurt. His body will make more. He won’t bleed to death. Nobody dies from getting their toenails cut.”

“Keep going, boy.”

“Nobody ever
has
died from this. He won’t be the first. I’m totally not killing him, and if I am, I’m sure my mom will believe me when I say that it was his idea and that I ignored my own best judgment when a ninety-year-old man told me to bleed him. That’s what’s happening. I’m bleeding him and I am a fucking butcher.”

I had one foot done. There was blood all over my hands. I asked permission to towel him off, and wrapped up his left foot in a dishrag. Was this normal, to do this for old people? I wouldn’t know if it was normal. I had no idea what his blood type was, or if he knew, or what I’d do if this really was a bad idea.

But it wasn’t a bad idea. “Tell me when you need me to do this again,” I said. “Don’t let them grow this long.” I figured he’d never ask again, but he did, in just a couple weeks.

He also tore an ad out from the Sunday paper to mail away for a tiny little pair of nail scissors. He wrote a check for $3.50 and asked me to drop it in the mail. “And how are the nails doing?” I asked. “Would you like me to clip them tonight?” He said, aaaah, no, which meant it was now something he wanted me to cajole him into, so he wouldn’t have to ask. It was a lonely ritual. It was the first time I ever felt I had to keep a secret from my mom about my grandfather. As soon as I mentioned blood, it would be a big deal. So I didn’t tell anyone. It was just my hands, his feet, his blood, our secret, and it would be this way from now on. Even after I moved out, every time I came to visit, I was asking him about his feet, and talking him into it, the way I had to talk him into letting me drive him to Atlas Liquors for a bit of the Jameson. The way he used to talk me into taking money when I would come visit.

Jesus, Irish men. We can’t ask for a goddamn thing, can we? Asking for help, or accepting it, we just can’t handle it, can we? What the hell is wrong with us and how did we get this way?

He kept asking about the scissors he sent away for, even though they were no different from the scissors I got at the drugstore. The only way they were any different is that when these arrived in the mail, it would mean he had gotten them on his own, with no help from me. But they didn’t arrive. He wrote the scissors people a reminder letter and asked me to mail it for him. I wrote my own letter and slipped it into the same envelope. It wasn’t as polite as my grandfather’s, because I was angry. Even as I was writing it, I could tell it was my mother writing, the furious kind of letter my mom used to write our teachers and principals. It was the letter she would have written if she’d known about the toenails or the scissors. I wrote that if they needed to steal $3.50 from an old man, they were welcome to it but they were assholes. The scissors arrived the following week.

Late at night, kneeling on my grandfather’s kitchen floor, I cut into his skin again and felt him flinch. My hands were bloody. On my knees, on the floor, doing the bloody work of love. Learning, over and over. The work of love will make you bloody and it will make you lonely.

1989

 

 

 

 

The first time I watched
The Wraith
, I was with a girl. It was the greatest ’80s teen-trash melodrama I’d ever seen, which was probably because I was watching it with a girl. Renee was doing her regular Friday night babysitting gig out in Batesville, and although I’d only been her boyfriend for a few weeks, I had graduated to the status of the boy who shows up to distract the babysitter. I’d been waiting for this a long time. Mr. and Mrs. Sorrell had a well-stocked refrigerator and cable TV, both of which were novelties for a couple of starving grad students in Charlottesville. So, as soon as little Lindsey was asleep, we killed a box of Chicken in a Biskit crackers, drank Rolling Rocks and watched some trashy movies. A plush couch that was bigger than my apartment? Awesome! A refrigerator full of beer? Awesome!
The Wraith
? Mmmm, cancel that order of awesomes.

It’s a new-wave soap opera set in a small town in Arizona, with Sherilyn Fenn as the all-American beach bunny, plus the perverse twist that she’s a beach bunny in the middle of the desert, where the swimming hole has to be dug with bulldozers. Charlie Sheen is the mysterious new kid in town, who was secretly her true love in his past life. Except he was viciously killed by this evil gang of biker pirates who rampage wildly on the highways, so he’s come back to earth from outer space to get vengeance on the bikers, claim Sherilyn for himself, and drive this really cool, huge, black Wraithmobile, which is like a spaceship on wheels. The biker pirates have leather jackets and names like Skank or Og, but they can’t handle Charlie Sheen.

“It’s a wraith!” splutters Skank, trying to explain it to the other bad guys in their underground hideout. “A wraith, man! A ghost! An evil spirit, and it ain’t cool!”

We loved every minute of this deplorable film, even though practically every scene in this movie comes from
Rebel Without a Cause
,
Purple Rain
, or some other teen-outlaw biker flick. Randy Quaid plays the sheriff trying to solve the mystery, but like everybody else in this town, he’s never seen a TV movie before, so he has no idea Charlie Sheen is the Wraith. The soundtrack is the essence of ’80s electro-blare: Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell,” Nick Gilder’s “Scream of Angels,” Ozzy’s “Secret Loser.” It’s a star-crossed romance for sure, because while Charlie might be from out in the great blue yonder, Sherilyn is wearing a red bikini, and this girl is definitely flesh and blood. She works at the roadside drive-in burger joint as a roller-girl waitress, which means she skates through the parking lot shaking her ass to Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love.” She’s literally sex on wheels, a spaceboy’s dream girl with wide rock-and-roll hips and a foxy ankle bracelet. But she can’t figure out why she’s so drawn to Charlie Sheen, gosh darn it. Why does he remind her of somebody she used to know, like the boy who was killed by the biker gang? And where did Charlie get those mysterious scars on his back? Hmmmmmm!

“Are we not supposed to know Charlie Sheen is like an E.T.?” Renee asked.

“No, I think we’re supposed to know. But Sherilyn doesn’t know.”

“Is she a moron?”

“She’s never seen a wraith before.”

“She just switched from a red bikini to a blue bikini. That means she’s totally going to do him.”

“If she does him and she still doesn’t notice he’s from outer space, she’s got big problems.”

“She’s got big something. Look at those! She’s wearing that to work!”

“I’m worried about these two,” I said, rummaging for crumbs at the bottom of the cracker box. “It’s time for them to make out but we’ve already heard ‘Rebel Yell.’ Maybe if they didn’t make out during ‘Rebel Yell’ they missed their shot.”

“No way. She’s too hot. No boy is from that far outer space.”

They share their first kiss on his motorcycle, while a Bonnie Tyler ballad plays on the soundtrack. Then Charlie kills practically everybody in town except for Sherilyn, and that’s when our hero confesses his secret identity to the flesh-and-blood girl he left behind on earth. He can’t stay on this planet, but he’s returned to carry her off into the stars with him. Charlie tells Sherilyn, “I’ve come a long ways for you.” She cannot resist the Wraith. The movie ends with Sherilyn on the back of Charlie’s motorcycle as we watch their taillights fade.

For some reason, I started sobbing at the end of
The Wraith
and couldn’t stop. I’d never cried in front of Renee before, much less at a Charlie Sheen movie, and I felt like an idiot. But she was completely cool about it. As the credits rolled, she patted me on the back and mused, “Sherilyn has a nice ass, doesn’t she?” At that moment, I knew she was the girl for me. Of course, we’d already been going out for a few weeks, so I wasn’t, like, shocked or anything. But still, it’s never not nice to keep realizing.

I was somebody’s boyfriend now. This would mean a lot of trial and error. But she was who I wanted to try and err with.

Our first fall together, we did a lot of aimless driving around in the countryside. We’d cruise by the Amoco Food Shoppe on Route 29 for some chicken-battered french fries and hit the open road. When I say “aimless,” I do not mean anything negative—“aimless” was the major achievement of my life so far. Who needs aims, anyway? I’d spent twenty-three years collecting aims, and now I was sitting on so many I couldn’t give them away. Aimless was something I was just learning. So I kept telling myself how lucky I was to learn it from her, and kept praying I wouldn’t get carsick in her ’78 LeBaron as she whipped around the hills. No doubt you’ve heard the expression “She drove it like she stole it?” This girl drove it like she stole it from the cops and then did donuts on the altar of the Basilica of the Holy Redeemer on Mission Hill. That’s how she drove it.

We’d listen to hip-hop, which was all new to her. She’d never gotten into it before, and so she gobbled up my hip-hop cassettes. Her favorites were the women rappers like Roxanne Shante, MC Lyte, and L’Trimm, who were two badass Miami teenagers who liked the cars that go boom.Their names were Lady Tigra and Bunny D, and they only valued two things in a man, bass and booty, especially the former. “Cars with the Boom” was about rolling around in the Miami streets with your top down and the woofers exploding, but she thought it was excellent for zooming down the Blue Ridge Parkway. She’d always chant along. “We like the cars! The cars that go boom! We’re Tigra and Bunny! And we like the boom!”

Some afternoons she let me drive her around, which was a special occasion. I borrowed my sister Tracey’s cherry-red Ford Granada, which she hated because it couldn’t do more than forty without shaking all over like the girl in an Eddie Money song. This piece-of-crap Yankee car didn’t even have a gun rack. This car did
not
have boom. I secretly thought I was a better driver than she was, but it was just that I was a city driver and she was a country driver. She laughed at me for getting winded on mountain roads at forty-five degree angles, but that’s nothing compared with the way she panicked the first time I took her to Boston and drove her down the Arborway.

“There are no lines on this road!” she screamed.

“The lines are in my mind.”

“Where are we going?”

“Remember, this is Boston and everyone on the road is a lunatic. Relax.”

“I still don’t see any lines.”

“They don’t give you a license here if you notice lines.”

“They’re not letting you in.”

“I’m feeling my way in.”

“I hate it. I hate it, hate it, hate it. Now what in God’s name is that thing?”

“It’s called a rotary.”

“You can’t be serious.”

I took an extra couple of loops around the rotary just for fun, and just to hear her scream like a crazed old Southern lady. She actually said, “Great time of day!” I never heard her yell that one again.

I had never gotten the hang of dating—I was always going to be somebody who either had a girlfriend or didn’t. To me, dating was like the scene in
The French Connection
where Gene Hackman is shadowing the perp, Fernando Rey. Gene follows him into the subway. Fernando gets on the train, Gene gets on the train. Fernando gets off, Gene gets off. Back on, the doors close, but Fernando jams his umbrella in the door, so the doors open. Back out, back in, back out, the train pulls out of the station, Fernando waves good-bye through the window, Gene’s stuck standing on the platform. There’s your date. At least Gene didn’t have to pay for it.

But now I was actually on the train with the girl, and for the first time, I felt like we were going somewhere. She’d had millions of boyfriends, so she would get a little impatient at having to tell me all the time that she was
not
being annoying. She was just being a girlfriend. She thought she was doing me a huge favor by explaining to me what girlfriends were like.

“I’m gonna tell you a secret about women,” Renee told me one Saturday night after we’d stayed up at least two bourbons and two Bowie albums too late.

“I heard this one before.”

“No, this one’s different. It’s a secret, I promise. There are two kinds of women. The women who’d rather get their way, and women who’d rather get the credit for getting their way. This is the secret: we’re all the second kind.”

“But you always get your way.”

“No, you just keep telling me I always get my way. I like that better than actually getting my way.”

“Well, you like to get your way
and
get the credit.”

“I do like that, don’t I. And I like you.”