The Language of Men (11 page)

My mother walked into the kitchen wearing a black dress and black shoes, neither of which I'd ever seen her wear before. It was odd to see her standing there in the kitchen, rummaging through her small black handbag. A few hours before, I had been in the garden with her, watching her stab the earth with her silver shovel. I sat on the bag of fertilizer, racing my Matchbox cars up and down the deck. Before she had cut open the bag, she told me to go play somewhere else.

"This stuff is poison," she said.

From the other side of the lawn, I stood watching her poison her flowers. She wore a white facemask that protected her nose and mouth, and bright gardening gloves to protect her hands. I walked around the side of the pool, closer to her flower bed. The fertilizer fell like snow in the warm air, the petals catching some of the white granules, the rest falling to the ground.

"Hey," she said, wiping her forehead, "I told you to stay away."

"Why are you putting poison on your flowers, Mom?"

She looked down at the bag and then at her flowers, as if the answer lay somewhere between.

"It helps them grow," she said. "Sometimes things need a little poison to grow."

On the way to the funeral, they dropped me off at school. The three of them sat in the Chevy, looking straight out through the windshield. Each of them gave me a half smile. I turned and walked into the low brick building.

I was quiet for most of the day, but that wasn't much different from any other day. Mrs. Flood kept looking over at me throughout her lesson on long division, squinting, as if I was too far away to see. When we took our afternoon snack break, the rest of the kids unzipping baggies of apple slices or cheese and crackers, she touched my shoulder and guided me toward the hallway.

"Is everything okay today, Anthony?" I found her densely-freckled face soothing in a way and didn't mind how she always leaned over and spoke very close to me.

I nodded and smiled, then shrugged a little.

"Because you seem a little distant. A little glassy-eyed."

I thought about the boxes of glass eyes my father kept in the basement. They were mostly brown or black. I couldn't remember the color of Matt's eyes.

"I'm fine," I said. "Everything's fine."

The rest of the day my head felt huge and weightless, like a balloon attached to my neck by a thin string. Mrs. Flood's voice echoed in my head
:
A little glassy-eyed.
I imagined a chisel pointed at my face: a swift smack of a hammer and my eyeball would burst into shards, scattering across my desk.

AND WE'RE BACK! Comin' at ya live from Beneath the Sink, I-.
Wait, I messed up.
Okay. Comin' at ya live from Beneath the Sink, I'm your host, Anthony, here once again to bring you all your favorite movies on the radio! Um
(rustling of cereal boxes and potato chip bags).
Today... uh, for your listening enjoyment, we have the great movie
Goonies.
Now I have to say this is one of my favorites. A classic, really. I love it. You love it. We all love it. If you don't know it, you will love it. So for all you fans out there and also the people who haven't seen it and you're driving home from work now in beaucoup traffic, this one goes out to all of you. Okay
(rustling). Shoot. Why won't this stupid thing—okay.
Here we go! See you all next time! Enjoooy the movie!

A television flickered. Canned laughter from the living room or my room or my brother Don's room or my parents' room. I pulled 'fridge duty,' so I got out the salad dressings, ketchup, applesauce. My mother opened the oven and heat rushed out, filling the kitchen with invisible fire. The television laughed. She set the bowl down and stabbed a wooden spoon into the fleshy macaroni, and I thought of a behind-the-scenes show I had seen about the soundmen in movies—how it was actually some lucky guy's job to sit in a soundproof recording booth and make audiences believe that a knife stabbing through watermelon was Anthony Perkins slicing up Janet Leigh or crunching eggshells was Harrison Ford stepping down a path crawling with insects. I remembered the soundman in the show as a wild-haired, hyper little man who seemed to love that it was his job to use whatever materials necessary to convince people that these common sounds meant something more.

I loaded my plate with macaroni, topped it with a pork chop, grabbed my juice and began my slow balancing act down the hallway, up the stairs, toward my flickering blue light. My father did the same—dinner a chance for him to refuel, then return to Clint Eastwood or Sylvester Stallone in the living room—as did my brother, retreating to his room across the hall from mine to gaze at Ozzy Osbourne or the Beastie Boys on MTV.

I placed my plate on a folding dinner tray. With my Fisher-Price tape player—a brown plastic device with chunky white buttons—I recorded an audio version of
Goonies.
The tape player had all the fundamental features of a grown-up's recorder:
Play, Rewind, Fast Forward, Pause,
and
Record.
I discovered that if I pressed
Pause
on my recorder gently, the audio slowed to a warped, wobbly dialogue. Over and over, I forced the audio to a place between
Play
and
Pause,
changing all the characters' voices: Mouth's squeaky voice deepened and the evil Fertelli's gunshots boomed like cannons. Chunk did the "truffle shuffle" in slow motion. With a flick of my finger, the tape could go as fast or as slow as I wanted.

I sat inches from the television, holding my recorder to the speaker. My old Zenith television was huge, encased in an ornate wooden shell. It looked as if only the screen had been unpacked and the rest was still in its crate. Beneath the screen, brass rings offered access to false drawers. Sometimes I played with the brass rings, my bare feet tugging the cold metal as if the drawer might open.

During my intermissions, I paused the tape recorder and the VCR at the same time and ran downstairs to refill my juice. My mother was finishing her meal at the table. Sometimes I didn't take a break and came down hours after dinner and saw her in her worn recliner smoking a Marlboro Light, flipping through
Better Homes and Gardens,
my father nodding off to
Easy Rider
with his hand in his pants.

Above the
Play
and
Record
buttons on my tape recorder was a red bracket indicating that the two buttons must be pressed simultaneously. How can you play and record at the same time? It didn't make sense. With the pointer and middle finger of one hand hovering over the tape recorder, the pointer of my other hand poised before the VCR's
Play
button, I pressed all three at once. I was proud of my seamless transition. Though later, when I crawled beneath the sink and broadcast my tapes all over the country, I detected the changeover's soft click and hoped my audience didn't notice.

There were no movie restrictions in my house. My parents did not censor me, so in elementary and middle school, I taped
Full Metal Jacket
and
Goodfellas
and
Taxi Driver
and
The Doors
and
Platoon.
My best friend Marlon, who my father called Brando, wasn't allowed to watch R-rated movies. His father didn't believe I had seen
Full Metal Jacket,
so he quizzed me.

"All right, so what do the soldiers chant in the barracks?"

I smiled, chewing over the snap-crackle of my Rice Krispies.

"You mean before the sergeant gets his head blown off?"

"Yeah."

"But not before they leave Parris Island?"

"Uh huh."

I looked at Marlon, then back at his father. I finished chewing and stood up; my spoon in one hand, my crotch in the other.

" This is my rifle, this is my gun! One is for fighting, one is for fun!"

We laughed: his father at my response and me at Marlon's face as I recited the lines, knowing that he knew all the words, too, but couldn't let on that he'd seen
Full Metal Jacket
at my house.

I had my basic movie groups: Mob, War, Rockumentary. A film pyramid. A steady diet of explosions and curses and stage dives and full frontal nudity, with a sprinkling of comedies at the apex that I viewed sparingly. This was my foundation. Where I set my life.

I did not read. Books were set decorations, mere objects on a shelf, no more or less important than my mother's ceramic Christmas village on the mantel or my father's collection of antique beer cans in the basement. I did not spend afternoons tucked away in the public library nor did I read Chekhov in between bites of meatloaf at the dinner table. I did not keep journals or take notes or write stories. Reading and writing did not interest me because these activities seemed to require a great deal of thought and silence. I had more than enough of that. I preferred a retreat into the ready-made world of image and sound.

When I came home from school, I didn't have to think. The television screen brightened, the MGM lion roared or Paramount donned its crown of stars, opening music faded in, and I hit
Record.
Soon I was in another world, an atmosphere dominated by Sylvester Stallone's accumulating sweat and Robert De Niro's cool laugh and Joe Pesci's boiling temper. They all used words like my father. Though I was particularly tuned to their curses, their racial and sexual slurs, I replayed words like "ain't" and "brotha" and almost any I-N-G word where the actor dropped the final G: "kickin', walkin', talkin'". I collected these words like another kid might collect coins or stamps, then repeated them in my own voice, into my tape recorder.

Testing. Testing. One, two, three. Is this thing on?

I taped
The Karate Kid.
I taped
Top Gun.
I taped
Stand by Me.
I taped
Raiders of the Lost Ark, Back to the Future, Field of Dreams.
Lesser known titles:
Over the Top,
an early Stallone masterpiece in which his character, Lincoln Hawk, must compete in arm-wrestling matches in order to regain custody of his son.
Armed and Dangerous,
a comedy about two wanna-be cops who can't cut it, so they end up as armored car drivers in a plot full of cocaine and corruption and a tractor trailer full of rocket fuel (not to mention Steppenwolf's "Born to be Wild" as John Candy wobbles through traffic on a motorcycle).
Willow,
starring Val Kilmer as a renegade swordsmen hired by dwarfs to battle an evil sorceress who threatens to kill a baby, and that baby is destined to lead the eventual coup that will topple the sorceress and her wicked empire. A rare fantasy in my filmography. I preferred true stories, or at least ones that seemed real.

Recently, I found a tape. The label reads:
Creative Project, Mr. Martin, Period 2.
Mr. Martin was my fourth grade teacher. For our final project, we had the choice of an oral presentation or a "creative experience." I dreaded creative projects because they often involved poster boards and glue sticks and doilies. I was a horrible painter. I couldn't seem to transpose the images in my mind onto paper.

"I'd like to see some of you choose the creative experience," Mr. Martin said from his desk, glancing over his glasses. A broad-shouldered man in a tight flannel shirt, with bushy white hair and a beard. When he leaned forward and rested his chin on his hand, he looked like the cover of my mother's Kenny Rogers holiday CD,
The Gambler Does Christmas!

"Perhaps you'd like to make a movie or produce a radio program? Think about it."

So I brought my tape recorder over to Marlon's house. He lived in a stone house set deep in the woods off a busy main road. Ivy reached up from the foundation, stretched along the stone, and gripped the green gutters. I coasted down his long dirt driveway on my bike, listening to the traffic fade behind me. When I reached his patio, I couldn't hear a single car, only giant oak leaves brushing above me.

The interior had a thick smell ("incense," Marlon explained) and there were all kinds of weird paintings and sculptures hanging on the walls, none of which looked like the Norman Rockwell collector plates that decorated my house. Marlon's mother came rushing out of her "studio" and greeted us with hugs and loud kisses. When she heard about my creative project, she gasped.

"Oh, I love it! Love it! How phenomenal this experience will be for you. And what will your radio show be about?"

She often used words like "phenomenal" and "extraordinary," words my mother never said. When they stood opposite each other in the school parking lot or in each other's driveway, it was as if they appeared on a split-screen: the same actress portraying two very different characters.

"Mom, shut up, all right? He doesn't know yet."

She slapped Marlon's shoulder. Hard. They laughed.

"Well, if you boys need help, I once did some theater in—"

"Thanks, Mom!" Marlon said, pulling me down the stairs into the basement and slamming the door behind us.

A massive cement cave. Pipes dripped above our heads, bags and bags of cans and bottles, brand-new power tools on the workbench beside rusty hand drills and wooden clamps. The over-stuffed clothes dryer looked as if it had puked jeans and dress shirts all over the cement floor. We'd pee in a bucket, set fire to small objects and, as we got older, puke in the slop sink. We didn't talk much in Marlon's basement. Instead we blasted classic rock, sometimes sitting in his father's old MG Midget, pretending we were outrunning the law.

When I told my mother about my creative project, she bought me a new recorder. She came home from work one day and placed it on my bed. It was a black rectangle with a plastic handle and buttons like piano keys. The kind
Magnum, P.I.
might use to interrogate hardened suspects:
Start talking, Bozo.

I still marvel at our ability to create something from nothing. That was my project, and I had no clue what it was about when I asked Marlon to help. We never questioned each other. Tape something? Come on over.

"I got it," Marlon said. "I got it! I'll be this psycho Vietnam Vet who flips out during an interview." I thought about the time Marlon had asked my father if he had ever played any sports in school, and my father had told him, "No dice, Brando. My blood pressure was too high. And then I got drafted." Marlon's eyes widened. "You mean you went straight to the pros?"