The Language of Men (12 page)

I laughed at Marlon's suggestion for my project. "That's perfect! We just read something about war last week."

We didn't have a script. I just hit
Record
and started asking Marlon—Bud Montgomery—questions about what it was like rotating back to "The World." He told me Charlie was out to get him and explained how he got some shrapnel in his ass when he sat on a land mine. I asked him if he had any thoughts about how the war was portrayed in the media.

"Let me tell you something, Geraldo, the government screwed me! They screwed me!" Marlon waved a staple gun as he spoke. He clenched one of his father's burnt cigarette filters in his teeth. I held the recorder up to his mouth.

"Yes, Bud. Yes, I know. I know this must be painful for you. But take us back to that time, that time in your life when you were so innocent. One might say you had the whole world in the palm of your hand."

"Sounds great, boys!"

"Jesus Christ, Mom! We're fucking recording here!"

"Watch it, Marlon. Just watch your language, okay? Anthony, do you need anything?"

"No, thank you, Mrs. Ziello." It seemed okay for Marlon to curse and demand things from his mother, but I always felt weird. I couldn't imagine speaking to my mother that way. Marlon and his mother often yelled and swore, then soon after they were laughing and kissing, all while I sat on the couch wondering if I should call for help.

Mrs. Ziello exhaled sharply. "Call me Joanne, please, huh?"

When I heard the door close, I rewound the tape and repeated my question to Bud.

Our interview continued for another ten minutes, full of slang and jargon and coded messages we picked up from movies and classic rock. We had no idea who this Charlie dude was, just that he was out to get Bud and was usually up in a tree or down in a hole. Bud got progressively angrier until he reached into one of the black garbage bags, smashed a Perrier bottle against the floor, and held the broken neck up to Geraldo's cheek.

Technical difficulties. Please stand by.

Geraldo got back on the air and apologized to the audience.

"Bud is calm now, ladies and gentlemen. Isn't that right, Bud?"

"Yes. Yes. I'm calm. My apologies everyone. Friggin' Charlie. Shrapnel."

The interview ended peacefully, Bud and Geraldo making plans to grab a cold one after the show. Joanne came downstairs with grilled cheese sandwiches.

"What's all this glass? What broke?"

"Relax, Mom. Okay? Just props."

CHRISTMAS MORNING, 1991. I was nine years old. My father, my brother and I were on the couch watching
Goodfellas.
The smell of my mother's pancakes drifted from the kitchen, down the hallway, over piles of crumpled wrapping paper, and into the living room. I wore my stiff new baseball mitt, pounding oil into the palm, as Ray Liotta repeatedly bashed his gun into a young man's face. My father laughed.

"Broad daylight, too. Jesus," he said, sucking on a candy cane, the cellophane wrapper crinkling in his hand.

"Great scene," Don said. He leaned forward and added another new CD to the stacks in front of him: Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Doors.

Ray Liotta walked back to his wife's house, where she'd been standing in the doorway, watching him pistol whip her disrespectful neighbor. He placed the bloody gun in her hands and asked her if she was okay, but she didn't answer and he didn't wait for a reply; his eyes were still locked on the man across the street.

I mouthed her interior monologue while tightening a leather knot on my glove.

"You guys want bacon?" my mother yelled over the gunshots. We looked at each other as if silently electing a spokesman for the group.

"I don't care," my father said to me.

"I do," Don said, not loud enough for my mother to hear.

"Well?" she yelled.

"We all do, Mom!" I said.

I heard the bacon pop and sizzle in the frying pan. My father turned up the volume. Often when we watched movies, before a particularly funny or violent scene, my father would say, "Hey, Ant, watch this." I'd turn toward the TV and not look away until Stallone knocked out Mr. T or Clint Eastwood loomed tall on the screen and asked if I felt lucky. I wanted a name like Sylvester or Clint. Most guys named Anthony were chunky minor characters, guys that pushed papers while Bruce Willis fought terrorists, or else they were the snitches that got whacked by Joe Pesci.

Sometimes my father received mail that was intended for my brother. They had the same name, even middle names, and sometimes when my mother called their name from across the house, a single "Huh?" rang out in stereo. Sometimes my father opened packages and said, "Hey, I didn't order any of this Red Hot Chili Pepper crap." He'd toss the box in a basket beside the couch, full of credit card offers and sweepstakes notices all addressed to my brother.

Sometimes I asked my mother about my name. She said she had wanted to name me Jake. On the brown paper bag covers of my text books, I would write Jake D'Aries in tiny letters, look at it for a while, and then cross it out. Even now, I sometimes say the name in my head. If I had been a girl, she once told me, my father would have named me Tina Marie.

"Can you imagine?" she said, shaking her head. "He wondered what you'd look like if you were a girl, but I think that's as far as it went."

My father always liked the name Anthony but I wonder if my mother, or anyone else, ever knew that. My father's interests and desires often remained a mystery to all of us, until one day he'd say, "I always liked that," and we'd discover his new-found fondness for Native American jewelry or Melissa Etheridge.

"Why'd you have to give me the same name?" Don once asked my mother.

"Dad always wanted that," my mother answered.

"Fucking annoying. Anytime I try to sign up for anything or do whatever, they think I'm Dad."

I thought it would be cool to have the same name as my father, to be a junior. I could look at him to see who I'd become and he could look at me to remember who he once was. In the summer, my brother stretched out on a lawn chair, his hair dyed ice-pop blue; my father slid out from beneath his Chevy, hands caked with grease. They glanced at each other. I don't think they believed what they saw.

"I think
Goodfellas
is De Niro's best," my father said.

"No way," Don said, "
Taxi Driver."

"You think?"

"Definitely."

"Raging Bull,"
I said.

"Pancakes are done!"

"You think so, bud?" my father asked me.

"Without a doubt."

"Yeah, he's a mean bastard in that one," my father said.

"And he wasn't in
Taxi Driver?"
Don said. "Come on."

Big Italian men in white tank tops, suspenders and no shirts, stood around in tight groups. Loud body language punctuated hushed words. A secret code, a football team in a huddle. My father often called me over to his spot on the couch and whispered cryptic messages for me to whisper into my brother's ear. But by the time I would get over to my brother, his whisper had disappeared and I would just laugh in Don's ear.

"It's getting cold, guys!"

One scene that always cracked us up was at Ray Liotta's wedding. All of the wise guys were dressed in fine suits, hair slicked back. The camera panned the reception hall, showing dozens of conversations around the table:
I took care of that thing. You talk to that guy? Forget about tonight, forget about it.
In the middle of these conversations, Joe Pesci's mother stared out at the dance floor, speaking to no one:
Why don't you get a nice girl like your friend. He's married, he's settling down now, and you're still bouncing around from girl to girl.

My father always laughed.

"Who's she talking to?" he said. This white-haired woman reminded me of my father's mother, who spent much of Christmas Eve fiddling with her hearing aid, gazing at her four loud sons laughing in the kitchen.

"That's Scorsese's mother in real life," my father said.

"Really?" I asked.

"Yeah, he gives her small parts in his movies sometimes."

Finally, my mother came into the living room, glanced first at the tower of CDs in front of my brother, then at the television. "Come on, guys, it's ready." She waited in front of the large bay window, the sill lined with her ceramic Santa Claus collection. The tinsel she put on the tree sparkled like long drops of frozen rain; the red and green bubbler lights boiled in their plastic tubes. Snow muffled the tires of passing cars. The wind swirled in tiny cold tornadoes on the front lawn and in the driveway. Some of the neighborhood kids were already outside, pulling shiny new sleds up the block, their mothers standing on porches and sipping steaming cups of hot chocolate.

Joe Pesci's head popped like a party favor, misting the air with blood. The three of us let out a half groan, half cheer.

"Jesus," my mother said, "why are they playing this on Christmas?"

I picked up mixed signals from my mother: one minute she paced the house, muttering to herself about us watching the same movies, the next she would tell us what time
Casino
was on HBO. In the kitchen, she often complained about my father's TV-marathons, but that Christmas she bought him a wide-screen television. "It's what he likes to do."

My father pointed at the VCR. "It's a tape."

She sighed. "Pancakes are ready."

My father looked at me and grinned. "So bring it over."

"What?"

"Bring it ova' here."

"Don't ova' cook it,"
I said, leaning back in my chair like De Niro.
" You ova' cook it, it's no good. Defeats its own purpose."

"I never know what the hell you guys are talking about."

My brother joined in.
"It's like a piece of charcoal, bring, it ova' here!'

We laughed as my father paused the movie and headed into the kitchen.

"Raging Bull,
Mom," I said, picking a piece of crispy bacon from her plate.

If it wasn't the TV, it was the radio. My father quizzed us on song lyrics, turning up the music in the middle of my mother's sentences—
wait, wait, hang on, Kathy—
looking at me and my brother. An impromptu
Name That Tune.
He turned up the song with a grin on his face, as if he were the one who picked each song the DJ played. Most of the songs had been written twenty, thirty years before I was born—Beatles, Rolling Stones, Otis Redding. My brother, seven years older than I was, hijacked my father's record collection when he was twelve; he had a slight advantage. But even at eight or nine years old, I nailed "Love Me Do" after a few blasts of the harmonica, or listened to the melancholy trumpet give away "Try a Little Tenderness." My father gently sang,
oh, she may be weary
...
as my mother's unfinished thought hung in the air like a struck piano key.

My father often quizzed me in the driveway while we washed his Chevy. Soap suds clung to my forearm as I dug my hand into the bucket, then squeezed the big yellow sponge over the truck, the water running down the hood in sheets. My mother knelt in her garden, silver shovel glinting in the sun. I watched the clean water form black rivers on the driveway and flow out into the street.

"You paying attention, boy?" my father asked as I popped the soap bubbles in my hand. I looked up and nodded.

He walked into the garage and eased up the volume on the long silver radio. What sounded like a church choir poured out from the speakers.

"You got it?" he asked.

"I've never heard this song before in my life," I said, wishing my brother was there to give me a hint. The choir sang on; my mind was blank.

"Anthony, could you bring me that bag of topsoil?" my mother asked.

"Yes, you have," my father said. "One second, Kath." My father stood in the doorway of the garage, an unlit Winston clenched in his teeth.

My mother stood up and brushed the dirt from her knees, exhaling in a faint whistle like her tea kettle. Her sighs were her songs, the solos she sang softly in the kitchen, wrenching out the pots and pans jammed in the drawer beneath the stove, searching for that second sock in the wicker laundry basket, writing checks and stuffing them into envelopes on the kitchen table, carefully wrapping each Christmas present and signing each tag, "Love, Santa."

The song played on and I still had no clue. My father walked over to my mother's garden and picked up a stone. He bent his knees, rolled the stone down the driveway, then looked at me with a big grin.

I laughed. "What?"

He did it again. "Come on, boy!"

My mother stretched her back and walked into the garage. She took off her flowered gardening gloves, gripped the twenty-pound bag of top soil, and started to drag it across the driveway. I heard her whisper, "Rolling Stones," and give the bag a sharp tug.

"Rolling Stones?" I asked.

"Yeah! Told ya you knew it."

By the time Mick Jagger went into the chorus of "You Can't Always Get What You Want," my mother had dragged the bag of topsoil across the driveway and into her garden, a tiny stream of dirt betraying her path.

"Oh, Kath, I would have gotten that for you," my father said.

"No, no," she said, stretching, "it's fine."

Later on, in middle school, I would become obsessed with our home movies. Holidays, vacations, my old soccer or football games. I was fascinated with the past, the shaky footage my mother had filmed. I sometimes tried to get my brother to watch them with me, but he wasn't interested. Alone, I stayed up late and sat inches from the screen with the volume on low. Rewinding and playing, rewinding and playing. What was I looking for?

I was especially curious about the events occurring just outside the scope of the camera's lens, the elusive footage I could only hear. A conversation between two of my uncles. A neighbor's lawn mower. Someone laughing. I wanted to see beyond the frame.

If there had been footage of the Christmas morning we watched
Goodfellas,
I would want the camera to pan across our conversation in the living room, down the hallway, and into the kitchen, zoom in on my mother's hands caked with pancake batter, cooking spray smoldering in the hot frying pan. As one batch of pancakes cooks, she mixes more batter, cracking an egg and carefully picking out slivers of brown shell that have dropped into the bowl. Gunshot after gunshot blasts from the living room. The camera's microphone picks up her quiet sigh, and then her loud, unanswered questions about bacon. As if bored, the camera slowly pans back down the hallway, into the living room, past the bright tree and piles of presents, and across the mantel. Each of the stockings that my mother knit hangs full, bursting with candy and little toys, my father's overflowing with shaving cream and razor blades and Old Spice. My mother's stocking is empty.