The Language of Men (28 page)

'79 Buick. Regal. Matte black with red velvet interior and faux-wood dash. So sweet. Had a Buzz Lightyear super-glued to the hood as an ornament. Coming off the Expressway, a woman in a Volvo station wagon ran a light at a three-way stop (she had no license, and no insurance) and I slammed into her on the driver's side. No stopping time. Almost broke my nose. Blood gushed out like a fountain. Totaled.

'98 Jeep Wrangler. White. Sweet. Crashed across a few lawns one night. I was pretty messed up and no sleep, and should not have been driving. Just a few minutes before I had been pulled over by a cop for swerving on the road. I did the sobriety/walk the line/touch your nose test and told him I was just tired. Got out of the car and walked home. Mom and Dad were asleep. Came back the next morning and saw the path of destruction across a Japanese garden and the cars and trees I scraped but just barely missed smacking into and either destroying or being destroyed by.

Yup, crashed 'em all. Can't wait to own a motorcycle.

When my father and Don fought in the living room, the backyard, the driveway, I listened.
Fuck you
and
fuck, you, too,
and
get out of my house,
and
I am,
and
good, start walking.
And when it was over, the house hummed with silence and the air around my face felt close and thick. Don would be gone for a few days and then he'd return and the house became calm. Eventually, Don quit or got fired from the gas station or department store, and the weather within our home would begin to change again. A shift in temperature. Each morning my father woke up, each morning my brother went to sleep, they crossed paths like jet streams flowing in opposite directions.

Most fights rumbled like dormant volcanoes. No explosions, no fire. No clear winner or loser. A latent heat spread across our landscape, and I searched for clues within the ripples steaming at the surface.

When I think about my brother, I see a boy holding his breath. In the summers, when I was in elementary school and Don was in high school, we spent afternoons in the pool. He dove to the bottom, air bubbling from his lungs, and sank like an egg in a pot of boiling water. I followed him down, forcing air out of my body, but I couldn't quite sit on the bottom. I didn't realize that if I remained still, if I tucked in my arms and feet like Don, I would sink quicker. I struggled to get my knees down. I felt the roots beneath the pool pushing up through the blue liner.

Don sat across from me, eyes wide. I stared back at him, slowly flapping my arms, trying to keep my body submerged. Our voices sounded like the adults in Charlie Brown. We pretended we were at a fancy Hollywood party. Don pressed his hand to his ear and I repeated my question; he raised his pointer finger, complimenting my astute observations of his latest script. When he spoke, I rubbed my chin and nodded, as if yes, I agree, he would be perfect for my next film. I wanted to stay down there forever, but my eyes burned and the water felt heavy against my chest. I tapped the top of my wrist as if I were late for an appointment, then pushed myself to the top. Before I reached the air, I looked back at Don on the floor. He gazed from left to right as if chatting with other guests at the party. Each word bubbled from his mouth—small, clear balloons on a turbulent path to the surface.

Don never wanted to live a stalled life: Suburbs, mortgage, kids, television. So he moved on. Moved on to high school graduation and gas stations and community college. Moved on to art school. Moved from class to class, party to party, drug to drug. Moving and moving and moving. Moving at the speed of sound: waves crashing beneath the Golden Gate Bridge. The speed of light: neon throbbing in the window as he rang up films of people feigning pleasure. Moved back home, then back out. Plowed through college a second time, won awards for his paintings and photographs, steady job, steady girlfriend, but there was always something. Something pulling him. Something else.

I feel like my brother and I have been sitting on opposite ends of the same see-saw. We listen to the same music, watch the same movies, but often at different times: He'll be in his Rolling Stones and Scorsese phase, while I'm headlong into The Coen Brothers and Bob Dylan. We read nonfiction, but he'll loan me books about larger-than-life explorers navigating through the Amazon or high-profile serial killers at the turn of the century. I'll offer memoirs about domestic issues or father-son relationships, books by Tobias and Geoffrey Wolff—two brothers writing about the same man.

Don tries to introduce me to new music, bands that are still making the rounds at small bars and clubs in Brooklyn. He makes me mixes of this unfamiliar music and FedEx's them to Boston. I open the CDs and check the playlists for bands I recognize, songs I know by heart. I put the CD in my desk drawer where it will remain, for days, months, sometimes years, unheard.

Until one day I decide to clean. I pop in one of Don's CDs for background music, songs that won't distract me. As I scrub around the bathroom floor, sponging up renegade bobby pins and strands of my hair and Vanessa's, I pause. I hear a song I recognize. Not a tune I know by heart, but it's familiar. I walk over to the computer and check the artist, the title, and try to place the song. But it can't be placed. It's new. Something I've never heard before.

BEFORE MY first interview with my father, my mother took me to Radio Shack and helped me pick out a new recorder. As we approached the register, she reached into her purse.

"No, Mom."

"I want to," she said, smiling. "I think it's a good idea."

That afternoon, her smile faded when I took out the recorder and sat with her in her garden. Hands caked in soil, she knelt on a thick foam pad beside a small metal sign:
Gardeners Have the Best Dirt.
She said she had nothing to say, that it was my father who should be talking. I knew that wasn't true. I knew from the hours and hours we spent on the phone over the years, as she talked about this sister or that brother, often the same family events again and again. These jumbled characters and plots seemed to have no origin or destination, like pollen in the breeze. At the end of these conversations, she'd apologize for "talking my ear off." She brushed the dirt from her hands and stretched her back. Then she began a story she'd told me before, but this time slower, and in detail.

But first, like my father's mother, she would interrupt herself and talk about her jobs, the ones she worked from home. Selling arts and crafts or Mary Kay beauty products. For a while, she sold weight-loss pills called Herbalife. I remembered the giant green pill box sitting on our kitchen table. Sometimes I'd lie awake in bed and listen to her drop each pill into its proper place.

She told me about nursing school and the public speaking course that scared her off. She used to tell me this story when I was worried about giving a presentation in school. I thought this was the only reason she dropped out but, in her garden, she told me about the months she worked at a state hospital, scrubbing bed pans and drawing blood. There was one man who liked to talk to her. He told her war stories, heroic sea tales from his time in the Navy during World War I. When she'd lean over to adjust his IV, he'd slip his hand up her skirt. She told him to stop. He'd cut it out for a day or two and then start up again. Eventually, she turned in her uniform and quit.

Then she told me about her father. I could see my grandfather shuffle across his living room rug in pin-striped pajamas, sleeves cut off just above his anchor tattoo. The anchor was the color of a vein, a red heart stabbed on the anchor's fluke. In the summer, the mercury in the red ink made the heart swell like a blood blister. Sometimes I had to fight the urge to reach out and pop it. He made his way across the rug and paused in front of the china cabinet. His knees cracked and popped as he bent down and retrieved a bottle of amber liquid and a small silver cup. He filled the cup once, knocked it back. Again, slower this time, sipping. He sucked air through his teeth, then looked at me and grinned. I grinned back as if we had just shared a secret. Though I'm sure my mother and father were watching, at the time I thought my grandfather and I were playing our own private game of charades.

My mother stuck her shovel in the dirt and began the story she intended to tell me from the beginning. Her twin brothers, Richard and Robert. Robert was wild, rebellious, liked to cut school and smoke cigarettes behind the supermarket. Richard, a quiet boy, ran track—a sprinter. He sat in the front of the classroom. Excellent penmanship. The steady hand of a calligrapher.

When Robert was fifteen, he cut class to hang out at a friend's house. Maybe Richard told him not to, maybe he didn't. "Depends who's telling the story," my mother said. "Richard always blames himself."

Robert and his friend played cops and robbers, stalking around the couch, beneath the dining room table, down the hallway, into the bedroom. Pow. Bang, bang. Pow. I got you. No you didn't. Yes I did. The boy's sister had a boyfriend. He was a real cop, fought real crime with a real gun. The gun went off and hit Robert in the stomach.

My grandparents received a call, from whom my mother couldn't remember. An ambulance took Robert to the hospital. He died an hour later. That night my grandfather stood in the living room, still wearing his postman's uniform. A ship unmoored, swaying with the tide. My mother pressed her ear to her bedroom door, listening to her father, to the man she said always had an answer, repeat over and over:
I don't know.

The next day, my mother's sister got married. Robert's wake was the following day, and it lasted for two days and two nights. My mother's sister announced she was pregnant. My grandmother passed out tranquilizers. Robert was buried.

"Busy weekend, wouldn't you say?" my mother said, shaking her head. "After that, I don't know. Things were hard for grandma and grandpa. He was at the bar all the time and grandma kinda checked out. I think she was scared to get close to us, to let anyone get close to her. Richard had a very hard time."

Richard stopped sprinting. He trained for long distances. He took a scholarship and ran away. Headed south: Arizona, North Carolina, Kentucky, Georgia. Years later, my parents traveled down from Long Island to visit him. They spent the night at his house. His land was overgrown, and there was a rusty oil tank beside the shed. My father found a piece of PVC piping and attached it to the top of the oil tank to make it look like a beached submarine. They posed in front as my mother took their picture. On the back of the photograph, my father wrote
S.S. Redneck.

My mother stood up and stretched her knees. She grabbed a packet of seeds off the deck and sprinkled them into the holes in the ground. I raised my recorder to her lips.

"I think Richard sort of absorbed Robert's personality."

I nodded and thought about the water displacement experiments I used to do in science class. Drop in a cube made of wood, then aluminum, then lead. Measure the volume until the beaker overflows.

My mother bent down and pressed a seed into the dirt. "All of Robert's stuff was boxed up and we never talked about him. Not until grandma got sick. I hardly knew the woman, Anthony. I talked to her more in her last week alive than I had my whole life."

Robert died while my father was in Vietnam. I imagine my father in his hooch: crew cut, dark green sunglasses, toned body pressing against his green uniform. Hands in his pockets, twirling Eisenhower's profile, the coin he'd rub as his "freedom bird" lifted off from Saigon six months later. The coin he held as medics rushed bodies across Long Binh to the hospital. The coin he flipped as non-compliant American soldiers were escorted to the prison on the other side of the base.

Between the sick and the damned, he twirled a coin and prayed for luck.

One night, the red-alert sirens shocked him out of sleep. He left the coin in his hooch, rushed to the perimeter, gripping his M-16. Dropped to the dirt and took aim at no one, everyone. Squeezed his trigger and emptied a magazine of bullets into the dark.

My mother squinted into the sun. "I never wanted to limit you or your brother." She seemed like she was about to cry. Her tears snuck up on her. She breathed deeply. "Who am I to tell you guys what to do?"

NOT LONG AFTER my father's stroke, Don starts talking about getting him a tattoo for Christmas. I drive down from Boston and pick up Don at the train station. He tells me what assholes tattoo artists are and how they're elitists and you walk in there and before you even ask a question, before they even know anything about you, they assume you're some jerk-off who wants barbed-wire around your bicep or Yosemite Sam on your calf.

"What the fuck do you have to be stressed about, dude?" Don says to the windshield. "You're a tattoo artist. You got the coolest job in the world. Relax. And without customers, you wouldn't have shit."

"I know," I say. "I hate that. It's like you owe-"

"Owe them something! Exactly! Owe them something just for coming in."

Don used to talk about being a tattoo artist, and I think he may have been an apprentice for a little while, if not in New York, then maybe in San Francisco. But he hasn't mentioned it in years.

Don takes out a newspaper clipping of an eagle, the feathers red, white and blue.

"I can't believe this is what Dad wants," he says.

"Are you sure he really wants a tattoo?" I ask.

"He will after I get him a gift certificate."

"All right. Just asking."

"I know, dude. You already asked me."

I park beside the snow bank in front of Vintage Tattoo. Before my Honda rolls to a stop, Don pulls on the handle, but the door is locked. He pulls harder, swearing under his breath. I unlock it, but the door doesn't open because he's still pulling on the handle. I hit the button again and this time the door pops open.

"All right." He exhales. "Game face." He checks himself in the mirror and steps out.

My little silver Honda trembles as Hummers and Escalades zoom by, splashing the windshield with dirty water. I step out and Don is on the sidewalk with his arms spread like he doesn't know where to put them.