Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See (18 page)

“Hey, Pop.” I approached him tentatively. Like you would an unpredictable wild animal. I watched him carefully arrange scraps of paper in rows and then change his mind and sort them into piles. “Get any sleep last night, Pop?” I asked. He didn’t seem to hear me, but I knew the answer. I’d been right there next to him all night with the pillow over my head, trying to block out the noise.

“Got the idea off the TV,” he blurted out as if we were already in the middle of a conversation. Then he clapped his hands, like he was all ready to get to work. “Except the guys on the show completely missed the boat, whereas my way—”

My mother walked in with Jake and Ben sleepily trailing behind her.

“What’s going on?” my mother asked, trying to hide her nervousness.

My father ignored her and continued talking. “Let me tell you something, boys,” my father said, suddenly on his feet pitching to Ben and Jake. “The biggest success stories in our nation were risk-takers—Thomas Edison, Howard Hughes, Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh—great men who weren’t afraid to take chances.”

Ben and Jake stared at him, wide-eyed.

“Am I right?”

They looked at each other and then nodded. “Smart boys. Of course I am.”

I could feel disaster hovering like a huge blimp above our house. Again.

“Well, what do you think would have happened if those great men had played it safe?”

Ben’s hand shot up in the air. I put my hand on his shoulder and whispered, “Ben, you’re not in school and Pop’s not Miss Lipsky. You don’t have to raise your hand.”

“Ray, sweetie,” Mom asked, “what’s going on? Something I should know about?”

“When the time’s right,” he said without looking at her.

Last week Pop had stayed up drinking scotch, ransacked the kitchen, and found the Blue Chip Stamps my mother had painstakingly collected. He still wouldn’t tell any of us what he’d ordered. “When the time’s right” was all he would say. In the meantime, all we knew was they were gone. All of them.

“Willa, baby, have I ever let you down?” he said, coming up behind her and roughly massaging my mother’s shoulders.

“No, sweetheart, of course not …”

“Then you leave the financial matters to me,” he said and winked at me. “Every good entrepreneur knows you got to spend money to make money. Isn’t that right, Grey?”

After twenty minutes Pop had hardly paused to take a breath. “You have to diversify, which means investing.” I looked at him—dirty, ranting, stinking of booze and sweat—and thought of the crazies and the winos I’d seen staggering around Hollywood Boulevard near my grandfather’s store. I wondered for the first time if they had children.

“Pop,” I said loudly but calmly. “Pop, enough, okay?” But like a politician on some marathon filibuster, he just kept talking.

“And investing means spending. And that’s where the government bonds come in. Because I’ve figured out something no one else has—a way to manipulate the interest. All on the up and up. I think. And it all starts with credit.”

“Credit?” Suddenly my mother turned pale and sank to the floor.

“That’s right, by George.” Pop was practically beaming with pride now. It was almost as if he owned Diners Club outright; almost as if, without giving a thought to finance charges and monthly interest rates, he had charged well beyond his limit without bothering to pay a cent of it. Without even thinking about the fact that after his card was revoked it would take my mother two years of working overtime and weekends to pay off his debt. It was, in fact, almost as if my father’s confidence increased with the length of his unemployment. It was almost as if it had never happened before.

“What the heck?” Hannah had just appeared at my side.

“He’s … It’s bad, really bad,” was all I could say.

“Hannah,” my father boomed at her, “did you know that credit is one of the things that makes America great?”

A short-term, high-interest loan, he’d called it on more than one occasion.

While Pop was still talking, my mother slowly got up and pulled a chair over to the front closet where we kept the suitcases. “Greyson, could you help me please,” she said, her voice tight.

I took down all four suitcases. All four of the little gold locks had been pried off. Her handbags had been ransacked. Anything of value—silver candlesticks, my grandmother’s pearls, anything, everything—it was all gone. My mother collapsed onto the floor again, her face a blank mask except for the single tear running down her cheek.

“What else, Ray? Just tell me now. How bad is it?”

“It’s not bad, Willa, don’t you see? This is it—this is our big chance. I’ve figured it all out, all the angles. And sure it’s risky, but no risk, no reward. Right? Am I right? I’m right. This is an investment in our future. You trust me, don’t you, baby? I need to know you’re on my side.”

“I’m on your side, Ray,” my mother whispered.

“It doesn’t sound like you mean it,” my father bellowed. “Say it like you mean it.”

“I’m on your side,” she said again, almost letting her anger seep out. But not quite. Because she knew where that would get her. I clenched my jaw until I thought my molars would break.

“But I need to know,” she said, trying to keep her voice from shaking. “How much have you spent? What did you buy? Who did you give …” Her voice caught and she swallowed a sob. My mother knew by now that getting emotional when Pop was like this just made things worse. “Who’d you give our credit card numbers to? And did you give away anything else? We have a stack of bills that just keeps getting taller and taller and I don’t know how much longer I can—”

“What? What the hell do you know? I knew you’d crap all over my idea. You always do. You don’t know shit about business. You don’t know shit about anything. If it weren’t for you, I would have made my first million by now.”

“You know that’s not true, Pop,” I said. “You’re just exhausted. I’m going to get you cleaned up and then you’re going to rest for a while.”

“Bullshit! I have work to do. So if you’re not with me, get the hell out.”

Pop sat back down on the sofa and started organizing the napkins, empty potato chip bags, torn pieces of newspaper, and labels from the scotch bottle that he’d scribbled his notes on. He looked up at me, then at my mother.

“Are you deaf or just stupid? I said get out. Jesus Christ, the woman can’t do anything except breed.”

“Hannah, take the boys in the other room,” I said.

“What the hell are
you
staring at?” my father screamed at me.

“I think you owe Mom an apology,” I said through clenched teeth after they’d left.

“Oh yeah? Is that what you think, you little smart-ass piece of shit?”

My mother rushed toward us. “Raymond, please, he didn’t mean—”

“You shut up, I’m talking to my son!” he screamed. And then he hit her. Hard across the cheek. She fell onto the floor, too stunned to cry.

“There’s your fuckin’ apology. Happy now?”

He sat back down in front of the TV with his notepad and bottle of scotch. It took me that long to realize what had just happened. I pulled him off the sofa and started pummeling him, punching him over and over. He was still bigger than me—broader, heavier—but he was drunk and his reflexes were slow. He wasn’t even fighting back. I didn’t hear my mother begging me to stop until I’d broken his nose.

The room was very still for a moment after that. Then he left. Mom called after him but he didn’t turn around. He was still wearing his slippers.

That was on a Wednesday morning.

On Thursday, a truck arrived from Sears. Hannah was home with the boys.

“You signed for it?” I said, staring at the garage full of boxes. “What were you thinking?”

“Well, no one else was home and the driver said ‘signature required.’ ”

“Who gives a damn what the driver said? We don’t want this crap!”

Now she was crying. And it wasn’t her fault.

“I’m sorry for yelling,” I said. “You’re not the one I’m mad at.”

On Friday, our neighbor, Mrs. Hoffman, saw another Sears truck outside the house. Knowing no one was home, she dashed across the street and took it upon herself to sign for another eight cartons. The final inventory consisted of: tents (5), power lawn mowers (3), cases of Spackle (10), ironing boards (4), TV sets (5), wheelchair (1), set of matching luggage (1), canoes (3), radial tires (8), motorcycle (1), boxes of copper pipe, rubber tubing, aluminum siding (12).

My mother took it better than I thought she would.

“Well, I’m very familiar with the Sears return policy,” she said, arms crossed over her chest, looking into the nearly full garage. “Full refund if returned with a receipt within thirty days. Of course, they’d charge an arm and a leg to come pick it up. And we can’t wait thirty days. I can’t have these charges on Lord knows which card.”

She turned to look at me. “Greyson, do you think Mr. Van Gilder would let you borrow his truck for a few hours this weekend?”

“This weekend? I’m working Sunday …”

“Saturday then … tell him it’s just for a few hours.”

I looked at the garage and knew it would take more than a few hours. Cleaning up Pop’s mess would take most of the day. The day I was supposed to have my first real date with Ellen Goodman. I’d had a crush on her since the first day of European History class when she walked in and sat behind me. Her family wasn’t rich and they weren’t poor; they were in the middle—“comfortable,” as my parents would say. And she was smart. Smarter than I thought any girl that pretty could possibly be.

Alan was having a pool party and Ellen had agreed to go with me. Now I was going to have to cancel. She’d still go. Just not with me. I don’t think I ever hated my father more than that morning when I was loading those boxes into the back of Van Gilder’s flatbed.

Two days later, Pop reappeared in a light-blue convertible Cadillac Eldorado. He pulled up in front of our building and leaned on the horn until the neighbors yelled and my mother came running out in her bathrobe. He sat in the front seat wearing a brand-new shiny blue suit.

“Well, what do you think?” he asked, spreading his arms as if he were offering her a world he had to give instead of a used Caddie leveraged against wedding silver and college funds, bought by a crazy drunk on a Sunday morning.

Run. Run, is what I thought. Before it’s too late.

To be anywhere else.

Santiago International Airport, 1991
. I am having trouble sitting still. I know I cannot rely on my limbs to remain within the space allotted them by the FAA. So I buy two first-class seats for the flight to Entebbe. At first the woman behind the British Airways counter in Santiago is confused. She wants to know the name of the second passenger. I try to explain about my arms and legs, but she doesn’t understand. I can feel my skin getting hotter with my frustration, my irritation. She is ineffectual, useless. I put my hands on the cool Marbelite counter and lean in to get a look at her plastic ID badge. She backs away, startled.

“Pillar,” I say, closing my eyes and lowering my forehead to rest on the cool counter, “do you think perhaps I could speak with your boss or whomever you think would be kind enough to take my goddamn fucking money?”

She says nothing and I don’t look up, but I do hear the sound of her ridiculously high heels receding and then returning with her supervisor. Though she has demonstrated no understanding of it herself, Pillar seems to be explaining the situation to her boss. She is bilingually incompetent. She talks for forever. At least thirty minutes.

There is a huge clock over the entrance to the departure gates set to Santiago time. And another set to Tokyo time and one to New York time and one to Paris and one to Moscow. All of them indicate only nine minutes have passed since I arrived at the first-class ticket counter; only three since Pillar began her soliloquy. But I know that’s a manipulation. Something the airport management does to trick you into thinking you’re not waiting as long in line, or for your luggage, or to get on a delayed flight as you really are; that Pillar is not really as incompetent as in fact she is. Assholes. I’m surrounded by assholes.

I have to get out of here. Now. Where I go and what time I get there are largely irrelevant. I am never in the right place. The present,
here
, is just an anxious pit stop I make between memory (which is to say regret) and the dreadful anticipation of hoping
there
will be better but knowing it won’t.

Many people—usually the happier ones, apparently—spend the bulk of their lives living in the here and now rather than continuously running the stoplight at its intersection. And judging by the number of self-help and talk-show gurus around, many more are looking to buy in the neighborhood.

I, on the other hand, speed through, running lights and stop signs, causing one accident after another. I know this is not the way happy people live. I’ve tried to make
here
matter. But for whatever reason, I can’t make it count, much less make it last.

Unhappy people think like this. Like me. But I try not to dwell on it. It’s a buzzkill. And inevitably leads me down a road paved with nooses and guns and toxic combinations of sedatives, vodka, and oven cleaner. It’s better just to move on.

“Señor?”

I turn toward the voice and see the supervisor calling me from halfway across the ticketing area. I’ve been pacing. Restless. Uncooperative limbs. Unaware. Beware, small children, animals, the elderly and infirm.

“Señor?”

“I heard you the first time,” I call back testily. I stride purposefully back to the counter and bark at the supervisor. “This had better be important.”

The little mustached man is totally baffled. “Sir …? Señor?”

“You pulled me out of a meeting. What’s so urgent?”

He takes a small step back, nods slowly and smiles.

“I apologize for the interruption, señor. You would like to purchase two first-class tickets?”

“Yes.”

“But you are the only passenger?”

“Yes?”

“You would like to spend the additional 4,600 U.S. dollars to have the empty seat?”

“Yes.”

The supervisor begins clicking away on the computer keyboard in front of him. “How would you like to pay for that, sir?”