I'M NOT DEAD: The Journals of Charles Dudley Vol.1 (8 page)

I hated it when Richard propped my brother on his lap whenever we went to the beach like his little meat puppet. I cringed every time he applied tanning lotion to my brother’s little round frame with that filthy gleam in his eye, beach towel firmly wrapped over his engorged swim trunks. I vowed when I grew up I’d find a way to kill Richard and shit in his casket.

Richard didn’t stop with my brother, though. His wife found him palming nine-year-old Norman Braski’s head into his unzipped crotch in their cellar after coming home from a shift at the diner one afternoon. She blew the whistle, and Richard got 10 years in the brink after being found guilty of five accounts of child endangerment. The children of Pedophile Row can sleep peacefully at night knowing my uncle’s behind bars and won’t be fucking any more kids.

I hope the boys in the big house opened you up good and wide, Richard. They love your kind in there.

WHERE THE APPLE FALLS

Tuesday, January 14
^th
, 2014

To say Grandpa Mumford Dudley was
old
is an understatement. He was so old he overstayed his welcome, and the relatives stopped responding to him when they came to visit. I found Mumford buried beneath a pile of coats the guests neglected to hang one Thanksgiving.

He was a mean senile bastard imprisoned by the oxygen apparatus he kept himself hooked up to by the radiator in the living room. He alternated between the oxygen mask and his non-filtered cigarettes while occasionally wheezing, murmuring, and letting out a series of near-fatal coughs from his green fuzzy chair.

The mucus, when freed, shot up into his throat and his nostrils and out onto his handkerchief...the same crusty cloth he used to wipe the beads of sweat from his forehead and blow his nose before stuffing it into the back pocket of his dungarees.

Grandpa looked like a wrinkled Count Chocula with a case of the shingles and smelled like cigarettes, pee, and Icy Hot all the time. He would wear these goofy reading glasses that made his eyes appear frighteningly three times their size and stare at you from his chair. He would stare and stare with his wobbly head and bulging eyes.

Stewart disgusted Grandpa because of his illness. He called Stewart a moron, stupid, and all other kinds of degrading names until the day I stood up to the old bastard.

My uncle Roger called it the day my “balls dropped,” but whatever…I just grew tired of the name calling and people kicking my brother around for something he had no control over. I fought back because he couldn’t.

My father didn’t give a shit. He was guilty of doing the same—like father, like son.

“Watch your tone, boy.”

“Or what, you’ll hit me…again? What else is new?”

“You’re skating on thin ice now, son.”

I sit here on my couch with Cooper and still see that fossil shooting everyone dirty looks from across the room with those giant cataracts.

Grandpa never called my brother or me by our names.

We were both “you” to him. If he ever needed our attention, he would try to wave us over with his sticky and orange-stained fingers until one of us got off our asses.

“You.”

“Me?” I’d answer.

“No, the fat one,” he’d say, referring to Stewart.

When Mumford nodded off, I sometimes stepped on the tubes from his oxygen machine to see how long it would take him to die while he napped. Yes, a deadly experiment; unfortunately, it took too long, and he would wake up.

I lured the poodles Mimi and Bonnie to play by the outlet so they “accidentally” knocked the plug from the wall. His eyes widened and his lips curled inward into his mouth. All I had to do was smile and spell out the word “S-O-O-N” in the air with the tip of my itty-bitty finger to show him I meant “business.”

In my grandmother’s eyes, I could do no wrong because I was her little angel boy. Little did she know I was often fantasizing about and plotting to speed up her husband’s death. Unfortunately, the old geezer finally died of “natural causes” and not anything I could take credit for. Two packs of non-filtered Camels a day, bacon every morning, and enough medication to put away a mule sounds “natural” to me.

When Grandpa Dudley kicked the bucket, members of the family seemed to have been under the impression he’d died years ago. and were inconvenienced by his death. My family had deep pockets but short arms when it came to funerals. They shared their condolences by bargain hunting for the deceased’s casket and flower arrangements but spared no expense when it came to the food spread for our white-trash funerals.

AN ODE TO NANA

Thursday, January 16
^th
, 2014

Nana was the Queen Bee. She was the pin in the hand grenade known as the Dudley family. She was the stone cold matriarch who kept the kiddies in check, and once she was gone, the pin was pulled from the grenade, setting off a chain of explosive betrayal and calculated greed among my aunts and uncles.

The ink didn’t get a chance to dry on my grandmother’s will before the ambulance chasers and attorneys started calling. You can imagine the look on their faces when I got this house.

They had all waited with bated breath for her to die, and the greedy countdown had begun.

4…3…2…1…Cha-Ching!

Uncle Roger’s wife Posey was the most ravenous of them all. She was a low-class woman trying to cut it in a high-class world with her salon jobs, tacky sundresses, and shoes that screamed underneath the load of her legs and varicose veins.

“Oh, Nana, you were so bee-ootiful when you were young. You should have been a model! Oh, Nana, this necklace is so bee-ootiful!” Posey would squeal with delight as her desperate fat fingers engulfed Nana’s pearl necklaces.

I overheard “Pig face” Posey humming “na-na-hey-hey” at the barbeque just days before Nana died. What a piece of work.

I knew what you were doing, you lousy bitch. I was onto your feeding frenzy scheme the day the doctors diagnosed Nana with cancer, and she was, too. I’m sure it wasn’t the pearls, rings, and broaches you were after, you fat-faced worm, and in the end what did you get?—NOTHING. Your name couldn’t have been further from Nana’s will, and I laughed my ass off knowing she beat you at your own silly game. And I know you ate all the butter cookies and Linzer tarts, you fat bitch!

My uncles did everything in their power to have me hand them the house by trying to bribe me with money and keys to the timeshare in Nyack. “Charlie, it’s a lot of work owning a house. You have the mortgage and the bills to look after. It’s a lot of responsibility, pal. We could just sell it, give you your share and square it away,” and when that didn’t work, they tried to strong-arm me and use scare tactics.

I didn’t ask for this house or for the responsibilities that came with it, but I cherished the gift.

I was the last man standing, and I appreciated that Nana believed in me when no one else did. I wasn’t like the others who only called her on Christmas when they lived minutes away.

I loved my grandmother, and in many ways we were much alike, which is why we stuck together, true and through.

She confided in me how she knew what dipshits my uncles and father were when she and I smoked pot on the porch together at night.

I did the shopping, the laundry, and the cleaning, and most importantly, I tended to her needs after I fired the home attendant for stealing the porcelain from Nana’s curio chest.

“‘Mr. Charlie, I do not know what you are tawkeeng, I don’t steel notheeng,” she claimed.

“Sure you don’t, bitch. Your bag wasn’t that loaded when you came into work this morning.”

I moved out of my parents’ house after mom died and in with Nana.

Nana, besieged by her illnesses, suffered multiple surgeries and the loss of her left eye and a portion of her esophagus. She needed me to fend off the vultures.

Where were my uncles or their heifer wives when I had to insert and suction out the prosthetic eye from Nana’s head? They were never the ones fishing for the dentures or the eyeball in saline that rolled around like an olive in brine. I was. They weren’t there when she had trouble eating or the ones who wiped her bottom when she had accidents or bedsores.

I was—Charlie was.

You would think good ol’ cancer would have deterred her from smoking, but Nana was still up to two packs a day. I would hide cigarettes from her; she would find them. I stopped buying cigarettes for her; she would have someone else buy them. Nana smoked so much she turned the furniture, walls, and the poodles into all shades of yellow and brown from the nicotine.

I found Nana dead on the cold bathroom floor on a Thursday morning, halfway through her business. I found her without her eye, teeth, and hairpiece, and her drawers down at her ankles by the toilet.

She had succumbed to the cancer after three years. One year longer than the doctors gave her.

It took my uncle Roger forty minutes from the time I made the call to get the seven blocks from his house to Nana’s. When he arrived, the paramedics were already rolling Nana out on the gurney to the ambulance.

There he was, “Yukon Dan” with his bad cop mustache, sipping on his coffee, smoking a cigarette, and entertaining the neighbors like the smug bastard he always was. “You had time to stop and get a cup of coffee, you stupid son of a bitch?” I asked. “You know your mother’s dead, right?”

I stormed back into the house to arrange for Nana’s cremation at Salvatore’s Funeral home the following afternoon and didn’t tell any of the relatives.

At 18, I inherited Nana’s home and her two 14-year old poodles, along with money I used for the mortgage and restoration. The Dudley children divided the rest among themselves, and I dropped out of school to go to work and support myself.

The poodles, Mimi and Bonnie, died from arthritis a year later. I had them cremated and then planted in the back with Nana’s ashes underneath the peach tree where the sunlight landed first in the morning.

Giving me the house was Nana’s way of saying thank you, and keeping her and her dogs by me was my way of saying it back.

I love you, Nana.

Charles

BUBBA

Friday, January 17
^th
, 2014

“Charlie, baby Stewart is not going to replace you; we still love you, Daddy and me, we still love you, you know that, right?” That was my mom giving me the horseshit a parent tells the firstborn to dispel any grief when the newborn arrives.

No, that’s cool,
I thought.
Let him get all the attention. It will keep you people off my ass anyways.

I knew my parents were assholes from an early age, and I didn’t mind playing second fiddle to the baby. I wasn’t jealous one bit. In fact, I was glad Stewart had become a diversion.

I didn’t need to constantly have the neurotic police running around after me and breathing down my neck. “Charlie, don’t touch that, you’re going to break it. Charlie, don’t eat that, you’re going to choke on it and die. Charlie, get down from there, you’re going to break your neck. Charlie, sit down, sit still, shut up. Go away, get over here, put that down.”

They’re all yours now, Stewart. You can have the crazy giants all to yourself.

Stewart Dudley was something special. He wasn’t dumb as a turd, retarded, mentally disabled, slow, stupid, delayed, or any of that nonsense.

No one suspected there was something “off” with him until he was four, when he began showing so called “abnormal” behavior, but what kid doesn’t at that age? What they called “abnormal” I called “extraordinary.”

I knew he was different from the moment I laid eyes on him. He looked up at me with those fresh baby eyes and smiled. I smiled back and knew he was going to be my best friend forever.

“We got this, right, baby boy? The Big Man Upstairs sent your big brother Charlie some back-up.”

When my parents brought him home from the hospital, I was six years old and couldn’t help thinking how fat he was. He was ten pounds and two ounces, and none of the baby clothes my mom bought fit him properly. Stewart looked like overstuffed sausage in a diaper.

“Mommy, he’s fat, why is he so fat?” I asked. I didn’t know babies came in that size.

Mother rolled him up in a blanket and bound him with a row of safety pins until she could have him fitted better for baby clothes.

I used to call him a “piggy in a blanket,” but not to be mean. I loved him. I loved his powdery baby smell mixed with the faint smell of baby puke and his chubby rolls with the creases that looked like overlapping pizza dough.

I would have killed for my brother and came close to it many times growing up. All I knew was the ugliness of life, and he was my little twinkling beacon of hope. He was a thread of innocence I’d never known before, and maybe that’s why I became so overprotective of him.

Stewart and I were cellmates from the day my parents brought him home—my father had my mother relocate the baby’s crib into my room even though she had not recovered from the 18-hour delivery of Stewart.

“I can’t have the baby hollerin’ all night, Lorraine. You know I got work in the mornin’!”

That was Dad for you. He didn’t even bend for the baby. Just another baby, Dad, go get some shuteye. Tomorrow is another big day of you being one glorious asshole.

Stewart never cried, though, which worried me. He was quiet and in deep meditation like a Play-Doh Buddha.

“What are you thinking about, Stewart?” I’d ask him. “You’re thinking about something, you’ve got plans, don’cha?”

If he could’ve answered me, I knew what he would’ve said. Maybe the same thing I was thinking. “What’s the exit strategy here, buddy?’ How do we get away from these nut jobs?”

My mother slept in shifts every night. She’d nap for an hour, wake up, check on the baby, hold the baby, and go back to bed. She’d wake up an hour and a half later, change and clean the baby, go back to bed, and wake up again looking more tired than she did earlier. Stewart didn’t get any lighter, and her tired arms showed it each time.