“Never hold a knife up high like that. Didn’t your father teach you anything.” I raised my left forearm to his right wrist. “Look how easily you can be stopped.” The boy seemed to be in a trance.
“Give me the knife.” Gently, I pried it from his frozen fingers. It was a serrated kitchen deal, the kind used to cut tomatoes. “Hold the knife at elbow level with the blade up. See, the victim can’t block without getting cut.”
“I’m going to kill you.”
“Not until you learn how to handle a knife. Here, you try.” I stuck the knife back into Clark’s hand, where it dangled uselessly.
“You have dishonored my father.”
“Actually, your father dishonored my mother.”
“My father has never committed an un-Christian act in his life. That’s what I hate about him.”
The kid had an incomprehensible viewpoint toward parents. I could relate to that.
“Billy can’t help who he is,” I said.
Clark passed the back of his hand over his face, then his eyes seemed to focus and he saw my condition. “Did I cut you?”
“The blood’s from another father’s son. Listen, you want to come inside? We could talk about this love-’em, hate-’em problem people get with moms and dads.”
I started limping toward the door, but Clark stayed put. He said, “She must have been a total sleaze.”
I stopped. “Lydia is not a sleaze. Not total, anyway.”
“Only a sleazy woman would seduce five boys at once.”
“She was fourteen and they raped her.”
At the word
rape
Clark began to shake. “Saint Billy would never.”
“You were hiding behind the door, did you hear him deny it?”
“I’ll kill myself.” He held the knife across his wrist.
“You’ve been looking for an excuse all day.”
His eyes jerked toward me. “I’m not kidding. I am going to kill myself.”
“At least do it right. Don’t you read books?”
“I know more about suicide than anyone in my class.”
“Cut yourself that way and you’ll be two days bleeding to death.” I grabbed his wrist and twisted the knife ninety degrees. “Slice up the vein from the bottom to top. Lay it open and you’ll squirt like a stuck pig.”
I felt Clark’s wrist tighten, then he touched blade to blue vein. Nothing happened. I didn’t stop him and he didn’t go on.
His breath smelled of horehound drops. “You’re not taking me seriously, Mr. Callahan.”
“No, I’m not.” I released his wrist. “I’m sorry, Clark. I know I should but I’m too beat to humor a sad teenager. Come by in the morning and I’ll sincerely tell you why life is better than death. It is, you know. Took years, but I finally figured the thing out. Right now, I need sleep.”
“For my father’s honor, one of us has to die.”
“Can’t we forget the whole thing?”
He pointed the knife at me. “One of us has to die.”
***
My body was fast running out of gas. Even riding the bike a hundred miles had never worn me out this thoroughly. Bike fatigue was merely physical torture, and physical torture sometimes clears the mind. It sure helps you forget your other troubles. But the walk from Clark to my front door was a hike through the La Brea tar pits. Deathbed flu. The boy was beat.
How many people had I brought to tears today? How many threatened me with violence, compared to how many turned violent? And don’t forget Gilia Saunders. I didn’t even know the questions to ask on that one.
I dealt with the doorknob and thought, guess we’ll have to start locking soon, then I stumbled into the shelter of the family foyer and fell over a pumpkin. Landed on my hip on another pumpkin, which started a pumpkin avalanche. When the slide finally stopped, I lay on my back surrounded by mountains of pumpkins, oceans of pumpkins. The entry hallway was belly deep in orange.
I did not care. I did not give a hoot. I was not affected. Nothing and no one mattered except crawling up the staircase and into bed.
I dreamt of clitorides. Squadrons of clitorides marching in formation like mushrooms in Fantasia. High clitorides, flat clitorides, hard clitorides, squishy clitorides. Amber waves of clitorides.
My dreams used to center on the entire vertical ravine, from furry outgrowth to the hillock atop the twin cliffs—major and minor—leading into the black swamp from which all life arises but no man returns. Of late, my dreams had forsaken the chasm in general to focus on the pleasure button perched on high. Women try to keep pleasure caused by the pleasure button secret from men, because men are limited to the pressure cooker squirt, and the male gender would probably quit having sex if they found out women are having more fun than men are. Yet—the big yet—modern women demand that we know exactly where the button is and how it is operated.
The days when Henry Miller could write in
Tropic of Cancer
“A cunt came into the room,” “She was a cute cunt,” “Only a rich cunt can save me now” are long dead. And good riddance. Today, clitorides walk into rooms.
***
When I awoke, the weight of gravity had tripled overnight. A psychic anvil balanced on my forehead and my internal organs felt calcified. We’re talking symptoms of oncoming depression. Depression is paralyzed spirit. If they ever invent a pill that cures depression, I’ll take it. Even if the price is impotency, I’ll pop that pill in a heartbeat.
The only hope is to go through the motions. Shower, shave, brush the teeth—wonder how many years till they fall out. Maurey Pierce told me if you act normal long enough someday you’ll become normal. This was when I was fifteen and dressing like Scott Fitzgerald and wondering why girls wouldn’t go out with me. Maurey said if I brushed my teeth twice a day and read
TV Guide
cover to cover every issue pretty soon I would stop being strange and girls would begin to make eye contact.
Downstairs, I found Gus, Shannon, and the male Eugene sprawled around the kitchen table, drinking coffee over the local morning paper. To my complete disgust, Shannon and Eugene both wore bathrobes.
“Have you no shame!”
“C’mon, Dad. You and Mom were living together at thirteen.”
“That’s because your mother was pregnant.”
Eugene grinned. The chump sat there in
my
bathrobe—a blue terry-cloth number that safety-pinned together because a woman named Linda used the belt to tie me up and somehow it’d gotten lost.
The import of my last words made me nauseous. “You’re not?”
Shannon broke into laughter, joined by Eugene and Gus. They laughed at me for trying to be a traditional father.
“Of course not,” Shannon said.
Since no one jumped to pour my coffee, I poured it myself. One thing Gus can do is make good coffee. “That’s not something to say ‘of course’ about,” I said. “Pregnancy is an accident.”
Shannon held her cup out to me. I refilled her but ignored Eugene’s similar silent plea.
“After the olden days when you and Mom were active, the scientists invented something called birth control,” Shannon said. I hate tacky kids.
Eugene said, “Shannon has a diaphragm.”
“You went to a doctor and told him you were planning ahead to have sex?”
“Daddy, this is the eighties. Times have changed since you were young.”
“I’m still young.”
Gus did her nostril exhale blast that says it all. “I got a grandpa acts younger than you and he’s in a rest home.”
Eugene smirked into his empty cup. He had no call to come off young and vital; his hairline was already in full retreat. By the time Eugene made thirty he was going to pass for Friar Tuck. I may not have much, but at least I’ve kept my hair.
Gus pushed herself up from the table. “Eat your beans, you’ll feel better.”
“I am not in the mood for red beans.”
“Your father’s pouting again,” Gus said to Shannon.
“I am not pouting, I’m just tired of red beans for breakfast. Why can’t we have biscuits and ham like other rich families with black cooks?”
Gus said, “Racist cracker.”
“Did you meet your fathers?” Shannon asked.
“Why are there two hundred pumpkins in the foyer?”
“Three hundred fifty,” Eugene said. He was eating beans. He seemed perfectly happy to sit at my table in my bathrobe eating my beans. After sleeping in my daughter’s bed. Goldilocks incarnate.
“Did you meet your fathers or not?” Shannon asked.
“Yes, I met them.”
“All five?”
“One’s dead.”
“Which one?” Eugene asked.
“The black guy.”
“Figures,” Gus said.
“And?” Shannon was impatient. I didn’t know what to tell her. The fathers were good, bad, and ugly, like everyone else. They had families and jobs. None were in the CIA or professional baseball, and, so far as I could tell, none had made a career out of rape.
Shannon stared at me. “Did you figure out who’s the real father?”
“Yesterday was the worst day of my life, including the day Wanda left. Confronting the fathers was stupid. Idiotic. I did it because you two made me and now it’s over and buried and I demand to know why there’s three hundred fifty fucking pumpkins in the foyer!”
“Daddy. That’s no way to talk in front of guests.”
***
Another morning at Tex and Shirley’s. I hadn’t eaten a meal cooked by my cook in three days. The waitress with Judy on her name tag recognized me from the day before—asked if I wanted cheese blintzes again. I said, “Sure thing,” without thinking because I was still going over what I should have said during the conversation back home. Us writer types aren’t good at live conversation. It takes eight drafts for me to sound spontaneous.
What happened was the kids had gone philanthropic at a pumpkin stand on the Blue Ridge Parkway.
“The little ragamuffin behind the counter wasn’t even wearing shoes,” Eugene said. “We had to nurture her somehow.”
“Shannon hardly ever wore shoes when she was a little ragamuffin.”
“We witnessed classic poverty in America. The girl obviously had a vitamin deficiency, and I don’t doubt she’d been physically abused. The vast majority of women in her socio-economic class are physically abused, statistically speaking.”
So Shannon rented a U-Haul trailer and bought out the pumpkin stand.
“Your daughter has a heart of gold,” Eugene said.
Young men speak in clichés; old men live them. “Why not give the girl all your money and let her keep the pumpkins to sell to someone else?” I asked. “Lord knows we don’t need more than one pumpkin.”
“Categorical impoverishment disdains charity,” Eugene said. Shannon wasn’t speaking to me. She does that whenever I won’t cooperate.
“I’ve found people you think won’t accept charity generally will when you word it right.”
Eugene sent me a look like I’m simple and he’s not. “These pumpkin sellers are endemic of the old Appalachian value system which ascribes nobility to poverty, but only in the context of the self-contained family unit, much like John Boy and the Waltons. Charity is viewed as debasement.”
Gus snorted and spoke to Shannon. “Does he talk that way in bed?” I left before Shannon answered.
***
At first I thought the waitress looked like the woman who walked her cat on a leash, then I realized she was the woman who walked her cat on a leash.
When she brought my blintzes, I asked, “Why walk a tied-up cat?”
She looked at me suspiciously, which is nothing new. Waitresses often look at me suspiciously. “Have you been spying on me?”
“I saw your cat yesterday and wondered why you walk her on a leash.”
“You ever try walking a cat without a leash?”
“My cat Alice went outside on her own.”
The waitress put her hand in her uniform pocket, then took it out again. She touched her ear and blinked quickly. “I can’t risk that with Judy.”
I looked at her name tag. “You’re Judy.”
She continued to move her hands nervously. I could tell this was a touchy subject. “Mr. Angusen named Judy after me. Mr. Angusen was my husband, before he caught the emphysema and said he’d rather die than quit Kent cigarettes. He was so crazy about our kitten that he named her after me.”
“My friend Maurey named a horse after her father.”
“Judy is all that’s left. I can’t risk losing her too.”
Made sense to me. “I used to be emotionally dependent on a cat. You reach a point where something outside yourself has to hold you together because you can’t do it on your own anymore, and a pet is the only choice.”
The waitress had sad eyes I hadn’t noticed the day before when I was busy fingering Linda Ronstadt. “What happened to your cat?” she asked.
“Alice got old and died.”
“How did you handle losing her?”
“I got married.”
***
I would never have married Wanda if Alice had lived. Alice was my cat who stuck with me while a score of women didn’t. Alice didn’t care for my women. She made a habit of peeing on panties left on the bedroom floor. I’m convinced several of my one-night stands would have lasted several more nights if the women involved had awoken to dry underwear. Alice was eighteen when her kidneys started to fail, and, for seven months, I injected her twice a day with fifty cc’s of electrolyte fluid. At the end I hand fed her ice for a week as she died. I doubt if I’ll ever get so close to an animal or person again. Intimacy on that deep a level takes too much out of you. After I lost Alice, I wallowed in fuck-and-suck avoidance for a month until Wanda came along, and, in a gush of relief that someone might actually take me for the long run, six weeks after I met Wanda I married her.
Then, ten days less than a year later—game four of the ’83 World Series—Wanda scrammed. She calculated the timing to inflict the highest amount of pain possible; of that I am certain. No woman just happens to leave her husband during the World Series.
***
My first marriage—the one we don’t talk about at family gatherings—lasted eight weeks. I was twenty-five, Leigh was thirty-seven and had just been divorced by her husband of fifteen years, who dumped her for Tammy Faye Bakker’s publicist. He left Leigh with a shattered personality, which I helped her glue back together piece by piece until she was whole enough to leave me for an underwater welder.
She said hurting me “balanced the books.” I asked her why she married me in the first place and she said, “To prove to myself someone still wanted me.”