“That song!” I shout. “I know that song!”
The baby jerks awake, bawls.
“Sonofabitch!” says Mr. Gottwald. His lower lip twitches up little droplets of drool.
I’ve seen worse. I’m seeing worse right now, namely Baby Gottwald.
Picture a red onion with a mouth that isn’t even a mouth, but more some kind of incredibly loud air horn used by Satan to signal his peons to mop up all the infernal poop and gunk that spills forth from his fiery pan-gendered holes as he gives birth to every evil in the world. It’s a lot to picture, I know, and some of it isn’t a picture at all, but you get the idea.
“We’re all going to die here,” says Mr. Gottwald.
“You’ve got to relax,” I say. “It’s a process.”
“You’ve got to be the worst fucking doula in the world.”
“O,” I say.
* * *
I’m washing dishes, folding up the pizza box, when Mr. Gottwald comes in and hands me his phone. It’s Monica Bolonik. I’m decertified. I guess it doesn’t require that much paperwork. If I remain on the Gottwald premises, Monica warns me, she will call the police. On the other hand, she adds, she may call the police.
“You have no jurisdiction,” I say, but Monica’s gone.
“So, that’s goodbye,” says Mr. Gottwald.
“Goodbye? Because of a lousy piece of paper? Did a piece of paper educate you on newborn care? Did a piece of paper keep all the balls of nurturing in the air?”
“Balls of nurturing?”
“Gentle now, guy.”
“What say we call it even,” says Mr. Gottwald. “What say you just leave and I don’t press charges.”
It’s hard to hear him because of Baby Gottwald, who hasn’t really stopped wailing since I woke him, but I think I get the gist. I get a better sense of it when Mr. Gottwald leaves the kitchen, comes back with a few throwing stars jutting from his fist.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” I say.
“You came highly recommended. That woman Fanny Hitchens sent us a fabulous letter.”
Thing is, I’m touched by this, because I wrote the letter, and I guess I really nailed it, even got Fanny’s signature right, which is famous and appears on the jacket of her book.
“Why don’t you put that ninja crap away,” I say. “Press what charges?”
“Endangering the life of a child, for starters.”
“A child who, by his very definition, is endangered,” I say.
“I’m sorry,” says Mr. Gottwald. “Excuse me?”
“This life,” I say, and my arm does this kind of grand sweepy thing I’m not quite able to control. “This thing we so blithely and with a detestable dearth of gravitas call life, it’s not all cuddles and fluff, you know. It’s also, methinks, a boat. And so we must ask ourselves, who’s got the helm? Where’s the skipper? Doth a proper pilot dwell upon this heap?”
“What the fuck are you—”
“Here comes the dock! Look out, man!”
I Frisbee the pizza box at Mr. Gottwald, bolt. Mr. Gottwald and a squealing Ezekiel scramble after me, but I’m already there at the corner rack, the nunchucks up in full, fearsome bolo over my head. I slide-step over to Mrs. Gottwald, who shrieks, shields the baby. Mr. Gottwald assumes a fighting stance, cocks a throwing star behind his ear.
“Barry, don’t!” cries Mrs. Gottwald. “You’ll hit Prague!”
“Prague?” I say.
“That’s the baby’s name.”
“Prague?”
“We love the city. Now step away from my wife.”
I lift Mrs. Gottwald’s swollen breast from her nightgown.
“This is going to hurt,” I say, “but we’ve got to clear those ducts.”
I lean down, suck hard. Mrs. Gottwald stiffens. My arm is going dead, and I begin to sense the nunchucks, our invincible cocoon of buzzing wood, slowing down, but in a moment it doesn’t matter, nothing matters, the milk is sweet, drips thick in my mouth as Mrs. Gottwald’s hind ducts open and all that deep cream starts to flow and I am suddenly every tiny helpless thing that ever wanted nothing but to survive another hour in this foolish, feckless universe. I am one particular tiny, helpless thing, too, namely Mitch, mewling newbie Mitchell Malley, latched onto his lovely and exhausted mother, the mother of his alternate reality dreams, the mother who will welcome wounded dugs, exult in throb and split, the mother who will spurn the antiseptic credos of the medical-Madonna complex, who will love her little Mitchell no matter what fate forces him to become, who will cherish his butter-colored teeth and ratty (vintage) buckskin jacket.
I guess it’s probably a good thing that my true, non–alternate reality mother’s not around to witness this. How could she, though? She’s in Montana with Vance and Tina. She’s on life support, if I heard my sister’s message right, though a part of me is still convincing the rest of me that I didn’t hear the message right.
Everybody thinks I hate my mother, that all of my so-called shenanigans can be traced back to some primal trauma. But though I’m not a rabid Vance fan, I love my mother. Like I said, she did the best she could. That’s what I’m trying to do, too, as I raise my lips from Mrs. Gottwald’s nipple and press Baby Gottwald’s mouth there. The hungry worm starts feeding and Mrs. Gottwald groans sweetly and I get to work on the other breast.
“Zekey,” whispers Mr. Gottwald, “nine one one.”
“Did it,” says the boy in a faraway voice.
When Fanny was dying in her apartment uptown, I sat with her most days and nights. I’d hold her birdlike hand, not that her hand looked like a bird, it looked more like a very old and sick hand, but I’d hold it as she whispered the Wisdom of the Doulas one last time.
“Mother the mother,” she said. “Mother the father. Mother the room.”
“Nurture,” she said. “Nurture, nurture, nurture. Plus nature.”
“And remember, don’t spring for the pizza.”
Okay, that last one was mine, but what I’m trying to say is all I ever wanted was to carry on Fanny’s legacy, be part of a loving continuum.
There’s a thud in the pillar near my head. An iron star quivers in the wood. Now comes the sound of many men in non-nurturing boots. I can see them from the corner of my eye, padded black turtlenecks, batons. One stomps over, jabbing at the air with a weird-looking gun. He seems very judgmental.
My story won’t end here. I’ll start my own foundation, certify myself. The American League got a late start, but don’t they win their share of all-star games? No more forged letters from Fanny, either. I’ll find the families that need me, appreciate my craft. I’ll start with my building, Paula the Crackhead down the hall. There’s no question she’s knocked up, and I’d wager she could stand for a little doulo-style tenderness.
Outside the window the evening is overly bright, and I wonder if the gods aren’t having a festival of capricious cruelty in the sky, which for some reason I picture including a hot buffet, maybe because I can almost smell one, and I notice some trucks parked down the block, big floodlights, reflectors, rigged for a night shoot. Men and women with walkie-talkies mill around a table heaped with pasta and fruit.
There but for the grace of God, and Fanny Hitchens, mill I.
Now the man with the weird-looking gun is shouting some official-sounding speech about the electrical nature of his weapon, which he vows to fire if I don’t drop the nunchucks.
I don’t drop the nunchucks. I whip them at his gun. They miss, skitter across the floor.
“Zap this fuck!” calls one of the turtlenecks, maybe the turtleneck leader.
The volts eel up my spine, out my arms and legs, and as I’m going down, I can see my fist pump in the air, pump once, twice, until it finally flops into a sweet caress of absolutely nothing.
I call it the Doulo Salute.
It’s mine, too.
SNACKS
Everybody waited for me to get skinny. My father said it could be any day. My mother said if I got skinny, it would improve my moods. She promised me a new wardrobe, one more congruent with my era, my region. My sister said if I got skinny, there would be the possibility of hand jobs from her friends in the Jazz Dancing Club. Blow jobs, even. All the jobs. It was only fair, she said. Her friends had brothers. She’d done her part.
No one ever told me to stop eating, or even to curb it.
There was the occasional mealtime glance. Somebody might say “Stop playing with your food,” which I could reckon only as code. Never in my life did I play with it.
Dinner was the least of it. Lunch was nothing. Breakfast was how I got to lunch.
Home from school, I’d stand at the refrigerator. Everything I needed in this life was there, cold, in plastic pouches, cylindrical tubs. I hated the word “snack.” It demeaned.
My mother liked to watch while I dipped nachos into the jelly jar.
“Are you losing weight?” she’d say.
* * *
Somebody on TV said sex could make you skinny. I knew I’d have to go it alone.
Unfortunately, a certain technique of mine had consequences. The hair on the parts of my arms that rubbed against the mattress rubbed off. It grew back patchy, stubbly. Somebody started a rumor that I shaved my arms.
All the time I spent denying this, tracing the source of the lie, I could have read some inspirational book, had the world opened up to me. The world never opened up to me. It just sat there. It needed a little salt.
* * *
Cigarettes, a girl I was eavesdropping on told her friend, cut your appetite. I bought the brand I’d once spotted while going through my babysitter’s purse. Later I learned they were women’s cigarettes.
This affected me.
Eventually I moved into the basement. It was meant to be a sign of independence, being nearer to the boiler. I could conceivably control the temperature of rooms. Here, far from the sidelong sadness of my progenitors, I learned to ungirl my manner with a cigarette, to teach myself a disrespect for fire.
“Are you smoking?”
A shift in aromatics had brought my father to the door. He always sniffed at things—his breakfast, his wife. He liked to pinkie out his earwax, whiff it. He said the smell contained important information about his health. Most of his knowledge was of this order. He’d come from strivers, made the Ivy League, but this is what he’d whittled it down to. I was a major admirer.
“I’m giving you a chance to answer me,” he said now. “Are you smoking cigarettes down here?”
He’d been prelaw in college, and I remember thinking that since he was not a lawyer, he would die prelaw. I crushed out the burning Capri in my pocket.
“I’ll ask you one more time,” he said. “Are you?”
We squinted at each other through the smoke.
“No,” I said.
I felt a part of his world then. Men lied to his face every day.
* * *
It was hard to believe how big I was. I wasn’t quite obese. Those types were to be pitied, the ones we saw at the mall when my mother drove me over for new fat-boy pants. We’d circle the parking lot, the inseams of my corduroys planed down or outright split, my hands cupped over pressured bars of crotch flesh.
“It’s glandular, poor things,” she’d say, point them out for me, the obese kids hobbling past our windshield with their mothers. “It’s not their fault.”
Me, on the other hand, I was definitely my fault.
I spent long minutes on the bench outside the ladies’ room, listening to my mother’s voice above the flushes, the faucets. She’d strike up talk with other mothers. Maybe some had come for fat-boy pants. You didn’t really need your fat boy along for buying fat-boy pants. There were not a lot of choices to make. There were not a lot of colors. It was just a matter of getting really big pants. Maybe a sweater.
* * *
I knew some Catholic kids from the Catholic school down the block. They called me names, but not fat names. They called me kike, Christ killer. Finally, real friends. I sat with them on the bike rack behind their school and smoked.
One of them was huge, too. He said we were both going to hell for gluttony. The idea seemed to make him giddy. I told him my parents had parented me to understand that you pay for everything here, in your own time, in your own home, even. They were humanists. They got special magazines in the mail.
My ass, my thighs, my belly, my breasts, it was all becoming an ethical question, a great humanist dilemma. Also, there were these big, moist boils on my chest. My father said not to worry. The same thing had happened to him. Then one magical summer the weight just melted away. He’d even written a prizewinning children’s book about it.
We had to read this book in school.
The boy picked to give the report on it stood in front of the class and stared at me.
“The author hopes to show how gross his son is.”
* * *
The new boy, he was Brody. He was mall obese. He was beyond mall obese. He had a new kind of body, something never before seen. When he walked through the hallway, everyone whispered “glandular,” as though they were saying “Holocaust” or “slavery,” all hushed and sorry.
Brody was holy, made by God, hands-on. They figured him for the fattest boy in the world. Me, I was fat for the town, the county. I was Fat Shit, Lard Ass, Tits, Tub. Brody was the wonder of glands. He’d been put on this planet to teach us. Even the real torture freaks wouldn’t touch him. They’d compliment his sneakers. If Brody dropped a ball in gym, some jock would jog over, hand it back to him. Brody could not pick up the ball himself, but he had other vital work. Any ball I dropped I got back hard in the nuts.
Sometimes I wondered what Brody’s mother told Brody when they circled for parking at the mall.
Did she point me out, and say, “You, my darling Brody, are glandular, but that boy there, he’s just weak”?
Is that what she said?
Whore.
* * *
They put us back-to-back, yards apart, each yoked to the looped end of a tug-of-war rope. Such was physical education in our school. The coaches least known for copping feels, the cruel, unperverted ones, had thought it up. Students cut lunch, free periods, to attend. They came in sick to see.
We stood there on the hardwood floor. Light poured down from the high gym windows. I couldn’t see Brody, but I could feel him test the rope. It tightened at my hips, burned up my belly, went slack again. I heard his sneakers squeak.