Ethel’s
voice was growing louder now. “Don’t tell your mother to shut up, Rodney!
Rodney! Don’t you dare tell
me
to
shut up!
Rodney! You come down
here! Rodney! Why don’t
you
shut up,
Rodney! Why don’t
you
shut up, then!
Rodney! You
come down here!
You
shut up, Rodney!
You
shut up!”
Rodney
pulled a pair of Cokes from underneath his bed and ripped them free of the
stiff plastic spine. “It’s like living in a madhouse,” he said, not even
looking at me. I felt complicit in a frame of violence I couldn’t understand. I
just sat there hoping his mom wouldn’t remember what I looked like. I just
hoped Rodney’s mom wouldn’t remember my name.
“Sometimes
I think she’s the biggest asshole in the entire universe,” Rodney said, pulled
the television closer on its wobbly castered frame and switched it on. You
could hear the charge of it before you saw the light abrupt to its screen. Suddenly
we were in any house, every house; suddenly we were drifting again through the
regions of my exile. We watched cartoons, movies, detective and western
programs while I listened to the outside hallway for the steps of wounded Ethel
on the thin carpet as she moved, slowly and eventually, to her own bedroom down
the hall, awaiting the moment when I could escape this house and my own
complicity in Ethel’s systematic humiliation by Rodney, the most remarkably
powerful person I have ever known in my entire life.
10
I
CELEBRATED MY birthday in secret that year, on a day I firmly refuse to
commemorate or even mention. There was something firm and round about the new
age that filled my body like an old song, or smoke from a cigarette. Usually I
didn’t return home until one or two a.m., since Rodney and I regularly stayed
up drinking Ethel’s whiskey or smoking Rodney’s grass. My feet staggered and
slipped against the knotty carpet as I let myself in the front door. My tongue
felt thick and swollen. I staggered down the dark hall, already sensing the
thick silence behind Mom’s steadfast door. “Mom,” I said, leaning against her
door, uncertain of the floor’s balance. “Mom, it’s me. It’s your son, Mom. It’s
Phillip.” I heard my whispered words deep in my throat and chest, resonating
like bones. I could hear her taking a breath as my hand gently grasped the
loose aluminum doorknob. The knob ticked in its frame when I turned it. Its
resistance was at once strange and comforting, like the taste of a new tooth.
Mom’s door was always locked. She never let me inside anymore.
“Mom.”
I tried to sound firm, sober and
mature. “There’s money on the kitchen counter. There’s still some Colonel
Sanders in the fridge. It’s cold, Mom. Just the way you like it. And coleslaw.
Have a banana. Bananas are filled with potassium.” Motes and air whirled in
Mom’s dark room, rustling and indifferent. This was the sound Mom lived. The
long slow pause in her heart where she gathered language and waited for history
to resume again.
“Thank
you, Phillip,” she said, as obliquely as she might acknowledge some porter in a
hotel. “Thank you very much.”
“I’m
in my room, Mom, if you need me.” I felt the pulse of alcohol in my blood as if
the entire house were contracting gently around me. Then I heard the
unmistakable gurgle of liquor being poured into Mom’s smudged glass.
“You’re
a very good boy, Phillip. Don’t worry, I’ll be fine, I’ll be all right. Just
make certain you’re going to be all right too.” There was a rustle of
newspapers. I could feel the darkness assembling in Mom’s room, like clouds and
gulls around some alien shoreline. For months I thought I was the one who had
eliminated the buzzing opposition of Mom’s men, but now I knew it was that
gathering darkness. It was descending in the elevator from its high luxury
office building. It was accepting the keys to its Triumph from the black
attendant. It was flying off across freeways and cities. It loved us. It loved
Mom and it loved me. It loved both of us very much.
I
DIDN’T THINK of Ethel as a surrogate so much as a compensation. She could never
take my mom’s place, but she could make that place seem less cold and drafty. Some
days I arrived deliberately early at Rodney’s house, when I knew he was still
in school, and drank generous Manhattans with Ethel while melodramas played at
us from her blurry black and white television (the good color television, of course,
was in Rodney’s room). Eagerly she told me all the lost, distracted secrets of
her prodigal son. “Rodney is actually a very affectionate young boy. Like you,
Phillip, he is patient and attentive. He’s a good listener. He’s considerate
and well-mannered–when he wants to be, that is. He always helps with the housework
if my legs are sore. Sometimes he saves money from his allowance and buys me
little presents. If he’s rude, it’s because he likes to show off in front of
his friends. Young men, as you know, are embarrassed to show affection to their
mothers, particularly when their friends are around.”
I
wanted to ask her why, but was afraid such an awkward question might give me
away. I might accidentally divulge the secret life I lived in strange houses,
the secret life my mom had begun living behind the bolted door of her minimally
furnished room.
“Would
you like another Manhattan?” Ethel asked.
She
showed me her empty glass and I took it.
“I’ll
get these,” I said, and returned to the kitchen for the Jack Daniel’s. Ethel
had taught me how to mix a number of competent drinks, a feat in which I admit
I took some pride. I returned and sat on the sofa beside the morning’s smeary
newspaper and watched the fabulous television. Ethel was absently handling her
embroidery frame and gazing out the window at the harsh, smoggy sunlight, the
palm trees faded and unraveled like some overexposed snapshot, the uniform
houses and pavements and flashing cars. “People don’t always intend to make
other people feel bad, Ethel,” I told her, though I was never sure she was listening.
“Sometimes people just forget other people are even around. I know it sounds
strange, but people operate that way, I swear. Sometimes they don’t know what
they’re doing. Sometimes they don’t even know you’re there at all.” I was
grasping at straws. Whenever I found myself trying to excuse Rodney’s
disgraceful behavior I became tangled and caught in my own inflexible words. Ethel,
meanwhile, gazed out the window. “Maybe people just don’t know where they are
sometimes,” I said, afraid to stop talking because then the judgment would
come. In the long pause my talk would have to mean something. “Maybe people
just talk without remembering who it is they’re actually talking to. Maybe you
just shouldn’t think about it, Ethel. Maybe you should join a health spa, or
develop an interesting hobby. Do you hear me, Ethel? Would you like another
drink? Ethel? Are you listening?”
BEFORE
LONG I was taking lunch with Ethel every afternoon around one o’clock. The
casual scheme of my domesticity was growing more fulfilled and content. My
paper route, breakfast, morning study sessions (I was currently investigating
Plato, biophysics and Freud), afternoons with Rodney burgling strange homes,
television, evening meals and bed. And every afternoon before I left the house
I would leave Mom’s lunch wrapped in plastic and deposited outside her bedroom
door. Ethel was instructing me in the art of fine sandwich building. Tuna and
chicken salad, avocado and sprouts, bacon, lettuce and tomato, roast beef,
pastrami and turkey with cottage cheese, peanut butter and bananas. Whenever
Ethel sliced the sandwiches in their rich brown bread the divided segments
always looked impossibly tidy and controlled on their clean white plates. “Sometimes
at night,” Ethel said, humming and staring out the back window while she washed
her hands at the sink, “Rodney’s father calls me from a long way away. He says
he wants to move back. He says he misses my cooking.” Ethel’s voice trailed off
aimlessly, like late night drivers descending off-ramps in search of a quick,
inexpensive meal. “I tell him I wouldn’t mind, if it was just up to me.” Drying
her hands on a thin patterned towel, Ethel gazed over my shoulder. Her eyes
looked so intent, I often turned to see what she was seeing. I suspected a
grown man had suddenly appeared behind me, perhaps a taller and more mature
version of myself, Ethel’s more substantial companion that my thin body merely
represented. “‘But it’s not up to me, Harold,’ I tell him.” Ethel was sculpting
soft white flower petals from the bodies of scoured radishes with a small sharp
paring knife. “‘We have to do what’s best for Rodney. We have to do what’s best
for our son, who’s been raised under very trying and unfortunate circumstances,
as I think you well know. It’s easy, being a father, to think you can just show
up when you feel like it. Children need someone they can count on, Harold. And
as much as I may want you back, I don’t think Rodney could ever count on you
again. You’d only disappoint him.’”
Ethel
never disturbed or embarrassed me. I knew she had her own secret life to live,
just as all mothers live fair portions of their lives down there in dark secure
rooms and hidden gardens filled with strange plants and trees. I was simply
grateful for the time Ethel spent with me here on the outside while I learned
to prepare bases for soups and gravy, toss Caesar and fruit salads, cook purées
and stews. I fricasseed, baked, boiled and roasted. I cleaned chicken and fish,
basted lamb and pork, pressed my hungry hands into the thick dough of breads and
cakes and cookies and pastry. I loved Ethel’s warm kitchen and the heady smell
of bread baking while I waited for Rodney to return home and transgress with me
those other, colder kitchens where I was picking up handy appliances, kitchen
pots, pans and utensils and reassembling them in the hard irrefutable kitchen
of Mom’s silent and discriminating house. I wanted to build Mom a strong home
that would always be there for her and provide anything she might ever need. I
was beginning to realize that I would have to leave someday. I still loved Mom
more than ever, but I was learning that life carries us places, like rivers and
winds carry things, often against our will.
RODNEY
MAY HAVE been only twelve years old, but he had big ambitions. “I need real
estate,” Rodney often said after his second or third drink. With our
merchandise gathered around us in the living room like a family at Christmas,
we were lingering overlong in a commodious four-bedroom Spanish-style home in the
foothills of Sherman Oaks. Outside the streets were filled with dry, amber
lawns and stark, shedding palm trees. Every once in a while a bright bluebird
flashed. “I need tax incentives, money market liquid asset accounts,
diversified stock portfolios, treasury bills, low-interest tax deductible
loans, property, houses, income property, cars, trucks, buses, planes. I don’t
need this. I don’t need this crap,” he said, making his customary gesture at
the huddling portable televisions, radios, jewelry and microwave and, still in
its original Sears packing case, an adjustable three-temperature electric
blanket which I intended to leave that night, like a meal or some religious
devotion, outside my mom’s bedroom door. “I don’t need a bunch of crap just
weighing me down. I need negotiable capital. I need security and a firm
financial investment base. I need money, property and women. I’m talking gash,
now. I’m talking poontang. I’m talking scuzz. I’m talking countless
good-looking, insatiable young women with really big tits.” Aimlessly Rodney’s
left hand began stroking the inner thigh of his Levi’s. Then, abruptly, he
leaned forward and reached for the margarita mix in the blender’s thick Pyrex
bowl. “I need money and sex and more sex. I been thinking about it every day
lately, Phil. I gotta get laid, man. I really gotta get laid.”
Then,
contemplating his refreshed glass for a moment, Rodney slumped back against the
sofa while I tried to appear as calm and unaffected as a prayer. I was
practicing with a cigarette, sucking the thick smoke into my mouth every few
seconds and expelling it, pushing it out with my tongue and cheeks. Phooh, I said,
as quietly as I could, because it wasn’t a sound Rodney or Mom made when they
smoked. Phooh. An ugly miniature terrier lay asleep dribbling in my lap. Gently
I lifted it onto the sofa’s side. “Don’t talk about it,” I told him. “Don’t
talk about what you want too much. You’ll lose the edge.”
“I
need to fuck women.” Rodney’s voice was growing subdued, distant, ritual and
dark. “I need to fuck fuck fuck until I can’t fuck anymore.”
“It’s
all a dream, Rodney. If you talk about it too much, you wake up. Then there’s
just the bright sun. Then there’s just the cold bed.”
Suddenly
Rodney sat up straight and placed his margarita on the table. He cautioned me
with his left hand and gazed off intently at the far wall, as if listening with
his eyes, poised like a diver.
I
heard the footsteps too. Keys being shaken. Then a sack of something banging
against the porch while keys rattled more distinctly. Implicitly feminine
sounds.
“If
you keep dreaming, you can have it all, Rodney. If you keep dreaming you can
even be a grown-up. You can even fall in love.”
“Fuck
love,” Rodney said.
We
were grabbing the most compact and obvious loot, then slipping down the back
stairs and out the rear garage door, through the yard and backyard gate while
upstairs that stupid terrier was yelping and throwing itself up and down in the
air as its master incautiously opened the front door.
“Fuck
love, man,” Rodney said later at Burrito King. “Fuck family. Fuck people and
things. I want the real
stuff
, man. I
want currency, I want sex. Give me the
stuff
and save all the bullshit. I’ve had it up to here with all the
bullshit, Phillip. I’m tired of rotting away in Ethel’s lousy household. It’s
time I started living my own life. I’m telling you, guy. Life is something you
do. Bullshit is just something you’ve got.”
CURRENCY
AND SEX were forces in our lives now, like smoky, violet surges of electricity
and light. Sex and currency, currency and sex. The hum and the pop, chirring
and turning, beating like electricity. We could drive cars with that force
radiating deep inside us. We could activate industrial machinery. We could
generate enough massive interior energy to drive cities, planets and suns.
I
didn’t feel the same sudden push inside my flesh that Rodney felt, but rather a
sort of anxious intellectual charge. The energy whirled aimlessly inside my
head, where I nightly replayed that strange film I had watched with Mom only a
few months before on a hotel-room closed-circuit television,
Sexually Altered States
. Sexually
altered, sexually altered altered states, states of sexually altered states,
altered states of sexually altered states. Sometimes the images sped and raced
in my mind, and I imagined myself taking a seat in my own subjective cinema. I
imagined the curtains sweeping open and the light dimming, I imagined the
credits, and then the first exuberant breathless cinematic fuck. I tried to
contain all the events within the frame of a plot. I tried to imagine the
interstitial scenes, the dinners and champagne, the slow dances and undress, often
growing so involved in them that I never got around to thinking through to the
serious action again, the way the karate master is supposed to think through boards
and blocks of concrete. I thought it was the anticipation that made sex real,
but now I know it was merely my explicit faith in that imagination which
unreeled around my childhood like the spokes of a milky galaxy. I was beginning
to learn that the imaginative act was more important to my life than action
itself. Action merely articulated you with an exterior and superficial network
of facts, data and information that superimposed itself across the realer world
of my imagination like a restraint, or a clinging, oily film. I wanted the
dream of sex, the energy and heat of it. Had I been able to articulate the
problem for Rodney, I’m certain he would have preferred the dreams too.