Dad was turning thirty-eight. Last year, while framing a house, he had cut off half his left-hand index finger with a circular Skilsaw. Around that time Jack Ruby had shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald with a snub-nosed .38 and Dad had nicknamed himself “Jack Ruby.”
At breakfast on his birthday morning he had aimed his stubby trigger finger at us and said, “Blam, blam. You’ll be gunned down on live TV like that assassin Oswald if I don’t get my big you-know-what party tonight.”
He laughed and I laughed, too, just to go along with him, but not for long. Mom stiffened and declared that he should never refer to “that horrid Ruby man again” or decent people would find Dad “just as contemptible.” Every time Mom used a four-syllable word she said it as if it were always italicized.
She had admired President Kennedy, who, like me and Dad, was named John but called Jack. She especially loved Jackie Kennedy because she, too, was a mother with young children and my mom wiped tears from her eyes whenever the brave Kennedy children, Caroline and John-John, were shown on TV.
Mom had a tender inner life, which I feared because instinctively I knew her kind heart had given birth to my own heart and I had her same softness within me, but I was a boy and not a mom and it seemed impossible, even wrong, that we could share the same emotional life. Still, we did, though tenderheartedness expressed itself differently through us.
For her, sadness was a mood that connected her to an embracing world of others who were equally sad and equally resolute.
For me, sadness was a repulsive flaw I hid darkly within myself so I couldn’t find it. I was ashamed of my sadness and knew it was a sign that I was not brave; instead I was a coward, and being a coward was the source of the whole world’s scorn.
How could sadness give her great strength when it only left me feeling weak and small? I loved my mother and it confused me to think that this difference in our twin hearts might tear us apart.
When I left Gary standing at the canal and ran up to the back porch to get the tray of hamburgers and buns from my mother, she firmly looked me in the eye and said to me, “Let’s make sure this is a special moment for your father. He works very hard, and I want this party to make him proud of his family.”
“I hear you loud and clear,” I replied, and gave her a snap salute, then quickly took the tray and turned away from her before she noticed my bloody shirt and blisters. The tray was heavy in my hands, but even a cloud would have been heavy in my hands at that instant because I was feeling gutless and weak for not telling her I had already ruined the trophy moment by setting the special banner of honorific flags on fire.
“No monkey business,” she warned as I marched away.
“Okay,” I called back earnestly. “I promise I’ll do a good job on the grill.” I truly was sorry about the burned flags and wanted to make up for the stupid blunder.
But when I returned to the grill and stared down into the eyes of the glowing coals, they leaped up like red bolts of lightning and seared that dutiful promise right out of my mind. I removed the hamburgers and buns from the tray and hastily tossed them any which way onto the scorching grate. Almost instantly the meat drippings and snotty gobs of fat sizzled and crisped like someone burning at the stake, but I wasn’t paying them any attention.
I just stood there in a glazed trance while watching Gary dig the hole in his backyard. I was traveling on his train now and I knew it. Where he went and what he did mattered most. My time was now. My mother and father were losing their influence over me. When I looked at them I could see that their own teenage dreams had expired. Maybe they had had bigger plans that melted away with their wasted days and nights. And once they had us kids, their chances for greatness became as extinct as dinosaurs and now they just wanted to survive. Their past was not a story I wanted to live. This day was my turn at greatness. I was the young one now, and Gary was my leader. I was following him out of the dull trap of my life. Soon, I knew, I would catch up and be equal to him. Then I would be him. Then maybe I would surpass him. And he would want to be like me. He would envy me because I would be the stronger leader and he would be the follower.
That was what I was thinking as my eyes were glued on Gary and my neglected party food burned into furiously charred fists on the grill.
He kept digging and every now and again his mother pulled a window curtain to one side. She coughed and exhaled empty clouds of gray cigarette smoke that were abruptly filled with tarred words. “Is the hole finished yet?” she hollered in her raspy voice.
Gary shrugged. “No,” he said patiently. “Give me a minute.”
In less than a minute she hollered out, “Are you digging to the center of God’s unholy earth?”
“I would,” he replied sarcastically, “if I could be sure I’d find your big ol’ fat hunk of bacon down there.”
“Then what’s taking so long?” she called back, clearly annoyed.
“For God’s sake, Mom,” he replied in frustration, and jammed the garden fork into the ground. “You’re puttin’ me in a bad mood and you know how I can get when I’m in a mood.”
“You’re always in a mood,” she whined, imitating him.
“It’s a greyhound we are burying,” he said. “It’s the size of a four-legged third grader.”
“Maybe we could use the grave your probation officer said you already dug for yourself,” she suggested in a clever voice meant to needle him. “He said it’s dug pretty darn deep after all your sass and law-breaking stunts.”
“I figure we’ll save that grave for the future,” he replied slickly, “so when I’m dead you can roll me into it and kick the dirt over my smiling face with your slippers.”
“Don’t you dare turn your moody smart-ass mouth onto me,” she threatened. “Or I’ll call your officer in a jiffy and give him an earful—don’t think I don’t know that you sneak out at night for God-knows-what trouble.”
“A little fresh air is good for my health,” he replied. “And fresh air would be good for yours, too.”
“And being fresh with me is bad for your health,” she said. “Now, dig!”
Their conversation carried back and forth like they were an old married couple gnawing on words that could never nourish love. I only found out later that she lived entirely in the house. Gary said she was a freakishly big woman who never went outside and when she walked the halls the whole house rocked back and forth like it was a boat tied to a dock.
I wasn’t sure why she never went outside—vanity or insanity, I figured. But with the Pagoda family there was no reason why they did anything and yet they were always doing something. The five of them just did what they wanted. They were all loudly critical of each other. Our houses were so close I could hear most everything, but then maybe that was what kept them together. Their yelling was like glue.
Perhaps I was hypnotized by Gary and his mother’s banter because all along I was standing with the warm spatula in my hand but was not paying attention to the grill. I was not myself. I was in the process of becoming less and less of my former self while becoming more and more of something else I couldn’t yet define. Gary’s words were like heat rising from the flames of his hot breath, which he breathed into me as if he were molding me into something else—into an Adam or a golem or some magical creature that had once been a handful of dirt but was now under his spell.
Anyway, I stood there in my trance watching him dig that hole while he was half dressed as if he had fled a burning house. He must have sensed my steady gaze because at one point he stood up with one hand on his hip and stared directly at me like an animal sizing up a meal he was confident of swallowing.
I waved to him with the spatula.
Was he thinking about me as much as I was now thinking about him? It seemed impossible that it could be any other way. My consumption of who he was must have been equaled by his consumption of me, but I never considered that the word consumption could be so different between us. I was consumed with me becoming him. I didn’t know then that he was consumed with me becoming his.
In the meantime I let the hamburgers burn down into craggy meat rocks that smoldered like pointy hunks of smoking meteorites. The hamburger buns were lacy domes of gray ash that sifted through the grill grate and down onto the flames.
Normally I would have been worried about the ruined food and my thoughtless waste of the family dinner, but instead an unusual moment of calm came over me. Fire changes everything so quickly. If I didn’t care about being in trouble, then consequences had no power over me. My apathy dissolved my alarm. I used the spatula to scrape up and then catapult the charred nuggets of meat into the air. They arced about twenty feet overhead and then hit the fleshy surface of the canal like someone being slapped across the face.
That drew my mother’s attention to where I was standing and she came rushing down to judge for herself what exactly I had screwed up.
When she saw, she looked furious and said, “Didn’t I tell you not to ruin this?”
“Don’t worry,” I said before she kept at me. “I’m getting rid of the evidence before Dad notices.”
“What has happened to you?” she asked, both cross and puzzled. “All you had to do was flip them back and forth like you’ve done a million times. It couldn’t be easier.”
“If you do easy stuff for too long it becomes hard,” I said without emotion. “Even monkeys get tired of monkeying around.”
“What’s gotten into you?” she asked. “You’re talking like an idiot. And is that blood on your shirt?”
I didn’t have to answer because Gary suddenly shouted out, “I’m ready for the body, Mom!”
“It’s about time,” Mrs. Pagoda fired back as my mother looked over at their house in shock.
Then as our curiosity quietly froze us both in place, Mrs. Pagoda called for Gary’s dad, who was in some inner part of the house.
“Mr. P!” she said sharply as if jabbing him awake from a nap. “Mr. Pickles. Get up offa your divan, it’s time for the funeral!”
My mother gave me a nudge. “What funeral?” she whispered. “And who is Mr. Pickles?”
“I think it’s a pet name for the dad,” I replied, and then I pointed my nose toward the open hole. “And that would be for the dog funeral.”
“Well, we don’t have time for this perverse spectacle,” she said impatiently. “And don’t throw the meat in the canal—those awful fish will just get all overexcited and want more.”
Then, from inside our house, we heard the smooth voice of Nat King Cole singing, “Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa.” My sister, Karen, had turned up the stereo. It was my father’s favorite song and he always sang along with it as his fancy footwork glided around our house in dance-floor circles.
Hastily my mother turned toward our back porch and frowned. “I’m sweating,” she said with exasperation, and dabbed a paper napkin at the half moon of perspiration under her sleeveless blouse. “And you’ve ruined the meal. Let’s hope your sister holds the fort.”
My sister must have seen my father pull into the driveway and put the record on with the volume turned up. And now she was saving the day or, should I say, saving the trophy moment, because on the back porch, in her outstretched arms, she was holding forth a cookie sheet ready for the Commodore’s inspection. On it was brilliantly modeled a birthday cake shaped after the USS Newport News, which was our Sea Cadet chapter’s sponsor ship.
“Happy birthday, Dad,” she said warmly just as he danced around the corner from the front of the house.
Then she presented him with the cake as if she were the real Mona Lisa while Nat King Cole crooned about men bringing dreams to her doorstep.
He grinned widely as he raised his arms to greet her. “Now, this is a trophy moment,” he declared gleefully above the music, and grasped one end of the tray and then the two of them slid it carefully onto the patio table.
He knelt down on one knee to examine the red-tipped cannons, which were made of candy cigarettes. Then his eyes glazed over when he saw, up on the bridge of the cake ship, the standing Commodore modeled out of marzipan with a row of marzipan sailors saluting him. The smokestacks were made of curled thin sheets of licorice. Even the line of signal flags flying from the jack staff on the bow and up to the bridge flagstaff and over to the stacks and back to the stern ensign staff read HAPPY BIRTHDAY COMMODORE, exactly like the ones I had already burned. The ship sat on a dappled sea of blue icing with churning white foam rolling outward from the prop wash. My sister had thought of everything.
My mother turned the music down.
Dad beamed. He danced around the cake while murmuring, “Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa,” as his eyes searched out every nautical detail. “Wonderful. Marvelous. Genius,” he declared in a singsongy voice while sneaking swipes of battleship-gray icing off the ship’s hull.
He had been giddy like this all my life. I never questioned it, but suddenly his cheerfulness seemed artificial, as if his life was the repetition of a recorded song going around and around, repeating itself day after day until the day came when the record got old and thin and silent and the needle peeled the vinyl into a circular curl of the Mona Lisa’s silent hair. Could having a family like us really make him happy, or was this an accidental life he was trying to make the best of, which was why all his joy seemed so vastly overinflated?
He seemed like a hot-air balloon on the verge of exploding and showering us with the confetti of all the shredded dreams that had kept him going. I couldn’t tell if I was being too rough on him. Yesterday he seemed the same as I had always known him. But today I couldn’t be sure, and if I judged him differently, wouldn’t I judge myself differently, too? How could I know he was so full of hot air unless I was, too?
“Who made this dreamboat?” he finally asked, and his eyes flashed mischievously as he snapped off the portside candy anchor and crunched down on it. “Which da Vinci of the ship’s galley created this masterpiece?”
My sister had done every meticulous bit of the work. I was no help, though she had asked me to assist with painting on the ocean of icing, which was the easiest task, but I had told her I was busy.
I had been watching television. It was a show on how to repair cars. The narrator-mechanic talked like he had a mouthful of ball bearings. He had a nasty scar running up under his neck that then hooked upward over his chin and connected with the tip of a V-shaped gap in his floppy lower lip. I guessed he had stuck his head too far under the hood and got hacked a good one by the fan blade. His lower lip warbled when he spoke, but still he knew what he was talking about, and he was efficient with his hands, which did most of the teaching anyway. I liked knowing how to repair flat tires and change water pumps and spark plugs. I wanted a car and figured I’d only get a junker, so I’d need to know how to fix it up, which was why I didn’t pitch in and help my sister.
Mom had promised to assist with the cake, but then she got busy with a nursery project putting up wallpaper cows jumping over grinning moons in the baby’s room.
“The moon looks a little depraved,” I had remarked that morning when I stuck my head around the corner. “It’s smiling like Hermann Göring.” I was on a kick where I tried to ruin each innocent moment by perversely listing the deeds of every evil Nazi I could recall. I was good at history.
“Don’t be morbid,” she replied. “The wallpaper will guard the baby against germs.”
“Or Germans,” I remarked as I slouched back to my car repair show. Mom continued to hang the wallpaper. My sister continued to sing to her records and create her masterpiece.
Now, as my father looked eagerly into all of our faces to learn who had constructed the ship cake, I stared down at my roughed-up shoes. I expected my sister to take the full credit she deserved.
“We all contributed,” she said graciously. “It was family teamwork.”
She knew that saying the word teamwork was like magnifying his extra-tall, extra-gilded trophy moment because the instant she said it he livened up even more and launched into one of his instructional naval discourses.
“A ship, like a family, is only as good as the teamwork of her sailors,” he announced as if reading out the title of a treasured lecture he was about to deliver. Then he rattled on for a while as my mind begged to drift off toward the Pagoda animal burial.
At our cadet meetings, where we practiced tying elaborate boat knots and attempted to carve tiny sailing ships that fit into impossibly tinier bottles, my father often took the time to address us as a unit.
He would stand up on the seat of a chair and begin a talk with, “Crew, nobody likes to be a weak link on a ship. Now, boys, everyone line up side by side.”
There were only about twenty of us. We groaned as we put down our half-made elaborate boat knots, which would snailishly fall open again, or sheathed our wood-carving knives, and then we all lined up about a foot apart from each other.
“Now, get close enough so that you can lock arms,” Dad ordered, eyeing us impatiently.
We did. We had done it many times before, so we knew the drill by heart.
“I want the two end boys to circle around,” he instructed, “and link up to form a perfect, impenetrable circular chain.”
He rhythmically clapped his hands together to motivate us. Once the end boys linked arms he began to tap a beat with his foot and sing an old sea chantey that he knew we loved.
“What shall we do with a drunken sailor?” he bellowed. “What shall we do with a drunken sailor? What shall we do with a drunken sailor? Early in the morning.”
Then we all sang back, “Put him in the long boat ’til he’s sober. Pull out the bung and wet him all over. Heave him by the leg…”
By then we were singing so wildly and dancing like cows kicking our legs this way and that until one of us got lifted off his feet and tilted over and then the whole chain of us would wobble a bit and slowly collapse inward with a final slaphappy groan. Then we’d have to pull our arms free and get up and do it again.
Dad was dead set on everyone working together as a unit and conforming to the theory of the “unbreakable chain of collective strength.”
“When you’re under enemy fire,” he instructed sagely, “every moment lost to confusion results in a casualty. It is worthy of a court-martial to waste a man’s life because of poor training.”
Now as Dad stood in front of the birthday cake he rubbed his half-fingered fist into the palm of his good hand. I saw that stubby finger jiggle like a tongue wagging and thought of his Jack Ruby comment from breakfast. It was a stupid joke, but then I had laughed anyway. It was a teamwork laugh, I supposed, or maybe I was just being spineless.
But suddenly the references seemed as contemptible as Mom had said and I no longer felt part of his team. If I had shown any guts I would have backed her up by blurting out, “I think it’s a stupid joke, too.” But sometimes agreeing with Mom left me the target of Dad’s annoyance, and he could fume and hold a grudge for a week, so I had kept my mouth shut.
Then, from behind Dad’s back, and lurking on the other side of the fence, Gary and his father appeared and were breathing heavily as they leaned forward like fishermen pulling a net full of fish. They strained to drag a large canvas tarp toward the grave. I guessed the greyhound was wrapped in the tarp.
Mom cast a puzzled glance over at the panting, struggling Pagodas and I wished she hadn’t. At first I thought Mr. Pickles was wearing a large red-velvet cake on his head. As he tugged the tarp forward I realized it was a Shriners fez, and the elaborately knotted tassel swung back and forth in front of the ceremonial silver scimitar and Moorish moon like a scolding finger saying “No, no, no.” For a second I thought Mom was going to invite them over for cake, but then she must have summed them up as hazardous social germs because she turned her back toward them and announced cheerfully, “Family-trophy-moment photo!”
“Indeed!” Dad agreed, and drew himself up to attention.
Mom quickly retrieved the camera with the flash cube from the kitchen and Dad stood with the cake tray tilted forward, but not too forward, and my sister and I knelt like bookends on either side of him. It was a classic trophy-moment photograph.
Then I took a photo of Mom and Karen and Dad. Then Karen took one of me and Mom and Dad. By then the mosquitoes had begun to rise up off the canal into winged formations of humming hypodermics and we carried the cake into the kitchen, where Dad did the honors of slicing it up according to Mr. Bowditch’s famous nautical rules on latitude and longitude. I received a shallow piece of the ocean but didn’t dare complain. I ate it while peering out the window, trying to get a better sense of what Gary and his dad were doing. But I only saw a final glimpse of Mr. Pickles pushing up on the lower edge of his fez, which had slipped down over his eyes that were as wrinkled as raw oysters. Then he adjusted the fez as if he were carefully straightening a lampshade while he trotted toward his wine-colored Cadillac. He obviously had a Shriners meeting to attend and left the rest of the work to Gary.
Since the hamburgers were ruined Dad suggested that he and Mom go to the Sea Cadet Commodores’ cocktail party at the Kon-Tiki Club after all. He had been going to skip the party because of his birthday celebration, but now without dinner I had inadvertently given him and Mom an excuse to get away from us.
It didn’t take them long to spruce up, and once they left the house my sister put on my mother’s lipstick and came up to me and playfully punched me in the shoulder.
“I know you burned the banner,” she said slyly. “You are such a clown. Now you owe me one for keeping my mouth shut. And after what you did to the burgers you owe it to yourself to start paying attention to what you are doing.”
She was right, but I wasn’t in a mood to be wrong. My mistakes always made me respond like a jerk.
“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks. I’ll pay you back when you least expect it.”
“Moron,” she replied in a tired voice. “You are too stupid to know when people are being nice to you.”
She was always more fair to me than I was to her, and somehow this kept me from being totally honest with her. I wasn’t smarter than her, so being a liar was my only way of trying to get the upper hand, but she saw right through me.
“And what were you and that kid in the skanky underwear talking about down by the canal?” she asked suspiciously. “That was pretty weird.”
I shrugged. “Nothing,” I said. “Just saying hi.”
The less I said about him the better. As a kid I learned that when you announced you had an invisible friend it was no longer invisible. It was best to keep Gary in the shadows.
Karen continued. “And could you figure out what he and his dad were doing out back?” she asked. “They were creeping around like they were burying something illegal.”
“They are burying a greyhound,” I explained. “Gary was digging the hole.”
“I hope it doesn’t smell,” she remarked.
“It’s a deep hole,” I added, cutting off the subject.
“Well, I’m going to visit Suzy,” she said, and headed for the door. Then from over her shoulder she added, “Watch it. Suzy said that guy’s a two-faced user. And she should know.”
Suzy Pryor was a friend of hers from two schools ago when we lived in Lauderhill and just by coincidence she was now living in the same Wilton Manors neighborhood we had moved into. They had been thrilled to discover each other again and were already planning out what activities they wanted to get involved with once school started. They were the type of girls who lived to organize clubs and run for class office. They were smart and energetic and had each other.
This would be my sixth new school in eight grades. I wasn’t looking forward to another friendless year all over again. I guess you could say I didn’t make real friends. I just hung around groups of kids and mimed being a friend. I’d silently laugh at their jokes, but I might just as well have been laughing into a mirror because I was the only one watching me.
I hadn’t made any plans for school other than to show up on time and keep my mouth shut. In my last school I had been in the Latin club and the chess club. Maybe I’d do that again. They were easy clubs to join because they had so few members they didn’t even reject the rejects. If you hung around enough you got your picture in the yearbook and pretended to be a part of something. I did. In the chess club photo I had stood with my arms high across my chest and head tilted forward in a pose that I thought would make me appear moody and troubled—as if I were someone artistically conflicted that you’d want to know. But when I saw the photo my pug face made me look like I was too mentally dim to speak Latin or play chess—and no one sought me out to get to know me better. I looked like the IQ equal of our pathetic club mascot—a three-foot-high brown Naugahyde pawn with a metal ruler stabbed into its ball-peen head and a flag taped to the ruler that read RULE THE WORLD ONE MOVE AT A TIME.
I wished the expressions on my face matched up to my thoughts, but they rarely did. Only when I was in extreme physical pain did my face knot up and truly express extreme physical pain. Happiness looked like a square peg struggling to fit into a round hole. It was all mismatched. When it came to my heart I felt everything okay, but when I tried to express my feelings the words came out of me like invisible ink.
Before Karen left the house I said, “Tell Suzy I very much look forward to seeing her.”
I purposely spoke in a big, proper sentence because I had a crush on Suzy that had suddenly revived when I fantasized how she might possibly pull up in front of our house and rescue me in a white pickup truck and give me that flaming-hot kiss I wanted.
Karen stopped with her hand on the doorknob. “Let me give you some girlfriend advice,” she said, turning toward me. “You should pay more attention to girls whose Salvation Army missionary work is trying to save tragic boys like you. Being a reclamation project is the only chance you have of attracting a girl as immature as you are.”
“I’m not immature,” I said defensively.
“Remember the burning flags today? The ruined food? Your infatuation with your new half-naked skinny-legged friend? Remember that weighing the pros and cons of the world around you is a sign of maturity.”
“I got bored,” I said. “Most of life is boring. It’s only what I’m thinking about between the boring parts that keeps me from killing myself.” This was true only because I wished it to be true.
“Please don’t share any more of your perpetually self-involved thoughts,” she said. “Just clean up the kitchen and the outside mess so Mom doesn’t make herself sick tomorrow by trying to disinfect the entire backyard with something that could hurt the baby. You know how obsessive she gets when it comes to germs.”
“Germans,” I mumbled.
She then went up the street to see Suzy. My eyes followed her until I imagined myself knocking on Suzy’s door.