A dad briefly, five years, and then no dad. A dead mom, a sister I’ve never met, a little furry substitute for everything, Gluey, my pooch, named after my dad who’s serving a life sentence in Leavenworth for living up to his nickname, by gluing people’s mouths shut until they stopped breathing. As a little boy, I remember holding onto my dad’s giant shoulders when he swam the breaststroke the length of a pool. The big hairy ride, my swimming bear. He made decent money as a carpenter, but he was paid 10 times that for performing unusual tasks for crooks he knew growing up in the neighborhood. His specialty was strapping a guy down onto his worktable and filling his mouth with glue. Then he’d flip them onto their sides and do the same to their ears. Speak no evil, hear no evil. If the guy was supposed to remain alive, he’d fill up their bung holes or seal up a man’s genitals in resin the way a craftsman embalms scorpions in amber to make jewelry.
After my dad was taken away, I would like to say that I was raised by wolves, but I wasn’t, unfortunately. I was brought up under the slow-moving gloom of my grandparents, Izzy and Ida. A cartoonist could zipper a blabbermouth’s face shut and all the kids would laugh: My dad does it in real life and goes to jail forever.
I make drawings of people with webbed feet. I have dreams of becoming a frog. I’d like to remain a frog, sit half-submerged in a lagoon at 3 A.M. croaking with a gang of other frogs, eating insects, having sex with other slippery frogs. Never do I want to turn into a prince. I want to decapitate the prince.
My dad was a good father, a gangster in the grand tradition of Jewish gangsters, once a singular presence on the American scene, like the Jewish boxer or baseball player. I love him. He doesn’t accept visitors anymore. Not even me. He’ll draw a heart on a square of toilet paper and drop it in the toilet. He’ll watch the ink bleed. Then he’ll flush it down. I could see him doing that.
In the book World of Dogs, it says that Gluey, my furry partner with whom I prowl around, exudes a shy mournful brilliance. Truer words were never written. He smells the earth as if he were taking notes for an encyclopedia. A hummingbird jams its dipstick into a succulent flower, withdraws some juice, and flies away. I know it might seem disrespectful to name a dog after your own living father, a no-no in the Jewish religion, but I don’t see it that way. My intention was to think of my dad whenever I shouted Gluey’s name. I accept visitors. A woman so beautiful she causes trees to sway and bow when she walks by comes up to us, or to Gluey, and says, Hello, sweet thing. I could swear she says, Gallows geek spring, but that’s not what she says, because she’s talking to Gluey. She kneels down and both her knees make a faint cracking sound. She looks up and asks, What’s his name? I say his name is Gluey. I kneel down with her and scratch his chest. The woman rubs his behind. Gluey’s rear leg convulses. She says, Oh I got you now, what a sweet boy you are, Lou. She asks if he has any puppies, and you say he has puppies; would you like to come home with us and see all the puppies and pick your very favorite and take him or her home with you, would you like that? Oh yes, she says, that would be divine, fantastic; she follows us home, and while we’re having sex, I have this vision that the inside of her body is lined with pink satin, then she whispers, while bobbing up and down on top of me, Open me up, so I say with the butcher knife, and she says, Yes, with that, so I reach for the huge blade that sits on the nightstand beside a stack of books and hack away only to realize that this beautiful girl is an ordinary human being with the same insides as everyone else and I didn’t have to go and slice her up like that even if she begged me to do it; but I didn’t. I just thought it up, so no harm done, none, no harm, still free to live and breathe. Gluey hangs his tongue out, drools a little thank you. He’s tired maybe. The woman says goodbye and I tip my hat. I try to be polite to everyone.