I’ve heard the story many times, from my mom and from Ed, who wasn’t even there but who tells it like he was and gets a huge kick out of it. But as Bro drains his beer and launches into it again I’m listening with brand-new ears. “First time I meet Joe Sweeney,” he says, “he comes over to the folks’ for a big Sunday dinner. Tall as a motherfucker. Skinny. Big hornrims. Tight white turtleneck. Duke and I look at each other like Who the fuck’s this?”
“Duke?” from Cherie, lying on the couch, right hand resting what’s left of her drink on her stomach.
“My brother. We’re the youngest, man, the black sheep. We did so many drugs back then you could have powered a third world country. It was funny actually, we had a little grow in our mom’s garden, just a few plants. No one ever knew. The Commander, he had no clue what a pot plant looked like. A gin bottle, sure. Whiskey, vodka, wine, no problem. And that’s what old Joe Sweeney walked into. His new girlfriend’s crazy alcoholic dad and her high-strung mom and two stoned brothers. I kind of feel bad for the guy, looking back.”
“Weird to think of my mom as someone’s girlfriend,” I say.
Cherie says, “Why? She’s still a girl, you know. Just ’cause we grow up and our hair turns gray, it doesn’t mean we stop being girls. Same way no matter how old you get, you’ll always be a boy. Like your uncle. Look at him. Still just a boy.”
Bro smiles briefly. He looks down at his empty High Life bottle, works back a corner of the label and then reapplies it, smoothing it out with his thumb. “Right away Joe Sweeney goes to work,” he says, “talking to the Commander about, you know, naval history and World War Two and obscure battles and shit.”
“That’s his thing, man. War histories, the Civil War.”
“Which is weird, don’t you think, because he seems like such a pussy otherwise. But the Commander was fucking eating it up, slapping him on the back, laughing at all his jokes. That’s the thing about my dad. He treated his own kids, his own flesh and blood, like total shit. But if you’re a stranger, an outsider, someone else’s kid, a boyfriend or girlfriend, well then hey, let’s all have a beer and be friends. To this day, he’s still nicer to the waiter at Bill Knapp’s than he’s ever been to me or your mom or any of us. But give old JS credit. My mom dug him too. I mean he’d fucking, he’d read all the books, man, he had the intellectual shit down pat. And he smiled a lot. None of us really smiled. I wanted to. But a lotta the time I was too pissed off or too stoned or both. Plus he’d been in the army, so that was big shit. Even though obviously I could have kicked his ass with all four limbs tied together, the fact that he’d been in the army got him points in the Commander’s book. He never saw combat but so what. I guess just being there you learn discipline and I don’t know, all that other bullshit. I mean, one day the Commander comes to me and he’s fucking yelling about something and he gets all up in my face, you know, so close I can smell his breath and he’s spraying all his spit all over me and poking me in the chest and he says It’s just too goddamn bad you’re too young to go fight. If you were old enough I’d drag your ass downtown and fucking volunteer you myself. So that’s who we’re dealing with here. A guy who wants to send his own kids to Vietnam. So Duke and I, just before dinner we go to the basement and burn a huge reefer and get high as a motherfucker, man, I mean like . . . drooling stoned. And we get hungry. And it’s powerful. I’m fucking crawling out of my skin with the force of this hunger. But I know it’s gonna be all right because my mom’s making spaghetti, a big giant pot of it, which is like, one of her signature dishes. We’re down there eating our fingernails, Duke and I, waiting for the word. Finally it comes. We go upstairs and sit at the table and right in the middle’s the dish. The lid comes off. I wanna dive in the spaghetti and live in it the rest of my life. No. Joe Sweeney, being the guest, gets first crack. Someone slides it over and the motherfucker starts . . . piling it on, he heaps it on till there’s a little mountain almost spilling over the side of his plate. I’m watching this happen in utter horror. By the time it comes around to me, there’s barely enough for a kid-sized portion. Even Duke, man, he got his. I’m the only one suffering. And I’m seething, seeing red, just . . . I’m enraged. But what still fucking gets me after all this time, twenty years later, Joe Sweeney barely touches the food on his plate, barely even fucking glances at it. I finish my kid portion in about a minute, look over. Joe Sweeney’s talking, laughing, drinking wine, making jokes, holding forth, basically doing everything except eating. Now and then he’ll move the food around, play with it, make a little pile, smush it with his fork, take a little bite or two, just for show. End of the meal, my mom says Finished, Joe? Oh yes, thank you, that was delicious, he says. And she takes his plate into the kitchen and scrapes his big mountain of spaghetti off into the garbage. God I wanted to grab him by his turtleneck and yell What the fuck’s wrong with you, Fuck-eye? That was my spaghetti.”
“Babe,” Cherie’s laughing, “you’re insane,” she says. “How do you figure?”
“Because it was just damn spaghetti.”
“All right, so apparently you don’t understand.”
“Hey man, I understand.”
“See? Vim’s the only one who gets me.”
I move up on the floor into a sitting position. “Kinda wish you would’ve done it though.”
“What?”
“Grabbed the old turtleneck and given the dude a good shaking. Told him to get in the wind. Who knows, you might’ve saved me some trouble that way.”
“How’s that?”
“Well for one thing I might never have been born.”
“Good point,” Bro says, nodding thoughtfully. After a minute he stands and in the same motion lobs the empty bottle, now without a label, and I reach up and catch it instinctively. “But if you were never born who’d be going to the store right now to get more beer?”