I’ve been staying up pretty late typing away and my mom says she’s having a hard enough time falling asleep without hearing my clackity-clack at one in the morning.
“And why don’t you go to bed already and what is it you’re writing anyway? War and Peace?”
I shrug and pull the page out of the typewriter and shove it in my desk drawer because I really don’t want her to read it, especially the stuff where I talk about her being so sad and crying.
“What’s wrong? You don’t want me to read it?”
“I’d rather you didn’t,” I say.
“Why not? Are there some things in there you don’t want me to know?” I shrug. Then she looks at the stack of all my typed pages on my desk and she puts her hand on it as if she’s going to pick up the first page and read it anyway, even though I told her I didn’t want her to.
“Has your father read it?”
“No,” I tell her.
“OK, I understand,” she says. I know her feelings are hurt, and I wish I could let her read some of the pages, but I know if she reads the wrong section she’ll get upset and I don’t want to add to the sadness.
One day, when she got home from work, she came into my room again, only this time she was carrying a bunch of books she thinks I need to read.
“If you’re going to be a writer, you might want to read these. They’re some of my favorites and they all happen to be Irish Americans.”
I nod and hope she isn’t really expecting me to read all these books because they look really hard and boring.
She left the stack of books on my desk and went down to the kitchen to make dinner. I looked at the books and never heard of any of them except The Old Man and the Sea because I saw some of that movie one night when there was nothing else to watch on TV. The other books were The Great Gatsby by a guy named Fitzgerald—which is actually my dad’s mother’s maiden name and my middle name, so maybe I’ll look at that one—and the complete works of Eugene O’Neill. Looking at the titles, the O’Neill books look really boring except maybe The Hairy Ape. But Long Day’s Journey into Night sounds like a tagline for the most boring story ever told.
I don’t know if I mentioned this but I’m not really much of a reader and it drives my parents crazy because both of them read all the time and they can’t understand why I don’t just sit with them on the couch or on our towel at the beach and disappear into a good book. What can I say? I’d rather play than disappear.
When I come down for dinner, it’s just me and my mom because who the hell knows where Tommy is and my dad’s working. She knows if it’s just the two of us she doesn’t have to make a whole big meal, so it’s a tuna fish sandwich for her and liverwurst and baloney for me.
“I still don’t understand how you and your father can eat that crap,” she says. “That’s not even meat. I don’t know what it is.”
I tell her we eat it because it’s delicious. “Like the dirty water hot dogs we get in the city,” I say.
“You’re your father’s son,” she says, and I can see the sadness coming into her eyes when she says that, so I quickly change the subject.
“Where’s Tommy?” I ask.
“Who knows?” she says, and this makes her sadder and madder than she’s already been, and I realize that was a stupid thing to ask, so I don’t say anything else. I just focus on my liverwurst and baloney sandwich.
I guess now would be a good time to tell you more about my brother Tommy. You see, it wasn’t always so bad between him and my parents. I mean, he used to be their favorite. He was the firstborn son and in an Irish house, that child holds a special place, so he does—or at least that’s what I overheard Pop McSweeney say once. But now God’s gift is always in trouble, so he is. And it all started when he decided to leave Chaminade.
Chaminade is an all-boys Catholic high school that Tommy went to for his freshman and sophomore years, but then left to join his neighborhood friends at the public school. The main reason Tommy went to Chaminade was to play baseball because he used to think he was gonna be some kinda big baseball star and play in the majors, but when he got there something like 120 kids tried out for the freshman team and Tommy didn’t make the cut because he was a late bloomer and hadn’t really hit puberty by then, so he was still pretty short and skinny. But Tommy’s one of those kids that does the thing he says he’s gonna do and he said he was gonna be a baseball star so he was gonna do whatever it took to make that happen. My dad jokes that the first word that little baby Tommy ever said was “determined.” He said it after he climbed up and outta his crib for the first time—or so the story goes. So, Tommy worked out that whole summer before tenth grade to make the JV team.
“Ass up, head down, Tommy!” That’s what my dad would tell him. I think that means work hard and don’t think too much about it. But Tommy would get discouraged sometimes because even with all the hard work, he wasn’t getting any bigger.
“Don’t worry about that. Just like the hair on your balls, it’s gonna come. It’s just gonna come a little later for you than the other kids. It’s the Hibernian Curve,” my dad would tell him. I’m not quite sure what the Hibernian Curve is, but it seems to be connected to Irish kids and when they grow hair on their balls.
My dad and Tommy were best friends that summer, lifting weights and going jogging and watching Yankee games in the backyard. My dad would take the small black-and-white TV from his bedroom and run an extension cord out the kitchen window so he and Tommy could watch the game while my dad smoked his cigar as they discussed every play. Then over the winter, Tommy finally got his growth spurt and got really big and strong, and when spring came he made the JV and my dad was so proud.
“What did I tell you Tommy Boy, hard work pays off. Just put in the work and good things will come,” my dad told him.
But then in the third game Tommy broke his arm sliding into home and had to sit out the rest of the season and he got really depressed and decided he hates Chaminade and at the end of the school year he told my parents he wanted to leave so he could go to the public school in town with all his buddies. My dad hates Tommy’s dopey friends, and he was afraid that if he went to the public school with them, they were going to be a bad influence on him.
“Your dopey friends are morons and idiots and if you hang out with morons and idiots you become a moron and an idiot.”
Tommy didn’t care. He was done with Chaminade and that broke my parents’ hearts because they really wanted Tommy to graduate from there so he could get into a good college because neither one of them went to college and he would have been the first in our family with a college degree but now Tommy seems to have turned into a moron and idiot just like his friends and none of those dopes are going to college and you’re only as good as the company you keep and what the hell are you going to do with your life now.