In the car going to Mass one day, my mom wants to know if I started reading any of the books she got me. I lie. I tell her I started The Old Man and the Sea because that’s the only title I can remember. I ask her about her fight with dad and she lies and says it was nothing. So, I guess we’re even. Two liars on their way to church.
A few weeks earlier, Tommy told me he thought my mom and dad might get a divorce. Of course, I blamed it on him for being such a jerk to both of them lately, but I didn’t say that out loud because he would have kicked my ass. I don’t know any divorced people even though most of my friends’ parents seem to be fighting all the time. But we’re all Catholic and Catholics don’t get divorced and that’s why my mom and dad won’t split up either. I hope.
It’s just me and my mom going to Mass this morning because my dad is working and won’t be home until after dinner and Tommy’s sleeping one off, not that he goes to church anymore, either with or without us. We park behind the church near the stone grotto eggshell with the giant statue of the Virgin Mary which is where you take your picture after your First Holy Communion and your Confirmation, which I won’t have to deal with until next year but I’m already dreading it because it’s a ton of extra schoolwork and studying and it’s all about God and Jesus and I hate to admit it, but that stuff is really boring and just makes you feel lousy about yourself because you can’t possibly live up to the standards of all the saints.
The parking lot at the church also serves as the playground for my school but the Virgin Mother’s eggshell is off limits. If you’re playing kickball during recess and someone like T-Mac kicks the ball over everyone’s head and it lands all the way next to the Blessed Mother, you better not think of getting it yourself because if you do, you’re going to the Bull’s office. But if you’re in a tight game and it’s almost the end of the lunch break and your team needs another at bat, you might risk it and make a mad dash to grab the ball, saying a quick prayer as you pass the Blessed Mother’s statue that one of the lunch ladies doesn’t see you.
But on a Sunday, you can go right up to the statue and take as much time as you want. You can even touch her feet if you want to—somebody once put nail polish on her toes—but there’s no thrill in approaching the Mother of God if there isn’t the threat of being sent to the Bull’s, so me and my mom just walk past her with a quick genuflection on our way into Mass.
There is a giant old tree next to the side steps of the church. I have no idea what kind of tree it is. I just know it’s not a maple, but like a maple, it has giant roots. My mom asks me if I remember the rat who lived under the tree and how we used to see him running along the roots and then disappear down into a hole in the wall of the church and how she turned that into my favorite bedtime story.
“‘Matt Fat the Water Rat?’ Of course I remember,” I say. “Do you remember I brought him my Tonka dump truck so that he could have a set of wheels?” I ask her. Of course she remembers because she’s like me—she remembers everything.
I gave Matt Fat the Water Rat my toy truck because I read this book in school—one that I actually liked—called Runaway Ralph about a mouse that could ride a toy motorcycle. So, because of this Runaway Ralph and his toy motorcycle, I wanted to leave something for Matt Fat the Water Rat, but since he was a pretty big fat rat and not a cute little mouse, I knew my matchbox cars would be too small for him, so one day we left my old Tonka truck under the big tree for Matt instead.
When we told my dad about the rat and the Tonka truck, he told the Monsignor, who asked my dad if the Father’s Club would help get rid of the rat. The Father’s Club is a group of dads who help out doing jobs around the school and church, like painting classrooms, fixing broken desks and tables, and I guess, thanks to my dad, killing rats. My dad actually started the Father’s Club a few years ago because our school had a Mother’s Club that did all sorts of charity events for the school like bake sales and white elephant sales where people sold their old junk so they could use the money to help the school and my dad thought the fathers should help out as well. So now, anytime there’s a job that the Monsignor needs done, he calls my dad, including “taking out” Matt Fat the Water Rat.
When the deed was done, I was so upset I didn’t talk to my dad for almost two weeks. Looking back on it, it woulda been so easy for him to have killed Matt Fat and hide it from me and have my mom tell me a bedtime story about how Matt Fat took the Tonka truck on a cross-country journey to be reunited with his brothers or some bullshit like that and I would have believed it because I was a little kid who still believed that rats could drive toy trucks. But no, that’s not what happened. What happened was my dad took me with him to run some errands the next day.
When you’re little, you like running errands with your dad, because if you’re going up to the stores, you’re going to walk by Carvel and nine times out of ten, your dad is going to ask if you want some ice cream, so that’s why I always agreed to go with him to run some errands. But on this day, our first and only stop was to Henry’s Hardware which also happens to be next door to Buzzy’s Deli, so I thought we would at least go get some Ring Dings or some Yodels or a Hostess Coffee Cake if he said no to the ice cream but that didn’t happen. I guess he was too focused on the job at hand.
Henry and Buzzy were two old German guys from the early days of the neighborhood when the Lutheran church would be packed to the gills and “those were the days, weren’t they Buzzy?” Before “the flood gates from Brooklyn and Queens opened, and the wave of Irish and Italians and their big families showed up.” My dad loves these two old timers because my dad loves old guys who tell old stories about the olden days even if they always mention how all the Catholic families like ours who came from the city ruined the place.
“Why they got ten kids if they got no farm? It doesn’t make no sense. If you had a farm, you’d need those hands to work it. Otherwise, I don’t understand why you’d want the ten and eleven kids in one house,” Henry says.
Anytime we go into Buzzy’s, he starts going into his stories about when he stormed the beach at Normandy on D-Day. My dad will be in the middle of ordering a roast beef sandwich and Buzzy will decide that’s a good time to show you his war wounds.
“I had just jumped off the Higgins boat, up to my waist in the water when this Nazi machine gun ripped my guts apart.”
Buzzy pulls up his shirt and shows us his stomach which has the nastiest scars you’ve ever seen. He points to where the five bullets entered his belly and the big scar that the medics left when they cut him open and pulled out four of the bullets.
“They left one in for good luck,” Buzzy laughs.
“Hey Buzz,” my dad says, “maybe you show us the scars when we’re in here buying a six pack but not after I just ordered a roast beef sandwich.” Buzzy laughs again, even though the two of them have had this same conversation a hundred times before. My dad says Buzzy always tells that story to remind people that not all Germans were Nazis.
The other old German guy, Henry, is even older than Buzzy and like Buzzy, he tells the same stories every time we go into his hardware store.
“Have I ever told you about how the Green Acres Mall used to be the Curtiss Airfield and how Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart used to fly out of there?”
“I don’t think so,” my dad says, and I look at my dad like he’s lost his mind because we’ve heard this story a million times.
“When I was a kid, we used to sit at the end of the runway in the high grass and watch as the planes took off and landed. We’d lie on our backs and those planes were so close to us we could wave at the pilots, and they’d wave back. Even Charlie Lindbergh. It was incredible. And then they turn it into a goddamn shopping mall? Dummkopfs.”
I love the word “dummkopf” because it sounds exactly like what it means. Buzzy calls everyone a dummkopf who comes up to his counter and hasn’t already decided what they want to order.
“What the hell have you been thinking about for the last ten minutes, you dummkopf? You think I got all day for you to make up your mind. Next!”
If Buzzy called you a dummkopf and you didn’t know what it meant, you would still know he was calling you an idiot because that’s what it sounds like. It’s like stooge. If you’re called a stooge, you know that’s not a good thing even if you never heard the word before. Schmuck, schlemiel, and schmegegge are all good ones too, but skeeve is probably my favorite. It means dirtbag, only worse. If you heard someone called a skeeve, you would know it means they’re probably not so clean and neat. Right? Even the way it feels in your mouth when you say it—skeeve—tells you what it is. We got a family around the block we call the Skeevy O’Leavys and the name really fits because they have eight kids and each one is dirtier than the next. I don’t need to tell you what the two old Lutherans thought of them when they moved into the neighborhood.
My dad then tells Henry a story he’s told him a million times before, but Henry doesn’t seem to remember either. This must be a thing old guys do, tell each other the same stories over and over again. I could understand if you tell your favorite story to a guy you just met but these guys seem to do it every single time they see one another.
“When I was a kid,” my dad says, “We did the same thing, only at LaGuardia, when that was still a sleepy little airport. I went to school with a kid who moved to Astoria and in the summer we’d ride our bikes from his house to go fishing in the streams that used to run through the marsh over there and on our way home we’d hide in the bushes at the end of the runway and you’d lie on your back and watch these massive planes take off and land right over you. And Henry, let me ask you, as a little kid, was there anything more exciting than that?”
Henry doesn’t answer him. He just nods with a smile on his face. And my dad nods with a smile on his face too. Then they both stand silently, just nodding and staring off into space, smiling. I guess that’s why old guys like to tell these old childhood stories over and over again—it makes them smile.
Anyway, my dad tells Henry about Matt Fat the Water Rat and how the Monsignor wants the rat “taken care of.” Henry nods, then goes behind the counter and comes back with five giant mousetraps.
“These will take care of your rat, no problem,” he says. “But forget about using a piece of cheese like in the cartoons. What you do is you put some peanut butter in there. The rat loves the peanut butter. The mouse loves the cheese. But you also got to make sure you put down a lot of newspaper. Newspaper all over the floor and even try to tape some to the walls. Here, I’ll give you some masking tape for that too. You need all this newspaper because when the rat goes to eat the peanut butter, this trap comes down so hard it will cut him in half so be careful of yourself when you set it up. You’re not careful and you could lose a finger. The newspaper is for the mess so don’t chintz on the newspaper because you don’t want to have to scrub all that rat blood and guts off your Monsignor’s walls.”
On the way home, the rat traps are sitting in the passenger seat next to my dad because I refused to sit up front with him and the traps that will cut Matt Fat in half and spray his blood all over the walls. Instead, I jumped into the back of our Volkswagen so I wouldn’t have to look at my dad, the rat killer. We had a VW Bug back then, and behind the back seat was this little cozy nook that I could squeeze into. So that’s where I tucked myself and cried the whole way home.
When we parked at the house, I refused to come out, so my dad left me there. He kept the windows open so I could breathe but it still got too hot, and I eventually had to get out and do my crying in the backyard.
Every Sunday after that I would look for Matt Fat the Water Rat when we walked along the side of the church to Mass, but I never saw him again. Thanks, Dad.