TODD

Last night I watched a movie called I’ll Take Sweden with Bob Hope and then one called Boeing Boeing with Tony Curtis. They were both terrible.

Audrey got sick again and I cleaned it up, but you can still see the spot. I don’t know what’s wrong with her.

I tried calling my Dad by using Information in these cities: Spokane, Seattle, Olympia, Tacoma, Yakima, Walla Walla, Sacramento, Redding, Chico, Eureka, Santa Rosa, Yuba City, Crescent City, Denver, Durango, Boulder, Buena Vista, Fort Collins, Greeley, Grand Junction, Glenwood Springs, Steamboat Springs, Pagosa Springs. A lot of them I found in an atlas of his called These United States. If you call the regular operator and give the city and state, they’ll give you the area code.

I have a map where I put a pin in the city after I call.

When my father was still here, one of the things he liked to do was go to Yankee and Met games. We went like twice a year. He went to the World Series in 1986, when the Mets played the Red Sox, and saw the ball go through Bill Buckner’s legs. I don’t know how he got tickets. He had friends. He said he wanted to take me, but I was only four and my mother thought I was too young. She said she didn’t think I would have even remembered going. I would have remembered.

He threw the ball around with me a lot. When he threw me ground balls, he called me Luis, after Luis Aparicio, a player he liked when he was a kid. I looked him up in Bill James’s Baseball Abstract. He’s in the Hall of Fame.

I called the police again and hung up again. I’m never going to do anything with that. I might as well just stop.

My mom came back at one in the morning from her date with Bruno. I don’t know how long the concert was supposed to go, but I doubt it was that long.

Last night I had a dream so bad I don’t even want to talk about it.

Toward the end, Sister Justine came into it. Sister Justine last year was one of the ones who’d watch us during Mass to make sure we were singing the songs right. Sometimes kids would make up their own words to try and crack you up. Sisters hate that.

Sometimes you really didn’t know the words, though, and you didn’t bother reading along in the Missalettes. She came down the row once and grabbed me by the elbow, and I didn’t even know what I did wrong. I was singing, “‘Oh, my soul, praise Him, for He is our health and salvation. Christ the high priest bids us all join in His feast, victims with Him on the altar,’” and I thought those were the right words. She scared me.

At the end of the day on Monday, she made us all keep our seats and she announced that Todd Muhlberg was going to sing a hymn the right way for us and we were all going to listen to the right way before we went home. She kept the class after, because I didn’t know the words. This made me even more popular.

She made me go up to the front of the room. She picked a different song and she didn’t let me use the Missalette. I don’t know why she picked a different song. Maybe she figured I might have practiced the other one.

Then, when she had me up there, she made me wait until there was perfect silence.

I remember standing there with my hands folded, everybody looking at me, everybody ready to go. Their schoolbags were all on their desks.

She made me sing the whole thing. She made me repeat one part of it, because I messed it up. And the whole time I was singing I was looking at her, and here’s what I was thinking: I was thinking, You’re not making me a better person; you’re making me a worse person. I felt better, thinking that. What she made me sing still goes through my head at weird times:

For the sheep the Lamb has bled,

sinless, in the sinner’s stead.

Christ the Lord is risen on high.

Now He lives, no more to die.