Knuckleheads

by Jeff Kass

  It’s bad enough to hear the voice of my father’s lover leave him a message while I’m trying to bang a woman I’m not in love with because she’s not my brother’s wife who I am in love with—who I’ve always been in love with since the first time I saw her running the 400-meter hurdles back in high school—but it’s worse, way worse, when the message spews frothy cheese like I owe you a back massage. Face it, nobody wants to imagine his father as one half of a horny adolescent couple so ashamed of its desires it has to mask them with the pretense of back rubs. The squawking-bird voice embedding itself in my father’s apartment left me spitting breast from my mouth and sitting rigid on the couch because I realized my dad caused my mother a quantity of misery so gargantuan I can hardly talk to her for fear of disappointing her with all I’ve never lived up to, and the thing is—is this what it was all for?

  Some pathetic slitbag still playing the same act that probably worked twice, or maybe three times prior to the middle school pool party season when everyone started trying it and there was an outbreak of backrubs at every encounter between the sexes, and then, as rapidly as acne, the movement began to reek of its own self-conscious stink?

  All of which is to say I’m sorry for forgetting the name of the woman whose nipple I spit out, and for walking her so quickly back to the dance club she had to hold her heels in one hand and half-jog to catch up with me, but the fact is when I heard the shrill and candied chirp of my father’s lover, I finished up quick—one final and shameful spurt—and had to evacuate the brownstone immediately because I knew it was a wrong thing, a profanity against nature for Naomi to be with my brother when I loved her more than he did.

  Here’s one truth: my father, who at sixty-seven continues to dye his hair with a paste as thick as shoe-polish and wear a diamond stud in his left ear, is nevertheless heroic. He left my mother but on some level I understand it. She’s needy and nerdy and has an ornithological proclivity to find out everything she can about penguins even if she doesn’t like sleeping with a creepy stuffed one. He’s a big strong guy with big strong hands and his voice is deep and musical enough to make people believe in the magic of his shapes and arrows and his laugh is the kind of laugh that restaurants refer to as ambiance.

  Yet my mother, for all her faults, is a sturdy woman grounded in a kind of natural and beautiful earthiness. In that way, she’s like Naomi: like the naked elemental world somehow pushed up from its mud and gave her the gift of understanding its primordial dance. I’m in love with that quality. It feels both rare and brimming with redemption, as if it offers a kind of daily rebirth. All of which is to say my mom is capable of much more than cheeseball massages. Much more truth and much more spirit and maybe my dad just got overwhelmed and couldn’t handle something older and deeper and more layered than his fancy furniture. Which also means I can no longer have random sex with women I don’t love, because look at my father. Look at him with his miserable teenage-minded girlfriend trying sadly to be sexy. What if I have a chance at the kind of love that’s pure unfiltered fuel, a real chance with a gorgeous fire-cracker earth-woman, and what if I just let that chance drift past me and never dare reach for its flame?

  Here’s another truth: I love my brother. We spent many hours delivering newspapers in the late and moribund light of winter afternoons, and he carried the larger canvas sack. Two gothic-looking houses stood at the end of our route a quarter-mile past any of the others and we had to climb two steep hills to reach them. Many days I was tired and cold and tempted to throw the last couple papers down the sewer, but my brother would tell me to take it easy for a few minutes, and he’d walk alone to those last two houses and I’d sit on the curb by the sewer-grate and wait for him and I loved that interval of rest, the frigid air on my cheeks, the cars rushing past, the thin, bare branches of trees waving like tentacles. I’d see him marching back to me with his upright and purposeful gait and I’d love him and stand up and march home with him and I’ll walk with him on the beach every night if he wants me to, and I’ll listen to him splash the waves with his tirades and I’ll even nod in sympathy on occasion, but, truthfully, he must be suffering. If he really loved Naomi, why would he spend so much time in the musty murk of his basement typing blog-entries destined to be read by no one?

  Why don’t they have any children?

  Why does he do nothing to save their house from dying?

  Why, after dinner each night, does he walk in one direction and she run in the other, the distance between them increasing with each step?

  The voice on my father’s answering machine is a whip. Outside, a siren sounds from a fire-truck blocks away and it’s probably not symbolic but it reminds me of my responsibility to get moving. After dropping the rapidly dressing woman back at the dance club, I return to my ridiculous apartment in condo-town, pack a bag and toss it in my car—it’s a hybrid, thank you, Old Goat, don’t fucking go crazy because I actually utilize the ingenuity of the automobile industry to go places—and then I head east around the bottom of the lake for a slow and agonizing two hours, and then turn north toward Naomi.

  When I knock on their door, gently, so as to avoid causing the house to topple over the bluff, my brother and his wife are surprised to see me. “I had a dream,” I say, “a vision of your house tumbling down the hillside, rolling end-over-end like a wooden avalanche with dilapidated roof shingles, and finally it crashed against the beach and broke into a billion pieces and a lot of those pieces killed reptiles and birds and spread particulate of lead paint through the sand and the debris engendered a murderous effect for decades. Let me live here with you guys. Let me stay here and fix things. Give me six months. I’ll shore up the foundation, re-joist the walls and floors, plant some beach-grass—native species, of course—to slow the erosion of the cliff. Give me six months. I’ll give your house another fifty years.”

  Old Goat looks like he wants to kill me for wasting gasoline driving to his dying house and for imagining the possibility that it doesn’t actually have to fall down, that it’s thinkable to stave off the twin specter of ecological and domestic disaster, and Naomi, beautiful short Naomi, arches a beautiful, lush eyebrow, but, at last, they nod, more or less in unison, and I’m in.

  Now Naomi holds a damp blouse to the breeze so it fills like an airport windsock and she is standing on the side of the porch that’s still not too dangerous to stand on—the boards are only partially rotted—and she is not drying the shirt in the dryer in the basement because that is an appliance that no longer functions and, even if it did work, it would use electricity, and she didn’t pin it to the clothesline because there’s no room left and the blouse is of a turquoise and shimmering substance and I imagine her thinking how in the morning she will mount her five-speed bicycle and soldier off to the kindergarten with renewed determination to save a generation of five-year-olds from the wiles of Spongebob and touch-phones and it seems to me it’s not the wind but her spirit filling the contours of the blouse, puffing it, rippling it in the sun.

  Naomi toasts marshmallows around a fire-pit in the yard by the front door and Old Goat doesn’t eat marshmallows because marshmallows can only be purchased in plastic bags but Naomi likes them and every once in a while she’ll find a stick of appropriate length, pierce a marshmallow through its gut as if she’s stabbing a vampire’s heart, and then she’ll wave it over the hot coals and hold it there long enough for the sides to crisp.

  “If they catch fire, they remind me of the Olympic Torch,” she tells me. “I don’t exactly get off on that, but there’s a thrill there, I won’t deny it. “

  Naomi helps me carry two-by-fours while Old Goat is rummaging for balloons on the beach. Naomi dismembers bananas in a blender and hands me a Phillips-head screwdriver and an adjustable wrench. At the market, she catches lemons when I lob them to her. When she naps on the side of the porch she can still nap on, her breasts rise and fall like buoys on the lake. She dances in the kitchen, her legs waving like sea-grass, and when the radio plays Belinda Car
lisle, she tosses the thick mane of her hair and says, “When I was little, I wanted to be a Go-Go. Sometimes I still harbor that ambition.”

  “What’s a Go-Go?” asks Old Goat.

  One Sunday afternoon, after I tire of watching Old Goat flail at his keyboard, I tiptoe up the ancient, claustrophobic stairs and find Naomi taping drawings made by her students to her refrigerator. She bites her lip as she presses the tape to the corners until the pictures stick. Later, she escorts me to the ice cream parlor near a park that has an abandoned railroad track running through it. She orders what I order, two scoops of Michigan Cherry. Old Goat remains at home blogging. He doesn’t eat ice cream because of something about cows and methane and greenhouse gases.

  In the morning, showered and fresh for work in a flowered-print dress that drapes nearly to her ankles, a crumb of toast on her lips, Naomi kisses her husband’s beard and waves and winks at me. “By the time you get home this afternoon,” I tell her, “it will be safe to stand on both sides of the porch.”

  Over the course of seven months, I have sunk all my money into this house, every dollar I got from the sale of my characterless condo. The edifice is now durable. It will stand for another half-century. There is really nothing more for me to do, but when I leave I will have nowhere to live and no job. I don’t often think about the bleakness of those prospects. Neither Old Goat nor Naomi brings up my future. She is grateful I saved her domicile. The Mylar Man is consumed with balloons.

  Now, with no more work to do, I walk the beach every night with him and help gather garbage. We don’t bring any bags down because there are no plastic bags in the house except on the rare occasions Naomi buys marshmallows and we are sure to find a number of bags while we’re down there anyway, or at least we’ll find a mylar balloon we can rip a hole in and turn into a bag. We walk in one direction. Naomi runs in the other. I turn around periodically and see if I can spot her in the distance.

  “Look at this one,” the Mylar Man says.

  It’s a Happy Birthday balloon, a balloon with the faded images of other balloons on it, like a meta-balloon. The Mylar Man says again what I have heard him say many times: “Happy Death Day is more like it.”

  I have heard all the Mylar Man’s stories and statistics on numerous occasions, how an elementary school class gathered over 500 balloons in just one half-hour of combing through the sand on the Jersey shore; how in late 2006 a Celebration 2000 balloon was found still intact on a beach in Cape Cod; how approximately 51,000 balloons are collected annually from he shores of Lake Michigan. “Listen,” he tells me. “If you studied the chemical composition of this beach, you would find traces of plastic in every single grain of sand. Every single one.”

  Whether what my brother says is true or not, I have options. I don’t have to keep picking up garbage. I don’t have to feel guilt. My arms, back and hands have been transformed by all the work on the house. I am steel and strong. There is no one else on this beach except for Naomi who is far away and growing farther with each step. I can plaster one of these balloons across Old Goat’s nose and mouth and suffocate him, twist the ribbon around his neck and pull. I can shove him face-down into the lake and hold him underwater until his breath stops bubbling. There are dunes where I can bury him and he won’t be found for decades. Unlike mylar, he would decompose. After a suitable period of mourning, Naomi and I could settle down in the newly reconditioned house.

  But my brother is already a martyr in his own mind and I won’t give him the satisfaction of becoming a public one. Naomi looks often at the new floorboards, the window-screens, the sturdy rails on her porch, and the day is nearing when she will no longer kiss her husband in the mornings when she leaves the house. She will wave and wink at me still, and there will be a day when her leaving will be my leaving too. The Old Goat can remain, in a house that will give him a good many more years as he scours the beach. We will not feel guilty when we are gone. This day is near. Already Naomi walks close to me in the narrow kitchen, brushes her hips against mine, reaches out to touch my sleeve. There is a tide drifting our skins toward each other. I must be patient and float with the rhythms of the lake. It is nearly unbearable but I must not let my desire grow into a storm that overwhelms. I must be a calm body, a tide that waits. When our skins finally meet, we will not separate.

  There is a story about mylar balloons I have been waiting to tell my brother. I have known it for a long time. It’s a story about how administrators in Grand Central Station grew frustrated about the horde of mylars that had been loosed from the hands of kids in the lobby and journeyed to the ceiling. How the balloons lingered for months, congregated into a veritable convention, obscuring the magnificent starscape that had been painted when the building was first erected. The administrators didn’t know how to get the balloons down and contacted some spiritual doppelgangers of my brother, a couple guys who nearly wrecked their marriages when they became obsessed with rescuing plastic bags—“bag-snatching” they called it—from tree-branches. Guys who spent entire weekends combing Greenwich Village with twelve-foot-long aluminum dowels with coat-hooks duct-taped to the ends so they could collect thousands of bags that had once held cosmetics or take-out. “Want to know what these guys came up with?” I ask. “Want to know how they finally got the balloons down?”

  The Mylar Man is interested. He tugs shreds of red latex from the sand, a balloon remnant that’s been torn to sharp oblong triangles, like dragon fangs. He looks at me. “How’d they do it?” he says.

  I wait. The sun is setting over the lake in a swirl of blues, salmons and oranges. I understand what my brother’s trying to save. He is beautiful and altruistic and a treasure, but nevertheless a lunatic. Ahead of us is the lighthouse, striped like a barber’s pole. Because there have been a lot of balloons today, a lot of digging and clawing, we won’t reach it tonight. Soon, we’ll reverse course and head back home. Naomi will also turn around and we will journey toward each other. She will become larger and larger as we approach, but she’ll still be small, never taller than five feet.

  “They clumped a group of other balloons together, a half-dozen or so. Tied the clump to a long string like a giant kite. Then they slathered each balloon with industrial adhesives, buttered their surfaces sticky and sent them to the ceiling. Used the gummy clump like a monstrous fishing rod and, one by one, caught the renegade balloons and pulled them down.”

  “That’s genius,” my brother says. “Like a family setting out to recapture its prodigal sons and return them to the fold. I gotta meet these guys.”

  My brother never wants to meet anyone.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” he tells me as he squints toward the vanishing sun. “I’ve enjoyed these walks with you.”

  I’m tempted to pick up a rock and stone him with it. He is a gorgeous Poseidon, shirtless and rippled with the sunset behind him and I don’t want to listen to his rants anymore and I don’t want him to appreciate me. I am a lousy brother. The temptation to pick up a rock is palpable, quivering. The sound against his temple would be a gift, an inheritance. I want it. I reach downward into the sand. Dig with my fingers and encounter some latex. Blue with a yellow ribbon. I claw it from the beach. Give it to the Mylar Man. He bags it.

  Tonight Naomi will not run. Last night, she twisted her ankle. A misstep in the sand, a skitter off an upturned rock. She limped back and iced it for twenty minutes with the cubes leaking through a cloth napkin. She will ice the ankle again tonight instead of running. She is a wounded woman and I have volunteered to keep her company. Old Goat is on the beach. We are watching him from the rebuilt porch as he works his way toward the lighthouse. He is a human combine reaping a harvest of latex and mylar. I imagine he is looking up periodically, missing me, how there is no one tonight for him to show-and-tell.

  Naomi sits on a wicker chair, her ankle propped on a throw pillow on a matching chair two feet away. She leans over with a napkin full of ice cubes and applies it to the swelling. The ice melts and leaks in streams dow
n her leg and she fidgets and twists and grimaces and tries to refold napkin corners to contain the leaking. The Mylar Man is far down the beach now, barely visible, a slowly moving dot, smaller, smaller, gone.

  “I can’t bear to watch him,” Naomi says. “That’s why I run in the opposite direction.”

  “Pretty pathetic, isn’t he?” I say, and I wonder if I’ve offended her. She forgets about fussing with the napkin, lets the water stream across her shin. She spends a long minute gazing at the beach, as if she can still see her husband, even though she can’t.

  “You’re making a joke,” she says. “You’re saying his obsession is ridiculous, that he lacks dignity. But he is pathetic. It’s sad. He can’t clean the whole planet. He can’t even clean this stretch of beach.”

  Naomi’s back curves as she presses the leaking ice to her ankle, and all the fire has gone out of her shoulders. She is uncomfortable, twisting more and fidgeting. What she’s telling me is that my brother is also too big of a beach to clean. Too deep a wound. She can’t dive into it anymore, the canyon of his hurt, and she can’t save him and she’s ready to give up. She wants someone who will take on tasks that aren’t hopeless. A man who can save a home.

  I point my finger upward and draw a heart in the air.

  She shakes her head, looks out at the beach, then turns back toward me.

  A ribbon of hair falls across her face and scratches her cheek. She can’t do anything about it because her hands are holding the ice, and I reach toward her. I lift the strand and when she looks at me her eyes are full. The sun is a ripe blaze. We know how long her husband will be gone, two hours at least.