Eventually, this got to be too much. My parents asked Pa to stay at his own house a few days a week so that Gregg and I could play in the basement and my mom could clean it. Pa was hurt, and took this suggestion as a request to never step foot in our house again. He retreated to his home and became even more reclusive. Gregg and I would visit him, until one night he pulled us aside.
“You shouldn’t come here anymore,” he said, grim and serious.
I looked at Gregg, who asked Pa, “Well, why not?”
Pa leaned in close to our faces.
“Because your grandmother’s ghost haunts this house,” he said, “and you don’t want to make the ghost angry.”
In hindsight, I realize he was simply depressed and wanted to be left alone—but at the time, his warnings of my grandma’s ghost frightened me to my core, because I was a little kid and shit like that is scary. I dreaded the times my mother would send me to Pa’s house to borrow a tool or bring him food. I’d stand on his steps, shaking, praying the ghost wouldn’t get me. It would be nine years before I again stepped inside his house.
After my mother finished filling me in on my family’s history of various mental difficulties, I felt exposed and uncomfortable.
“Mom,” I asked her, “do you think I’m going to be okay?”
“Well,” she answered. “Pa got better.”
Pa emerged from his self-imposed isolation around 1992 a changed man. No one knew for sure what caused his rebirth, but something had happened inside that house that led him to a true revelation, in two parts: (1) He was old and going to die soon, and (2) he could therefore say and do whatever the fuck he wanted, anytime, anywhere.
One of my first experiences with the “new Pa” occurred while I was in sixth grade. I awoke early one Saturday to watch cartoons but was interrupted by furious knocking on our back door. I ran to open it, wearing only my underwear, and saw a frightened Pa frantically motioning for me to let him in. He leapt through the door before I even had it completely open, knocking me backward. His rambling was nonstop except for quick gasps for breath, punctuated by wild gestures toward the yard. I looked out the window and saw a skunk sitting on our lawn, completely motionless.
“Oh well, time to call animal control,” my mom said, picking up the phone.
Pa reached over and put the phone back onto the receiver.
“Oh to hell with that, get me a broom,” he replied in his trademark ornery style. “I’m going to kill it.” We all turned and stared at him in disbelief.
“What?” I asked.
“There’s a trick to killing a skunk,” he said. He put his hand on my shoulder and looked me in the eye. “You take a stick and bash it right on the tip of its nose. They have soft bones. Hit them in the right spot and their skulls cave in. You crush their brains.”
“No!” I shouted, locking eyes with Pa and shaking my head. I looked to my parents and grabbed at my hair in disbelief. “Are you just going to let him kill it?”
“Ahh to hell with you,” Pa shouted. “Get me the goddamned broom!” I looked back to my father, who nodded at me. I went and got the broom.
Pa was in his seventies, but when he got that broom in his hand he became as agile as a collegiate wrestler. He leapt off the porch, wielding the broom like a Filipino eskrima stick. He inched closer to the skunk and raised the broomstick in the air, allowing it to hover above the unsuspecting beast. With deadly precision, he brought it down on the animal’s nose. The poor creature collapsed onto its side. I screamed.
Pa picked the skunk up and walked toward me. In my panic I could only shout the word “No,” over and over again. Pa grinned and tossed the animal at me. I had no choice but to catch it.
At which point I realized it was dead and stuffed, albeit ultra-realistic.
Pa, it turned out, had been up since six in the morning, lurking in our yard. He was waiting for any signs that I was awake inside the house, for the sole purpose of seeing my reaction when he pretended to murder an animal in front of me.
“Really?” I asked my mom. “He got better? Because he seemed pretty out there.”
My mom laughed as she sipped her tea.
Pa refused to give up his Buick, though he had no right driving at his age. Besides swerving like a blacked-out drunk, he drove so slowly that the neighborhood kids would race his car, on foot, up our hill. We always won.
My father was filled with anxiety whenever he saw his dad behind the wheel. Gardening has always been one of the few activities that clears my dad’s mind in times of stress. During my childhood he would often come home from work brooding and quiet, only to head into our yard to tend to his tomato plants. After an hour or so, he’d emerge, covered in dirt but visibly more relaxed. Gardening is to my father what weird hippie yoga is to other people. For my father, Pa’s driving was definitely a cause for gardening.
One day, a kickball game I was embroiled in was interrupted when Pa’s car turned the corner and headed up the block. We cleared the way so he could pass. There was no need. Pa plowed directly into the back of a brand-new Jeep that was parked in front of the Tylers’ house. Audrey Tyler’s boyfriend flew out the door.
“My car! Shit!” he shouted, dismayed at the destruction wrought to his taillights.
“It’s okay,” Pa shouted from his window. “I’m Kenny’s father !” He then pointed in the direction of my dad, who’d been peacefully tending the flowers on our front lawn. Pa waved to my dad and drove away, leaving my father—who was clearly mortified, on his knees and holding gardening tools—alone to deal with the situation. I don’t think my father ever found as much peace in gardening after that day.
“You were too young to really remember him before Grammy died,” my mom explained. “I knew him when she was alive, and saw how hard it hit him.”
I looked up at my mom, who smiled.
“I think Pa was weird,” she continued. “But weird was better than sad.”
For Pa’s eightieth birthday, our family gathered for a party at my uncle’s house. It was rare for some members on my father’s side of the family to admit each other’s existence, let alone be in one place together. I was fifteen, and it was the first time in my life that I remember everyone acting polite and cordial to each other. Aunt Joan wasn’t talking as much as usual, which is to say she was only talking constantly. My one uncle didn’t tell his joke about Hitler being his favorite American. All seemed strangely right.
But no one was speaking to my brother. I would touch base with him, then go off to catch up with someone else, only to see him standing alone in a corner, looking confused, or eating chips while everyone ignored him. Gregg was as baffled as I was.
“Dude, did you say something to piss everyone off?” I asked.
“Chris, I know I sometimes say weird shit,” he said, “but I swear to God, I have no idea why nobody’s talking to me.”
Fearing that his social leprosy might rub off on me, I left him standing next to a cooler of my Aunt Karen’s famous homemade lemonade and got back to the party.
Eventually, Gregg was approached by Kathy, one of my female cousins (the sassy one in her early thirties who lived in Manhattan, making her “open-minded”).
“You know, Gregory, I’m fine with whatever you choose,” Kathy told him.
“Uh . . . okay, thanks,” Gregg replied.
“Not everyone here will support your decision,” she continued, “but I respect it. I may not understand it, but I respect that it’s how you want to live. And you’re going off to college next year, so now’s the time to figure it all out.”
“Umm . . . okay?” Gregg managed to squeak out.
I walked back over to Gregg.
“They think I’m gay,” he said.
I scanned the yard and saw many raised eyebrows thrown our way. Suspicions were being tossed toward Gregg with the subtlety of an early ’90s Jim Carrey movie.
“Why do they think that?” I asked. True, my brother was shy, and never had a girlfriend to bring
around, but that was rooted in his status as a skinny weirdo who was obsessed with pro wrestling and geography, not in any disinterest in ladies.
Gregg stared across the yard. Pa was seated in a folding chair, looking directly at us. Our grandfather laughed wildly and slapped his knee in obvious delight.
“I’m pretty sure,” Gregg sighed, “that Pa told everyone I’m gay.” As the evening wore on, people began quietly asking me how I felt about my brother’s sexual awakening.
“Well, the thing is,” I told one second cousin, “he’s not gay. I’m not really sure how that rumor started, but it’s not true.”
“Huh,” my cousin grunted, his Jersey mullet catching the wind. “I don’t know.... ”
My brother and Pa didn’t talk for years after that. It was only after Pa’s death that I got Gregg to admit that our grandfather’s prank was fucking hilarious.
“He was crazy,” I told my mother. “But at least he was crazy in a good way.”
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s not so bad. You just have to figure out how to be crazy in a good way, too.”
My greatest moment with Pa came when I was a sophomore in high school. It was that amazing time of year on the East Coast, those three or four days during fall when a cool breeze is already blowing but the sun is still shining, and the leaves have just about fully changed but none have fallen.
I was on the phone in my bedroom, kicking it to a husky freshman named Melissa (who would inevitably turn me down), when I smelled a smoky odor wafting in through my second-floor window. I stuck my head outside and looked around the neighborhood.
All seemed normal. In the middle of the street, Jerry Hubert was competing with Matt Kehoe and Nick Scagliozzi in a fierce game of wiffle ball. In the background, I could see Pa doing a strange dance in his backyard. Par for the course.
I continued flirting with the chunky apple of my eye. The smoky smell worsened, but I was in the zone, really working a good sophomore-in-high-school game, and didn’t pay it any attention until my mom charged up the stairs.
“Chris! Chris! Pa’s lawn is on fire! ” she screamed.
I looked out the window again to see that Pa’s dancing had taken a turn for the worse. The kids had stopped playing wiffle ball and were gathered near his fence.
“Go!” my mom said. “You have to help him!”
I couldn’t figure out what my mother meant. His lawn was on fire? That concept made, and still makes, very little sense to me.
“Is everything okay?” I heard Melissa’s distant voice ask. I brought the handset back to my ear and tried to sound as heroic as possible.
“I’ll call you back,” I said in a half-whisper. “I’ve got to go save my grandpa.” My voice didn’t sound even vaguely heroic, as it still hadn’t changed by the age of fifteen.
I flew down the steps and charged out the door. I headed straight across Mrs. Burns’s lawn and vaulted over Pa’s rusted chain-link fence in one leap.
Foot-high licks of flame were rising out of my grandfather’s grass. It had been a hot summer and much of the yard was dead and browned. Pa was trying to stamp the flames away. I needed to get him out of there.
“Pa, come on!” I shouted. “We gotta call the fire department.”
He looked me dead in the eye and replied, “Fuck you.”
My jaw dropped. Did my grandfather just say fuck me? I looked at him, breathing heavily, staring me down. He had. He had definitely said fuck me.
“I can handle this,” he continued, before turning around and stamping his foot into a three-foot-wide, one-foot-high swath of fire.
I glared at the old man.
“You gonna let him talk to you like that?” one of the neighborhood kids shouted from beyond the fence. I couldn’t see which kid yelled it as there was now a wall of smoke rising between us. My anger was quickly replaced by fear.
Pa’s lawn was shooting fire at us, and his stomping of the flames was only spreading fire to other patches of grass. Even worse, because Pa had developed kidney problems, the nerves in his feet were deadened. In horror, I watched as his trademark brown loafers caught flame as he brought them down into the inferno. The motion of raising his foot blew the flames out, at which point he’d stomp down again, igniting his shoe once more. Because he had no feeling in his feet he had no idea this was happening.
The flames reached the edge of his property and spread to bushes that had been placed there by landscapers who had evidently also sprayed them down with heavily flammable insecticides. One by one, the shrubs turned into six-foot-tall spires of flame. It was like being in the first circle of hell, or on the set of a Mexican game show. I shouted to the neighborhood kids to get Mrs. Burns out of her house before it caught fire.
The old man refused to leave. He’d decided that if his house was going to burn, he was going down with the ship. I had to put out the fire, and needed to find the tools to do so. Grandma’s ghost or not, I was going to have to go inside Pa’s house.
I ran through Pa’s back doorway and up the steps into the kitchen, where I froze in my tracks. It had been so long since I’d seen the place that I didn’t even remember the layout. There was something tomblike and sealed off from time about the room that gave me the creeps. I took a deep breath that stung in my chest. I didn’t know if it was from smoke inhalation or the lingering fear that my grandmother’s disembodied form was about to descend upon me.
I was walking through a bizarre time capsule of my own childhood. Some cardboard blocks painted to look like bricks lay scattered on the back porch, clearly untouched since the last time my brother and I had played with them. A clock I’d painted and given to my grandma when I was four hung above the kitchen table, exactly where she’d placed it the day I gave it to her. The hands were frozen in place.
My fear was replaced with profound sadness. Pa had been sitting in this house for years, just thinking about my grandma. He didn’t change anything about his life or his surroundings. He’d shared this home with his wife for over fifty years. She died. Some time later—who knows when?—that clock died. And clearly Pa spent the last portion of his life doing little more than sitting inside his house waiting to die as well.
An occasional car crash here. A skunk and/or homosexuality-driven prank there. They were very minor distractions at the end of a very long life. Nothing more.
The only thing that could be more depressing would be letting my grandpa die in a fire. I had to find a way to help him.
I ran to the basement looking for a washbasin or bucket—nothing. I sprinted back to the kitchen. Panic was setting in as I laid my eyes on my only hope to save the day.
Look, it’s not like I thought using a teapot to put out a raging fire was a great idea. It’s just that during a crisis, you’ve got to do something. So I filled Pa’s teapot to its brim—a whopping three to four cups’ worth of water. I ran back into the yard and dumped the water as if I was pouring tea—through the spout part. This produced a round of applause and laughter from the neighborhood kids standing on the other side of the fence, finding their afternoon entertainment in the prospect that I might be burned alive before their eyes. I ran back in and refilled the teapot, then ran back out, only to see Pa’s next-door neighbor spraying down the lawn with his hose.
I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Frazzled and exhausted, I walked over to Pa and placed my hand on the old man’s back. He was surely terrified by this whole thing, but I had come to his aid. I realized that my patting his back was the most physical contact, and the most intimate moment, we’d shared in almost a decade. I felt a profound sense of closeness with my grandfather, and I vowed that this strange, awful experience would serve as the impetus for my taking better care of the guy, being there for him more often.
He looked at me with what I thought was pride in his eyes. I figured he was experiencing the same sentiments. Then he spoke and brought me back down to Earth.
“This is all your fault!” he shouted, scorn filling his voice.
�
��What? How could this possibly be my fault?” I asked.
“I asked you to mow my lawn,” he shot back. “You didn’t, so I just lit it on fire!”
For the record, he had never asked me anything of the sort.
Pa died in 2003. His skunk was the only thing I asked to inherit. I still have it.
The fact is, Pa represents some of the genetic material that contributed to my very existence. It’s a frightening thought, but one that fills me with a great amount of hope as well.
One day, I’ll be old. Everyone will have died or left me, and I will be alone. Maybe depression will have a hold on me, or my grasp on reality will have slipped. I will sense that my day of reckoning is at hand, and I will undoubtedly be scared.
When that day comes, I pray that I will find strength. Not the strength to endure, and not the strength to come to grips with the life I’ve led and the mistakes I’ve made. I know myself well enough to know that such strength will be beyond me to summon.
Instead, I pray for the strength to reach for the stuffed skunk that is my grandfather’s legacy. For the strength to live my final days as he did—distracting myself from my ultimate fate with weirdness and fun.
I pray for the strength during my final days to strike the match that will set my whole world on fire, as my grandfather did before me.
Koozo
Koozo.
In my neighborhood, it was a name that could only be spoken in whispers.1
I first met the man known as Koozo when he climbed out of a sewer pipe at the bottom of my street wearing mesh shorts and no underwear. I had been playing kickball with a few other kids when we saw him emerge from the depths to approach us.
A Bad Idea I'm About to Do Page 3
