No Sad Songs

by Frank Morelli

  There’s a couple about my age sitting on the same bench seat of a booth near the counter. She makes creepy little cooing noises—like a wacked out pigeon with a speech impediment—and feeds him pieces of pizza crust like I’d do to the seagulls in Wildwood, NJ. He seems to like it. Mr. Perdomo does not. He leans on his broom and stares at them over the register. He catches me watching him and passes along his most solemn and judgmental nod.

  “Gabey-boy!” he says. “I was starting to think you and Johnny don’t like my pizza no more. I never see you guys.”

  “The pizza’s great,” I tell him. “It’s the rest of my life that’s kind of shitty.” Perdomo looks at me weird and I realize all this acting like an adult is making me forget how to talk to them as a kid. “I mean crappy, sir. That’s a little better.”

  “Not much,” he says. “But I’ll take it.” He ruffles the front of my hair like he’s done since I was maybe three years old. Then there’s another weird look, but this is one I recognize. It’s pity. The eyes. The soft tones. The dramatic silence. Ugh. The same crud I get at school. “So, son,” he says in the voice of a guidance counselor, “how ya holding up? Ya know, if you need me for anything you can always ask, cause I know how hard it is to—”

  “Things are good,” I say before he can make this scene any more grotesque. I’m lying but I don’t need Perdomo thinking I’m a charity case too. I decide to lay it on extra thick. “My Uncle Nick and I, we’re taking care of my grandfather. I’m acing all my classes, and I’m gonna start second base on the baseball team.”

  “Second base, eh? That was my position when I was at Schuylkill. I trust you with it.”

  “It’s in good hands, sir.”

  “And your Uncle Nick? He’s you mother’s brother?”

  “My dad’s.”

  “I didn’t know he had one.”

  “Sometimes I felt that way too. But he’s back now and we’re moving forward.”

  “That’s good to hear, Gabey-boy.”

  “Yep. I’m even thinking about getting myself out there in the job market.”

  Job market? Do you hear yourself, Gabe? You didn’t graduate Harvard Business School. You’re looking for minimum wage.

  Perdomo smiles. Apparently he’s amused by my stockbroker talk.

  “Job market, eh? Well, I’m proud of you. Hard work’s important. In fact, I’m actually looking for a little help at the moment.”

  “You mean me? You think I’m capable of flipping pizzas?”

  “No, son. I don’t. But we got other things to do around here. We’ll work our way up to the flipping.” I don’t know what to say, so I just hold out my hand and we shake. In the same motion, Mr. Perdomo slides a slice across the counter to me.

  “On the house,” he says. Amazing what you can get with a little youthful energy. A few curb jumps on the Mongoose turned into a free lunch and a new job. I’m so shocked, happy, and relieved at the same time I decide to take the slice on the road. Eat it on the Mongoose. Hands on pizza only. “You can start after school on Monday!” I hear Perdomo shout as I hit the doors. I give him a quick thumbs-up and then hop on my bike for a final joy ride.

  All that’s left of the pizza as I pedal into the driveway is a grease-covered plate that I roll into a spyglass and attempt to use as my view-finder for the final ten feet or so of the ride. I toss it in the garbage can (I gotta remember to put that damn thing away), and head for the door.

  But I notice something. At first I think it might be just a trick of the light, but as I get closer it’s confirmed. A scratch—or rather a series of scratches and a dent—on the front, passenger-side fender of the Trans-Am. It’s freaking mangled. Little flakes of paint cling like curly banana peels in places where something—presumably a giant cheese grater—rubbed them raw from the colorless steel below. A quarter-sized dimple sits in the middle of the collage like a lifeless eye.

  It was driveable. Sure. But I could almost feel the pull of Dad’s eyes on the back of my skull, like he was standing there on the porch, as always, shaking his head and doubting my abilities as a motorist. “But how could this have happened?” he would say. “WHERE would this have happened?” would be the follow-up.

  “I don’t know,” I’d tell him. “The only place I’ve driven it is to school.”

  School. The maniacal, dog-eat-dog world that is the Schuylkill High School parking lot. That had to be where it happened. Someone must have clipped her before I got out of there yesterday. All I’d have to do is find the car in the lot on Monday with red streaks down its side and I’ll know the identity of the classmate who will be purchasing my new fender. The son of a bitch. I’ll worry about it on Monday. I’m in too good of a mood to let it screw me today. Time for a Madden marathon. Maybe I’ll call John.

  When I push through the front door, Nick is still drooling in front of his Western. Grandpa staggers out of the bathroom and shuffles a couple of feet back to his bedroom.

  “I’m back,” I say in Nick’s general direction.

  “I know. I heard you. Not like you were trying to be quiet.”

  “Whatever. Everything alright?”

  “Look around. The place is still here.” He’s still glued to the Western and his words come out like he’s communicating through a zombie translator—so I let him get back to his busy schedule.

  I pick up the phone and dial John. As it rings, I notice I’m clearing a bunch of crap off the hall table that should have been put away—a box of toothpicks, an old tissue, a beer can, Nick’s wallet, my spare set of keys.

  Ugh. I feel like Mom. Always juggling.

  Gabe LoScuda

  English 4A – Personal Essay #3

  Mr. Mastrocola

  October 23

  Never Leave a Debt

  Robert Frost provided me with perhaps my very first taste of poetry, way back when I thought verse could only exist in neat, little rhyming packages with sing-songy refrains. My mom used to recite “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” every year around Thanksgiving, when the temperatures in the Philly area started to nip at the ears and bite at the hands. I guess maybe she thought her reading would summon up a snow day so that we’d skip school and work and spend the day drinking cocoa and sitting in front of the fireplace between rounds of sledding. Her recitations rarely worked, but the poem did leave its impression on me.

  In it, Frost writes, “These woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep” which always made me think, “Wow, this dude is trekking across an arctic freaking landscape and he’s still worried about keeping some dumb promise, probably to some girl he likes.”

  Hey, I was a little kid, but I still got the feeling that promises were not just something you threw out there to be polite. So, Frost is probably to blame for my borderline psychotic obsession with maintaining Dad’s promise to Grandpa. Then again, maybe it wasn’t Frost at all. Maybe it was actually Gramps who’d created the impression for me—on a pleasant afternoon way back when he was still able to hoist me up off the ground and lift me over his head in a single swoop.

  The shadows of oak leaves flickered around me on that day. They made me feel like an undersea diver searching for daggers of light in a darkened world. My darkened world was a mass of gnarled roots that jutted up through the lawn under the canopy of Grandpa’s prized shade tree.

  Mom and Dad had a wedding to attend. Someone from Dad’s work, I remember. Another teacher. They’d left me with Gramps in the morning and I was all too happy to grab my G.I. Joe action figures and have Joe himself stake military claim to a small chunk of my grandfather’s yard. The tree roots provided the perfect base, a network of hardwood highways that twisted and turned in impossible directions. Natural depressions between the moist soil and the roadways were dream locations to arrange mine fields and build trenches and set traps to ambush Cobra and his evil cronies.

  As I shot down plastic helicopters with imaginary surface-to-air missiles, Grandpa worked his way up an
d down the ladder like a mechanized monkey. He slathered brick-red paint on his ancient shutters with the bristles of a five-inch horsehair brush, never once leaving a speckle of the red on his brilliant, white shingles.

  There was a sting in the air that morning, the kind of chill that surprises you in early October. The kind that gives meddling moms all the reason they need to force their sons into winter coats against their wills. With the warmth of the midday sun came the absence of my winter coat, which I’d left sprawled-out across the lawn—a sort of munitions dump to stash spare propeller blades and headless figurines.

  “Didn’t your mother tell you to keep that coat on your body?”

  His voice was gruff and heavy and it startled me out of my fantasy army world. He smelled like some kind of spicy aftershave. Probably Aqua Velva. He always kept a bottle of that blue stuff on his bathroom sink. And I always fought the urge to slug it down like a bottle of Gatorade. Don’t ask.

  I looked up at him from under a dense shadow. “She told me to wear it this morning,” I said with the stone-cold logic of a seven-year-old. “Now it’s afternoon.”

  “That does seem to be the case.” A slight grin rose on his face and he wiped it away with the back of his hand. “Well, seeing as you’ve finally burst out of that cocoon your mother packed you in—and seeing as I’m out of paint—what do you say we take a ride to the hardware store in your granddaddy’s Caddy?”

  It didn’t take much to sell me on a ride in his Coupe Deville. In the same way my father saw the Trans-Am as a living entity, Gramps provided for his Deville like he would a spouse. Even gave the damn thing a name. An old lady’s name—Rita.

  “Rita told me she’s itching to take a few sweeping turns today,” he told me as he hoisted me up on the camel-colored passenger seat. “And who am I to keep old Rita from her joy?”

  Gramps hopped into the driver’s seat and cranked the engine. He popped a white tape in the cassette player and pushed the “play” button until it held fast. A few soft guitar chords flirted with the rising hush of a live audience. Grandpa patted my knee with a weather-beaten hand. “Nothing like a little Johnny Cash to get you over that midday hump,” he said. “Now hold on tight.” He tugged a bit on my seatbelt, nodded his approval, then slapped both hands on the leather steering wheel and stomped on the gas. We shot out of the driveway like one of those racecars that has to fire a freaking parachute out its backside just to stop.

  All the skin on my face stretched tight against my skull and my spine nestled firmly against the seat. The corners of Grandpa’s mouth creased upward, his eyelids relaxed, and the usually taught lines in his forehead seemed washed away. His face bore an expression of pure serenity that matched the rolling deepness of Mr. Cash’s lyrics.

  We pushed past the boundary lines of his neighborhood and sped down a straight stretch of highway sewn through a patch of forest like a concrete artery. Gramps steadied the wheel and guided the Deville with only the slightest flick and twitch of his bony wrists. The car glided around curves the way Olympic skaters carve figure eights into sheets of pristine ice. And good old Johnny just sat in the back seat and strummed his guitar and grunted out lyrics about a beautiful girl in a long, black veil in a rawhide, Cowboy cadence.

  Gramps rolled down the volume a few notches and careened around another curve with only his left hand on the wheel. Then he pointed deep into a clearing as we approached it on the left side. “Take a look over there, Gabe,” he said. Three fat, Jersey cows munched on dandelions beside a rotted-out barn. They stared at us, eyes gleaming with innocence, as we roared past in the Deville. Then, suddenly, we pulled up at an intersection and we were in town. A long strip of traffic lights, strip malls, and cement moseyed off into the sunset beyond. Mabel’s Hardware store was a quick left after the first light.

  “I’ll just be a few minutes,” Grandpa said as he pulled up in the empty lot. “Wait here for me and don’t get out of the car.”

  I nodded, because what boy in his right mind would ever want to leave a vehicle like this? All the levers and buttons and ashtray covers to open? All the windows to crank and seats to reposition? All the treasure to be found under the floor mats or, better yet, in the glove box?

  The glove box.

  My curiosity was burning. I waited until Grandpa was safely inside the store, then I popped open the little compartment in front of my seat as if I were a secret agent cracking a safe in Saddam Hussein’s palace. A wad of crinkled napkins flipped out first, followed by a vinyl-covered booklet of sorts that had the same symbol raised on its cover that Grandpa had displayed as an ornament on his hood. Weird. I tossed it in the back seat and kept digging.

  A box of fuses, three dried-up cigars, a tire gauge, and a few pairs of outof-style glasses later and I found the mother lode. Some kind of medal. It was dark bronze with signs of weathering on the surface. A few pieces of lint from the glove box had collected on its face. I wiped them clear to reveal a small, misshapen heart with a few odd words and an eagle transcribed around it. It was attached to some kind of ribbon with a pin, probably so you could hook it on your shirt or something.

  I flipped it over and over again, allowing the smooth finish to play against the palm of my hand. I tried to imagine any of the variety of ways Grandpa could have won the medal. It was a heart, so maybe Grandma had given it to him? There was an eagle on it, so maybe he won it playing football or maybe for spotting the most birds through his binoculars? Or, maybe he’d won it in a spelling bee or something? There were a bunch of words on it I didn’t understand, so Gramps had to be a pretty good speller to figure them out.

  Whatever it was Gramps had achieved I was about to find out, because suddenly I heard the driver’s side door unlatch and a shadow loomed over me. I looked up, the medal still sitting in the middle of my palm, and Grandpa’s eyes were glued to it, unmoving. His lips were thin and tight, and his hand a bit shaky as he propped himself against the wheel.

  “Looks like you found yourself a relic,” he said.

  “What’s a relish?” I asked. “Is it something you win for doing cool stuff?”

  Grandpa’s eyes softened and he sat down in the seat beside me. He let out an almost silent chuckle before speaking. “Not a relish, Gabe. A relic. It’s a keepsake. Something to help you remember an important moment in time.”

  “How’d you get it?”

  “Well, you were right about one thing. I won it … for doing some pretty cool stuff.” He flicked the ignition on the Deville and stretched his arm into the back seat to deposit his new can of paint on the floor.

  “I think this may be a time for some ice cream, Gabe. Every story deserves a cone of vanilla. Don’t you think?”

  “Chocolate,” I said.

  “Okay, chocolate it is.” And Gramps pulled out of that parking lot with the same grace as Mario Andretti. He hugged the dotted lines on the road like a surgeon making an incision. He was in complete control of the Deville, and I’d never felt safer in my life.

  We pulled up at the Dairy Queen for our frozen treats and lapped up the long ribbons of chocolate soft serve in the empty parking lot.

  “This medal is called a Purple Heart,” Grandpa said as he cradled it in his hand like a trapped ladybug. “Given to me by the President of the United States, Mr. Harry S. Truman. Most of the boys in my unit got one.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we happened to step in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “They gave you an award for screwing up?” I asked.

  “Not exactly, Gabe. But then again, I guess you might be on to something. See, we were coming up over this ridge and the Germans had us pinned between them and a thick bramble of trees. Kind of a thicket, I guess. We didn’t have the ammunition to fire on them, so we took the only choice they gave us. We retreated into the woods. It was exactly what they wanted us to do.”

  He paused to take a big bite of his ice cream and another glance at the medal.

  “Why would they want you to
do that? Wouldn’t you be able to escape?”

  “That’s what we thought. Boy, were we wrong. See, the Germans had filled up that whole darn thicket with bouncing Bettys.”

  “They tried to attack you with a bunch of … gymnasts?”

  Grandpa lost it for some reason when I asked the question. Melted ice cream sprayed from his mouth as he laughed, and he handed me the medal while he mopped it off the dashboard and its various instruments.

  “Bouncing Bettys are land mines,” he said after a few breaths. “They bury the devils in a secluded place and when you walk on them they get tripped—meaning they blow up. Only these suckers bounce up from the ground and blow up at chest level. They shoot little bits of sharpened metal all over the battlefield when they do. It’s how most of us were wounded that day.”

  “You got wounded in battle?”

  “Yep. Just a small wound. Here.” He lifted up his pant leg and pushed down his sock to reveal a jagged scar that ran across his ankle and half way up the back of his calf. “Most of the muscle was hanging out like a batch of giblet gravy, and you could see the bone in a few places. But it wasn’t half as bad as what happened to Private Gus Bradley.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “One of those Bettys blew his arm clean off his body. We found it a good thirty yards away hanging from a willow tree. Well, we did after reinforcements arrived and we cleaned the Krauts out of the area.”

  “What happened to Private Bradley?”

  “I did the only thing I could think of at the time. I hoisted myself up on one leg, grabbed a downed branch to use as a crutch, and hobbled over to him as fast as I could. He wasn’t moving, just breathing real heavy and sweat was rolling down his face in little beads. I carried him as far as I could. Got him off the battlefield and delivered him to the MPs.”

  “You’re a hero, Grandpa.”

  “I guess some people would say that, Gabe. Not me. See, Private Bradley didn’t make it. Died right there on the gurney before they even got him to the field hospital.”