“Mom’s been arrested for soliciting,” I told Pedro one night. “That means Mom slept with men and they paid her. She didn’t just take money from men, she engaged in business relations. That means they took something from her too.” Pedro was dreamily envisioning a new redwood knickknack shelf with Y joints and notched shelves. He was twiddling his thumbs in his lap like a little boy. “Mom has been committing crimes I didn’t even know about. She has stolen real cash and valuable cars. She even sold drugs once. She put two men in a hospital and at least one man in a morgue. Mom has been committing these secret acts without my help, because she’s got a terrible temper and can’t help herself. What’s more, Pedro, Mom can be cured. Her condition is something that can be altered by the proper medication, regulated by trained doctors and commercial, cost-effective therapy. Mom has a very bad temper, Dad says. Mom has a very bad temper and I’ve never seen it.” I was feeling hot and flushed. Something gave in my stomach, like a loose floorboard. I started to cry. “Mom’s someone I don’t know at all, Pedro. That’s why I’m growing up so wild. That’s why I’m doing things I really shouldn’t do. Perhaps that’s why I even did those things to you, Pedro. But I can’t remember. I can’t even remember what I did to you anymore.” I tried to stop, but I couldn’t stop crying. The atmosphere of my small room turned moist and clinging. I felt as if I were crying inside the womb of some hibernal animal.
“If you’re gonna play hardball, you’re gonna get hurt,” Pedro said wisely, drifting away into the mist. “We’re all grown-ups in this game, kiddo. We’ve all got to live the lives we’ve got to live.”
Pedro’s easy aphorisms disguised a real truth. There were still some very important things Pedro wasn’t telling.
SOUND AND GRAVITY
________________
9
ODDLY enough, it was during this period of Mom’s increasingly alcoholic estrangement that I began to experience anything like that “normal childhood” one usually encounters only in books. I grew inured, if not accustomed, to the patent bliss of domesticity. I developed a system of routine chores and scheduled ambitions, marking each day on the calendar as I doled out payments to our landlord and utility franchises, milkman and insurance broker. I took two paper routes. I studied every morning and, every evening, fixed both Mom and myself a perfectly edible meal. Two or three afternoons each week I would go out to what I referred to as my “job” in order to earn money with which to “put bread on the table.”
As a paperboy, I was kept informed when my clients went on vacations, and so, on routine afternoons, I broke into carefully preselected homes and took jewelry, portable televisions, cordless phones and microwaves, along with the more alluring household appliances, and transported them downtown on the bus, where I sold them at one of the various pawnshops frequented by gaunt men in loose socks who stood about exposing swollen veins in their necks and foreheads, or glowered at me from behind massy and varnished oak countertops as they inspected my merchandise and contemplated ludicrous sums.
“Ten dollars,” they said, eyeing me suspiciously, not concerned with where I got it so much as how little I would take. “It isn’t worth my trouble. It isn’t worth my time.”
“Make it fifteen,” I replied, chewing my impassive bubble gum. “Maybe it’s worth a little of your trouble. Maybe it’s worth a little of your precious time.”
I even acquired during these days a friend. Rodney was twelve years old, and lived in the corner house with his mother, a rather fragmented and conspicuous woman named Ethel. Rodney was the perfect friend for me, really, and introduced me to a world far more disorderly, I imagined, than my own. Rodney was submissive without obedience, patient without serenity. He had a Stingray bicycle, a rather brutal attitude toward his unfortunate mother (which, I admit, caused me some uneasy admiration, as an aborigine might admire the miracle of a cigarette lighter or a beeping digital watch) and a top-floor bedroom filled with marvelous and dispensable things.
“Why don’t you take this shirt,” he might tell me. “These are some pants I grew out of. You never change your clothes, guy. You never wash your hair.”
Usually I wasn’t listening. I was far too preoccupied with the room’s many bright objects to feel at all self-conscious about my appearance. There were board games: Stratego, Polyanna, Monopoly, The Game of Life, Battleship and Risk. We constructed monstrous machines with red and white Lego blocks, Erector sets and plastic, prepackaged model kits. Mostly, though, I was thoroughly taken with Rodney’s chemistry set, a somewhat corroded metal cabinet box which, unfolded, displayed tidy bottles of strange substances with unfamiliar smells, tastes and textures in them. Some, like tannic acid, were labeled with urgent red crosses and warned of deadly dangers that should be investigated only “in the company of adults.” The set contained beakers and flasks and test tubes and even a small chemical fire with metal clasps and braces. “This is life’s sudden start,” I said, the first time I saw it. “This is chemistry.” I purchased a loose-leaf notebook and began keeping track of the various mixtures I contrived. Sulphuric acid and nitrous oxide and carbon, zinc and rubbing alcohol and a few kernels of long-grain white rice. Then, under what I considered “controlled laboratory conditions,” I exposed small animals to them. Bugs, butterflies, lizards and frogs. Sometimes the small animals betrayed no reactions at all. Sometimes, a few hours or a few days later, they died. “Science isn’t reason, Rodney,” I told him. “Science is pure chance and sudden luck. It’s magic, in a way. Chemistry is that unstable and perfectly coordinated music of the fundamental that lives in our skin and our shoes. This is where life achieved its sudden flash, and where time itself will someday rediscover its own timeless regeneration.” I contributed tannic acid to the beaker labeled POETIC TROPE #117, thiamine spirit and, from Rodney’s mother’s kitchen cabinet, baking soda, and just a touch of oregano. A thin sudsy foam gathered around the beaker’s rim. “We’ll seek secrets in the random,” I told Rodney. “We’ll discover truth in chance’s sudden dances.”
Rodney, leaning against the table and gazing into the brownish fluid, displayed only that marvelous and half-lidded unconcern for which I always envied him. He wasn’t after anything, my friend Rodney. He sincerely didn’t care if he lived forever or not.
“What about a booger?” Rodney asked. “What about if we put a booger in it?” Without looking at me, he tapped the beaker’s rim with the nail of one of his clean, well-manicured fingers, as if trying to startle into existence whatever soft chemical reactions lay down there in the hidden world of chemistry.
THE HOMES RODNEY and I systematically violated that spring were wary places, hollow, haunted and impercipient, like old lovers or dying trees. Because I was smallest, I always entered first, through basement windows, up shaky trellises into high bedrooms or, more usually, through the opaque slender windows of bathrooms that had been left open to air out the muggy shower smells. Then I would come around to the front door where Rodney would snap his gum at me with his weary and affected nonchalance and help me peruse the belongings of these soft and dimly dreaming houses.
“What a bunch of crap,” Rodney said. “What are we going to do with all this crap?”
Rodney was an idealist who refused to be corrupted by mere matter. If I was a sort of exemplary enlightenment scientist, Rodney was a romantic poet, airy and uncompromised. “Crap crap crap crap crap,” Rodney said as I loaded pearls and sparkling brooches into my green plastic Hefty bag, watches and piggy banks, digital clocks and compact discs. “They’ll never even notice it’s gone. They’re probably at the shopping plaza right now, buying more crap.” He shook his head wearily, and poured himself a stiff bourbon from the liquor cabinet. If he found a pack of cigarettes on a bedroom bureau or kitchen counter he would chain-smoke casually, filling those transgressed homes with the roiling, misty odor of Marlboros and Kools. I had great hopes for Rodney in those days. I believed then, as I believe now, he was destined for far greater achievements than myself.
/> “Good riddance,” he always said, slamming shut the garage or front door as we walked off down the suburban streets with our loot. We wore the purported innocence of childhood wrapped around us like menacing cloaks and fog in some old movie. Only Rodney and I knew what we hid inside those cloaks. Only Rodney and I knew the secrets of the movies we lived inside, the movies other people only watched on TV.
THESE WERE THE days of my exile, a time of dense silence, strange houses and broken basement windows. They contained locks that could be uncranked with tire irons, or cats that purred and rubbed themselves against you. Sometimes the dogs barked, but if you approached them in a certain way they would bow submissively and allow you to scratch their foreheads. Sometimes we fed the pets while we gathered up the belongings of their masters, and they curled up purring and dreaming on the living room carpets where we would activate the TV for them, for Rodney and I also felt more at home with the sound of the television around us. Game shows filled with jeering buzzers and brand-new cars. Morning chat shows that interviewed interchangeable circus clowns and school board supervisors. Inexhaustible diurnal melodramas in which beautiful men and women lived and loved and hated and died. Then there was only the resinous darkness moving into the houses when we left them. Sometimes we transported our new stuff home in stray shopping carts; sometimes, brazenly, we parked these indemnified carts outside a McDonald’s or Burger King while we paused inside for a well-deserved cup of coffee, a sweet roll or fries. I always knew in those days that this was not the world I really belonged to; it was not my mom’s world, which both Mom and I had lost, but a world of other moms and dads I would never comprehend. A stony vast plateau without any landmarks or colors on it. A pale cloudless sky in which nothing moved, nothing sounded. You could walk and walk for miles in this world without ever seeing anybody, except of course at night when you were asleep and dreaming about the dense silence, strange houses and broken basement windows. Locks uncranked with tire irons, purring cats and submissive, basement-anxious dogs. Exile was a dream of a return to something you couldn’t remember. It took you back to a place you’d never been.
“I think we should burn the dump,” Rodney said sometimes, languorously reviewing a TV Guide on the living room sofa while I did all the hard work, disengaging the VHS from the Panasonic, stuffing my coats full with quarters from a tin cookie jar in the kitchen. “I think we should see if shit burns.” Rodney never seemed the invader of these broken homes, but rather their more legitimate occupant, as if his invisible royal blood admitted him to secret kinships and demesnes. Sometimes I felt awkward, looting the silver and jewelry before Rodney’s calm and disaffected gaze. It was as if Rodney was allowing my trespass and at any moment, if I made one wrong move or discourteous gesture, my license would be summarily revoked. His expression always seemed remotely curious whenever he looked at me, or at the items in my hands, as if he retained some unflagging interest even though many thousands of years ago he had given up on the possibility of ever being surprised again. “There’s a good movie on Channel Four we can watch at my house,” he said. “It’s got Ginger Rogers in it. I think Ginger Rogers is a great piece of ass, don’t you?”
All these houses seemed like one house, just as all the silence of my strained exile seemed like one continent, one forlorn place without a name. I could hear my mom in these houses, I could see her dazed looks as she sat drinking alone in her room, waiting while Dad gathered somewhere in the world like moisture, like thick clouds, like heavy black currents. My sense of exile was my inheritance from Mom; it might somehow, without my even understanding why, constitute my one real gift to Dad, to whom I still owed the ominous debt of conception. I was off in the world alone now. I was investigating strange rooms, basements and gardens. I was trundling off with my pillowcases and Hefty bags filled with merchandise like some diabolical and inverted Santa Claus. All of the houses were part of one house. All of the houses in the world were part of that one house by which Mom and I were divided as well as embraced. “Growing up” began to signify one thing only to my feverish imagination. Mom and I could live in worlds without each other in them.
I NEVER UNDERSTOOD Rodney, but I was always awestruck by the incomprehensible life he lived with his mother. Ethel had a generous pension from the Marine Corps subsequent to her husband’s death at Tet, gray hair, and bad circulation in her legs. Usually she sat all day and embroidered in a big stuffed chair, her feet propped by cushions and a macramé footstool; when she walked she walked with the aid of an aluminum cane. Whenever we came through the front door with our stuff she would put down her knitting and watch while we stored it all in the hall closet alongside the departed Mr. Johansen’s crisply dry-cleaned military uniform, unused golf clubs, and loose photographs in a chipped Macy’s gift box (I was forever examining the contents of other people’s closets). After we were finished, Ethel offered us food and refreshments. “There’s tuna salad, Roddy. In case you and your friend are hungry. There are some Snickers bars in the freezer, just the way you like them. Only have some tuna salad first. Have some good canned soup–there’s mushroom and cream of tomato. Then, if you and your little friend want, I could fix us all a Manhattan.”
Rodney said, “Mmmm.” He went into the kitchen and banged cupboard doors. I stood noncommittally in the hall, watching Ethel in her chair. Ethel was reading one of her old “collector’s” editions of The Amazing Spider Man, and the plastic envelope lay across her knees like some official procedure. “There’s Sara Lee pound cake, and even a couple of Twinkies hidden away. And of course I could fix you both that Manhattan. Would you like a Manhattan, Phillip?” She started to lay her comic on the coffee table and reach for her cane.
“Do me a favor, Ethel,” Rodney said. He had suddenly appeared beside me, one foot on the stairs. He held a pair of tuna salad sandwiches on a white plate, and a large bag of Nacho Cheese Flavored Doritos under one arm. “Just sit down, read your comics, and shut the fuck up.”
I couldn’t look at Ethel. I couldn’t look at Rodney. I felt a deep painful turning in my body. My face was filling up with heat. I was walking through a stunned silence, my feet on the stairs, Rodney already at the top. I was trembling. Everything was a blur. I could hardly see where I was going.
“Don’t tell me to shut up,” Ethel said, quite simply and emphatically at first. It was as if she were telling us where the mayonnaise was. “Don’t tell your mother to shut up. Rodney. Rodney, come back here.”
Breathing a long sigh, Rodney gestured me into his room. He handed me the plate of sandwiches. Then he shut his bedroom door firmly and locked the flimsy knob.
Ethel’s voice was growing louder now. “Don’t tell your mother to shut up, Rodney! Rodney! Don’t you dare tell me to shut up! Rodney! You come down here! Rodney! Why don’t you shut up, Rodney! Why don’t you shut up, then! Rodney! You come down here! You shut up, Rodney! You shut up!”
Rodney pulled a pair of Cokes from underneath his bed and ripped them free of the stiff plastic spine. “It’s like living in a madhouse,” he said, not even looking at me. I felt complicit in a frame of violence I couldn’t understand. I just sat there hoping his mom wouldn’t remember what I looked like. I just hoped Rodney’s mom wouldn’t remember my name.
“Sometimes I think she’s the biggest asshole in the entire universe,” Rodney said, pulled the television closer on its wobbly castered frame and switched it on. You could hear the charge of it before you saw the light abrupt to its screen. Suddenly we were in any house, every house; suddenly we were drifting again through the regions of my exile. We watched cartoons, movies, detective and western programs while I listened to the outside hallway for the steps of wounded Ethel on the thin carpet as she moved, slowly and eventually, to her own bedroom down the hall, awaiting the moment when I could escape this house and my own complicity in Ethel’s systematic humiliation by Rodney, the most remarkably powerful person I have ever known in my entire life.
10
I CELEBRATED MY
birthday in secret that year, on a day I firmly refuse to commemorate or even mention. There was something firm and round about the new age that filled my body like an old song, or smoke from a cigarette. Usually I didn’t return home until one or two a.m., since Rodney and I regularly stayed up drinking Ethel’s whiskey or smoking Rodney’s grass. My feet staggered and slipped against the knotty carpet as I let myself in the front door. My tongue felt thick and swollen. I staggered down the dark hall, already sensing the thick silence behind Mom’s steadfast door. “Mom,” I said, leaning against her door, uncertain of the floor’s balance. “Mom, it’s me. It’s your son, Mom. It’s Phillip.” I heard my whispered words deep in my throat and chest, resonating like bones. I could hear her taking a breath as my hand gently grasped the loose aluminum doorknob. The knob ticked in its frame when I turned it. Its resistance was at once strange and comforting, like the taste of a new tooth. Mom’s door was always locked. She never let me inside anymore.
“Mom.” I tried to sound firm, sober and mature. “There’s money on the kitchen counter. There’s still some Colonel Sanders in the fridge. It’s cold, Mom. Just the way you like it. And coleslaw. Have a banana. Bananas are filled with potassium.” Motes and air whirled in Mom’s dark room, rustling and indifferent. This was the sound Mom lived. The long slow pause in her heart where she gathered language and waited for history to resume again.
The History of Luminous Motion Page 5
