The Language of Men

by Anthony D'Aries

  "I invited her to your going-away party."

  "What! No. No, you didn't."

  She cackled and stood up. I asked her again and again if she was joking, but she wouldn't answer me. I stood at the hostess stand as she walked behind the bar, through the kitchen's saloon doors, into the cloud of steam rising from the dishwasher.

  Word got out about my going-away party and by the end of the night, some of my old friends showed up at my parents' house. It felt like the season finale of a sitcom, when all the minor characters return to fill in the plot holes. Their voices sounded different, deeper, as if they'd gone through a second puberty. Our conversations were superficial and, after a few beers, vaguely nostalgic. I remember a part of me thinking how ridiculous the whole situation was, how our decade-long friendship had come to an end just because I had dated one of their exes for a year. I had violated a code. Whether or not the code still applied didn't matter; the violation was permanent. As the night went on, our conversations seemed to edge closer and closer to some kind of an apology. But no one mentioned it.

  All night I kept an eye on the door, wondering when Vanessa would show up. After a while, I thought she wasn't going to come, and I couldn't decide if I was relieved or disappointed. Alba had been telling me details about her for the last two weeks, but I already knew Vanessa, sort of. We had gone to school together since kindergarten. She was in a lot of my home movies. While she sang in our 3rd grade production of Horton Hears a Who!, I played a tree. In our Halloween parade in 5th grade, she dressed as Raggedy Ann and, at five-foot-five, towered over me and the rest of the boys.

  Near the end of the party, she walked through the door with a couple of her friends. I pretended not to notice. I moved from group to group, conversation to conversation. I refilled the coolers with beer, went to the bathroom several times. Eventually, the party cleared out and it was impossible to hide.

  I remember our first conversation, how we talked about the restaurant. I told her that Alba was trying to play match-maker. Vanessa laughed and said Alba had been talking me up, too. At first, Alba referred to me as "Chubby," so Vanessa had no clue who she was talking about. When Alba finally said "Anthony," Vanessa remembered.

  I laughed. "I'm surprised you knew who I was."

  "Come on," she said. "Fifth grade. Halloween. You were the Grim Reaper. And I was gigantic. Seriously, I had boobs in third grade."

  We talked the rest of the night, but what I remember most is the way her face looked when she listened. She turned her head a little to one side. She smiled and nodded, even when I took long pauses, trying to find the right words. Though she later told me she was nervous, she didn't seem that way. She didn't finish my sentences or repeat what I said in her own words. When she spoke, her voice was soft and quiet. I leaned close.

  She laughed.

  "What?" I said.

  "Nothing," she said. "It's just that most people can never hear me."

  Vanessa was already going to school in Worcester, about an hour from Boston. After the party, we made a plan to drive up together. I asked if she wanted me to write down the directions, but she said she knew how to get there.

  A month later, she accepted an internship in Namibia. She would be gone for six months. As her departure date approached, we took long, aimless drives through unfamiliar suburbs between Boston and Worcester, sometimes talking about what our plan was, other times describing our old teachers from elementary school. Neither one of us had tried a long-distance relationship before. I was under the impression, from my friends and my brother, that situations like that were doomed. We agreed to give it a shot.

  *

  A photograph. When it was taken, Vanessa was on the other side of the planet. A few members of Team Destructo and I are walking down the street in lower Manhattan. It's raining, and I'm not wearing a shirt. My hair is long and my beard is full. I am in my Jim Morrison phase, which means I am binge drinking and writing bad poetry. In my hand is a wet, beer-can-shaped paper bag.

  I don't remember who took the picture, but I remember clearly what happened after. We stepped down into a subway station and in the middle of the staircase, I threw my fist through the fluorescent light above our heads. Bits of powdery glass fell on our heads, sprinkled the steps. A girl we had just met asked me what the hell was wrong with me. My friends laughed. We high-fived at the bottom of the steps as a K-9 cop adjusted his rifle. His German Shepherd bared its teeth. I was no longer drunk, but I pretended I could barely stand.

  "You gotta be shittin' me," the cop said. "Up against the wall."

  He patted each of us down, then told us to turn around. His dog sniffed my kneecap.

  "Which one of you did it?" He looked at each one of us. "I bet it was you," he said to one of my friends. "You skinny punk." The cop turned to the girls standing behind him. "Keep moving, ladies. G'head." I listened to the turnstiles click as each of them walked away.

  The cop shook his head and told the attendant in the glass booth to get us a broom. As we swept up the broken glass, I heard the cop's leather belt creak as he shifted his weight.

  "Pullin' this, now? With all this terrorist shit going on?"

  I didn't know what 9/11 had to do with me breaking a light bulb, but the cop, and the dog, seemed convinced that our actions were particularly shameful. For some reason, he let us leave, and we met up with the girls waiting for us on the platform.

  I wrote to Vanessa in Africa about my performance in the subway. I described it in detail, leaving out the parts about me being scared or acting drunker than I was. To my guy friends, in our little part of the world, I was a hero. In their eyes, I had achieved something.

  *

  Team Destructo had dispersed to different colleges across New England. Even though we were far apart, our objectives remained clear: #1—Drink. #2—Break Stuff. With enough alcohol, even our own stuff was vulnerable. When a group of us visited T.J. at college, we spent the better part of the night kicking out the wooden spindles on his banister. He got me back, though, when he came to my place and chucked two-by-fours off the roof and dropped 40-ounce beer bottles onto the cars behind my building.

  We often tried to combine destruction with self-inflicted pain. Breaking beer bottles over our heads, lighting our chest hair on fire, punching ourselves in the face. We subscribed to the anger and adrenaline of punk rock and skate boarding. Though I was never much of a skater, I enjoyed watching my friends fall down.

  The fact that we didn't know where our anger came from made us all the more mad—not that we questioned it or anything else at the time. "Mad" was a word we used constantly, but to us, the term meant "a lot," as in "I drank mad beers yesterday," or "I got mad homework." "Mad" was our way of saying beaucoup.

  Public urination was a popular activity for Team Destructo. Like a pack of wild dogs, we wandered the streets, marking our territory. Once we arrived at so-and-so's party or dorm room, it was only a matter of time before we pissed in the washing machine or on one of the beds. The riskier the place, the better. We kept an unspoken tally, and we were always trying to outdo each other. It wasn't rare to wake up to the rain tapping on the roof and realize it was actually one of us staking our claim on your beanbag chair.

  We didn't think, we just did, and our impulsiveness was invigorating. Up until Team Destructo, I lived inside my head, or vicariously through actors or musicians. Then, simply by consuming a lot of Southern Comfort and punching out a window, I could make people remember my name.

  We humped each other. Humping was hilarious, a sure-fire way of getting all the guys in the room to crack up. We'd sit on the couch, watching a movie, drinking beer and without warning, I'd roll over and straddle Marlon or T.J. and pump my hips into their chest until they gasped.

  "C-c-cut it out, D-D-D'Aries."

  But I wouldn't stop because the other guys were laughing, plus whoever I was humping had most likely humped me earlier that day and it was payback time.

  Sometimes we snuck up behind each other an
d humped so hard we dropped our drinks, but that didn't matter; we kept humping. We held each other down on the ground and humped until we were both out of breath. Sometimes the other guy got pissed off and tried to punch his way out of the hump, but once the humping started, it was near impossible to stop.

  At a beach party one night, Team Destructo stood around a large bonfire. A few high school kids showed up. One was the younger brother of a Team Destructo member, but they didn't acknowledge each other. After a few beers, one of the guys from our group threw the younger brother on the ground beside the fire and humped his face. He humped him so hard his glasses fell off. The kid cursed and screamed, but the humper didn't stop until he faked orgasm and rolled over on his back. His chest heaved. The kid lifted his head, his lips and cheek coated in sand. We had tears in our eyes from laughter.

  When we got tired of humping, we punched each other in the balls.

  Sometimes when I watched war movies, the narrator talked about soldiers "humping" up a mountain or across a rice paddy. A part of me laughed each time I heard the word because all I could think of was the freshman's face slamming into the sand. But the soldiers on screen weren't holding each other down and thrusting their hips; they were hunched over beneath the weight on their backs. They took slow, even steps. They marched.

  The meaning of the word "hump" was confusing. Did it mean what my friends and I thought it meant? Or did it mean to carry a weight? How could something we did in our parents' basements or on the beach have anything to do with men in green stomping through the mud?

  *

  Near the end of my first semester of college in Boston, I took a bus to Don's apartment for a party. He had recently moved to Brooklyn. Sometimes before I visited Don, my mother would tell me to keep any eye on him. I told her not to worry. I'd been watching my brother my whole life.

  As the bus idled at a rest stop, my phone vibrated in my pocket and shocked me out of sleep.

  "Hey, Ant, it's Mom." She always identified herself on the phone.

  "I know, Mom, who else—"

  My body felt like it was sliding down the seat, but I wasn't moving. She kept talking, but I only heard her each time she said "the man." She had started referring to her own father as "the man" when he went into the hospital. "The man is sick, doesn't anyone get that?" or "The man has cancer, okay?" or "The man's been through a lot." He used to bum Winstons off my father in between chemo treatments. I watched my father hand him one, filter-end first. My grandfather—who my father called "Duke" because he walked and talked like John Wayne—broke off the filter, squeezed the cigarette between his teeth. My father gave him his lighter. Within the smoke of his first exhale, I saw my grandfather transported out of his wheelchair and back to his home in New Jersey, my father helping him tie his boat to the dock. In hindsight, I judge them both, and myself, but in those moments, the ends far outweighed the means.

  My mother said my father was doing well but I sensed she was convincing herself. She told me to go to the party, have a good time, and come see him in the morning.

  "Did you tell Don?" I asked.

  "No. Not yet." She paused. "Can you?"

  "Sure," I said, surprised at how quickly I agreed.

  I told her we'd be home early the next morning. I closed my phone and shifted in my seat, searching for a comfortable position that did not exist. I felt guilty for not saying more to my mother, not offering anything but a few prescribed words of encouragement. I'm sure he'll be fine. At least they caught it early. He's a fighter. I didn't really know any of this, could not be certain that my words were true or if I was conveying an accurate description of my father in the hospital. Though I had spent little time in either place, hospitals always reminded me of churches. The echoing halls, the scent of disinfectant, the equal capacity for life and death. Priests in their robes, doctors in their long coats. Hospitals were only a step closer to the grave. A rosary. A stethoscope. No guarantee.

  The strangers on the bus crumpled their hamburger wrappers, slurped their sodas. I still had three hours before we reached New York.

  When I arrived at my brother's apartment in the early evening, we went out for dinner. I could have mentioned it at any time but I didn't. I kept quiet. I was in possession of privileged information, and a part of me lingered in the moment.

  In his kitchen, after everyone had stumbled home, I told him.

  "Are you serious? What the hell, dude, why didn't you tell me earlier?"

  "I don't know." I said. "There just wasn't a good time."

  He walked into his room and dragged a pillow and a sheet down from the cabinet above his closet. I took them from him. I made up my bed and he stood in the doorway, staring at the floor, asking silent questions for which I had no answer.

  *

  The double-sided elevator chimed, revealing two frail doctors in oversized white coats. When we reached their floor, the doctors nodded as Don and I stepped aside. Alone, we rode up to the sixth floor. For some reason, it stopped on every floor and each time both sides opened to empty halls. By the time we made it to our floor, my mouth was sour with motion sickness.

  Don bit his nails as we walked down the hall. I felt like we should be talking, but all I heard was the sound of our sneakers on the tile, screeching like school kids on their way to the principal's office. The sound drew stern looks from doctors, squinty glances from patients in their dimly-lit rooms.

  First I saw my mother, sitting in a chair, rolling the back of her hand against her palm, talking to a shadow behind a curtain. She stood and smiled when we walked in. On the other side of the curtain was my father, sitting on the edge of the bed, twirling his silver dollar on the dinner tray.

  "Yo! What up?" He stood and gave me a strong hug. I felt the bare skin of his back, exposed by the opening in his gown. I stepped aside so he could reach Don, and I couldn't remember the last time I saw them hug for that long. Maybe they had and I just never saw it. I gave my mother a kiss and walked around to the other side of the bed and leaned against the windows. He looked at me. Then at Don. Then back to me.

  "So," I started, "how are you feeling?"

  "I feel good. You know, a little tired but not too bad." He told us about the previous day, waking up, looking at his lip in the mirror, going to work. I detected a lisp in his speech, as if he were speaking with an ice cube in his mouth.

  "But uh, the doc says I'm lucky. Just gotta take a pill, lay off the smokes."

  "That's right," my mother said. "He's quitting; we both are."

  "Yeah, I'm done." He looked out the window; my mother nodded at the floor.

  "So how was that bus ride, boy?"

  Fine, I said. Long.

  "Oh, yeah? Any traffic?"

  "No. Not really. A little when we hit the city but other than that-"

  "Good, good."

  "So why didn't you go to the hospital right away? What were you waiting for?" Don asked.

  Sometimes my brother speaks over me, through me. Occasionally, his words ring at that common octave, the familiar twist and blend of our parents' vocal cords, and I hear his speech expressing my thoughts. At the time, I didn't like the accusatory tone of his questions, but I was thinking the same thing. Why didn't you go to the hospital right away? What were you waiting for? Is work more important than your life?

  My father tapped his upper lip with his middle finger. "I don't know. Never dawned on me. Tell ya, though, my lip feels friggin' weird." He poked at it. "Doc says all the feeling will come back over time. Same with my tongue."

  "You sound much better now than you did before," my mother said.

  He moved his jaw like a horse. "Just feels awkward, you know. But it's coming back."

  We talked about blood tests and CT scans and hospital food. Then we watched a little bit of King Kong on my father's bedside television. The scene where Kong is captured, strapped to a massive wooden gurney.

  "Holy shit," I said. "That's Jeff Bridges?"

  "I know, right?" my father said.
"He's young in this."

  "Was this before or after Starman?'

  My brother looked at me. "Dude. Way before. Are you kidding?"

  I glanced at my mother beside me, and she smiled as if waiting to be called on. She rubbed my knee and asked me about college. In the middle of my response, a woman holding a big basket of fruit wrapped in orange cellophane entered the room.

  "Oh, poor baby! How are you?" She gasped and leaned over to kiss my father's cheek. I looked at my brother. He was still watching King Kong.

  "Hey, Rosie, what's shakin'?"

  "Nothing, Don, nothing. Can you believe him?" she said, turning to us. "Can you believe this man? In the hospital and he's asking about me."

  My mother smiled. I smiled, too.

  "I just wanted to stop by and see you and let you know we're all thinking about you. When I saw you, pale as a frickin' ghost, my god." She held her breast.

  My father grinned. "Then you two-timed me and called the fuzz."

  "Oh, please," Rosie said. She shook her head at my mother. My mother shook her head, too.

  "They saved your life," my mother said.

  "How'd you guys make out today? Jesus bang in sick again?"

  "We're fine, Don. We're fine. Don't worry about Jesus."

  Rosie sounded like she smoked unfiltered cigarettes. She was decorated in large, plastic jewelry, each piece a different primary color. Her bracelets clacked together as she talked. I couldn't tell if my mother had met this woman before. She didn't know me or my brother, but somehow she scooted into my father's room as if she were continuing an old conversation.

  "I'll let you get back to your family now. But you get better soon, you hear me?" She laughed and leaned in to kiss him goodbye. "He loves the way I smell. Remember you said you could always know when I was coming in the store?"

  I stood there watching as if this were a soap opera, a corny hospital scene where the romantic lead is on his death bed. My mother smiled so wide her eyes disappeared. My brother glanced at the basket, then returned to King Kong.