Raising Jake

by Charlie Carillo

  The air grows heavier the closer we get, because my old house is only a few blocks from Flushing Bay. My knees are starting to quake. As a young reporter for the Star I’d climbed tenement steps and banged on doors in the city’s worst neighborhoods, and never once did I feel so much as a tingle of fear. I felt invincible back then, and besides, I had nothing to lose.

  Now I have things to lose. A son. My pride. My sanity, or what’s left of it.

  Jake senses my fear. “You okay, Dad?”

  “I’m just doing the math. If he’s alive, he’s seventy-nine or eighty.”

  “Maybe he moved to Florida.”

  “No, Jake. My old man wasn’t the type of person to budge. If he’s alive, he’s here in Flushing.”

  “Why’d you tell me he was dead?”

  “You’ll see when you meet him. If you you meet him.”

  “I already met him, in a way.”

  “Well, yeah. Like I told you, he came to the hospital the day you were born, and that was the last we all saw of each other.”

  “I’ll bet this has something to do with Mom.”

  “Since you brought it up…”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, it’s your name.”

  “My name?”

  “Your last name. Your mother insisted that her name went in there along with mine, so she wouldn’t get ‘wiped out,’ as she put it. My old man took one look at the ‘Perez-Sullivan’ last name on the card over your bassinet, and he went nuts.”

  “Come on.”

  “Swear to God. He actually barged into the nursery with a black Magic Marker and crossed out the ‘Perez’ on the card. The nursery’s supposed to be a sanitary area, and here’s this lunatic with no gown and no mask, scrawling away. Somebody called security, and it took three guards to drag him out of the hospital.”

  Jake chuckles. “That’s pretty funny.”

  “Yeah, well, your mother didn’t think so. When I told her what happened she said, and I quote: ‘The less our son has to do with that man, the better.’”

  Jake is no longer chuckling. “That sounds like her, all right.”

  “Oh, she meant it. That was the end of it.”

  “You never saw him again?”

  “Never saw him, never spoke with him.” I sigh, long and hard. “It’s less dramatic than it sounds, Jake. It’s not as if we had a strong relationship going before the bassinet thing. Sometimes people just let go of each other. He didn’t call us, and we didn’t call him. And the years just passed.”

  Jake stops walking and takes my arm. His eyes are bright with tears that have not yet spilled over.

  “I hope you don’t let go of me,” he says.

  I take him in my arms, hugging as if we’re both falling from the sky and sharing one parachute.

  “Never happen,” I say. “Never.” And I hope to Christ I am telling the truth.

  And as we hold each other, a funny thing happens, right there on that crooked little street in Queens. I can feel strength flowing from my son right through my arms, across my chest, and straight down my legs, where the quivering of my knees suddenly stops. I pull back from my son, wipe the tears from his eyes with a gentle knuckle.

  “All right, then, Jake. Let’s go see if this old bastard is still breathing.”

  The clapboard house is still standing, though the yellow paint is peeling and faded. Jake points at it from half a block away. “That’s got to be it. Am I right?”

  “You are right.”

  “Think he’s alive?”

  “We’ll know soon enough.”

  A tall privet hedge blocks our view of the front lawn, but as we approach we can hear digging sounds, the scrape of steel against stone, and as we reach the front walk there he is on his knees, in jeans and a green T-shirt, prying up a chunk of cement with a crowbar.

  He’s got his back to us. His thick hair has gone completely white, the radiant white of a healthy old man, and it’s cropped close to the scalp. All around him are pried-up chunks of the short cement path that used to lead from the front door to the sidewalk, and then I see a sledgehammer, which he’s obviously used to smash the cement path to smithereens.

  Sledgehammers and crowbars. So much for my premonitions about a feeble old man.

  He wiggles the crowbar from side to side, loosens a chunk of cement, pulls it free with a groan of satisfaction, and chucks it aside. Now the entire path has been removed, down to the dirt. My father gets to his feet, and claps his gloved hands together to knock off the dirt. He turns toward the sidewalk and freezes at the sight of us standing there.

  Except for the totally white hair, he hasn’t changed very much since the day Jake was born. He’s still as lean as a leopard, his big blue eyes twinkle with mischief, and his bare arms are ropy with sinew and muscle.

  “So, Dad,” I begin. “How are you, anyway?”

  He stands there and stares at me, squints at me, as if maybe his eyes could be playing tricks on him in the wake of the enormous physical effort he’s just expended to demolish the cement path.

  But he quickly realizes I’m no mirage. He pulls off his gloves and tosses them to the ground, like a hockey player ready for a fight.

  “Holy shit,” says Danny Sullivan, in a voice many decibels quieter than the voice I remember from my childhood. Still looking straight at me, he points a finger in Jake’s direction. “My grandson?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Come here, kid.”

  A wide-eyed Jake obeys my father, stepping up to him and stopping before him as if a medal is going to be pinned to his chest. Instead, my father reaches out and gingerly touches his cheek, then his chest, then his arms, as if Jake is an oil painting, a work of art that is not quite dry. A smile that’s half a smirk creases my father’s face. “You’re taller than your old man.”

  “A little.”

  “You happy about that?”

  “I guess so. I hadn’t really thought about it.”

  My father turns to me, smiling broadly now, and I see that he still has his teeth. They gleam a golden yellow in the early afternoon light.

  “How about that?” he says. “The Spick-Mick is taller than you!”

  Political correctness was never one of my old man’s strengths. Jake has grown up in a hothouse of it under Doris’s roof, so I’m somewhat astonished to see that he’s all but doubled over with laughter at what his paternal grandfather has just called him. My father offers a hand to shake with Jake, then pulls the boy into a headlock. “Your father let you drink beer, kid?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Call me Danny. Should we go inside and have a cold one?”

  “Unless you want to take me to Charlie’s Bar.”

  “Ho-ho!” My father laughs out loud. “Charlie’s Bar! How do you know about Charlie’s Bar?”

  “I’ve heard some things,” Jake deadpans.

  “Well, kid, I’d love to take you, but Charlie’s Bar burned to the ground about five years ago. So what say we go inside and wet our whistles?”

  “Okay by me, Danny.”

  My father keeps Jake in a headlock on the short walk to the house. Giggling like he did when he was five years old, Jake has to walk hunched over so’s not to break my father’s grasp.

  I’m still standing on the sidewalk in a state of shock. When they get to the door, my father turns to me. “You can come in, too, if you’re thirsty.”

  The three of us sit at the old kitchen table. The wooden chairs have gone rickety with the years, the same chairs we sat on when my mother was alive, and fighting the good fight for my soul.

  My father has kept the walls freshly painted and the house is surprisingly clean, but all the furniture and appliances are the same stuff I grew up with. This tiny, boxy house is like a well-kept museum, with an eighty-year-old curator.

  He’s taken three longneck bottles of Rheingold beer from the refrigerator, and we all drink straight from the bottle. Nobody proposes a toast. My father wipes foam from his li
ps with the back of his hand and says to Jake, “Still got that double last name going?”

  “Hey, Dad—”

  “I’m just asking! I’m not allowed to ask?”

  Jake nods and says, “My last name is Perez-Sullivan.”

  My old man winces, quite theatrically. “It’s a hell of a mess.”

  “Why do you say that, Danny?”

  “Well, Jacob—do they call you Jacob?”

  “I prefer Jake.”

  “Good! Well, Jake, look at it this way. You’ve got two last names, right? Now let’s say you fall in love with a girl whose feminist mother also refused to surrender her last name. You marry, you have a kid, and that kid’s got four last names. I mean, where does it end? A generation later it’s eight last names, then sixteen. Christ Almighty, what the hell’s the phone book gonna look like fifty years from now? It’ll be two feet thick!”

  I duck my face so Jake can’t see me smiling, but it doesn’t matter. He’s actually laughing out loud over his grandfather’s perceptions.

  “Good point you got there, Danny.”

  “Well, it’s just common sense, isn’t it? At some point you gotta stand in front of the bullshit wagon, put your hands up and say, ‘Enough!’”

  He delivers this rant to Jake, but of course it’s intended for my ears. I never liked the fact that my kid had two last names, but like so many fathers of my time I let it slide, let the bullshit wagon run right over me.

  Jake gets to his feet. “Danny,” he says, “is it okay if I take a look at my father’s old room?”

  “You do whatever you like.” My father points toward the staircase. “Second door on the left. Toilet’s the third door, in case you need it.”

  Jake leaves. My father and I drink in an excruciating silence I feel compelled to break. “Charlie’s Bar burned down?”

  “Few years back. Charlie forgot to turn off a space heater one winter night after last call.”

  “Anybody killed?”

  My father laughs. “Always the reporter, eh, Sammy? No, nobody was killed. But the last bar in Queens that refused to serve ‘light’ beer was gone forever, I’m sorry to say.”

  “How’s Charlie?”

  “Dead. Cancer got him about a year after the bar burned down.”

  “Must have been rough on you, losing a friend like that.”

  “Yeah, well, you get to be my age, you’re gonna attend some funerals…. Did you ever darken Charlie’s doorway?”

  Was this a trick question? Or did he really not know about the night I went in there looking for him, and wound up getting laid for the first time?

  “I was underage,” I finally say.

  He nods, shrugs. “Well, it’s too bad we never hoisted one together at Charlie’s.”

  It feels funny to know that the place I first got laid out of is gone. Why hadn’t Fran mentioned it? A little bit of my history is ashes, and I’m tempted to tell my father about it, but what for? Why bother? He hardly knows anything else about me, so why should he know this?

  My father gulps more beer, clears his throat, and gestures toward the stairs Jake has just climbed. “What’s with the hair and the beard? Your kid starring in A Passion Play?”

  “He likes it. I figure it’s better than a tattoo.”

  My father shoves his shirtsleeve up toward his shoulder, revealing a blue tattoo of an anchor with chains beneath faded letters that read U.S. NAVY. “What, may I ask, is wrong with a tattoo?”

  “Please don’t show him that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Dad—”

  “All right, all right.” He rolls the sleeve back down. “What’s it been, fifteen years?”

  “Seventeen, Dad. Almost eighteen. Since the day Jake was born.”

  “Christ!” He shakes his head. “You know, I thought you might’ve picked up the phone to give me a call on 9/11, just to let me know you were alive.”

  “Funny, I was waiting for you to call me on that same day.”

  “I guess we were both wrong.”

  “I guess.”

  “How come Doris didn’t come with you for this little reunion?”

  “We’ve been divorced for thirteen years.”

  “It didn’t last, eh? What a shock.”

  “I guess it just wasn’t a marriage made in heaven, like you and Mom.”

  My father sits back, studies my face, drinks more beer. “You happy since you split?”

  “No.”

  “How about Doris?”

  “Probably not.”

  “So nothing changed, except you’ve been shelling out for two apartments all these years, and shuttling the kid back and forth.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  “Tell me another way.”

  “Two people could not get along. If they’d stayed together, the misery would have eaten them alive.”

  “You’re miserable anyway.”

  “It’s a different kind of misery.”

  “Bullshit. Misery is misery. All in all, you might as well have stayed together. It worked for your mother and me. It’s not as if we had the perfect union.”

  “Mom was good enough to drop dead on you, old man. It would have been interesting to see how things would have shaken out if she’d lived. My gut tells me you’d have wound up in a furnished room in Kew Gardens.”

  He tightens his big-knuckled hand around his beer bottle. “Watch who you’re calling an old man.”

  There is true menace in his voice. We have not so much as shaken hands, and suddenly it looks as if our first physical contact might be his fist flattening my nose. As family reunions go, this one could use a little work.

  I swallow some beer and say, “Been a long time since you painted the house, I notice.”

  “It’s next on my list, after the front path.”

  “Got a color picked out?”

  “Same as last time. Canary yellow. Benjamin Moore, the best stuff around. Got eight gallons in the garage.”

  I shake my head in wonder. “It’s so nice how you uphold traditions, Dad. Mom’s dead, but you’re still going with that color she despised.”

  “You got a problem with it?”

  “I’m just amazed at how long you can stay spiteful. You picked that ridiculous color because you were so pissed off about me going to Catholic school.”

  “I picked that color because I like it. Yellow, like buttercups, like sunshine. You got something against buttercups and sunshine?”

  “Paint it with polka dots, for all I care. Mom’s dead. You can’t hurt her anymore.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “Enough, Dad. This was a mistake. We’ll drink up and get the hell out of your life.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  I drain my bottle, set it down, and start to chuckle.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “I’ll tell you what’s funny. My son thought maybe you’d remarried. Nobody who ever knew you would think such a thing.”

  “I’ve had plenty of chances.”

  “Yeah, sure. Women just line up for the chance to be miserable with you, don’t they?”

  “Not lately. They did for a while. But I only ever loved your mother.”

  It’s almost a paralyzing thing to hear, and for a moment or two I can’t move, and I can barely breathe.

  Can there be any truth to what he’s just said? And if there is, how different might his life have been if my mother had lived? Maybe time would have healed their wounds. Maybe they would have grown into each other, a pair of lovable curmudgeons spending too much time together, griping away on their trips to the mall. Maybe it could have worked. Anything can work, if love is real…right?

  “You loved her, Dad? Is that what you said?”

  “In my own lousy way, yeah. Don’t get me wrong here. She was a pain in the ass and a religious fanatic. She liked getting her own way. I liked getting my way. And poor you, always stuck in the middle. Did I ever apologize to you
for that? If not, I apologize now.”

  “Don’t bother. Doris and I did the same thing to our son.”

  “Well, there you go. Maybe we all do it. Maybe there’s no such thing as compatibility. Not if your last name is Sullivan.”

  Just then Jake bops back into the room, shattering the mood as he sits down, grabs his beer bottle and takes a swig. “Who’s that girl on that poster in your room, Dad?”

  “Poster?”

  “Her name is Debbie Harry,” my father says. “A singer. Your old man was obsessed with her. He pleasured himself on many a night, staring at that poster.”

  The two of them laugh out loud at my expense. I can feel my face burning. “The Debbie Harry poster is still hanging in my room?!”

  “I haven’t touched a thing since you left. Go take a look.”

  “I don’t need a look.”

  “Go ahead. You seem tense. Go relax yourself. Jake and I will respect your privacy.”

  Jake tries to suppress a giggle.

  I roll my eyes. “Jesus, Dad!”

  “All right, all right, it was just a joke. A bad joke.”

  A silence falls over the table, so severe a silence that the ticking of the kitchen clock seems to get louder with each successive second, ominous as a fuse burning toward a bomb. Jake can feel it, too. He’s struggling for something to say, and at last he says it.

  “Danny,” he begins, “how come you smashed up the path to your house?”

  “He’s going to build a moat,” I say. “Fill it with pirhana. Keep everybody away for good.”

  My father ignores me, turns to Jake. “It was in lousy shape. I’ve been meaning to replace it for years. Finally getting around to it, replacing it with something that’ll last.”

  He’s deceptively optimistic, my old man. He’s eighty years old, and determined to build a path that will last another fifty years. Why? Who will walk on it, besides the mailman? Who comes to visit this hard-bitten, angry old man?

  My father leans closer to Jake, as if to confer with a conspirator in a shady deal. “I’m not pouring cement this time. Ohhh, I’ve got a beautiful plan for that path.”