The Life and Times of Benny Alvarez

by Peter Johnson

  Crash can get away with being a wise guy to my grandfather.

  “What a mouth on that kid,” my grandfather says, laughing. “A real Alvarez. What’s his name again?” And then the words get jumbled up. “Cramp? Crap?”

  “It’s Crap, Grandpa,” I say, my father scowling at me. And that’s what he calls Crash for the rest of the day, with no one correcting him. Even Crash gives him a pass, knowing my grandfather’s hearing a different word than the one coming out of his mouth.

  “Well, let’s get rolling,” he says. “Let’s get the show on the road. Let’s kick some butt.”

  “Let’s get you some socks first,” my father says.

  Crash and I look at my grandfather’s feet, and sure enough, they’re sockless. But he’s not embarrassed, because he knows where to put the blame. “That woman,” he says again, pointing toward the house.

  My father ignores him, goes into the house, and returns with a pair of white ankle socks. Gloria’s standing behind him, smiling. It’s almost four thirty, but she’s still in her bathrobe. A black hairnet holds the bulk of her gray hair in place. “Have fun,” she says.

  “Yeah, right,” my grandfather says.

  “You’re the love of my life,” she croons playfully, which makes us all laugh. Despite what my grandfather says, Gloria’s okay, and she takes good care of him.

  Before long, we’re on the practice green at Firefly.

  “One ball, one club,” my grandfather says, holding up his putter. He brought the long one. The top of the shaft touches his chest, so he doesn’t have to bend over, just sway it back and forth like a pendulum. We actually don’t have a chance against him, because he practices on his living-room rug about two hours a day, putting balls into the mouth of a Dixie cup, which is pretty difficult.

  Even if we could beat him, my father and I would lose on purpose, but not Crash. One day, my father got lucky and was a stroke ahead of my grandfather until he messed up the next two putts on purpose. When I mentioned it to him later, Crash said, “Grandpa wouldn’t want to win that way. He’s no weak Sally.” A weak Sally is what Grandpa calls us when our putts come up short.

  There are five holes on the practice green, and the idea is to play them twice, then add up our strokes. My grandfather decides how far away we should putt from by tossing a quarter behind his back. He gets really serious when he does this, like it’s a ritual handed down from Alvarez to Alvarez since the beginning of Alvarez time.

  Crash, with his little putter, almost beats him today, but his last putt goes four feet past the hole. He unintentionally lets slip a swear word, and my father says, “Totally unnecessary, Crash.” But then my grandfather’s putt ends up short, and he says the same word, waddling over to Crash and placing his brown-spotted hand on Crash’s shoulder. “Never up, never in,” he says, and Crash nods, smiling broadly. My father just shakes his head, and for a moment, I’m a little jealous of Crash, wanting my grandfather all to myself.

  After golf, we go to McDonald’s, and my grandfather abuses the counter people because they won’t let him use his senior discount to pay for everyone’s meal. He does this every week, so they’re used to it. Then we take him home. Gloria’s waiting at the front door in the same outfit, ready for round fifteen. She invites us in, but my father says my mother’s expecting us for dinner.

  On the way home, I apologize to Crash for letting the “Crap” thing go on. “You know Grandpa would’ve beaten up on himself if he knew he messed up your name.”

  “Well, you could’ve gone with Cramp.”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” I admit.

  “Is he losing it?” Crash asked.

  “Strokes aren’t like that,” my father says. “They mess up your wiring, so he has to try to retrain his brain, like he did the last time. Now even reading’s been taken away from him.”

  “Who took it away?” Crash asks.

  “Fate,” I say. I’m not sure where that comes from, but my father seems to agree with me, while Crash probes the inside of his cheek with his tongue and nods, repeating his favorite phrase, “It’s a dirty trick.”

  “It is what it is,” my father says.

  Moving Targets

  It isn’t unusual for my father to become more serious when talking about my grandfather. From what I’ve heard over the years, they butted heads most of their lives, and I guess my grandfather was pretty hard on him, especially when he was a teenager, which is hard to believe, considering how laid-back and jokey he is with me and Crash. Sometimes when the four of us are together, it’s like we’re all fighting for my grandfather’s attention: my father probably trying to make up for those lost teenage years, and Crash and me jockeying to be top grandson. When we were much younger, at a birthday party for my grandfather, I remember us pushing and shoving to see who’d help him blow out the candles, my grandfather seeming to enjoy it all.

  One day, shortly before his first stroke, he and I were hitting golf balls off a green mat into a stretch of black netting he had tacked across the back of his garage, and I surprised myself by asking if he liked Crash more than me. He moved the mat a few feet onto the driveway, so we wouldn’t break a club on our upswings; then he teed up an old range ball. Whack! I heard, the ball’s flight cut short by the net. He leaned on his driver with one hand and rubbed his chin with the other, saying, “What makes you think I like Crash better than you?”

  “Maybe ‘better’ isn’t the right word, but you always cut him slack.”

  “Crash acts like a tough guy,” he said, “but he’s a gentle soul. That kind of Alvarez is born with a ‘Handle with Care’ sign around his neck.”

  I laughed. “Crash, a gentle soul?”

  He teed up another ball and swung hard. Whack! “Your father was like Crash, Benny, and I made some mistakes there.”

  “I’ve heard.”

  He seemed taken aback by this confession. “Come here a second,” he said, placing another ball on the mat. “Let me see you swing.”

  I grabbed a five iron and made a pass at the ball, following its low trajectory into the net.

  “Take a shorter backswing,” he said. “That shot would’ve never made it over the water hole at Firefly.”

  He was trying to distract me, but I wouldn’t let him off the hook. “Are you proud of me, Grandpa?” I said.

  He sighed deeply, then brushed some hair away from my eyes, as if admiring me. “Every day, Benny. You’re our Golden Boy.”

  “Golden Boy?”

  He laughed, stepping away a few feet. “Oh, you’re a pain-in-the-neck Alvarez, all right, but you have your mother’s grit and heart.”

  “That’s not what I hear from everyone else.”

  “Then you’ll have to prove them wrong. But I trust my instincts. Just be yourself, Benny. The real trick is to be crafty, kind of like a boxer, learning when to punch and when to duck and dodge. As my father once said, ‘Trouble can’t hit a moving target.’”

  “Trouble, Grandpa?”

  He didn’t answer but instead asked for my five iron. “You need a stronger grip,” he said, positioning his hands around the top of the club’s shaft to demonstrate. “See what I mean?”

  I grabbed the club and followed his suggestion, happy to see the ball take flight toward the top of the net.

  Aldo

  My sister’s looking nervous this morning. Aldo’s picking her up for school, and he’s not one of my father’s favorite people. I think he wanted her first real boyfriend to be a clean-cut jock with a social conscience, but Aldo’s got long, stringy black hair and looks like an undertaker: black jeans, black Converse low basketball shoes, a black T-shirt with the name of some rock group on front, and a black jean jacket. I read somewhere that Albert Einstein had seven of the same outfits hanging in his closet, one for every day of the week, so he could focus on the meaning of the universe instead of worrying if the green tie went with the brown sports coat. Likewise, I imagine Aldo’s closet being a sea of black denim.

  What really
drives my father bonkers, though, is that Aldo has a yellow tattoo of Tweety Bird on his neck. My father would’ve hated any tattoo, but Tweety Bird? What the heck is that about? We’re almost afraid to ask.

  Surprisingly, Aldo’s a good basketball player; actually, a great basketball player. He often shoots hoops with me, even though I make a point to frequently bust him because his cockiness rubs me the wrong way. Once, when I asked him why he didn’t play for the school team, he proudly said, “Team sports suck. Coaches suck. Been there, done that.” The next time I saw him I said, “Did you mean ‘suck’ as in ‘stinks’ or ‘rots’?”

  He smiled broadly, though it wasn’t a friendly smile, more like one of those I’m-about-to-smack-your-punk-behind smiles. “I meant sucks as in sucks,” he said.

  Ironically, Aldo’s cockiness is the only reason my father tolerates him. Anyone who goes against the status quo is okay with him. But he still can’t get past the tattoo. Also, the fact that Aldo is a drummer and lead vocalist in a band named the Cro-Magnons. You would’ve thought a guy who has a tattoo of Tweety Bird on his neck would’ve called his band the Flintstones, but Aldo told my parents they were looking for “something prehistoric, something primeval.” At the word “primeval,” my father’s eyeballs widened about a quarter of an inch, and even my mother flinched. It was downhill for Aldo after that. If he had said “archaic” or “antediluvian” instead of “primeval,” my parents wouldn’t have been so terrified for dear sweet Irene. But none of it mattered, anyway, because Aldo could’ve been a budding serial murderer and Irene would have turned him to the good side.

  I’m actually feeling sorry for her today, as she’s sitting nervously, waiting for Aldo to show. We have a wide-open kitchen attached to the family room. Irene’s at the kitchen table, checking her watch, pretending to flip through the pages of a novel. My mother’s emptying the dishwasher, and my father’s on his leather recliner, reading the paper, so he can have a ringside seat when Aldo arrives. Crash is upstairs for hiding the TV’s remote because my mother wouldn’t let him watch a rerun of Good Luck Charlie.

  When the doorbell rings, everyone freezes except for me and Spot, who’s barking and attacking the screen door. I open it a crack, and Aldo says, “Is Irene home?”

  “No,” I say. “She ran off with a Russian ballet dancer.”

  “I thought it was a Bulgarian prince.”

  “That was last week.”

  Aldo smirks. “Well, tell her I’ll have the car running.”

  “I’m telling the truth this time,” I say.

  He starts to walk to his car, an old black BMW with a sharp-toothed caveman painted on the hood. I have to admit, it’s pretty cool. Suddenly, he turns and says, “Tell your father I miss him.”

  Before I can reply, Irene’s at the door with her backpack. “You’re impossible,” she says, kissing me on the cheek, “but I love you.” Sometimes I wish she’d smack me or cut holes in the crotch of my jockey shorts.

  I watch her get into Aldo’s car and drive away, thinking his car and Irene’s personality are oddly contradictory. To my father, it’s probably like watching Alice in Wonderland disappear on Attila the Hun’s horse. I sit down on the couch and look up “contradictory”: “inconsistent, incompatible, supine” (forget that one), and finally come to what I’m looking for, “incongruous.” “Aldo and Irene are an incongruous couple.” That’s my phrase for Beanie and Jocko today.

  “Is it really necessary to tease Aldo?” my mother asks.

  “All great heroes have to pass a test,” I say, echoing one of my father’s expressions.

  She looks professional today in a light-blue pants suit. She has long, curly blond hair and green eyes. I wish I had gotten that hair. Mine is straight and black, so I keep it short. My father says I got the Black Irish gene, whatever that means.

  “I find this constant teasing negative and a waste of time,” she says.

  There’s that word again.

  “You can also see it as humorous,” my father interrupts.

  “What could possibly be funny about telling that poor boy every morning that Irene has eloped with assorted strange men?”

  “Repetition is a fundamental staple of comedy,” my father says. “We laugh at comedians when they keep hitting themselves in the face with a hammer. That’s why Charlie Chaplin was so famous.”

  “I’m not one of your students, Colin,” she says, then turns her attention to me. “Anything unusual happening in school today?” She says it as if she already knows.

  “No,” I say.

  “Not even in Ms. Butterfield’s class?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Not something to do with poetry?”

  “Oh yeah,” I say, as if just remembering, then add, “What do you do, talk to her every day?”

  “It was on the website.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, it’s always exciting when a guest visits. Ms. Butterfield has brought that dimension to your school.”

  I’m about to respond, impressed by her use of “dimension,” but Crash interrupts from upstairs. “I’m going to be late for my bus,” he says. He’s right, so I walk him there, returning just in time to meet up with Beanie and Jocko, who are parked by my front door on their bikes.

  “Aldo and Irene are an incongruous couple,” I say.

  “Wow, you’re on your game today,” Jocko says. He’s a big kid with a round face, a buzz cut, and so many freckles his face glows like a wet pumpkin. His size makes him appear tough, but he’s no bully. In fact, he can be kind of nervous and is a compulsive worrier. Most girls I know worry, so maybe that’s why they like him.

  “You don’t have to answer now,” I say.

  “I can’t even tie my shoes this early,” Beanie says.

  Jocko seconds that, so we hop on our bikes and head to school.

  Mr. Congo

  At first, this morning seems free from drama, except for a couple of warnings from the principal, one about wearing baseball hats in school because they’re associated with gangs. About the only gang you’ll find in my middle-class neighborhood is a posse of paunchy new moms gathering every morning on the school track to chat and trot behind baby joggers.

  After that announcement I’m off to Mr. Congo’s (that’s his real name) math class, where we’ve been playing Crunching Numbers for the last two weeks. It supposedly helps us to review concepts for the inane state exams given every fall. The kids hate them, the teachers hate them, and my father, who reads more about the demise of our public school system than the secretary of education, hates them, but obviously, some screwball in Washington decided they make us smarter. The Crunching Numbers period usually ends up being a battle between the boys and girls, a battle we actually win sometimes, much to the annoyance of Claudine and her gang.

  This morning, Mr. Congo looks like he wrestled three pit bulls on the way to class. He’s only in his twenties, but he’s bald and has dark circles under his eyes. Add to the bald head and baggy eyes that he’s thin and pale, and you could easily mistake him for a convict just released from solitary. To be fair, Mr. Congo’s wife had a baby a month ago, and it’s clear he’s not sleeping much. If Claudine didn’t water all the strange, cool plants his wife arranged in the classroom the first day of school, they wouldn’t have lasted a week.

  But Claudine’s not too happy this morning. Five minutes left to go in class and the final Crunching Numbers question lights up the screen: (5x + 2x) = (4x − 3y) “Tick, tick, tick,” I say, realizing she and her gang don’t have a clue. “Tick, tick, tick,” I say, rubbing it in before tapping the little bell on my desk and giving the correct answer.

  “You the man,” Beanie yells, and before Mr. Congo can lecture us about being “gracious” (a favorite word of his), we’re off to English class.

  Claudine’s ahead of me in the hall, so I slow down, not wanting to invade her unhappy space, but I know she feels my nearness because I swear she’s slowing down on purpose. The more slo
wly she walks, the more I try to lag behind until we’re crawling toward Ms. D’s room.

  Suddenly, I’m pushed from behind. “Get moving, Alvarez.” It’s Big Joe. “What are you, crippled?”

  Before I can respond, I find myself careening into Claudine.

  She wheels around, obviously as uncomfortable with this encounter as I am, and Paige, who’s walking beside her, glares at me like I’m a laboratory rat she’s about to dissect on a black slab she has concealed in her basement.

  I can feel the blood vessels swelling in my face, and I’m trying to calm down, but it’s harder than getting rid of the hiccups.

  “Big Joe pushed me,” I say, my victory in math class a distant memory.

  “No, I didn’t,” Big Joe lies.

  “Yes, you did,” Beanie chimes in.

  Claudine suddenly seems taller and older and speaks in that voice Irene uses when trying to convert me or Crash to her cult of positivity. She places one hand on her hip and says, “Your excuses don’t matter much, Benny, but an apology does.”

  “Well, I think his excuse matters,” Beanie says.

  “Forget it, Beanie,” I say, knowing it’s too late. Claudine has turned the tables, my brief advantage destroyed by a simple push.

  “Well?” she says, expressionless.

  I don’t know why I wimp out so easily, but I say, “Sorry.”

  I’m waiting for her to accept or not accept it, or kick me in the shins, but she turns and strolls into Ms. D’s class.

  “What just happened?” I ask Beanie.

  Big Joe laughs. “You got punked, dude.”

  I look to Beanie for support, but he seems seriously disappointed. “When it comes to that girl, dude, you have to toughen up.”

  The last thing I hear before walking into Ms. D’s room is Big Joe’s stupid laugh.

  Caulfield Thomas Jones

  Ms. D’s room looks different today. There are twenty kids in class, and normally groups of four desks are arranged in five separate squares, so we’re forced to face one another while Ms. D roams the room. Some guys don’t like this setup. They’re usually the ones who nod off, and that’s hard to do when you’re staring across at another student, who’s always a girl. Ms. D makes sure of that. I sit with Beanie and Clare Davis and Bethany Briggs. I don’t have a problem with those girls because they’re what I call neutrals: girls who don’t pile on when Claudine goes after me or one of the other guys.