Chapter 4

IV

My Way

That night, after the dance, I cried. I’d been holding back tears all night, but once alone in my room, I couldn’t help it.

I smoked a cigarette to calm myself down, but I kept on crying. All at once my nerve endings deserted me and I couldn’t feel a thing except for an intense pain in my forehead and the smoke wheezing into my lungs. I felt like I’d been hit in the head with a wrench, my skull compressed on all sides. When I closed my eyes, I saw lightening and heard thunder. My arms and legs felt like tired lead, my stomach like a black hole. It was a cold night outside but I was sweating anyway. I reclined on my bed, pressing my face into the pillow, which grew damp from the perspiration on my brow and tears on my face. I turned over onto my back and the sweat from my brow mixed with the tears slowly streaming from my eyes, producing a road-slick of saltwater on my cheeks.

I fought with you that night, Mom, remember? It was about my smoking, which you always suspected and I always denied. As usual, you randomly brought it up at the worst possible time— during the car ride home. “Girls don’t like boys who smoke,” you said. “It’s disgusting.” It was typical of you to ruin a good night by mentioning something like that. You are good at that. And you are such a hypocrite, too, because you used to suck down two packs a day. The result was the same old scene on a different day: I yelled at you, you yelled back, and then I kicked the dashboard as we parallel parked in front of the house. You didn’t say a word after that.

But that’s not what upset me to tears. To be honest, I’m not sure what exactly made me cry. I remember sprinting straight up our creaky wooden staircase to my room once I got home. I didn’t bother to turn the stairwell light on as I ascended, because I knew the stairs well enough the climb them with no problem. As usual, I felt like someone was chasing me up the stairs, like a hunter, so I hopped up two steps at a time, trying to escape.

As I reached the top step I was already out of breath, and some tears had started falling from my eyes. I turned quickly and tried to stare down the stairwell toward the bottom step; I saw nothing but murky darkness. I was still scared, though, as if someone had followed me up the staircase, crawling on his belly, eager to snatch my legs out from under me.

Reaching toward the wall I felt for the light switch and flicked it on. Suddenly, it was so bright that I was forced to squint my eyes for a moment, simultaneously releasing what seemed like a thousand fireflies behind my eyelids. My heart was still palpitating, and as I turned to walk away from the stairs toward my room, I looked back one last time to check for the hunter. But all I saw was my shadow waning as I turned the unlit corner toward my bedroom.

As I fell on my bed more tears seemed to fall with me. I was helpless. I’ll never see Maria again, I thought. I would die that night, I just knew it. There is nothing, I thought. Nothing. There is no God, no hope. No fate, no destiny. I was alone in the world. Had I been in a crowded room, I would’ve felt like Robinson Crusoe. I couldn’t face challenges. I couldn’t win. I couldn’t kill the hunter, he would always be chasing me. I was strengthless.

I lay prone on my back for a while, looking at this poster above my desk—the same one I’m looking at now, although back then I didn’t know what it portrayed—flying through thick clouds high above what looked like a city. Below the jet was a caption that read: V-J Day! Dad, you gave it to me on Victory in Japan day a few years ago, because you knew how much I liked aircraft and how fascinated I was by World War II. Right next to the poster was a black and white photograph of you holding your combat helmet under your arm in Vietnam, standing at the nose of a B-52. What a cool fucking picture.

You said it was taken right after your last mission, right before you left for Hawaii, and then back to New York. You looked so proud, so strong, so dignified. You looked like a man who could jump the highest hurdles. And you did. You hated the war but ran your mission while there. You never complained or even cursed about it. You did what you were asked to do by an unforgiving country, a deceptive President, and an arrogant commanding officer. And you persisted with your mission once he got home. Only weeks after your plane landed in New York, you married mommy and bought a brick colonial in Queens.

You wanted to leave Queens but mommy wanted to stay. So you drove to Newark every day and put in forty hours a week, not counting the commute. You never once bitched or moaned. You did your duty for family just as you had for your country. You worked silently, day-in and day-out, without recognition, like a gymnast who trains endlessly for the Olympics and doesn’t even win a bronze, but trains even harder right afterward.

Hey mom and dad, I often wonder if you guys really went through the same stuff as me when you were my age. You may think so, but I say probably not. Hell, I don’t even know what you guys saw in each other when you met. These days, no two totally different people would ever fall in love like you did. When thunder marries lightening all you get is a storm.

Occasionally, I blow the dust off of your old, musty high school yearbooks in the attic and stare at your pictures. Mom, you beamed like Mary Tyler Moore. And dad, you glared defiantly like James Dean. You guys actually look normal and attractive.

But, Mom—and this is where I get so fucking confused—you must have been a mental case back then, too! That’s an awful thing to write, I know. But it must’ve been true. As far back as I can remember, you were always a little crazy. You never beat us, and you bought us everything we wanted, but you just couldn’t control your mouth.

You were never like all the mothers I saw on TV. On all the other shows the moms were the same—pleasant and gentle and caring. But you were never like those moms. I’ve always been pissed at you for that. I mean, there was dad who had fought in the war, and he was really cool and collected. Even when me and Tracy were bad, my dad always understood and never went crazy. But you, mom—holy shit! If you couldn’t control yourself, why did you bother to have children in the first place?

I admit that I forgave you, Dad, for your mistakes very early in life. Any other woman for a wife and you never would’ve cheated, I know that. Your flaws never affected me. You always kept yourself in control. Mommy, on the other hand, even though you didn’t hit as much, you never had any control of yourself. I remember one time you got angry and actually went at me with a fork. Maybe I was bad that day. I don’t know. But why couldn’t you just hit me and send me to my room? Why’d you have to go crazy like that? And that’s no exception to the rule. That shit happened day-in and day-out. You couldn’t control her mouth, either. All the moms on TV would ask nicely for something the first time, and then yell later if the kid didn’t do it. Not you. You’d yell the first time, or even curse, and never asked nicely for anything.

Most of the time, I guess, it was the alcohol talking. When you were sober, you weren’t as bad. You always bought me and Tracy clothes, and gave us tons of presents for Christmases and birthdays. As a matter of fact, you gave us too many presents. If I were a parent, I’d never waste so much money on buying so many goddamn toys each holiday. But that’s the thing—you’d shower us with gifts all the time, but all I ever really wanted was for you to be nice and stop drinking and cursing. You never understood this. And I never bothered explaining it to you, because I didn’t know how to back then.

It’s not like I never loved you. I did. But when I was a kid I hated you more often than loved you. I loathed you for having no control over yourself when you drank. I know that soon you’ll start seeing your shrink every day, instead of just once a week, after all that you’re going to discover about your beloved son. Take this journal to your shrink, mommy. This is my official statement.

Growing up with an alcoholic, I came to recognize and anticipate your routine. One rum and Coke induced a few moments of passivity. Two, and you started to talk a lot, with a look in your eyes that said, “Why isn’t anyone listening?” By your third your eyes were glossy and your voice spewed quick and obtrusive half-sentences. By your fifth rum and Coke you were loaded: One hundred and nineteen pounds of simulated supremacy, like when Charlie Chaplin dressed up as Hitler and kicked a globe around the room. You’d screech petty orders and hurl ugly expletives at me, Daddy, and Tracy. Six or seven drinks and you were gone, passed out, occasionally in a puddle of vomit in the bathroom, but usually on your bed. The sound of your bedroom door slamming shut never came to soon.

Occasionally, when you drank and lost all control of yourself, dad would glance in my direction and nod furtively as if to say, “Hey, kiddo, I know she’s messed up. Don’t worry, she’ll be asleep soon.” Amazing, but you never let her bother you too much. You gave mom’s drunken ravings as much attention as I give a strong breeze, allowing it to take its course and then settle down. And no matter what she did, no matter how crazy she was, you always took my mom’s side. I never liked that, of course. But, looking back on it now, I understand why. You didn’t want to make her even more crazy by siding with me. You always knew how wrong she was, but you tried to be a good husband and father.

Tracy never flinched when mom went berserk. Two years younger than me, she was still sharp enough to realize early on that mom was unmanageable. She never reacted the way I did. For some reason or another, Tracy never seemed to be bothered by that type of stuff. But I always was. Sometimes Tracy would say to me, “Hey, J. J. , why do you let mommy bother you like that? Just ignore her when she drinks.” It was good advice, I guess, but easier said than done.

Rum and Coke and Smoke—that’s what I called you one day. I was eight years old, and I suppose the rhyme sounded cute to me. You mashed your cigarette into a crystal ashtray and called for daddy to reprimand me. As punishment, dad smacked me with his belt. To a little kid, watching your father unbuckle his belt—hearing the clank of the brass and the rip of the leather—was like having a cocked revolver put to your head. The sounds hurt more than the leather. Nevertheless, mom, you always accused daddy of going soft on me. God, I despised you for wanting to see me punished more severely. And I always wanted to say something or do something that made you rethink your behavior and grasp how viciously you treated us all. But nothing ever got through to you, sober or otherwise.

***

As I thought about all this it overlay images of Maria, and the life would could spend together if I only could forget my own past. I kept watching the poster like it was a movie, and then switched back to the photo. First one, then the other, and then back again. I smoked a few more cigarettes, and cried one more tear for you, Dad.

I thought a lot that night. I thought about this guy named Richard that I worked with in an office the summer before. Richard was a short little man with thick black glasses and a big shaggy beard. He was a real slob, even more of a slob than my friend Kyle. Hell, he practically never had his shirt tucked in. And, even though he never wore a tie, he always kept his shirt buttoned up to the top. Fucking weird. Worse, sometimes he’d tuck the front part of his shirt into his underwear and then his belt-less pants would fall a few inches, displaying an elastic band that read Hanes. He was thirty-five, unmarried, and living with his mother when we met. He hadn’t shaved his beard for almost twenty years, and he hadn’t left the island of Manhattan since he was eighteen. I once asked him why he hadn’t gotten married, and he responded: “Because I don’t want to lose my freedom.” What freedom? I thought.

I used to pick on this guy non-stop. It’s not like I made him cry or anything; he always knew that I was just busting his balls. I started little arguments with him about everything. I argued for everything that he was against. He was one of those orthodox Jews who justified moral righteousness by quoting Biblical passages.

I also busted his balls every time he asked me for help. At least once daily, he'd approach me timidly and say something like, "Joel, can you show me how to use the photocopy machine?" or "Please help me turn on my computer. I forgot how." My response was always the same: "You've been here fifteen years and you can't operate the copier? Yeah, right!" I thought he was trying to unload his work on me, the bastard.

Despite these exchanges, we were friends in the office, and he knew I never meant any harm. But one day, about halfway through the summer, my supervisor pulled me aside and said something like, “Don’t be so hard on Richard. He’s a little retarded, you know.” At first I thought this was funny, because everyone knew that Richard was more than a little retarded. But then I noticed the somber look on my supervisor's face, and suddenly it all made sense. Richard had been working at the same office job for almost fifteen years; he lived with his mom; he acted like a weirdo; he dressed like a hobo with bad taste. It hit me: Shit! I've been making fun of a retarded guy! A guy with actual Down’s Syndrome! My stomach sank like the Titanic and my mouth went dry. I couldn’t believe that I’d been making fun of a real retarded guy all along. Poor Richard! I thought. I had been dissing the weakest person available. I don't think I spoke to him once after I found out what he was.

I thought about all this stuff for a while. Finally, after an hour or so, I regained my composure.

I smoked a few more cigarettes, wrote about the dance in my journal, and I fell asleep right there in my clothes and sneakers. Lucky it was a Friday night, because I didn’t wake up until around noon the following day.

***

At school, two days later, I told all of my friends about what happened at the dance. The response was what I expected: Kyle asked, “Did you bang her?” knowing full-well that I only danced with Maria. Rick tried to drown out my story with his own, but failed. Mike smiled like a big dope, because I knew he’d never even talked to a girl much less danced with one. Paul wasn’t like Mike. Mike had so little experience with girls that he thought I exaggerated the whole story, even though I didn’t. But Paul’s reaction was different. Paul was in disbelief because he knew that everything I said was true, and he couldn’t believe that I’d had yet another success with yet another girl.

“What’s her name?” Rick asked.

“Julie McCormick,” I said. Mike laughed his ass off. Rick laughed harder. Kyle laughed the hardest. Paul frowned and looked at his shoes.

My friends were in awe. I told Paul that I’d give him Lynn now that I was done with her. I know that sounds crude, but, Christ, we were guys, and we all talked that way.

It was a great lunch time that afternoon. Usually we talked about all sorts of stuff—girls, sports, teachers, whatever. But that day all we talked about was me and Maria. They kept asking me if I hooked up with her, but I responded by smiling like a Cheshire cat, letting them believe what they wanted to. I had the feeling there would be plenty of stuff to tell them during lunch time in the future.

After lunch, me and my friends walked back up to our lockers. That year, our junior year, our lockers were close to one another. So after we got our books, as usual, we hung around near the stairwell and bullshitted for a while until the bell rang. Kyle towered over all of us. He’s about six foot two or three, maybe even taller. He had dirty blonde hair that fell straight down to his shoulder blades. His face was gaunt and seldom clean-shaven. A circle of dirty blonde stubble lined the circumference of his lips nearly every day. Worse than that, Kyle's stringy hair dangled below his shirt collar, well beyond his neck. This sort of hair style breached the school's dress code. But of course, Kyle never got caught by the Brothers. Not once! He slyly tucked his hair into his collar, never raising an eyebrow from the faculty. How he managed to escape trouble through four years of high school looking like an out-of-work drummer is beyond me.

Between his gray, creaseless, slacks and shit brown shoes Kyle was a fashion train wreck. And when I say he wore this crap every day, I mean every day. He could have passed easily for the poorest kid in school. Kyle was, well, Kyle was Kyle. But the thing was, he didn’t give a shit what anyone thought of him. And he was pretty happy with the way he was. I’ve always admired Kyle for that. I always wanted to know his secret. Still do.

I remember the first time I met Kyle. It was the last day of classes during our freshman year. Mike had known Kyle since elementary school. As everyone piled out of school, Mike plucked me from the crowd outside and said, “Joel, this is Kyle. Kyle, this is Joel.” As we shook hands hello, I noticed how unkempt he was. So there I was, with this weirdo friend of a friend, lanky as hell, and all I could think to say to him was, “You have an earring.” And he sure as hell did have one, a big gold spider web earring dangling from a thin gold chain attached to his ear lobe. I think it even had a spider on it, too. I couldn’t believe that Mike was friends with such a freak. Earrings were for losers!

“No shit? I have a dick, too. Wanna see?” Kyle replied, without missing a beat. And that was that. I didn’t see him again until the beginning of our sophomore year. But whenever I spoke with Mike over the summer, he had a new Kyle story to tell me. It wasn’t until the next fall when school began that Kyle and I became friends. And how did we become friends? How did two seemingly different people manage to kindle a relationship? The answer is simple: We both thought Mike was a Polack.

See, we were both friends with Mike. But there was no doubt that Mike was, well, a geek. He was a great guy who wouldn't harm a fly. Strange thing is, though, Mike never hung out with anyone but Kyle and me. He was a geek for hanging out with us! Correction: Us and his mom. "Momma’s boy,” we’d always call him. And that’s precisely what Kyle heard me say under my breath one day when Mike committed one of his usual blunders. Well, it wasn’t actually a blunder, but it was typical Mike. While walking down the hall in school with him and Kyle one morning, I started belting My Way, the Elvis Presley song. As I finished the final crescendo of the song, as that final "my way" echoed down the black and blue and beige tiled hallway past Mrs. Simpkin’s English class, I turned to Mike and said: “That’s the way Elvis sang it.”

“It’s Frank Sinatra song,” he said.

“No, Polack, it’s an Elvis song.”

“But Sinatra also sang it,” he insisted. “I heard it on my mom's Sinatra record last week.”

Shit. He was right. I searched for a response. “Go fuck yourself, Mike!” was about all I could muster. But then, under my breath, I said, “Momma’s boy,” and laughed. Mike didn’t hear it, but Kyle’s thin lips grinned from ear to ear. From that point on, I knew that Kyle and I were going to be terrific friends. On that day we discovered a bond that would gel any two people together, no matter how dissimilar: a mutual derision for a mutual third friend.

Although both Kyle and I loved Mike like a brother, we reveled equally in his nerdiness throughout high school. Christ, we’d make fun of everything about Mike: his messed up hair, his pot belly, his sloppy clothes.

He was an easy target, but not too easy. The other two members of my high school quintet, Paul and Rick, were the insult magnets. Mike, however, was just a tad cooler than them, so Kyle and I considered it our duty to poke fun at him.

And there was plenty about Mike to dis. He stood about six feet, taller than me, but shorter than Kyle. But while I was kind of the average-sized member of the group, and Kyle was the emaciated member, Mike was the fat one. Not rolly-polly fat, not Jeff and his sister fat, but fat nonetheless. At sixteen, before he's ever tasted beer, he had a portly beer belly. And before he'd ever felt a chick's tit, he'd grown his own little pair of A-cups, the contour of which could be seen clearly through most any shirt. At school, between those tits there hung an unstylish pencil thin tie, usually an acrylic maroon one, no matter what color shirt he wore.

If I had to summarize Mike, I'd say that looked as ridiculous as Kyle, but unlike Kyle, he longed to look like me. Kyle was happy with his appearance. His style was being out of style. But Mike wished he didn't look like himself, he tried like hell to appear cool and hip. But he was what he was, and that's what Kyle and I found so hilarious. That's why we made fun of him incessantly.

This'll sound funny, but most of all, we made fun of Mike because me and Kyle were his only friends. Our friendship is reminiscent of an adage my father used to recite: "I wouldn't join any club that would have me as a member." Applied to us, Kyle and I picked on Mike because he wasn't sophisticated enough to have any friends other than two guys who constantly ridiculed him.

When Mike wasn't being laughed at by me and Kyle, he was at home watching movies with his mother. Almost every day, especially on Mondays following a weekend full of movie-watching, Mike would try to impress the gang by citing all sorts of extraneous facts about movies he's seen. Sometimes, I'll admit, his comments were interesting.

At lunch one day when Mike announced that he'd just seen The Godfather, and that we should all go over his house that weekend and watch it with him. Reluctantly, we went. It began as a typical afternoon: Rick's mom picked up me and Paul. Kyle, who also lived in Astoria, just walked over there around three. As usual, Mike's mom doted all over the five of us, probably because she was so happy he had more than one friend.

We settled in Mike's oversized stuffed sofa and thought, in unison: Mike is making a big deal over nothing...Mike is making a big deal over nothing. And then we saw it. Christ, Mike was right. The Godfather was great. It’s one of my favorite movies of all time now. Most people have seen it, but nobody has studied it like Kyle and I did that day. Everything about it was great—the dialogue, the acting, everything. What astonished me and Kyle the most, though, were the characters. Since there were five main Mafia guys in the movie, Kyle and I named our little high school clique after those guys.

Here's the rundown: I was Vito Coreleone, the Godfather himself, the composed, revered, dapper don that gently petted his cat as he plotted to brutally murder his enemies. Kyle was Tom Hagen, the Godfather's collected and thoughtful aide-de-camp or, as it's called in Italian, consigliere, which translated means "most trusted advisor." Paul was Fredo. Fredo’s basically a loser in the movie, and his timidity results in the Godfather getting shot in cold blood on a curbside in Little Italy. Rick was Tessio, which was perfect, because in the movie Tessio is a quiet caporegime, or lieutenant. And Mike was Clemenza, the other caporegime, Tessio's portly counterpart. He wasn't Mike's identical twin, but the comparison annoyed Mike. If Mike hadn't been so annoyed, he wouldn't have been such a perfect Clemenza.

Toward the end of the flick, after the Godfather’s son, the new Godfather, annihilates all of his enemies, Clemenza, Fredo, Tessio, and Tom Hagen are his only loyal partners left in the world. Throughout the movie they referred to themselves as The Family. Consequently, everyone started calling our quintet The Family, too. Not that my friends and I were anything close to a murderous gang or anything; hell, we thought farting in public was bold. But we always called ourselves The Family and referred to ourselves by our Mafia names. Me and Kyle did, at least.