kid forgave Gene. But I don’t know how suspicion couldn’t linger in the back of any of our minds after that one.
10
WHEN I WAS TEN years old, my father called one day and set up an appointment to come over and take me out for the first time. He apologized to my mother over the phone for all the years that had passed and blamed it on his work and not being able to find us. When he arrived an hour late he came up the stairs and blamed it on the traffic.
“I needed to drive on the sidewalks to get here. It’s busy around here.”
He had been used to the quieter way of life out east on the island, closer to where I had lived before my mother married Don. My father lived a mere couple of miles away all that time, but he was out driving trucks just like my mother’s father had done. Her father had died when she was around the age when my father had just started to come around, so I guess I couldn’t complain.
The man intrigued me. He was strange and wild— full of hyperbolic stories and loud laughs. The first day he took me for a drive and pointed to a shack on Sunrise Highway.
“Hey, we’re home,” he said and then laughed loud at the puzzled expression on my face.
He was tan like he had sat outside too long floating on a boat. He liked to fish so that’s where we went a lot of the time. He’d pick me up on Sundays and we’d go to a pier, a lake, or the beach. I liked being outside. But boy did he have lousy luck because we hardly ever caught fish. I didn’t mind because I didn’t see the point in hooking a fish out of the water just to throw it back. His bad luck was our good luck.
My father would drive us around a lot. His Marlboro smoke drifting out his driver side window. I liked the smell. We’d stop at video arcades and fast food places. We’d stop for snack breaks at gas stations or delis that usually consisted of a Kit Kat bar and a glass bottle of Coke. We went on errands and visited all the friends he managed to make around town. He liked to talk to people. To me, it seemed tiring. He had given up driving big trucks to manage a car wash because it kept him at home where he wouldn’t be so lonely like he was when he was out on the road. I liked driving around seeing different places, listening to the 80s music on the radio.
Some days he was late. A few times he just didn’t show up at all. I remember waking up early on Sunday and waiting around for several hours until I gave up. By noon I was out at my friend’s house or roaming the neighborhood trying to forget all about him. No phone call. No apology. No explanation. Weeks would pass and then he’d call my mother to set up another Sunday as if nothing had even happened. When I’d see him again, he’d pretend as if everything was normal. I guess I went right along with it.
11
WHEN DON UPGRADED to the Bentley, he decided to rent use of the driveway, but that didn’t stop the punks. One day I heard a hissing noise. It sounded like the hiss of a leaking garden hose. I peeked out the window and didn’t see anything. I went and found Don in the other room and told him I heard something funny outside. He froze and then pivoted toward the door. He took off down the stairs and out the front door. I followed right behind him. Upon exiting the house, the kid took off. The light switch had gone off in Don as it had other times, like when he went berserk on a security guard in a retail store for accusing him of stealing. Assault charges were eventually dropped. One day my brother JP was crying and my mother was yelling about something as we were driving down the road, and Don came to an abrupt stop, slammed the car into drive, yanked the keys out of the ignition, and walked home. We sat there in the middle of the road for a while until my mother decided to walk home and get the keys. You just never knew with Don.
From a distance, I watched Don capture the lone vandal. He grabbed him by the back of the head and repeatedly punched his face in until the kid could no longer stand. Don returned with blood on his hands and shirt. He looked like an axe murderer. I thought I had caught a look at the vandal when we first pursued him and then later on from down the block as I watched him crumble. I was never sure, but it looked a lot like Crazy John, in maybe what was one last failed attempt to terrorize me. Don’s car was never vandalized again.
The Bentley eventually became a symbol for all that was wrong. No food in the kitchen. No allowance or lunch money. A slap in the face. We were broke. I would hear Don rant to my mother about the mounting bills, yet there was an eighty thousand dollar car in the driveway.
Sometimes it was the same dinner three or four nights in a row. Some nights I would have to go to a friend’s house for dinner; I’d even bring food home for the morning. Some nights we’d go to my grandmother’s to eat and I’d fill my backpack with food from her cabinets. She had lots of healthy food and some treats too. She lived right across the street from the Entenmann’s family who owned a famous baked goods company, and they were always giving my grandmother donuts and cakes. It wasn’t the kind of food my grandmother and Andre indulged in though, so they always gave them away to us. I was lucky because I know many don’t have any food at all.
Other than basic shelter and food some of the time, one thing I could thank Don for was the part-time work he gave me as a teenager. He would bring me to jobs and put me to work cleaning cars in lots and showrooms. I would go around and shine up the rims and apply a shiny spray to the tires. I got to see all the newest cars and some old restored ones too. Don always paid me well, but it was often weeks late. This fluctuation in pay created a manic-depressive state for me. One week I’d have money in my pocket and the next one I’d be scrounging for change and wondering when and how I would eat.
Lunch money was scarce and the refrigerator would go bare for weeks, and I didn’t qualify for free lunch anymore like I had when it was just my mother and me. During these times as I waited for my pay, I would have to scrounge up money in the cafeteria with what they called grubbing— standing outside the cafe door asking “got any change?” I collected five or six dollars every day, which I would use for lunch and breakfast the next morning. Some days things were just bad and no one seemed to have any extra change. There were days in high school when I had to qualify myself for free lunch by stealing. I’d wait for the line monitor to be distracted and then I’d slip the Sunny Doodles and drink into my pants and walk out pretending to have forgotten my money. It only worked with packaged junk food, but it was something to eat. Lifting cakes didn’t always work because on some days they had a lady walk up and down the line as a watcher. If I couldn’t find anyone with any money to lend, then I’d go hungry for the day. I would go to school with an empty stomach and was expected to learn and behave. I usually left school with a rotten stomach.
$$$
While Don didn’t pay me or provide food on a consistent basis, he did provide a gigantic three thousand dollar television. He bought one of those early big screen televisions that weighed five hundred pounds and took four grown men to hoist it up the steps to our living room. Those poor guys. I found it amusing that we had such a large expensive television in such a small inexpensive apartment in the upstairs of someone else’s house. It was another toy for Don. Another problem though. Too often, my brother JP would bump into it and get whooped for it. One time he smeared food on the screen with his fingers and Don went ballistic. A safe zone was established. Violate the zone and he’d get beat. I never got hit even once, but I was sure to use the remote from a distance. Maybe I was smart. Maybe he was just intimidated by the fact I had a crazy father who could pop up from out of nowhere if he needed to. Maybe hitting JP was something else, something personal, and something to do with his own feelings about himself. I wasn’t about to test the theories though.
12
FOR A WHILE I felt hazy. At eleven years old I had strange bouts of odd dopey feelings. I would doze off on the living room couch after a bowl of cereal and wake to a kaleidoscope of colors swirling around on the big screen television. Except the television was turned off.
