“You probably flooded the engine. Is the sparkplug connected?”
“Yeah, Dad.”
“She have plenty of gas in her?”
I shake my head. “You do realize I’m not retarded, right?”
“Understood.” Dad adjusts his robe over his still noticeable bulge. Mom gives his butt a squeeze as he walks past, pouring salt into my psychological wounds. “Let’s have a look, then.”
There are few more timeless traditions than men yelling at inanimate objects. We stand in the driveway pleading with the four-wheeled, two-cycle engine to obey our commands. Dad can’t get the mower started either, but he loves the old machine. Grandpa George bought it when Dad was in high school. It’s one of those yellow metal Lawn-Boys from the mid-sixties that manages to hurl everything it finds—sticks, rocks, dog poop, bird carcasses—back in your face. I don’t like the mower so much.
Dad gives the starter a few more tugs. He comes as close as he’s capable to cussing, managing a “sheee-oot.”
Mom yells out the garage door, interrupting our exercise in futility with the news that she’s put on a second pot of coffee.
“Sounds good to me.” Dad pushes the mower back into the garage.
I nod. “Don’t have to ask me twice.”
My father looks at me. I look at him. We exchange wordless smiles. I enjoy Dad’s company more than I’m willing to admit.
Chapter Two
My family is sorta semi-nomadic. When I was born, we lived in an apartment on the south side of Indianapolis off Thompson Road. It shared a parking lot with a Red Lobster. Our next door neighbor, Uncle Angelo, was a fat, bald guy with black-rimmed glasses and a salt-and-pepper mustache. He tended bar at the Milano Inn but moonlighted as the Fitzpatrick family’s guardian angel. When someone broke into our apartment when Dad was out of town, Mom grabbed me and went straight to Uncle Angelo’s place.
“Debbie, you-anna-uh-Hank stay here with-uh-yur Aunt-uh-Pat,” he said with his thick Italian brogue. He went over to our place in full crime-stopping gear—white ribbed tank top, stained boxer shorts, loaded rifle on his hip. Uncle Angelo’s wife’s name was Pasqualina, or “Aunt Pat” to everyone who knew her. She fed me my first solid food—pasta in marinara sauce.
After the place on Thompson, we moved a couple miles south to Southport, an incorporated town inside Indianapolis that got the South part of its name because it’s on the far Southside of Indy and the port part of its name apparently because the town’s founders had a perverse sense of irony about having a port in the middle of a waterless stretch of farmland. Our backyard overlooked the playground at St. Ambrose, the Catholic parish my family attended for most of the first ten years of my life. My sister, Jeanine, was born when I was three years old. Mom wrapped our piss-yellow, velvety living room couch in white sheets for Jeanine’s first formal photo shoot. She was too fat to smile.
After I turned four, we moved outside the city. Claiming it was “an unbelievable opportunity,” Dad took a sales job with a Chrysler dealership in Kokomo. Mom had to pull up the olive-green shag carpet in our two-bedroom ranch because the floors smelled like cat urine, while Dad found out the deal he got on our house had less to do with his negotiating skills and more to do with the previous owner hanging herself in the garage.
There was a large gray gas tower crowned by red-and-white checkers that served as Mom’s primary guidepost when she drove around Kokomo. She spent most of her day at the mall with me and Jeanine in lieu of fraternizing with our neighbors who had cigarettes permanently attached to their lips and drank Budweiser for breakfast. Mom was so depressed she started taking belly dancing lessons. It would be the only time in my mother’s life she would feel inclined to do anything that could be interpreted as exercise, so essentially we should have been on suicide watch.
On some afternoons, Mom would take me to see Dad at the dealership. Dad showed me off to the wrinkled suits and grease monkeys, who I thought were the coolest bunch of guys I’d ever met. But mostly I stayed at home and did my best to stay out of the way of my mom’s misery. My favorite thing to do was skip rocks across the creek running through our backyard, at least until a mosquito bit Grandma Eleanor and she almost died from encephalitis. We fled Dad’s “unbelievable opportunity” after less than six months. As we were driving out of town for the last time, Dad thought Jeanine and I were sleeping when he pointed to his rearview mirror and said to Mom, “Hey, Debbie, did you know Kokomo pronounced backward is oh muh cock?”
After Kokomo, Dad got a job selling Mercedes while his family sought refuge in a newer neighborhood back in Southport just off Meridian Street called Clematis Gardens. No matter how many times Mom pointed out “clematis” was a flower and not a sexually transmitted disease, Dad still snickered at the name.
The summer after my sixth birthday, we moved into an old farmhouse north of County Line Road, during which time I attended St. Ambrose through all of elementary school. St. Ambrose had separate girls’ and boys’ monkey bars on opposite sides of the playground. The boys would “launch” periodic attacks into the girls’ monkey bars, pretending with our outstretched arms and fake propeller noises to be fighter planes as we weaved in and out of the biting and scratching flurry of plaid skirts and white oxfords.
In the first grade, I fell in love with Kimberly Thompson after she rescued me, bloodied and torn, following a kamikaze dive into the girls’ monkey bars. As a token of my devotion, I stole a silver tin of consecrated hosts from the church sacristy for Kimberly. Stealing the body of Christ for love—where does a guy go from there to impress the ladies?
Kimberly refused my gift. She always did the right thing, except for the time she swallowed aspirin when she had chicken pox and died of Reye’s syndrome. Mom made me wear my First Communion suit to Kimberly’s funeral. It was navy-blue polyester wrapped around a butterfly-collared shirt of powder blue. I remember standing at the funeral and Mom whispering to me that Kimberly would have thought I was handsome. I remember thinking her casket was too small and that I hated my haircut.
We moved to Louisville, Kentucky, the summer before my fifth-grade year. Dad felt bad about moving out of state, what with his mother, Grandma Eleanor, getting sick and all. But the financial security afforded him as general manager of a BMW franchise in northern Kentucky was too good to pass up.
Our new house stood on a wooded hilltop just off Highway 42. Uncle Mitch and Aunt Ophelia drove down from Indianapolis to help us unpack. Uncle Mitch was not my real uncle, but Dad was an only child and Mitchell Hass had been Dad’s best friend since they were kids. A month after I was born, Mom and Dad asked Mitch to be my godfather, so calling him “Uncle” became an afterthought. Three years after that, they extended the same courtesy to his wife, “Aunt” Ophelia, after Jeanine was born.
Our first night in the house, there was a thunderstorm that knocked out our power. Dad went down into the basement to check the fuse box. He left me alone with Uncle Mitch in my bedroom. It wasn’t the first time or the last time Dad left me alone with him, and it wasn’t the first or last time Uncle Mitch took advantage of the situation. My godfather handed me his beer and moved next to me on my bed. He winked at me and said, “Our little secret, Hank.” It was my first beer. It tasted awful, but I kept the beer on my lips and drank the whole thing. I stared at the ceiling while Uncle Mitch put his hands down the front of my underwear. He liked touching me. A godfather’s love measured by the length of his godson’s erection.
Our little secret,
