I could hear the similarities and thought it was all Irish music. Tom even sang along with some of these country singers. He’d get serious when the girl singers sang their sad stories: “I’d take care of you, Honey,” he’d say.
I felt sorry for the sad girls, I wished they could meet my uncle. He didn’t have anyone special that I could see, and after the incident at Riverview I shared Uncle Mike’s hope that Tom would forget about the unnamed girl I’d heard them talking about. Whoever she was, she meant trouble for him, one way or the other.
Once I saw him break into a jitterbug to Grandma’s big yellow kitchen radio. They’d told me about his dancing—Aunt Anne told me he was the best dancer in the neighborhood. “Oh, he’s grand,” Grandma agreed. The dancing part made me uneasy. It was one thing to sing in the kitchen, but I wasn’t sure a boy was supposed to like dancing, let alone excel at it. But it was fascinating to watch him and, in the end, I decided that if Uncle Tom liked it, there had to be something in it. I tried it myself once, alone in the kitchen with the music, and fell over one of the kitchen chairs. Grateful that I’d had no audience, I decided it wasn’t for me.
It was also through his example that I learned the rewards of reading in the bathroom. He was fond of reading in the bathtub—no, that doesn’t come close to it: he was unable to get into the tub without a paper or magazine. Once when my grandmother upbraided him for the time he took in the tub—“You’ll get pneumonia,” was one of her arguments, “You’ll get your death of cold,” and, “It’s bad for your skin to soak so long in warm water,” were others—I heard him play his black ace: he told her that this was the result of Korea.
“I sat up there on that hill, Ma, and I thought about getting out of there like anybody else, and I thought about you, Ma, and I wanted to be warm and clean someplace, I wanted to be home. But the thing I kept thinking about was a hot bath. A hot bath. And I promised myself I’d never hurry through one again—just in case … you know, in case I get sent back to Korea.”
“Oh, God forbid!” she muttered, but she left him alone after that.
Also—and predictably—he read on the toilet. I learned this one morning on his day off, the morning that was to keep him forever associated in my mind with blood. I was in the living room rifling through my box of lead soldiers trying to find enough men with heads to make a squad and he emerged from the bathroom looking like a leper. Tiny pieces of tissue were stuck to his face and blood seeped through each one. He seemed unmoved by this predicament.
“Hey, Butch. You got some comics around, don’t you?”
I must have been staring, for he repeated the question and I responded with another.
“What happened to your face?”
“What? Nothing happened to me … Oh.” He laughed, a short little bark. “I cut myself shaving. It’s nothing. Some day you’ll be able to shave and then you’ll get all these little cuts on your face.”
“Do they hurt?”
“No, but if I’m not careful, I could lose enough blood to die.”
“You could?”
“Nah, I’m just kidding.” He surveyed the living room for a moment and a tiny patch of bloody tissue came loose and fluttered down to the floor like the last red leaf of autumn. If I close my eyes I can still see him coming out with a dozen patched cuts, looking like something out of an old Ed Wood movie—The Bleeding Men from Outer Space, perhaps, or Attack of the People with Open Sores.
“So how ’bout some comics? Man needs some reading material when he sits on the throne.”
“He does?”
“Sure. Some things you should never be in a hurry for. Going to the can is one of them.”
“They’re by my bed.” In the tiny half-room at the front of the house where I slept, I had just enough room for my bed, a small dresser, a toybox and two cardboard cartons, one for my soldiers and the other for my comics. I had hundreds, I bought them constantly or people bought them for me and I never threw them away: at the Certified on the corner of Barry and Leavitt they sold old ones without covers, three comics to a pack for a dime.
I had Archie and Walt Disney comics, Superman and Blackhawk and the occasional bloodthirsty war comic like G.I. Comics, horror comics I didn’t even understand and nearly fifty Classics Illustrated—all purchased by my grandmother lest Archie and Jughead cause an atrophy of my young brain.
Tom disappeared with his leprous face into my room for several minutes and I heard him exclaiming at my collection. He emerged with the Classics Illustrated version of “Ivanhoe” and told me he could be found “in the library.” From that day on, I seldom spent more than five minutes in the bathroom without one of my comics, his purloined habit becoming my custom for life and occasioning many fierce debates between me and my grandparents, who contended that I now took half an hour to do thirty seconds’ business.
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