Making Nice Page 2

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  The first thing I did was clean the microwave. I went from there. Sometimes I succeeded, sometimes there were other times. I’ve witnessed people break, cry, collapse, kill themselves, get killed, or get old. I’ve seen people lose their hair, their minds, their driver’s licenses. My father lost his gallbladder after dieting with Nutri-system. What could I do? I mopped the kitchen floor, took a walk, saw a dead baby rabbit with a bicycle tire tread through its middle. It reminded me of a friend of mine named Nicky who had hairy legs and liked fireworks. One summer he caught his girlfriend cheating, sprinted from her doorstep toward Vanderbilt Boulevard and dove in front of a station wagon with a couple of kids in the backseat.

  I saw an old lady in 7-Eleven wearing a nightgown, with red mittens on her feet and blue veins in her ankles. I bought potato chips. People got married. They got houses and they got furniture and they trusted the government and they got fat. There was a homeless man with long hair, a black leather jacket, green cutoff shorts, and a mental problem that he tried to walk off like a Little League baseball injury. Walking, walking, always walking. He was very tan. The locals called him “the man with a million miles on his feet.” The police shot him in the back when he didn’t stop to answer their questions.

  I remember sitting in the passenger seat of my father’s diesel after a Roy Rogers dinner. My brother was in the back. A car a couple of cars in front of us swerved left, then the next car swerved, then the next, until the car directly in front us didn’t swerve. We watched in the headlights as three puppies rolled out from underneath it, leaned closer to them as my father braked, steered around and past and pulled over. On the side of the road two of them looked just fine except they were dead. The third was bleeding, it was hard to tell from where exactly, there was a lot of blood, but it kept breathing for a few minutes before it stopped and died in the on-and-off orange of my father’s hazards.

  People ate veal. I dated a chubby Catholic girl who told me her parents never touched her, that as a kid she wanted to be touched so badly she looked forward to the lice and scoliosis tests at school. I knew a guy in junior high who told everyone he owned a baby elephant; years later he murdered his stepmother by beating her head in with a can of Chicken & Stars soup. I saw cats, dogs, possums, raccoons and squirrels, a fox, a kangaroo, a bear, deer, rabbits and birds, toads, rats and mice and snakes with their guts smashed out, their insides outside, their heads crushed and dead on sunny roadsides. My mother had cancer.

  I came home, held her hand, pushed her pain button, did her nails and fluffed her pillows, brushed her teeth and emptied her piss bag. I bought her stuffed animals and licorice and long straws so she could drink her juice in bed. She mostly just slept and vomited. Her hospital room was noisy. There was lots of moaning, beds creaking, PCA pumps beeping, nurses coming and going and laughing and asking, How are you on a scale of zero to ten, zero being no pain and ten being the worst pain you’ve ever felt? Twelve.

  Three months into it my brother and I were watching the Dilaudid drip, listening to her mumble “ow ow ow” in her sleep, when her eyes opened wide, then wider, then came back together in a real slow drug-drunk blink. Then she threw her sheet on the floor, picked her hospital gown up over her head. “No more fucking water.”

  I said, “Do you want me to go to the Coke machine?”

  “Why are you trying to kill me?”

  “We’re not.”

  “Do you realize I’m laying here, full frontal?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you happy to see your mother full frontal?”

  “Not really.”

  “Then get out.”

  We sat there unsure of what to do or say, where to look. She yelled there was salt on her legs, something about conductors and the procedure and don’t touch my antique fork. She ripped the IVs out of her arms, the Hickman port out of her chest. Blood shot up in the air. I grabbed her as my brother went running down the hall toward the nurses’ station, screaming. I held her down by the wrists—it wasn’t difficult, she hadn’t been eating, maybe weighed eighty-five pounds at that point. When she was through struggling she just kinda collapsed in on herself and cried. I said, “Mom,” like it was a question.

  Later, after they had strapped her to the bed, bandaged her up, shot her full of strong whatever until she passed out, redid her IVs in her feet so she couldn’t reach them, after we had called our father and lied that everything was fine and he should take the night off, called our sister and told her what happened, then regretted it, we smoked a couple of cigarettes out front with a transporter who had burned his hand with cinnamon-roll icing and decided we’d both spend the night. Back in the room, after we sat there watching the Dilaudid drip, not speaking for half an hour, just listening to our mother mumble “ow ow ow” in her sleep, I turned to my brother and said, “Yo, her vagina’s in a lot better shape than I thought it’d be.”

  He considered it for a second, then nodded in agreement.

  She came home to die. Hospice delivered a bed, equipment, boxes of meds, and a lady doctor who told us one to three days. We set her up in the den, under the ceiling fan my sister had tied little glass dragonflies to with string. My mother seemed to like watching them fly their circle around the room but I didn’t. I got good at spackling, got impressed with bubble gum’s resistance to decay, ate her Ativan like aspirin. I told her that I’d miss her, that I hated her body for getting sick, that I wanted to seize god or fate or the universe by the throat and make it leave her alone. She laughed at me. Her bedsores leaked an awful-smelling fluid. My brother, sister, and I took turns changing her bandages and sheets, drank her liquid Valium, and played UNO. We watched our father watch her dying, learned from the grief on his face every time he walked in the room. He never lasted more than ten minutes. A priest came to give her last rites and I gave him my meanest look. He asked me if I’d like to receive Communion and I gave him a different meanest look and walked out of the room. A week later the lady doctor came back, said one to three days again. My brother and I wrote each other cheerer-upper notes on brown napkins:

  Do you worry that Mom will see your gay thoughts from heaven?

  No. Do you worry she gets X-ray vision and sees the undescended testicles in your girlfriend’s abdomen?

  That girlfriend, Tara, came over later that day and hung around like she was part of the family, then cooked us a chicken for dinner. Just as we sat down to eat it my brother said I should do the dishes. I said, “You’re kidding?” He said he wasn’t. I told him that I wasn’t gonna do any damn dishes until he cleaned his IBS shit shrapnel off the fuckin’ toilet. His face turned red. I said, “Looks like you might wanna hit me. If you do I’m going to stab you in the head with my fork.” Then I took a bite of the chicken—it was pretty good—and he punched it out of my mouth; cracked me right in the jaw. I was so shocked that I didn’t do anything for two whole seconds and neither did anyone else. Then I lunged at him, strangled him, smashed his head into the kitchen counter. He started bleeding from somewhere in his hair, his girlfriend started pulling mine, and my sister wedged herself in between us. I think she caught a stray or two before we all fell into the empty beer bottles on top of the radiator. My father came wobble-running in like a gorilla, yelling something I couldn’t quite understand because Tara was clawing at my ears.

  Outside in the driveway I caught my breath, smoked a cigarette, stomped on a disk of ice frozen into the upside-down lid of a green garbage can, shook. A few minutes later my sister came out with my jacket and asked if I was all right. I said I was and asked if my brother was all right. She said he had a pretty good cut on his head but seemed all right. For the first time in a long time I felt relief, like I had just fucked or cried or quit a job. It feels good to be punched in the face, to punch someone in the face. I walked over to the dock and stared at the boats for a while, then headed to the Mexican restaurant around the corner and drank Budweiser. Twenty minutes later my father showed up, said he followed my
footprints in the snow. I asked him if he wanted to do a shot of something, anything. He said, “If I start drinkin’ now I won’t stop.” Just then my brother called my phone.

  He said, “Hey man.”

  I said, “Hey man.”

  “Did you really stab me?”

  “No.”

  “Are you gonna do the dishes?”

  “Yeah, I’ll do the dishes.”

  “Cool.”

  “Is Mom still alive?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Cool.”

  She died a week later. I got a job gutting houses.

  I worked with an interesting guy who smoked things off tinfoil; he’d had a rough childhood and adulthood’s rough on everyone. We were ripping vinyl tiles out of a kitchen when he told me that a twenty-eight-year-old girl he knew was working at Lord & Taylor when her heart exploded. He told me just like that, plain, not angry at all. I told him that a fifteen-year-old from Bayport stepped in front of an LIRR train and let it run her down.

  “I heard about that,” he said. “Dragged her body a mile.”

  Also, two bicyclists were killed by one car on Sunrise Highway and a twenty-year-old died of a drug overdose a block from our house. Her daughter was three. Every year someone drowns in Lake Ronkonkoma and thousands of toads drown in swimming pools. A good friend’s kid brother got killed in Iraq, a really pretty girl I met in San Francisco went to sleep one night and didn’t wake up, and a guy I know didn’t have health insurance when he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. The restaurant he worked at was kind enough to have a fundraiser for him that grossed over eight thousand dollars. They gave him six hundred.

  A few weeks later I went to lunch with my family, asked my sister how she was doing since Mom. She just looked at me and let her eyes water. I asked my dad the same question. He just pointed to my sister like, I feel like that. My brother shrugged. I told them that I was OK, which might’ve been true, that I’d help them if I knew how. The waitress came over, dressed in all black including the apron, called me “Ma’am, sir … ma’am.” I said, “Do I look like a lady to you?” She stammered an apology, said she hadn’t looked closely enough, which was strange because she was avoiding looking at me while she spoke. I didn’t eat much, just picked at my french fries and drank ice water while they ate and argued about the will, about the money. I didn’t know what I thought about the money except that I didn’t feel like arguing about it. We’re not a dessert family but we like black coffee. I was almost done with my cup when my sister said she went to the cemetery and ate some of the grass off our mother’s grave. My father reached for his wallet.

  When we got home there was a baby bird in the driveway, lying there, featherless. It was tiny. Its skin was almost see-through. We were all just standing around it—looking. I said, “I’ll go get something to put it in,” and started toward the house. My father said maybe the best thing to do would be to back over it with the car.

  IF P, THEN Q

  In the middle of solving an equation on the board my eleventh-grade calculus teacher, Mr. McGar, dropped the chalk, which broke into pieces on the floor. He looked down at the pieces for a few seconds, then turned to the class, and said, “As a kid I used to catch bumblebees in a butterfly net. When I caught one I’d put it in an upside-down jar, then I’d slide a tissue soaked in alcohol underneath the rim of the jar, which would knock the bee unconscious. I would then very carefully tie a string around the bumblebee’s neck, and after a few minutes the bumblebee would wake up, and I would have him on a leash.” Then he walked over to the window and stared out past the parking lot filled with cars that looked alike.

  So I studied math as an undergrad until I tried, using modus tollens, to prove to Kate Damon that she should date me. It didn’t work, and I realized that math would not get me what I wanted, so I dropped out and started drinking a lot of well whiskey in a bar around the corner from the apartment I would eventually be evicted from. Money ran out quickly, and more out of boredom than habit, I kept going to the ATM checking to see if a balance would somehow appear in my account. It never did, and so I learned a little green Spanish and spent hours doing finger puppetry for the ATM camera. I got pretty good at it.

  I can do a dog, a rabbit, a lizard, an elephant, a hawk, and an eagle (there’s a difference in the thumbs). I can do a donkey, a squirrel, a cow, a cobra, a horse, and a pig. I also do a mouse and make him say ee ee ee and then I also do myself and he says, “What? I can’t hear you, Ma.”

  Mom, my left hand, asks, “What’s wrong, Alby?”

  My right hand goes, “It’s the little things, the little things, Ma. They’re relentless.”

  “Why are you so angry?”

  “I don’t know, Ma. I don’t know.”

  Excuse me, a voice behind me said. I need to use the ATM.

  I didn’t say anything, just stuffed my hands in my pants pockets and walked off thinking about what to do next.

  RAPE IN THE ANIMAL KINGDOM

  What I did was mix a cup of cat food with a quarter-cup of applesauce, a TUMS smooth dissolve tablet ground to powder, a hard-boiled egg and water until it was the approximate consistency of cooked oatmeal. I did that because that’s what it said to do online. It also said online to cut the end of a straw to make a small scoop, to feed it every fourteen to twenty minutes from sunrise to sunset, that you should never put liquids directly into its mouth or it could drown, to keep it warm, and that despite your best efforts 90 to 95 percent will die, good luck. With luck like that, I didn’t name him at first. I didn’t think I could stand losing another thing with a name. When he lasted a week, I called him Gary.

  Gary was, for the most part, at least to start off with, almost transparent. He looked like a dog’s heart with a bird’s head stuck on, a blob with a beak, and one time when I was leaning in real close to better see the veins pumping blood under his skin he woke up and bit me on the nose and started chirping like crazy. I shushed him and fed him till he stopped chirping like crazy and closed his eyes and went back to sleep. Then I just watched him breathe for a while, making sure he wasn’t dead.

  One morning when I was making sure he wasn’t dead there was a knock on my bedroom door and my father popped his toupee-ed head in.

  “Made you breakfast,” he said. “Steak and eggs.”

  “We don’t have steak,” I said. “Or eggs. So I know you’re lying.”

  “I did,” he insisted, but really he didn’t because what he’d actually made me was a chicken-and-cheese Hot Pocket that he thought was a steak-and-egg Hot Pocket, because for some reason he’d thrown out the boxes and Hot Pockets all look the same. None of that matters. What matters is that when my losing-his-mind father saw Gary’s setup on my desk, he told me I was losing mine.

  Maybe I was. By this point I’d abandoned the laundry-lint-in-cereal-bowl nest because the lint was getting stuck in Gary’s pinfeathers, instead opting for crumpled hand towels in a small Easter basket suspended with string from the handle of a large Easter basket. For decor and scent’s sake I’d paper-clamped on some pinecones and twigs, then fastened a large oak leaf over the whole thing to shade him from the lamp. Finally, I bought a big wooden G from the local arts and crafts store and painted it the same green as a horsefly eye, then glued it to the handle of the big basket.

  “What are you,” my father asked me, the sun coming through the window, lighting half his face, “crazy now?”

  If I could go back I’d answer differently. I’d lie that I was fine, or make a joke, or tell him the truth: that I was just trying to get through it. That I was having a hard time. That—and I know how hollow and sentimental this sounds, how lame—I missed my mother in a way that felt anaerobic. I couldn’t get my air back; at one point I literally stuck my head out the car window and opened my mouth to force it in.

  “What do you mean now?” I said.

  It fell flat in front of us, like a stupid fact, and there was nothing left for him to do but hobble over to get a better look. Afte
r he got it he turned to better-look at me, and then he better-looked at Gary’s setup again.

  “Listen,” I said, “he’s helpless and he needs me, and I got a thing in my heart for helpless things that need me, OK? So I’m gonna be here for him until he dies or grows into a goddamned falcon that flies around the neighborhood all day eating raccoons and dogs and little toddlers before he flies back to my forearm and takes shits. I already ordered the glove, dude—online—’cause Gary here is gonna terrorize all of Suffolk County, hunting mammals and butt-fucking seagulls.”

  “Why you gotta talk like that?” he said. “You sound stupid.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “people keep telling me that, but people also keep being pieces a shit that are wrong. So let me tell you something else that’ll sound stupid: right now, Gary’s stem cells are generating rods and cones for better night vision that he’ll use to bite people’s dicks off in the dark. Dudes’ dicks are in danger, Dad. And if you don’t think so, you can get right the fuck out of my bedroom!”

  He said “Calm down” like he meant it, then “Sure they are” like he didn’t, then “How’s he doing?” like he did again.

  “Great,” I said. “He can already pick his head up like it’s nothing. Watch.”

  The two of us scooched closer to the Easter baskets and I scooped some food-mush onto the straw and stuck it near his bird-face. “Demo time, bro. Hup-hup. Eat this for strength!” But Gary didn’t move at all, not even when I tapped his beak with it.