I'm Sorry You Feel That Way (14 page)

Bye-Bye likes to look good. He has twenty-five pairs of shoes, he has beautiful silk ties and a gold watch, he has well-fitting suits. He also has a T-shirt that says
Things Not to Say to a Police Officer
and the list includes “Oink! Oink!” “Aren’t you the guy from the Village People?” “Gee, Officer, your eyes look glazed—have you been eating doughnuts?” and “No
, you
assume the position.”

He was wearing that T-shirt the last time I saw him. Because we live so far apart, we don’t get to see much of each other, and I wanted the time we could be together to be special. That night while we were out for dinner, he drew a picture of an enormous speckled and spurting penis on my address book; then he said it’s ridiculous that I still make my son go to bed by a certain time; then he told me a joke about a man with a sunburnt dick, how the guy had been advised to dip his dick in milk, and how when he was in the midst of doing so, the man’s girlfriend, a dull-witted blonde, said, “I always wondered how you guys loaded those.”

My brother knows hundreds of similar jokes. At least twice a week, he calls to tell me them. During these calls, he also describes his love life and mocks my parenting skills. Sometimes I wonder why he would call me. I don’t seem to be his audience. I have never been even mildly amused by one of his jokes, I’m defensive about my parenting skills, squeamish about his love life, and alarmed by his sexism. So we don’t have much in common. Right now, Bye-Bye is telling me that same joke: the one about the man who stayed out in the sun too long—only this time the guy has been advised to dip his dick in yogurt, and the blonde wants to know if it’s fat-free.

My brother is partial to blondes. He comes home from a night at the bar with matchbooks, cocktail napkins, and scraps of paper upon which all the little honeys have written their phone numbers. There are so many blondes that he can’t keep them all straight. He needed some way to distinguish them besides the color of their hair so he developed a system of shorthand:
R-Bl-BT
, for example, or
Y-Br-VBT.
The first category is the color of the girl’s shirt,
R
meaning red,
Y
meaning yellow. The second—
Bl
and
Br
—notes the color of her eyes, blue and brown, respectively. “I better not even have to tell you what
BT
and
VBT
stand for,” he says.

I tell my brother I’m not stupid. “Bright teeth,” I say, “and Very Bright Teeth.” When he tells me wrong, guess again, I say, “Big Trees” and “Very Big Trees.”

And that’s all it takes to get him going. He’s off, he’s running, I’ve been on the phone with him for two hours, and now it will be two more. He’s attacking my politics—“You’re all about saving trees but putting serial killers back on the streets,” he says. “Aren’t you?”—which leads to him attacking my position on the war in Iraq—“I say we just bomb those fuckers, but you’re all about giving the terrorists the soft kind of toilet paper and fresh goat meat, aren’t you?”—which leads to him attacking my apparent lack of taste—“Chicken livers are delicious, but you don’t know what’s good, do you? Your taste buds are fried like your brain.” He tells me he has undeniable, indisputable proof that marijuana is a gateway drug. “You think dope should be legal and dopers should have drive-thru windows, but you haven’t read the studies,” he says. “Because you’re a pothead.” Then he tells me the story about when he held a twelve-year-old in his arms, a boy who would eventually die from the gunshot wound to his neck, the kid popped during a home invasion gone wrong, a botched robbery where the perpetrator was out for the stash belonging to the kid’s mother.

“Poor little bastard,” my brother says. This isn’t the first time or even the second or the third he’s told me about it. “Poor little fucker,” my brother says. He tells me to hold on a minute, and I hear loud rustling, like he’s crumpling newspaper or a plastic grocery bag into the receiver. It’s not hard to imagine Bye-Bye is inserting a plug of Copenhagen between his lower lip and gum, or flicking a booger across the room, or catching a fly in his fist, or asking a little honey what time is it. When the rustling stops and he returns, it’s to lobby for loosening the restrictions on my son’s bedtime. “Look,” Bye-Bye says, “you’re the one who wants to free criminals and support terrorists and smoke dope, so why are you such a bitch to your own kid? Just tell him, dude, if you’re gonna be a mean little asshole because you’re tired from staying up all night, I’ma gonna sticka my foot up ya ass. You baby that kid. How long are you going to let him dangle from your tit? It’s time to get a stick and beat him with it. Sister, you got to tell him get off my tit, you little sucker! Let go!”

Next to the picture of the speckled dick my brother drew in my address book, he wrote a 42 and put a circle around it—the number on his high school football jersey. My brother voted for George W. Bush, not once, but twice, and he told me he’d do what I think is unimaginable, inconceivable, unfathomable, and irresponsible: “I’d vote for my man a third time if I could. Hell, yeah!” When he vacationed with that B-list celebrity’s daughter in California, he showed her some love on Friday night, and apparently she was a kinky sex freak, because afterward she said she wanted to introduce him to her best friend—“Another kinky sex freak!”—and on Saturday night and for part of the day on Sunday, the three of them did like they were French.

“I bet you don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?” he says. My brother is so crude and nasty and arrogant, and I don’t always believe the things he tells me, maybe because I don’t want to. But he is also the only person in my life who has never hung up the telephone without first saying he loves me.

I’ve been on the phone with him for three hours; hanging up is still another hour away. When I tell him, “Travis, you are disgusting,” he sings in a high-pitched voice, “Kinky sex freaks,” then in his regular voice he says he wishes he knew a nice girl, he asks me do I know any nice girls, do I know any nice girls I could introduce him to, any nice girls he could meet?

W
hen I went to Detroit to visit Al’s family, I got a glimpse into what he and I might become, what our future might look like. In it, Al dozes in his La-Z-Boy while I watch made-for-TV movies from mine: I’m especially partial to ones where Melissa Gilbert or Valerie Bertinelli plays a woman who’s been victimized by the patriarchy and how she overcomes that oppression. During commercials, Al snores, and I check out the home shopping on QVC, maybe catch Joan Rivers hawking her line of baubles. When Al wakes up, we chain-smoke, express skepticism about the severity of the other’s back pain, and call up family members to ask how much they pay for goods and services like milk and gasoline and long distance.

In short, we become my in-laws.

 

 

 

 

 

I didn’t want to go to Detroit.

Al’s eighty-one-year-old father, Lucky, and seventy-six-year-old stepmother, Karleen, live in a suburb on the east side. Because Al doesn’t seem to understand that the secret to the family visit is staying in a hotel, they provide our accommodations. Their guest room is Al’s childhood bedroom, the place where, according to Al, the magic began.

It’s fine with me that he wants to visit his folks. I never try to stop him. In his absence, I can keep myself entertained: there are puppet show/craft activities at the public library, for example, and regularly scheduled free lessons on how to tie woolly boogers and sow bugs at Check Your Fly, and the ongoing seventy-five-percent-off sale at the local porn store.

The first time I ever met Al’s dad was just a day or two after the old man’s heart surgery. Lucky was still in the hospital, recovering, fragile, and pale, when he asked Al to bring him a hand mirror, a hairbrush, and a large chocolate shake from McDonald’s. Vain and sweet-toothed, Lucky was my kind of guy, and later that day, Karleen, his wife, gave me two Xanax, which in my book made her A-okay.

Lucky had been home from the hospital for less than an hour when he asked if Al and I would do him a favor. The man had survived some intense medical stuff; we were happy to accommodate him. “Anything!” we said.

He wanted us to buy toilet paper. He was particular about what he wanted—Charmin Plus with Lotion, a twelve-pack—and he was clear about where we were to make this purchase: “I want you to go to the Kmart on Gratiot.”

There were already three twelve-packs of Charmin Plus with Lotion in the linen closet, and though Al and I agreed that nine rolls for each of us ought to be plenty, we didn’t see anything wrong with humoring him.

But when I suggested we walk to the little mom-and-pop grocery down the street instead of driving several miles to Kmart, Al said no. He said they probably didn’t carry Charmin Plus with Lotion. When I said we could see if they did, he said why bother, it would be cheaper at Kmart. When I offered to cough up the difference, saying it couldn’t be that much more, and even if it amounted to twenty dollars, I’d be happy to pay it as a way to avoid going to Kmart, Al said thank you, but that would not be necessary.

“The toilet paper will be purchased at Kmart,” he said. “It’s what my father wants.”

Such inflexibility from the guy who once went out for a loaf of bread and came home with a two-thousand-dollar acoustic-electric guitar was hard to understand. I asked how would his father know whether we bought the toilet paper at Kmart or Wal-Mart, Target or Meijer. If we heisted a twelve-pack of Charmin Plus with Lotion from a shipment en route to South America or won it in a game of dice from some back-alley pusher, really, how would the old man possibly know, and even if he did discover the truth, so what? It’s not like he could ground us. It’s not like he could take away our phone privileges or deny us the keys to the car for a month.

Al looked at me sadly. “You were real wild as a teenager, weren’t you?” he said. “I bet you told a lot of lies.” He decided to go to Kmart without me. Like it was a punishment.

Still, I understood where Al was coming from. Going home means regressing to the boy whose job is to take out the trash or the girl who sets the table. No matter how old you are, home is the place where the grown-ups still get to decide what’s on TV and when it’s lights-out. If they let you borrow the car, they want to know where are you going, when will you be back. Going home means going back in time. It’s not a trip you care to take alone, and anyway, isn’t that the main reason to take a mate? So you have an ally in the civil war against your parents?

 

 

 

 

 

Out-of-town visitors do not justify a deviation from my in-laws’ routine. The last time we were there, Al and I put our suitcase in the guest room, we sat down on the bumpy couch, we watched a movie starring either Melissa Gilbert or Valerie Bertinelli on Lifetime Television. Al’s stepmother immediately returned to the topic she discussed at length the last time I was there: everything she hates about Al’s father.

“I just don’t know about that man!” Karleen said. She was wearing a pink velour tunic top with dragonflies embroidered around the collar. “I think there’s something wrong with him!” she said. She was talking about the amount of time Lucky spends in the bathroom, which, according to her, is a lot. “Guess what he’s doing in there!” she said.

We said we couldn’t begin to.

“Why, he’s primping! He’s combing his hair! Fixing it just so!” she said. “He’s worse than a woman!”

Karleen also resented that Lucky falls asleep in his La-Z-Boy every night by eight o’clock. “It’s lonely!” she said. “I don’t have anybody to talk to.” She found it irritating that he’s always fussing, obsessively straightening, stacking, tidying, cleaning. Apparently, he scoured the enamel off the bathtub, scrubbed right down to the steel. “What’s wrong with him?” Karleen wanted to know. Then she announced she didn’t believe for a minute that Lucky’s hearing is as bad as he makes it out to be. “Trust me,” she said, “he can hear when he wants to.”

Lucky was sitting in his La-Z-Boy, nodding like he could indeed hear what his wife had been saying about him, every word of it, and he was smiling like he agreed. “How much was your last electric bill, Allen?” he said, and when Al told him it was one hundred and twenty-nine dollars, Karleen shouted, “IT WAS ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-NINE DOLLARS!” and Lucky said, “Uh-huh. Uh-huh.”

Lucky’s hearing loss began with a case of childhood measles, and over the years it’s gotten progressively worse. He’s now ninety percent deaf. About ten years ago, he signed up to learn lip-reading at a local community center, but he only went to a class or two before dropping out. He didn’t say why. Having a conversation with him over the telephone is next to impossible, so Al sometimes writes his father letters, but Lucky doesn’t answer them. It’s like playing catch with someone who won’t toss back the ball. When Al asked him did you get my letters, the old man said he did. Then he asked Al how much does he pay for a pound of hamburger.

 

 

 

 

 

It always catches me by surprise just how much Al and his father are alike. If I want a sneak peek of Al at age eighty, all I have to do is take a look at his old man. Lucky’s ears are big and stick out. His glasses are big and round, his teeth are not his own. Though his appetite is gluttonous, he has always been a slender man. He hitches up his corduroy pants past his navel, then belts them so they stay there, high as if for a flood. He wears his shirts tucked in, his shoes in the house, navy blue cotton pajamas to bed. He’s four inches shorter than he used to be, but Lucky is still a handsome man, blue-eyed and smooth-skinned, proud of his hair, which is thick and full, silvery gray and parted on the right. On top, his hair swirls into two distinct finger waves, like silver surf on a moonlit beach, a stage prop on loan from
The Lawrence Welk Show.
In his hospital room, any time someone asked him how was he feeling, heart surgery is serious, was he feeling okay, Lucky would apologize for his hair. “It probably looks just terrible,” he said. “I hate to think how it must look.”