JD (31 page)

He shrugged and took the bill. When he had gone I realized that maybe I was just trying to make him share
something
with me. I suppose the shrug meant that he, too, understood this. But it was worth it to get the money.

Mickey got home some hours later, probably having already made some inroads into the little bag of vegetable matter he displayed. “This is an ounce,” he declared. “A four-finger ounce.” Who said he didn't learn anything at Warwick? We went to his room, he produced some cigarette papers, started to roll what he called a joint. “I use a pipe mostly, because it doesn't waste as much. But I think you'll like a joint better for starting out.”

“I used to roll my own cigarettes,” I said. “That's not how, let me--”

“It's not supposed to be like a cigarette. It's supposed to be a little puffy, like a blimp. Trust me for once.”

I trusted him for once, followed every instruction diligently and really did get high, I think. We went to the dinner table suppressing giggles, and I was for some reason so ravenous I even ate what I think were lima beans. Martha looked at the two of us, frowned, didn't say anything. So I don't know if she disapproved or if she was just sad that she hadn't been asked to the party.

I wanted to try a little more after dinner, but Mickey was going out. “We'll do it tomorrow or the next day,” he said. In a tone that, I'm afraid, was not unlike the one I must have used years ago, when I'd postpone a promised trip to the zoo or the movies. I thought of pointing out that I had paid for the bag he was thrusting into his coat pocket. But I really didn't want any more grass, just a few more minutes with him. So it isn't the grass I paid for, is it?

I am buying time with my own son, as if he were a hooker.

April 4, 1972

Everyone was despondent at Faherty's. The baseball players are on strike, so the television was tuned to, for God's sake,
Gunsmoke
. They're still showing
Gunsmoke
after all these years, the last thing Mickey and I watched together. No one was watching last night. Mostly the guys just sat looking into their beers. A few talked about the strike--oddly siding with management. I assume practically everybody in Faherty's is a union guy, but they didn't feel any solidarity. They think the players make too much money already. It doesn't occur to them that maybe the owners make a lot of money, too, and the owners can't even hit or catch.

No solidarity, not even with one another: the glue of baseball gone, they sat next to one another drinking as silently and glumly as … As Mickey and I, when we sit in his room smoking the grass I buy. Side by side on his bed, a decorous and precise one foot apart, passing the joint back and forth across this gulf.

Today he said he couldn't get hold of the guy he usually deals with, so we wouldn't partake tonight of what has already become a ritual. (Maybe this was true, or maybe he just needed a night free of me. He didn't, in any case, give back the twenty I'd slipped him earlier.) Hence my visit to Faherty's and, after a few gloomy minutes there, my trek down to Virgil's. So easy: it's a wonder I didn't start paying years ago.

April 9, 1972

Yesterday was Mickey's twentieth birthday. Every birthday, except the one when he was away at school, we've had spaghetti and meatballs, because that was his favorite when he was little. For dessert, always cannoli. Martha struggles every year to cut a hole in one--cannolo, I guess--just big enough for a candle without shattering the shell.

I tried to get Mickey to walk with me to Ferrara's, the bakery. He said, “Don't bother. Don't even bother this year.”

“It isn't for you, it's for your mother.” He shrugged, in a way that suggested: isn't everything for her? But perhaps I'm just projecting. “Come on,” I said. “Walk with me.”

He shook his head. “I'm going back to bed.” I know kids his age sleep a lot. But Mickey seems to have only a few spells of consciousness during the day--long enough to eat, shit, share the grass, nod off. I suppose this is depression. Who knew it was an infectious disease?

Outside, strolling over to Mulberry, I noticed that it was a nice morning. I never notice the weather. Martha used to joke about how I'd come home from somewhere, she'd say “What's it like out,” I'd say “I don't know.” So it is a token of how permanently the clouds have settled into our apartment that yesterday I was conscious of the sunshine and the women walking cheerful dogs and the jovial honking of taxi horns.

I got four cannoli, thinking I'd sneak one to Mickey as an early birthday treat. I went home by way of Sixth Avenue and passed by Goldman's Hobby Shop. I used to take Mickey there all the time. He'd look covetously at the train sets we didn't have any room for, then we'd buy him a model kit. Revell, they were called, plastic kits that made a car or a ship or a plane. Mickey would put them together with his characteristic meticulousness, squeezing the glue delicately so there wouldn't be any extra at the joints, carefully aligning the little decals that put the insignia on an airplane's wing or the ship's name at its bow. This was
back when he was meticulous, before he dispensed with frivolities like showering to allow more time for sleep.

I went into Goldman's. It seemed like there were fewer things to put together, more things already assembled: cars and boats with sleek finishes and remote controls. I don't guess kids learned a whole lot from putting together a Revell kit. When they were done they had at best a little model that didn't do anything; they were lucky if a plane's propellers turned. But they built
something
, they didn't just open a box.

Deep in the recesses at Goldman's were a few dusty kits. The biggest were the
U.S.S. Missouri
and the
Queen Mary
. I bought the
Queen Mary
, 2O inches long and 21O parts. Wondering if maybe the 21O parts included tiny figures of Edgar Villard and Robert.

For some years now Martha and I, no longer able to divine what Mickey could possibly want or need, have just given him a check-following a ritual tussle about how big an inflation allowance is appropriate. This year Martha held out for $12O, which seems a hell of a lot for a birthday, especially when it will all go to pharmaceuticals. I got her down to $1OO, and now I was coming home with a kit and two tubes of glue and a paintbrush, total $21.78 with tax. I knew she'd be furious, and Mickey would be scornful. What did I think, he was going to sit down at his desk like a little kid and put together the fucking
Queen Mary
?

When I got home Martha was standing in the kitchen, red-eyed and grim. There were a few meatballs on the cutting board, on the floor the smashed bowl that held the rest of the hamburger. On one burner a pot of tomato sauce was going gloop-gloop, geysers of sauce shooting up and spilling out onto the stove. She looked at me and shook her head, the way she does when she is too angry even to hum, much less explain what's wrong. I figured Mickey might have a clue, but he wasn't in his room. So they must have had a fight--a pretty big one if he'd go outdoors instead of back to bed.

I stuck the
Queen Mary
kit in Mickey's room before Martha noticed it. Then I went back and put the cannoli in the icebox, turned off the flame under the tomato sauce, started picking up the shards of glass and the little heap of raw meat and onions. Martha just watched, even when I got out the broom and dustpan, complex tools I am not usually allowed to operate.

I thought I should try to wrap the
Queen Mary
somehow, if only in newspaper. On Mickey's desk was the open letter.

Jonathan had gone to fetch the cannoli, I had started the meatballs and the sauce. For a little break, I went down to fetch the mail.

Who knows how long I stood there in the vestibule, looking at the envelope, the block letters:

OFFICIAL BUSINESS ONLY
$500 PENALTY FOR MISUSE

For American boys in those days, and their mothers, no other icon was ever as powerful as that blunt letterhead. The death warrant nestling in the mailbox with the innocent postcards and magazines and bills.

I hadn't even been worrying about it, really, but of course it was inevitable: SLS had to notify the draft board when a boy flunked out. Complicity with the war machine, Jonathan might have said, but they had to cooperate, or every boy would have lost his deferment. So the paperwork was set in motion. That it even took a couple of months just meant that some clerk had been too lazy to move Mickey's fate from the inbox to the outbox.

To move Mickey himself, from that inbox where he lay suspended in a pot-smoke haze to the outbox of something happening next. I knew even then, standing in the vestibule, that my terror was mixed with a sort of fatal relief. He wasn't going to die right there in the apartment, time was beginning for him again. Whatever the future
was going to bring him, however short the future would be, he had one now, bestowed on him by some bureaucrat.

Mickey was asleep, in his underwear, on top of the sheets. His face all but buried in the pillow, his long, dirty golden hair flaring like a tangled sunburst. He smelled of tobacco and grass and male funk. I tried to, couldn't, remember how he had smelled as a baby. His smell now: was it something the world had covered him with, that would wash off if I could take him in my arms and bathe him once again? Or did it come from inside, a way of announcing himself? I am not your unindividuated baby anymore, I am autonomous Mickey.

I sat on the edge of his bed and shook him awake. He rolled over. “Whatsa matter?”

If they had drafted babies, the envelope would have been addressed to me. But their business was with Michael A. Ascher. I handed it over, just the messenger.

He sat up, looked at the envelope, didn't open it. I wished he would, I had the fleeting fantasy that there might be some kind of surprise in it. We are pleased to inform you that the army has recruited enough boys named Michael and wants you to get on with your life.

Still, he just looked at it, showing nothing. I was the one who started crying. Not for him, but for myself. Everything I'd done, bearing him, feeding him, changing him, bathing him—all just to hand him over to them. My whole life, every dream I'd given up, to find that I was all along just a humble worker on the assembly line that made soldiers.

He reached a hand up to my shoulder: trying to comfort me, but the warm damp fingers suddenly gave me a focus for my anger. I whispered: “You stupid little bastard.” And went on, helplessly, it was all his fault, he'd fucked up, we'd given him everything and he hadn't even tried, he'd disappointed me and my father who'd had such hopes, it served him right. Winding up, “You won't be able to call us this time, we can't come and bring you home. You're a man now.” You grew up, and you stink like a man, and I can't save you anymore.

He took it. There were tears in his eyes, but he didn't change his expression. Just looked at me and took it, like a man. Until I laid my face down on his skinny, naked chest and just sobbed. Wishing I could take it all back: I wasn't mad at him, he was just in the way.

But who was I mad at, then? I had, first, the official thoughts Jonathan would have expected me to have. The little Jonathan I carried inside, still carry, pronounced: you are mad at the Government. At Richard Nixon and Melvin Laird and the Herr-Professor of Death Henry Kissinger, who stay up at night plotting to seize your son. But I wasn't mad at them. They were just cartoons, too distant for anger. Maybe Jonathan took the Government personally, but to me it was just some natural disaster, a storm from which we had inadequately sheltered our baby.

It was me, then, I was mad at myself: this was my own failure. I hadn't been making a soldier, I'd been making something else, and I'd spoiled it, marred it. They were just coming to collect something broken.

I had stopped crying, working out this puzzle. I was still lying there, feeling how heavy my head must be on my child's frail chest. But he was motionless, patient. I wanted to sit up and see his face, but the puzzle was still nagging at me. How could it be so hard, just to figure out what I was feeling?

In analysis, Jonathan had reported, the doctor prattled all the time about
resistance
. This one concept was about all we got out of the couple of grand we had dumped into Jonathan's little adventure. You are in a hallway with many doors, trapped, all the doors but one are unlocked. You try each in turn, but there is nothing behind them, no way out. You know that behind the locked door is a monster; if you can open it there will pour out of it disorder and destruction. So it is the one you must open, you must break it open.

Break twenty years of marriage, the whole life you've built, fling open the door and see Jonathan the destroyer, who had devoured his own child, torn apart the only thing I had ever made. I didn't know how he had done it—back then, of course, I hadn't read the journals. I told myself: this is absurd, Jonathan loves Mickey, he's been the best father he could. But I couldn't shake it. I wanted to tell Mickey, it's not your fault, I'm sorry I bitched at you, this is all your father's doing. Of course I couldn't tell him anything of the kind, couldn't figure out how to take back the recriminations he had borne so quietly. I never got another chance to take them back.

I sat up. Mickey had opened the letter. “It's just a notice of reclassification. I'm I-A now.”

Class I-A: eligible for immediate call-up. Each local draft board had a quota to meet. It would call up the I-A boys in the order of their lottery number. If a boy made it to the end of the year without being called, he was free for life. But Mickey's number was 35, they were bound to get to 35 before 1972 ended.

He shrugged, gave me a mournful little one-sided smile. I thought, my brave little man. You are the only strong one left here.