Knuckleheads (12 page)

He hates latex balloons, which is what he mostly finds. At least those eventually decompose, he tells me. Maybe it takes six months, then longer for the ribbons, and it’s likely large numbers of birds and turtles die from eating them, but eventually they go back to the earth. Mylar balloons don’t. They never decompose. They float in the water looking like giant tasty jellyfish, or they make their way to the beach and nestle in the sand. Then they live there, like hermits, dead but alive too, until the Mylar Man finds them, and bags them, and throws them in the trash.

“Look at this one,” he says.

It’s heart-shaped, but little of the paint that once adorned it remains, just a few white frills and splotches of red. “What does something like this have to do with love?” he says. “This is a symbol of non-love. This is symbol of violence. Profess your love to your girlfriend by buying one of these, and you’re professing your hatred of your planet. This balloon is a death-sentence to your grandchildren.”

“Don’t aim your Old Goat venom in my direction,” I say. “I didn’t let it go.”

“You would have though,” he says. “If you had someone you were in love with, you’d do it. You’re romantic and stupid. I know you.”

He does know me. And I am stupid, though not romantic. I wouldn’t give his wife a balloon on Valentine’s Day, just an earth-shattering orgasm that would make her forget her planet entirely. Naomi is short, under five feet, and a fireball of thick brown hair and compact muscular body that I know will just shake and shake and I wonder if my sand-clawing brother has any clue how to make her happy. She always seems happy, always laments the state of her falling-down house with a fond joke. Says, “Don’t sit on that side of the dining room, you might wind up bobbing in the lake,” and when she jogs barefoot on the beach she travels far away from her husband digging up balloons. Her gait is forceful and resolute. I want to catch her behind one of the dunes and hold her around her shapely waist and whisper to the top of her lush, rain-forest head, “I will not let you support me with your job teaching kindergartners while I rant and rave to either no one or maybe just a small pathetic cadre of other on-line whack-jobs. Together, we can save each other and your family-home and keep it from falling into the surf.”

Naomi is friendly to me, but wary. She knows what I’m after, has always known it. I ask her why she teaches kindergarten instead of high school, why she wouldn’t want students who can challenge her intellectually, explore probing questions.

“Do you know what a Word Wall is?” she asks me.

I don’t.

“My kids learn how to spell is. They lean how to spell
of
and
the
and
and
. They look at these words every day on a wall, the curves and lines and dots. They watch these words with their eyes and live inside them and spell them in the air with their fingers.”

Naomi is stirring pasta salad when she tells me this. She discards the spoon and reaches into the bowl of cold risotto, kneading the mixture of grain and olive and tomato with her hands as if she’s a sculptor working with clay. Her hair is tied behind her head in a tight ponytail.

“I’ve seen high school kids,” she says. “They don’t know what recess is. If you tell them to go outside and play, they’ll pull their phones from their pockets and start texting. I’m a patient person. I get nervous when I see that.”

I watch her play with the pasta. She pulls her hands out then holds up an index finger and licks it. Makes a puzzled face. Digs back into the pasta, points the finger toward me. “Taste this,” she says.

I lean forward.

“No, don’t,” she says, pulling her finger back. “It needs salt.”

“Look at this one,” the Mylar Man says, after he’s waded hip-deep into the water to retrieve a balloon that’s still partially inflated, his cut-off jean-shorts now soaked. “From Chicago, I bet. Some idiot let it go during a festival. Ate too many chili-dogs and didn’t give a shit about his grandchildren’s future and just let it fly.”

The mylar is a familiar design, once a glowing yellow moon-pie with a smiley face, like a floating LSD tab, with two black dots for eyes and a slice of semi-circle for a mouth. Most of the yellow paint is gone, but the smiley face remains, looking like a leer now, a grin, more taunting and scary when its background is transparent.

“I understand the impulse,” the Mylar Man says. “It’s fun to let go of things. To feel a sense of release when something you’ve been holding too long drifts away. Your load lightens. But here’s the thing, John.” He pauses for a moment to stare at me and he looks like a God, bronzed and unhunched, silhouetted by the sky’s pink embers. He is beautiful, my brother, always has been, a force of skin and beard and purpose. “John,” he says, “it’s an illusion. Life is never carefree. If you don’t care, you die.”

I had a balloon exactly like this yellow one once, when I was after Rachel. She had an eight-year-old son named Micah, and I tried to fill my apartment with all manner of playthings like baseball cards and Hot Wheels cars and plastic machine-guns and balloons so he wouldn’t mind when I spent significant time with his mother in the bedroom. Rachel dumped me for a guy who makes hinged models of teeth and sells them to dentist offices—Micah started a collection and likes to polish them to a sparkle with a toothbrush and shaving cream—and I don’t know what happened to the big yellow balloon. It wasn’t hard to let Rachel go. If she drifted to the clouds, growing smaller and smaller each time I looked until finally I could no longer find her in the sky—fair enough, happy flying. Land safely with the teeth-maker.

Chicago—the idiot city, my brother calls it—is where I live. Not exactly plunk in the wind-battered big-shouldered heart, but in a bleak condo-town on the outskirts. My apartment, where I used to encourage Micah to cultivate imaginary friends as I investigated his mother below the belt, is characterless. The pool and fitness center in the condo-town clubhouse are poorly maintained; embarrassing, I’d say, so when my Dad travels out of town, which he often does for his consulting job where he draws shapes and arrows on legal pads, I borrow his Lincoln Park brownstone and bring women there. Always nice to fuck people on the four-thousand dollar leather couch where, when he’s not traveling, my father also fucks people while my mother is home sleeping with the over-sized hemp-filled penguin my dip-shit older brother and I mistakenly bought her one Christmas so she wouldn’t be lonely. She hates that stupid non-animal with its creepy glass eyes and bright orange beak. She hates all it mockingly represents, but she’ll never tell that to the Mylar Man or to me because she wants us to believe we harbor a modicum of essential goodness, which neither of us actually do believe, but when we’re home visiting, we’re willing to fake it to make her happy.

That’s the kind of family we have, but none of that bothered me if the woman I was screwing on my father’s couch was attractive enough, or groaned audibly. Except that one night my father’s phone rang while I had a mouthful of breast and when the machine came on, one of my father’s many paramours left him a message that said, “Franklin, when you get back to town, call me. I owe you a back massage.”

It’s bad enough to hear the voice of my father’s lover leave him a message while I’m trying to bang a woman I’m not in love with because she’s not my brother’s wife who I am in love with—who I’ve always been in love with since the first time I saw her running the 400-meter hurdles back in high school—but it’s worse, way worse, when the message spews frothy cheese like
I owe you a back massage
. Face it, nobody wants to imagine his father as one half of a horny adolescent couple so ashamed of its desires it has to mask them with the pretense of back rubs. The squawking-bird voice embedding itself in my father’s apartment left me spitting breast from my mouth and sitting rigid on the couch because I realized my dad caused my mother a quantity of misery so gargantuan I can hardly talk to her for fear of disappointing her with all I’ve never lived up to, and the thing is—is this what it was all for?

Some pathetic slitbag still playing the same act that probably worked twice, or maybe three times prior to the middle school pool party season when everyone started trying it and there was an outbreak of backrubs at every encounter between the sexes, and then, as rapidly as acne, the movement began to reek of its own self-conscious stink?

All of which is to say I’m sorry for forgetting the name of the woman whose nipple I spit out, and for walking her so quickly back to the dance club she had to hold her heels in one hand and half-jog to catch up with me, but the fact is when I heard the shrill and candied chirp of my father’s lover, I finished up quick—one final and shameful spurt—and had to evacuate the brownstone immediately because I knew it was a wrong thing, a profanity against nature for Naomi to be with my brother when I loved her more than he did.

Here’s one truth: my father, who at sixty-seven continues to dye his hair with a paste as thick as shoe-polish and wear a diamond stud in his left ear, is nevertheless heroic. He left my mother but on some level I understand it. She’s needy and nerdy and has an ornithological proclivity to find out everything she can about penguins even if she doesn’t like sleeping with a creepy stuffed one. He’s a big strong guy with big strong hands and his voice is deep and musical enough to make people believe in the magic of his shapes and arrows and his laugh is the kind of laugh that restaurants refer to as ambiance.

Yet my mother, for all her faults, is a sturdy woman grounded in a kind of natural and beautiful earthiness. In that way, she’s like Naomi: like the naked elemental world somehow pushed up from its mud and gave her the gift of understanding its primordial dance. I’m in love with that quality. It feels both rare and brimming with redemption, as if it offers a kind of daily rebirth. All of which is to say my mom is capable of much more than cheeseball massages. Much more truth and much more spirit and maybe my dad just got overwhelmed and couldn’t handle something older and deeper and more layered than his fancy furniture. Which also means I can no longer have random sex with women I don’t love, because look at my father. Look at him with his miserable teenage-minded girlfriend trying sadly to be sexy. What if I have a chance at the kind of love that’s pure unfiltered fuel, a real chance with a gorgeous fire-cracker earth-woman, and what if I just let that chance drift past me and never dare reach for its flame?

Here’s another truth: I love my brother. We spent many hours delivering newspapers in the late and moribund light of winter afternoons, and he carried the larger canvas sack. Two gothic-looking houses stood at the end of our route a quarter-mile past any of the others and we had to climb two steep hills to reach them. Many days I was tired and cold and tempted to throw the last couple papers down the sewer, but my brother would tell me to take it easy for a few minutes, and he’d walk alone to those last two houses and I’d sit on the curb by the sewer-grate and wait for him and I loved that interval of rest, the frigid air on my cheeks, the cars rushing past, the thin, bare branches of trees waving like tentacles. I’d see him marching back to me with his upright and purposeful gait and I’d love him and stand up and march home with him and I’ll walk with him on the beach every night if he wants me to, and I’ll listen to him splash the waves with his tirades and I’ll even nod in sympathy on occasion, but, truthfully, he must be suffering. If he really loved Naomi, why would he spend so much time in the musty murk of his basement typing blog-entries destined to be read by no one?

Why don’t they have any children?

Why does he do nothing to save their house from dying?

Why, after dinner each night, does he walk in one direction and she run in the other, the distance between them increasing with each step?

The voice on my father’s answering machine is a whip. Outside, a siren sounds from a fire-truck blocks away and it’s probably not symbolic but it reminds me of my responsibility to get moving. After dropping the rapidly dressing woman back at the dance club, I return to my ridiculous apartment in condo-town, pack a bag and toss it in my car—it’s a hybrid, thank you, Old Goat, don’t fucking go crazy because I actually utilize the ingenuity of the automobile industry to go places—and then I head east around the bottom of the lake for a slow and agonizing two hours, and then turn north toward Naomi.

When I knock on their door, gently, so as to avoid causing the house to topple over the bluff, my brother and his wife are surprised to see me. “I had a dream,” I say, “a vision of your house tumbling down the hillside, rolling end-over-end like a wooden avalanche with dilapidated roof shingles, and finally it crashed against the beach and broke into a billion pieces and a lot of those pieces killed reptiles and birds and spread particulate of lead paint through the sand and the debris engendered a murderous effect for decades. Let me live here with you guys. Let me stay here and fix things. Give me six months. I’ll shore up the foundation, re-joist the walls and floors, plant some beach-grass—native species, of course—to slow the erosion of the cliff. Give me six months. I’ll give your house another fifty years.”

Old Goat looks like he wants to kill me for wasting gasoline driving to his dying house and for imagining the possibility that it doesn’t actually have to fall down, that it’s thinkable to stave off the twin specter of ecological and domestic disaster, and Naomi, beautiful short Naomi, arches a beautiful, lush eyebrow, but, at last, they nod, more or less in unison, and I’m in.

Now Naomi holds a damp blouse to the breeze so it fills like an airport windsock and she is standing on the side of the porch that’s still not too dangerous to stand on—the boards are only partially rotted—and she is not drying the shirt in the dryer in the basement because that is an appliance that no longer functions and, even if it did work, it would use electricity, and she didn’t pin it to the clothesline because there’s no room left and the blouse is of a turquoise and shimmering substance and I imagine her thinking how in the morning she will mount her five-speed bicycle and soldier off to the kindergarten with renewed determination to save a generation of five-year-olds from the wiles of Spongebob and touch-phones and it seems to me it’s not the wind but her spirit filling the contours of the blouse, puffing it, rippling it in the sun.