We're All in This Together Page 3
"It's old school," I said.
Gil cackled, waving smoke.
"Hey, Old School." My grandfather snapped his fingers for the bowl they were sharing. "Pass that along."
It happened that this incident nearly coincided with the delivery of my grandfather's billboard. He had composed the text some time after Nana died, and ordered it professionally made by a union printer in Providence.
"Take a good long look, George," Papa said to me when I came over to see the sign. He wore a big smile on his face as he tapped the text with a finger. "This is what democracy looks like." He moved his finger to the drawing of Al Gore. "And this: this is what a president looks like."
The first attack took place a week after that. Spray-painted across Al Gore's face, in glaring pink, the words: GET OVER IT SHITHEEL! YOU LOST!
From the get-go, there was only one suspect. "Get over it? Get over it?" my grandfather asked rhetorically, as the two of us rubbed at the paint with soapy sponges. "Who does this little terrorist think he is, George Will?"
Then, no sooner had the sign been cleaned than it was vandalized for a second time, and on this occasion Papa had stumbled out of bed to investigate a clatter outside. They were gone before he could make a positive identification, but down the street, he thought he saw a pair of diminishing forms on bicycles. There were also two other pieces of evidence: first, a second act of vandalism against the billboard-LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT SHITHEEL!-and perhaps more ominously, a hunter's flare that he discovered still smoldering in the hedge alongside the house.
Papa stomped out the flare, then went inside and called Gil. They had watched satellite television and smoked buds until first light, at which time Henry McGlaughlin went into action.
Summarily, he placed phone calls to Mr. and Mrs. Rodney Sugar of 113 Elkington Drive, then to the Amberson Township Police, and, finally, for good measure, the ACLU.
Papa offered no introduction to the Sugars, but went right to the crux: "Your son has impinged on my free speech, and I want to know what you plan to do about it."
"Pardon?" asked the groggy female voice on the other end of the line.
"My free speech has been impinged. Violated. Trod upon. My First Amendment right. By your son."
There was a moment of silence before Mrs. Sugar gathered her wits. "Free speech? At five-twenty in the morning? Are you serious? Well shit on you, you crazy old coot."
She hung up, but before lunch the Sugars' lawyer messengered over a response. Mr. McGlaughlin, the attorney wrote, we are aware of, and sympathetic to, your recent loss . . . However, if this harassment continues, on behalf of my clients we are prepared to apply for a restraining order . . .
The investigating police sergeant gave the area around the sign a cursory inspection, and grimly scratched his goatee with his unopened notebook. "Okay, chief," said the officer, "It does appear that we have a case of vandalism on our hands."
"Yes, my former paperboy—"
"I know, I know. But there's no proof. The parents say you've got the wrong man, and you're ready for the bughouse to boot. Now, that's not for me to say, but"—the officer paused, and made a point of sniffing the air—"are you aware that cannabis is illegal in the state of Maine, Mr. McGlaughlin?"
My grandfather took a deep breath and looked up at the sky. "Are you aware, Officer Corcoran, of a document called the United States Constitution? It has a list of amendments—laws, that is—the first of which gives me the right to free speech."
The officer flipped his notebook open, squinted at a blank page, and flipped the notebook shut again. "If that's how you want to play it, chief, that's fine with me." He put his hands on his hips and shook his head at the ground. He licked the mustache of his goatee with the tip of his tongue. "Let's face it, a sign like this, I bet it pisses a lot of people off.
"Tell you the truth, it kind of pisses me off. It's unpatriotic as hell if you ask me. Now look, I believe in free speech as much as the next guy, but not so far as this sort of garbage goes. What do you think about that, chief?"
"I think," said Papa, "that you have a very nice goatee, Officer."
The ACLU lawyer came third. Papa told her the whole story, and she listened, asking a few questions, but mostly staying quiet. When he finished, she apologized. "There's no angle, Mr. M."
"What about my free speech? How's that for an angle? You know, I gave money to you jokers when it meant something. I gave when Hoover was in office."
"Your free speech isn't being violated by an entity here, sir, just by a paperboy. Look, if your paperboy were being funded by an interest group, or backed by the KKK or something, I'd have this thing on the front page of USA Today tomorrow." Papa heard the hiss of compressed air as the ACLU lawyer opened a soda. "Besides, and I'm hardly being facetious here, but down in D.C. we've got Ashcroft probably planning to compile a database of everyone who's ever had fun before. If we let this guy out of our sight for a minute, he'll start having people scourged for picking their wedge on the Sabbath. Really, sir, and with all due respect to the good and honorable work you've done, when it comes to brass balls, Old Mary Hoover couldn't have budged the pair that Ashcroft is hauling around. Take my word, as an American citizen in the year 2001, a dink paperboy is not the worst problem you've got."
Of course, by this time, my grandfather's Sunday New York Times had become something else entirely. Which brought us up to the present day, and the third attack, the one that had convinced my grandfather to settle matters himself.
I could not recall ever having spoken to Steven Sugar, or even having heard his voice, although he was a familiar sight in the halls: a chunky kid two grades ahead of me, who clomped from class to class in his combat boots and baggy desert-toned fatigues, usually followed a few steps behind by the lieutenant, Tolson.
Still, before all of this-before GET OVER IT SHITHEEL! YOU LOST! before LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT SHITHEEL! and, before COMMUNIST SHITHEEL! were scarred in blazing pink across my grandfather's billboard and Al Gore's face—I didn't know if I ever spared Steven Sugar so much as a single conscious thought.
Now I imagined him punching through the dark suburbs on his bicycle, the summer night rushing through his brush cut, the newspaper satchel packed with spray cans clattering against his hip, a vessel of absolute calm and purpose, locked and loaded, a true believer and an armed combatant. The vision amazed me, and a part of me envied him, this budding fascist who had fucked up my grandfather's Sunday New York Times and written right across his First Amendment rights. I could only marvel at his confidence, at his criminal's justification. I did not understand Steven Sugar's motives, but I sensed his satisfaction, like a dark mass on a radar screen, like an iceberg, and grand like an iceberg, too.
I pictured Steven Sugar, hunched under the tent of his blankets, as he crinkled through the purloined newspapers by flashlight. He turned over the last unsullied islands of the Mediterranean, the white beaches and the ancient piles of stone, and he licked his lips over column inches of the weddings of well-to-do young women in Manhattan, with Ivy League degrees and careers in handbag design.
What did it mean to him? Did he imagine laying waste to these beautiful landscapes, and rolling tanks through rustic villages? Did he fantasize of ripping these bright new wives from their honeymoons and their husbands? Or, maybe, he hated our little Maine town, and longed more than anything just to travel far away, to start again, and make his life in another country altogether. Was it possible that Steven Sugar read the wedding announcements for research, for that time ten years from now when he would be a surgeon (or a hedge fund tycoon), and it would be time to marry his own twenty-six-year-old producer of a children's television show (or director of marketing at a glossy magazine), his own pretty, pale-eyed Hannah (or Caroline)? Maybe it didn't mean anything to him. Maybe Steven Sugar stole from my grandfather's newspaper for the simplest reason—just because he could.
Just because he could. The idea raised the skin on my forearms and caused me to breathe through my mo
uth.
My grandfather placed an expectant hand on my shoulder, and repeated his question. "Well, what is it? What do you really think, George? Is he crazy, or he is angry?"
"No," I said. "I don't think Steven Sugar's crazy. I think he's just angry."
Papa squeezed my shoulder and walked across the room to the window. "Then that makes us even, because I may be crazy, but I surely am angry, too." The old man bent over the rifle and peered into the scope. "And I've come to realize that the only way to talk to these monsters is to speak in a language they understand."
3.
The difficulty of communication was, in fact, the source of my own personal distress. I wasn't getting along with my mother, and I didn't care to get along with Dr. Vic. Of late, I suffered not so much from a feeling that my voice wasn't being heard, as from a sense that I was speaking an entirely different language. Or perhaps, I thought, to their ears my voice was soundless, on the wrong frequency, like a dog whistle, and they only waited for the moment that my lips stopped moving to smile, and shake their heads, and explain what it was that I failed to understand.
We had moved into Dr. Vic's place that winter, a sprawling new three-story that sat right on the shore of Lake Keynes. From the window of my attic loft I had an obstructed panorama of the lake, which spanned a couple of miles across, toward pine-covered foothills and farther away, to a bald mountainside where tourists came to ski in December. This vantage point also offered a clear view of the deck, and the landing where Dr. Vic tied up his putt-putt and his kayak.
Earlier that summer they were engaged, and since the weather warmed up, my mother and her lover had kept a nightly ritual of dancing on the landing at the end of the deck. They took a portable stereo out with them, along with a stack of CDs, a couple of mugs, and a can of insect repellant, and sometimes stayed for hours, slow dancing until the early morning. Their object was to find their "wedding song," the perfect song for their first dance as a married couple.
The sounds of Dr. Vic's music collection drifted up in a tinny echo, and if I wanted I could watch them from my window. Instead, I sat beneath the sill, back against the wall, and hated myself for even wondering what song they would pick, for surreptitiously playing along with their stupid game. Between songs I caught snatches of their conversations, their laughter, the clink of their toasts.
Frequently, Dr. Vic's taste sent my mother into paroxysms of laughter, and I would hear her rolling around on the deck, overcome by it, as if he were the funniest guy in the world. The sound dropped through me like a heavy object released from a great height, and never seemed to hit bottom.
One night I heard her scream with delight at the discovery of a Don Johnson CD. It was like finding his porn stash, she whooped. My mother laughed and beat her bare feet on the deck.
"Come on," said Dr. Vic. "You liked him, too, you know you did. You know you never missed an episode."
This was porn, she howled, this was emotional porn. Crockett Sings Just for You My mother began to weep as she laughed.
"Wait a second, wait a second. 'Heartbeat' is good. Seriously, you've got to admit that 'Heartbeat' is a pretty good song." Now Dr. Vic was snickering, too.
A few moments passed before my mother could speak again. She thought she'd fallen for a respectable country doctor, Emma gasped, but in actuality, she had fallen for a nine-year-old girl from 1984, and oh, my God, was it wrong that she loved him anyway? Because she did. She loved him, loved him, loved him.
Their kisses were inaudible, but I was old enough to know that was what came next. Sometimes they listened to CDs until the night turned gray, and after I fell asleep Dr. Vic's middle-aged music, the Wynton Marsalis and the Phil Collins and the terrible seventies pop which all seemed to bear edible names—Bread and Juice Newton and Humble Pie—infiltrated my subconscious and provided the soundtrack for my dreams. I chased after them in these dreams, my mother and her fiance, as they strolled arm in arm along crowded sidewalks and through parks and malls. I ran beside them and jumped around and screamed for my mother to listen to me, to fucking turn that shit off and listen to me, because I had something to say, something very important to say. At most, Dr. Vic might shush me, or my mother might give him a look of apology, but they never stopped, and in the morning there were tears of frustration crusted beneath my eyes. I was embarrassed by the childish obviousness of these dreams, and the way that I could feel them gathering inside of me even when I was awake, each angry observation floating up like a little black balloon, until night came again and my sky jostled with them.
It seemed that I was letting go of those balloon strings all day long: every time I saw him rub her shoulders while she sat reading a book; every time I saw her standing outside with him in a cold drizzle, holding the umbrella while he walked his dogs; every time we drove somewhere and Dr. Vic told me to go ahead and take the front, and I knew that it was something that they discussed in private and decided to give me.
To them, I was just the jealous kid of a single mother, with no understanding of sex or intimacy, or the difference between a lover's love and a child's love, and why an adult needed both. To me, this was a slanderous lie. Dr. Vic was the exception. We had lived all over and my mother had dated all sorts of different men, and there was never a problem before.
In Blue Hill, there had been Paul, the raccoon-eyed owner of a pottery studio for tourists, who helped me fire and paint a cookie jar in the shape of a Jerry Bear for Emma's birthday. When my mother worked at the University of Maine, she dated a German graduate student named Jupps, who would let me watch anything I wanted on television, and laugh uproariously, no matter if the show was about ski slope accidents, or the big bang. The first year we moved home to Yarmouth, before Nana got sick and before my mother took the job at the local branch of Planned Parenthood and met Dr. Vic, she went out with Dale, the editor of the local weekly, the Amberson Common. Dale and I used to play a game where I tried to guess the classifieds that he made up, things like,
Wanted:
SWM seeks cheeseburger, Coke, respect
CAN YOU PITCH?
Lefthander wntd. Must be bipedal, animate. Respondents should report immed to Fenway Park, Boston, MA.
After they broke up, Dale posted me a classified that said,
Old White Dude:
OWD can provide referncs, illeg firewrks, home remdies, etc. Cool kid always welc.
I liked them all—even Jupps, who reeked of mouthwash and sometimes unnerved me with his maniacal laughter. That was because these men simply accepted my presence, and let me determine the level of our interaction. They had, so to speak, paid their dues.
The evening after my grandfather used me for target practice, I offered to take Dr. Vic's two yapping little Pekinese—"the Laddies," he insisted on calling them—for a walk while dinner was on the patio grill. This was something I had been doing a lot lately, to Dr. Vic's obvious pleasure. "Even after the longest winter, there is a thaw," I overheard him whisper to my mother.
But my mother knew me better. Now, sitting nearby on a lawn chair, she indicated her suspicion with a deep breath.
"Don't put up with any guff from those rascals, okay?" said my mother's fiance. He chuckled and sipped his glass of white wine. His clip-on sunglasses were slightly askew.
"Nice shades, Doc," I said.
"Thank ya very much," he said, like Elvis.
I turned from him to sneer at my mother. She shrugged, tapped her finger against the zipper of her shorts. I rolled my eyes at her. She tapped the zipper of her shorts again. I looked downward—then jerked up my fly and started into the house.
"You know, Emma, I think that our young George here, may just have stumbled upon one of the great secrets of manhood here," said Dr. Vic, and I didn't have to see the huge, open-faced smile that he was giving to my mother to know it was there. "Back in my single days, I took the Laddies from pillar to post and back again. It might seem a little devious, but a regular guy has to make his breaks where he can, and not
everybody can play guitar. For a regular guy, a dog is the next best thing to being a musician. You might even say that the Laddies are 'The Bomb.'" He emphasized this statement with index finger quotation marks. "You might even say that they're 'The Shit.'"
This was typical of Dr. Vic, to make a big, cheesy production out of everything, even the names of his dogs. Every time he spoke, his wide doughy face opening up in a way that reminded me of the singing clams in Disney's Alice in Wonderland, I felt a little part of myself die from shame. In fact, I believed that Dr. Vic m
ust be the most embarrassing person in the world.
To begin with, there were the little absurdist poems that he wrote about how much he loved my mother, and what he would do if she were suddenly transformed into something other than herself, something inanimate usually, like a toaster or a grape—
The Woman I Love Is A Grape (For The Purposes Of This Poem)
By Victor Lipscomb
If she were a grape and I was still an ape
Yd wait for days and try to think of some way
Not to eat her, to reanimate her
But if I had to, I'd be glad to
Because Emma is so sweet.
For our enjoyment, he taped these poems to the fridge, like a first-grader would his watercolors.
Then there was his music, of course, the awful songs Dr. Vic always listened to in his car and in his study, stuff like "Seasons in the Sun" and "Dreamweaver"; songs that were so damned impossible to stop singing to yourself they were like dippy little Post-it Notes pasted to the inside of your skull, and until the glue dried up and the note fell off, there was nothing you could do to defend yourself against the insipid, endless trickling of the Dreamweaver's synthesizer, or to keep from chanting, helplessly, over and over again, "We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun."
And Dr. Vic talked to his crossword puzzles; every time he found the answer "Yoko," or "Ono," he cried out, "There she is again!" like he was in a bingo parlor; and when he poured wine for my mother, he stood with a dish towel over his wrist and twirled the end of an invisible mustache while he waited for her to nod; and in restaurants, Dr. Vic liked to hand his credit card to the cashier and make an introduction, "Peter: Paul, Paul: Peter"; and finally—and I thought, most tellingly of all—there were the utility pants he wore, which drooped from the weight of all the hard candies and dog treats that he stuffed in the tiny pockets, so that much of the time he walked around with one hand holding up his belt, like a goddamned clown.