The Late Bloomer (7 page)

Mom parks the car behind a thicket of bushes in Gramma's backyard, so that our gun-toting Dad won't know we are there if he comes looking. We close the curtains and turn off all the lights. As we have always done at Gramma's, my brothers and I play war with plastic toy soldiers. The whole time I chew my nails while envisioning the carnage that will happen when he barges through the front door waving his pistol like Al Pacino in
Dog Day Afternoon.

Kris doesn't understand why we have to hide from our own dad. I just tell Kris, who is seven, that we are only playing a game, sort of like hide-and-seek, only with Dad. I take him to the back bedroom, shut the door and place a flashlight on the carpet. We play war in the shadows until he falls asleep.

Later that night, “the game” ends. The cops call to inform my mother that they have found him sitting alone in his car by the lake. He hasn't shot himself; he is alive.

Dad spends the night detained in the county jail, under observation and heavy medication. The next day, a psychiatrist evaluates him. Being the bullshitter that he is, Dad probably convinces them it
was all just a big misunderstanding, that his wife, in order to get him arrested, made up the whole story.

Dad is renting an apartment and I don't see him for a couple of weeks, although we talk on the phone almost every day. He never mentions the incident. Neither do I. I'm afraid that the most important man in my life may say something unbecoming of the most important man in my life. And we leave it at that.

—

My father once told me, “The best thing about marrying your mother was that Lyndon Johnson couldn't draft me into Vietnam.” Apparently, Kevin didn't get the message, because when he was twenty-one he impregnated his fifteen-year-old girlfriend. A few months later, I attended the young couple's wedding ceremony in the Hamburg village hall, Kevin's teen bride packing a beach ball under a maternity blouse almost as loose-fitting as the judge's robe.

Not too long after, Kevin, who by then had snake-and-dagger tattoos etched up and down his thick arms, found God in a Pentecostal church.

Kevin may be a born-again Christian, but apparently free baby-sitting doesn't come with eternal life in heaven. Whenever his young wife isn't around and Kevin's away working for minimal wage as an aide at a home for the developmentally disabled, I take care of the baby, Josh. I am only fourteen and I spent the last few years as a sort of father figure to Kris, but I really don't know what I have gotten myself into until it is too late.

I quickly learn how to breathe through my mouth while changing a diaper. Forcing a fourteen-year-old boy to scrub his little nephew's butt crack with Baby Wipes is an effective, if underused, form of birth control. By the time I am sixteen and in a relationship with my first serious girlfriend, Jenny, I am fully fearful of equally fucking up my life by becoming a young daddy, like my brother Kevin, like my father.
Changing dirty diapers provides just another reason for me to train even harder in hockey so I won't end up stuck in Buffalo the rest of my life.

Hockey continues to be my escape. And my success not only belies my unathletic body, it comes in spite of—and probably in reaction to—the mess that my family life becomes when my parents finally put themselves and all of us kids out of their married misery and split.

The day my parents split for good, on a cold Saturday morning in January of 1983, Dad is supposed to drive me to a game in Rochester. Instead, he spends the day loading his car with boxes of his stuff while I sit laconically in the garage watching him. Figuring that I am too upset to play hockey today (I cried into my pillow all morning), my parents suggest I stay home.

But we are playing the Rochester Americans, a pretty good team, and my team needs me if we are going to win. And I need them. I call my teammate Jay's father and ask for a ride.

During the entire hour-long drive I don't think about my dad's engorged veins popping out his temples, about his throwing a coffee mug into the dining-room wall, about how earlier this morning Kevin (who is now bigger than my dad) threatened to kill Dad if he even laid a finger on Mom, about how the next few years of my life are probably about to be made extremely complicated by my parents' marriage meltdown.

I block all of it out on the ice too. It's generally considered an excellent save percentage if a goalie stops at least nine out of every ten shots. I stop 63 of 64 shots, and we win by a score of 2 to 1. When I return to the de-fathered war zone that is my home, I lie in bed and write in my diary about the big win. I write about how I will kick just as much ass in my next game, how I won't let any of this family mess distract me from being the greatest goalie in the history of the game. After all, I have learned a thing or two from my father about blocking out the past in order to survive the present.

—

My parents, now separated, put our house up for sale. It is a four-bedroom ranch-style home with an in-ground pool and a two-car garage in an upper-middle-class neighborhood with manicured green lawns and street names suggesting suburban loftiness. We live on Yale Avenue, which runs parallel to Harvard, Columbia, Dartmouth and Princeton avenues.

Dad is in the process of selling his print shop, partly because he is feeling burned out but mostly to avoid being forced into a divorce settlement in which my mother, whom he now despises, gets half the ownership.

Mom has won the right to custody of us three youngest Ks, as well as the honor of becoming a single mom who, with an annual income of $15,000 a year, makes a little more than minimum wage but also has the burden of supporting three kids. Even with my dad's court-ordered child payments, she can only afford a $250-a-month duplex on Harwood Avenue that is located, like most every low-rent dwelling in Hamburg, within earshot of the railroad tracks. It's only five miles from our old place on Yale Avenue, but it may as well be five hundred miles away. The duplex's shit-brown (Kris's adjective) paint is drab and peeling from the siding; a hideous yellow coat of paint flakes underneath. Being a duplex, we live in, basically, half of a house. That means everything is half the size of a regular house. Our beds take up nearly all of the floor space in the bedrooms.

Keith and Kevin have moved into their own apartments in another part of Hamburg. My dad has rented a place with his new love a few towns to the east, in a much nicer neighborhood than ours, a fact that my mother regularly reminds us of. Kyle's a year older, but since he is so quiet and Kris considers me his true “big brother,” my mother informs me that I am now “the man of the house.”

My life is about as Dickensian as one can get in the suburbs. Mom's income is low enough for us to qualify for free school lunches and a
monthly ration of government surplus cheese, huge blocks of cheddar wrapped in cellophane, which, until we've eaten it all, serves as the centerpiece of our diet. Grilled cheese sandwiches. Cheese omelets. Cheese and crackers. Macaroni and cheese. Mom has enough money to buy us new clothes for school every fall—usually two pairs of pants, two shirts, new shoes (but only if the tread is worn on our old ones).

About a week after we move in, Mom is down in the basement doing laundry when brown water starts leaking through cracks in the concrete wall.

“Kenny!” she shouts upstairs to the living room, where I'm watching television. “Come down here!”

The basement always smells musty, but once I reach the middle of the stairs I catch wind of an odor much ranker than the usual mold.

“It smells like shit down here,” I say, pinching my nose.

Grimacing, Mom points to the wet wall. “It's coming from there.”

Seconds later, Kyle and Kris have come down for a whiff. The four of us stand there with our hands over our noses. Mom is almost crying.

She stomps upstairs and calls Mister Slumlord. She tells him there's a putrid brown fluid seeping through the walls. “Maybe there's a septic tank leaking or something,” she offers, listening to Mister Slumlord's tepid response. “Yes,” she affirms. “Definitely. It smells just like shit.”

Mister Slumlord sends a plumber over the next day to fix the problem. I spy on him from the top of the stairs as he sticks his forefinger into a crack and smells it.

“Pee-yew,” he says, wiping the gnarly brown muck on his pant leg.

The plumber mops up the puddles of shit and fills the wall cracks with caulk. Thirty minutes after arriving, he tosses a few rancid sponges into the trash, packs up his tools and heads outside, even though the cellar still smells shittier than the town's sewage treatment plant, which, natch, is located about a mile away from our duplex, downwind of course.

I'm thinking,
You fucker! Do you have any idea how upset my mom is? Don't you realize she's probably up in her bedroom, bawling her eyes out, wondering how in the hell she is going to pay next month's rent, let alone keep the stench from killing all of us? If Dad were here, he'd kick your wimpy little ass from here to Rochester.

As he walks to his car I step in front of the bespectacled little rodent and inform him the basement still smells like shit.

“Well, then, go tell your mother to put a fan down there,” he says, annoyed.

“We don't
own
a fan,” I fire back.

“Go buy one.”

Thereafter, we smell our tap water before drinking, and I learn how to operate a caulk gun.

My new bedroom is roughly the size of a closet and has no wall insulation or finished floor. Mom helps me nail an old red shag carpet over the wood planks; for Christmas our first year there, I get an electric blanket. It's yellow, wired to a white control module with settings from one to ten, ten being the highest. On cold winter nights (which, I suppose, is redundant), if it is set below eight, it's not even worth turning on.

At least we don't need a clock, because we know that every thirty minutes a convoy of rail cars brimming with scrap metal from the Ford metal-stamping plant a half mile over the hill whistles by, rattling our windows, as if we need a reminder that we don't exactly live in Bel Air.

Still, I don't complain. I've grown accustomed to making do with the leftovers and hand-me-downs, and since both my parents grew up poor, I've been reminded my whole childhood that things could always be worse. Therefore, I try to view our duplex, with its squealing mice beneath the porch, its proximity to the railroad tracks, the moldiness permeating every inch of the house, its nasty fluids leaking into the basement, as a residential version of a used baseball mitt. Mom remains optimistic—
At least we aren't homeless; at least we have a home
—but I doubt our life in that duplex represents the kind of middle-class
existence the Republicans on the Sunday-morning political shows have in mind when they proudly speak of the Reagan Revolution. Oh, well. As Dad, ever the macho cliché machine, likes to say, “Life's a bitch; then you marry one; then you die.”

—

Shortly after moving to Harwood Avenue, Kyle joins the stoner crowd, much to the chagrin of my mother, who literally goes to St. Bernadette's every Sunday and prays that I, Kyle and Kris won't end up being, like her two oldest boys, doped-out Deadheads. Sometimes I accompany her, persuading Kris to come along. Not because I think the cardboard holy wafers taste good, not because I can understand the point of the old priest's rambling homilies, certainly not because I like the scent of old-lady perfume permeating the pews, but because my mother is feeling alone in the world. Keith and Kevin, it seems, couldn't give two shits about Mom's feelings. Kyle is either sleeping or out smoking. That leaves me and Kris. When Mom kneels on the prayer rest and pinches her eyes tightly shut, I silently utter a
Me too
to the Holy Spirit because I know what she's asking for.

Despite our ramshackle duplex, despite no longer living with Dad, I retain the optimistic attitude that Dad might have abandoned my mother, but he hasn't abandoned me. Mom does my laundry, she cooks my meals, she drives me to school when I wake up late. Although she is taking night-school classes at Buffalo State University to get her business degree, she finds time to be my daily caretaker. But as hard as she may try, Mom doesn't understand my obsession with hockey. She knows I'm pretty good at it, but she doesn't think it's my meal ticket to a better life. “You need to study more and play hockey less,” she says.

Not Dad. It remains mostly Dad who drives me to hockey practice, mostly Dad who cheers me on from the stands, mostly Dad who has been telling me since I was eight years old that, with hard work and dedication, I will make it to the NHL, I will someday make enough money to wear the nicest goalie pads, rather than the tattered leather
ones he can afford. Having grown up in Maryland, he never played hockey; he can't even skate. But he is my biggest fan, my cheerleader, my greatest motivator. I affectionately call him Coach.

Meanwhile, Mom's boyfriend, whom she met through a personal ad in the
Buffalo News
, is spending a lot of time with us in the duplex. Disgusted at the thought of some guy intruding into my life, at first I delude myself into thinking he's just a friend of my mother's.

His name is Norm. He is an electrician at the Fisher-Price toy plant. He hunts and he used to be a television repairman. He knows my game of hockey about as well as I know his work with electronic circuitry. I have never seen my father go to work without a tie on, and Dad is a hockey junkie. The most my father knows about television technology is how to turn it on and off. With a résumé so unlike my father's, Norm doesn't seem like my kind of guy, and I am fully prepared to hate him. But I don't. Actually, I like him. Perhaps it helped the day he came to me in the living room and said, with the kind of respect a peasant shows a king, that he understands if I'm feeling a bit annoyed by him shacking up with my mother. He never tells me what to do and never says a bad word about my dad. A few months later, he teaches me how to drive in my mom's brown Mercury Bobcat. He's a good man.