When he was a boy his father insisted that all his children kiss him when he got home from work and kiss him when they went to sleep and kiss him first thing when they saw him in the morning. “I kissed my father every day of my life till the day he died and I expect the same treatment from my kids.”
His sister one night scratched his face and pulled his hair and ripped the shirt off his back because she said each of the boys in the family got more things bought for them than the girl.
He met his wife at a party on New Year's Eve. She was sitting on a couch, looked sick. He sat down next to her and said “Excuse me, but you don't look well, is there anything I can do?” She said “You can get me two aspirins if you don't mind,” and he brought them back with a glass of water. She said “That was very nice of you. I didn't ask for waterânot because I forgotâI like to swallow my aspirins wholeâbut you thought of it for me. If it wouldn't also be a bother, and because I trust you now and think you have a good pragmatic head for such things, could you walk me to the bathroom and hold my waist from behind while I throw up? I usually do it so violently that I throw my shoulders out of joint.”
His father was a pharmacist and everyone called him Doc. Don had three best friends over the years whose fathers were pharmacists and all their acquaintances and customers called them Doc. Don's father was the only one of the four who brought most of his pharmaceutical samples home, leaving very little closet space for anyone else in the apartment. After he died, Don's mother asked Don to sort the good samples from the bad, but he just put them all into about a dozen big plastic garbage bags and threw them out.
He met a woman in England when he was in college, corresponded with her during the school year and the following summer hitchhiked with her from her home in South Africa to Cairo. It took them four months. They were in love when they started out and hated each other by the time they reached the Sudan. He saw her off at the Cairo airport and her next to last words to him were “What did I ever see in you I wonder?” His last words to her were “If we'd time I'd remind you, but as for me I used to love the way you looked, acted and talked and that you answered and so intelligently and lengthily a letter of mine every other week and that you thought there was nothing better in life for you to do than become a hospital nurse and that you once sent me a nine by twelve inch photo of yourself in a skimpy swimsuit and that you hailed from Estcourt, Natal, and summered when I wintered and that when we lived in our native countries we never saw the same stars.” “Is that true about the stars I wonder?” and she went up the ramp to the plane. He was broke and the American embassy wouldn't loan him money so he called his folks collect for the fare home.
His sister was Gretel to his Hansel in a summer camp play. He wanted a girl closer in age to him to play the part but the drama counselor said their being brother and sister would make the play more realistic and endearing to the audience. The camp photographer took pictures of the performance and till his sister died his mother loved to bring them out and show them to the women friends he'd ask over for dinner or drinks.
He was playing ring-a-levio one night on his block. A girl named Mary, who lived on the next block, was hiding in the same brownstone walkway with him. They were kneeling close together, their shoulders and arms touched. She had on a short skirt and when she looked over the walkway wall to see if the person who was “it” was anywhere near them, he looked up between her legs, hoping to see her vagina or maybe some hair if she had any there yet but only saw the ends of her buttocks sticking out of her panties. Later, as a prisoner, it seemed his underpants were wet. He felt down inside them, thinking he might have made. His penis and the pants around it were sticky. He got scared for a second, then remembered the dirty part of a book he'd recently read and something some boy had said, and thought Holy Christ, for the first time in my life I've spermed.
“Touch me again and I'll call the cops,” a woman friend said to him. She got dressed, left his apartment and he never spoke to her after that till he bumped into her in a museum garden a few years later. She said hello and smiled, then must have remembered what he did that night and walked past him into the museum. He started after her, wanted to ask what it was he did that nightâhe'd completely forgotten or had blocked it outâso he could apologize again or for the first time. “I don't care how bad it was, I want to know,” he wanted to say, but the museum was crowded and he couldn't find her. That evening he wanted to call her and apologize for whatever he'd done that time years ago, but her name wasn't in the phonebook. He knew a couple of people who might know her or how to find her, but then thought it's all right, you can have a few harmless enemies in this world and still sleep well and live through a normal day every day. In time you'll straighten it out with her, if it was that important.
For the last two months, when he brushed his hair on the right side, his head hurt. He went to a doctor, something he hadn't done in about a dozen years, and pointed to the spot. The doctor felt it, looked into his eyes with a penlight, took his blood pressure and said “I know you must be worried it's brain cancer or some form of brain damage or anything resembling those, but that you're definitely on your way out of this beautiful world, but it's not so. You're healthier than you almost should be for your age; when you're approaching fifty you should begin conducting yourself as if you are. You must have hit your head hard two months back and it hasn't healed fully.” He was relieved when he left her office, didn't feel any pain the next day when he brushed his hair or pressed down on that spot, but has felt the same pain and even worse every day since for the last two weeks. He was worried about it again but more worried what a neurologist might do to try to find the reason behind the pain, so for the time being he'd avoid brushing that part of his head and pretend to believe the pain would ultimately go away.
His wife was playing with his penis when she said “Good God, you've blood coming out of the hole.” He went to a doctor, afraid he had something serious. His wife went with him, saying “Don't get excited, it's probably nothing. People always think they have the worst when they should think that nine times out of ten they have nothing, and if they do have something, it can usually be cured simply and quickly.” The doctor said it was a minor case of prostatitis and prescribed pills that would clear up the infection in two weeks. “Can I have sex during this time?” he asked and the doctor said “By all meansâit's good for the prostate gland. Only thing to stop you from it now is if your wife for the next few days minds a drop or two of your blood.”
For a year his uncle showed him a lot of attention. He took him to professional baseball and hockey games every other week, took him to first-run movies or Broadway plays at night, let him stay with him an entire summer month at his beach house, gave him a hundred dollars on his birthday and told him to buy what he liked with it. They were never close before then, and after the year his uncle stopped calling or coming by. He'd call his uncle and his uncle would say “I'm busy this weekend, kid. I'll see you next Saturday or Sunday,” and the next weekend he wouldn't call or show up either. Finally Don's mother told him “I think my brother's going through some change-of-life crisisâdon't feel it's your fault he doesn't act the way he used to with you.” Ten years later his mother called and said “Uncle Nat died in Miami last nightâa heart attack. I'm flying down with Dadâcan you look after my plants?” He said “I'd like to come too,” and she said “What for?âyou two were never close.”
His wife said “Let's renew our marriage vows, just together, Carole can stay with my mother. We'll write the ceremony ourselves, be our own witnesses and judge, go on the Caribbean honeymoon we never took, not tell anyone what we've done and only my mother where we're goingâit'll be our one secret we'll keep from everyone for life.” “Let me think about it,” he said, and that was the last they spoke of it.
He was thumbing through the phone directory looking for the zip code page when his wife said “Excuse me, I don't mean to bother you if you're doing anything important, but would you like to go to bed for fifteen minutes?” “I just want to find this,” he said and she said “What are you looking for? A zip code; for Christ sakes. Forget my proposal,” and he said “No no, I have it now just let me mark it down,” and she said “Next time I should try to catch you when you're reading page five of the
Post
, because I'm not asking too much, am I?” and he said “No, I can always do it; just it might take a little more time.”
His wife said “Please don't take itâit can't be good for you. The others here are all heads and know how to handle the stuff,” and he said “I always wanted to take a tripânow's my chance, and I swear I'll be okay,” and swallowed the LSD tab. First they were all gods and goddesses on Mount Olympus and his wife, who hadn't taken any, said “If this is all it's going to be, maybe it wasn't so bad after all,” and he said “Drop another grape in my mouth and then come kiss me, you lovely beastâoh God, I love you,” But soon after that he became a famous black gospel singer and sang gospels in her voice and then he went outdoors to embrace all of nature and crawled low in the snow because he thought one of the other LSD takers was trying to kill him with a rifle and then he was in a circle with three other naked people in a dungeon, all with their heads yoked between the thighs of the person in front of them and turning a horizontal wheel for what would be an eternity and then he was a bug on the dungeon floor and human feet were trying to smash him. He was given a strong tranquilizer and while he was coming down he told his wife he had gone mad and nothing would ever make him sane again and he'd be completely dependent on her or in a squalid institution for life, “so listen, your friend with the gun before, get him to put it to my head and shoot perfectly.” Then he fell asleep and the next morning his wife said to him “I know how you hate I told-you-so's but I wish you'd listen to me on things like this,” and he said “You're right, no need to hedge around it, but I've seen the darkest I can become and nothing so much before has made me appreciate sanity and day-to-day sameness and simple sleep and just sitting here with you, for instance, and admitting any of this.”
“You're being hired for your musculature and height, not your potential to teach,” the assistant principal said to him, and an hour later, after he introduced himself to the class as the new permanent sub and asked the students to one by one tell him their names, a boy stood up, the first student to ever respond to him in his own class, and said “I'm not taking orders from any white man,” and left the room. “Come back,” he said, “you come back.”
He was in college, dating a girl from New Jersey. He took the bus from Port Authority and was walking in the rain along the street to her house when she jumped out from behind a tree just to the side of him and said “Boo,” He looked at her from about ten feet away, sheepish grin on her face, body still partly hidden by the tree trunk. That was the single happiest moment of his life. Other than that he was in love with her and had looked forward to seeing her that day, he can't really explain it beyond that. He went over to her, they hugged and kissed, but the most rhapsodic part of the experience was over for him.
He finished
The Idiot
, thought it the best book he read and wanted to talk to someone about it. No one he knew had read it, not even his brothers and mother who among them seemed to have read everything. A couple of high school friends said if the book was that great they'd start reading it right away, but he said by the time they finished he'd probably have forgotten most of it. “I need someone to talk about it with now. Maybe someone in your family,” and one friend reported back that his father had started it in college but couldn't get past the first fifty pages.
He sent away ten cents and a box top and every Saturday after that waited for the mail in the building's vestibule or on weekdays rushed home around lunchtime when the mail was often delivered. His mother said “It takes time,” but he said “Maybe this company just wanted to steal my dime.” Two months later the mailman said “I think this is for you. I could've left it by your letter box yesterday hut I knew the contents were especially precious to you,” and he gave him the small package. He opened it in his room, put the ring on his finger, adjusted the band, blew the ring's whistle, peered into its sight, learned where north and south were in the room, held the ring under a light and then went into a dark closet, shut the door and brought the ring up close to his face and was able to make out the ring and the knuckle of his ring finger.
His mother took his sister and him to see Macy's Santa Claus.
Santa's helper ran the specially decorated elevator, other helpers led them down and around a dark corridor that looked like a funhouse's and at the end of it gave them each a brown paper bag of Christmas candy. When his turn came, Santa sat him on his lap, called him “a skinny lad” and asked what he wanted for Christmas. “An electric train set and the right to change my name to Toby Tyler.”
His father was drafted. For a while Don slept in the same bed with his mother because she was afraid to sleep alone. But he kicked too much and occasionally wet himself, so she put him back in the boys' room. Years later he mentioned this and she denied he'd ever slept in the same bed with her even when he was sick, so he stopped talking about it or even bringing up that time when his father was in the service.
His parents were on their double bed. He crawled into the room, stood up by holding the bedspread, wondered how they got into the bed. They must use a ladder and he imagined a ladder against the side of the bed and his parents climbing up it. He raised his arms and shook them and his father lifted him up and dropped him between them.