I was early, though. Better to just sit out in the car and listen to the rain drum against the roof than to go up and cool my jets in that cramped little space outside her door. I looked in the mirror at my fogged-up face. Thought, again, about that rock-bottom night—the third night after I’d gotten home from the hospital. . . .
For three days, everyone had been milling around, getting in each other’s way trying to help out the poor jerk who’d totaled his truck and fallen off a roof, and whose pregnant girlfriend had bailed in the middle of it. The home health care people, Meals on Wheels, Leo and Angie, Ray: it’d been like Grand Central Station over there for three days and then, on that third night, it got quiet. I’d been set up for my first nighttime solo: phone, urinal, remote control for the TV. Water in a thermos, two Percoset doses laid out on the nightstand. The health care aide was due back at seven the next morning.
All I had to do was lie there. Stay put. Watch TV, drug myself on schedule, and sleep.
But I got restless. Panicky. I couldn’t stand just lying there, listening anymore to that yacking little bedside TV that Leo had gotten me. Only, when I turned the damned thing off, the silence was even worse. The absolute quiet: it spooked me. And when I closed my eyes, I saw my brother: the way his eyes had looked at me in my morphine dream, the way his body had jerked and twisted on the end of the noose. . . .
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I saw Rood, up in his attic window. . . .
Saw the Duchess, standing by my hospital bed, holding that cassette of hers. . . . She’d let him
watch
us, man. She’d let that sick fuck turn our most private, our most intimate . . . And both of those times he’d been there—each of those two nights she’d let him trespass like that—it had been
him
she was making love to. Not me. I’d just been the dupe, the means to their perverted little end. And so I lay there feeling ashamed. Dirty. Powerless to take back my fuck. . . .
I got up. Got out of bed, in spite of all the promises I had made to everyone to stay put. I gimped my way out to the kitchen. Stood there, watching the phone message blinks. Nine, ten, eleven. I’d been avoiding listening to that thing since I’d gotten home from the hospital three days before. At first I didn’t even
know
why and then, finally, I realized what it was: Rood. I was afraid Rood’s voice would be on there, whether he’d blown out his brains or not.
Welcome to the
black hole, Dominick. I’m your tour guide, Henry Rood. . . .
I’d been planning it right along—had spent a lot of time in the hospital getting used to the idea. Figuring out how. I figured I’d take my Percoset prescription and that Happy Holidays bottle of Scotch I’d gotten and just Kevorkian myself. Get it over with. Because it was all over anyway. Joy had fucked me over and left. Dessa sure as hell wasn’t coming back. She’d sent over some stew, put a couple of get-well cards in the mail. But that was all I was going to get. Those years we’d been together were as dead, now, as our daughter. And without the hope of her ever coming back, I was already a dead man. Breathing was just a technicality.
I hobbled my way out to the spare room and got the Scotch. Got back to the kitchen. I eased myself down onto a chair, broke the seal, unscrewed the cap. Took three or four long swigs—swallowed, winced. In between slugs, I kept picking up my prescription vial.
Shaking it. Listening to those capsules click around in there. Dead man’s castanets, I thought. It struck me funny.
Should I leave a note?
Dear Ray, Thanks for the memories.
. . . Dear Dessa, Thanks for sticking by me, for better or worse.
And what about Thomas? . . .
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Hey, man,
fuck
Thomas. Wouldn’t that be one of suicide’s big perks—throwing the look-alike talking corpse, once and for all, off my shoulders? Getting my life sentence as my brother’s keeper com-muted? It was funny, though—not at all what I’d figured on: Thomas outlasting me. Winning.
I wanted to watch myself take them: watch the condemned man eat his last meal. On the way to the bathroom—the medicine cabinet mirror—I stopped.
Slipped open the door of Joy’s empty closet.
I tapped the empty wire hangers, watched the way they rocked back and forth, back and forth. Betrayal didn’t cut any deeper than what she had done. Let him into our bedroom—let him crouch in there like sin itself. . . . And I thought, suddenly, about Ralph Drinkwater. The way Joseph Monk had snatched his sister and his mother had self-destructed over it. The way Dell Weeks and his wife had given Ralph food and shelter for . . . for his nakedness. For dirty pictures that they could turn around and sell to strangers.
That’s what
that
had been about: profiting from a young boy’s vulnerability—a confused kid’s need to have a home.
This
was how bad human nature could get, I thought. This was the sweet little world I was checking out of.
The guy in the medicine cabinet mirror scared me a little—looked both familiar and strange. Looked nothing like Henry Rood had looked. . . . I held up my two hands, wiggled my fingers a little.
Saw Thomas, whole again. Saw Ma without the split in her lip. And I could see Domenico, too—that stern face in the tinted portrait on my mother’s bureau. The resemblances were scary. Undeniable. We were all, in a way, each other. . . .
Maybe we were damned or something. Cursed. Was that it? . . .
Funny: I was never going to finish Papa’s manuscript after all. I’d lost that damned thing, had gotten it back again, and then had put off reading it for weeks. Months, now, really. Had only just that week started reading it. I’d purposely
avoided
reading it—his “history of a great man from humble beginnings.” Unfinished business.
A loose end. Well, so what? Fuck it, man. Couldn’t keep the Grim I Know[526-565] 7/24/02 2:08 PM Page 548
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Reaper waiting. . . . It was strange, though. Or it was the Percoset or something. I could see their faces in my face. . . .
I couldn’t do it.
Poured that little cascade of capsules down the sink instead of down my throat. Turned the water on and washed away my big suicide. I hobbled back into the bedroom. Eased myself back down on the bed.
Called Leo.
And by some miracle, it was Leo who answered. “Hello? . . .
Hello?
”
It felt like one of those dreams where you can’t run, can’t scream.
“Dominick? Dominick, is that you? . . . Hold on, man. I’m coming right over.”
It was time. The rain had let up a little. I swung the door open and hoisted my bad leg over and onto the wet asphalt. With all the leg room they gave you in these luxury Escorts, getting in and out on a bum foot was a breeze. And pigs flew. And we were in that war over in Kuwait for all the
right
reasons. . . .
Inside, I surveyed the long, wet flight of stairs that led up to Miss Patti’s Academy of World Dance on the left, Dr. Patel’s office on the right. When I’d been going to see her before, I hadn’t even really
noticed
those stairs—had probably barreled up the damn things two at a time. But that had been three months and a lifetime ago—back when Rood was still leaving messages on my machine and Joy’s boyfriend was still hiding in the closet and I was still kidding myself about springing my brother from Hatch. Everything had changed since then. Everything. We’d gone to goddamned
war
, for Christ’s sake. . . .
The stairwell walls vibrated with the pulse of African drum music.
“Let the rhythm enter your body,
” someone called out up there.
“
Let it
be
your body. Faster, now! Faster!
”
Take it slow, I told myself. Damn stairs were wet, waxed. Your I Know[526-565] 7/24/02 2:08 PM Page 549
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ankle’s still weak, no matter how good you’re doing down at physical therapy. You slip and fall, you’ll set yourself back another couple months. You’ll
really
need a shrink then.
I clutched the railing with my left hand, the crutch with my right. Started up. Those stairs were just the warm-up, I reminded myself. The
real
challenge was up at the top, door on the right.
Because if I was serious about finally getting some answers, they weren’t going to come without some pain. Without me opening up a vein or two.
I was a third of the way up when I heard footsteps, giggles. The door below banged open. I froze. Held my breath. “Wait a minute, girls,” some merciful mother called. “Wait for that man to get up.”
“It’s okay,” I called back over my shoulder. “They can go around me. I’ll just hold on to the rail.”
“No, no, you go ahead. Take your time.”
I negotiated a step. Another one. What about that goddamned Americans with Disabilities act that Bush had signed, anyway?
Where was the friggin’
elevator
? I could hear them all down there, watching me, waiting.
“Really,” I called back. “I’ll just stop. Have ’em go around me.”
She must have given them the okay because the next thing I knew, they were clomping up, stampeding past me. “Easy,” I mumbled. “Easy.” My crutch hand was shaking so bad, the rubber tip on the bottom squeaked against the wet stair.
By the time I got to the top, I’d had to stop and let three more groups pass—one up, two down. My usual great timing: I’d managed to get there right when all the classes were changing. But, okay, I’d made it. Gotten up there
.
I stood at Dr. Patel’s door, my heart thumping, my shirt soaked in sweat. In three months’ time, I’d forgotten the protocol—whether you knocked first or just went in.
So what are you going to do then, Birdsey? Just stand here?
Make a chickenshit U-turn and climb all the way back
down
again?
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over on Hollyhock Avenue. Opening the door on all our lives, and on Domenico’s life, too. Stepping back into all that. I knew that now.
You want to go forward? Go back.
I raised my fist.
Lowered it again.
Took a breath, raised it again. Knocked.
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33
f
f
20 July 1949
The hellish voyage aboard the SS
Napolitano
ended on the morning of 4 October 1901. As the ship sailed into New York Harbor, I gazed in near-disbelief at the beautiful
Statu di Libberta!
My heart beat rapidly. I made the sign of the cross. It was as if I was in the presence of the Weeping
Vergine
herself, only this time the tears fell from my own eyes, not those of the stone woman! I dropped to my knees in the middle of the pushing crowd, hiding as best I could my tears and thanking the Son of God and His Holy Mother that we had landed on American soil.
My young brother Vincenzo threw cold water on my reverie.
“If all the women in America are of such formidable size as this one,” Vincenzo said in a loud voice, pointing at that holy statue,
“then they will be glad that Vincenzo Tempesta has finally arrived to satisfy their desires and fill up their big pussies!” The mood of the weary travelers was one of giddy relief, and so several of the men around us laughed at Vincenzo’s shameful remark, my brother Pasquale included. Thus encouraged, Vincenzo thrust his hips forward and backward in a lewd manner. It was, of course, my duty and my burden to get off my knees and rise to my full height. I answered Vincenzo’s shocking offense with the
551
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f
back of my hand, and gave Pasquale a poke as well. Chastened to
silenzio
, Vincenzo arrived on American soil dripping Tempesta blood from his broken lip.
My two brothers and I lived for a while in Brooklyn with our cousins and sponsors, Lena and Vitaglio, and their five young brats. I was unable to find work as a mason. Instead, I took a nighttime job as a
janitore
at the New York Public Library. (Just as well that I had found night work—my journey aboard the
Napolitano
had bedeviled my sleep forever!) Pasquale got work as a street sweeper and Vincenzo washed glasses and ran errands at a small
taverna
just down the street from my cousins’ apartment, a saloon that was patronized mostly by
siciliani
.
During my free hours, I practiced English at the library with the help of discarded newspapers and magazines. In this endeavor, I was assisted by a kindly one-eyed librarian who gave me my beloved coverless dictionary, which the library was about to destroy. To destroy a book’s insides because of outside defect?
Sacrilege! The wastefulness of Americans disgusted me when I first arrived, but not my brothers. In their squandering ways, Pasquale and Vincenzo quickly became
’Mericano
. Each week, they paid board to our cousins and threw away the little of their salaries that was left on stage shows and glasses of beer and games of pinochle, ignoring, as usual, the good example I provided them. As for myself, I studied and saved my money with the determination of one who is destined to seize opportunity and succeed! Often, I pictured in my mind the snobbish waiter and the wealthy couple who had stared at me with disgust on board the deck of the SS
Napolitano
. . . .
The world is made of stairs; some go up and some go down.
. . .
To this day, I am glad in my heart that that haughty couple heard my reply. And as for that arrogant, goddamned waiter, I hope that he tripped over his own shoelaces and fell into the ocean, headfirst, and was strangled by the tentacles of a hungry octopus!