I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son (10 page)

“It’s all over but the buryin’,” Dad said. He removed himself from the jar and finger painted the crust of a ham sandwich. “Sweet death, come take me soon.” He handed it to me wrapped in a paper towel. “Me and all the other mayonnaise-loving, Ernest-Tubb-listening-to whiteys out there. Our time is done-zo.”

I’ve been told that right before my delivery date, Mom was bumped from the room she’d reserved at Jackson Memorial Hospital. A boatload of pregnant Haitians had just landed. Emergency cases. They’d risked their lives crossing the Florida Strait in tubs so they could see their babies born in Miami. And born they were, a great many of them, all at once. This was a huge boon, it turned out, because were it not for the refugee
fruitful, and had my mother had me when she’d planned to, I would’ve split her uterus. She and I both would’ve died en route to the hospital.

Before me, she’d miscarried twice. Imperious men who strode about converting their will into law, I think they would’ve been. Bizarro-me’s, with a gift for languages, and thick cocks. They were never more than clouds, though; weather on a screen. They got washed from drain to sewer stem to deep blue sea.

I, however, was delivered early via emergency cesarean. December 19, though she wanted my birthday nearer JC’s.

Mom was unconscious for the whole thing, of course. When Dad tried to behold my delivery, shit-housed, with an eight-cell boom box pressed over his head, blaring “Born in the U.S.A.”—he was bounced.

I’ve also been told that on that day, I fit right into the crick of his arm. The warmth I gave off was geological, he said. A heat that made me seem some figurine shot straight from the center of the earth, hot and still pliable. He handled me as delicately as possible so as not to misshape me as I cooled.

That would become his prime directive. A native strain of the Golden Rule: I will leave you free to do what you might like to do, but I expect you’ll do the same for me. Imposition being not just bad parenting—worse, it’s un-American.

Ergo, I was free to do what I wanted. Which meant I did nothing. Left to my devices, I did what was most convenient and most selfish. Napped a lot, joined no clubs. Dated nobody and volunteered nothing. Didn’t really read, write, care. In fact, I can so little recollect what exactly I
did
in my adolescence that I’m supremely suspicious of any dude who can.

I had a group of four friends; that much I remember. In middle and high school, we spent every weekend together. We all could smirk but not smile. We played roller hockey badly, and downloaded snuff films from early file-sharing sites. We
were not nerdy. We were aloof. Bored enough for badness. We liked to get faded and do violence to matter.

Actually, that’s one thing—the day Columbine happened. I can recall discussing it during eighth-grade religion class at St. Hugh. Sister Patricia was dumbfounded by Ryan. Like, jaw-dropped. She’d asked what we were feeling about the news. Ryan raised his hand and—this being when Coloradoans were still fleeing in lines like ducklings on TV—said, “Just judging from what they’re saying, it’s not only shotguns the shooters are using.”

We knew what was coming. The “circle time,” the separate, compassionate grillings. One of our group was himself something of a duster aficionado, so he got it worst. Juan liked to take milk-naked photos of himself. On these he’d doodle varicose, H. R. Giger–style dongs before distributing them. On everything else, he doodled
Waffen-SS
sig runes. He was kind of a Naziphile? Which, even now, it’s like—Juan, bro, you’re full-blooded Cuban.
What’re you doing?

The nuns’ memories were long. They brought up the fact that when asked to name our lunch table (so it could be included in the wheel of chores), we christened ourselves after a machine pistol. They brought up the fact that in fourth grade we’d eagerly swapped paperback novelizations of the first-person shooter
Doom,
a video game that Harris and Klebold were reputed to love. (Did I remember writing a poem about the game’s sequel, they asked, and then
produced the original poem.
) They tried to turn us on to books like
A Wrinkle in Time
or
The Giver
—but, lame.

Obviously, we didn’t
condone
the act. We didn’t condone it, and we knew it was wrong. We understood how it could
happen,
sure. But we also considered the killers pussies. For succumbing to the pressure.

Regardless, to the nuns we fit the description. Every class
has one(s) like us who does—a boy, often white, who is not quite rounding into shape but will be given the benefit of every doubt.
He’ll put it all together, at some point
seems to be the consensus. There is a general love or craving in him—you can see it in his eyes—but it has not yet found its direct object. So, to protect himself, he has it manifest as hurtful apathy.

Still, this apathy is more or less benign in the grand scheme. The worst it did in me was get me suspended on prom night. Filipe and I must’ve been some conspicuous-ass needles in that particular haystack. (Granted, it should’ve been my third suspension—grounds for expulsion—but the second one had been expunged. Turned out that partaking in our same bender during a class trip to Orlando was the class president–slash–football mascot. And we had the pictures to prove it.) When my high school principal, a creeping shit-sucker if there ever was one, begrudgingly handed over my diploma a few weeks later, he smiled for the cameras while whispering in my ear, “Lay off the booze, eh, you son of a bitch.”

The only one of us I ever was a wee bit scared of was Jake. Jake would order rifles online and mean his racial slurs when he said them. He went on to Jesuit high school with Ryan, but he didn’t fistfight. He seemed rather to move about like a violent decision that was in the process of making itself.

Later, he became the second of the group to pay a prostitute to take his virginity. The second to enlist, too. But his blond hair and Lurch-like personage made him perfect for the honor guard. He didn’t go overseas. He was one of the twenty-one guns saluting our war dead at Arlington.

I know that Juan left a trail of scag vials and bad checks and got himself locked up. Filipe took the high road and became a banker in Brazil. But I don’t know what’s become of Jake. We didn’t keep in touch. Last I heard, he was bussing tables at a North Florida Outback Steakhouse. I worry. He wasn’t
lucky enough in his early life to have developed the capacity to metabolize love. I’m fairly certain that without it, he today is cold pride and latent rage wrapped up in an unfeeling vessel. A homegrown IED, waiting to go off.

I’m fairly certain of that
now.
But at the time, we were all of us blind to the elephant in the room. No one wanted to try touching it, much less describing what he felt.

Dad was mummifying the leftover ham and bread in four layers of Saran, for freshness. He swaddled clingwrap over clingwrap, the contents obscured like prey caught in silk.

I went, “There’s this spider that, right before her babies are big enough to leave the nest? She lets them eat her. Just lays herself down, allows the fruit of her egg sac to skitter all over, inject digestive venom.”

“Uh huh,” he said, knitting hands, not looking up.

“Their development ends with her getting
eaten
from the
inside out.
You see what I’m saying?”

“That you are an assholing know-it-all.”

He palmed his one long tress of hair across his head. It had been dangling past his neck, looking like a broken feather in a one-feather headdress. I was reminded then of his funerary imperatives, which have evolved suchly:

In middle school—“Look, I’ve been trying hard to croak on a Wednesday. I know you’ve never taken the garbage out in your life—but Wednesday’s garbage day. When I succeed in my task, okay, just break my legs so you can fold me over and close the lid.”

In high school—“When I die at this ball game, just put my shades on my face, cross my arms, and leave me be. But
after
you’ve made sure to get the car keys and wallet out of my pockets.”

College—“Any one of you tries putting me in a home—forget about it. I’m grabbing the gun and disappearing into the swamp. Happy hunting, assholes.”

And then, right on cue, he said, “It is the duty of the old to die. So, take whatever you want: pens, underwear, the TV. All I ask in exchange is that you take my ashes to Point Bonita or some shit. Just don’t do like Donnie in
The Big Lebowski.
Really get me in the water.”

I poised my hands above the laptop’s keyboard and asked, “Right. We’ll get to that bridge when we cross it. But first: What,
exactly,
is gonna be lost when you are gone, would you say?”

He turned his head and scowled down his shoulder at me. He asked, “What,
exactly,
are you typing?”

First thing next morning, I tried to watch a Louis C.K. clip the Internet was telling me to watch. “You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something,” his bit goes. “That’s what the phones are taking away, is the ability to just sit there. That’s being a person. Because underneath everything in your life there is that thing, that empty—forever empty.”

“SHHHH GODDAMNIT!” Dad said, at a volume far louder than YouTube. He looked to the ceiling and waited for the upstairs neighbors to stomp. This is his telltale conscience. Of course, no one ever stomps. Up there, they’re just graceless.

Sticking to my splendor of morning has never been easy. On school days, Dad would pace up and down the hallway counting down
FIVE MINUTES!
and then
THREE MINUTES!
as Karen, Lauren, and I hustled into the plaids and loafers we’d laid out the night before. He wore dark aviators and stood cross-armed next to the idling car while we grabbed what could be carried, as though rushing from a fire. St. Hugh was less than five minutes away.

We were never late. Not once. Not even on days when tropical storms blew in and “driving” to school involved spraying heavy wakes that capsized other commuters’ rubber rafts. When
we pulled up to the main building, we wouldn’t need to push the car doors open; yank the handle, and the wind took care of the rest. Sister Kathleen would emerge with her arms up and splayed, a touchdown of disbelief. The black flame of her coif danced on the howl as she exaggeratedly mouthed the words “RUSSELLS, GO HOME.”

One time, in high school—the one time, and an unavoidable one at that, as Dad had to take Lauren to look at state schools—he entrusted the job to Karen, who was herself home from college. Naturally, Karen overslept by twenty minutes. She roused me by pushing me clear out of bed, in her underwear, shrieking
“FUCK, KENT, RUN!”
When Ms. Feldman failed to notice me slinking into second-period English, I was more than astounded. My faith was rocked. Negligence had exposed me to the punitive intelligence that runs the universe and … nothing had happened.

What did we think would happen? What did he tell us would happen? Long ago, the stress of it gave Karen an ulcer. In the endoscopic image, it looked like the planet Jupiter. I was four years old and absolutely certain that the gastroenterologist was Bob Saget. I saw Bob Saget in the face of every tall white man, as I loved not only
Full House
but also
America’s Funniest Home Videos.
Every Sunday night, after church and dinner, Mom would get back to work, and the rest of us would sandbag ourselves on Dad on the couch and watch the latter show. Dad would be at his rip-roaringest then, sloshing loud laughs as father after father got whomped in the dick by his kid.

Later that morning, he was in an athletic crouch next to the television, using his crippled right pinkie to point out a blob of Yuletide-colored rain whorling over the Midwest. He got that pinky crimped irrevocably while blocking a spike during
a volleyball game at a rehab facility. Game was probably just as sweatily homoerotic as the one in
Top Gun,
only with more dry heaving.

“Yeah, you wanted to be driving down there right now, right, asshole?” he asked, gesturing at Ohio.

This bullheadedness tickled me greatly. I probably wouldn’t be so hard up about going there otherwise.

“Let’s do it,” I said. “Once the rain clears out, the heat should be gone.
Blam
—perfect.”

“Aww, hell,” he said. He pinched his rosy gin blossom and exhaled, effecting some kind of decompression. “All you gotta do is call up the Ohio Chamber of Commerce and have them send you a fucking videotape.

“Look, I was out of Ohio by eight years old. I went back once, when I was fourteen. Ohio in the fifties—Jesus Christ, it was so goddamned boring you just wanted to pour yourself with gasoline and light a match. I made my life elsewhere, you understand.

“In fact, I’m sort of mad at my parents for wanting to be buried there. Though now that I’m away from the swamp, I can sort of understand it. Anyone from the North does not want to be buried in South Florida. Your bones get sucked through the limestone. Completely recycled. You become a part of fountain drinks and toilet flushes. A horrible place.”

He’s right, of course. But I don’t like non-natives talking trash. He may have moved there, lived there, been deformed by the place—but he’s not
of
there. He wasn’t Miami, Florida, born and raised.

Miami is America’s Samarkand. It is a borderplace, a porous frontier that seems to be both seat of culture and lawless zone. Economically, it is a bright, shiny mirage. The city exists insofar as it reflects the appetites and fantasies of people arriving from the north and west. (And, to a lesser but exponentially increasing
extent, those coming from south-by-southwest.) Lots of chrome curves and billowing white. Tits like tan dirigibles, and the best sunsets on the East Coast.

But there’s something about Miami that’s … at odds … with the rest of the nation. It’s a melting pot, yes, but more than New York or L.A. it is sort of … uniquely fucked up. Out-of-towners can’t help but alternate between pining after the place and passing judgment.

Many if not most people outside Miami misapprehend just what the city is about. They come, and implicitly they believe that because this is their equatorial getaway from where real lives are lived, the living in Miami must be simpler, less real. It’s the classic tropical syllogism: the place advertises sun, leisure, and repose; you come and experience sun, leisure, and repose; therefore, the locals must know nothing, really, aside from sun, leisure, and repose.