I'M NOT DEAD: The Journals of Charles Dudley Vol.1 (3 page)

The decorated war hero suffered two strokes and hip surgery and had three children (and seven grandkids) by his late wife Barbara before she passed away last spring of a heart attack. Oh, how I miss Barbara’s Christmas lasagna.

I’m going in.

LAST RIGHTS

Christmas morning

When we were kids, Joe would let us come by and see his medals and the prized .9 millimeter Berretta Modello pistol he kept holstered around his wife beater.

The old goon had tall tales to tell about Normandy and his enemies: the Krauts and the Nips. He wore his World War II scars with valor and a hearing aid turned up so high it would whistle.

Once the dementia started kicking in, Joe stopped accommodating neighbors and told us kids to fuck off whenever we came too close to his house.

He didn’t like us “little faggots” playing stickball anywhere near his property.

Joe never left the house once Barbara passed away. His best friend Winslow, a colored man and fellow war buddy, died of diabetes a year before Barbara did.

His kids stopped dropping by with their families months ago. Visits from the kids came throughout the week and the weekend, then weekends, then once a month, and finally, no visits from them at all. Maybe they stopped coming for the same reason the home attendants stopped coming. He was just a miserable old bastard who had no problem telling everyone to go to hell.

I was alone in Joe’s cellar this morning in a room filled to the brim with weapons and military nostalgia, so fascinated that I did not hear the faint thumping and rattling coming from upstairs.

Sweet Jesus, Joseph.

I knew Joe was packin’ heat, but he had an arsenal in his house capable of supplying a small army.

I immediately sorted through the inventory of guns—rifles, handguns, a shotgun, two machine guns, ammo, and dog tags, and I didn’t know if these relics worked or were loaded.

I’ve always been uncomfortable around guns, thanks to my drunken gun-toting uncle Roger who terrorized his family and liked to shoot holes in his ceilings when he drank.

I’d never shot a gun, out of fear I’d shoot myself like Chester Westcott did three years ago after taking large amounts of PCP at a house party in Whitestone. The 16-year-old shot half his head off in front of a group of his rich friends by his pool after getting a hold of Daddy’s shotgun.

He lived, horribly disfigured, occasionally working the talk show circuit and the antidrug lectures at the schools between multiple surgeries that would reattach and restore his face.

The banging from upstairs got louder and more desperate.

I panicked, accidentally knocking over some crates that were stenciled “HELLFIRE”. I grabbed a bayonet from the wall and my Louisville Slugger before running up to the kitchen.

 The noise came from upstairs, and I thought,
why should I care? I should grab the shit, leave, and not look back.

But, I didn’t.

Instead, my curiosity got the best of me, and I slowly made my way up to the first bedroom at the top of the stairs.

The stuffy room smelled like Ben Gay and pee. The night table was littered with pill bottles and rubbing alcohol. There was a bedpan on the floor, but no Joe in sight.

I put the bat down by the bedpost as I continued making my way towards the closet door from where the thumping came. Holding the bayonet outward, heart slamming against my chest, I took two steps closer. I stopped, and my eyes followed the dried spatter of blood leading from the stairs to the closet door. I hesitated reaching for the doorknob.

I swung the door open with the bayonet held high, ready to strike, but I froze.

Fuck me. There was little old Joe hiding in the closet trembling in his underwear, covered in his own blood and shit.

“Joe?”

What do I do?
I was happy to see Joe alive, but he was 90 years old, and I know I couldn’t get him to a hospital. Not there was a hospital anymore for me to take him to. I tried prying him out of the closet, but he punched me in the head with his big potato hand, leaving a nice little knot above my forehead afterwards.

“It’s me, Joe, Charlie from across the street. I’m the Dudley boy, remember me?” I said, sitting with him. I tried talking to him, but he was rambling and a bleeding mess. I tried comforting him, but he wouldn’t be comforted. I knew we couldn’t sit there all day and that I needed to act fast—for Joe’s sake.

He raised his hand, aiming his finger at the night table.

I assumed Joe’d gone without his medication, so I walked over to the night table and began holding up the brown pill bottles from the miniature pharmacy he had sitting by his bed. He shook his head. No. Ben Gay? No.

I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t think about just leaving him there.

I jiggled the drawer open, finding his Modello handgun, a Bible, a picture of him and Barbara from when they first married in Hawaii.

I figured the gun couldn’t possibly be what he wanted—maybe he wanted the picture?—but Joe let out a gravelly and painful “yyyeessssss” from  deep within his throat when I made the gesture of a gun with my thumb and index finger.

He waved me over as I pulled the gun from the drawer.

It was heavy, and it felt dangerous, too dangerous, and dangerous enough to blow the jaw from my face—like Chester Westcott.

Joe flailed his arms from the closet at me like a baby throwing a tantrum for his bottle.

 “Don’t rush me, old man!” I shouted. “I’m coming, I’m coming!”

I walked back to Joe, shaking in the corner of the dark, cold closet.

“Tell me what to do, Joe,” I said.

Joe raised his trembling finger one more time and pressed it firmly against his forehead as tears streamed down and over the valleys of his old face.

I didn’t understand: was he asking me to put him out of his misery?

Are you kidding me?

“What do you think you’re doing, you crazy bastard?” I said, smacking the finger from his face. “Don’t ask me to do that shit. No fucking way. There is no fucking way I am doing that!” Joe repeatedly slammed his finger against his forehead. “Okay! Okay!” I yelled, “but your ass isn’t dying in the closet with the moths.”

I carefully lifted his frail frame and carried him to his bed, where the improved lighting further showed the horrible bruising on his arm.

He weighed almost nothing. I immediately knew what the bruising was from when Jerry and I met Ted Wibert on the night of the storm.

Joe escaped the Deviants with enough time to lock himself in the closet, but not without them taking a chunk of his shoulder first.

“The fight to the end, huh, Joe?”

I had a bad feeling, and Joe knew as well when he saw how the infection was spreading down his arm like rotted roots blackening his veins.

I could’ve left him there to die a slow torturous death or let the man do what he had to do before the change. Either way, it was the end of the road for ol’ Joe.

I left the room assuring Joe I’d return, and I did, with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue and two shot glasses I rescued from his shattered liquor cabinet downstairs. The old man had taste in liquor and guns.

Memories of gun-wielding Joe, chiseled-chest and proud, acting out killing the enemy for us kids rolled inside my head like scenes from an old movie. He ducked and dodged, shooting the
bad guys
with the point of his finger: BANG! BANG! BANG!

“Come on ya Kraut bastids! Is dat all ya got, ya sonsabitches?” he’d yell, taking center stage in some wild flashback.

He was our Mr. America. He was
our hero.

He’d perform to the chorus of
oohs
and
ahhs
and kids looking on in amazement. “Yay, Joe! Show us how you killed a buncha’ people again, please, Joe!” we’d cry.

The disheveled old man sitting in front of me used to be larger than life to us kids, but there we were. There I was aiding him in his death, the withered war hero who was going to swallow a bullet with shit in his Dockers.

I poured us each a shot into the little shot glasses that read
Welcome to the Bahamas
on each side.

I put my hand on his shoulder one last time as the veins pushed their way through the faded blue tattoo of the girl in a hula skirt on his arm. “Here’s to you and Barbara...and Winslow. Cheers.”

A man like Joe deserved to die with dignity and on his own terms, but he was going to do it alone.

I put the gun and pictures of Barbara and Winslow in his hand and made my way back downstairs to the basement, giving the man his privacy.

God gained himself a soldier.

Merry Christmas, Joe

R.I.P. Joseph Rafael Giordano

CRYING IS FOR PUSSIES

Thursday, December 26
^th
, 2013

My wife left me days before the storm. Morgan packed her things and ran off with my eight-year-old daughter Kate, after a quarrel in the bedroom. I could still hear it in Morgan’s voice when I dreamed of her—nothing but sadness and disappointment. My heart sank and sat there when I thought of her. It could be the guilt weighing on me, I guess. I know I haven’t been the best husband. I’m a decent father but a terrible husband, or so I’m told. I should’ve told her how very much in love I was with her.

I picked up my charming ways from Dad, who always told me, “Crying is for pussies!”

You would get smacked upside the head if you looked like you were about to cry. You can say he wasn’t the most sympathetic guy. He was a dick.

If you bitched about driving a nail into your finger on the job, he made it a point to remind you how Roy McCrery had to have his arm amputated after he accidentally injected himself with high-pressured oil on a mining job. Unfortunately, Roy didn’t catch the infection in time, and the oil festered in his arm and destroyed it.

“Come on, ya pussy! You still have another arm! Get back to work, ya bum!”

That was a real man according to my dad—the man who didn’t cry about shit and did what he had to do to put food on the table, (but then took his crap out on his family).

On the night of my sixth wedding anniversary, I brought Morgan home a pizza from Santino’s, a bottle of Cabernet, and a $200 gift card from Cheeky Chicks Boutique because I was too lazy to go shopping after a long day of…whatever, I don’t remember.

I drank all the wine myself and had passed out on the couch with a half-eaten slice of pizza on my lap by 9:15. I couldn’t figure out why she didn’t speak to me for the next two days. I just assumed she didn’t appreciate the gift or stopped taking her antidepressants again.

I was oblivious to why she went above and beyond to do the things she did sometimes, compensating to make our marriage work as the undertow of my bullshit pulled us under. I took her for granted.

I regretfully made the mistake of forgetting why we were in this together, because it was all about Charles Mumford Dudley after my accident: Charles’s secret pill addiction, Charles’s drinking, and Charles’s impatience with the kid when she wanted to play and Daddy’s back hurt. Charles, Charles, Charles. The painkiller did its job, and I was Super Dad again.

I hit the ground running and charged up before the medication wore off, and then I reverted to doing Charles’s stuff again, which included retreating from life and the wife and kid.

The pain wants you to its greedy self. It never lets up. It does what it can slowly, to kill love, kill motivation, and keep you off your feet for as long as you allow it.

Consuming like the high-pressured injection in Roy McCrery’s arm, festering to the point of infection until you wind up losing a part of yourself when it’s too late.

BLUNT OBJECTS

Saturday, December 28
^th
, 2013

My father once told me never to trust anything that bleeds for seven days and doesn’t die. That was Seymour Dudley’s pigheaded outlook on women. He viewed them as voiceless evil servants programmed to reproduce and make men happy.

My father did everything with the approach of an unapologetic Neanderthal and thought anyone who appeared smarter than him was a homosexual. If a man was too good looking, he was a homosexual. If a man dressed well, he must’ve been a homosexual.

If my mother ever suggested that someone on the television was attractive, my father immediately scoffed, huffed, and accused the person of being a flaming homosexual.

“Jesus, Lorraine—look at him, he’s a fag for Christ’s sake!”

If any of my friends had exceptionally good grades in school, my Dad wanted to be sure they weren’t homosexuals. Any man who became successful without blowing something up, tearing something down or killing something at some point in their life must and will have a dick in his ass.

My father was so homophobic, he would break out in hives if he knew there was a male with a limp wrist in his presence. He thought homosexuals were witches who cast spells on you so they can sodomize you at will.

No, Dad—that’s your brother Richard.

If my mother ever dared ask me to help her fold laundry, my father flew off his recliner like a caped crusader fighting crime.

“Goddamn it, Lorraine, the boy is going to grow up queer as a deer if you keep having him do a woman’s work! What are you teaching him?”

That’s how it was in the Dudley household. We were all captives to my father’s backwoods ignorance.

Stewart and I couldn’t use the bathroom at the public pool because we might catch “the AIDS” if we sat on the toilets. Therefore, if we ever had to take a shit, we had to hold it in until we got home.

Thanks to my father, I shat myself in the station wagon on the Fourth of July, 1987, sitting in traffic on the Grand Central parkway.

I sat on a mound of my own warm stew for a good half hour, praying my father would avoid potholes and sharp turns that would suddenly jerk and chafe my bottom against the car seat and underwear.