Will Not Attend: Lively Stories of Detachment and Isolation (16 page)

Thank God my hands are clean on this one,
I thought.

That’s when his ruddy tomato-shaped face swiveled in my direction, where it would remain. With the arrogance of a peacock presenting its tail, Ben extended his meaty arm, revealing a constellation of psoriasis plaques. A sausage-like finger pointed at my forehead.

“There’s a man knocking at your front door!” he thundered in a rich, full voice without the slightest hint of throat irritation. “And that man’s name is Jesus Christ!” My skin suddenly felt prickly. I glanced over, ready to blame the kid, but he was gone.

A small crowd began to gather.

“This prideful, selfish boy,” he boomed, finger still jabbing at my face, “is
lost
. Failed by his minister, failed by his parents . . . failed by
each and
every one of us
!”

A few folks murmured in agreement and I suddenly longed to be at the threshing demonstration.

“He lives by his own set of rules. He cares for no one but
himself. The whole of human civilization is his to laugh at. But his foot will slide in due time!”

Big Ben brought his gaze back to me where I remained frozen, fixated on that huge flabby arm—an arm with enough flesh for ten limbs, an embarrassment of riches.

“The choice is yours, boy—two paths! Sin or God! Sin or God!
Sin or God!
” Each pronouncement went up an octave; the final one was so cracked and high-pitched it was barely audible. I could feel every syllable in my throat, as if I’d swallowed a nest of tangled wires.

And with that, the fattest man in York, Pennsylvania, collapsed back in his chair. The vinyl pillow hissed, getting in the last word.

When I rejoined my classmates, they were sitting in a field by the exhibition buildings, enjoying apple cider and cake donuts. Mr. Mueller was still inspecting the thresher, driving the farmer nuts with redundant questions about a throttle valve. I sat on the ground by a small shed, away from the others, leaning against a discarded sign that simply said
BOILED!
in red milk paint.

Roy Hatcher wandered over.

“Well, did you see your freaks?” he asked, looking down at me.

“No. I didn’t go.”

“Then where were you?”

“I didn’t go anywhere.”

He gave me an odd look and walked back to his place among the donut eaters.

I was watching a pair of resigned-looking mules being loaded into a trailer when a shadow fell over me. I looked up and saw Mr. Mueller.

“You think I’m an idiot, Resnick?” he demanded.

“No.”

“You think I’m too dumb to do a head count?”

“No.”

“See me first thing tomorrow or I’ll have your ass wrapped in cellophane. This shit won’t fly, you know that, right?”

So many questions. How do people deal with so many questions?

When it comes to guilt, I’m an easy lay. I have a habit of believing only the bad things that are said about me. And Big Ben obviously knew me inside out. He had my number all right, that listless fat fuck. Or did I have his? Could truthful words be spoken in a voice that was itself a lie? Did Big Ben really have a sore throat? In considering the notion that the world was divided between the Sealos and the Big Bens, where did I fit in?

My head was starting to pound, and I wondered, as I often did, if I had mental problems.

I reached into my pocket for Sealo’s pitch card and read the inscription:

To Adam—a swell fellow. Always remember your visit to the York
Fair.

Ever since I was a toddler, I’ve had a distaste for self-promotion. I would no sooner tell some jackass “what a doggie says” than specify where my belly button was—or any other body part for that matter. Some of this stemmed from a congenital low threshold for embarrassment, and the rest can be chalked up to my basic revulsion for human interaction. By the time I was seven or so, my mother decided this behavior was no longer cute. The turning point, I believe, came during a trip to the grocery store, when I was offered the opportunity to appear on the front page of the
Patriot-News,
holding a frozen turkey with cash stuffed in my mouth.

The exact concept behind the picture remains unclear to
this day. It obviously had something to do with Thanksgiving—that much the principals agree on—but there’s still some debate whether the man worked for the newspaper or the supermarket. And I’ve yet to find a satisfying connection between holding a turkey and biting down on money. In the end, all that mattered was that he found me. I was standing alone at the magazine rack, minding my own business, leafing through a copy of
Famous Monsters of Filmland
.

The photographer wore round Harold Lloyd glasses and was holding one of those old-fashioned press cameras with the big flash reflector. He looked like just about every guy my father knew: skinny tie, wingtips, and a head full of Wildroot. There was a little bounce in his eyebrows that he probably used to greater effect with pretty waitresses.

“Hey, son, is your mother around?”

Everything seemed to move at the speed of light. Joyce dashed over with her shopping cart like a community theater player whose entrance screamed OVEREAGER! There was a brightness in her eyes, as if she knew something extraordinary was about to happen, maybe the greatest thing to happen in the history of the Resnick family.

The photographer laid it out for her: “I want to put this monkey in the
Patriot
, whaddaya think, Mom? He’s gonna hold a frozen turkey, we’ll put some cash in his mouth, it’s gonna be beautiful.”

“In the
Patriot
?” she responded, coaxing him to repeat it.

“Right on the front page—the boy, the bird, the dough . . . it’ll be gorgeous.”

“But he’s got such a dirty face.” She giggled, sounding like a freshman sneaking her first smoke in the lavatory.

“I love the dirty face! He’s all boy! Give me the messy hair too!” He locked my head in his arm like a TV wrestler and mussed up my hair. I wanted to kill him.

They both laughed. I unconsciously rolled the magazine into a tube, tightening my fist around Peter Cushing’s throat. Had I been asked, I would’ve let it be known that I couldn’t think of anything more repulsive than having my picture in the newspaper. Beyond the props, beyond the notion of putting filthy, grimy money in my mouth for reasons that had yet to be explained, how absurd to think I’d agree to put myself on display, to allow people to see my face and read my name. Forget the embarrassment of it all; what if someone recognized me in public and said “Hi”? Christ, I didn’t want to meet anyone new. Between school and other activities beyond my control, I had enough fucking people in my life.

“So here’s what we’ll do,” the photographer plowed ahead, “we’ll set him up over there, below the manager’s booth and we’ll hang a flag behind him. It’ll be tremendous!”

What the hell is he talking about?

“And we’ll get a stack of tens and twenties and he’ll clamp
down on ’em. You know, really chomp down and show the cabbage.”

Joyce shrugged as if she had no choice in the matter, chirping, “Oh well, I guess you’re the boss!” No questions, no “Let me think it through”—just run with it. Sure, the kid’ll look like an asshole, but hey—it’s going on the front page!

The photographer whistled to the store manager, who jumped up in his elevated booth like a startled hen. He seemed to be half asleep and shaking off a nightmare. Straightening his smock and bow tie, he grabbed the microphone and announced over the PA: “Meat Department—bird, ten pound, frozen, up front, picture.” Later, in third grade, I thought back to that sentence when we were learning about verbs.

My mother squeezed my shoulders.

“Isn’t this exciting? Out of all the kids, he picked you!”

Poor Joyce. So swept up in the moment that she’d lost all sense of reality and forgotten who she was dealing with. Or maybe she thought if she could distract me long enough, I wouldn’t realize what was happening until it was too late.

“Did you hear the Keeners got a Chow Chow?” she asked. “What was the name of their old dog again? The one with the little wheels on his back legs?”

“I’m not doing it,” I said, casting the monster magazine into the shopping cart. “I want to wait in the car.”

She took a deep breath and knelt down, stroking my hair in a funny direction so it remained messy.

“It’s just a picture, sweetie. It’ll be over in two seconds.”

I resented the patronizing logic. I wasn’t four years old anymore and this wasn’t a tetanus shot. Certainly she had to be aware by now of my astonishing power to foresee every conceivable downside to a situation. And this little caper—which I would never consent to under any circumstance—wasn’t going to vanish in a flash of magnesium. The fallout would be long and grisly:

“Hey, Adam, saw your picture in the paper.”

“There he is! Mr. Picture in the Paper!”

“That was a heck of a turkey you were holding in that picture, in the paper.”

“Lemme ask ya, kid,
what was the point of the money in your mouth?”

No thank you. Give me tetanus, give me diphtheria, give me that weird disease that turns kids into old people, but I wanted no part of this jackpot.

The photographer sensed something was off. He asked my mother if there was a problem. She responded with a shy parlor laugh like a Tennessee Williams character.

“No, just a silly little boy is all. They can be positively
willful
at this age. Ha-ha.”

She grabbed my arm and pulled me aside.

“Not everything is about
you
,” she hissed. “This man is being very nice and he was probably in the war and the least you can do is be cooperative!”

I was nothing if not diplomatic. I told her the guy was welcome to take my picture as long as it didn’t involve a turkey, the American flag, or soiled currency in my mouth. Additionally, it could not appear in the newspaper or any other publication. A look of unbridled fury came over her. She plucked
Famous Monsters of Filmland
from the shopping cart and flung it back toward the magazine rack, where it fluttered like a bat before dying behind the stamp machine. “What makes you think you deserve that book? What makes you think you deserve anything! I do so much for you, and this one time, all I ask for is—”

She quickly composed herself and tried a different approach—offering to take me to the hobby shop to buy the Invisible Man model I wanted so badly. I responded favorably to the suggestion . . . with the caveat that it wouldn’t require me to pose for a picture that appeared in the newspaper or any other publication. She did a “slow burn”—or as I recognized it, the face Moe makes right before he throttles Curly.

A pudgy little man with the face of a dull child arrived clutching a frozen turkey. His white apron was mottled with blood the same color as his name tag, which was blank. He
shuffled over to the manager’s booth and held the turkey high in the air. The manager snapped, “Don’t give it to me, you moron! Give it to the kid!” The little man walked the turkey over to me, but I turned away, refusing it. Then he carted it back to his boss, reporting in a weepy voice, “But he don’t want it neither.” The annoyed manager looked up from his clipboard and replied, “What do you mean,
H
e
don’t want it neither
? Of course he wants it!” “I tried to give it to him,” the little man explained, “but he won’t put his hands or arms out or nothin’.”

The photographer was growing concerned. He glanced at my mother and simply said, “Ma’am?” Joyce looked like she wanted to crawl under the display of Campfire marshmallows and die. Finally, she mumbled, “He said he doesn’t want to do it.”

“Doesn’t want to do it? Doesn’t want to do
what
?” He seemed genuinely baffled. Who in their right mind would refuse an opportunity like this?

The manager grunted and stomped down the four steps from his roost, emerging through a low swinging door. He grabbed the turkey from the little man—scaring him half to death—and marched over to me. His eyes softened and he concocted a smile.

“Whattsa matter, Sarge? You don’t wanna hold the turkey?” I didn’t answer. “You know what—I just might let you
keep
that turkey.” He eyed the photographer and repeated, “I just might let him keep that son of a gun!” The photographer ran with it: “Wow. It’s a big one too. I bet a strong boy like him could hold that buzzard like it was a pack of cigarettes.” He winked at my mother, who blatantly begged, “Adam,
pleeease
hold the turkey.”

The photographer squatted down and tried to look me in the eye.

“This is going on the front page, son. Everyone’s gonna see it—your friends, your family, old grandpops . . . imagine that.” The manager reached into his smock and withdrew a wad of limp bills. He grinned broadly, pointed to the money, then to his mouth, and finally at me, miming some magnificent concept he felt I wasn’t grasping. I responded by gazing down at an ancient produce sticker that appeared fused to the linoleum, marveling at how it survived all these years.

“He’s just so willful,” my dazed mother said to no one in particular.

The photographer sighed and spoke to the back of my head. “Are you sure about this, son? Don’t you want to make Mom happy?”

Del Monte Quality Banano de Costa Rica.

“Son, are you listening?”

Moments later I was trailing behind my mother as she finished her shopping. She was walking unusually fast and my
corduroys were swooshing like a wind turbine. Every box, jar, and sack was viciously hurled into the cart, and I noticed the back of her neck looked sunburned. All the cute shit, like calling me her “number one helper” or “the best tomato-picker-outer in the world,” was absent, replaced by dead air and an icy disregard. I wisely kept my mouth shut. I think it pissed her off more.

My brother Rick found us. Five years older than me, he was allowed to wander around the shopping center alone and even play pinball at the bowling alley across the street. Now he was irritated, wanting to go home and wondering why my mother hadn’t checked out yet. “Why don’t you ask your brother?” she suggested, ratting me out. I gave up nothing, of course, so it was her pleasure to unburden herself of the details. Naturally, I was portrayed as the bad guy, but her retelling of the events was needlessly emotional and riddled with inaccuracies. For one thing, at no point had I “thrown a fit” and I certainly wasn’t “tossing magazines around like a crazy person.”
She’s
the one who threw the magazine.

“You stupid idiot!” Rick screamed in my face. “You could’ve been in the paper! That money was yours to keep! Who cares if it was in your mouth? It was probably hundreds of dollars!” As usual, he had it all figured out.

Ever the opportunist, Rick rushed off to find the photographer. This was a kid who craved the spotlight. Whether it
was at school, Little League, or the Blue Mountain chapter of the Good Deed Bandits, he was constantly looking for a way to put himself out there. This time, though, he came up empty. The photographer was at Woolworth’s, still on the prowl for a cute kid with a dirty face, when Rick tracked him down. My brother did everything he could to charm and bullshit his way into the gig, rattling off one good deed after another, but he was just too old. He wasn’t “right.” The photographer wanted
me
. There was just one problem: He couldn’t have me. Not for all the fame and fortune he could ram down my throat. And why? Because I didn’t do things like that.

On the ride home, Joyce and Rick talked in the front seat like they were the only people in the car.

“He’s got problems,” Rick told her. “He doesn’t even have any friends. Do you know how many friends I had at his age? Remember the time I got everyone to sign up for the bike rodeo? Best year ever. Remember the picture they put up—me giving the coffee can to the March of Dimes guy?”

“He has a good heart,” my mother said. “He just gets in his own way sometimes.”

“Kids hate kids like him.
I
would hate him. It’s only a matter of time before he gets beat up.”

Thanksgiving morning, the newspaper banged against the screen door. Rick ran out to get it. On the front page was a picture of Walter DeCanto holding a frozen turkey. There
were a few wrinkled bills lodged between his nubby teeth. The caption below said something about “Thanksgiving Savings.” Walter was a grade ahead of me. I didn’t really know him, but my mother always claimed that his mother “acted entitled.” So that added a nice little patina to things.

Dinner that evening was quiet for a Resnick Thanksgiving. No screaming, no violence—even my father was unusually sedate. There was an unspoken feeling in the dining room that we had lost out on something, and would continue to lose out. We would never be front-pagers. And that was just fine with me. I was the invisible
man.