"I'm leaving."
"Look, Chick, she's not a kid anymore, and if–" "You couldn't stand up for me?"
I heard her exhale. "Leaving where?" she said. "You couldn't stand up for me?"
"I'm sorry. It's complicated. There's his family, too. And they–" "Did you go with someone?"
"Oh, Chick ... I'm at work, OK? "
At that moment, I felt lonelier than I'd ever felt before, and that loneliness seemed to squat in my lungs and crush all but my most minimal breathing. There was nothing left to say. Not about this. Not about anything.
"It's all right," I whispered. "I'm sorry." There was a pause. "Leaving where?" she said. I hung up.
AND THEN, FOR the last time, I got drunk. First at a place called Mr.
Ted's Pub, where the bartender was a skinny, round-faced kid, probably no older than the guy my daughter married. Later I went back to my apartment and drank some more. I knocked over furniture. I wrote on the walls. I think I actually stuffed the wedding photos down the garbage disposal. Somewhere in the middle of the night I decided to go home, meaning Pepperville Beach, the town where I grew up. It was two hours away by car, but I hadn't been there in years. I moved around my apartment, walking in circles as if preparing for the journey. You don't need much for a good-bye trip. I went to the bedroom and took a gun out of the drawer.
I stumbled down to the garage, found my car, put the gun in the glove compartment, threw a jacket in the backseat, maybe the front seat, or maybe the jacket was already there, I don't know, and I screeched into the street. The city was quiet, the lights were blinking yellow, and I was going to end my life where I began it.
Blundering back to God. Simple as that.
We are proud to announce the birth of
Charles Alexander
8 pounds, 11 ounces November 21, 1949 Leonard and Pauline Benetto (from Chick Benetto's papers)
IT WAS COLD AND RAINING LIGHTLY, but the highway was empty, and I used every one of its four lanes, weaving back and forth. You would think, you would hope, that someone as lit as I was would be stopped by the police, but I wasn't. At one point I even rolled into one of those all-night convenience stores, and I bought a six-pack of beer from an Asian guy with a thin mustache.
"Lottery ticket? " he asked.
I had, over the years, perfected a functional appearance when I was smashed the alcoholic as walking man–and I pretended to give the question some thought.
"Not this time," I said.
He put the beer in a bag. I caught his gaze, two dull, dark eyes, and I thought to myself, This is the last face I will see on earth.
He pushed my change across the counter.
BY THE TIME I saw the sign for my hometown - PEPPERVILLE BEACH, EXIT 1 MILE–two of the beers were gone, and one had spilled all over the passenger seat. The wipers were thumping. I was fighting to stay awake. I must have tranced out thinking, "Exit 1 Mile,” because after a while I saw a sign for another town and realized I had missed my turnoff altogether. I banged on the dashboard. Then I spun the car around, right there, in the middle of the highway, and drove back in the wrong direction. There was no traffic and I wouldn't have cared anyhow. I was getting to that exit. I slammed the accelerator. Quickly enough, a ramp came into view–the on-ramp, not the exit ramp–and I screeched toward it. It was one of those long twisting things, and I held the wheel in a locked turn, going fast, around and down.
Suddenly, two huge lights blinded me, like two giant suns. Then a truck horn blasted, then a jolting smash, then my car flew over an embankment and landed hard, thumping downhill. There was glass everywhere and beer cans bouncing around and I grabbed wildly at the steering wheel and the car jerked backward, flipping me onto my stomach. I somehow found the door handle and yanked it hard, and I remember flashes of black sky and green weeds and a sound like thunder and something high and solid crashing down.
WHEN I OPENED my eyes, I was lying in wet grass. My car was half-buried under a now-destroyed billboard for a local Chevrolet dealership, into which it had apparently plowed. In one of those freak moments of physics, I must have been thrown from the vehicle before its final impact. I can't explain it. When you want to die, you are spared. Who can explain that?
I slowly, painfully, got to my feet. My back was soaked. I ached all over. It was still raining lightly, but it was quiet, save for the sound of crickets. Normally, at this point, you'd say, "I was just happy to be alive," but I can't say that, because I wasn't. I looked up at the highway. In the mist, I could make out the truck, like a big, hulking shipwreck, the front cab bent as if its neck had been snapped. Steam rose from the hood. One headlamp was still working, casting a lonely beam down the muddy hill that made twinkling diamonds out of the shattered glass.
Where was the driver? Was he alive? Hurt? Bleeding? Breathing? The courageous thing, of course, would have been to climb up and check, but courage was not my strong suit at that moment.
So I didn't.
Instead, I put my hands down flat by my sides and I turned south, walking back toward my old town. I am not proud of this. But I was not in any way rational. I was a zombie, a robot, devoid of concern for anyone, myself included–myself, actually, at the top of the list. I forgot about the car, the truck, the gun; I left it all behind. My shoes crunched on the gravel, and I heard the crickets laughing.
I CAN'T SAY how long I walked. Long enough that the rain stopped and the sky began to lighten with the first stirrings of dawn. I reached the outskirts of Pepperville Beach, which was marked by a big, rusty water tower, just behind the baseball fields. In small towns like mine, climbing water towers was a rite of passage, and my baseball buddies and I used to climb this one on weekends, the spray-paint cans jammed in our waistbands.
Now I stood before that water tower again, wet and old and broken and drunk and perhaps a killer, I should add, or so I suspected, because I never did see the driver of the truck. It didn't matter, because my next act was a no-brainer, as determined as I was to make this the last night of my life. I found the ladder's bottom.
I began to climb.
It took me a while to reach the riveted tank. When I finally did, I collapsed on the catwalk, breathing hard, sucking air. In the back of my addled brain, a voice scolded me for being so out of shape.
I looked out on the trees below me. Behind them I saw the baseball field where I had learned the game from my father. The sight of it still dredged up sad memories. What is it about childhood that never lets you go, even when you're so wrecked it's hard to believe you ever were a child?
The sky was lightening. The crickets grew louder. I had a sudden memory flash of little Maria asleep on my chest when she was small enough to cradle in one arm, her skin smelling of talcum powder. Then I had a vision of me, wet and filthy as I was now, bursting into her wedding, the music stopping, everyone looking up horrified, Maria the most horrified of all.
I lowered my head.
I would not be missed.
I took two running steps, grabbed the railing, and hurled myself over.
THE REST IS inexplicable. What I hit, how I survived, I cannot tell you.
All I recall is twisting and snapping and brushing and flipping and scraping and a final thud. These scars on my face? I figured they came from that. It seemed as if I fell for a very long time.
When I opened my eyes, I was surrounded by fallen pieces of the tree.
Stones pressed into my stomach and chest. I lifted my chin, and this is what I saw: the baseball field of my youth, coming into the morning light, the two dugouts, the pitcher's mound.
And my mother, who had been dead for years.
II . Morning
Chick's Mom
MY FATHER ONCE TOLD ME, "You can be a mama's boy or a daddy's boy. But you can't be both. "
So I was a daddy's boy. I mimicked his walk. I mimicked his deep, smoky laugh. I carried a baseball glove because he loved baseball, and I took every hardball he threw, even the ones that stung my hands so badly I thought I would scream.
When school was out, I would run to his liquor store on Kraft Avenue and stay until dinnertime, playing with empty boxes in the storeroom, waiting for him to finish. We would ride home together in his sky blue Buick sedan, and sometimes we would sit in the driveway as he smoked his Chesterfields and listened to the radio news.
I have a younger sister named Roberta, and back then she wore pink ballerina slippers almost everywhere. When we ate at the local diner, my mother would yank her to the "ladies' " room–her pink feet sliding across the tile–while my father took me to the "gents'. " In my young mind I figured this was life's assignment: me with him, her with her.
Ladies'. Gents'. Mama's. Daddy's. A daddy's boy.
I was a daddy's boy, and I remained a daddy's boy right up to a hot, cloudless Saturday morning in the spring of fifth grade year. We had a doubleheader scheduled that day against the Cardinals, who wore red wool uniforms and were sponsored by Connor's Plumbing Supply.
The sun was already warming the kitchen when I entered in my long socks, carrying my glove, and saw my mother at the table smoking a cigarette. My mother was a beautiful woman, but she didn't look beautiful that morning. She bit her lip and looked away from me. I remember the smell of burnt toast and I thought she was upset because she messed up breakfast.
"I'll eat cereal," I said.
I took a bowl from the cupboard.
She cleared her throat. "What time is your game, honey? "
"Do you have a cold? " I asked.
She shook her head and put a hand to her cheek. "What time is your game? " "I dunno. " I shrugged. This was before I wore a watch.
I got the glass bottle of milk and the big box of corn puffs. I poured the corn puffs too fast and some bounced out ofthe bowl and onto the table. My mother picked them up, one at a time, and put them in her palm.
"I'll take you," she whispered. "Whenever it is. "
"Why can't Daddy take me? " I asked "Daddy's not here. " "Where is he? " She didn't answer.
"When's he coming back?"
She squeezed the corn puffs and they crumbled into floury dust. I was a mama's boy from that day on.
Now, WHEN I SAY I SAW MY DEAD MOTHER, I mean just that. I saw her. She was standing by the dugout, wearing a lavender jacket, holding her pocketbook. She didn't say a word. She just looked at me.
I tried to lift myself in her direction then fell back, a bolt of pain shooting through my muscles. My brain wanted to shout her name, but there was no sound from my throat.
I lowered my head and put my palms together. I pushed hard again, and this time I lifted myself halfway off the ground. I looked up.
She was gone.
I don't expect you to go with me here. It's crazy, I know. You don't see dead people. You don't get visits. You don't fall ofTofa water tower, miraculously alive despite your best attempt to kill yourself, and see your dearly departed mother holding her pocketbook on the third-base line.
I have given it all the thought that you are probably giving it right now; a hallucination, a fantasy, a drunken dream, the mixed-up brain on its mixed-up way. As I say, I don't expect you to go with me here.
But this is what happened. She had been there. I had seen her. I lay on the field for an indeterminate amount of time, then I rose to my feet and I got myself walking. I brushed the sand and debris from my knees and forearms. I was bleeding from dozens of cuts, most of them small, a few bigger. I could taste blood in my mouth.
I cut across a familiar patch of grass. A morning wind shook the trees and brought a sweep of yellow leaves, like a small, fluttering rainstorm. I had twice failed to kill myself. How pathetic was that?
I headed toward my old house, determined to finish the job.
Dear Charley,
Have lots of FUN in school today!
I will see you at lunchtime and we'll get a milkshake.
I love you everyday!
Mom
(from Chick Benetto's papers, circa 1954)
How Mother Met Father
MY MOTHER WAS ALWAYS WRITING ME NOTES. She slipped them to me whenever she dropped me off somewhere. I never understood this, since anything she had to say she could have said right then and saved herself the paper and the awful taste of envelope glue.
I think the first note was on my first day of kindergarten in 1954. What was I, five years old? The schoolyard was filled with kids, shrieking and running around. We approached, me holding my mother's hand, as a woman in a black beret formed lines in front of the teachers. I saw the other mothers kissing their kids and walking away. I must have started crying.
"What's the matter? " my mother asked. "Don't go. "
"I'll be here when you come out. " “No.”
"It's OK. I'll be here. " "What if I can't find you? " "You will. "
"What if I lose you? "
"You can't lose your mother, Charley. "
She smiled. She reached inside her jacket pocket and handed me a small blue envelope.
"Here, " she said. "If you miss me really badly, you can open this. "