Miles (9 page)

We
almost drove clear over a tiny Datsun hurrying into a valuable parking space
outside the show, let Jason buy the popcorn, Twizzlers (Jason's choice), and
Coke - no hot dogs, dammit - and sat in the first row of the Carnegie's
"upper deck" (my choice) and laughed ourselves silly watching
"The Pink Panther Strikes Again".  Arlene met us for a pig-out
pizza dinner at Geno's, before Jason offered to buy each of us an album at a
nearby record store.  Arlene picked out an old collection of torch songs
by Frank Sinatra, while Jason found another Elvis Presley Christmas album, I
was sorry to see.  We lone wolves headed straight to the classical
section: Felix took a recording of Prokofiev's
Peter and the Wolf
with
Sean Connery narrating ("Those woods are filled with wolves.  Do you
know anything about wolves?  Dangerous lot, wolves.") and I chose an
all-Russian concert by Arthur Fiedler that featured Shostakovitch's
Hamlet
Suite, which I'd never heard or heard of before. 

We
drove back to the apartment and agreed to listen to each of the records in the
morning.  I got an unexpected goodnight kiss from both of Felix's parents
before they retired to their bathroom to take a long shower together. 
Felix asked if we wanted to stay up and watch "It's A Wonderful
Life," perhaps my least favorite film of all time, but I said I was tired
- which was bullshit, since we always ran our mouths until well past
midnight.  But he backed me up anyway, and we locked ourselves in for the
night.

Felix
stood at the foot of the bunk and reached under where the two beds came
together.  "Help me with this, buddy."  I took the other
side and let Felix guide his top bunk directly beside mine.  "Right
here is cool."

"I'm
afraid to ask what you're up to, shortstop."  But not as afraid as I
was about what was going through my mind like a fever.

"Trust
me, Hitman."

The
gleaming silver lights from the adjacent hotel flowed over both beds now.
Satisfied with our new sleeping arrangements, Felix walked me by the arm to his
desk, where he pulled a heavy manila business envelope out from the
clutter.  He held it up in front of him with a sober look.
 "This is from all of us." 

"Jesus,
Felix!  You know your presents are at my house.  Let's wait until you
guys drop me off Sunday, and we can open them all together." 

"No. 
I want to share this with you now."

I
had no idea what could be in the envelope, remembering the one Nicolasha gave
me earlier, still stuffed in my coat.  I wondered if that was why we
visited the record store. Gift certificates?  That would be really
cool.  I slid my finger in the seam and pulled out an inexpensive card
depicting a cute village scene filled with little kids playing in the snow and
a short greeting embossed in gold and written in Cyrillic.  I shook my
head with a chuckle and opened the card, astounded into silence by the sight of
an Eastern Airlines ticket to
Fort
Myers
,
Florida
.

"We
leave late Sunday night.  You leave early Wednesday morning." 
Wham.  The sinker hit the catcher's glove, and I was standing there with
the bat on my shoulder.  "We'll take the sailboat out every morning,
play ball all day, and hang out at the beach until we go to bed."  I
must have looked pretty stupid, staring at the ticket with my mouth hanging
open.  "If you think your parents won't let you go, fuck 'em. 
Don't say anything, and just get to the airport.  Ma says we can deal with
it when we come back." 

I
have a solution.  Let's not come back.

I
tossed the card and ticket onto the desk and wrapped my arm around Felix's
shoulders.  He smiled and put an arm around my back.  We stood there
together, suddenly feeling the other one saying "Hey, you're my best
friend, I love you!" without having to break down and say it out
loud. 

This
was all very new to me.   

Felix
reached up and kissed me on the nose.  "Happy Hanukah,
Hitman."  Jesus.

I
pulled Felix into my arms and held him there for a few quiet seconds before I
bent down and lifted him off of the floor from his waist, slinging him over my
shoulder.  His hands reached down my body, pulling my shirt and the
elastic band of my shorts out from my jeans.  I pressed my fingers into
Felix' legs, triggering the tickling mechanism.  We burst out laughing as
I began to stagger and we fell onto the beds. 

*

We
laid close to each other, separated by the edge of the mattresses, our
respective blankets, and the underwear we both left on that night.  We
went to sleep almost immediately after our pillow fight, but I was awake again,
anxiously staring at the unfocused dark of the ceiling with my hands folded
behind my head on the pillow.  My mind was filled with warm images of
Florida
's
Gulf
Coast
, while my heart was filled with emotion, thinking
about Felix and his family. 

I'd
never been sailing.  In fact, the only kinds of vehicles I usually liked
were the ones with engines.  Maybe Jason would teach me how to sail. 
I hoped we could find enough people to get a ball game going.  Was
Fort Myers
close to
Sarasota
?  Wonder if any Sox guys were down there
yet?  I couldn't wait to lie on the beach and talk all night until we saw
the sun rise.  Hopefully, the Gulf wouldn't be too cold to skinny-dip
in.  I tried to not get hard just thinking about it.

I'll
bet Felix' grandparents were really cool.  I was glad the Cromwells
weren't religious.  I could barely stand all my Catholic stuff by then,
much less some other name-brand God stuff.  If the Jewish holy days were
half as depressing as their folk music...oy!

The
next two weeks would be great, being a part of a real, live family.  That
was my idea of a Christmas present.

Felix
faced me as he slept on his side, one arm under his pillow, the other hanging
loose across his chest.  I moved closer to him and touched his loose hand,
which closed ever so slightly on my fingers.  "You're my best friend,
Felix."  And my first, I realized.  He moved a little bit. 
"I love you." 

There. 
I said it.

I
ran the back of my hand over his cheek very lightly.  Felix began to stir
and slid over onto his stomach, dropping his loose hand beside my bare
shoulder.  He moaned softly into his pillow.

"I
hope we're friends forever, shortstop."

"Me,
too, Hitman."   

I
considered slapping him silly with my pillow, but his warm hand closed over my
shoulder, and I went back to sleep with a smile on my face.

* * *

and less than kind!

Hamlet

Outsiders
used to have a hard time keeping track of our family tree, but I didn't, since
most of the branches have long since been pruned by the tall, hooded guy with
the scythe.  With the singular exception of Uncle Alex, the branches that
were left would make some fine kindling wood.

I
specifically refer to the trio of carrion, also known as A) Dad's stepmother /
aunt's sisters, B) Uncle Alex's mom's sisters, and C) my great vulture aunts,
great when they sent me five or ten dollars on my birthday, vultures the rest
of the time.  The proper word hasn't been invented to describe these
predators when we would spend yet another torturous Christmas Eve at one their
homes, straddling the tangled, barbed wire of their malicious gossip,
innuendos, suggestions, put-downs, cut-downs, and manipulations.

Aunt
Dutch was the oldest, a cold, near-psychotic spinster with an oversized bank
account amassed by her dead (luckily for him) husband, who spent her free time
hatching attitudes with her submissive shrew of a little sister, Aunt Melody,
an alcoholic fool whose singular life achievement had been to bear two children
with her oblivious bartender husband, Dad's Uncle Albert.  Julia was the
oldest.  She was an over-educated, fast-talking slut, who bounced from
companion to companion {always accruing something tangible from the split, like
condos, cars, that sort of thing} and career to career {stock broker,
photographer, tennis pro, teacher, consultant, and who the hell knows what
else}, while little Matt was an untalented ex-college jock and failed National
Hockey League forward, who trailed along behind his sister, landing jobs and
insider scams in her peripatetic wake.)

Which
brings us to the baby hydra, dear Aunt Hilly, a brittle, ruthless personality
with a good intellect and a better mean streak, two qualities she used to
dominate the emotionally-trodden lives of her husband, George, an inept
tradesman, and her once-handsome son, Lawrence, the big fish mayor of the
little upscale suburban pond we all fled to from our old neighborhood in the
city.

Ah,
Christmas Eve.  Wake me when it's over.

Our
entire day had been strung like piano wire.  Dad stayed in his room and
continued to pack his clothes and belongings, Mom stayed downstairs and
decorated our huge artificial tree, and I entertained the household with a
particularly bombastic collection of orchestral greats, carefully selected from
my Thanksgiving buying spree.  We all ignored the fact that the sun would
eventually go down, our vampire relatives would rise from their graves, and we
would be off to Aunt Hilly's lair, an oversized, faux-antebellum home for our
family's Christmas Eve masque. 

I
was glad Aunt Hilly drew the short stick that year, though.  She was the
only good cook I was related to, and had a stern, unyielding air about her that
I kind of liked.  Oh, she was a vile bitch, through and through, but Aunt
Hilly always let me get away with murder when I was a younger brat (something
she never did for the rest of her nieces and nephews), while I enjoyed watching
the rest of the family scatter like pigeons when she came into a room.

(I
think it was my tenth birthday, when I eavesdropped and heard Aunt Hilly tell
Uncle George she thought Dad was a bully and a shyster, Mom was a horseshit
cook and housekeeper, Uncle Alex was a pretentious, flaky wannabe artist, and I
was the only good thing left out of her dead sister's family.  Well, Dad
still was, Mom always had been, but Uncle Alex wasn't a wannabe anything. 
That was his problem.  I think the real reason Aunt Hilly liked me because
I wasn't afraid of her.)

I
hadn't seen my Uncle since last year.  I wondered if he had hooked up with
another wife? 

The
volume on my stereo was so loud, I could hear it through my bedroom wall, the
shower curtain, and the running water.  It was kind of like taking a bath
offstage at the Concertgebouw, with their Orchestra in full swing.  Every
time I heard Prelude to Act Three of
Lohengrin
, I pictured Stukas
sweeping out of the sky and panzers bursting across the plain.  Wow. 
I pondered those real-life images in terms of my family's blood and couldn't
keep from smirking. 

Oh,
I forgot, Mom, you don't like Wagner.

I
dried off in my locked bedroom.  Why I locked the door was anyone's guess. 
I don't remember the last time either of them tried to come in once my music
started playing.  The record moved on to the Liebestod from
Tristan und
Isolde
.  Its passion and devastation filled the dark and my
thoughts.  The damp towel fell to the carpet as I stood in front of the
icy window, reaching a hand out to press my fingertips against the frozen
glass.

I
put on a fresh t-shirt and a black corduroy shirt, thermal socks, long
underwear, a new pair of jeans, and my hiking shoes, just in case Uncle Alex
wanted to get away from the party and have one of his famous long conversations
outside in the cold.  We took Mom's Mercury station wagon over to Aunt
Hilly's.  It was as old as I was.  I think she kept it just to aggravate
her husband, successfully.  Dad did the driving, without turning on the
radio or the heat, but that was OK, because Mom's matter-of-fact Season's
Greetings was quite enough comforting entertainment for me, thank you. 
You see, my parents, in the grip of a heightened state of seasonal dementia,
decided to announce their divorce to what was left of the family tonight. 

I
remembered me and Felix sitting very close to each other in the dark back seat
of his dad's
Lincoln
while his parents drove me home the previous day,
and how happy I felt just being in the same vehicle with the Cromwells. 
Well.  I guess I must have fallen out of the car and been run over by a
train or something and died and went to hell and just didn't realize it yet.

Was
she still talking?  Were we moving then?  I always thought hell would
be a lot warmer than the wagon was at that point.  I should jump out of
the car when we pass over a bridge, I thought.  But there weren't any
bridges on the way to Aunt Hilly's.  If there were, I'm sure Mom or Dad
would have set fire to them by now.

Fuck,
when did my flight leave?

*

Everyone
got their kisses and phony compliments before fanning out into the nest of
vipers.  Uncle Albert and Uncle George exchanged opinionated
misinformation on the college football scene while watching some lesser Bowl
game on TV, Aunt Dutch clawed her way through Matthew's outer defenses in her
undisguised effort to make him look bad in front of his pale and dumpy fiancée
(his third, I was pretty sure), Aunt Melody was drooling her way through a
self-justifying homily with Julia's opaque acquiescence, there were some
cousins with bad accents who I didn't even know running around being friends
with everyone, Uncle Alex hadn't arrived yet (probably sitting in his rent-a-car
a block away, smoking a bag) and Aunt Hilly, while conducting the preparation
of her ten-course feast like it was the landing at Inch'on, decided to open up
two more fronts, attacking Mom (“No time to be a
real
wife or mother, in
between your vacuous, overpriced social circuit and your save-the-world, you
hard-headed queeny...”) and Dad (“And you call yourself a husband, a father, a
man
,
letting your family dissolve like an Alka Seltzer you wolf down to get through
another day of high class duplicity?!).

Aunt
Hilly didn't believe in divorce, apparently.

"What
about your son?  Did either of you selfish blockheads ever stop and think
what this might do to him?  Or what it already may have done?"

A
playwright could not have timed it better.  I walked into the warm,
over-lit kitchen, playing with one of Aunt Hilly's old black cats, just as she
began to pose these questions to my ashen-faced and disoriented parents. 
My unexpected presence gave a palpable justification to Aunt Hilly's sneering
assault. 

"Their
son doesn't give a damn, anymore." 

"No,
and I don't blame you."  She dismissed them with the singular act of
putting out her cigarette.  "Here," she handed me a large bowl
of red cabbage and a basket of homemade bread, "help me bring the food
in."

*

Uncle
Alex barged into the house in the middle of the meal, accompanied by a
Veronica, some young woman with short hair, sleepy eyes, no make-up, and
perfectly formed lips.  She looked more like my older sister than his
latest wife.  She greeted Mom and Dad as if she knew them (the only moment
Dad took a break from glaring furiously at me), and gave me a hug before
sitting down on Uncle Alex's lap.  She smelt like a pine tree after a
rainfall, and was dressed like Morticia Addams.  

Of
course, everyone acted as if they weren't appalled by the latest addition to
our gathering, and the desultory conversation hardly missed a beat, until it
wound its way to me.

"So,
are you still going to that expensive university school your father always
complains about, nephew?"  Uncle Alex's fur-lined trench coat looked
to be worth stealing.

"Uh
huh."  I took a mouthful of sweet potatoes and stuffing.

"Learn
anything interesting for all that litigation money?"

Well,
I thought, let's see.  I could tell you all about the Manchu Dynasty, or
discuss Nietzsche, or fake my way through some geometry, or have a few opinions
on Buddhism, or respond
non capisco cos'e che non va
when you asked
about my parents, or make you swim in lines from
Much Ado About Nothing
,
or even what records to buy if you went on a mad shopping binge, Unc.  And
a little about Judaism.  Oh, yes, and a little about modern
photography.  I have this album at home.  Would you like to see it?

I
washed my food down with a sip of tart
New
York
white wine.  "I'm learning
a lot about classical music."  I smiled at Aunt Hilly.  I bet
she liked Wagner.

"That's
it?"  Uncle Alex grabbed a drumstick from my plate.

"I'm
learning how to make friends, too."  My face was blank as I stared
back at Dad.

"Good. 
That's more important than the rest of the crap these schools push,
lately."  Uncle Alex kissed Veronica.  "What are your plans
for the next couple of days?"

I
shifted uneasily in my seat, glancing between Mom and Dad, and took another sip
of the dour wine.  "I'm going to
Florida
." 

Veronica
touched Mom's unmoving hand.  "That sounds fun."

"I'm
going alone."  Dad sat back in his chair, his bitter gaze locked on
me.  Mom nibbled on her lower lip, and tried to avoid everyone's inquiring
look.  "My best friend invited me."  I said that as if it
explained everything.

A
few seconds elapsed, but they might as well have been minutes, or hours. 
Or days, if the pit of my stomach was any gauge.  The silence soon grew
deafening.

Veronica
tried to put a good face on it.  "I'm sure you'll have a wonderful
time."  Honey, when you're at ground zero, there's only one direction
you can go.

"Maybe
we should talk about this at home, baby."  For some reason, Mom
looked genuinely hurt.  I couldn't imagine why.

"What,
and interrupt your divorce?"

That
wasn't meant to be thought out loud.

Uncle
Alex looked to his beloved Rika and Simon for something in the way of an
elucidation.  Mom began to cry as she got up and hurried out of the
crowded dining room.  Dad's eyes continued to burn into me as he hurled
his chair backwards and stormed away.  A few of the displaced-person
cousins, undoubtedly starved from their long voyage on the canned ham boat,
tucked back into their meals.  Nobody seemed ready to chime in and play
referee, and, one by one, they fell back into the morass of their own private
skirmishes.

My
uncle looked at me in complete dismay and confusion.  I looked back in
outrage.  Sure, my family had a near Olympian skill for papering over and
lying about their troubles, but I still could not believe Dad hadn't mentioned
a single word to Uncle Alex about their split.  Talk about ground zero.

Mom
practically screamed out my name from the front door.  I finished my wine
as Uncle Alex took me by the arm, pulling me down to his lips.  "I
don't know what the hell is going on, but we'll come over tomorrow morning, to
try and sort this out.  Stay cool until then, huh?" 

"Yeah,
right.  The funeral parlor opens at nine."

Aunt
Hilly let a long sigh out through her nose as I walked away to Santa's
Detroit
sleigh.

*

Dad
swung me into the back seat by my collar.  The wheels of the station wagon
squealed as we spun out of the icy driveway onto the empty suburban
avenue.  I heard Mom sniffling and gasping, trying to keep the flood gates
at bay, staring into some unknown space outside of her window.  The
further we got from Aunt Hilly's house, the faster Dad accelerated.  His
hands were wrapped like coil around the steering wheel.  I closed my eyes,
trying to picture a silver and blue Eastern jet rumbling down the runway and
screaming off into the December morning sky.  It was almost
nine p.m.
 
Only thirty six hours to go.