91: shaftoe
When I'm seventeen and in high demand, it's a rare night when I have nothing planned or hopeful happening. I've left home, I'm preparing for school on a scholarship, and the taciturn and vague guidance given me by my father's nanny, with whom I live in a small two-bedroom apartment near school, is just like running wild. I won't miss her when I'm gone, and I won't miss her when I find myself twenty, and thirty, but it is a good time in life.
Thus it's all the more random when the single mom upstairs and two apartments over comes knocking, rattling our door. She's a level-headed lady, a secretary or something with frizzy hair and horrible clothes, who loves her garden and her young son. She calls him Little Bobby Shaftoe, which I love, and though I've learned to keep my distance from kids I don't send him away when he comes to bother me. I just don't let him into the house.
She's looking for Rita, the woman with whom I live, and whom I -- like my younger brothers -- call "Nana." Rita is out of town, visiting her ex-husband in a bordertown as she does most weekends. "Don't worry about it when he sleeps over," I remember her telling me after I'd met him the first time. "He was in Korea. He has a truss."
When I am a thousand I still can't recall a time I've ever been less curious about a person, a word, a concept. So little information is really toxic. When I am seventeen I let it go with a sage nod, and look it up later in the fat dictionary I keep near my bed.
Her eldest son, though, is another thing again: Late thirties, with a young son of his own and a moustache. I'm seventeen, I want it all, but there's something about him -- a kindness in his eyes that bypasses all my teenage attachment to intelligence and superiority -- that I can't get out of my head. He's an auto mechanic by trade, with that smell. Have you ever smelled it? Add it to the list: That mixture of stale cigarettes, sweat long-worn, and gasoline, soaked into the skin and inescapable. It is the smell of sex, I think.
He is divorced, and often without a place to live, so sometimes he stays with us too. I keep him lingering before work on those mornings, sometimes missing the bus to ask him questions about Cat Stevens -- Teaser & The Firecat is his favorite album of all time -- and pretend to care about the answers. When I am seventeen I'm still young enough to think I can trick him into sleeping with me. What he is, is tolerant to a fault.
So this woman, this harried woman with whom I share only, in all the world, the passionate love of Tori Amos and Julia Roberts, is staring at me across the threshold when I am seventeen, begging me to track Rita down. I tell her Nana is out of town for the weekend, buying lottery tickets in two states and cooking up craft schemes with her ex-husband, all of which is true, and she leans dramatically against the doorpost. I ask what I can do.
It turns out that her boyfriend's son, a few years older than me, is having some kind of crisis. Which is predictable enough that he should have known it was coming, since it's a Friday date night, but in any case it's going to take four hands and possibly his ex-wife's presence in order to calm the kid down. I briefly wonder what might have happened, if I'd put my considerable will -- and flair for drama -- in the service of keeping my own parents together. I can't imagine anything more horrid than the two of them together, though, so I shake my head to rid it of the fantasies and ask again what I can do to help.
What I can do is sit for an hour or two with her young son, with whom she reminds me I have always gotten along, while she cleans up yet another motherfucking mess. My jaw, dropped, steels itself against laughter, and I nod silently, encouragingly, sympathetic.
"Just pop a video in, I promise he'll be fine," she says, loading up enticements and apologies and justifications until I want to shake her and say, "Your kid is not a problem. Your kid is great. Stop apologizing for your kid and start taking care of yourself." I am very young, at seventeen. I'm offended to see all the messiness of her life, when I thought she had it so together. I'd imagined myself a single parent in her image more than once, walking a stroller and talking on a cellular phone about Hollywood contracts or interior designers. Just shake the shit out of her, for disappointing me.
Instead, I reach out and touch her wrist lightly -- brushing the pisiform bone on the outside of her wrist, which seems to instantly calm people -- and tell her it's not a problem. She moves from one harried task to the next, and launches into a spiel about how she's a single mother and doesn't have a lot of money, and I tell her to chill, almost barking it this time.
"You got lucky. It's a Friday and I've got nothing going on. I was just going to write tonight anyhow. It's not a problem. Don't worry about it." You're doing fine. You're not a failure. He loves you, and he is good. That should be enough. Go to your men, and let us solve things ourselves. Get out of the way. Get out of your own way.
She clutches at me, and my hands go up before I can tame them, to pull her away from me. I've not quite rid myself of the self-defense reflex, even after all these years away from my mother.
She's gone soon enough, and Little Bobby Shaftoe stares up at me in his doorway, grinning secretively and hopping from foot to foot. He takes me to his room, which is an unholy mess like the rest of the house, to show me the fort that he's built from every pillow and cushion in the entire house.
After two hours, I'm yawning. I have been a pirate, a baker, three men in a boat, a dog, a dog trainer, a hot-air balloon owner/operator, three kinds of Disney prince and five kinds of Disney princess; I've sung him each and every song from the Violent Femmes album, some twice, and I'm working on teaching him the words to the first Sundays record when I hear the distinctive tones of my house phone. I look at Bobby suddenly, across the kitchen bar, and he nods his assent. I take him down from the barstools, hoisting him onto a hip, and down the stairs to our apartment. It's Robbie, in trouble again.
I don't really understand the story through his tears; to be honest I'm just glad to be useful. It makes me feel closer to him, somehow. To be needed. This doesn't translate into or substitute for sex, but I'm at least three years from understanding that, so it's still enough. Robbie's beloved stepbrother died two years ago, turned the taps on and the music up, and when Robbie and his parents got home an hour or two later they found his stepbrother, two cats and a dog lying dead in various parts of the house. We haven't discussed it beyond the facts -- the music was Black Flag, and when we listen to them we don't discuss it -- but I've met his parents on more than one occasion, and find them as terrifying as they find me, when I am seventeen.
"Can you get a ride here? I'm just hanging out with Bobby from upstairs while his Mom puts the world back together. It'll be fine, just no... S-M-O-K-I-N-G." Bobby's eyes go wide and he claps his hands to his mouth, making me laugh silently and shake my head.
Robbie sniffles into the phone, and says he can get a ride, but needs a place to sleep. It won't be a problem, I promise, and get the ice cream out of our fridge to defrost for them both: My little men.
Hours later, when the mom comes home, we are all three asleep on the couch, in front of some inane cartoon video. Bobby's feet are in my lap, and his head is on Robbie's shoulder. From this angle, with hair sweat-sticky and fists at their throats, they could be the same boy. The last thing I did before falling asleep was stare at them both until my eyes burned, and my heart, and lost myself to the incalculable and unlikely future. My dreams, when I am seventeen, are equally of fire and of water, and families just like this: We three men, in a boat. Wynken and Blynken and Nod. Little Bobby Shaftoe, Sweet Baby James, and the Dread Pirate Robin.
I think I'm going to get reamed out for having a boy over, but she doesn't even blink, just kisses my cheek and thanks me. She calls me a saint; I wake Robbie gently while she winks and puts Bobby to bed, with the same coos and whispers, echoing from one room to the next. I walk him down the stairs -- he's a hard sleeper and a heavy waker, and often cries if woken too soon -- and place him in my bed.
I watch Robbie for awhile, his breathing becoming softer and sweeter in no time, and sighing and romantic beyond all measure, nearly in tears myself with the beauty of life: I'll sleep on the floor, on a pallet made of blankets, and in the morning he'll be shocked and ask why I didn't just climb in with him, and I will shake my head manfully and say, "You looked so peaceful."
I look at him, just a little longer, just to memorize it, and practice the lines in my head, wondering what he will say next. He will protest when I say that, and pull me to him, and say that we fit together perfectly when we are awake: Why shouldn't we line up just as well when we are sleeping? I'll pretend to think it over.
I nod to myself, crisply, woken from a spell, and he reaches out a hand as I turn to go, without opening his eyes. I squeeze back; he takes both hands and looks up, unsmiling and hungry, pulling me forward into nonsense music. When I am seventeen, I kiss a boy. We become new things, slow and quick.
END Chapter One: Housekey