Chapter Six

--May, 1999 (cont’d)

Boomtown Rats – “I Don’t Like Mondays”

My time at the country club had made me lazy. I had gotten a taste of the good life and did not want to go back to my crappy public school. On Monday, I feigned an illness that even Ferris Bueller would have been proud of having. It must have been convincing too because Mom volunteered to pick up some movies at the video store for me. She came back with

all three “Godfathers,” a glaring hole in my movie knowledge, I know, but that’s how I watched them for the first time, one after the other. My idea of treating myself has always been a movie marathon. All I had to do was pop in a VHS and I was off dreaming about a life that didn’t so closely resemble mine. I set myself up on our mustard-colored couch in a cocoon of blankets and watched Al Pacino in his last subtle performance.

I think my love affair with movies started with Uncle Nick and Aunt Sheila’s big screen T.V. The adults would naturally just congregate around it. We were a Swayze household, “Ghost” and “Dirty Dancing” on repeat. Mom was a big Bruce Willis fan, so “Die Hard” was up there too. As a kid, I loved Indiana Jones and remember watching “Raiders” a lot, but also “Last Crusade.” Mom recognized my burgeoning interest and cultivated it. Whenever we went to the tape store, I would get two tapes while Mom always went off and came back with some obscure movie I wouldn’t pick in a hundred years. That’s how I learned about older films. Mom had her favorites and would show me what to look for, but I quickly evolved my own tastes.

I loved the fun of Amblin movies and the anarchy of a good slasher flick. I found movie trailers to be unsung pieces of art. I’d argue with people over who the greatest film composer of all time was and hoped that my Oscars backstory would be as good as Ben and Matt’s. I felt, quite rightly, that the technical and art departments of “Citizen Kane” deserved their place in the history books, but the story just wasn’t best movie of all-time quality. I mean, come on - his sled?! What psychological material did they pepper throughout the movie for his childhood sled to mean anything, let alone be the most important prop of the movie?!

After “The Godfather” ended, I threw in part two. Mom popped in and out during the run, even surprised me by mentioning that she went out to L.A. once to try and be an actress around the time they were shooting it.

I thought about going for a second sick day. As I finished up Godfather Three, I started coughing and complaining about this damn headache that wouldn’t go away. However, Mom was a little tired of being at my beck and call all hours of the day. She hardly got any work done. If I was going to be sick tomorrow, I’d be staying with Nannie.

“What about Uncle Nick?” I asked.

Mom shook her head. “I don’t know...”

“Well, he doesn’t work...”

“Still, maybe he doesn’t want to watch a sick fourteen-year-old.”

“You and I both know that’s nonsense!” Reluctantly, Mom placed the call. After a couple rings, Sheila picked up and eagerly volunteered her husband on the spot.

When I headed over bright and early the next day, Mom left me with the warning, “Take it easy on Uncle Nick, he hasn’t been feeling well lately.” I said that I would.

Nick and Sheila’s house sat in the shade of a giant oak that took up most of the front yard. That meant that even in direct sunlight, it had an air of the ominous. The house was decorated with ornamental slate, a look which made it seem as if it was made entirely of stone. The overall effect was one of doom and gloom.

It was right up my alley.

Because Aunt Sheila had loads of money, Uncle Nick didn’t have to work. From what I could tell, he just lounged around the house all day, watching the Home Shopping Network and “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.”

We got into the forest green BMW with the slick leather interior that Sheila leased for Nick and drove into town. Halfway there, he put the top down and let the wind whip his trim mustache and long hair. For most of my life, he wore his hair in a mullet; not in a backwoods, white trash kind of way, but more so in a “business in the front, party in the back” kind of way. I noticed, not for the first time, that the guy was a bit of a clotheshorse. He believed in only the finest things in life. Today it was a dark, long-sleeved button down with loud designer pants belted at the waist. “So, are you faking it or are you really sick?” he asked.

“Promise not to tell?”

He laughed. “’Nuff said. I read your story, by the way. The one about the motel?”

“She showed that to you?!” I slapped the dash, pissed. Who hadn’t Mom shown it to?!

But Nick just waved me off. “I liked it.”

“You did?”

“Sure, it was very Stephen King meets Kafka – you know Kafka?”

“He wrote Metamorphosis, right?”

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“You’ve read it?”

I shook my head.

“It’s a compliment. And speaking of vermin...” We started talking about the Vanowens. Nick agreed that Lynn was a wet blanket and that Kevin was an ass, but when I brought up Uncle Bill, he became suddenly serious. “He had a hair-trigger temper growing up. Once threw me out the screen door for not putting the top back on a jar of peanut butter right.”

I laughed. “He what?!”

“True story.”

Nick pulled into the parking lot of 7-11 and found a spot. “Come on,” he said. “Anything you want.” He plucked a credit card from his wallet and smiled. “It’s on Aunt Sheila.”

I laughed and followed him into the store. It was the same one he used to take me to after my karate lessons which made me nostalgic. I got my typical coke slurpee and Uncle Nick got more cigarettes. Luxury, I decided, was constantly buying things so you didn’t have to think about your life -- something I fully supported. Afterwards, Nick took me by our old tape store in Summit, where I got a couple WWF tapes.

When we got back to the house, I decided to watch “Wrestlemania 9” which took place at Caesar’s Palace and is still the only Wrestlemania to be held outdoors. It was a good one with lots of twists and turns. During the main event, Bret “the Hitman” Hart lost the Championship belt to Yokozuna when the sumo cheated by throwing a blinding pod in his face. Hulk Hogan ran to his friend’s defense and the crowd started chanting for him to settle the score. The Hulkster ended up beating Yokozuna and getting the belt back for the good guys.

As we watched though, Mom kept calling to check up on me. It was starting to get annoying. But I guess I couldn’t blame her. It had been said by many a person that there wasn’t a drug that Nick hadn’t done. Or, as he put it so succinctly, “the only problem I have with drugs is when I can’t find any.” I like to think that while I was watching wrestling, he was in the kitchen blowing lines. Or maybe he just did it behind me on the glass coffee table because, come on, no one has a glass coffee table to NOT do coke on...

When Mom called for the third time, Nick managed to convince her that everything was fine. Then he hung up and said, “let’s go jump on the beds.” I didn’t need to be asked twice. We headed up to my old bedroom that Sheila had converted into a staid guest room. My bed now had frilly lace all around it. Gone was any sense that a child had once lived there. It was a mattress I would be proud to wreck. We spent the next fifteen minutes hopping up and down, ruining the sheets.

Which. Was. Awesome.

I had started to think that growing up meant being unhappy, but here Nick was proving to be the rare exception. I told him about hanging out with Dean’s friends and how they had made fun of my clothes.

“Fuck them!” Nick blurted out. “You want to pick some stuff out of my closet. Rub their face in it?” I nodded.

Nick’s walk-in closet was wall-to-wall Pierre Cardin suits, collarless dress shirts and leather wing-tipped shoes. So, this was where Sheila’s money was going. There was easily $25,000 worth of clothes here. I ran my hands reverently over the duds that were worth more than my life.

I noticed Nick smiling at me. “Ya got taste, kid.” I watched him mull something over before finally saying, “You want to see some of my paintings?”

I had only recently heard that Nick was a great artist growing up, so I was more than a little curious to see his early work. In the garage, he arranged three of his favorite pieces on a couple of dusty chairs then stood back anxiously as I kneeled down to look at them. Growing up, girls hung all over him, which explained the wild nudes. But he was also gifted at pointillism which he told me took hours and hours to finish even the smallest of images.

My favorite though was a mixed media self-portrait he did in which his head was exploding, as if by a gunshot. But instead of blood, everything was coming out: musical notes, moments in history, cultural references. I looked at it for a while but didn’t say what I was thinking. That I sometimes felt like that too... that life was too much. But I didn’t want to put my foot in my mouth if I was wrong, if that wasn’t what he’d intended. Instead, I said that I thought he was talented.

“That’s the kiss of death in the arts. You’ll need to know this if you keep writing. You don’t want people to think you’re talented. You want them to think you’re professional. That you won’t embarrass them to the public if they display your work...” He stared regretfully at his paintings. “Sometimes I think that it’s probably better to be relevant than talented.” I watched as he became lost in thought.

I wondered what had happened to him to make him think that way. I desired to be a great artist, but my life was so boring. I wanted tragedy and drama and real emotion, something I didn’t second guess five minutes after.

I was halfway through my second tape, Survivor Series ‘94, when Aunt Sheila came home from work, looking exhausted. She was in a power suit, her barrel-chested frame tapering off into little chicken legs that made her appear off-balance. Still, she was a really hard worker and nobody’s fool. She even kicked Uncle Nick out for a period in the mid-eighties. He became a used car salesman for a month before begging her to take him back.

She brightened when she saw me. She was like a second mother to me growing up, once getting us box seats to Ringling Brothers. Unfortunately, she never got that kid she wanted. She asked Nick why dinner wasn’t ready. Apparently, even Uncle Nick had chores. He moved to get up, but she waved him off.

When Mom came by to pick me up, Sheila tried to get us to stay for dinner, but Janet said we’d already taken up enough of their time. On our way out, Mom saw a packet of adoption papers on the coffee table that I had somehow missed. She asked Nick about them. He just shrugged and said, “Eh, she wants it...”

Nick rose to show us to the door. As Mom headed straight for the car though, I hung back. “Maybe tomorrow, I can still pretend to be sick?” I asked hopefully.

Nick smiled a sad sort of smile. “Yeah, maybe…”

It didn’t strike me until later that he might not have liked wrestling at all.

When we were in the Volvo, I asked Mom about a memory that had been bothering me all day. It was one from when I was very young. There was a wall full of windows, letting in the afternoon light, and Nick was there in a wicker chair, his back to us. Mom had gotten me a desert camouflage G.I. Joe fighter jet just for the occasion...

“Was that rehab?” I asked her.

Janet was quiet for a moment. “You know, some people remember nice things.”

“Was it?” She nodded after a while and we descended into an uncomfortable silence. I figured it was up to me to break it. “Well, I think he cracked the code because he is living the life now! All he does is nothing but watch T.V. all day!”

Mom looked at me, seriously. “Is that how you want to live your life?”

I said, “maybe...” Then, I thought about it a little. “No, I guess not.”

Janet smiled. “Sometimes I love you more than I can stand.” She forced a hug on me and said the thing she had told me a million times before: “If they lined up all the little boys...” I would always cut her off before she could finish it. The whole thing went, “If they lined up all the little boys in the world, I’d still pick you.” I spent most of my childhood trying to refute it, asking her what would happen if she didn’t know me before she had to make the choice?

But she would just smile and say, “I’d still know.”