Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride. Brian SweanyЧитать онлайн книгу.
would be the only time in my mother’s life she would feel inclined to do anything that could be interpreted as exercise, so essentially we should have been on suicide watch.
On some afternoons, Mom would take me to see Dad at the dealership. Dad showed me off to the wrinkled suits and grease monkeys, who I thought were the coolest bunch of guys I’d ever met. But mostly I stayed at home and did my best to stay out of the way of my mom’s misery. My favorite thing to do was skip rocks across the creek running through our backyard, at least until a mosquito bit Grandma Eleanor and she almost died from encephalitis. We fled Dad’s “unbelievable opportunity” after less than six months. As we were driving out of town for the last time, Dad thought Jeanine and I were sleeping when he pointed to his rearview mirror and said to Mom, “Hey, Debbie, did you know Kokomo pronounced backward is oh muh cock?”
After Kokomo, Dad got a job selling Mercedes while his family sought refuge in a newer neighborhood back in Southport just off Meridian Street called Clematis Gardens. No matter how many times Mom pointed out “clematis” was a flower and not a sexually transmitted disease, Dad still snickered at the name.
The summer after my sixth birthday, we moved into an old farmhouse north of County Line Road, during which time I attended St. Ambrose through all of elementary school. St. Ambrose had separate girls’ and boys’ monkey bars on opposite sides of the playground. The boys would “launch” periodic attacks into the girls’ monkey bars, pretending with our outstretched arms and fake propeller noises to be fighter planes as we weaved in and out of the biting and scratching flurry of plaid skirts and white oxfords.
In the first grade, I fell in love with Kimberly Thompson after she rescued me, bloodied and torn, following a kamikaze dive into the girls’ monkey bars. As a token of my devotion, I stole a silver tin of consecrated hosts from the church sacristy for Kimberly. Stealing the body of Christ for love—where does a guy go from there to impress the ladies?
Kimberly refused my gift. She always did the right thing, except for the time she swallowed aspirin when she had chicken pox and died of Reye’s syndrome. Mom made me wear my First Communion suit to Kimberly’s funeral. It was navy-blue polyester wrapped around a butterfly-collared shirt of powder blue. I remember standing at the funeral and Mom whispering to me that Kimberly would have thought I was handsome. I remember thinking her casket was too small and that I hated my haircut.
We moved to Louisville, Kentucky, the summer before my fifth-grade year. Dad felt bad about moving out of state, what with his mother, Grandma Eleanor, getting sick and all. But the financial security afforded him as general manager of a BMW franchise in northern Kentucky was too good to pass up.
Our new house stood on a wooded hilltop just off Highway 42. Uncle Mitch and Aunt Ophelia drove down from Indianapolis to help us unpack. Uncle Mitch was not my real uncle, but Dad was an only child and Mitchell Hass had been Dad’s best friend since they were kids. A month after I was born, Mom and Dad asked Mitch to be my godfather, so calling him “Uncle” became an afterthought. Three years after that, they extended the same courtesy to his wife, “Aunt” Ophelia, after Jeanine was born.
Our first night in the house, there was a thunderstorm that knocked out our power. Dad went down into the basement to check the fuse box. He left me alone with Uncle Mitch in my bedroom. It wasn’t the first time or the last time Dad left me alone with him, and it wasn’t the first or last time Uncle Mitch took advantage of the situation. My godfather handed me his beer and moved next to me on my bed. He winked at me and said, “Our little secret, Hank.” It was my first beer. It tasted awful, but I kept the beer on my lips and drank the whole thing. I stared at the ceiling while Uncle Mitch put his hands down the front of my underwear. He liked touching me. A godfather’s love measured by the length of his godson’s erection.
Our little secret, Hank.
Dad cried when he told us the news. The owner of the BMW franchise fired Dad because his employees preferred Dad’s leadership to that of the guy signing their checks—plus Dad busted said owner for having drinks with his mistress. Dad was rewarded a nice severance package from a judge who agreed Dad’s former boss was a complete asshole. It was the second time I ever saw my father cry. The other time was when Grandma Eleanor died. Our Pentecostal cleaning lady, Charlotte Fayne, sang “The Old Rugged Cross” at the funeral. Charlotte wore her hair and skirts long because the Devil had a place reserved in hell for shorthaired women who wore pants.
We moved from Louisville back to the south side of Indianapolis—Greenwood this time, a town that’s of course more grey colored and relatively devoid of trees. Dad took a job as a stockbroker for Paine Webber, commuting back and forth to downtown Indy. He worked sixteen hour days in a three by five cubicle doing a job that a monkey flipping a coin could perform with equal competence. Dad’s new career came and went in a span of less than two years.
Those two years were much kinder to me. In addition to being the home of the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Greenwood staked its claim to a Chinese restaurant with the state’s largest indoor Koi pond and a Catholic school with the state’s largest pool of pubescent hormones. My seventh and eighth grade years at Our Lady of Perpetual Help were what I classify as my awkward, albeit enriching, years. Faced with the prospect of fading into adolescent obscurity, I compensated better than most for bad acne and twenty extra pounds. I quit football and became a wrestler, a sport my singlet-wearing fat ass inexplicably peddled into a higher-than-deserved social status. My sly sense of humor disarmed my peers and teachers into thinking I was harmless, and thanks to a couple years of cotillion, I could pull out dance moves that embarrassed the guys and enflamed the girls.
After a three-month flirtation with an eighth grade volleyball player during which I was crowned King of All Seventh Graders, I became drawn to Twyla Levine, a tall, brunette vixen who sat next to me in Mr. Marker’s seventh grade class. On an overnight field trip to St. Louis, Twyla and I made out during a game of spin the bottle. Later, on the bus ride home to Greenwood, I put my hand up Twyla’s skirt and managed to fiddle with the elastic on her panties. Someone witnessed the panties episode, so by the time we got back to Greenwood, Twyla had given me a hand job while I fingered her in the back of the bus. None of this was true, but over the years, as the story followed me and took on a life of its own, I never tried very hard to deny the rumors. Years later, I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles I lost my virginity in the back of that bus. True or not, you have to admit the image of a thirteen-year-old stumbling around a bus looking for a place to stick his dick has a humorously scandalous quality to it.
The truth was Twyla did give me an orgasm. After I got back from St. Louis I locked myself in the bathroom with Twyla—or at least, Twyla’s seventh grade class picture cut out of my yearbook and taped to the body of 1984 Playboy Playmate of the Year, Barbara Edwards. Twyla’s ambitions were “To fulfill my dream as a promising artist and actress and to contribute my share of help to the starving children of the world.” Her turn-ons were “Being a Sigma Chi sister of USC, drawing, traveling, and attending musicals.”
Even though I was a Notre Dame fan, I let the USC comment slide. Anything for Twyla.
In the wake of Dad’s stock broker experiment, a couple investors whose portfolios quite miraculously quadrupled on his watch set up my father as president of his own car dealership. We moved, again, putting down what turned out to be permanent roots in Empire Ridge, a mill town about halfway to Cincinnati. We said our driveway goodbyes to our Greenwood neighbors, a brand-new Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser station wagon hunched low over the tires with the weight of a couple more years of memories. I mailed a goodbye letter to Twyla, outing myself as the town pervert with the affecting words, “How about you take a picture of yourself naked and send it to me?” And in the fall of 1985, with the “Fitzpatrick Olds-Cadillac-Subaru” marquee hoisted and lit and my family settling down after our eighth move in twelve years, I enrolled as a freshman at Empire Ridge Public High School.
It’s been more than two infant-free years since Dad reversed his sterility. Much like his failed attempts to cajole disinterested sperm cells in the general direction of my mother’s worn-out uterus, I’m still finding my stride in Empire Ridge. I grew ten inches without gaining a pound, my complexion cleared up, and I carry one hundred and seventy pounds of taut muscle over a