Prodigal Father, Pagan Son

PROLOGUE
QUIETUS:
“Release from life. Death.”

Johns Hospital in Delaware County was a good reason not to get ill if a person was an addict and poor. The walls resembled gray skin, lumpy with veins, blood- drained and thin. Staff shuffl ed through the halls, their chatter like that of rare species of birds. Smells of soiled sheets and general rot wafted through the air. Screams punctuated the bustle.

A doctor with a pocked face and pursed lips clicked his pen open and shut, open and shut, as he stalled for words. He looked as rumpled as the patients except that he wore a white coat and smelled of antisep- tic. I paced the hallway outside intensive care, arms folded, shoulders squared, hoping my expression masked my fear.

“Menginie, right?” The doctor stumbled over my Italian name.

“LT.” I shrugged as if it didn’t matter anymore what people called me. Little Tony. Kid. I didn’t even have a name until I was old enough to speak.

“She has a thirty percent chance of survival.” I swallowed, glanced into the adjacent room. My mom curled like a fetus on the cot and rocked. She tossed off the thin sheet and it pooled on the fl oor. Thin wisps of blond hair were matted to her cheeks. She hadn’t bathed in weeks and she smelled of vomit. My ears throbbed and I shivered, partly from cold but mostly from a growing sense of dread. This is my mom. I can’t lose her. She is my only family, my only witness. My body numbed with resignation. I saw myself at thirteen again, sucking my thumb, unable to cry. At some point reaction replaced emotion, uncensored and raw. Pretty fucking pathetic consid- ering I was twenty- eight years old and the son of the Pagan Motor cycle Club’s most notorious power broker.

“Help me,” my mom whimpered. “Make it dark.”

“What’s wrong with her?” I asked. She sleeps and pukes, sleeps and pukes.

“She’s an alcoholic.” The doctor tucked his pen into his pocket. “She has the d.t.’s. Hers is worse than a heroin withdrawal. At this point she’ll get sick if she doesn’t drink.”

Gallon of vodka daily, and alternating between Grand- Dad and Jack Daniel’s. Yeah, I guess so.

“Her pancreas is infl amed to sixteen thousand. Normal is two hundred and under,” the doctor continued, but I was barely listening. “She’s going to die, isn’t she?” I started to shake.

“I’ve been dead a long time,” my mom hollered.

“She cuts herself, you know, with razor blades?” I hovered over the nurse, who shone a light into my mom’s eyes, as if searching for her youth blowing at the back of a cave. The room smelled rank like urine. And this was only day two of what promised to be weeks of hospital visits for me. So far my mom wasn’t improving. She was self- destructing. Intensive care meant no one ever really left. That thought nagged at my conscience. Death had defi ned my childhood— thirteen funerals before the age of twelve. After the fi rst couple of ceremonies, mourners fun- neled through the motions of what they thought they should feel but couldn’t really justify. Mostly the bikers who attended clustered at the entrance of a stifl ing funeral parlor, stoic expressions masking their worst fear— their own deaths barreling toward them, full speed, sud- den as double- aught (00) buckshot.

“She’s fi fty- two?” The pretty, starched nurse arched a brow at me as if I were making it up.

Going on eighty. Going on ten. Going.

“Do you know who you are?” the woman shouted at my mom, who, only moments before, believed George Washington was still the president.

My mom squinted at her and said, “I am an accessory after the fact.” Her lips webbed with spit and her milky eyes swelled. She was so thin, she resembled a deformed child. Terrible pale hands fl uttered to her throat and she jabbered something about bikers and the Pagan Club’s code— bike, club, dog, women, kids. In that order. “Help me,” she screamed at me.

Help me. The tele vi sion above her cot blared. My mom twined a skeletal arm through the chrome bedrail and reached toward me. “There’s something you should know about your father,” she wheezed. The nurse slipped out of the room. Here it comes. I didn’t care about Maingy. I’d lost touch with my old man. But a newspaper article described him as a turtle, cowering in an all- black neighborhood in Philadelphia, peeking out of his shell, king of his own dark world protected by the very citizens he once vowed to destroy.

“Mom, don’t talk.”

“Maingy and I met at a bar called the Accident. That should have been a sign. He never offi cially proposed. He just ordered me one day to become his old lady.” She adjusted her pillow and her hands shook. “I wasn’t a good one.”

“I’m sure you were fi ne.” But I knew she was right. She shook her head. “I had the nerve to get pregnant, twice.” Now, that was news.

“I aborted the fi rst one because a kid didn’t fi t with the biker life- style.” She coughed. “But the second one”— she cocked her head side- ways and smiled at me—“I told Maingy he could fucking die.” “Thanks, Mom.”

We sat in silence for several moments. I pointed the remote control to shut off the tele vi sion, and the beautiful people with bold white teeth disappeared.

“He’s watching me again.” My mom’s hands fl uttered to her throat. Day three. Her whole body shook. She looked thinner, a bulbous head on a hanger. She was held together with white cords. A box beeped her vitals. On the monitor at least, she looked alive. Green peaks and val- leys recorded her pulse. A plastic bag bounced on her hip. “Who?” I shrugged out of my red trench coat and draped it over the back of a chair.

“Your father. He’s at the window.” “Mom, we’re on the fourth fl oor.” But I looked anyway. A blue sheen covered the street below. Headlights glowed. Snow fell. My head throbbed and I craved a hit of weed. I wasn’t an addict or anything, at least not anymore, but marijuana calmed my nerves.

“He’s come to give us money,” my mom’s voice interrupted. She had left her bed.

“No.” I turned, cupped my mom’s elbow, and led her to the edge of the cot.

“I’m so cold,” she said, her voice small and childlike. I lowered my mom into the sheets, streaked brown with fecal matter.

“Nurse,” I called, as a cold draft explored my skin. A fan whirred overhead, casting bladed shadows on the ceiling. Johns Hospital, for certain kinds of people, was a kind of grave. The poor never really recovered. They were just returned to loved ones, pieced together as spare parts, hoping no one would notice the difference. The hall echoed with screams, muffl ed groans, and curses.

“What’s wrong with all of you? Help her.” I darted into the hall, frantic.

Nurses stared at me with dull, numb expressions. Papers blew around them. One, with a pencil wedged behind her ear, mouthed to her colleague, “Enabler.”

Fuck you. Fuck all of you. With shaking hands, I returned to my mom’s room, dampened a washcloth in the sink, and gently dabbed at the sores on my mom’s leg, carefully rinsing out the cloth, wetting it again, smoothing down my mom’s arms, her face. Chilly tears slid down her cheeks. “You’re a good kid, such a good kid.”

Mom. I shook her but she crumbled in my hands, a dry husk, teeming with maggots. I startled awake, my body sore from being folded so long in the chair. My legs tingled. My mom wheezed. She slept with her feet tucked into cat slippers with overstuffed heads. A doctor hov- ered in the doorway, his expression grim.

“She can’t drink anymore,” he said wearily as he pressed my mom’s chart to his chest. The monitor bleeped a fl at green line. “Is she dead?” My voice shook.

“If she has another drink, she’ll die.” The green line on the monitor peaked slightly. My mom was still with me but barely.

I squeezed her hand and the fl esh was loose, like a sack of rocks. “You can’t drink anymore, do you understand?” A lump formed in my throat.

My mom’s lashes moistened and she said softly, “I promise.” Then, after a pause, she asked, “What about pills?”

“There’s a little girl in my room.” My mom’s clawlike fi ngers gripped the bedrail. Her sunken eyes were wider than they should have been. “There’s no one here, Mom.” I stretched at the window and caught my refl ection in the glass. My eyes dulled as if a light had gone out of them. I chewed the soft fl esh inside my cheek. Monotony mixed with tension. At least funerals promised closure and celebration; illness, particularly dementia, just guaranteed heightened awareness of my own life. I wasn’t sure I was ready for that kind of realization. “She’s right there,” my mom insisted, jabbing the air with her claw. She tossed the sheets to the fl oor and moved her legs over the side. “Get her out of here. She’ll die.”

“Mom, what are you doing?” I protested. “It’s my coat, see?” I pulled my trench from the hook and held it in front of me, waving the empty sleeves at her.

My mom’s expression soured, she furrowed her brows, snaked her tongue around her upper lip. “Motherfucker,” she screamed, and threw the remote at my head. She struggled to her feet, fell, and exposed a wet, brown stain on her hospital gown.

“Nurse,” I choked. “Somebody fucking help her.”

I lifted my mom off the fi lthy fl oor. I fell back with her on the cot, and her breath reeked of paste. My arms were streaked with excre- ment. She had diarrhea and the commode overfl owed. I scrubbed my skin under the faucet, the force of the spray reminding me of the morning I interrupted one of my mom’s suicide attempts. I was four years old the fi rst time. She had locked the bathroom door again. It was dark, easily four in the morning. The sound of water woke me. A pot clanged in the kitchen.

I heard the familiar crinkle of plastic wrap as my mom ripped open the package of razor blades. I pounded on the door. No answer. “Go away.”

More pounding.

Plates shattered against the wall below me. Muffl ed laughter fi l- tered up the stairs.

I heard a click and my mom slid back the dead bolt. The door creaked open and I found her naked, straddling the sides of the tub, one leg dangled in the water, the other with a blade plunged deep into the main artery.

“She’ll be released tomorrow,” the doctor said, hugging my mom’s chart to his chest. “Does she have a place to go?”

I stood in my mom’s kitchen, hands on my hips, heaviness in my chest. I didn’t turn on the lights. Better to work in the dark and pre- tend I could actually clean the place. My mom’s latest companion, Chuck, sat in a chair in a corner. He was hunched over, blind, shiver- ing. Neither of us uttered a word. I felt displaced, like a fi xture from another house that didn’t quite work. Memory had a smell, like a sweetly rotten intimacy. Relief washed over me. I’ll admit as a child I had wor- ried that my life would leave no imprint. That all the violence and anger would just dissipate through wall vents like a potent drug. In its place would be another empty space for unsuspecting tenants to fi ll, to start over as if pain were just a glossy fi nish. No scars. No witness. Just odor.

I poured bleach onto a rag and inhaled. Dirty dishes fi lled the sink. The garbage bag overfl owed with empty bottles of vodka, Jack Dan- iel’s, and cans of SPAM. Water dripped from the faucet and slicked the counter. The refrigerator door cracked open. The bulb inside fl ickered. Flies buzzed on a half- eaten hamburger. Spilled milk sloshed over the shelves, the carton tipped on its side missing a lid. A child’s smiling black- and- white photo was creased on its edges. Rows and rows of beer were stacked on the shelves. Cleaning became ritual, a cathartic exercise. A space evolved into the life of its inhabitants. Nothing was static. The fi lth would return. Still, it felt good to clean. To wipe away surface junk. Even if none of it mattered.

I opened a window and a cold breeze hit me full in the face. It was early and overcast. I promised to collect my mom later that afternoon. I dropped to my knees and moved the bleach rag back and forth over the linoleum until dull brown turned to ivory. Sweat dripped from my temple and stung my eyes. I scrubbed until my hands chafed. I moved to the counter, poured more bleach onto my rag. The light in the sky darkened with the threat of snow. I emptied another garbage bag. I had been at it for hours and my body ached with the strain. But the pain felt good, made me feel alive. That was something, to feel alive. “Smells good,” Chuck said, fi nally lifting his head.

“Do you think she’ll like it?” I hedged.

“She won’t even notice.”

Acknowledgments xiii
Prologue—Quietus: “Release from Life. Death.” 1
Part I:
Introduction
9
1. Blood Sport 11
2. School Haze 16
3. Rites of Passage 24
4. Drifter 28
5. Swallowed Whole 32
6. No Easy Exit 47
Part II
55
7. In Memoriam 57
8. Stray 67
9. Killer Instincts 77
10. Happy Spot 84
11. Safe 96
12. Bitch- Slapped 110
13. A Real Killer 118
14. 1 Percent 131
15. Strike Two 144Part III
163
16. Raising Hell 165
17. Payback 170
18. Prospecting 193
19. The Shit 216
20. Mission Impossible 231
21. Taking Care of Business 248
Epilogue 265