Confessions, Part I

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To: marla.jenkins@dch.com

From: Frank Flounder

Date: January 11, 2011

Subject: Confessions, Part I

Dear Marla:

It is Sunday morning and somewhere there are church bells ringing. I am in a confessing mood. Marla, over the course of our relationship, I have not been completely honest with you.

Regarding my pedigree: you may be under the impression that I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth. Maybe this is because I was prone to wearing ascots and cream-colored suits that carried the faint scent of ocean spray, or maybe it is because I tended to drop the names of island retreats named after saints that no one has ever heard of. It might have been the way in which I flaunted the grass stains on my trousers, how I claimed that they got there after playing touch football on a rolling lawn in Montauk. I may have said these things in a loud, confident voice, as if I'd long ago grown accustomed to surveying empires from lush libraries smelling of leather.

But now a confession: my ancestors were not captains of industry. They did not build summer homes in Florida and winter homes in Newport. The manservant of which I spoke does not exist, nor does the fleet of vintage cars that are supposedly stacked away in an airport hangar in New Jersey. My poor dentition cannot be traced to centuries of splendid inbreeding and I lied about my supposed hemophilia. My family does not have a coat-of-arms or trace their bloodline back to some Merovingian king. Our bloodline got muddled a long time ago, and it runs thick with the seed of ruffians born nine months after some invasion or another.

Dear Marla, I faked my nobility. Of this fact I am not proud, though my reasons were sound enough. You see, blue bloods are allowed to be boorish and stupid, and thus having secured a modest reservoir of both, I ladled out my boorishness and stupidity in an effort to show how well-bred I really was. There are few professions for which this slight of hand is more useful than in the law, and so yes, I have cloaked myself in the warm glow of patrician birth so that might obscure the depths of my vulgarity. Inasmuch as I am a vulgar man, I regarded my nobility as an essential adaptation in a profession that relies almost exclusively on appearances. As such, my nobility has allowed me to litigate entire cases without having the slightest idea as to what I was talking about and to deliver closing arguments in a drunken stupor. My nobility made it perfectly acceptable to urinate in the offices of my opposing counsel (it was into a potted plant—a fern, no less), and on three separate occasions, to fart in a judge's chambers, for the sons and daughters of privilege are allowed – even expected – to do these things, and in so doing they remind us that they are touched by God.

But Marla, I am no son of privilege. I am the son of a schoolteacher and a maid.

I was born in a small house in the Bronx — a narrow, vinyl-sided affair squeezed in between a six-story tenement and a three-story home for retarded children. It was what I suppose you would call a "working class house," a cluttered box surrounded by still more boxes, though my cluttered box had a porch and a patch of lawn in front that sprouted weeds in the summertime, so I suppose you can say I grew up privileged in a relative sort of way. After my parents died, I packed up everything in that house and took it home. It all fit neatly in the corner of my basement.

My house sat on a narrow street that ran along small hill. At the top of the hill was an old church. It was a beautiful church, with four giant steeples and an enormous stained-glass window in the shape of a flower petal. Every Sunday morning, the bells from that church would crack off of the bricks of the tenement houses and then double back upon themselves so that they seemed to be coming from all directions, and so whenever I hear the sound of church bells, as now, I am reminded of my old neighborhood, and sometimes the distant Doppler of that sound conjures certain memories that, for one reason or another, rattle my hitherto delicate equilibrium, forcing my foot ever more firmly upon the gas pedal so that the City spires cannot recede fast enough.

Yes, I am in a confessing mood. Marla, let me tell you a story:

As I have said, I used to live next to a home for retarded children. The home had once belonged to one of the lesser Rockefellers and, along with the church up the street, it was one of the few buildings in my neighborhood that could be called "majestic," though its majesty had faded long ago, caked over with the weight of many seasons, so that its bones, however fine they might have been, were only apparent if you squinted hard enough to subtract the dirt and shanty piles that lapped along its sandstone shores. The lesser Rockefeller had bought the house for his mistress —this before his fortunes improved and he could afford to move her to the Hamptons. As a blue blood (a real one) he must have felt a certain empathy toward the mentally retarded, and so he thought he might make a small and fully tax-deductible difference by donating the house to that cause.

The house had a set of fine stone steps that led up to a broad porch braced by six wooden columns. Fronting the porch was an enormous bay window that must have seemed like a good idea when the house looked out onto an open field. Now it looks out onto a dingy apartment building, and so the window, for as long as I can remember, has always been framed by a set of thick, red curtains that were permanently closed. In all my years, save for once, I never saw those curtains parted, nor did I ever once venture inside that house. It remained as mysterious and dark as a tomb.

I had many friends among the retarded children, and though I was not retarded myself, we got along swimmingly because I was in the habit of forming clubs that needed members and, more importantly, those members needed to be shrewd enough to recognize me as their supreme and unchallenged leader. Most of the neighborhood children balked at joining plainly undemocratic institutions (the Cold War was still going on back then; there was still a great deal of anti-Soviet sentiment), but the retarded children held no such reservations. And so I assembled a raft of civic societies devoted to a wide range of pursuits: there was the Turtle Club (not actually dedicated to turtles);  the Michael Jackson Fan Club (since disbanded), the George Michael fan club, the Order of Hamster Keepers (suggested by several older members of the George Michael fan club), the Young Republicans (mentally retarded Bronx chapter), the Anti-Defamation League and the pro—Defamation League (the latter resulting from some confusion as to what "defamation" actually meant).

My best friend, neighbor and trusted lieutenant was a slow kid named Billy "the Mouth," so named because his mouth was about three sizes too big for his face, as if it had been drawn on by a toddler working on his sense of proportion. He had a broad, kind face with wide-set eyes streaked with crow's feet -- a premature condition resulting from the fact that he was always smiling, as if he were in on a joke that only he could hear.

Now on Sundays our street was closed on account of the churchgoers traipsing up and down the hill for morning services, and so the street itself became a vast, concrete playground for the infidels. It was on this playground that Billy and I played basketball beneath an old fruit basket that someone had nailed to a telephone pole in front of my house.

I was a spirited if slightly aggressive competitor, all elbows and teeth, and this led Billy to yell "foul!" on more than one occasion. "Foul!" was one of Billy's favorite words, though it was less of a word than a sound that emanated from the back of his throat, as if punching its way from his lungs onto the court, and it carried none of the undertones that one might hear from other children: Billy yelled foul as if to record some historical event rather than a crime in progress, a symptom of the fact that he could care less about the score. Billy played basketball for the sheer joy of playing, which is probably why I usually beat him by about 20-1.

Another of Billy's favorite phrases was "God bless you!"— a phrase he'd picked up one morning when we ventured too close to the church up the hill. Billy and I were lurking along one of the church walls. We were hoping to get a peek through the basement window and into the women's bathroom when we were spotted by one of the parishioners taking a smoking break. She was large, blobby, middle-aged woman with a habit of pointing with her cigarette pinched between her fingers, and I distinctly remember how she called us over in a husky voice that seemed strangely devoid of Christian charity:

"Just what in the hell do you think you're doing?" she said.

Billy and I were about seven years old at the time, and I was not yet comfortable lying to adults — I would acquire this skill much later in life — and so I chose to remain silent. Billy, on the other hand, was constitutionally incapable of lying, and so with that giant mouth of his, studded as it was with missing and gap-toothed teeth, replied:

"We're looking at the girls go pee!"

Now this parishioner had called us over from some distance, and so she did not, until it was too late, appreciate the possibility that some combination of the two of us was not playing with a full deck. But Billy the Mouth had a way of driving that point home with that enormous grin of his, a thing that was at once so monstrous and wide that it tended to shock some some into silence, and others into a state of confused introspection. In this case the parishioner, whose face had been painted red so as to look presentable to God, suddenly turned a pale white, stood erect and touched her hand lightly to her breast:

"Oh," she said -- as much to herself as to Billy the Mouth -- "God bless you."

When Billy heard this and his smile grew wider, something that I hadn't thought was possible until then. He too held his hand to his breast, as as he pressed it there he leaned forward and said: "God bleth you," just before I took him by that same hand and led him home.

I suppose that Billy the Mouth, whose simple head always seemed so full of secrets, felt as if he'd been let in on something that just had to be shared with the outside world. How else to explain his actions? From that point on, whenever the Sunday church bells rang, Billy would drop his basketball, run up the wide stone steps of his house, perch atop his porch and yell at each and every passerby:

"God bleth you!"

Billy yelled God bleth you! with the same abandon as that characterized his exhortations of foul! — and he did this, over and over again, as the parade of churchgoers flocked in rivulets along our narrow street: old men clad in threadbare jackets brought over from the old country, old women clutching purses in one hand and rosaries in another, and so as Billy blessed each of them, they bowed their heads and studied the concrete with furious intensity, for such benedictions were unusual in this part of the world -- all the more so when cast by diminutive mongoloids preaching from on-high.

One day, Billy blessed an elderly Irishwoman. She was an ancient woman with a long black dress that made her look like a comma when wrapped around her severely stooped frame. But unlike the march of churchgoers before her, this Irishwoman stopped in front of Billy's porch. As always, I was sitting on Billy's stoop, basketball tucked under one arm, waiting for him to finish. She and motioned for me to come over.

"Is that boy alright?" she said.

"I guess so," I said. "I mean, he's retarded but he's alright."

"Is he a Catholic?"

"Not sure." I motioned for Billy to come down from where he stood.

"Billy, you a Catholic?"

Billy looked at me like I'd just asked him if he was made of toast. Nevertheless, he kept on smiling that huge smile of his.

"I don't think he's a Catholic," I said, "but I think he believes in Jesus and everything."

Billy was seven years old. Neither of us knew much about Jesus.

Then Billy tried to speak. This was not something he did often, and in any event, his vocabulary was somewhat limited and usually delivered with all the verve and articulation of a drunken seal. Thus when Billy spoke he instead produced a low moan that gave the old Irishwoman such a fright she staggered backward and almost fell. But she was a woman unaccustomed to retreat, and when recovered she drew herself up, walked straight past Billy and me, went up his steps and rang the doorbell.

Billy's foster mother was a three hundred pound woman who'd once worked at the Department of Motor Vehicles. I'd never actually met her but had seen her often – every Thursday in fact. That was the day that she went to agency to pick up her paycheck, usually with Billy in tow, and it was evident from the way in which she dragged him behind her considerable draft that she had not taken her job out of love.

Other than this I did not know much about Billy's mother except that she had certain hours during the day when she liked to watch television. The children were not to disturb her during these hours and adults were expected to adhere to do the same. As it happened, the old Irishwoman rang the doorbell during television time, a fact that did not bode well for Billy the Mouth.

Billy's foster mother appeared clad in a silk nightgown that was made for someone about 200 pounds lighter than herself. Incredibly, though it was not even eight o'clock in the morning, her face was fully made up so that the weight of her eyeshadow pressed heavily upon her lids. With one, thick arm she supported herself against the door frame and let lose a growl that she had honed for years at the DMV.

"Can I help you?" she said.

If the Irishwoman was intimidated she did not show it. "Do you know this boy?" she said, pointing to Billy the Mouth.

"What he do?"

"Are you aware," said the Irishwoman, "that this boy has been standing on your porch all morning, yelling at the people walking by?"

"He what?"

"He's been yelling at them. He makes a ghastly noise at decent people walking to church."

Billy's mother placed her hands onto her hips in slow motion, a move calculated to terrify onlookers as much as it was intended to steady the top half of her body. When she spoke, her lower jaw rotated forward:

"Billy," she said, "Get. Your. Ass. Inside."

For the first time that I remember, that wide smile on Billy's face disappeared. He held out his hands for his basketball, which I gave to him, and with slumped shoulders he turned and disappeared into the darkened house.

Billy's mother watched him go in and then trained here heavy-lidded eyes upon the Irishwoman. "Anything else?" she said.

The Irishwoman tucked her little black purse under her arm and tried to hide the faint smile of victory that crossed her lips. "Nothing at all," she said.  Then she turned and left.

Billy's mother shut the door with a thunderous clap.

For a moment I sat down on Billy's steps and stared at the street below. The church bells had stopped ringing and I suppose the parishioners were seated in their pews, waiting to hear the something of the Word. Then, an old woman scurried past, her short steps doing double-time in the shadow of the temple, and out of the corner of my eye I saw the thick, red curtains around Billy's front window flutter as if blown by some unseen wind, and Billy's face appeared. Billy hadn't seen me sitting on his stoop – he'd caught sight of the old woman dashing by, and through the glass I could read his lips, stretched across that big mouth of his, already chanting one last benediction.

"God bleth you," he said.

F.F.