Dixon Street

If it was a Wednesday, we’d get pizza after midnight.

Grandpa Ed would wake me up from my spot on the couch. The television would be playing reruns of a show from the 1950’s about a talking cat or a horse that solves crime. The black and white would cross my face, and I’d fear for a moment that the world had lost its color. Then, warmth. I’d be scooped up into arms that smelled like tweed and Aramis. I’d pretend to still be asleep, but I don’t know why. I don’t know why that was my favorite thing to do. Fight going to bed only to continue feigning slumber. So much of childhood behavior is a mystery to me. Maybe that’s how it is for everyone. I don’t know.

Out we’d go to the car, and I’d be placed in the backseat, as though Grandpa Ed was my chauffeur. He’d fire up the Ford Taurus, and we’d make a right turn onto Spring Street, and then a left, and then another left onto Thames. The pizza place stayed open until 1:45am year-round. They were open that late even in the off-season when the only people walking the streets were the ghosts of navy men and debutantes who never made it to their ball. Inside, you’d pay $6.99 for a ten-inch, one-topping. Grandpa would hand the teenage girl behind the counter a ten, and tell her to keep the change. That’s how they came to remember him. He was the older man who tipped well enough to merit forgiveness for having an eight-year-old boy out with him close to midnight on a Wednesday.

The place had high, round tables that were all different colors, but I always demanded that we sit at the green table. If someone was already sitting there, Grandpa would kindly ask them if they could move, because his grandson’s favorite color was green. They’d always oblige, although I’m talking as though this happened all the time. It didn’t. I’m turning one event into a series, because I’m surprised that the green table was always free. Maybe it wasn’t. I might be making things up. I do that now. I look back, and I invent. I do it to fill in the spaces, but when I’m done, I like to add a little color on top. Memory adjusts, why shouldn’t I?

The topping was always pepperoni, which is not exciting. If this was a made-up story, I’d tell you we had sausage or pineapple or something even more exotic, like eggplant. No, we did pepperoni, and I don’t feel like adjusting that. The slices were big enough to take up the entirety of a paper plate, and I’d take my time eating, because when we were done, it meant home to bed, and not to the couch with the tv playing. It meant really going to bed. My bedroom was a spare room that used to be my mother’s. It still had a poster on the wall of David Cassidy and a desk with a diary on it. Inside the diary, there was one page filled out, and it was the page where you’re prompted to answer questions about yourself.

Favorite Food:  Ham and Cheese Sandwich

Favorite Movie:  The Amityville Horror

Future Job:  Lawyer

How Many Kids Will I Have:  I Don’t Want Kids.

Several months earlier, I was sitting in front of my school waiting to be picked up. My father had forgotten to pick me up two days in a row the previous week, and so my mother decided it would now fall to her to retrieve me. I couldn’t ride the schoolbus, because the kids on the bus made fun of me for my dirty hair and wrinkled clothes. The school refused to do anything about it unless my parents came in for a meeting, and since my parents never came in for a meeting, the solution was for me to be picked up everyday. My father assured my mother he could handle it since he was out of work, and there wouldn’t be any reason he couldn’t set his alarm at 1:45pm five days a week and make the ten-minute trip down the road to get his only son.

Even that, however, proved too difficult for him, and I had to use the phone in the secretary’s office to call, wake him up, and then have him ask me if I had any money on me for a taxi. The secretary brought me home that day even though it probably wasn’t allowed. She was a nice, older woman who felt bad for me. She even let me take candy out of her glove compartment on the way home. It was a tart candy, but I don’t remember exactly what it was. The next day when my father didn’t show up, I simply walked home. It began to rain, and when I showed up, my mother was furious. She wasn’t furious at my father, because she never got furious at my father. She was furious at the time.

“How can it be so late,” she screeched, upon seeing me drenched, standing at the front door, “No, it’s not three o’clock. It’s not. No. I don’t accept that. It’s not.”

For as long as I could remember, my mother had always believed that the world was against her. So why not time now as well? When faced with her addiction and the consequences it was having, she chose to believe that the clocks were conspiring to make her look like a bad mother. Why else would her son be walking home in the rain? Luckily for me, even at her lowest, she was a fighter. She would pick me up from that day on. That was how this would resolve itself. She would stop drinking at noon, and by 1:45pm, she’d be good to drive to school, pick me up, bring me home, make me a snack of dry cereal in an unwashed bowl, and then commence drinking again until she passed out next to my father in front of the television. The black and white light turning all the alcohol in their bodies to something kind and nostalgic. Nothing that could hurt them or me, their only son. Nothing to be ashamed of.

My mother was not only there on time, but she was early, and that’s how I knew we might not make it home alive. Those moments of panic when it was her trying desperately to lead a normal life while her desire to drink hammered away at her like Hephaestus created a kind of balance wherein she could focus, because she had to. Because she knew the lion was at her neck, and if she got too comfortable, it would begin to chew. Today, she had arrived early. The smile on her face as she got in the car told me all I needed to know. She was not just a good mother, but a great mother. She was a mother who arrived to pick her son up early. She had done her hair. She had some make-up on. The smell of the Long Island was palpable in the car, but it had no bearing on my mother and her parenting. She was doing it all. The drinking, the falling down, the picking up, and driving.

We almost made it home. I won’t go into details, not because they’re gory, but because they’re mundane. You always almost make it home. Most accidents happen close to home. I could see our driveway as they were pulling me out of the car. I worried that I smelled like alcohol. I worried that the paramedics would think I was the one drinking. I was only a child. Drinking would get me in trouble. I wasn’t worried about my mother. Why would I worry about her? She was an adult. What happens to an adult? I should have been terrified. I should have screamed for my mother. I should have asked where they were taking her. I didn’t. I’m not making that up. I know I didn’t scream. I know I was quiet. I know I was.

* * * * * *

The promise was just one summer with Grandpa Ed. It couldn’t be more than summer. Grandpa Ed lived in Newport, Rhode Island, and that was a beautiful place in the summer. In the summer, the town filled up with men in salmon shorts and women with white sweaters tied around their shoulders. There was tennis and beach days and weddings every day of the week. Everybody wanted to be in Newport in the summer. I was lucky. Lucky to be alive and lucky to have a grandfather who had a house in Newport. My mother would go spend the summers with him too after her parents divorced. The two of them would live together, but that was about all they’d do. She’d leave everyday to go down to the beach where she’d meet boys from rich families who would kiss her and then ask why she wore the same bathing suit everyday. Newport was where she met my father, who did not come from a rich family, but a family that owned a small restaurant in town. He brought my mother there on a date when she was seventeen and he was nineteen. He served her spaghetti like he’d cooked it, and then moved a meatball over to her with his nose like they were in Lady & The Tramp. That’s the story he told me anyway, but I don’t know if it’s true. If not all of it, most of it is true. Mostly true is all you could get out of my father. Mostly true was all he could give you.

My father was the one who told me it would only be one summer. In the Fall, after my mother was done with physical therapy, and they’d both completed a rehabilitation program, they would come and pick me up. We’d get ice cream at Kilwin’s and go to the arcade next door, and it would be as though nothing bad had ever happened. Until then, I’d only ever seen Grandpa Ed on holidays, and he’d even skipped a few of those. He wasn’t an unpleasant man, but he seemed to have no interest in children. When my father dropped me off, the two of them exchanged words in the driveway, and then my father drove away while Granda Ed watched him go. He turned and almost looked surprised to see me standing on his second step. The steps leading into a house that had housed only him for years now.

“You like tv,” he asked me, and then before I could answer, “I know kids like tv.”

That might have been all he knew.

What he learned over that summer was that if you don’t know how to parent a child, then you can simply become a child alongside them. That’s why we spent every afternoon in the arcade. That was why ice cream was often our only dinner. That’s why we watched television late into the night until one or both of us passed out. It was only on Wednesdays when we had a routine. Tv, pizza, and then home to bed. I don’t know what was special about Wednesday’s. I never asked then, and I can’t ask now. Grandpa Ed died of pancreatic cancer two years after I left him at the age of seventeen. That one summer turned into many summers. The season of tennis and tourism turned into off-season after off-season. I skipped half a school year until the truant officer showed up, and then a routine was foisted upon us. Grandpa Ed didn’t drink, but that didn’t mean being a father came easy to him. He hadn’t ever taken my mother to school, and so I became his do-over. He was retired from the navy, but any discipline he learned in the service was long gone by the time I showed up. I never had a curfew, I never did chores, and as long as the school wasn’t calling to ask him who the hell was raising that grandson of his, I never got in any trouble. My parents never came back to pick me up, but, instead, they became the new Grandpa Ed. They showed up at Christmas, if at all. Sometimes with gifts, sometimes not. Some years drunk, some dried out and practically comatose. There were usually apologies and tears and then we’d all go to a movie together. My mother eventually did get sober when I turned twenty-one. I was ready to take my first drink when my cell phone rang, and I saw “Mom” come across the screen.

“I’m done,” she said, “I promise, this time, I’m really done.”

I thought about her diary. I thought about the kids she never wanted. I thought about the lawyer she never got to bed. I thought about how the world was against her and time and stop signs she swore came out of nowhere. I put down the drink.

“That’s great, Mom,” I said, “That’s really great.”

That story sounds made up, but it’s true. I can tell you true stories about my mother. I have to make up stories about my father. The real one isn’t something I can tell. You can make up one if you want. You’ll have to. Even my made up ones aren’t worth telling.

* * * * * * * *

One night, after pizza, I asked my grandfather if I could sleep in the car instead of coming inside. It was the night before Labor Day. My parents would be coming in a few days to get me. Soon, I’d be packing up my things and returning to my real home with my real television with the black and white light that could cleanse you as you slept. Things would be better, but also the same. The same school, but with freshly shampooed hair everyday and ironed clothes that smelled that Tide. The same parents, but happier and always on time, never early or not there. The same life, but one I would appreciate, because I’d seen the alternative. I hadn’t hated the summer with Grandpa Ed, but everything about it felt like hard soil. You couldn’t plant roots there, and that was intentional. This wasn’t a place where people came to stay.

Grandpa Ed might also have believed that my parents were coming to get me that week, and that our time was drawing to an end. Why else would he have acquiesced and let his grandson stay in the car with the doors unlocked and the windows rolled down? He lived in a nice neighborhood, because most neighborhoods in Newport were nice, but it was still reckless, wasn’t it? I wish I could ask him about this. I wish I could ask him why he nodded slightly, and then went inside the house. I wish I could ask him how he knew I’d be all right. I wish I could ask when he realized my parents weren’t coming back. I didn’t realize it until almost Halloween of that year. I was cutting holes in a sheet to go trick-or-treating as a ghost when I understood that it had been too long. It had been too long and there was no coming back. Not for anyone.

That night in the car, I laid across the front seat, and thought about how I could forgive my mother. It seemed to me that there were all kinds of ways to forgive someone, and if you did it just right, they might not be afraid to return to you. I practiced forgiving her in my mind, and then out loud. I chose my words carefully. I invented new words. I sang a bit. From outside, the ocean made its ocean air, and kissed the tires, the doors, the steering wheel, the locks, and the front door of every house in town.

It never kissed me though. It knew I was leaving. It was sure of it.

You see?

Even the ocean makes mistakes.