The Reason You're Alive Page 11

  I also invited Sue, for all of the reasons I already stated, and because she was friends with Timmy already. If my son proved to be an inadequate host of gays, Sue could help me pick up the slack, being that—like me—she was well versed in gay friendship.

  When Timmy called me back, he was concerned about my health. Like I already told you, the gays are very considerate, which is why they make fantastic buddies. Once Timmy heard that my meds had been adjusted and that I would be able to start doing a light workout within a week or so—and therefore I hadn’t reneged on my commitment to fitness—he was appeased enough to talk about dinner.

  I told him not to expect much because my son was heterosexual and therefore handicapped when it came to throwing dinner parties, but I sure would like to pay my favorite gay couple back for all the times they had me over, and I knew that my living with Hank was probably our absolute best shot.

  Timmy laughed like he always does when I talk about homo-hetero relations. I realize that I don’t know all the proper homo terms, which is why he’s always laughing at me, but he also knows me for who I am and we have been through a lot, so terminology doesn’t really matter so much, despite what your average liberal will tell you.

  At the club I also sometimes play pickup basketball with the brothers, and they all call me honky or cracker or old man whitey or even sometimes G.I. Joe, because they like me and I even got better jobs for some of them. I used my old contacts in the city to help the blacks make some more coin, which is the best sort of reparations there is—the ability to make your own money with your own brain and your own efforts, fair and square. It has been my experience that a black will be much more appreciative than a white when it comes to help getting jobs, and that’s why I stopped helping most whites, who, truth be told, far too often act like assholes.

  I should probably mention that these are all high-class brothers who can afford to pay the fitness club fees. But they call each other racist names on the court—even the biggest no-no word there is, the one that not even I will say anymore—just like the black soldiers did when I was in Vietnam.

  If he were ever in the gym when these guys got to shooting off their mouths, my son would immediately lecture them on which words they were and weren’t supposed to use, which would get his ass beat quick and ensure that the blacks would never pick him up on a side when it came to playing basketball. He’d be standing against the wall just holding his little white pecker from then on.

  But the brothers always let me play hoops, and they laugh when I call them dark meat. They even kick one of their own off the court when I walk in, just so I can run a little ball. I never last too long, so don’t go feeling too bad for the dude who has to sit down.

  Needless to say I am the shittiest basketball player in the gym, especially compared to these black guys who are half my age, but they respect veterans and sometimes they even let me get a shot off. I know every single one of them can jump over fucking skyscrapers, so I only get shots off when they let me. They don’t make it too obvious, and everyone on both sides—all of the brothers—whoop it up for me when one of my shots eventually tickles the twine because it usually takes me five or six tries, during which they yell words of encouragement.

  Sometimes I even grab some chicken wings with these guys afterward at this local bar they frequent. Only I shouldn’t eat too many chicken wings on account of my shitty health, and Timmy has a heart attack himself whenever he finds out I’ve been eating chicken with the brothers. It’s his job to keep me healthy, and white people get extremely fat when we eat fried chicken slathered in hot sauce and blue cheese. I always argue, saying I eat the celery they serve with the wings too, but Timmy doesn’t give a shit about that.

  My son gets real touchy when I talk about these basketball players. Hank is afraid of black people, although he will never admit it. I’m not afraid of anyone. And that’s mostly why I am down with the brothers, who even teach me their secret handshakes, which means I am almost an honorary black myself, no matter what the fuck my son says.

  On the night of our homo-hetero rainbow dinner party, I combed Ella’s hair and told her that my friends Timmy and Johnny would surely notice how her hair was styled and so we had better pick carefully. Ella asked for a French braid, but I have already told you how I feel about the French, and so we went with traditional American pigtails, which was Ella’s second choice. Hank had gone all in for the dinner party, even though I didn’t tell him we would be having gay guests. He even cooked a small amount of meat, albeit tuna, which he seared for an Asian salad, no doubt thinking of Sue’s preferences.

  He had purchased a new outfit too—some jeans that cost more than your car and a sweater that looked like you could not throw it in the washing machine but had to send it to a good trustworthy Asian dry cleaner. And he had styled his hair with gel so that he looked like a homo sailor from the fifties. It made me smile because it was exactly how Johnny and Timmy styled their hair, so I knew they would be impressed with my son’s effort, even though he was almost bald.

  I was hoping that the new fancy outfit was for Sue, who hadn’t been by in some time and hadn’t talked to Hank on the phone either. I know, because I watched my son put in his cell phone code one night, and then I started checking his in- and outgoing calls when he wasn’t looking. On his phone I could also check his e-mail—which was mostly art-world business bullshit I will never understand—and it was clear that Hank and Sue had not been in contact. I wondered if my seizure at the art museum had fucked up everything.

  One alarming bit of news my domestic espionage turned up was the fact that Hank had been talking to Femke nightly after my meds knocked my ass out for the day, which was strange, because that would be the middle of the night for Femke, who—according to my understanding at that moment—was on Amsterdam time, so two a.m. and sometimes even later for her. There was a story there, and I knew it couldn’t be good for any American patriot anywhere, but I also knew I’d catch hell if Hank found out I was spying on him via his phone, so I couldn’t say shit to him about it. Every night I would try to stay awake so that I could catch him red-handed, but the army of pills in my system would win out and overtake my consciousness around nine p.m. like clockwork. I was out cold a half hour later.

  Me, myself, I was wearing nothing but camouflage those days. I feel safest in my lucky army-issued outfit, and I had been through a lot in a short amount of time at that juncture. My friends all understood and didn’t say anything about my dressing like a soldier. The black dudes at the fitness club sometimes wore camouflage too, which was another reason we got along, even though they had never been in the military. But I shined up my combat boots for that dinner party. That was my contribution to the night’s ambience. I also groomed my beard and used the brand-new nose-and-ear hair trimmer Hank had discreetly left on the guest-room dresser. I’m not a moron. I got that fucking hint.

  My friends all took the train into Jersey from the city, so they arrived en masse. As soon as they were in Hank’s house, Timmy and Johnny began to freak out.

  “Oh. My. God,” Johnny said, pointing at my son’s racist painting.

  “Is that an original Eggplant X?” Timmy said.

  The ends of Hank’s proud smile almost knocked his ears clear off his head as he told them all about his business relationship with his top-selling artist. It was a lucky night for Hank, because within five minutes of meeting my friends he had all but sold one of Eggplant X’s works in progress. Hank didn’t even know Timmy and Johnny’s names yet, but that didn’t stop him from inviting them both to Eggplant X’s forthcoming showing, which made them literally jump up and down. By the way they dressed and the twenty-thousand-dollar-plus matching Patek Philippe watches they each wore on their left wrists like gay wedding bands—I think they call them commitment watches or some such gay terminology, but I’m not sure—it was easy to see that Timmy and Johnny had a shit-ton of money.

  Hank loves money just like everyone else, and I appreciate that
about my son because love of money is American, but I hadn’t scheduled this dinner party to make Hank’s pockets fatter. So I said, “These are my very best gay friends, Johnny and Timmy. And this is my only son, Hank.”

  “You don’t have to announce the fact that they’re gay, Dad,” Hank fired at me in this bitchy way that Johnny and Timmy picked up on immediately.

  “Why?” Johnny said. “It’s not an insult, last time I checked.”

  Hank’s face became the eggplant in the room, he was so embarrassed to have made a faux pas. I felt a little bad for him. Like I said before, the gays are a lot like cobras, and Johnny had definitely flared his hood at my son’s attempt to embarrass me. I appreciated Johnny’s getting my back, even though I didn’t need any help when it came to putting Hank in his place.

  In an effort to deescalate the situation, I said, “Hank’s real name is Henri. I call him Hank, but he prefers Henri.”

  Johnny and Timmy nodded, and an astonished Hank said, “Wow.”

  “Why wow?” Timmy said.

  “My father has never once introduced me as Henri,” Hank said.

  “His mother named him, but she’s dead,” I said.

  “Where’s Ella?” Sue asked. Once she learned that my granddaughter was in her bedroom, my best friend was up the stairs like a mother hen to round up her chick.

  “These are for you,” Johnny said, extending a fancy bag full of wine to Hank.

  Hank looked inside and said, “These are fantastic bottles. Thank you,” which probably meant everyone but me would be drinking wine that cost at least two hundred dollars a pop, because Hank wouldn’t have been impressed if it had been anything under that.

  “If we’re going to ingest the calories, we’re going to make them count,” Timmy said. That got a good laugh, but I knew from experience that he wouldn’t take more than three sips of his wine all night, which is another reason his abs are like six little stones arranged two-by-two on a slab of marble.

  Johnny and Timmy insisted on helping Hank in the kitchen, and I sat back and watched as they made everything a little bit better, reorganizing the flowers on the table, spacing the silverware out a bit more, and doing something to Hank’s hair at one point, which made me smile for Hank, because a bleeding-heart liberal having a legitimate gay man mess with his hair is like a Catholic being blessed by the pope. Everything falls into a nice rhythm whenever Johnny and Timmy are around. The key is, you just have to let them be in control of most things, and so I always do.

  Hank asked them a million questions about how they knew me, and his jaw fell lower and lower with each one of their responses. “I had no idea that you have a subscription to the Forrest Theatre, Dad,” Hank said at one point. I asked him why he didn’t ever believe me when I said he didn’t know shit about his father.

  Sue and Ella came down the stairs, both dressed as princesses. Sue was wearing a tiara and holding a magic wand, whereas Ella had on her princess dress. Her hair was in the French braid she had asked for earlier, but I decided to let that slide too, because it looked pretty good, and Sue had undoubtedly worked really hard to get my granddaughter’s hair the way she originally wanted it. The French make everything too complicated, little girls’ hairstyles were no exception.

  Timmy and Johnny made a big deal about everything related to Ella. A lot of dumb morons think we should keep homosexuals away from our children, but that’s only because they have never seen the gays in action around kids. Johnny and Timmy have unlimited amounts of energy when it comes to talking about princesses and hairstyles and dresses and all of the other shit that Ella likes.

  While my friends were talking to my princess granddaughter, I snuck outside for a cigarette, and Hank followed me. I lit up, and he didn’t say anything at first. Then he said, “Dad, I feel like I don’t even know you.”

  “Get to know me,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  Hank gave me a confused look. I was worried that he was going to turn on the waterworks again, but instead he put his arm around me.

  “Why didn’t you ever mention Timmy and Johnny before?” he asked.

  “You never asked,” I said.

  Hank pointed to my cigarette and asked for a drag.

  “You don’t smoke,” I said.

  “I used to. Before Femke,” he said.

  I gave him a drag, even though I didn’t want him to start smoking again. Cigarette smoke is not good for Ella. I never smoke around her, but I have excellent self-control, and Hank doesn’t. My son blew the smoke through the air, and then he took another drag before he gave me back my Marlboro Light.

  “You can talk to me about anything. I won’t judge you. I’ll just listen. I’m here for you, Dad.” Hank said this in a way that made me believe he was actually sincere, but I didn’t want to get into all that horrible shit while our perfectly nice dinner party was taking place, so I just puffed on my smoke and said nothing.

  He kept his arm around me for another ten seconds or so before he gave me a squeeze and then went back inside.

  Across the street an old lady was watching me through her bay window. I waved at her, but she didn’t wave back. Instead, she pulled the curtain. Then I remembered I was in full camouflage, which sometimes makes nonmilitary types nervous.

  As I finished my cigarette, I thought about the dinner party I had cobbled together. Hank’s house had become a true melting pot. It was nice to have such a fantastic collection of friends inside, getting along with the only family I had left. I should have known better when it came to thinking everything was going good for me, because that’s always when something shitty happens, and that night was no exception.

  A cab pulled up right on cue, and that Dutch cunt Femke popped out, wearing a bright yellow coat and black leggings so that it looked like she might be naked otherwise underneath. My daughter-in-law dyes her hair vinyl-record black and keeps her bangs razorblade straight, so that they cover her eyebrows, which prevents you from knowing what mood she’s in. Her skin is completely drained of color, like all the evil witches in Ella’s cartoons.

  I immediately pointed to the cabdriver—who was wearing a little Muslim knitted cap, by the way—and told him not to leave.

  Femke asked what I was doing there, and I told her that I had moved in because Hank needed help raising Ella, now that she had abandoned her family.

  Then she called me “Aap” again and tried to push her way around me, but I held my ground and told her that Hank didn’t want to see her anymore, and neither did Ella.

  She started crying at this point, trying to trick me, but I didn’t fall for it.

  I told her that we were having a dinner party and she was cordially not invited. “Americans only,” I said.

  She pointed to my scar and asked me what happened to my head, I guess because Hank hadn’t told her, and so I filled her in on what the US government had done to me. She got tired of that story quickly, because she doesn’t give two rat shits about the USA, let alone its combat veterans. I know because in the middle of my story, she interrupted, saying she was staying at the Four Seasons, and to please have Hank contact her as soon as possible. Her fickle ass suddenly wanted to be part of my family again.

  I asked her if sex with a global warming theorist had cooled down, which I thought was a pretty good joke, but she didn’t acknowledge it. She just got in the cab, and it drove away.

  I went back inside and tried to enjoy the dinner party, but I kept feeling as though I had done something wrong, even though I knew letting Femke into Hank’s home would have absolutely destroyed our melting-pot dinner. My mind was certain that Hank would be better off with Sue, but my heart kept asking questions, especially since I knew Ella had been doing a lot of crying about missing her mother. Her sobbing had woken me up in the middle of the night a few times, and that was awful. It sounded like someone was trying to kill her in her bed, and it reminded me of the many times Jessica’s crying woke me up.

  Hank always beat me to Ella’s room, and h
e was pretty good at calming her and getting her back to sleep, but I knew it was wearing my son down, being both father and mother, especially since he had to take care of his mentally fucked-up father too, who was always having seizures and ending up in the hospital talking to crooks and skiers.

  To be honest, I can’t remember anything about the rest of that dinner party. I was too lost in my thoughts, debating whether I had done the right thing, blocking Femke from entering Hank’s home and keeping Ella from the hug and kiss she wanted so desperately from her biological Dutch mother. A few times my friends asked me if anything was wrong. I kept blaming it on the meds, until finally I said good night to everyone and went to bed.

  The next thing I knew it was three a.m., and I was awake again, feeling like I had done something wrong. I went into Hank’s bedroom and poked him. He didn’t wake up so I poked him harder. That made him sit up and say, “Ella? Are you okay?”

  When he turned on the light and saw it was me, he started to get a little pissed off, which made telling him about Femke even harder. Finally I just spilled the beans, letting him know that Femke was at the Four Seasons, and that she had tried to invade our dinner party, but I had told her she wasn’t welcome.

  Hank closed his eyes and gritted his teeth for a good minute. Finally I asked if he was okay, and that’s when he started to say he couldn’t “do this anymore,” over and over again, like he was having a breakdown himself. I didn’t know what to say, so I just stood there.