“I’m what?” Mock horror. Mock indignation. Mock mockery.
“I said, Dad, that you are all yak and no shack.” I didn’t know what I meant, but I liked how tough it sounded.
“The things that come out of your mouth.” He snorted. “Where do you get them?” In mock fury, he commanded, “Get your tush over here. Right now, you little… you little… you little you.”
He shook his head gravely, freighting the final pronoun, you with extra volume and vocal emphasis, so that the you by whom he meant me almost sounded like it referred to something special. Like some languages had one you for politely addressing outside-people and another you for informally addressing inside-people; other languages had one you for speaking to superiors and another you for speaking to subordinates; English — rather, my Dad’s peculiar delivery of English — conferred upon me a separate, specific second-person pronoun. It sounded and was spelled the same as other you’s, but Dad’s you as in, “you little… you,” referred just to My very own second-person pronoun! Now that was one tremendous gift if there ever was one.
But even having my very own personal pronoun was risky, because it’s pretty tough to keep stopped-hope stopped up when you are getting all youed up, when someone you really like keeps promising you scary, fun, exciting stuff — and even tougher for the of that moment to remain securely devoid of hope, to make smart, self-denying decisions with Dad youing me — the long ooo of it broad and extended, like a hand.
“Now,” he announced, rubbing his hands together — like a man who’s busted his ass all week, eaten crow at a job he hates, but it’s Friday, and his dinner at Abbracciamento on the Pier, a thick steak pizzaiolo, fatty, bloody meat sizzling, cheese bubbling, is being served by a hot-to-trot miniskirt, he’s salivating, thinking, this is gonna be yummy — “we start practicing.” Before I noticed his swift crouch and downward reach, he’d grabbed my ankles and flipped me, along with the rest of the visible world, upside down. Queasy with suddenness, I tried focusing hard, to keep everything from whirling too wildly, on the paint-splatters everywhere covering his stumble-proof, good-luck work boots. Together, we slid to the floor. I righted myself to sitting too fast; my subadequately upholstered tush — a bony butt without cushioning ocks — banged to the linoleum. “We gotta be prepared,” he declared. “I’m gonna need some big muscles if we’re gonna do this.”
I was a weedy child at sixty pounds. My father was a bridgeman. A workingman. To work, in the true, original sense, meant to move heavy objects, to transfer energy from one system to another, causing an object, against its own resistance and stationary inertia, to move. Work called for muscle, math, multiplication. Work was the product of the force used to move something stubbornly heavy and the distance the object had successfully moved in the direction of that force. Dad had been working for a long time.
His biceps were strip steaks, marbled not with fat, but lined with web-works of veins materializing from under his skin. “Put them back! Put them back inside!” I’d cry, when I was little — which, by the time I turned eight, I adamantly decreed I wasn’t, not anymore — while futilely pushing and pressing individual bulging veins back underneath his skin to keep him intact, to return his veins to their proper place inside, where all matters blood-related belonged. And Dad’s thighs and calves were sometimes hard to look at without contemplating mint jelly.
The man had muscle. Nonetheless, he was determined to bench-press me, sans bench, every night. For strength. For practice. A delaying tactic, I understood later, but then, like a fool, I’d already reversed my own prior, better judgment. Stupidly, I again hoped, and I believed that his teasing promise had finally and for real tipped away from the tease toward its promise: the bridge — although I would have gone with him anywhere. I would have had to have gone with him anywhere. Lucky, lucky me: As it happened, I’d been hungering to go up on a bridge with him for years, but if he’d have wanted to go somewhere else, or if he’d have wanted to do something else, there wouldn’t have been much else for me, other than to go, and to do.
After dinner we’d meet in the living room for practicing. He’d go horizontal on the floor, stretching his arms to their widest span. Like a career waiter, deftly steadying a sterling tray, piled nearly to toppling with fragile tableware, he’d broaden and flatten his right hand’s fingers, balancing me delicately, without a flinch, at the bony hollows of my throat and chest. I’d soften my scrawny structure, make myself pliant. When he’d stabilized my torso, he’d wrap his flung left palm around my ankles for lift-off. Muscles and veins popping out all over him, our bodies perpendicular, his arms pumped my body — first up and aloft, far from his, then down, low and close — up and down, up and down until I was flying and falling, flying and falling, breathless, giddy, shrieking, stoned with giggles. He grunted with pretend exertion, like it was so laborious. When he decided we were finished — always, always, he made this determination unilaterally, so I could never anticipate when the end was approaching and temper my wishes accordingly — he lowered me, I rolled off him, and he moaned, exhaling gigantically, like he was so winded.
Bedtime followed. He’d toss me like a gunny sack over one shoulder and carry me firefighter-style to the living room couch, which was my bed, right there in the room where we practiced. Not far to get to my bed. No transitional cooling-off time. After the wild velocity and proximity of practicing, the end’s abruptness, the severance accompanying his “Goodnight, you” — separations always hitting the one who stays behind harder than they hit the one who goes on ahead — I’d marinate in a living room redolent with breath, heat, his man-smell, my flannelly kid-having-fun smell, while he went away to his own bedroom. I’d have trouble falling asleep in that still-buzzing living room. Overstimulated, alone, all jagged up, for hours I’d twist myself into pretzels of indecision.
Should I or shouldn’t I? I shouldn’t. I shouldn’t. I knew that I shouldn’t.
Much later on, comfortable without the burden and benefit of empirical evidence to negate or support my hypothesis, I’d maintain that sexual acts per se were meager foreplay for the truer pleasure, the deeper intimacy, of shared sleep. Whoever has access to a helpless, sleeping body owns it, controls it, can do anything to it, so it was natural that I’d only ever slept with Dad. Sleeping with him was bad. I knew that. I also knew that bad things weren’t necessarily wrong things, but interrupting his sleep was criminal; if we’d had religion, it would have been sinful. Hours before completely confessing to my sorry self that I’d already decided to go ahead and do it, I’d cringe with the afterward-shame, the dirty regret that should have sunk in later — or the next morning, his eyes still bloodshot, his features absent of all signs of being rested — and which should have deterred me. I hated myself for interfering with his sleep, even more so for loving to do it. For exploiting the wakeful one’s God-like power of ultimate say-so over a defenseless body. He worked very hard at a dangerous job to keep me housed, schooled, fed, clothed. He needed rest. Badly. Too often, always knowing better, I couldn’t defeat the urge to do wrong, especially once the light appeared, and I’d re-remember that not having closed my eyes during the night would neither retard nor prevent the arrival of the too-bright morning, of another next day with unbounded possibilities to be survived or not.