I know he didn’t have to do it. He didn’t have to do anything for me. If you ever hear me complain about the man, don’t lose sight of that bottom line, okay? Here’s the first problem, though. If you want to start your life over, you need to move more than fifty miles away. Fifty miles is not far enough to get away from your old life, or to avoid having everyone you meet still know you as the person you were.
It’s not nearly far enough if you’ve already become famous for something you want to forget forever.
And the town of Milford itself… well, I know it’s a yuppie little “exurb” now, but back then it was still just a working-class little hick town with a Main Street that ran cockeyed under a railroad bridge. No matter how many flashing lights and big yellow signs they put up, they probably averaged two or three accidents every month. Just from the drunken idiots who couldn’t negotiate that sudden little jog in the road that took you within inches of the concrete embankments. Hell, just my uncle’s customers alone… because his liquor store was right next to the bridge. Lito’s Liquors. On the other side was a restaurant called the Flame. If you’ve ever eaten at a Denny’s, just imagine that same dining experience except with food that’s about half as good. You’d think I wouldn’t have ever eaten there more than once, like most people, but because the Flame was so close to the liquor store, and because there was this one waitress my uncle had a thing for. Anyway, it sounds like an old joke, but if there was anything that would have ever gotten me to finally speak up, it would have been the food at the Flame.
Beyond that, there was a park down Main Street with rusty old swing sets and monkey bars you’d be a fool to touch without a tetanus shot. The park sloped down to the Huron River, which was littered with old tires and shopping carts and stacks of newspapers still in their bindings. There was a bank against the river where the railroad ran over it, and that’s where the kids from the high school hung out at night, blasting their car radios, drinking beer, smoking pot, whatever.
I know, you think I’m probably exaggerating. If you saw Milford now, you’d think I was crazy, with all the upscale housing developments they’ve got there now, and Main Street with all its antiques and healthy sandwich wraps and salons. There’s a big white gazebo in the park now. They do concerts there in the summer. If you tried to smoke a joint under the railroad bridge now, the cops would be there in three seconds.
It was a different place back then, is what I’m trying to say. A lonely place, especially for a kid just turning nine years old. With no parents. Living in a strange house with a man he barely knew. Uncle Lito had this little one-story thing behind the store, this sad little house with mint green aluminum siding. He took the poker table out of the back room, and that became my bedroom. “Guess we won’t be playing poker here anymore,” he said as he showed me the room for the first time. “But you know what? I was losing money most of the time, so maybe I should thank you.”
He reached out his hand to me. It was a gesture I’d come to know well. It was like a playful slap or maybe the way you’d knock your best buddy on the shoulder. You know, a little horseplay between two guys, but more tentative, like he didn’t want to touch me too hard. Or like he was leaving open the possibility that I’d step closer and he could turn it into an awkward sideways hug.
I could tell Uncle Lito was trying hard to figure out what to do with me. “We’re just a couple of bachelors,” he said to me on more than one occasion. “Living off the fat of the land, eh? What do you say we go to the Flame and get a bite to eat.” As if the Flame’s food qualified as the fat of the land. We’d sit in the booth and Uncle Lito would run down his day to me in great detail, how many bottles of this or that he sold and what he needed to reorder. I’d sit there completely silent. Of course. Whether I was really listening to him, it didn’t seem to matter much. He just kept up his end of a one-sided conversation, pretty much every waking moment.
“Whaddya say, Mike? You think we need to do some laundry today?”
“Time to go to work, Mike. Another day, another dollar. You feel like hanging around in the back while I clean things up a bit?”
“Getting low on supplies here, Mike. I think we need a trip to the store. Whaddya say we pick up a couple of honeys while we’re out, eh? Bring ’em back here? Have a party?”
This habit of his, this jabbering on and on all the time… it’s the kind of thing I’d run into a lot, wherever I went. People who naturally like to talk, it takes them a minute to get used to me, but once they do they just turn it on and never turn it off. God forbid there be one moment of silence.
The quiet people, on the other hand… I usually make them uncomfortable as hell, because they know they can’t compete with me. I’ll out-quiet anybody, in any venue for any stakes. I’m the undisputed champion of keeping my mouth shut and just sitting there like a piece of furniture.
Okay, so I had to feel sorry for myself for a little while there. Put the pen down and lie on my bunk. Stare at the ceiling. That always helps. Try it sometime if you don’t believe me. Next time you find yourself in a cage for a few years. Anyway, back to the story. I won’t drag you through all the doctor visits I sat through. All the speech therapists, the counselors, the psychologists… Looking back on it, I must have been the ultimate wet dream for these people. To every one of them, I was the sad, silent, totally lost kid with the messy hair and the big brown eyes. The Miracle Boy who hadn’t said one word since that fateful day he cheated death. With the right treatment, the right coaching, the right amount of understanding and encouragement… that doctor or speech therapist or counselor or psychologist would find the magic key to unlock my wounded psyche, and I’d end up bawling in their arms while they stroked my hair and told me that everything was finally going to be all right.
That’s what they all wanted from me. Each and every one. Believe me, they weren’t going to get it.
Whenever we’d leave a new doctor’s office, Uncle Lito would have a new diagnosis to recite to himself on the way home. “Selective mutism.” “Psychogenic aphonia.” “Traumatically induced laryngeal paralysis.” Really, in the end, they all amounted to exactly the same thing. For whatever reason, I had simply decided to stop talking.
When people find out I grew up behind a liquor store, the first thing they ask me is how many times the place got robbed. Every time, guaranteed. The first question I get. The answer? Exactly once.
It was that first year after I moved in with him. One of the first warm nights of that summer. The parking lot was empty, aside from Uncle Lito’s ancient two-tone Grand Marquis with the big dent in the back bumper. This man, he came in and took one quick lap around the store, making sure the place was really as empty as it looked. He stopped dead when he saw me standing in the doorway to the back room.
Now technically, I wasn’t supposed to be on the premises at all. I was nine years old then, and this was a liquor store. But Uncle Lito didn’t have a lot of options, at least not in the evenings. Most of the time I’d sit in my little spot in the back room. My “office,” as Uncle Lito called it, with walls made from empty boxes stacked five feet high, and a reading lamp. I’d sit back there and read every night, mostly comic books that I’d get from a store down the street, until it was time to go home to bed.
So even though I wasn’t supposed to be there at all, let alone every night, who was going to bust us? Everybody in town knew my story. Everybody knew Uncle Lito was doing the best job he could with me, with no real help from anyone else. So people left us alone.
The man stood there for a long time, looking down at me. He had freckles and light red hair.
“You need any help back there, friend?” Uncle Lito’s voice from the front of the store.