Memories of Emily: Attack of the Az Part 2
Poop Deck
Poop Deck
In the summer of 1978, my stepfather’s job necessitated my parents traveling abroad, but rather than paying a full-time babysitter, they sent me to my grandparents’ home in Baltimore City. Visits to my grandparents infrequently occurred, mostly on holidays, and this lack of familial association inspired reluctance to stay there. New experiences prophesized painful outcomes like boating, but to my surprise, summer days at my grandparents’ provided a mostly peaceful learning experience.
Arriving at my grandparents armed with action figures, The Antediluvian World, and some clothes, I felt prepared for return to the motherland. Staying with my grandparents represented a homecoming of sorts, having been born in Baltimore, where my original home on Howard Street stood a few blocks from my grandparents’ home on twenty-seventh street in Remington. The Howard Street home fragmented into unrecognizable flashes of my blood father and ghoulish visions of roaches crawling in my food scored to my mother’s incessant screaming. Those memories grew increasingly questionable in chronology and accuracy as that place continued being enveloped in the forgotten, especially since my mother refused to speak of it except indirectly as “The hell from which your stepfather saved us.”
Upon return to my birthplace, I quickly realized the communication gap with my relatives as they said things like, “Hon, get me a glaz of wadder from da zink.” The language of Baltimoron seemed difficult at first, but I soon proudly reclaimed the ancestral tongue with little effort and expertly wielded the vernacular as if I never left. My grandmother, saying, “Jeet-nuf? Gud. Go on out to da stoop and ax yer uncle to run to da druckstewer an geet me sum aspern,” translated, “Did you eat enough? Good. Go on out to the stoop, (the step outside the front door), and ask your uncle to run to the drugstore and get me some aspirin.”
A few days of language learning shifted into the family history, specifically the history of my blood father, a topic never broached with my mother after encountering tremendous aggression in the past. While my mother didn’t like speaking of him, my uncles did not mind at all.
My uncles stood above six feet, appearing like fearsome giants, but their intimidating frames contrasted strongly with friendly dispositions making them likable and easy to approach. Family education began with my uncle Jabal who earned the name Scoop by delivering newspapers for a living. Scoop delivered the Sunday Sun in high school, and upon graduation, he exchanged his bicycle for a pickup truck to continue a newspaper delivery career. He told me about my father while we cleaned his pickup. “You’re an Eye-talian.” He stopped spraying a hose into the bed of his pickup and pretended to throw a bag. “You’re named after three pounds of shit stuffed in a bread bag thrown against a wall. WOP!”
Scoop often spoke in this odd manner which made me laugh. “I’ll see you all in the funny papers,” or, “What’s up with your stepfather? Is he black or mulatto?”
I shrugged, not understanding “mulatto.”
“I’ve been trying to figure this out because he looks mostly white, but he has sort of a fro maybe. He acts awful white like he might be able to fool a Klan member.”
My uncle Joed, nicknamed Three-Point, earned his name in high school, shooting three-point shots in basketball. Scoop told me this story, “Three-Point sucked at basketball. He couldn’t dribble or anything, so he just practiced shooting three-point shots from the top of the key. To this day, he can only make baskets from that position and is useless anywhere else on the court.”
Questioning Three-Point about my father provided more information. “Your dad is a deadbeat. He’s a gambling fool. I never seen anyone bet and lose on horses like he did. Well, you better believe when he was still in the picture, your mom had no problem coming around here needing favors. I guess your mom thinks she’s better than all of us now that she married into some money.”
Not knowing much about gambling, I continued inquiring about my father. My uncle Joel, nicknamed Steelhead, added a more colorful input to the family dialogue. Steelhead earned his name by roaring down Charles Street on his chopper at a hundred miles an hour in a police chase ending in a crash necessitating a cranioplasty to hold his brain in his skull so he could go to jail.
I found Steelhead sitting in his room in the basement with a girl drinking beer and sticking needles in their arms. The girl aimlessly rolled about the floor laughing as Steelhead leaned back in a chair. “Man, your mom married into a lot of bread. You think they’d give us a slice?”
Not understanding Steelhead, I sought out my uncle Ishhod who went by Babyface: a name that held no mystery as his head looked like an infant’s head someone placed on a grown man’s body. Babyface enlightened me on the dad subject while repairing his car in the alley behind my grandmother’s house. “Don’t listen to those Baltimorons. They might be your uncles, but they have their heads in their asses. Your real dad, Vito, was Italian. Italians are kind of a weird group because they’re not quite white, and maybe that explains why Vito named all his kids “Vito” as their first name. Maybe it’s an Italian custom to name every son the same name; I don’t know. Luckily for you, he left, and your mother changed your name from Vito Vincent to Vincent Vito. It ain’t great, but it’s better. Your nickname is what baffles me. Somehow, your mother came up with Bo, which she claimed made you sound tough, but I have no idea what she was thinking.
“Now going back to you dad, last I heard, he was in New York, and you have a sister and at least two brothers who are both named Vito. Most people will tell you it sucks your dad left you, but I’m telling you — you’re blessed. The only thing Vito did was gamble on horses. Pimlico should’ve given him a VIP box for all the money he spent at that track.
“While you can consider yourself lucky your real dad is gone, your stepfather’s an ass. He acts like he’s white because he wants to get ahead at his job. He’s been acting that way so long he actually thinks he’s a white person. I think he looks down on coloreds more than he looks down on us.
“Now, to tell you just how stupid he is, next time you go inside, take a hard look at your grandfather. If you notice- Hey, get me another beer out of the cooler.”
Reaching into the icy water, I pulled a can and held it under the hood.
He grabbed the beer and cracked the tab. “Thanks. Now if you notice, your grandfather is almost as dark as the tar on the roof, but he ain’t actually black. He’s Indian. Although us kids all take after mom, we’re all actually half-Indian. So that makes you half WOP, a quarter Indian, and a quarter German. That makes your stepfather an asshole because if there is any fucking house he should feel comfortable in, it should be this one. Instead, he looks at all of us like we're trailer trash, which one or two of us might be.”
This conversation caused much deep reflection as imagining myself as the sci-fie version of the Lone Ranger or Shane morphed to visions of Tonto and the Indians. This new association confused me because the Indians always appeared dumb and violent on TV, which sharply contradicted how I characterized my uncles except maybe Steelhead. The Indians also constantly got killed, which didn’t appeal to me, but unable to escape the counterintuitive nature of being a cowboy, space cowboy lost practicality. I wondered if the Rebel Alliance accepted space Indians.
The first few nights in Baltimore, fear of wetting the bed caused sleeplessness from frequent bathroom trips, even when not feeling the need to go. Thankfully, the bedwetting ended on the visit’s third day after meeting my uncle Cain.
My uncle Cain didn’t say much on the matter of family. Cain didn’t say much about anything due to being, as my uncles said, "loose in the head" after Vietnam. My uncle Three-Point once explained Cain’s issue, “Whatever Cain saw in Vietnam, made him bonkers.”
The Veterans Administration paid Cain monthly due to his loose-head condition that rendered him incapable of work, and he spent much of his time milling about the stoop or resting in his room upstairs. A tremor in his hands made manipulating things like tools difficult, and after he took medication, he fidgeted and paced, looking uncomfortable.
Cain’s quiet nature appealed to me because he offered no hostility, and he bought me peanut butter Tastykakes, which became a daily habit of buying at the corner store along with eating silently together on the stoop. Cain always treated me well, but people avoided him.
Just three days into the visit, a neighbor boy, Donnie, stole two of my Star Wars figures while playing on the stoop by myself. He parked his bike and snatched Darth Vader and Gredo off the marble step, throwing up his fist. “What? What are you going to do?”
I went inside and told my grandmother, and she yelled from the kitchen, “Cain!” Cain lumbered down the stairs and reported to my grandmother. “Cain, that Donnie delinquent stole Bo’s toys.”
Following Cain outside and down the street to a different rowhome, we found Donnie setting the kickstand of his bike, which toppled over upon seeing Cain. Cain grabbed his neck and threw him to the ground as he tried to run into the house. “What did I tell you about stealing from us?”
Donnie fumbled the action figures out of his pockets, tossing them towards me, to which Cain responded by gripping the front of Donnie’s shirt, yanking him from the ground, and shaking him. “If I catch you or any of your brothers near my house again, I’ll fucking kill you.”
Donnie cried and peed himself. Cain pushed him away and tapped my shoulder. “Come on. Let’s go.”
When he pushed Donnie away and turned towards me, the distant empty look in Cain’s eyes opened a portal to a place of all-consuming darkness that terrified me more than my stepfather, and I never again looked too deeply into those eyes. Turning back as we walked away, Donnie cried with the front of his pants soiled with urine.
The Donnie incident further enlightened the rules and their application since my family believed and enforced the rules. My aunt Adah, who my uncles claimed, “knew everyone’s business,” came by in the evening to eat dinner after work, and she highlighted some of the rules unknown to me. “Donnie’s mom told Wanda, who told me that Cain threatened Donnie. I told Wanda to tell Donnie’s mom that Donnie is a juvenile delinquent and needed some tough love.”
My uncles and grandparents agreed between shoveling fried chicken and potatoes in their mouths while Adah pointed her fork in the air. “If you want to play, you got to pay, is what I said. Donnie needs to pick on people his own size.”
I knew some of the rules from Beretta and some from my parents, like “don’t cry like a sissy,” but clearly, there were more rules. The rules already held much confusion, like when someone beat me at school, my stepfather said, "stand up for myself," but when I did, fighting at school incurred punishment. I listened to the conversation trying to make sense of the rules as my grandmother taught me the value of putting butter on everything by decorating slices of bread and other foods before sliding them on my plate. “He needs to learn to defend himself. His parents are making him a sissy.”
My grandmother’s assertion didn’t feel good, but at least my sissyhood was not of my doing, and despite not understanding them, the rules had a purpose, which lessened somewhat the confusion. That night passed without peeing the bed.
My grandmother held an ancient aspect perhaps caused by her many medical conditions such as diabetes and heart failure. Despite her infirmed nature, she maintained a strong composure, rarely speaking except to assert some truth. She mostly cooked and could easily be found in the kitchen preparing a meal since feeding my five uncles and aunt required a lot of food. All but Cain and Steelhead had their own homes, but one wouldn’t know this fact since everyone frequented my grandparents’ house all the time, especially at breakfast and dinner when everyone packed around the table that overflowed food.
On laundry days, I helped with the chores that began at sunrise by turning mountains of bacon in a large cast-iron skillet filled with hot, popping grease. Eggs or pancakes, sometimes both, cooked on a flat, cast-iron pan as toast jumped from the toaster that I reloaded between placing orange juice and milk on the table.
Breakfast ended with washing dishes, which I enjoyed since I could use the hose on the sink to blast the plates. Dish-play ended shortly as the laundry needed tending. My uncles and aunts piled dirty laundry near the old washing machine that pumped water from the runoff hose into the kitchen sink. The washer ran while my grandmother and I swept, mopped, vacuumed, and dusted all the furniture except the living room’s plastic-covered furnishings reserved for special guests who never came.
Before lunch, we hung the clothes in the backyard to dry. From the back porch, the clothesline ran to a pole on the opposite side of the yard, and my grandmother worked the squeaking clothesline sending clothes into the yard as she sang an old work song.
Adios — run away
Ms., I seen today
Dirge’s lead the way
Iron works decay
Work and days
Work and days
Lies, lies, and lies away
Sly’s the new dog’s way
Work, work, work no play
Work his will and pray
Work and days
Work and days
The clothes dried while my grandmother kept a watchful eye on the soaps playing on the television as she gave a Baltimoron food lesson. “You’re from Baltimore, and you eat crabs. We eat crab on just about everything. I keep a jar of crab hidden in the back of the frig. Go get the crab meat, a tomato, and the mayo.”
I placed the items on the table, and she sliced the tomato thin. “Good. Now, take the butter knife and push the mayo all around both sides of the bread and then you take Old Bay and a little pepper and sprinkle it on the mayo. Why do you do that?”
I shook my head.
“Because the mayo holds the spice, so it don’t fall off the sandwich. Now you put your crab meat on one slice and then put a little more mayo on top of the meat. On the other slice, put your slices of tomato tight in mayo. Put a little more mayo on the tomato and lay your lettuce on top. See, mayo is sandwich glue. Put a little more mayo on either the meat or the lettuce, and you’re ready to glue them together. Good. Now you can make all kinds of sandwiches using all kinds of glues like horseradish, mustard, jelly, honey, and peanut butter.”
Finished with the art of sandwich making, we watched TV and folded laundry until needing to prepare dinner. A bag of potatoes required washing, chopping, and soaking in water, and many a cow, chicken, and fish met a battered, deep-fried fate depending on my grandmother’s desire. Green beans and other vegetables soaked in water, waiting to be cooked, while the oven relentlessly heated cakes, pies, or loaves of bread. My grandmother pointed to the washer as she chopped steak. “You take the folded laundry and place it along the wall by the stairs, so it's not underfoot in the kitchen, and I’ll fry the steak. Everybody will be here soon.”
The smell of fried steak mixed with other foods made me ravenous by the time everyone arrived and filled the table. Once dinner finished, my grandmother and I cleared the table, washed dishes, then sat to eat cake while my uncles and aunt gathered around the stoop as my grandfather half-slept watching the news. She pushed a slice of angel food cake towards me and rested her head on the table. Lacking an appetite, I slid the cake away and rested my head on the table, tired and worn.
A short, dark-skinned, native American man, my grandfather never spoke of being Indian or belonging to a tribe. He never spoke of much of anything, maintaining an enigmatic stoicism. When my grandfather broke his silence, his words rang decisive and honest in their brevity. Once, a traveling preacher encountered my grandfather at the front door. “Sir, do you have a minute to discuss the teachings of Jesus Christ?”
“No, we’re all the sons of bitches God kicked out, and we ain’t beggin’ to go back.” My grandfather slammed the door.
His religion was work evidenced by the carpenters’ pants, work shirt, and tape measure he wore seven days a week. Appearing ready to leap up and start work at any moment, my grandfather reminded me of my stepfather with his singular view of life through work’s lens. This view may have been erroneous since my grandfather worked hard but had nothing to show for his effort other than the rowhome in Baltimore and an old house in Chipley, Florida. His lack of wealth didn’t seem to bother him. “The so-called Great Depression didn’t mean much to me. I had nothing going in and nothing coming out. Still don’t.”
Retired from carpentry, my grandfather spent most of his days performing odd jobs for neighbors or around the home. His regimented schedule began with breakfast and reading the newspaper front to back which was the only thing my grandfather read. One Sunday, while I read the comics, he lowered the paper and tapped the table, stealing my attention from the colorful animations. “You know, I taught myself to read using the paper. I didn’t have the luxury of school like you do. We were so poor I went to work full-time to support my mother and sisters when my dad died. I was nine when that happened.” He returned to reading the paper as he did every day.
He never went to church, Sunday or not, and never spoke of God unless provoked by someone like the door-to-door preacher. He instead watched the television evangelists on Sunday — all day. The montage of screaming preachers and godly men in suits drove my uncles into the backyard to drink beer and work on cars and motorcycles while my grandmother went upstairs and slept most of the day. My grandfather sat fixed in front of the television, appearing to resent the men of God yet continued watching them as if they were a chore. On Sunday evenings, he retired to the back porch to spit tobacco, and sometimes I sat with him, curious as to why he never sat on the stoop with my uncles and aunt.
“I’m not a Baltimoron like some of your uncles and your grandmother. I’m a Florida cracker, and we don’t sit on the stoop and smoke cigarettes; we sit on the porch and chew tobacco. In Florida, we sit on the front or back porch, not on a marble step on the front of the house. That’s just stupid, but you’re a Baltimoron, so that’s what you do.”
“Why?”
“Well, Babyface and Cain were born in Florida along with your aunt Adah and your mother. That makes them crackers. Everyone born in Baltimore, well, really Maryland, are Baltimorons. Now, if you’re smart, you’ll just go about the business of being a Baltimoron and accept that as your lot in life. If your stupid, you’ll pretend you’re something you’re not, and this will get you in trouble. Take your uncle Three-Point as an example. He’s a Baltimoron, but years ago, while staying at the house in Florida, he tried to be a cracker and wrestle an alligator. He’s a big boy, but an alligator is an alligator, and cracker or not, wrestling one is a bad idea. He tried to latch onto the gator’s jaws to hold them shut, but that gator swung his tail around, breaking every bone in your uncle’s knee, leaving it held together with steel pins and hope. You see what I’m saying?”
“I guess.”
“Alright, let me put it like this; your uncle Scoop is a Baltimoron, and years ago, he lived in Florida for a few weeks after high school. He got it in his mind to climb a palm tree. He learned to climb the palm tree pretty good, but being a Baltimoron, he decided to have a contest with a cracker who’d been climbing palm trees since the moment he come out the womb. Overconfident in his climbing ability, Scoop ended up falling out of the palm tree. He was already a little slow in the head, and the fall didn’t help matters. The point is, if you’re a Baltimoron, you don’t climb palm trees and wrestle alligators, and if you’re a cracker, you don’t sit on the stoop and smoke. You are what you are for better or worse. You get it?”
“Yes.”
When my grandfather wasn’t spitting tobacco and philosophizing the differences between Baltimorons and crackers, he worked. Sometimes he took my uncle Steelhead, yelling into the basement early in the morning, “Let’s go.”
Steelhead rushed upstairs to avoid making my grandfather wait since my grandfather lacked diplomacy. Once the next-door neighbor, Jeff, decided to argue with my grandfather about something to do with the fence dividing the backyards, and whatever the issue, my grandfather tried to end the argument as politely as possible. “The fence is fine. I’m not spending money to fix what ain’t broke, Jeff.”
Jeff didn’t like this response and continued arguing, but after a few seconds of listening, my grandfather punched him in the head so hard Jeff’s temple jetted blood everywhere. Jeff grew angry but went in his house, and I never saw him again.
My uncle Steelhead and my grandfather painted window frames on the rowhome across the street while I watched from the stoop of my grandparents’ house. My grandfather climbed the ladder after telling Steelhead to steady the ladder, but one of the neighborhood girls walked by, and Steelhead let go of the ladder while talking to her. Shifting his weight on the ladder caused the ladder to kick, making my grandfather lose balance and fall two stories.
Jumping from the ground, my grandfather clenched Steelhead’s shirt pulling my uncle down to bloody his nose and lips before pointing down the street. “Go get the car and take me to the hospital.”
My grandfather only took off a day after hurting his back, and we sat on the back porch eating pork sandwiches for lunch. The silence erupting from this small-framed man made him large and powerful. My grandfather’s self-contained nature depended on nothing and divined all truths internally, making him fearless, even to the men of God. His internal universe held no conflict and perpetually resolved itself, which I didn’t understand but witnessed in a peaceful strength that distinguished him from other people unless provoked. Whatever created this placidity remained a mystery since he felt no need or urgency to speak of it, except rarely in self-devised adages, “You don’t need to say what’s already known," and "Everyone’s got to learn to live life of their own accord.”
Unlike my parents and teachers, who often contradicted themselves in words, actions, and rules, my grandfather spoke and acted deliberate and forthright in all things. For a man who said little, he articulated volumes of meaning.
Remington neighbored a rough area known as Hampden, which my grandmother often warned, “Stay out of that area. There’s Klan over there.”
Whether the Ku Klux Klan lived in Hampden, I didn’t know, but for certain, people in Hampden didn’t like outsiders: black or white. My family often referred to Hampden as the Mecca of white trash, which I didn’t understand until I visited Hampden with my uncle Scoop to buy a tool carried by a hardware store in the area.
While walking along a strip of stores, a commotion erupted in front of us as six white men surrounded a black man. They held the man against the glass of the storefront as he bled from his nose and lips while the leader of the white men stuck his finger in the man’s face. “Don’t walk on this street.”
My uncle Scoop tugged my shoulder, directing me across the street. “Come on.”
I looked back at the scene that reminded me of Earl blocking my path at school, forcing me to listen to ridicule. The man’s eyes showed a tired stare of futility and exasperation that held some knowledge I didn’t, and he shouldn’t understand.
The girl next door was my age and went by the name Micky, like the mouse. Her name derived from her ears popping out like saucers when she pulled back her hair. Mickey stayed with her grandparents on Mondays and Thursdays when her mom dropped her off, and my grandmother freed me of chores to play with Micky.
Our friendship began on perilous footing when I revealed to Micky The Antediluvian World explaining in great detail the volume’s importance, but she rolled her eyes as if enduring the most pedestrian novel ever written and issued an absurd and unfounded literary critique. “That’s dumb.”
Moving past this difference in opinion, we found common ground in life circumstances and toys. Micky’s father, like mine, left when she was little, which we never discussed, but Micky’s grandmother and another neighbor did discuss while smoking. While we played on the stoop, Micky’s grandmother stood a few feet away, narrating wildly with her cigarette. “He doesn't ever come see Micky. I told Jackie not to go out with him, not because he was black, you know, but because I just knew he was bad news.”
The neighbor lit a cigarette. “Doesn’t he work at Sparrows Point?”
“Yes, so there’s no excuse for him not paying more in child support since the coloreds got guaranteed equal pay at Bethlehem Steel back in seventy-four.”
The adults talked while Micky displayed Barbie dolls, which I informed her were okay but did not compare with action figures. Micky protested, revealing her obsession with Captain Caveman. Standing on the stoop with her long, frizzy hair bouncing, she pointed at the toys. “Captain Cave Girl! Unga bunga!”
Believing the focus of our play shifted, I stood. “Captain Caveman!”
Mickey shook her head. “Men are chromags.”
“Huh?”
“Mom says men are chromags, not cavemen.”
Not understanding, I returned to the original debate of Barbie versus action figure superiority. I acknowledged her objections to my belief in the inferiority of Barbies, and she sat on the stoop, willing to compromise by holding many theatrical performances where action figures fought the giant Barbie monster.
Days with Micky passed watching Captain Caveman in the afternoon before holding theatre, which went well apart from the occasional Captain Cave Girl outburst. Either mine or Mickey’s grandmother made us lunch with tall plastic cups with Kool-Aid as we held masterpiece theatre eating sandwiches and sipping ambrosia on the stoop. Life was good, until,
“Nappy heads!”
Mickey and I turned to see an older boy and girl standing a few feet away. Rex and his sister Kim had straight hair and took offense to our curly hair with Kim scowling. “Nappy head punks.”
Kim took off her wooden shoe and began beating me, sending Mickey screaming to her grandmother, but Rex caught her at the door and pulled down the back of her pants, revealing her ass just as Kim smashed my eye with her clog sending me to the ground. The commotion brought my grandmother armed with her shoe in hand, which was not wood but a viable weapon, evidenced by the beating that sent those kids running home in tears.
At dinner, my grandmother made me hold an ice bag to my swollen eye as she expressed displeasure over the situation with Rex and Kim. “Somebody needs to teach him how to fight. He’s getting beat up by girls.”
The following Saturday, my uncle Babyface, being the best fighter amongst my uncles, walked me to the nearby Wyman Park to teach me to fight. Babyface looked me up and down when we arrived. “Okay, I kind of see the problem. You’re thin and weak. That’s okay because you just ain’t hit your growth spurt yet. In a few years, you’re going to pop up tall, and you’ll be able to hit people and hurt them. Until then, you might take a few ass whippings. Now, because people bigger than you are going to start fights, the object is not to win. You just need to protect yourself and inflict enough pain to make it not worth their effort. The way to do this is to put your fists up to block when they hit you. They’re probably going to get through if they’re bigger than you, but you won’t take the full shot. Raise your fists like this.”
Raising my fists to guard, he threw some light punches while I blocked. “Good job. Now, clench your fist and make sure your thumb is tucked behind your fingers but not under them. You don’t want to break your thumb. Good. Now throw some punches at my hand and imagine Rex’s face. Good.”
Babyface aligned my shoulders better, and we continued practicing. “Now, you need to understand the rules.”
Finally, someone would clarify the nonsensical rules.
“Bo, you need to know you can’t go around beating on people who are weaker than you. You can’t hit people without a good reason, and you don’t take cheap shots at people. Like if a man is asleep or hurt, you don’t go hitting him.”
I nodded.
“The most important rule that defines you as a real man is to never hit a girl. Most girls are not as big and strong as you, and hitting a woman makes a guy a coward. If a girl like Kim tries to hit you, you just got to run away or find some other way to get out of the situation.”
I nodded.
Babyface stopped for a moment and stared inquisitively. “There’s always going to be someone bigger and stronger than you. There’s always going to be someone to test you to see if you’ll stand up to them: sometimes even your own family. If you don’t stand up to the Man, he’ll take everything from you. He’ll take your toys, home, family, humanity, and soul. It’s just the way things are.”