18. At My Cousins’ Apartment in New York

At my cousins’ apartment in New York City, the adults were in the kitchen laughing. I was in the bedroom with my cousin Linda talking about Bobby Sherman. Linda was trying to explain to me why he was so good. She said it was part his voice, and part the good songs he sang, but mostly his personality. She played me one his songs as she showed me a picture from one of her magazines and asked, “You can see it, right? Look at him. He just looks so…nice. You know he would be nice to you, if you met him and talked to him.”

These cousins were from my mother’s side of the family. Linda was just a year older than me, and Ellen was the exact same age as my brother. My mother and my Aunt Jane, my mother’s sister, used to joke about being pregnant at the same time, trying to get around on the subways with a two-year old (me) and three-year old (Linda) also in tow.

My brother and my cousin Ellen were in the bedroom, too, watching television. Ellen yelled to turn it off when Linda played the Bobby Sherman song, even though Linda played it really low so it wouldn’t bother them. I wondered if it would have been worth having to share a bedroom with my brother if it meant we could have our own TV in there.

“I think me and my friends would beat up any boy who wore that necklace thing,” I said to Linda, as I looked at his picture in her magazine.

Linda tsked. “It’s called a choker. And it looks good on him. You’re just making fun.”

“I am,” I admitted to her.

“Yeah, well, how would you like it if I made fun of you with all your monster magazines and stuff.”

“What’s there to make fun of? Monster magazines are cool.”

“Can you guys be quieter?” Ellen called over. “We’re watching this here.”

Linda sighed. “Why don’t we go see what’s going on inside.”

In the kitchen were my mother and my sister and the woman who lived next door, whose name was Tina, and a guy named Steve and his mother who also lived in the building. Steve was about my mother and aunt’s age, but he still lived with and took care of his mother. She was very old and sickly. Steve was telling a story as we walked in, and his mother looked like she was listening but you could tell the words weren’t really registering, that she was just there in body.

I liked Steve. I’d seen him loads of times while I was over at my cousins’ apartment. He seemed to spend a lot of time over there. I actually think I saw him more often than I saw my Uncle Phil.

“So,” Steve was saying. “Jane and I were walking back from the restaurant with the kids, and there’s this guy, he’s just standing there taking a leak on the sidewalk. It’s not even that dark out! And we’re embarrassed, you know, we’re trying to walk by as quickly and quietly as possible, when what does the guy do but turn around as we’re walking by! We must have been so quiet, he didn’t even know we were there, and so he turns around and he’s still going!”

Everyone was laughing again. Linda and I were laughing, too. It felt good to be with the adults, laughing.

“What did you do?” Tina asked.

“We didn’t do anything,” Steve continued. “As soon as the guy saw us, he just froze in mid—in mid, you know, and he started tucking himself in and running away. He was embarrassed too. Only in New York, right?”

“You didn’t say anything to him, Jane?” my mother asked.

Steve answered for her. “Say anything? Jane didn’t have to say anything. It was just love at first sight.”

That got everyone laughing even harder

Just then, my Uncle Phil walked in. He nodded to everyone, pulled a chair from the kitchen table, turned it backwards and sat down. As the laughter died down, he asked, “What’s so funny?”

“Nothing, just a story,” Steve said. “How are you doing, Phil?”

“I’m doing fine. Kind of beat. Long day.”

Uncle Phil was supposed to work as a bartender. But even I knew he had strange hours for bartender. Sometimes he worked in the middle of the afternoon, sometimes the middle of the night. Whenever we visited Linda and Ellen, he was always just showing up. No one knew ever knew if he was going to be around or not. He hardly ever came to visit us up in Monroe; Aunt Jane and Linda and Ellen usually took the train. I don’t think my father and Uncle Phil liked each other very much.

“You all staying over tonight?” Uncle Phil asked my mother.

“Yes,” she said quickly. “Just for the one night.”

Everyone always acted like this around Uncle Phil, kind of nervous. Which was funny, since Phil was a short, wiry guy, not someone you’d expect everyone would be scared of.

“That’s fine,” Uncle Phil said, and stood up abruptly. “You know, I think I’m going to take a shower. I really am beat.”

“We can leave…” Steve began.

“No, no, stay,” Uncle Phil said. “You know me. I can sleep through anything.”

This was true. There were some visits we’d made to Linda and Ellen where we’d been over there the whole afternoon, talking and yelling and laughing, and I’d never even known Uncle Phil was asleep in the bedroom.

 Uncle Phil walked over to the refrigerator, got himself a beer. He paused for a second in the kitchen doorway. “Okay then, enjoy it, anyway” Uncle Phil  said to everyone, and laughed. That was another thing about Uncle Phil, he was always saying weird little things that made no sense to me but he thought were really funny.

Once we all heard the shower water running, everyone calmed down and started laughing and telling stories again. I was remembering the last time I’d seen my Uncle Phil, which was about two months before, in our kitchen back at home. My brother and I were walking home from the bus stop after school and I’d seen a car I didn’t recognize parked out front. When we walked in he was there, and my brother instantly asked where Linda and Ellen were, but he said no, he’d just come up by himself for a little visit. He left almost immediately, after a few squirmy minutes where he asked us how school was going.

I found out later what had happened, from listening in on my parents when they thought I was asleep. Uncle Phil had hit my Aunt Jane, and she’d thrown him out of the house. He’d driven all the way up to Monroe to try to get my mother to convince my Aunt Jane to take him back.

“He was crying, Jack,” my mother said to my father, while I listened from my bedroom. “He was sitting right there in front of me, crying.”

“Do what you want to do,” my father answered. “But it’s not the first time, is it?”

I came back to the conversation in the kitchen. Tina, the next-door neighbor, was telling a funny story about a bum who’d lived in the lobby of her old building for over two years. Everyone, even the super, liked him so much that no one could tell him to leave. I looked around the table: everyone was smiling, shaking their heads. Even Steve’s mother seemed to be enjoying the story.

I slipped out to go to the bathroom. I’d had to go for the last half hour, but hadn’t wanted to miss any of the funny stories. But I couldn’t hold it any longer.

“Hey,” a voice called out as I was returning to the kitchen. “Hey, Chris. Come in here for a second. Sit down for a second.”

It was Uncle Phil. He was in the living room with the lights out, sipping on his beer. I came in, sat on the far end of the couch from him.

“You like music, don’t you?” he asked.

I said yes, although I didn’t know how he’d know if I liked music or anything else.

“I heard this on the radio today. I had to go out and buy it..”

He took a 45 record out of a plastic Korvette’s bag. “Just listen to this,” Uncle Phil said.

He got up and put the record on the turntable. He put the record on really low. It started out with guitars that sounded like the country music my father listened to, but then a deep, sad voice began singing words that were nothing like any country music I’d ever heard:

Yesterday when I was young 
The taste of love was sweet as rain upon my tongue
I teased at life as if it were a foolish game
The way the evening breeze may tease a candle flame….

As I sat on the couch listening, I watched Uncle Phil. He was still standing at the record player, but he had his ear dipped near the speaker, and kept getting closer and closer to it as the song went on. It was like he wanted to crawl inside the speaker.

“Isn’t that great?” he asked, when it ended.

“It’s really good,” I said.

He nodded. “Let’s listen again.”

He started the record again. Again, he listened with fierce concentration. At the end, he shook his head, then looked up at me as if waking up from a dream. “You don’t want to be in here with me,” he said. “You can go. It’s okay.”

As I walked away, I heard him cueing up the record again.

In the kitchen, there was light, and Steve was telling another story. Aunt Jane was laughing, and Linda, and Tina the next door neighbor, and my mother was laughing, which wasn’t something she did very much. Steve paused in his story long enough to ask me, “Meet anyone while you were doing your business?” which made everyone laugh even harder, and then he picked right up from where he’d left off.

I sat down in my seat. I was relieved to be back here, glad to be away from Uncle Phil and that dark living room. This was where I belonged.

But that song Uncle Phil  had played for me: how to explain much better it sounded to me than Bobby Sherman, and how much I wanted to hear it again?