Say Uncle
Benjamin Laskin
Arete Books
Copyright © [revised 2014] [Benjamin Laskin]
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to persons living or dead is coincidental.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Published by [Arete Books]
Cover design by Brian Volkhausen
ISBN: [978-1-5023-3482-4]
e-book formatting by bookow.com
Dedication
For my wonderful and loving mother.
Table of Contents
Part One
The Homecoming
Down Shift
Margaritaville
Hunks
Naughty Santa
The Epicurean
The Aristotelian
The Flake
The Cosmopolitan
Party Animals
Stars and Gripes
Glitches
The Übermensch
Kojak-sac
True Love
Enter the Dragon
A Good Dump
Anonymous Man
Intruders
Bullseye!
Aurora Borealis
Part Two
Squiggly-Wigglies
Living Nightmare, Lasting Dream
A Cute Little Pepper
Color Blinded
Message in a Tuk-Tuk
Hello. Goodbye
Killing Time
Guilt Trip
Fate Gets a Body
Bren and Sten
A Close Shave
Living Legend
Kismet
Part Three
Guy’s Analogy of the Cave
Pros and Cons
A Pissimist
Who’s Your Pal?
Call Me Fuckwit
Hennes
The Greenhouse Effect
Ishin Dotai
A Battle of Epigrammatic Proportions
Hostile Blood
Stiff Apology
Part Four
Millie’s Prayer
Gravid Details
Sharc Infested Waters
Slugger
Whammo!
Kindred Spirits
Hands-On Experience
From A to Zeeva
A Sporting Chance
A Classy Act
A Boy-Girl Thing
Part Five
Heart Smarts
Bunkies
Mirror Mirror
Zen and The Art of Gardening
Blasts from the Past
Mongoosed
Little Lollipop
Phantoms of the Operatives
Everything Excellent
Traitor
Face Slap
Mitzvah, Brother?
Lost and Found
People Dream
Doing the Math
Spyguy
Arizona Highways
French Fried Enchilada Style
Pulling Toes
Grounded
Anchors Away
Breaking Up is Hard to Do
A Super Snowball
The Graduate
A Message from Benjamin Laskin
Other Novels by Benjamin Laskin
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Part One
The great man is the play actor of his ideals.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
The Homecoming
Phoenix, Arizona, December 23
“True power does not reside in the talents and strengths that you are born with, but in weaknesses overcome.”
Anonymous Man wrote those words sitting in a trench up to his waist in goopy, bloodstained mud as German artillery burst all around him. Then, he was the same age I was when I sat parked in my Chevy pickup in front of my parents’ house listening to Santa Claus on the radio telling me what I wanted for Christmas. Claus was wrong.
I thought I knew plenty about my weaknesses that day. I had just finished ticking them off with each of the one hundred milepost signs from Tucson to Phoenix. I thought of little else. I certainly didn’t think about Anonymous Man because I didn’t even know he existed. Twelve hours later my life would never be the same again.
Christmas was only a couple of days off and I still hadn’t purchased a single present for anyone in my family. I knew there wasn’t anything I could buy that would make my news about flunking out of college any easier to swallow.
Did anyone hear me drive up? Was it too late to turn around and go back to Tucson?
Santa said, “Ho, ho, ho!”
I got out of my truck and grabbed my duffel bag from the bed. My eyes were immediately drawn to pyramid-shaped Piestewa Peak framed against the blue sky about a mile away. It’s really not much of a mountain; one can climb to its summit in forty-five minutes. I remembered hiking it on hot summer afternoons when I was in high school. Sometimes I would sit in the partial shade of a rock—there were no trees—and write lousy poems about unrequited love as beads of sweat rolled off my nose and made little blue inky pools on the paper.
We lived in the Biltmore Estates. I never thought of my family as wealthy, but when anyone learned that I lived there, I knew by the way the person nodded his head that he figured we had bucks, and that I was spoiled. Maybe, but all the spoiled kids that I knew were cool. I was too square to be spoiled. Nevertheless, if I pestered my parents long enough, I usually got what I wanted, only in a secondhand version—a garage-sale guitar, a swap-meet mountain bike, and my trusty old, smoking, pasty-white pickup, for instance.
I was glad to see that the lawn needed mowing. Unlike my college education, cutting grass provided tangible results; something I could point at with pride; something I had a talent for—one of my strengths.
The first to notice my arrival was Freud, our one-eyed, overweight, gimpy, fifteen-year-old German shepherd. I heard his muffled woofs through the door and felt a ripple of joy in anticipation of seeing the broken-down pooch again, grateful that he was still hanging in there.
I ran my fingers through my hair, drew it back off of my shoulders, and pushed up the sleeves of my sweatshirt. I hoped that my shabby appearance and the dread that made my movements stiff and unnatural wouldn’t telegraph that I was the bearer of bad news.
Expecting an enthusiastic greeting, I forged a big smile and opened the door. The only one waiting to welcome me was Freud. He wagged his tail, jumped up on me once, did a clumsy caper, rolled onto his back, and showed me his genitals. I petted him gladly and we exchanged doggie kisses. Then, leaving my bag by the washing machine, I stepped into the kitchen. It had taken a lot of effort to manufacture that smile; I wasn’t sure I could do it so well a second time.
But there wasn’t going to be a second time.
“Get him!”
I whirled and saw my four sisters, Kathleen, Colleen, Maureen, and Doreen, come charging out of the living room. They grabbed me, dragged me back into the living room, and tackled and nailed me to the carpet. Within seconds they had my shoes off, my pants down to my knees, and my sweatshirt crammed under my chin. Amidst their hooting laughter I thought: Oh no, not this time. This time they’re not going to make me say it.
But they did.
Kathleen, my eldest sister, pinned my legs together, slipped off my
socks, and alternately tickled my feet and nibbled at my toes, which I thought was really gross because I knew how many days in a row I had worn those socks. Colleen, the second oldest, blew mouth-farts into my exposed belly, snapped the front of my boxer shorts, and said, “Peek-a-boo!” The next youngest, Maureen, sat on my left arm, and Doreen, my youngest sister, one year older than me, sat on my right. The two of them tickled me and tousled my hair. All the while my sisters sang, “Say uncle, Guy! Guy, say uncle!” I had been submitted to this kind of humiliation ever since I could remember. My mother once told me that the first word I ever uttered was uncle, and wondered how I could have possibly learned it.
No one would have guessed it by their childish displays, but my sisters were not only pretty, they were also very intelligent. Kathleen and Colleen both graduated at the top of their classes and had become lawyers. Kathleen, who was 26, worked at my father’s firm, and Colleen, 25, followed her now ex-husband to Las Vegas, where she joined a small firm and was doing exceedingly well. My 23-year-old-sister, Maureen, was in medical school. Doreen, 20, topped the honor roll at the University of Arizona, the school I also attended until semester grades came out anyway. My sisters were talented too. They all played a different instrument, had lovely voices, and were superb athletes.
And, they loved me, really loved me. Sure, we had our squabbles, all of which I started, but nothing ever came of them but a hug, a kiss, and an apology. Theirs, never mine.
For an American family at the frizzy-tailed start of an already frazzled twenty-first century, we weren’t doing too badly. We were tight. We were nuclear. Still, somehow, I always felt that there was something incongruous about my relationship with my siblings. I could never put my finger on it, though. When I tried, it was like pushing against a wisp of smoke.
I squirmed and cursed as Freud looked on with his good eye and barked mechanically.
“Say uncle!”
“No!”
They tickled, tousled, tittered, and kissed me all the more. They called me cute, and they humiliated me.
My sisters had me. Escape was impossible. I was exhausted and blotted with hickeys. Out of the corner of my eye I saw my father, Will Andrews, step into the doorway. Dressed in khaki pants and a purple golf shirt, and looking handsome and debonair as always, he smiled and shook his head. “Welcome home, Guy,” he said.
Before I could reply, Colleen blew a terrific mouth-fart into my belly. I grimaced and wilted in defeat.
“Say uncle!”
“Uncle,” I mumbled.
“We can’t h-e-a-r you!”
“Uncle!”
“Again!”
“Uncle already. Uncle!”
They leaped off of me in victory, jumped up and down and clapped their hands like school children. I sat up, grabbed my jeans from my ankles, and wiggled back into them.
“Look at him,” Kathleen said, as I mopped myself with my sweatshirt. “Isn’t he sweet?”
“Like candy,” Colleen said, smacking her lips.
Maureen said, “He needs a haircut, though.”
“Oh, no,” Colleen said. “The more of him the better.” She knelt down and messed my hair up some more.
“Come on,” I said, swatting her hand away. “Cut it out, would ya? Jeez…”
“Oh,” Colleen said, “is Guy-Guy mad at his big, mean sisters?”
That made them laugh. They knew I hated it when they called me Guy-Guy.
Doreen said, “Hey, Guy, check out the Christmas tree. Look at all those presents!”
I rolled my head towards the far end of the room and sized up the tree. It was huge, maybe fifteen feet tall, lit up, and dripping with tinsel. On top I saw the same angel we used every year, the one I made when I was in the third grade. Heaped beneath the tree and spread out like an oil slick waited dozens and dozens of presents.
“How bourgeois,” I said.
“Yeah,” Kathleen said, rubbing her hands together. “Where are our presents, Guy? You didn’t forget us again, did you?”
“What do you mean, again? ”
“You didn’t get us anything last year,” Colleen said.
“What? Of course I did.”
“No, you didn’t,” they sang.
“I did too,” I insisted, racking my brain trying to recall my generosity.
They shook their heads and rolled their eyes.
“Sure, yeah, I remember…” It was coming to me.
“What?” Maureen said. They were all staring down at me, fists to hips, smiling smugly.
Then I remembered. Thank God. I had them now.
“Boy,” I said. “I can’t believe your ingratitude. I spent a fortune on you girls last year. Subscriptions to National Geographic.” I snapped my fingers in the air as if I were bringing them out of a trance. “Remember? Sheesh.”
“Guy!” Doreen said. “Aunt Paula gave us those, not you. You got one too!”
Hold on. Was it possible? Could I really have been so cheap, so thoughtless, so incredibly lame as to forget my own sisters on Christmas?
“Really?”
“Yeah,” Doreen said. “You didn’t get us diddly-squat, pal.”
“Wow,” I said. “What a creep.”
My sisters nodded.
“Well, I made up for it this year, girls. Big time. You wait and see.”
They didn’t believe me, of course. But I was going to prove them all wrong. I was going to lavish them with gifts, and if necessary, spend every penny I had. This wasn’t generosity; it was revenge!
I stood up and casually dipped my hands into my front pockets to feel around for my life’s savings. Man, did I break that twenty already? I cleared my throat.
“By the way, Doreen,” I said, “are you still interested in buying my mountain bike? I saw this really cool one the other day that I thought I might pick up, so—”
Colleen said, “He’s broke.”
My sisters giggled, made jokes at my expense, and then rushed me again.
I thought: Do I hit dad up for money before or after I tell him I flunked out of school?
Down Shift
I didn’t have to do either. An hour later on the way out to dinner I reached into my pocket for my car keys and found a fifty-dollar bill. I checked my other pockets—another fifty, three twenties, and a hundred. Obviously my adoring sisters had stashed the bills in my pockets under a later deluge of hugs and kisses. Why? Doreen winked at me as we climbed into my truck. I was too ashamed and prideful to muster a thank you, and too greedy and cowardly to give the money back.
Grabbing the truck’s stick with her left hand, Doreen asked, “Can I shift?”
Doreen was easily amused, as were all my sisters. I envied them that trait. I said okay, and off we went to meet the rest of the family and celebrate our reunion at a pricey Mexican restaurant.
Except for the giggles Doreen let out each time she shifted, neither of us said a word. I soon sensed by my sister’s furtive glances that my silence was hurting her feelings. Of my four sisters, Doreen and I had always been the tightest. Knowing that something was bothering me and that I wasn’t confiding in her made her feel uncomfortable. I reached for the dash and flicked on the radio. Santa interrupted the silence with, “Ho, ho, ho!”
I saw a yellow light at the intersection, decided to shoot it, and gave Doreen the order to downshift. I let the clutch back up, the engine roared, and we went into a terrifying glide. The light turned red before I got to the intersection but it was too late to slam on the brakes. A horn blared, brakes screeched, and a SUV swerved out of the way just missing us.
“Doreen! What the hell are you doing? You almost got us killed!”
She smiled, very pleased with herself. I slapped her hand from the stick and jammed it into second. I switched off the radio and glared at her. “Huh?” I said, demanding an explanation.
She pursed her lips and sucked back her smile.
“Really funny, Doreen. Gawd…”
I was driving with an expired lic
ense and two unpaid tickets.
“What’s the matter, Guy?”
“There’s something about dying in a car crash that I find really obscene, okay?” My heart was still pounding. “Jeez that was close.”
“That’s not it,” she said. “Something is bothering you.”
“Something is always bothering me, Doreen. You know that. I don’t get you sometimes…”
“Tell me, dickhead.”
What she meant was, ‘don’t be a dickhead, you know you can trust me.’ It was a brother-sister thing.
“Forget it, okay?”
“It’s not Weltschmerz again, is it? Because if it is you’ll just have to live with it like everybody else.”
“I love the way you turn the profundity of my existential crisis into a bubble-gummy platitude. And, no, that’s not it.”
“Well, what then?”
I straightened myself and put both hands on the steering wheel.
“Come on, Guy. Is it a girl?”
Don’t I wish, I thought. Has it ever been a girl?
“No.”
“Then it must be school.”
“I flunked all my classes.”
“All of them?”
“I think so.”
“Oh, Guy… Why?”
“What do you mean, why?”
“I mean, why didn’t you come to me for help? I could have helped you.”
“Because,” I said.
That was my answer for just about everything. It wasn’t much of an answer and showed a distinct lack of imagination, but if I said it with conviction it usually bought me enough time to think of something better.
“But, Guy, college is not that difficult and you know it. To flunk you have to be a complete moron, and you’re not. You didn’t even try. I thought you liked it in Tucson.”
“I do.”
“Then why did you let this happen?”
I shrugged. I didn’t know, and it shot home like a bullet. My God, I’m more screwed up than I thought.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“Me neither.”
I stopped at a light. Doreen scooted over to me and put her arm around my shoulder. She kissed me on the cheek and then rested her head in the crook of my neck. I sighed and looked out the window. A Ray-Ban-wearing, yuppie-looking dude in a Mercedes was staring at us. He looked…stumped, as if he was wondering what a dweeb like me was doing with such a great-looking chick. He checked out my truck and then my sister, who, unaware that she was being scoped, reached up and planted another kiss on my cheek.