“Johnny-uh-Hank” has been Grandpa’s unintentional nickname for me my whole life, as he never quite remembers that I’m his grandson instead of his son until halfway into my name.
“Well, Grandpa, I assumed Dad made it my business when he shoved his vas deferens in my face.”
“Take it easy, son,” Dad says, smiling. Smiling! And it isn’t just any smile. It’s one of those irrepressible John Fitzpatrick smiles that lights up a room while at the same time diffusing any situation. Dad tilts his head down, still smiling. He arches his dark, I-know-better-than-you eyebrows and points his pronounced Fitzpatrick nose at me.
“I’m going in for the procedure on Monday morning, and your Mom and I are taking this one day at a time. I only have a fifty-fifty shot at even regaining my fertility.”
He says fertility with an unmistakable reverence in his voice, as if his sperm is akin to the holiest of holy oils as opposed to what I dispense daily like party confetti. Chrism, jism—what’s the fucking difference?
“Whatever, Pops. They’re your balls.”
“Henry David Fitzpatrick!”
She nails me across the back of my bedhead with her open palm. It’s more annoying than punitive, but it gets the job done. “Dammit, Mom!”
She smacks me again. “Don’t think you’re too old for me to wash your mouth out with soap,” Mom says.
Dad shoves two pieces of bacon into his mouth, smothering his laughter. Grandpa left the room unnoticed, shuffling out for his morning walk around the neighborhood with his sassafras cane.
“Well, if we’re talking about another kid,” I say, “can we have the dog conversation again?”
My mother hates animals. In my first fifteen years of life, various people—no fewer than three babysitters, Aunt Claudia, even a couple girlfriends—conspired to get me a dog. And each time, Mom was steadfast in her opposition.
“Hank, as long as you live under this roof…”
“I know, I know. Fish are the only pets I’ll ever get.”
Dad washes down his bacon with a swallow of coffee. He looks out the kitchen window at our backyard. Our lawn is bordered on the left by a willow tree stump, and on the right by a purple martin house. The ankle-high bluegrass waves in the morning breeze, its silver-green tapering off at the edge of the pond behind our house. “That lawn isn’t going to cut itself,” he says.
I grumble as I walk outside. I raise the garage door, step out onto the driveway. The morning dew on the grass mocks me with its promise of matted clumps clogging the lawnmower and two hours of frustration and engine-masked profanity. The mower greets me with predictable ambivalence. A dozen futile pulls on the starter send me back into the house.
I don’t know when Dad ceded lawn duties over to me. The transition was imperceptible. Yesterday, I was a little kid sitting in the family room wearing my Miami Dolphins helmet and cursing the New York Jets—this was back in the late seventies when Shula was God in my world, long before the Colts came to town—while Dad was outside coating himself in layers of grass, fertilizer, and gasoline. Today, I’m a teenager, no longer a Dolphins fan but still not enough of a Colts fan to care, bursting in on Mom and Dad coating themselves in pre-sex sweat.
I wish I could say this is the first time I’ve walked in on them. Hell, I wish I could say this is the first time I’ve walked in on them this week.
“Seriously, you two? I’m outside for five minutes, and you’re already dry-humping on the couch?” The inherent repulsiveness of parental copulation sends an acidic bacon and coffee burp up from my stomach.
“What’s the problem, son?” Dad stands up, erection in tow, trying to cover himself. His robe leaves little to the imagination, so he turns sideways with his back to me.
“Well, other than my disintegrating psyche, the stupid lawnmower won’t start.”
“You prime her?” Dad asks.
“A bunch of times.”
“You probably flooded the engine. Is the sparkplug connected?”
“Yeah, Dad.”
“She have plenty of gas in her?”
I shake my head. “You do realize I’m not retarded, right?”
“Understood.” Dad adjusts his robe over his still noticeable bulge. Mom gives his butt a squeeze as he walks past, pouring salt into my psychological wounds. “Let’s have a look, then.”
There are few more timeless traditions than men yelling at inanimate objects. We stand in the driveway pleading with the four-wheeled, two-cycle engine to obey our commands. Dad can’t get the mower started either, but he loves the old machine. Grandpa George bought it when Dad was in high school. It’s one of those yellow metal Lawn-Boys from the mid-sixties that manages to hurl everything it finds—sticks, rocks, dog poop, bird carcasses—back in your face. I don’t like the mower so much.
Dad gives the starter a few more tugs. He comes as close as he’s capable to cussing, managing a “sheee-oot.”
Mom yells out the garage door, interrupting our exercise in futility with the news that she’s put on a second pot of coffee.
“Sounds good to me.” Dad pushes the mower back into the garage.
I nod. “Don’t have to ask me twice.”
My father looks at me. I look at him. We exchange wordless smiles. I enjoy Dad’s company more than I’m willing to admit.
Chapter Two
My family is sorta semi-nomadic. When I was born, we lived in an apartment on the south side of Indianapolis off Thompson Road. It shared a parking lot with a Red Lobster. Our next door neighbor, Uncle Angelo, was a fat, bald guy with black-rimmed glasses and a salt-and-pepper mustache. He tended bar at the Milano Inn but moonlighted as the Fitzpatrick family’s guardian angel. When someone broke into our apartment when Dad was out of town, Mom grabbed me and went straight to Uncle Angelo’s place.
“Debbie, you-anna-uh-Hank stay here with-uh-yur Aunt-uh-Pat,” he said with his thick Italian brogue. He went over to our place in full crime-stopping gear—white ribbed tank top, stained boxer shorts, loaded rifle on his hip. Uncle Angelo’s wife’s name was Pasqualina, or “Aunt Pat” to everyone who knew her. She fed me my first solid food—pasta in marinara sauce.
After the place on Thompson, we moved a couple miles south to Southport, an incorporated town inside Indianapolis that got the South part of its name because it’s on the far Southside of Indy and the port part of its name apparently because the town’s founders had a perverse sense of irony about having a port in the middle of a waterless stretch of farmland. Our backyard overlooked the playground at St. Ambrose, the Catholic parish my family attended for most of the first ten years of my life. My sister, Jeanine, was born when I was three years old. Mom wrapped our piss-yellow, velvety living room couch in white sheets for Jeanine’s first formal photo shoot. She was too fat to smile.
After I turned four, we moved outside the city. Claiming it was “an unbelievable opportunity,” Dad took a sales job with a Chrysler dealership in Kokomo. Mom had to pull up the olive-green shag carpet in our two-bedroom ranch because the floors smelled like cat urine, while Dad found out the deal he got on our house had less to do with his negotiating skills and more to do with the previous owner hanging herself in the garage.
There was a large gray gas tower crowned by red-and-white checkers that served as Mom’s primary guidepost when she drove around Kokomo. She spent most of her day at the mall with me and Jeanine in lieu of fraternizing with our neighbors who had cigarettes permanently attached