Her evidence to this effect went unspoken, unexplained, but I saw it in the way she rolled her eyes whenever I recounted an anecdote of his, like the time he ran a friend’s car into a ditch in El Paso and then, trying to pull it out, crashed a forklift on top of it. Or the time he said a parakeet followed him around for a year, perching on his shoulder and being protective of him for no discernible reason. Or the winter he spent in Alaska, where he said the dogs were all beautiful and the women all rabid. These were just a few of his improbable stories, mind you, yet my mother acted unimpressed by it all.
Still, my uncle Barry had lived what seemed to me this enormous and unpredictable life, the exact opposite of what a teenager feels, and I came to idolize him. And although my mother told me to take everything he said with a grain of salt, I never doubted his tales the way I did those of people like Tyler Bannister or Jason Landry or even my own father, really, because he was not trying to be funny or cruel or impressive when he told them. Instead he recounted these stories as if they were still as surprising to him as the day they had happened. “I couldn’t believe it, either,” he’d say, “but there I was.”
Yet there were some days on the porch when a car would pull into our driveway and Uncle Barry would leave me to go talk with the man that drove it. Often for only a minute or two, sometimes laughing, other times exchanging what appeared to me to be only a handshake, and other times banging his fist against the car as if in pain. When I asked him about this, he shrugged the visit off as being that of an old friend, somebody telling him about a possible job.
And since Barry was a handyman of sorts, he often disappeared for days, working on “construction jags,” as he called them, because the suburbs of Baton Rouge were booming back then. I spent those days without him feeling especially lost and confused, like the only sane man in a house full of crying women. What made this all worse was that when Barry returned from these jobs he would always act more philosophical and resigned. A woman would drop him off in our driveway, never coming inside the house, and I’d ask him who she was. “Who, her?” he’d say. “That was mistake number three hundred and eighty-four.”
I laughed at this until I realized that the next time it was mistake number three hundred and eighty-five, then eighty-six, and so forth, and I got the feeling this was an accurate count. And during these times our jovial talks on the porch would stray from the visible things around us to questions that had no obvious origin or answer. He would sit for long minutes, crickets calling out in the distance, and utter what seemed to me to be impossible truths. One, I remember, about sleep and love.
“Do you like to sleep?” he asked me. “I mean, do you like to just lie in bed all day? Maybe spend a whole weekend just sleeping?”
“Not really,” I said. “I mean, I don’t think so.”
“Me neither,” he said. “So, here’s the deal: what you need to do is get you a woman who loves to do that. Because if you like to sleep all day and so does she, then y’all won’t ever get anything done. But what’s worse is if neither of you like to sleep, if both of you can’t stand lying around idle.”
“Then what?” I asked him.
“Then you’re never in bed at the same time,” he said. “Then you end up like me.”
I had no idea what he meant by this, as being like him appeared to me a wonderful possibility. Still, at that moment he seemed to be working out some problem in his head that had nothing to do with me or my mother or Piney Creek Road, and he looked sad. So, I said na?ve things. I tried to be encouraging.
“I’m sure it’s different for different people,” I told him. “I mean, I’m sure sometimes everything works out all right.”
“Nope,” he said. “That’s the thing. Love is always the same for everybody.”
This, you must understand, was the opposite of all that I’d heard. I’d watched movies where the goodhearted got together. I wrote love poems to a girl who wouldn’t speak to me. I believed, without sarcasm, in soul mates. I was a private-school kid in America, by God, and felt that nothing was off-limits to me if I tried. True love and happy marriage and healthy children were inevitable.
“Love’s the same for everybody?” I said. “That’s depressing.”
He sat around thinking about this.
“I think you might have misread me,” he said. “Let’s put it this way: are you in love with a girl right now?”
I smiled, or maybe I grimaced, and this gave it away.
“Okay,” he said. “All I’m saying is this: that girl you’re in love with right now, you’re always going to be in love with her. In some way or another. Her or someone else just like her. Love never changes. You might be fifty years old and find yourself doing the craziest things for a woman who you think is nothing like that first one, but she is. There will always be some connection, I promise. Love never changes. So the trick is to pick a good one to start with. If you do that, then there’s nothing depressing about it.”
I leaned over in my chair and thought about this. I put my elbows on my knees like an old man on a fishing pier.
“But what if you don’t pick a good one?” I asked. “What if the person you base all your loves on is the wrong one?”
“Well, then,” he said, “you end up being what they call the vast majority.”
I looked at the house across the street and two doors down from us and didn’t say anything for a while. My uncle handed me his old Duncan yo-yo.
“Go ahead, man,” he said. “Talk about her. I’m listening.”
23.
It is easy to gloss over agony.
They say this happens with women and childbirth, when they experience pain off the charts. Ask them how it feels during the process and you’ll get daggerlike stares, answers in a sailor’s vocabulary. Ask them a few months later, when they are holding the child, or after they’ve put him or her to bed, and they’ll say, “I remember it being bad, but not too bad.” Then give them a second, wait for a smile.
This is not the only example.
Even when we talk about youthful summers and strange uncles and front porches, it’s easy to not recount the many hours we spent furious. In my case, I’d written Lindy a flurry of passionate and apologetic letters, never mailed. I’d tried to cut my own thighs with a Swiss Army knife but gained neither pleasure nor scars from the experience. I’d dialed up teen help hotlines in the middle of the night that we’d been given by guest lecturers at my school. “What is your emergency?” they’d ask me. “I don’t know,” I’d say. “Do I have to have an emergency?” and they’d be quiet until I hung up. I did things like push-ups when I couldn’t sleep. I thought, constantly, of Lindy.
Yet when I found myself asked to actually speak of her I realized how long it had been since I had. My uncle Barry was looking for a simple description, I’m sure, maybe just a name and a face, but the task seemed impossible to me. And if it had been my mother or sister who’d asked me to talk about Lindy, I would have ignored them. But with Barry, a person who didn’t know her history, our history, and who didn’t know that to speak of her was to speak of a before and after, of two lives wrapped into one, I felt I might as well tell the truth.
“There’s this girl,” I told him. “And when I look at her, I don’t know what to do.”
Barry smiled as if he understood, as if he’d known this exact feeling himself. He leaned forward in his chair. “Well,” he asked me, “what do you want to do when you see her? Let me guess: cook her a steak? Protect her from danger? Rip off her bra?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “All of those things, I guess. But I think what I’d really like is to not have to do anything. I’d like to just kind of stand there and look at her, maybe, watch her laugh. Maybe she could tell me something funny.”
“Okay,” Barry said. “Then what? I mean, that’s just a start. What comes after that?”
“I don’t know,” I told him. “Then maybe she could tell me something sad.”
“Ouch,” he said. “You’ve got it bad.”
“She never talks to me,” I said.
Evening soon fell on the porch that night, and we first knew this by the way we began to scratch at our ankles, wave at mosquitoes buzzing our ears. Next door to us, we saw the Stillers’ floodlights click on automatically. We heard a neighbor pull their trash out to the curb. Finally, the sky began to purple.
“Listen,” Barry said. “I wish I was even half as smart as you when I was your age. Back then I thought the way to pick up girls was to rev a car engine and stuff a sock in my jeans.”