“You pee in a pod,” Tom replies before Mom snaps, “That’s enough.”
But I know what Tom’s saying. In the last six months I’ve taken to sleepwalking, urinating in unlikely places at three o’clock in the morning. I’ve whizzed in the laundry hamper in the hall closet, drawn back the shower curtain to pee in the tub, and emptied my bladder into the Schlitz-can wastebasket. Even in my sleep, it sounded like Mom filling the spaghetti pot with water from the kitchen sink.
More than once, Tom has woken to find me pausing during one of my nocturnal constitutionals, standing over him, business in hand, poised to wet his bed.
“Price,” Jim says.
“Price,” Dad repeats. “Correct. What are the other two Ps of marketing?”
Strictly for each other’s ears, Tom and I whisper all the scatological P words we can think of, which is quite a lot of them.
“I’ll give you the second P,” Dad says. “It’s product. So price, product, and…”
There is no sound but the hum of the fridge. Dad shakes his head in exasperation. “Promotion!” he says. “Price, product, and promotion.”
In Dad’s view, his children are enamored of the third P, promotion, to the exclusion of the first two. As consumers, he says, we give no consideration to the quality of the product and certainly don’t concern ourselves with the price. What is left—promotion—is The County Seat jingle and the tag that says ‘Levi’s’ sewn into the back right pocket.
“You only care about the tag,” Dad says. “Without the Levi’s tag, you wouldn’t wear the Levi’s.”
“I don’t care about the tag,” Jim says. “I couldn’t care less about the tag. Levi’s are the only cords that fit me.”
“Me too,” I say.
“You wish, squid,” Jim replies.
Jim has taken to calling me and Tom “squid” as an insult. Squid is also a verb. It is not unusual to encounter Jim in the upstairs hall these days and have him ask the rhetorical question “Squid much?” We don’t know what this means, but as we press our backs against the wall to let him pass we always answer “No.”
After dinner, I excuse myself and retreat to Dad’s workbench in the basement to shine his shoes. I pull the chain that bathes the bench in the light of a 60-watt bare bulb. Dad has shown me how he learned to shine shoes in the army. He gave me a shoeshine box with a wood-handled brush bristling with horsehair and a bottle—never used—of edge ink for the heels. There are two tins of polish: Kiwi black and Kiwi brown. There is no need for cordovan. Dad is never going to wear cordovan.
I open the tin of Kiwi black, take a deep drag of its contents, and place a chamois over the index and middle fingers of my right hand. On my left hand I wear one of Dad’s wingtips like a hand puppet. I dip the chamois in the polish and cover the shoe with Kiwi black in a series of small circular motions. Then I buff it to a high shine. “I want to see my reflection in these,” Dad says. When I’m finished he can shave in these shoes.
But he’s upstairs for now, and I’m down here, all alone at the workbench, with all these tools for cutting and wrenching hanging on hooks embedded in pegboard. Running the length of the room is a clothesline Mom uses in the winter. Pinned to that line is a single pair of pants: Jim’s navy-blue Levi’s corduroys.
It is not literally a snip to remove a Levi’s tag from its pocket, even using a pair of long-jawed, forged-steel cutting pliers. I have to step on the Levi’s for leverage while pulling with the pliers with both hands. Even then, the white tag is a tooth that won’t come out. It takes three solid minutes of yanking and twisting before the tag is pulled, trailing its roots of white thread. The Levi’s are tagless, toothless as the portraits of Bobby Clarke and Jude Drouin looking down on me from the basement wall.
Dad will be proud, for I am road-testing the three Ps of marketing. If Jim really loves the product, he won’t care about the promotion, the little white billboard on his butt. Emerging from the basement and into the kitchen, I place Dad’s shoes on the linoleum and toss the Levi’s tag on the table. Setting down her coffee, Mom regards the tag with horror. “What is this?” she says. It sits on the table like the severed finger of a kidnap victim.
“A Levi’s tag,” I say, beaming. “I ripped it out of Jim’s cords. You know, to see if he’ll still wear them.”
“You did what?” Dad says.
“I ripped it out of his cords with your pliers,” I say. “’Cause he said he doesn’t care about the tag.”
“What the hell is the matter with you?” Dad says, drawing the attention of my siblings in the next room. It occurs to me, looking at Jim fill the doorframe, that I have made a grievous error.
“I’ll sew the tag back on,” Mom tells Jim, but his mustache is twitching and his biceps are flexing and—to borrow a phrase I suddenly recall hearing on the radio—his hands are clenched in fists of rage.
Jim has entered a prehistoric phase of discourse, communicating in grunts and monosyllables. His caveman’s club is a hockey stick. But when enraged, as he is now—contemplating life at Lincoln High School in tagless Levi’s—he’s given to colorful expressions of intent. He is frequently offering to “rearrange my face” or telling Tom he is “dead meat.”
“I’m going to rip your lips off,” he tells me, now with perfect elocution, and a facial tic I’ve never seen before.
I shoot up the stairs, racing him to my bedroom, where the locked door buys me ten extra seconds. While Jim finds a coat hanger to poke through the little hole in the knob, I scramble under my bed, listening for the lock to pop. And then he appears to me from carpet level as just a pair of Roms and tube socks. “Come out, squid” is all he says.
He pulls me out by my ankles. The rug burns my back. We both know the drill. He kneels on my biceps and begins to give me a 99 Bump. I’m keeping count in my head of every knuckle-blow to the sternum, but he isn’t. It could end at forty-five, it could go to three hundred. A rope of drool extends from his mouth and briefly bungees above my face before breaking. I turn my head to take it on the cheek, as Jesus would.