A Bad Idea I'm About to Do (5 page)

“Uh . . . okay, thanks,” Gregg replied.

“Not everyone here will support your decision,” she continued, “but I respect it. I may not
understand
it, but I respect that it's how you want to live. And you're going off to college next year, so now's the time to figure it all out.”

“Umm . . . okay?” Gregg managed to squeak out.

I walked back over to Gregg.

“They think I'm gay,” he said.

I scanned the yard and saw many raised eyebrows thrown our way. Suspicions were being tossed toward Gregg with the subtlety of an early '90s Jim Carrey movie.

“Why do they think that?” I asked. True, my brother was shy, and never had a girlfriend to bring around, but that was rooted in his status as a skinny weirdo who was obsessed with pro wrestling and geography, not in any disinterest in ladies.

Gregg stared across the yard. Pa was seated in a folding chair, looking directly at us. Our grandfather laughed wildly and slapped his knee in obvious delight.

“I'm pretty sure,” Gregg sighed, “that Pa told everyone I'm gay.” As the evening wore on, people began quietly asking me how I felt about my brother's sexual awakening.

“Well, the thing is,” I told one second cousin, “he's not gay. I'm not really sure how that rumor started, but it's not true.”

“Huh,” my cousin grunted, his Jersey mullet catching the wind. “I don't know.... ”

My brother and Pa didn't talk for years after that. It was only after Pa's death that I got Gregg to admit that our grandfather's prank was fucking hilarious.

“H
e was crazy,” I told my mother. “But at least he was crazy in a good way.”

“Yeah,” she said. “It's not so bad. You just have to figure out how to be crazy in a good way, too.”

M
y greatest moment with Pa came when I was a sophomore in high school. It was that amazing time of year on the East Coast, those three or four days during fall when a cool breeze is already blowing but the sun is still shining, and the leaves have just about fully changed but none have fallen.

I was on the phone in my bedroom, kicking it to a husky freshman named Melissa (who would inevitably turn me down), when I smelled a smoky odor wafting in through my second-floor window. I stuck my head outside and looked around the neighborhood.

All seemed normal. In the middle of the street, Jerry Hubert was competing with Matt Kehoe and Nick Scagliozzi in a fierce
game of wiffle ball. In the background, I could see Pa doing a strange dance in his backyard. Par for the course.

I continued flirting with the chunky apple of my eye. The smoky smell worsened, but I was in the zone, really working a good sophomore-in-high-school game, and didn't pay it any attention until my mom charged up the stairs.

“Chris! Chris!
Pa's lawn is on fire!
” she screamed.

I looked out the window again to see that Pa's dancing had taken a turn for the worse. The kids had stopped playing wiffle ball and were gathered near his fence.

“Go!” my mom said. “You have to help him!”

I couldn't figure out what my mother meant. His lawn was on fire? That concept made, and still makes, very little sense to me.

“Is everything okay?” I heard Melissa's distant voice ask. I brought the handset back to my ear and tried to sound as heroic as possible.

“I'll call you back,” I said in a half-whisper. “I've got to go save my grandpa.” My voice didn't sound even vaguely heroic, as it still hadn't changed by the age of fifteen.

I flew down the steps and charged out the door. I headed straight across Mrs. Burns's lawn and vaulted over Pa's rusted chain-link fence in one leap.

Foot-high licks of flame were rising out of my grandfather's grass. It had been a hot summer and much of the yard was dead and browned. Pa was trying to stamp the flames away. I needed to get him out of there.

“Pa, come on!” I shouted. “We gotta call the fire department.”

He looked me dead in the eye and replied, “Fuck you.”

My jaw dropped.
Did my grandfather just say fuck me?
I looked at him, breathing heavily, staring me down. He had. He had definitely said fuck me.

“I can handle this,” he continued, before turning around and stamping his foot into a three-foot-wide, one-foot-high swath of fire.

I glared at the old man.

“You gonna let him talk to you like that?” one of the neighborhood kids shouted from beyond the fence. I couldn't see which kid yelled it as there was now a wall of smoke rising between us. My anger was quickly replaced by fear.

Pa's lawn was
shooting fire at us
, and his stomping of the flames was only spreading fire to other patches of grass. Even worse, because Pa had developed kidney problems, the nerves in his feet were deadened. In horror, I watched as his trademark brown loafers caught flame as he brought them down into the inferno. The motion of raising his foot blew the flames out, at which point he'd stomp down again, igniting his shoe once more. Because he had no feeling in his feet he had no idea this was happening.

The flames reached the edge of his property and spread to bushes that had been placed there by landscapers who had evidently also sprayed them down with heavily flammable insecticides. One by one, the shrubs turned into six-foot-tall spires of flame. It was like being in the first circle of hell, or on the set of a Mexican game show. I shouted to the neighborhood kids to get Mrs. Burns out of her house before it caught fire.

The old man refused to leave. He'd decided that if his house was going to burn, he was going down with the ship. I had to put out the fire, and needed to find the tools to do so. Grandma's ghost or not, I was going to have to go inside Pa's house.

I ran through Pa's back doorway and up the steps into the kitchen, where I froze in my tracks. It had been so long since I'd seen the place that I didn't even remember the layout. There was something tomblike and sealed off from time about the room
that gave me the creeps. I took a deep breath that stung in my chest. I didn't know if it was from smoke inhalation or the lingering fear that my grandmother's disembodied form was about to descend upon me.

I was walking through a bizarre time capsule of my own childhood. Some cardboard blocks painted to look like bricks lay scattered on the back porch, clearly untouched since the last time my brother and I had played with them. A clock I'd painted and given to my grandma when I was four hung above the kitchen table, exactly where she'd placed it the day I gave it to her. The hands were frozen in place.

My fear was replaced with profound sadness. Pa had been sitting in this house for years, just thinking about my grandma. He didn't change anything about his life or his surroundings. He'd shared this home with his wife for over fifty years. She died. Some time later—who knows when?—that clock died. And clearly Pa spent the last portion of his life doing little more than sitting inside his house waiting to die as well.

An occasional car crash here. A skunk and/or homosexuality-driven prank there. They were very minor distractions at the end of a very long life. Nothing more.

The only thing that could be more depressing would be letting my grandpa die in a fire. I had to find a way to help him.

I ran to the basement looking for a washbasin or bucket—nothing. I sprinted back to the kitchen. Panic was setting in as I laid my eyes on my only hope to save the day.

Look, it's not like I thought using a teapot to put out a raging fire was a great idea. It's just that during a crisis, you've got to do
something
. So I filled Pa's teapot to its brim—a whopping three to four cups' worth of water. I ran back into the yard and dumped the water as if I was pouring tea—through the spout part. This
produced a round of applause and laughter from the neighborhood kids standing on the other side of the fence, finding their afternoon entertainment in the prospect that I might be burned alive before their eyes. I ran back in and refilled the teapot, then ran back out, only to see Pa's next-door neighbor spraying down the lawn with his hose.

I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Frazzled and exhausted, I walked over to Pa and placed my hand on the old man's back. He was surely terrified by this whole thing, but I had come to his aid. I realized that my patting his back was the most physical contact, and the most intimate moment, we'd shared in almost a decade. I felt a profound sense of closeness with my grandfather, and I vowed that this strange, awful experience would serve as the impetus for my taking better care of the guy, being there for him more often.

He looked at me with what I thought was pride in his eyes. I figured he was experiencing the same sentiments. Then he spoke and brought me back down to Earth.

“This is all your fault!” he shouted, scorn filling his voice.

“What? How could this possibly be my fault?” I asked.

“I asked you to mow my lawn,” he shot back. “You didn't, so I just lit it on fire!”

For the record, he had never asked me anything of the sort.

P
a died in 2003. His skunk was the only thing I asked to inherit. I still have it.

The fact is, Pa represents some of the genetic material that contributed to my very existence. It's a frightening thought, but one that fills me with a great amount of hope as well.

One day, I'll be old. Everyone will have died or left me, and I will be alone. Maybe depression will have a hold on me, or my grasp on reality will have slipped. I will sense that my day of reckoning is at hand, and I will undoubtedly be scared.

When that day comes, I pray that I will find strength. Not the strength to endure, and not the strength to come to grips with the life I've led and the mistakes I've made. I know myself well enough to know that such strength will be beyond me to summon.

Instead, I pray for the strength to reach for the stuffed skunk that is my grandfather's legacy. For the strength to live my final days as he did—distracting myself from my ultimate fate with weirdness and fun.

I pray for the strength during my final days to strike the match that will set my whole world on fire, as my grandfather did before me.

K
oozo.

In my neighborhood, it was a name that could only be spoken in whispers.
¹

I first met the man known as Koozo when he climbed out of a sewer pipe at the bottom of my street wearing mesh shorts and no underwear. I had been playing kickball with a few other kids when we saw him emerge from the depths to approach us.

“Hey, I'm Koozo,” he said, wild-eyed and grinning.

“Do you know we can see your wiener?” my brother asked. No sense in beating around the bush when it comes to something as prominent as an exposed phallus.