The Late Bloomer (5 page)

Before Keith can unleash his torture of choice, I rapidly scan my brain's directory for last-ditch pleas, and . . .
voilà!
I come up with the one and only verbal defense that can stop this bully in his fuming tracks.

“If you hit me, I'll tell Dad you always sneak girls down here.”

He clenches his teeth. “No, you won't. Y'know why?”—he wrinkles his nose like a pit bull—”'Cause then I'll kick your white ass, that's why.”

“I don't care,” I bluff. “I'll go wake him up right now and tell him.”

I know that Keith, four years older and at least forty pounds heavier than me, can't risk having Dad find out about his in-house humping. He lets go of my shirt and slams me against the cellar wall, pursing his lips and exhaling his beer breath into my sweating face. But he doesn't box my ears, yank a ball-buster or place my skull in a death grip. I smell victory.

“All right. Fine. But if you say something,
anything
, to Dad”—he stops and re-grabs my shirt, which has torn at the neck—“I'll kick your ass.”

I head for the stairs before he changes his mind. Halfway to the top, safely out of his reach, I muster the courage to shout, “Indian boy!”

Glaring up the stairs at me, Keith grunts, “KAK!”

KAK stands for
K
iss
A
ss
K
enny. When not calling me Little Shit, my charming brothers call me KAK for short. I've earned the acronym by, in the words of my brothers, being a “brown-noser,” a “suck-up,” a “momma's boy” and an all-around parental “ass-kisser,” which is the primary etymology of KAK.

Mom penned in my baby book, “Kenny is a cutie—Daddy's shadow,” when I was three years old. Ever since then, I've always shared a close bond with my father, viewing him as nothing short of God. I enjoy getting more attention than my other four brothers. I have come to crave it. That's why when Dad tells me to take out the garbage, I enthusiastically reply, “No problem, sir!” When Mom, standing with her hands on hips, complains that we're all a bunch of slobs who never clean up after themselves, I roll the vacuum cleaner out of the closet and suck up the mud clumps, the stale potato chip flakes, the pot seeds—basically, all the detritus of my brothers' various irresponsible activities. When Dad wants us home by nine o'clock, I make sure I'm home watching the cleavage-revealing country girls on
Hee Haw
(if it's a Saturday) with Dad in the living room at eight; if my brothers stay out past nine, thus infuriating Dad, then I will inform him exactly where they all are and what substances they were ingesting and/or inhaling the last time I saw them.

Sometimes I deserve their taunting; still, I hate the KAK nickname more than I hate Jerry Garcia, Kevin's and Keith's heroin-addicted hero. But I don't let them know how much their words hurt me. I can't show weakness. I learned early on that the more I let my brothers bully me, the more they will torment me. That means whenever they
entertain themselves by, say, locking me in a closet, I just lie down and nap until they get bored and let me out. Whenever they pin me down and singe my hair with a Bic lighter—you know, just for kicks—I spit at them in defiance, trying my damnedest not to cry. Whenever they knuckle-punch my arm, I flick them the finger and run away, then hide in my bedroom and bawl my eyes out, watching, as if through a time-lapse camera lens, a red spot on my arm morph into a blue-green bruise. No one has to tell me to be tough and act like a man; I know I have to.

—

At age ten, I'm a chubby kid, with pipe cleaners for arms, sloping shoulders and a paunch that gives me the overall shape of a bowling pin. Safe to say, it's an unimpressive physique.

Other kids notice my plumpness, and as kids often do, they try to make fun of me for it.
Try
being the optimal word. For example, I remember when Tyler, a wily speed-demon of a kid in my fourth-grade gym class, shouted across the asphalt playground, “Hey, Chugalug!” because, during a game of kickball, I had been running with all the grace and speed of a sumo wrestler. I responded to Tyler with the form of diplomacy my brothers had taught me to practice: I calmly walked over to Tyler, smiled and, when he was least expecting it, punched him in the gut. I was suspended from school for the rest of the day, but at least Tyler never called me Chugalug again.

Although such bullying might work against pip-squeaks, it can't defend me against a couple of older brothers who are bigger, faster and stronger. When Kevin turns fifteen (and I'm nine) he weighs close to two hundred pounds. Dad likes to say Kevin is “built like a brick shithouse.” Keith, meanwhile, lifts weights in his makeshift Muscle Beach, a corner in our basement rec room, for hours on end. He curls dumbbells until his biceps bulge and his long black hair sticks to his shoulders. “Curls for girls,” he says, standing before a mirror.

He takes off his shirt. Sweat traces down his V-shaped back.

I grab a couple of five-pounders and copycat-curl them, losing my balance.

Mid-grunt, Keith glances over and quips, “Nice try, KAK.”

I possess fightin' words, if not muscularity. I tell my brotherly tyrants that KAK is an acronym for
Kick
Ass Kenny, which I hope will stymie them because I high-mindedly assume they don't know what
acronym
means. It doesn't matter; they still abuse me.

Mom makes me feel better. She says my brothers are just jealous because Dad brags to everyone about my hockey talent and how I am generally “a good kid” who someday is going to make something of himself. My brotherly relations don't improve, however, when Dad starts spending most of his free time (when he isn't working at his printing shop, sleeping or watching TV) with me, which bothers my brothers, who, like me, were raised by our father to not show pain—be it emotional or physical. As Dad says, “Never let them see you cry.”

—

I perfect the role of Kiss Ass Kenny, playing the Good Son, balancing out the badness of my older brothers.

In so doing I suppress my desire to party, have friends and, well, sometimes be bad just for the sake of being bad. Few kids want to disappoint their fathers. But the stakes are doubly high for me, because Dad is always reminding me that Kris and I represent his last hopes for a son who will achieve the athletic stardom that he never did due to his mom and dad being “a couple of rednecks.”

Mom's always trying to explain to my father that there are more effective ways to get us to do things he wants than through profane threats, mind games and physical intimidation. It's no use, though.

Dad doesn't want to be a jerk. But his version of parenthood is one he learned from his own parents.

Six years after being born in Washington, DC, in May of 1943, Lawrence Leon Baker's parents divorced. His mother, Phyllis, a high school dropout turned waitress, took custody of Dad's younger brother and sister and moved to Silver Creek, a sleepy village about thirty miles south of Buffalo on the rocky shores of Lake Erie. “Little Larry,” meanwhile, stayed in Maryland with his dad, Wally, who had quickly remarried a woman named Margie.

Wally worked as a bail bondsman in Maryland's Prince George's County, which saw its fair share of spillover crime from the seedier neighborhoods of the nation's capital, a few miles to the west. Wally loaned cash to criminals at inflated interest rates, then bullied them to pay up when they didn't repay their debt in a timely fashion.

By night, as my Dad proudly tells us, Wally (“a real ladies' man”) tried to hump anything that moved. This, in my view, made Wally far from the model husband and father. On top of his extracurricular activities, Wally never played catch with my dad, never took him to the movies, never showed him much affection at all. If he did anything, Wally unknowingly was motivating my father to pay more attention to his kids. Problem is, Wally didn't show him how to express love while giving that attention.

While Wally didn't get to know his son Larry that well, he did
get to know a lot of hookers after bailing them out of jail. His dubiously benevolent acts of emancipation also earned him a few favors from his jailed ladies of the night—debts that, according to family legend, Wally gladly collected. At least, according to my dad.

Understandably, Wally's extracurricular activity didn't bode well for a happy marriage with Margie; when not shouting at his father, Margie, according to my father's version of events, would beat Larry with a leather belt, often till his back bled. When he was thirteen, my father visited his mother in Silver Creek for a summer vacation. She saw the marks on his back and refused to let him return to Washington. Other family members insisted Larry was making it all up, but my dad swore he was abused.

By the time my parents began dating at Silver Creek High School, Dad was one of the “bad boys” who strutted down the village sidewalks in blue jeans and a T-shirt, his black hair greased back and his black loafers spit-shined to perfection. He drove a red 1956 Ford, “a real hot rod,” as he says. On weekends, as my dad fondly recalls, he drank beer and drove over to the neighboring town, Dunkirk, where Dad and his cronies “beat up queers.”

My mother, meanwhile, was the Olivia Newton-John to my dad's John Travolta. Bookish and bespectacled, the Marcia Murphy one sees in Silver Creek High School's 1961 senior yearbook photo looks like a librarian. Marcia got straight As and was the school's queen of extracurricular activities: a member of the honor society, saxophonist in the school band, president of the Future Teachers club and a staff reporter on
Hi-Times
, the school newspaper. Larry was on the wrestling team, frequently skipped classes and smoked Pall Malls by the pack, which, à la James Dean, he stuffed beneath the sleeve of his white T-shirt.

In the summer of 1961, with the anticipation of life after high school as thick as the rising cornfields surrounding their rural high school, Larry Baker, then seventeen, penned a cursive love note to his steady girlfriend of the past year:

Dear Marcia
,

A couple of more weeks and our high school days are over. You'll be going to college, and I'll be working “in heaven,” at the Lake Shore News. I'll probably be using those pink ink removers your father got me on one of his trips. For some reason, I believe you and I will always remember Sunday afternoons!!!

We sure have had a good time in our senior year. I've had a hard time my senior year with my car. It won't be long now before it's back on the road. But your sweet mother is kind with her own car and considerate enough to let me use it. Not a bad mother-in-law, nor a bad car. What's more wonderful, I have a wonderful girl to go along with it. A fellow couldn't ask for a better girl, or the girl's family, than I have now and will have for many years to come. There is one night you will never forget!!! You know which night that was. Boy, were we ever lucky.

Well, I guess I'll close for now. This is our last year in school, but not the last year for us.

Love always
,

Larry

Two years later my mother, who was studying to be a teacher, dropped out of Buffalo State College after getting pregnant with Kevin. My mother was a strict Catholic: Abortion was not an option. Neither was an out-of-wedlock child. So, before the disturbingly lifelike crucifix inside Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church, less than a mile from their childhood homes, my father, a printing-press operator, married my mom. A few months after that, they had Kevin. Six years after that, on the morning of April 18, 1970, I was born.

—

Although my parents in seemingly every category were as opposite as a proton and an electron, they did share one major bond: They came from broken families.

My mother and her younger brother, Ron, grew up seeing their father, a lanky Irish engineer named Herbert Murphy, one day a week, if that. Their mom told them that Herb wasn't around much because he “traveled a lot” for his job as an engineer building bridges from Buffalo to Alabama. On Fridays, Herb would show up at their house and hand their mom crisp twenty-dollar bills. Sometimes he'd spend the night; sometimes he wouldn't. Sometimes he'd take Ron and Marcia and their mom out to dinner; sometimes he'd just pop in, say hello and head off to his next “trip.”

Her father's absence from her daily life became an embarrassment to my mom when neighborhood kids started asking her why she didn't have a dad. “I do have a dad,” she'd say. “He just travels a lot.”

Soon after my parents started dating, Larry, seventeen, grew curious about just where his girlfriend's dad was all the time. Something didn't seem right. Her brother Ron also had recently begun questioning his father's constant, mysterious out-of-town expeditions, but his mother didn't have any answers.

During one of Herb's regular Friday visits, Ron snooped through his father's wallet and found his driver's license. It listed an address of 35 Forest Drive in Orchard Park, a town located about thirty miles north of Silver Creek, just outside of Buffalo. That's strange, Ron thought. Why would his father list Orchard Park—not Silver Creek—as his home address? Maybe it was a boardinghouse, or a YMCA, where his father slept while on business trips. When Ron told my dad about it, the two decided to drive up there and find out for themselves.

So one Saturday morning, my father and Ron drove past the correct address on Forest Drive, which was a large white ranch-style home in a tree-lined neighborhood. My dad parked his '56 Ford down the street and, like a couple of cops on a stakeout, eyeballed the end of the driveway through the rearview mirror.

In those days, delivery men still brought baked goods to your doorstep. When the bread man walked by the car, Ron hopped out
and, pointing to 35 Forest Drive, asked, “Who lives in that house, do you know?”

“Mr. Murphy and his wife,” the bread man replied.

Ron's jaw dropped. He got back in the car and relayed the news to my father, who promptly made a U-turn and did another drive-by. This time as they passed the house, Herb was washing his Thunderbird in the driveway wearing shorts and a golf shirt. As they drove away, Ron realized that he had never seen his father in anything other than a business suit and that he didn't know his father owned such an expensive car.

They returned to Silver Creek and told my mom what they had discovered in Orchard Park. Then they confronted their mother about it. She confessed that, yes, their father was married to another woman, and, yes, Ron and Marcia were both what they used to call “illegitimate” children. Suddenly, everything made sense.

—

I know scant details of my father's childhood until he takes my little brother and me on a summer family trip to his childhood home in Maryland. I am fourteen. Wanting to spend some quality time with us, Dad takes us on the week-long trip. Our first stop is the house he lived in with Margie and the man whom my dad conspicuously calls “Wally,” rather than “Dad.”

My father has been chain-smoking his unfiltered Pall Malls all morning, spitting tobacco shreds out of the car window. As he steers the white Mazda through the rundown alley of postwar cookie-cutter homes, many with tarpaper roofs, Dad remarks that he has not been back here in thirty years and hardly recognizes the neighborhood. A pizza-oven breeze is tossing my dad's graying black hair.

Residents are cooling off in their front yards and wooden stoops, and Dad practically dislocates his neck when we pass an African-American family barbecuing on a porch. “Niggers?” Dad, as racist as
he is homophobic, says, locking his door with his elbow. “We never had niggers around when I lived here.”

Dad flashes back, telling us about riding his bicycle through these streets, catching snakes in the woods over there. He points out a grassy plot that no longer has a diamond but where he says he used to play baseball all day long on summer days like these. His voice trails off to a whisper; clearly, he's talking to himself, not us.

Kris and I are used to his sports-related bragging, but Dad rarely talks about his past or his family, only in the most superficially negative ways. As in “My stepmother was a nut case” or “They're all a bunch of ignoramuses.”
Morons
is among his favorite words, actually. But he never goes into detail.

We drive over the crest of a hill and park in front of a two-story clapboard house sorely in need of a paint job. Dad, who typically smokes three packs a day, has lit up at least ten nicotine delivery devices in the last twenty minutes.

With the car idling beside the curb, he stares past me at the house. The white paint is flaking, and the grass looks like it hasn't been mowed since my dad had last been here—in 1955. “This is where I lived when I was around your age, Kris,” he tells my ten-year-old brother, bored in the backseat. “Just like I remember it,” Dad mutters under his breath. “Same shithole.”

He flings his thirtieth cigarette butt of the day out the car window and steps outside. Kris stays in the back, slackjawed and napping.

It looks like no one's home. He and I walk around to the backyard for a look-see. Attached to the back door is a rickety wooden porch with a two-foot-high crawl space underneath. Dad casts a steely glare at the porch and crosses his arms in front of his chest. Expressionless, he sparks another Pall Mall and sucks in its tarry smoke. He stares at the porch. The hot breeze is clapping the leaves on a backyard poplar tree as he inhales a few more puffs. “You know, Kenny,” he says, “I used to sleep under that fucking porch.”

Unsure how to react, I raise my eyebrows and nod, pretending not
to notice as he quickly swipes a trickle from the corner of his brown eye. For the first time in my life, I see my dad cry. But I don't want him to know I've seen this happen.
Never let them see you cry.

We walk to the car and drive back into the city to take a narrated tour of the capital on a tourist tram. Dad, in his shorts and T-shirt, sits in languid silence the entire tour. As the tram crosses the Potomac and rolls into Arlington National Cemetery, Dad sits as stone silent as the thousands of white grave markers lining the green hills. Perhaps he's trying to re-bury his childhood memories along with the remains of the men buried below us.