Read More: A brief Q&A with James McSherry
I will start from here. I am seven-years-old and my brother Tommy, who is eleven, pulls out his dick and pisses out the window onto my head. My brother Joe, who is nine gets hits with the spray, too. The ants we were studying in the dirt scurry for their lives. Joe, curses loudly. I am not allowed to curse yet. So, I think in curses. We both jump back, away from the yellow spray.
“It’s raining,” Tommy laughs. “Watch the flowers grow.”
“Jump,” I holler and picture him falling out the window onto the ground and making a cartoon splash, the ants carrying his body away like a trophy.
I don’t want him to die. I just want him to scream, “Help me, James,” so I can say no.
Over in the bleachers at The Throggs Neck Little League I am sitting with my mother and my grandmother watching Tommy pitch. Just like that I am twelve-years-old and Tommy is sixteen.
I pretend to throw a pitch.
“Blink,” my mother says, “and you’ll be a teenager.”
It is the bottom of the ninth, two outs, men on first and third. Tommy winds up.
The opposing team heckles, “We need a pitcher, not a belly itcher!”
My mother stands up.
“You’re the best, Tommy!” she screams. “Burn ‘em!” The count is three and two.
“Bend down ump,” my mother yells. “How you gonna see the fuckin’ pitch?” The batter swings and strikes out.
My grandmother smiles, takes a long drag from her Pall Mall cigarette. “See Tommy smile?” my mother pokes me. “He’s happy.”
“It’s good to be happy,” my grandmother says.
“I see,” I answer.
“The next Tom Seaver,” my mother says. “Ya hear that everybody?” She winds up and throws an imaginary baseball at Tommy.
My brother turns the other way, ignoring her, as his teammates pat him on the back.
Tommy looks up, and points to the sky as if God threw the last pitch. I study the number on Tommy’s back, the same as Mickey Mantle, number seven. It’s supposed to be a lucky number my mother says. It’s the number Tommy prayed for when he got on the team. He came home smiling that day, uniform in hand, holding up the shirt, with the lucky number and pointed up at the sky that time, too.
That wouldn’t be the last time he pointed up. And each time, I looked up, too. I didn’t want to miss anything but there was nothing there.
When he turns around again, it is two years later and Tommy is eighteen. He is swallowing Black Beauties, in a competition with his best friend Crazy Charlie, to see who can stay up the longest. On the sixth day, in a frenzy, Tommy throws himself through the plate-glass window of our neighbor’s house.
See Tommy bleed. See Tommy crawl. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men. Even my mother couldn’t put Tommy back together again.
“Hush little baby, don’t say a word, mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird,” my mother sings to Tommy as she holds his head and waits for the ambulance.
“Up on the ward,” my mother says, when I ask where we are going.
It sounds like a song when she says it and I imagine someplace nice with a view. Up, up and away, I think, like Superman or Mama Cass in her beautiful balloon.
“This is my friend David,” Tommy says, as he leads us from the elevator, around a Ping-Pong table, to a row of orange chairs set against sea-green walls.
“He writes poetry, James,” Tommy says, “but it doesn’t even rhyme.”
“It’s not supposed to, “my mother says. “I’ve been telling James since forever that good poetry doesn’t rhyme.”
I am fourteen. David looks old to me, at least thirty, with greasy hair and thick, bottle-cap glasses. He doesn’t look like one of Tommy’s friends, who have long hair, wear dungaree jackets and combat boots and carry Bowie knives. They smoke pot and pop pills and punch each other when the next person is not looking. Sometimes, they make each other bleed. Then Tommy comes home angry, falls asleep with his clothes on and my mother complains that she’ll never get the blood out of his shirt, not even with Tide.
David reaches behind my ear and produces a cigarette and Tommy laughs.
“Hey, Houdini?” my mother says sarcastically. “Can you teach me how to get out of a straightjacket?”
David smiles at me.
“I just love magic,” Tommy says.
“And Marlboro’s,” David says, handing Tommy the cigarette.
My brother looks up and points to the ceiling because there is no sky.
It doesn’t surprise me so much that this stranger has pulled a cigarette from my ear, or that my mother has read my poems, or even that Tommy has taken up smoking. Up on the ward. Up, up and away. My mother leans over quietly, without a complaint and lights Tommy’s cigarette.
Non-rhyming poem #1: Underneath my mother’s fingernails is Tommy’s skin, underneath Tommy’s skin is a syringe – somewhere underneath these words – me.
My mother is here. Tommy is here. Joe is here. I am here. My little sister Sheila is here, too.
My older sister Susan, escaped. She’s out there somewhere like my father. Two needles in a haystack.
When I ask my mother where my father is, she just says, “Out there,” and points toward the door. I look that way, half-expecting a knock or to see his drunken face peering in and his square, unshaven chin scraping up against the screen door of our basement apartment.
But he’s not here.
Here is my grandmother’s house. She kicked her tenants out so we could live downstairs.
Sometimes my mother curses my grandmother and points up at the ceiling.
I look up, too, but see nothing but cracks along the molding and hear my grandmother pacing back and forth in the kitchen. I picture her stirring a pot of gravy and calling me upstairs to keep her company and help her figure out the Jumble in the Daily News or to watch the Mets game.
My grandmother is there.
I am sixteen now and my life is here and there.
“James,” my mother says. “I need your help.”
We pull Tommy from the tub, my mother and I. “He has fallen asleep,” she says.
“Since this morning?” I ask.
We lay Tommy’s body on the un-swept floor. His toes and fingers are wrinkled from staying in the bath water so long. In a matter of seconds, dust has collected on his pasty skin. Some of our dog Duchess’ shedding hair has found a home on the nape of Tommy’s neck. I go to brush it off.
“Leave him alone,” my mother yells. She lifts Tommy by the hands.
“It’s time to get up, it’s time to get up, it’s time to get up in the morning,” she sings.
My mother is carefree. When my father left, she sang, too.
“Maybe we should call an ambulance,” I say. She ignores me and grabs Tommy by the dick.
Though we are here alone, my mother, Tommy and I – I am embarrassed for her.
“The early bird catches the worm,” she jokes, shaking Tommy’s dick back and forth. She looks up at me and smiles. Tommy doesn’t move.
She lifts his eyelids, puts an ear to his chest, locates the pulse in his wrist. These three actions are the most reasonable things my mother has done in a long while.
“Well, what are you waiting for!” she screams. “For Christ’s sake, call an ambulance already.”
Tommy is in a coma for two weeks from overdosing on an unspecified number of Quaaludes.
When he comes home from the hospital, he lands his first and only job: sandblaster. He does three things for the first month after almost dying: go to work, climb the tree in our neighbor’s yard and sneak up to the roof of my grandmother’s house and sun himself. It is the middle of August and Tommy has hardly spoken to me.
“Go talk to him,” my mother says. I follow him to the roof.
“Want a smoke?” I ask, holding out one of my mother’s Chesterfield cigarettes. “All I need is fresh air and a blue moon,” he says.
“Something wrong?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer. I put the Chesterfield down and leave him alone there.
It is the last night in my grandmother’s house and my things are packed. I am eighteen. I can’t sleep. I’m afraid that when I wake up, I’ll be thirty. For the first time in my life, my family, at least most of them, will be here and I will be there. Tommy looks out the window and points toward the sky. “Look, James, Nanny and Daddy are up there.”
I will look up again, as I always do and see nothing but cumulus clouds shaped like regret.
In my dreams lately I have seen my father. He is a contestant on that game show “To Tell the Truth,” where a group of panelists drill him with questions to see if he is an imposter. Just as I run from the audience, onstage, he disappears behind a curtain and I am surrounded by the panelists. Kitty Carlisle asks me who I am.
“I am his son,” I say, pointing toward the curtain where my father has just disappeared. “When is your father’s birthday?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” I say, feeling embarrassed.
“He’s the imposter,” she says, pointing at me and the audience claps.
I am waked from a deep sleep by something pinching my foot. The digital clock says 3:16
a.m. Tommy’s shadow is on the wall and he is standing at the foot of my bed. “What is it?” I ask.
“Babinski,” he says, running what seems to be a metal spoon up and down the arch of my foot.
I realize I am not dreaming. It is the first time Tommy has spoken to me in a long while. “What are you doing?” I ask.
I see the red tip of his cigarette riding high over his head like he is reaching for something.
He sits on one of my packed suitcases.
“It’s what they do to you in the hospital to see if you’re still alive,” he says. “Well, I’m alive,” I say. “You can leave me alone now.”
He taps my foot with the spoon and leaves the room.
Non-rhyming dream poem #22: My brother has mastered the spoons. He can play anything.
His favorite song is “People are Strange,” by The Doors. He slams the spoons against his legs and whispers the lyrics. My mother’s voice calls out requests from the kitchen. Play “Mac the Knife,” she says. “It reminds me of your father.”
My mother hums as he plays. Sometimes, they stand on street corners and strangers clank change into a metal cup as my mother dances. I want to get up, stand with them and recite a poem. But I have grown and forgotten rhymes.
My new home is a furnished room. I share a kitchen and bathroom with five other men. I am the youngest by at least thirty years. The old man in the kitchen hands me a glass of wine to welcome me.
After the first week, the first month, the first year, the telephone rings. It is my mother. “Tommy has disappeared again,” she says.
The first time he is lying on the railroad tracks. I am twenty now. There is something about fifteen tabs of Mescaline and a message from John Lennon. The second time there is angel dust and a flame-throwing dragon that has chased Tommy to his hiding spot in the swamps off Balcom Avenue.
“It’s safe here,” Tommy says. “Fire and water don’t mix.”
The third time I canvas the rooftops, the drug spots, the churches and the parks before I get lucky and call all the Psychiatric Emergency rooms in the Bronx. Tommy is in Jacobi Hospital under my father’s name.
I am half-hoping that it is my father, like Lazarus, back from the dead but the nurse on the other end tells me the patient is in his twenties.
“He just walked in, almost naked,” she says. “PCP.”
I hang up the phone and think of calling my mother, visiting my brother, perhaps searching for my father’s remains; but when I step to move ten years have passed and I am thirty-years-old.
This is the here and now that I am talking to you from. In the time that it takes to read this, my brother Tommy, who is thirty-three-years old throws a television out of the third-floor window in the apartment he shares with my mother and misses my head by three inches. I look at him dangling his legs out of the window, laughing madly and I feel like yelling “Jump.” Twenty-two years have passed since he pissed out the window onto my head.
Now Tommy has barricaded himself inside the apartment.
I have to get him out.
Earlier in the day my mother phoned and said that Tommy had disappeared. When I got there he was standing in the kitchen gulping milk out of the carton and my mother was on the phone calling the Fire Department, the Coast Guard, and Congressman Eliot Engel’s office.
“I can’t get the Missing Person’s Bureau,” she yelled. “Tommy is right here,” I said.
“For Christ’s sake, James,” she said, “Don’t you know a fucking mirage when you see one?
Tommy, my dear son Tommy, has dis-a-fucking-peared.”
I am sitting in the psychiatric emergency of Jacobi Hospital. I committed my mother earlier the same day and now my brother. The receptionist behind the desk says: “If you bring one more, we’re going to lock you up.”
“Do I get a discount?” I ask. “Two for the price of one?”
The doctor calls me in and I go over twenty years of history in twenty minutes. I tell about the time I bought Tommy a razor because he hadn’t shaved in over a year. He wanted to dye his hair white. He thought he was Moses. He proceeded to shave off all of his hair: chest, eyebrows, legs, head. Tommy shaved everything except his beard.
The doctor laughs.
When I tell him about my mother calling in a bomb threat to a radio station because they wouldn’t play Sinatra, he appears amused but impatient.
“Go on,” he says. “When did your father leave?” We cover my father’s history in thirty seconds.
“I don’t remember much,” I say. “I can’t even tell you his birthday. He was murdered when we were teenagers but my mother didn’t tell us until later. She wanted to protect us.”
“No funeral?” he asks.
“She didn’t have the money,” I say. “He was buried in Potter’s Field.”
“Fine,” he says and gets up to leave. “Very good.”
In the emergency room, I wait for them to process my brother’s paperwork. He will be on 10 West, one floor above my mother who will be on 9 East. I think of that quote, “One flew east, one flew west, one flew over the cuckoo’s nest.”
I make two friends while waiting and we tell each other stories.
“I was listening to the radio,” the middle-aged Black woman says, “And they were talking about ‘The Anatomy of Help.’”
Her husband was an alcoholic and suicidal.
“There are signs,” she whispers, “and you have to be able to dissect those signs, take ‘em apart and realize when someone is crying out for help.”
The young man in the hat speaks.
“It’s my anniversary,” he says, “Ten years that I’ve been off the street. I was homeless and people helped me.”
“My father was homeless, too,” I said, “when he was murdered.”
“Oh Lord, oh Lord,” the woman says and looks up and makes the sign of the cross. I don’t look up anymore.
“I’m sorry,” the young man says. “Your father needed help.”
“That’s right,” the middle-aged woman says, “Always tellin’ me about tough love, turn your back on your man but I only know one kind of love.”
The young man in the hat works for “Bountiful,” a non-profit organization that feeds and clothes the homeless. It gives them opportunities to work. He’s admitting a close friend.
“Lord knows you got to help yourself,” he says. “But every man needs help.” “Amen,” the woman says.
There was more praying in that emergency room than in St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
We discover things about each other waiting there for hours. I picture my mother up on the ward, banging the ceiling of 9 East, as if she knows Tommy, her eldest son is up there and they can communicate their madness – code talkers in their own language – like Navajos during World War II.
“Come close now,” I feel like saying, like when you’re a child and someone says that and you know that he’s going to say something bad or why wouldn’t he just come out and say it?
It’s as if the voices in that room, the room itself has taken over and in my mind I start to say, “You know when you blow out the candles on your birthday cake and you wish for something? And then you cut the cake and everyone claps and your mother smiles and says, “What did you wish for, honey?”
“I wished that Tommy was dead.”
I don’t say that, though. I only think it. They might lock me up, too.
“My mother’s a manic-depressive and my brother’s a schizophrenic drug abuser,” I say. “They can’t live with each other and they can’t live without each other.”
It’s so simple I thought to myself.
“Oh Lord,” the woman says. “Two and I can’t even handle one.”
“They’ll disappear without you,” the man in the hat says, “And you’ll disappear with them.”
We lean over and whisper things to each other and wait. […]
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James McSherry is a graduate of Columbia University’s School of the Arts. He is a writer, filmmaker and educator. Mr. McSherry’s first book, A Clean Street’s a Happy Street is being taught in New York City public schools. He was a contributing writer for MovieMaker Magazine and has covered film events both in the United States and Europe. Mr. McSherry has taught writing and film to high school students in the Bronx and to college students at The School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. He currently teaches film at Mercy College and a memoir writing workshop to recent retirees with The New York City Department of Education. Mr. McSherry has just completed his latest book, The Stories We Tell Each Other and is developing a television series based on his experiences as a teacher in New York City. He is a devoted father and husband who currently resides in Westchester, New York.
Read More: A brief Q&A with James McSherry