Living on the Other Side of the Moon

Nature abhors a straight line.

—Capability Brown, landscape architect (1715-83)

Nobody's life travels a straight line. It's only in retrospect that any of it makes sense, or the fragments fit together. The rules of the road dictate that you can only find the missing corner piece under the sofa cushions when you've already given the jigsaw puzzle away.

Poor Pops, peeing in pain and so thin it was like his skeleton was superimposed on his skin. You went to hug him and held your breath in case you pressed too hard and he cracked or folded. I tried my best, but I wasn't a first-rate son. All he wanted when I was little was for me to go to college and be a rich businessman or a podiatrist, something he could crow about to his poker pals, someone to slip him a little extra cash in his declining years. I let him down, and just between you and me, he didn't miss a chance to let me know it.

When Mama left, I was eight and too little to understand. She never acted motherly anyways; she was too busy reading. In my third-grade class, I was the only kid whose mother never contributed to the bake sale or volunteered to come along on a field trip. She always "forgot" PTA meetings, couldn't be bothered with school conferences–even though I almost always won the school spelling bees and it most likely would have been good news–and never met a teacher she could tolerate. Pops, on the other hand, would get downright friendly when he came home from work, especially after he'd polished off a bottle or two, or won a big stake at poker. Heck, that was how we had a big house, even though houses like that in neighborhoods like this were really cheap back in the day. We'd toss a ball out in the alley or watch some football on TV. He could be real palsy-walsy then, although from my vantage point now he was probably just using me to get back at Mama. Mama was the brainy one. Pops was the ne'er-do-well.

As soon as she bolted out of there–I overheard the neighbors whispering something about her being a showgirl in Vegas–Pops went to the dogs. He spiraled down so fast I almost got vertigo watching him. If he cared about me one iota before, he sure didn't now. The fashionable daily martinis turned into bottles of rotgut. It wasn't too long before I was failing in school, although some teachers did make a valiant attempt to save me, since they kept insisting I had a high IQ. My fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Oppenheimer, actually went so far as to ring the doorbell to talk to Pops in person since he gracelessly refused her invitation to talk at school. He made me hide with him in the hall closet until she went away.

The teachers urged Pops to send me to summer school, but it was pretty easy to forge notes from Pops, crib on tests and just get through. The next few years, some teachers felt sorry for me and passed me on to the next grade, but eventually I got old enough that they realized I was a losing proposition. By then Pops had lost his salesman job from all the drinking. He'd stay sober long enough to score at a poker game just to pay the tax bill and hang onto the house and then head off for another bender. And as long as he stayed away from home, it was okay by me. All his dreams for me dribbled away along with the liqueur de jour, so daily I felt myself to be less and less. No college for this boy, since the day-to-day battle to hold onto the house and stay off the streets took up 24 hours of concentration and a lot of hustle. But I did the best I could with no education...