Monkey Boy by Francisco Goldman (free ebook reader for pc txt) 📗

bets. My father was a superb horse better, and as he sat studying the racing form, other old people, men and women, would come and stand behind him, trying to peek over his shoulder to decipher which horses he was circling with his stub of a pencil on his racing form or marking on the betting tickets. I don’t recall him ever having a losing day, but, at least in front of me, he bet only small amounts. That day in the offtrack betting place there was a guy there, hulking and glowering, tousled black hair, swarthy cheeks and chin, older than me but young for that place, who I assumed must be visiting family in Florida too. During every race, he shouted and flung his arms around and kept getting up and blocking everybody’s view of the screen. He looked like Bluto. The old people there were too passive or polite to reprimand someone else’s misbehaving son, but a few times I’d shouted at him to sit down, and he’d shot threatening looks back at me. As four tightly bunched horses, including the one my father and I had bet on, rounded the last bend, he stood up in front of the screen again, waving his arms and screaming his horse’s name, and I shouted out: Sit down! We want to see the race, not your fat ass! During my eulogy, I shouted out those words just as I had in Florida: Not your fat ass! When he heard me—though he’d probably heard me all along, this was just the first time I’d mentioned his fat ass—Bluto turned and charged through the tables, meaty fist raised and elbow cocked, with a speed that stunned me. He was massive. I rose from my chair and put my hands out to ward him off and just as he was about to throw a punch that was going to split open my face, eighty-something Bert was standing between us, shouting: Go back to your chair, you goddamned bully. Leave my son alone. You’ve been asking for trouble all day. Go back to your chair, and sit there so we can watch the races, you bully, you!

I finished my eulogy blubbering away: Oh Daddy, Daddy, best Daddy. Yes, I did. My sister, standing next to me, read the eulogy she’d written next but couldn’t even get through its first paragraph. She stood there sobbing and bouncing her sheaf of printed papers off her thigh like a tambourine, and I put my arm around her. There were times he’d loved us as we’d wished he always would have; maybe it took the shock of death to remind us. I haven’t been back to that cemetery since and wouldn’t know how to find it, don’t know its name or even what town it’s in—Norwood, Canton, Dedham—though my sister must. That last time we saw each other, a couple of years ago, when we took my mother out to dinner, we’d talked about how none of us had been out to my father’s grave since he’d died. Reap what you sow, said Lexi.

Teddy Feinstein, whom my father guided into a landscaping career, spoke at the funeral too. He told how when he was growing up his own father used to work all the time, even Saturdays, but Bert always had time for him. He was only three when he began spending time with my father in our yard, nearly every day and weekends when the weather was warm, helping with the rosebushes, the vegetable garden, the lawn. Bert had even taken him to Sarah Hancock Pond and taught him to skip rocks. Teddy started to cry then and, embarrassed, finished by saying that he only wanted to thank my father for everything, and he went and sat down.

Bert never took me to the pond to skip stones. Your father likes everyone’s else’s children more than his own, I remember my mother saying. I remember lying awake in bed the night after the funeral, asking myself what I could have done as a boy to make my father like me as much as he did Teddy.

During those first years that my parents were separated, when he had his own condo in Walpole and was still working at the tooth factory, Bert was always returning to mill around the yard and would even come inside to sit in his armchair. Mamita, having trouble handling the responsibilities for the house all alone, summoned him home more and more. After he retired, Bert spent his winters in Florida, but when he came north in the spring, driving himself in his Oldsmobile, eventually it was Wooded Hollow Road he returned to. Finally, he sold his Florida condo.

A couple of years before he died, Bert tried to apologize for beating me up so much when I was young. He blamed our neighbor, Phil Ferrini. When Phil Ferrini, who lived up the block on Blue Jay Road, had fallen on hard times, my father helped get him a job at Potashnik in the sales department. On their drives into work together, they liked to talk about their problematic children. Phil Ferrini had a temperamental, beautiful daughter, Michelle, and one of the boys she went out with for a bit was Ian Brown. After she stopped coming to school, there were whispers about a secret late-term abortion. On their drives to work, Phil Ferrini advised Bert that the only way to handle kids today is to beat the crap out of them. Beat the crap out of them, that’s how to get their attention! brayed my father that Sunday afternoon years later, reclining against stacked pillows on his bed like an old-man emperor. That goddamned Phil Ferrini, I wish I’d never listened to that goddamned son of a bitch! Gisela used to enjoy even the most violent of my Bert stories, but the uniquely Gisela place inside her where cruelty, empathy, and comedy merged especially relished the story of my father’s apology. Whenever