Minor Details

                                                            Minor Details 
 
I guess I should start out writing about why I killed my sister’s cat but we talked about that a lot already so it seems like I should write about other stuff I think about and remember like you said I should. I think I should just write about anything I can think of so you will know everything in my head even though I already told you a lot of it.

I started to read a book once in school that started with I Was Born. So I’ll start with saying I was born. It was in Detroit in 1946 right after the war. Dad wasn’t in the war. He was going to be but Timmy broke his collarbone and Dad got delayed so he could stay home and carry him around because Mom was pregnant with me. So I think I kept Dad out of the war but Timmy says it was him.

Timmy was born three years sooner than me on the same day as me on April 20. He said he cut down a cherry tree to give me when they brought me home from the hospital and it wasn’t till last year when I stopped believing him because how could a three year old chop down a tree and Mom and Dad would never have let him have an ax anyway. I felt a little stupid that I believed him for fourteen years.

The other thing I remember about our birthday is we were at the drugstore and we were still kids and Timmy picked up one of those almanac books that have a lot of facts in it and it had famous peoples names for every day and month they were born. I tried grabbing it from Timmy because he was being so slow about getting to April 20 but he grabbed it back and took his sweet time showing me like he always did that he could do that because he was bigger than me and he could do anything he wanted. I tried acting like I didn’t care and I was trying to figure out the TV Guide to see if Martin and Lewis were going to be on that week but I was really watching Timmy and wanting to know who was born on our birthday.

He finally got around to April and our day and he slammed it shut right away and put it up on a high shelf and went back to the soda fountain and got a cherry phosphate. You might not know about phosphates because a lot of my friends don’t so I can explain them to you. They mix bubbly water and practically anything you can think of to make the taste you want. That was before you could get pop in bottles from the store.

I stood up on a stack of some French sounding magazine with a woman with a big hat on the cover and wiggled my fingers so I could tip the almanac off the shelf so I could read it. I caught it when it fell and it flipped open easy to April. I couldn’t wait to see and there it was this list of famous people born on that day and the very first name was no one other than Adolph Hitler himself.

Even at seven I knew he was the worse person ever born. First time I saw him on a newsreel when I was six and I thought his mustache was funny and I laughed at the way he stretched his arm high and screamed out foreign words and people yelled and soldiers marched for him with really cool helmets. But everybody around me even Dad was booing out loud and somebody else said he was a really bad man and this other person said he was a murderer so I never told anybody he seemed pretty neat to me.

I asked Dad about him back then and he tried to explain it the way Dad explained stuff. He got up and brought back a copy of Look or Life or one of those magazines that had all kinds of pictures in it and this one showed piles of dead people and people that weren’t dead but looked dead standing inside fences they called a camp and they were waiting for our Army to let them out.

He said it was Hitler who killed them because they were Jewish and he really hated Jewish people. I asked him how he did it because I couldn’t see how one guy could kill so many people and I didn’t see any blood in the pictures but that didn’t really mean anything because I never saw any blood in any pictures back then anyway.  Dad told me he put them in ovens and I didn’t want to think about that and even though I didn’t know what a Jewish person was I knew I wasn’t one but I still didn’t understand what Dad was talking about so I asked him, When Did He Kill Them? When They Were Away At Camp? and remember I was only six then. 

He seemed like he didn’t want to talk about it anymore and he flipped a lot of pages and found a picture of a BB gun and said, Look At That, and I didn’t think about camps or ovens or Hitler again until that day I was looking at that almanac. I looked at a few other birthdays like Mom’s and Dad’s and my sisters and never heard of any of the famous people born on any of their days.

I told Timmy I thought it was so funny we were born on the same day and he said it was no big deal and it happens all the time all over the place and I said that I don’t mean that. I said I mean being born the same day as Hitler and he said, Yeah, but he told me there are only three hundred and sixty days every year so it happens a lot and I remember thinking for the first time I was smarter than him and said to him it didn’t happen all the time to brothers who are born on the same day too with no brothers and sisters in between and he said, So What. You’re Hitler, I’m Not. and we called each other Hitler the rest of that day.

I asked Dad that night why was Timmy and me born on Hitler’s birthday and I could tell by that look that he got every once in a while that he didn’t know about it. About Hitler’s birthday I mean and for the first time I remember thinking I was smarter than him too and that I was pretty smart for seven and by the time I would be ten like Timmy I would be a lot smarter than him and I still am. 

My really old sister Donna was born in 1938 so I guess that means she is about twenty three. She was never a kid to me and both of my memories of her are bad. The first one was when I was in kindergarten and they told us the next day they were going to give us polio shots but only if we wanted one. Donna walked me to school the next day and I told her I didn’t want a shot and she said that was okay and I asked her again if she was sure I wouldn’t have to get one and she said she was sure and I was really glad. I sat in class and a nurse was in the room where they stacked all the toys at night and Donna was her student assistant since she was in the 8th grade and she would come through the door every couple of minutes and call out one name at a time and that kid had to get up and go in and get a shot and I told my best friend David I didn’t have to get a shot and he was jealous. I couldn’t believe it when my sister came in and called my name and she was grinning when I had to go in. She knew it all the time and I knew she lied to me when she told me I didn’t have to.

The other time was when I was climbing my best friend Ken’s tree in his backyard and Dad told me to stop climbing so high and the next day I told Donna in secret that I climbed above the telephone wires and she told me it was really something. Then after dinner Dad took my hand and pulled me into the vestibule and started hitting me in the head without telling me why until the very end when he said it was because I climbed the tree above the telephone wires. I saw my sister later and she tried to give me a piece of spearmint gum and I threw it back at her. I was going to get even with her but she got pregnant and was only fourteen and got married to Ronald and moved with her cat to live in Ronald’s mom and dad’s basement.

My younger sister Sue Ann was born six years after me on April 17 in 1952. I was hoping back then she would be born on April 20 too like Timmy and me. When I thought about that after I learned about Hitler I was glad she wasn’t because that would have been really weird.

Before Sue Ann was born Mom was home all the time always cooking and cleaning and making us laugh by making gurgling sounds like Lucy from TV and sometimes calling Dad Ricky and stuff which was funny because Dad’s real name was Timothy.

When I was five I watched Lunch with Soupy every day and Soupy would tell all the mom’s what he was going to eat for lunch the next day and Mom would always have the same lunch as him waiting for me when I came home from school. I would wait even though I was starving because I wouldn’t eat till Soupy took a bite of his sandwich and then I would take a bite of mine at exactly the same time.

Mom made dinners and we ate together at the kitchen table because she didn’t want anyone to spill anything on the dining room table even though Uncle Roy and Uncle Garney spilt beer every time they played poker in the dining room when one of them would get a flush or a straight and jump up and yell and throw their cards down and knock their bottles of Schlitz over.

The best dinner was when Mom went and bought six little chickens and each of us had our own entire one to eat. I tried to eat all of mine but it was impossible but it was so cool to eat any part you wanted without sharing. After that when Mom would ask us what we wanted for dinner we’d always say, Can We Have Those Little Chickens Again, and Mom would say, Someday, but we never did except that one time.

After Sue Ann was born everything changed. Aunt Helen came over to visit and I never saw Mom so mad when Aunt Helen rang the doorbell. Mom grabbed the hammer and a big nail from the kitchen drawer and ran to the door when Aunt Helen was trying to open it and Mom pounded the nail in the door so it would be impossible to open it. She kept it nailed for a long time and it was a real pain to come and go from the back door all the time.

I don’t know why Mom was so mad at her sister except she said she was a drunk and didn’t want anything to do with her which didn’t make sense to me because Aunt Helen and Uncle Roy used to come over all the time and I remember Uncle Roy drinking Shlitz but Aunt Helen always drank tea.   

That’s when Mom started working at a restaurant right after Sue Ann was born. Nobody had a mom working anyplace back then and Mom and Dad never told us what to say when somebody asked us why Mom was working. Dad didn’t seem to like it even though we ate there almost every night. Cundari’s Pizza is what it was called.

Mom was a waitress and she worked real late almost every night and she woke Dad up when she got home and they would pour her tip money on the kitchen table and they would count it together and put the coins into her big mixing bowl and Donna would take it to the J&P the next day and turn it into dollar bills and give them to Mom but I know for a fact at least one of the times she didn’t give Mom all of them. 

Dad complained a lot about Mom waking him up when she got home and that it was hard to go back to sleep before having to get up to go to work at five in the morning. But the tip money was great because me and Timmy could get almost anything we wanted. Mom would sleep every day till noon but it was okay to wake her up for a minute and ask for money for something and she would tell us to take a dollar or two from her Stash which she moved around to different places around the house. Her Stash was really the part of the tip money she kept from Dad but Dad knew about it and thought it was stupid that she would hide it.

Mom would finally get up in the afternoon and Timmy and me would be out playing and we wouldn’t see her until around four when we came in to get something and she’d be Getting Ready and then she would wait till Dad got home. A lot of times she would get in her Ford and leave and wave to Dad just as he was pulling up in his Chevy. 

When I was ten Ford and Chevy came out in September with really cool looking cars and me and my best friend Al would go down to the corner of Joy Road the busy street and stand there waiting to see one drive by because it was only a few miles away that they made them and the bosses would drive them home. We were the first in school to see the 1956 Ford and it was really cool looking.

I ran home to tell Timmy and he was in the front room smoking from a whole pack of Pall Malls and coughing and really hated it but said he was trying to get used to them so he could smoke. He never did but I did and I was smoking Lucky Strikes in front of him starting a few days later. I liked Luckies because when you bought a pack in the machine for thirty cents at the drug store it came with three pennies scotch taped to the side because the real price was only twenty seven cents and I thought they were a very honest company. 

Mr. Cundari is what Mom and everybody called Mom’s boss except for Dad who called him Pete and I guess he moved here straight from being born in Italy before we were fighting them in the war. He had a more classy place called Cundari’s Lounge that had all kinds of Italian food and it had a lounge and a piano player over on Six Mile. I don’t remember the piano player’s name but he had music books with all the words and notes to thousands of songs. Dad said the books were against the law but that was how the guy knew so many songs that were mostly old people’s stuff but I liked a lot of them. Mr. Cundari would bring his mandolin and play with the piano player and Dad said that’s
why a lot of people put up with the lousy food.

Mr. Cundari wore a tuxedo all the time. He combed his hair back and you could see bobbypins shining when the lights hit his head. Dad pointed at them so many times whenever we ate there which was a lot and he would say Pete Is So Vain and I never knew what he meant. He also had one of those drawn on mustaches that looked like the mark that stays on your window after you flick off a chunk of bird poop.

Mom quit her job for a few months and tried to be a Mom again and made me and Timmy start piano lessons and Timmy was doing pretty good until I learned a song by myself that was two pages ahead in the lesson book from where he was learning so he quit. But Mom wouldn’t let me quit and she would tie me to the bench with stretchy clothes line and would set the alarm clock on the piano for an hour and I had to play till it went off. It made me mad but now I’m glad she did that because now I can play pretty good.

Mom was asked to be Den Mother for the Cub Scouts. She made me join but I didn’t like it. Mom didn’t like it either and didn’t come to the second meeting even though it was in our basement because Mr. Cundari said she could be the night manager of his lounge.

My best friend Victor had an older brother who had tattoos and his mom made Victor join the Cub Scouts too. We went to the rest of the Cub Scout meetings and we always tried to hang out after with some of the Boy Scouts when they had meetings at the same church because they were cooler and had better badges and could use knives to carve branches and make spears. One of them was named Sidney who was nice to us and spent time showing us his manual and stuff and showed us a couple of ways he could tie knots but the next time we tried to talk to him he walked away not saying anything to us. I think his buddies made fun of him for talking to Cubs.

When I was thirteen I was very popular in the 7th grade and Sidney was dating a girl named Suzanne in my class even though he was in the 8th grade. I went by myself to the school dance that Sidney brought her to but he couldn’t dance at all and I danced most of the records with her and Sidney was pissed off and I thought it was funny. I even went over to them when they were talking at the end of the basketball court which was the dance floor and I leaned against Sidney like he was a post or something and kept flirting with Suzanne.

The next day when I was dropping my books off in my locker everyone started telling me Sidney was outside and was going to kill me. I thought of running out the back but my best friend Bob Vichard said I’d be a coward. So I went out there and there was Sidney bigger than I remembered in his ROTC uniform with medals and stuff. He told me to punch him first because he had a rule or something that said he couldn’t start a fight. I said I wouldn’t and we stood there for about a half hour and he was blocking the way. Vichard was sitting on the short fence with the round iron railing and kept telling me out loud to just hit him because he had to get home.

I tried telling Sidney that my brother Timmy would get him if he beat me up but Sidney had a big brother too so that didn’t work. He finally told me to say I was sorry for trying to take his girl and I did. He seemed to be okay with that but he had some other ROTC guy with him who told him to make me get on my knees. So I did that too but Vichard was turning all red and started to leave so I rammed Sidney in his crouch with my head and knocked him against the fence and I think I hurt him really bad. I walked away but I was probably walking so fast that some of the kids said I ran away.

Dad heard about it and asked me if I ran away and I told him I didn’t. That’s when he picked up the phone and I didn’t know why till he started talking to Vichard’s mom and got her to put Vichard on the phone. Dad said, Bobby, This Is Mr. McIntyre. Donny Says You And Him Ran Away From A Fight Today.

I still don’t know exactly what Vichard said since I will never talk to him again but it was probably something like I Didn’t Run Away, Donny Did. Whatever he said it it wasn’t good because Dad hit me so hard across my left ear that it still hurts. He hung up the phone and grabbed me from the floor by the hair and whacked me twice more with his fist across the head saying Do You Know Why You’re Getting A Whipping? Not For Running, and he whacked me again, But For Lying To Me. I think he hit me again but I’m not sure.

Later I went up to the attic that Dad started redoing but never finished and I sat in the dark on the table Dad was making by putting an old door across a wood frame and I stared across the driveway into the lit window of Angie Toccho who was fifteen and the sister of my best friend Sonny. Their shade was up a couple of inches like it had been for about a week and I was excited when Angie walked past and I watched her undress. I could only see a slit of her taking off her blouse and her back was turned but I could see her bra strap and got to see her reach behind and unhook it. She didn’t turn around though and she put on a pajama top and it dropped below her waist and then she turned off her light. I was going to turn on our attic light and take my clothes off hoping she would be watching me when I heard Dad calling me. I thought he knew somehow what I was doing and I was scared when he said Get Down Here.

Mom had been shot in the head in the kitchen at Cundari’s lounge. The bullet went into her head right behind her ear and came out of the middle of her forehead and blasted away a big chunk of her skull. Everyone thought she would be dead any minute but they were wrong. She lived two more years. Somebody said it was a small pistol but I don’t know because Dad and Mom didn’t like guns.

Dad took me and Sue Ann to see Mom at Eloise Hospital just once. My best friend David told me in class that it was a nut house. I was nervous about going there but I wanted to anyway so I could see Mom. Her bandages were taken off her head that morning which I guess is why Dad never took us before because she would have looked scary with her head all wrapped up. She looked scary anyway but I was still glad to see her. Her hair was cut short and her face was real fat but mostly it was the crater in her head right out front like the biggest crater on the moon. I thought of the soft spot moms always warn you about on new babies. Mom had one like that big time but it was in front and it never went away.

I guess Eloise was a nut house but Dad said the real crazies were in other buildings and Mom was in a building where they just kept an eye on you till you got better. I remember an old lady with oily grey and white hair with an round pillow in her hands coming up and running it up and down my back like a massager but some nurse pulled her away from me as soon as she started.

Dad said that when they operated on Mom that she had a big tumor in her brain that nobody knew about and that it was some miracle that the bullet destroyed it. I guess I was supposed to believe that Mom saved her life by trying to kill herself but who would believe that?

When Mom came home she seemed okay. She actually seemed better than before because she was easier to talk to and never got upset or complained about anything. She started reading the bible and this old woman named Mrs. Bryant came over every week and they would read it together out loud while her husband sat in his car two doors away. Dad and Sue Ann moved out and was living at Stella’s house. Stella owned a 7/11 store and met Dad while Mom was in the hospital.

The strangest thing I ever saw around then was coming home from school and Mr. Cundari’s black Lincoln car was out front and he was pushing our lawn mower trying to cut our grass. He had his tuxedo on but the jacket part was on the seat in his car. He was sweating bullets and black ink lines were running down his neck and staining his white shirt and grass clippings were sprayed all over his shiny leather shoes.

Dad got a divorce right after I turned fourteen so he could marry Stella and he told Timmy and me that we could live with Mom or him. We both decided to live at Mom’s even though Timmy and me never talked about it to each other.

Dad bought Timmy a Royal Enfield motorcycle and Timmy joined a club called The Highwaymen and a lot of days when I came home there would be eight or ten motorcycles parked in front of Mom’s house and Timmy and his friends would be sitting around the front room and the porch talking about their bikes and the trips they were going to take up north but I don’t think they ever did.

In the winter Timmy’s motorcycle wasn’t working right and Mom didn’t want him to take it apart to fix it out in the cold so she let him bring his motorcycle into the front room and turn it upside down and it sat there for two months and parts were all over the place mostly on a sheet Mom put down on the floor but also in Dad’s chair and on the dining room table.

Timmy wore a black leather jacket with a skull that all The Highwaymen wore but Timmy also wore a derby hat just to be different I guess. He was only seventeen when he was at some party and some guys from another club called The Renegades showed up. The Renegades were guys that got kicked out of The Highwaymen because they wouldn’t follow the rules. What I heard was the President of the Renegades sat next to Timmy at the bar where Timmy sat with his derby on the counter and this guy crushed Timmy’s derby with his beer bottle on purpose. I heard Timmy hit the guy so hard they had to call an ambulance but nobody would tell the police who knocked the guy out so Timmy didn’t even get into trouble. What did happen was The Highwaymen made Timmy President although he was only seventeen.

When Timmy got his motorcycle I got a Wurlitzer electric piano. It was the same one used by Ray Charles on What’d I Say which is my favorite record. I started a band with my best friend Tommy who played sax and his cousin Charlie played guitar. We got so good by practicing every night till ten in Mom’s basement. Then Dale Nabb the best drummer in school joined us and his mom let him drive her station wagon and we began playing at parties and dances. I was the only one who would sing and even though my voice wasn’t very good I’d sing What’d I Say and play the piano exactly like Ray Charles and everybody loved it. We named the band The StingRays.

Mom got real fat and got a really bad case of diabetes and got put in the hospital it seems like almost every day. She died the last time and nobody was with her except for Donna who didn’t tell us she was dying because she said she didn’t know. But she got Mom to sign some papers giving her Mom’s house so that Dad couldn’t get it after she died. Everything happened really fast. Mom got cremated in an oven and we sprinkled her ashes around the elm tree in the front of the house and when they were being poured out there were some of her teeth mixed in and Timmy put them in his pocket before I could get any.

Donna and Ronald and little Ronnie and baby Joey moved into Mom’s house even though Dad was saying he was going to stop her but he didn’t. Timmy got a girl named Amy pregnant and she moved in too and they lived upstairs in me and Timmy’s room and since they were married I couldn’t sleep there anymore. So I had to sleep in the front room on the couch for about a year and Donna’s cat would wake me up every night by meowing or jumping on me all the time to lay on my stomach. It made me really hate cats.

Like I told you I was very upset then because I never got any sleep and when I got home from school I put the cat in the oven and turned it on. I wasn’t trying to kill it and I was going to take it out but I had to go to the bathroom and before I was done my best friend Paul was ringing the doorbell over and over. He just got a summer job working in shipping at the Hudson department store on Grand River and was all excited and went on and on about what he was going to be doing. We started walking to the drugstore and got about halfway when I remembered about Donna’s cat but it was way too late.

That’s everything in my head right now. I just want to go home. The StingRays need me and I won’t hurt anyone. I really like baby Joey even though he cries a lot and would never put him in the oven like Donna says I might. You have to remember that Donna lies a lot. I won’t go near the new stove except I would like to surprise everyone and cook little chickens for them on a day when Sue Ann and Timmy will be there and I can make one extra that could be on a plate in front of the chair Mom used to sit in. I think everybody would like that.

Thank you for reading this and understanding me better.

Donny

P.S. Please give everybody a copy of this so they will understand too.