Aberration of Starlight

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Penny arcade cigarette lighter that nobody ever filled.

Buddy was a pain in the ass but he didn’t have to die because of that. In Jersey City it was always grey and rainy.

The funny white stone pipes in the drawer with green ribbons tied to them.

Gramp’s fat guitar. Was that the kind of thing Tito Guizar played?

Uncle Joe talked funny and always gave him cold chicken to eat: “Boys gotta to eat.”

For his birthday when he was little Margie gave him a rector set. She had a green dress on and smelled sweet. “Like the five-and-ten.”

Daddy came in with one kind of suit on and went out with another one on right away.

Mrs. Herrick next door gave him and Dougie vanilla cookies and hot chocolate when the old hunkie’s police dog scared them.

Daddy took the tail off the zeppelin when he cut his heinie. “God damn mockie bastards at Shiffman’s!”

You could eat potatoes with big rats on your shoulder? How? They liked potatoes too? People could be anything!

“I’m sure you have to work tomorrow, don’t you, Tony?”

Once Gramp saw men pull a dead man out of his coffin and try to make him drink whiskey. Granma said the ice would melt under the coffin sometimes and the dead person would roll over.

Snow halfway up the door and Daddy dug a path like a big tunnel.

Everybody would die, even him.

A bunch of things like blotters attached together with a leather cover that said lake hopatcong, n.j., and had an Indian in a canoe on a river.

“Matches her shanty-Irish teeth.”

Buddy fell off a rope or something. He had a little backache and then he died.

The orange stuff on the salad was called French dressing Daddy wouldn’t eat: “That’s what makes the Americans all crazy.”

His other gramp was blind and he couldn’t understand what he said to him, they’d sit together in the backyard while the old man smoked licorice twists Uncle Angelo said were cigars. “Pop talks that damn Chinese to him all day long.”

The tin pig had a sailor suit on and a sailor hat and a drum and when you wound him up he beat the drum and walked funny across the floor until he stopped and then he fell over. He always smiled in a kind of scary way.

Once an old witch talked to him from behind the door in the kitchen that went down to the cellar. “Your mother told me to tell you to stop untying your shoes.” He ran around the house screaming and banging into the walls, the witch ate Mom!

“And I’m sure Miss Little Helper has to work tomorrow too?” Daddy pushed the salad away, “Give it to the pigs, O.K.?”

The dirty kid who smelled like coo-coo handed him a can of worms to eat. Cousin Katie told him to stay away from the filthy little dago.

A whole bunch of tiny little canes made out of blue glass tied together with a rubber band. Granma saw him looking in the drawer and hit him with her — skinny belt: “Like your father! Just like your father! Oh, Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” Daddy maybe looked in the drawer and they made him leave home when they found out.

Mom worked at a steam table and got tired. It must have been hot, whatever you did there.

He told Mom the fat man on the corner outside the saloon smiled and tipped his hat, and she pinched his arm. “Sh! He’s a bookmaker. I had enough of Italians to last me a lifetime.”

Some kid who was a cousin or something, Frankie Caffrey, ate bananas all the time with sugar all over them. “My mother says that gives you pimples.” “Shut your fuckin mouth, you greaseball!” He asked Mom about these funny words that pleased him and she told him that Frankie was nothing but a thick ignorant Mick.

Uncle Tom always took him to a park to have a catch with a hardball and once showed him the guy who said “Call for Philip Morris!” playing Softball. When they went back to Uncle Tom’s house he’d make pizza in a stone oven in the backyard and talk to Aunt Marie like his other gramp did.

“You don’t even have a father and that’s why you can’t go to Cathlick school. You’re a Protestant.” He spit in Pat’s face and ran. “You’re as Irish as that Mick!” Mom was really mad.

In the dark church with all the statues wrapped up in purple cloth they had to walk in line down the center aisle and then there was Jesus on the floor on a crucifix and they had to kneel down when the nun slapped her wooden clappers together and kiss Him on the mouth. His stomach turned over and he gagged.

Peggy Copan sat on the railing of the porch with her legs up and he saw her pink underpants.

Mrs. O’Neill asked Mom if she bought her fish from the guinea street peddler because he had the best. So guineas were dagos and wops and also greaseballs? He was a greaseball like Daddy and his other gramp! But he was also Irish like a thick Mick. A greaseball Mick?

“Is Margie a thick Mick?” Gramp laughed, shelling peas for Sunday dinner. “Between you me and the lamppost, not one of them that’s not, if truth be told, Billy — save your mother.”

When Helen Walsh kneeled down to kiss Jesus he saw her white underpants and so did Guido Pucci who made a hole with his left hand and moved his right finger in and out of it fast. Sister Francis de Sales saw him smiling and yanked him out of the line by his ear: “You committed a terrible sin laughing on Good Friday in Church!”

What Guido did meant fucking, because girls had a hole in their stomachs and you stuck your thing in it. Guido wore rubbers to school because his shoes had such big holes in them. He was a real greaseball because he was born in Italy. In the Christmas play Guido wore a black cardboard moustache and a gold earring and a shiny yellow shirt. His name was Happy Tony and he waved a little Italian flag: “I am Happy Tony, the fruitstand man. I love to sing and dance and my favorite dinner is spaghetti and meatballs! I come from sunny Italy’s pleasant land where grapes and olives grow!”

Granma’s corset stiff and monstrous on the chair, he smelled its flowery perfume. Did that mean that Margie wore one of these things? But her smell was different.

On 68th Street when they moved back from Jersey City he had a fistfight with Angie Salvati his first day on the block. “Cockeyes!” Then they were friends and then he was friends with everybody.

He couldn’t judge a thrown or batted ball and so was admitted into games out of pity. But nobody could run faster.

Mom at the kitchen sink in pink underpants and stockings with her chest bare, drinking a glass of water. “Billy, go back to bed!” her arms crossed over her breasts.

Granma hid the corset when Dr. Drescher came with his medicine bag. He would listen to his chest with his ear thing, just like he did with Granma. Bottles of dark-red and black medicine and sticky spoons. “Port wine to build up the blood, ja.”

He thought the Swedish Hospital would be all white and was astounded to find it drab and ordinary. “Swedish ships are the cleanest.” “The Palmolive company buys all the filthy oil and grease in the tanks after a voyage, that’s what they make that soap from, why do you think they color it green?”

He thought for sure Granma would open her eyes in the casket, her cheeks were so pink and terrible.

If Tom Thebus got to be his father what would his boy do for a father? White polo shirt and white shorts.

Peggy Copan told him that girls had to sit down to pee. Why was that?

Helen Copan had to go and get dressed two hours before she went dancing with the lifeguard. Two hours! It’s because ladies have to put on under their dresses all those things with straps and hooks and metal things.

“But all Italian ships are white.”

A whole pack of paper napkins: Chez Freddy, Manny’s Rest, Hi-Top, WigWam, Harry and Mary’s, Bluebird, Seven Gables, Blue Front, Red Apple Rest, Mom’s. Granma’s thin belt zipping around in an arc to catch him behind the knees.

Charlie Taylor said his mother had hair all over her hole, he saw it once. What did ladies have to have hair for? Not Mom! His birdie felt itchy when he thought of it.

Guineas were all riffraff and so were the shanty Irish. He was both of them.

His other gramp gave him a funny-looking thing he picked off a tree and Mom told him it was a fig.

Uncle Joe walked back and forth in the living room with his hat on: “Goddamma crip’ thinksa now he’sa the bigga boss!”

Delaney showed him a picture in a little book with Ella Cinders and she had a man’s big birdie in her mouth and big drops of sweat were falling off her face and he felt weak and funny in his head. “Ladies like to suck off a man’s cock.” Cock was the real name for a birdie.

He and Mom visited some old lady cousin or something on a dark winter afternoon and sat in the kitchen in the dim light of a kerosene lamp. Tea and stale cookies. “My God! Nothing cheaper than an old skinflint of a shanty spinster.” On the way home they stopped into Holsten’s and had hot chocolate with whipped cream on it. He wasn’t to tell Granma. That night on the couch in the dark front room he heard Mom say that she might have sure picked a winner but God knows what’s right is right and she had the best when she had anything and that if she’d married some Pat or Mike she’d have lived in a coalbin as God was her judge. “That’s right! Praise the greaseball mucky-muck to your own mother’s face! Jesus, Mary and Joseph!”

A big cardboard box bulging with his toys, the zeppelin down at the bottom but he didn’t play with it anymore.

On the first day of school, Miss Rush pulled him out of a line of children marching in a circle. He cried and didn’t want to go back to school. “You marching goop! Now, sit down in the corner until you can be good!” He had only just been marching around in a circle. Mom said she was an old dried-up battle-ax. She hugged and kissed him and squeezed orange juice and the next day they put him in Miss O’Reilly’s class instead.

The box had two smiling children on it and Mom told him the words said “The Gold Dust Twins.” He learned to read right away.

Miss Rush was round all the way around her body but her legs were skinny and she wore big black shoes. She probably wore a corset like Granma.

Mrs. Schmidt had a big round shape. And her titties were really big, that was a really dirty word, like cock.

They took him in to see Granma at the hospital and she was all grey and took his hand. Her hand felt like a bunch of cold bones and she didn’t have any teeth!

Jimmy Kenny came to the funeral parlor all dressed in his cop suit with a gun and everything. “She was a good woman, Marie. It’s all for the best.” Mom told Gramp it was a wonder the big gawm could spare the time. “Coming to pay his respects in his uniform! What riffraff!” Frankie Caffrey came in his blue serge Confirmation suit and said the Rosary, the thick ignorant Mick.

He got a new box, Super Suds, and threw his zeppelin away.

One summer evening while it was still light and Mom was talking on the front stoop he got up for water. “The Magrinos’ll be around all smiles before you know it looking for your straight Democratic vote.” On a chair he saw something pink with those straps with metal things hanging off it and flushed. But it was small and soft and stretched when you pulled it, so even with the straps and all it wasn’t like Granma’s.

Who made the world? God made the world.

Babies sucked their mothers’ titties? Johnny McNamee said that all ladies had their titties full of milk, like cows. That was the funniest thing he ever heard.

Kickie Delaney was dirty and he felt like with those kids Cookie and Honey when they took him in the garage. “A lady’s hole is a cunt.” Cunt sounded like it had hair all over it.

He told Mom that the Alpine marquee said if you could only cook. “Did you read that?” She bought him Black Beauty in the five-and-ten.

Tom Thebus told him that boys had to be strong and clean to grow up to be men so they shouldn’t touch themselves. He didn’t know what he meant.

At Steeplechase in the place where air from the floor blows ladies’ dresses up he blushed and didn’t know where to look. And those straps were to hold up a lady’s stockings!

He finished Black Beauty in bed with the chicken pox and cried so that he had to wipe his glasses.

In Caught Caught Blackwell once, all the kids quit because they couldn’t catch him, the last kid out.

Gramp got him an Army.45 cap gun for his ninth birthday right after they moved in with him and Granma.

Buttons that said something he couldn’t understand, green ribbons attached, one had a tiny white stone pipe pinned to the ribbon.

Mom bought him Skippy by Percy Crosby for his ninth birthday and he read it four times in a row straight through. He didn’t know any kids like that.

Granma shaking the Brooklyn Eagle at Mom: “Are you going to let this goddamned bimbo get away with this? Mrs. Recco? Mrs. Recco?”

After the lady from the Relief came to the house Mom cried and they moved in with Granma a few weeks later.

He heard Mom say that she had a crackerjack lawyer now, Aloysius Moran, “a black Irishman smart as a Jew.”

He got to know the kids on Senator Street but it was the same thing all over again with playing ball. “This new four-eyed kid can’t catch.”

Mom stopped working at the steam table.

He saw Tom Thebus touch Mom low on her back, almost on the heinie, when everybody was going in to supper, she turned around quick all red in the face, and gave him a little push.

He joined the library and got a book about a caveman and one called Penrod. He didn’t know any kids like that either.

“The son of a bitch is out on Gerritsen Avenue pretty as you please with that tramp!” Gramp was supposed to do something about it or something.

Kickie said that ladies had their holes between their legs, not in their stomachs.

He started crying in a movie about Tarzan and Daddy took him home and on the way bought him Charms.

The bookmaker asked Mom if he could help her through some slush at the corner and she made believe she didn’t hear him.

Mom slapped him across the face so quick that nobody saw it when they left Granma’s grave but he didn’t remember what for.

Rhoda Sandgren wet herself right in her seat in school and all the pee ran down on the floor. He laughed like the other kids but he felt really sorry for her. Later he thought of what Kickie had told him about ladies’ holes.

He kept missing the ball in a catch with Uncle Tom and wanted to cry.

Georgie Olsen told him in the schoolyard that his mother had to fuck to make him get born and he hit him on the head with his wooden pencil case and Georgie knocked his glasses off. They told Miss Lanchantin they were fooling around.

He’d never seen anything as white as the armband and tie he wore for his First Holy Communion. Blue serge suit from A&S. The host tasted like glue. “All the girls are so cunning, they look like little angels.” Even the Mother Superior smiled.

As long as he was washed and in bed he could stay awake and listen to Lux Radio Theatre.

“Tito Guizar will sing for you.”

Sister Andrew said that a boy once bit a host and it started to bleed, and some boy didn’t tell all his sins in Confession and when the priest put the host on his tongue he dropped dead right at the altar rail. Jack Gannon asked if you by accident swallowed a drop of water when you were washing your face in the morning before Communion, could you receive? You couldn’t.

Mrs. Schmidt sat down next to Gramp on a wooden lawn chair and started talking to him and Mom turned her head away and made a face.

He helped Louis bring the cows into the barn at night. They smelled delicious, like sweet hay and milk.

Max, the Russian barber who was Cousin Katie’s friend, smoked long cardboard cigarettes and cut all his curls off. His hair grew in straight and Mom cried about it for almost three days. “He has to look like boy, not girl and sissy.” Mom told Cousin Katie that as far as she was concerned he was a goddamn Polack greenhorn who had no business being in this country.

Vinnie Castigliano passed him a note in class and it had a stick-figure drawing of a girl and between her legs a big dark pencil scribble. Vinnie had written “Pat Christie’s bush” and drawn an arrow pointing to the scribble. That was another word. Kickie said that Vinnie used to play with his own sister’s cunt and she was fourteen, with a bush and all.

He won a Missal for getting the best mark on the Catechism test, the regular Catholic School kids got a Missal plus a comb in a little black cardboard case.

Mr. Bloom, the druggist, took a cinder out of his eye and gave him two Hershey kisses.

When he had the measles, Mom pulled down the shades and made him poached eggs and junket.

Tom Thebus made him laugh when he imitated Mrs. Schmidt: “Oh, ja, undt vor der lunsh ve haff it der Floadingk Islandt dessert, zo-oo-oo nize.” Gramp said he was a goddamned overgrown horse’s ass.

Mom saw a picture of Daddy and Margie in the Eagle with some other man and got so upset and mad that she started to cry. Daddy had a suit on with a bow tie like rich people wear, and Margie looked really fat.

He saw Gramp drinking whiskey right out of the bottle one day. Wilson’s “That’s All.”

Mom had an argument with Gramp across on the old church steps one hot afternoon.

Uncle Charlie took him out of the funeral parlor and bought him a black-and-white in Holsten’s.

Mom dried him after a bath in front of the kitchen stove at Cousin Katie’s.

He had three pennies and lost one and threw the others in the snow because now they were no good.

As soon as he got a new Big Little Book he tore out all the pictures he didn’t like.

A stack of cardboard things they called “coasters” right next to a ball of string. And the buttons said “Erin Go Bragh.”

Bubbsy said that Mrs. Long caught one of the big kids feeling a girl up in the auditorium and he got sent to reform school. How did a girl feel? A bush.

He never wanted anything so bad as to smoke tobacco like Tom’s in a pipe like his.

He saw Mom clap when Tom made a really good croquet shot and she looked like a girl.

When The Shadow laughed on the radio he would start to cry in fear.

The bookmaker gave him a nickel once and he was afraid to tell Mom.

Why did God make the world?

He played Alkali Ike in a school play and everybody said he should be a movie star, Dolores Marshall kissed him once in the middle of the play and her mouth tasted like orange Lifesavers.

To know Him and love Him in this world and to be happy with Him forever in the next.