The Perfume Burned His Eyes. Michael Imperioli
it sitting on his dish like bacon; but no such luck. His laughter subsided and he started doing what he did best: stuffing his mouth with cheeseburger.
It was always unpleasant to watch him eat but that night it was unbearable. He always chewed with his mouth open and made these disgusting smacking sounds as his tongue sucked the food off the roof of his mouth. I was sure I was going to puke any second.
“You eat like a cow.”
I couldn’t believe the words came out of my mouth. I am not a very confrontational person. I usually let things go, but something had happened to me. The fuck it thing had definitely begun to take over.
“And you know less about women than I do, and I admit I know hardly anything. She’s a beautiful woman but you’re just too stupid to see that.”
Willie stopped chewing. He closed his mouth.
I was on a roll and kept going: “You have shitty taste in music . . . and you laugh like a little girl.”
He looked at me with surprise, as if he wasn’t sure if I was joking or not. I saw a little fear cross his eyes. Then he took a huge bite of cheeseburger and started chewing with his mouth wide open. Smacking the food between his palate and tongue in a loud, exaggerated way and staring right at me. Food flew from his mouth onto my plate.
And then I did it. I reached across the booth, grabbed the back of his head, and slammed his face into his plateful of food. He let out a muffled shriek, a very feminine-sounding cry. I didn’t let him pull his head back up for a few seconds. When he finally surfaced his face was smeared with grease, cheese, and ketchup, and there were fries stuck to his nose.
It was beautiful. A work of art worthy of Pollock or Picasso. I was very proud. I got up and walked to the counter as he started cursing at me. I handed my waitress-with-the-long-red-hair a tensky and told her to keep the change. Then I looked into her big blue eyes and winked. She smiled, her wide mouth revealing gorgeous white teeth, the top front two with a big gap between them. I walked out onto Northern Boulevard and despite the heat of that July night, I was cool. I was Steve McQueen.
three
Most nights that summer I came home around eleven or eleven thirty. My mother would always be awake and we would watch The Honeymooners or The Twilight Zone together. The night I buried Willie’s face in his triple-burger deluxe I got home earlier than usual. Mom was surprised . . . Wait . . . Hold on a second . . .
Let’s stop here and go back. I’m sorry. I’m a liar. A liar and a coward.
I did none of the valiant things I described.
I did not tell Willie he ate like a cow, had shitty taste in music, and laughed like a little girl.
I did not put Willie’s face into his cheeseburgers like he deserved.
I did not hand the-waitress-with-the-long-red-hair a tensky and tell her to keep the change.
I was not cool nor was I Steve McQueen.
No.
I did absolutely nothing that night. I suffered Willie’s humiliation of me and the slandering of my fair maiden in silence.
I ate my cheeseburger, drank my Coke, and split the check with Willie, and we walked back to his house like nothing had happened at all. I can’t even say that I was filled with hate for the guy. Well, maybe that night I was. Maybe that night I wished the Q32 bus would squash him into a humongous pancake that I could feed to all the starving children of Biafra and Bangladesh and win the Nobel Peace Prize.
And maybe not. Maybe I just felt sad for this poor, unfortunate soul. A pathetic behemoth doomed to live out his days trapped in a mind the size of a postage stamp. No . . .
More lies. Forgive me.
Willie was not as fat as I’ve made him out to be. He was kind of flabby and chubby but not exactly obese.
I don’t want to write about Willie anymore, thank you.
So I did get home my usual time that night after all. Just as the full moon rose into the sky over the opening credits of The Honeymooners. My mother always tried to be cheery when I came in and would ask if I had fun. My answer was invariably “Yes.” I knew she was tortured and tormented over the breakup and the passing of my father. Watching her force herself to look like everything was fine made me sad. It also made me hate him even more. Which is a terrible way to feel about your dear old dead dad. But that’s the truth. I’d yet to find any sympathy or compassion for the man.
You see, the straw that broke the marriage was my dad having an affair with a tenant of my mother’s cousin. So the whole family, and many of our friends and neighbors, knew that he was fucking the young Lithuanian chick who lived in cousin Joan’s basement. My mother was humiliated and her heart was broken. And it wasn’t the first time, but it would be the last. Then after he died she felt even worse. I know she felt bad for me: a teenage boy without a father. But I think she felt bad for my dad too, and I think she missed him. And despite all the pain he caused us, despite all the selfish shit he indulged in, I think she blamed herself for the whole thing.
And all I did to ease her pain was spend half an hour every night watching TV with her. At the time, this felt like a big sacrifice on my part. A great Act of Charity. What a guy.
As the summer rolled on, my mother became more dependent on some kind of downer/barbiturate, most likely quaaludes. I never found them, even though I searched the house high and low. I wouldn’t have taken them myself; pills weren’t my thing. I just wanted to dump them into the toilet so she wouldn’t eat them anymore. I always knew when she was high. She would get all glassy-eyed, smiley, and slack-jawed. She fell asleep with a lit cigarette on several occasions. I was sure she would soon burn the house down.
four
On July 31 my maternal grandfather Gus Lombard had a heart attack while driving his car somewhere in Brooklyn. My grandma Betty was also in the car. Fortunately they just rolled slowly into a few parked cars and she wasn’t hurt. But her husband of forty-something years slumped dead in her lap. You can imagine the state my mother fell into after everything that had already happened.
At the funeral a black woman sang a gospel song. Her voice was powerful and moving. It shook the whole church and made everyone who was crying cry even more. She was the only black person in the building.
My cousin Nicky told me that my grandfather used to sleep with her now and then. This I found hard to accept. The notion of Grandpa Gus having sex with anyone at all was difficult for me, so the idea that he slept with this black woman was downright unfathomable. The woman was at least twenty years younger than my grandpa and for as long as I could remember, the man had nothing good to say about any black person outside of Nat King Cole and Willie Mays.
Nicky told me that the woman was a customer in my grandpa’s store and that her husband had died in Vietnam. Gramps let her open an account for her groceries, which was something he very rarely did. He also allowed her to call in for her orders (another rarity) and would make her deliveries personally. Thus began a love affair that lasted seven or eight years, or so the story goes.
The truth of the romance has never been completely confirmed. But on that Astorian August morning the woman sang her guts out. She put every possible ounce of feeling into the stirring melody. She must have felt something for the man.
My mother gave her a big hug after the service. My mother gave everybody a big hug after the service. It was like she was trying to extract pieces of my grandfather’s spirit out of everyone who knew him. Like if she squeezed everyone hard enough it would somehow reconstitute his being and he would rematerialize alive and well before us.
I miss him. I loved him a lot. It was already a rough summer for me but my concern for my mother outweighed my grief. She was getting high more often and I was scared she would OD and kill herself or wind up in a psych ward somewhere. For the first two weeks after my grandfather’s death it looked like one or the