Next time I'll bring a candle for that mouth of yours.

The despairing uncle was visiting from Florida last week.
The manic-depressive man of sixty-five
first Puerto Rican cop in Rockland County during the Sixties
until he came home high on LSD
to find his wife, my mom's best friend
cheating on him, and killed her with his bare hands.
He did some time for that one, alright;
probably not enough, but fifteen years was sufficient
to send the family into a spiral from which it never recovered.

I remember visiting him in prison when I was two.
More specifically, I remember the glowing logo
on the Pepsi machine in the big room where we'd meet
and not understanding why we had to wait for him
to come out and see us.
They told me it was his job.
In a way it was.

When he came out he was a new man.
"Found Jesus" and all that jazz.
Married a woman fifteen years younger
who loved him for him, even stayed with her for awhile.
But the man was always OK in my book.
He'd pick me up from my grandmother's house
to take me out on adventures in the wilderness
fishing the lesser-known streams and lakes
in the area he grew up in.
He was finding himself again, I was along for the ride.
And when my parents went through their split
he was the only one who listened to what I had to say
always having an analogy that a six-year-old could understand.
(My first understanding of the word 'perspective'
was somehow related to a plane passing overhead
though I don't recall the details.)

One day when he took me for a ride near a train trestle
he decided to tell me the whole truth about his past.
Somehow it didn't phase me, even though a ten-year-old
should understand the weight of his crime.
It was still my Uncle Ray sitting next to me in the car.
I loved him just the same.
Maybe more.



So that's your preface.
This is what happened the other night:
(It wasn' much but I want to remember.)



I was eating rice and fried chicken at my mom's house when he
walked in, a big bowling-pin of a man in a salmon polo shirt.
It was an awkward time for an arrival. No one likes
to be interrupted while eating, or shall I say shoveling
comfort food into one's mouth.

"What's up, Dude?" as he strides into the kitchen.
I mumble something incoherent, trying to keep the rice
in my mouth as he stands himself behind my chair
and squeezes my shoulders with those big, rough hands of his.
"Man, your shoulders got wider. You look even bigger
than your dad." My mom cuts in with something about
"that V-shaped upper body" that my father and I have
as I suck in my gut to try to prevent her from being a liar
though I guess it's still true from a front view.
And Ray was exaggerrating, Dad's frame is huge
or maybe I just remember it being bigger than it is.
He goes on to ask if I "work out, or if it's from
lifting the pipes and stuff."
I answer tersely with "Lifting the pipes and stuff."

His seven-year-old daughter runs past him
and around the corner into my mom's living room
to play on the computer. He left his wife twelve years ago
when she began demanding a kid and he said he was too old.
That makes it all the more ironic that the Peruvian illegal alien
he was seeing several years ago became pregnant with his child.
In a way that little girl saved his life by forcing him to think about
someone other than himself. That's always been hard for him to do
the bipolar oldest sibling who Did Time with other Christ Complexes.

"Celeste, say Hi to Cousin Mike," he pleads.
I finish chewing my food and swallow.
She comes in and lifts the sleeve of my shirt
asking why I have so many tattoos.
Christ, can't a man eat in peace?
My mom overhears the topic of discussion
and mentions the tiger lily I have for her
in a tone that still leaves me confused
as to whether that pleases her or not.
Uncle Ray starts telling a story about something arbitrary
and all I can focus on are his teeth, or lack thereof.
He's lost a few more since I last saw him a year-and-a-half ago.

He must've noticed me staring:
"Your mother's been calling me a Jack-O-Lantern. Nice, right?
My bridge fell out and another tooth shattered somehow
down here," as he pulls his lip aside to show me.
Dinner was over for me then if it wasn't already.

We walked into the living room to sit down and catch up.
He asked about work and my living situation.
For some reason I couldn't look him in the face
for too long, but I couldn't pinpoint why at the time.
Maybe because I knew it was coming.

He came right out with it:
"So you fired her, huh?"
("Her" being my Ex that I had brought on "Vacation" to Florida
with me at the end of the March before last
and the end of our horrid relationship.
He could never get her name right and kept calling her Lisa.)
"Yeah, but I found a much better one," I retorted.
"Of course, of course," as he nodded his head knowingly
implying that I get my moves from somewhere.
And when that five-foot-four Improvement walked in
and stole the show Ray's eyes lit up in agreement
with my assessment of the situation.

The three of us made small-talk until it became redundant.
I stood up, her hand in mine, saying we were
going to take off for the night.
I went into the kitchen where my mom was cleaning up
to kiss her goodbye. We said our appropriate farewells
and gave the obligatory hugs, though they're always warm
in my mother's house for some reason.

Before I left I pulled Ray aside.
"So I hear you're going to be a Hall of Famer."
My mother told me he was being inducted into
the North Rockland High School Basketball Hall of Fame.
It sounds funny some forty-five years after the fact:
his name on a plaque in a box in his closet;
his name on a wall in some gymnasium
in a long list of others
stared at blankly by bored parents sitting in bleachers pretending
to watch the game but really thinking about what's for dinner later.
"Man, I don't care about that nonsense. I'm not going to that
stupid ceremony. For what? To see a bunch of other old men
point and say 'Look, there's Ray Amengual.' I ain't got time for that."
He didn't care and he shouldn't; the man's got far more
to be proud of than that.
That little girl, for instance.

We laughed about it for a second as I gave him one last hug
making sure it was adequate for a curtain-close.
It was one of those moments you have to make
in case you don't see someone again.
We'd shared a lot over the years that'd be eulogy-worthy
but a story is only as good as its ending.
This is just another one I sold short.