Joan Silber - Fools - Stories

When I was in ninth grade, my mother said, “Will you listen for a second? Stop eating and listen. I might get fired.” A sizable wad of cash was missing from the till. Betsy said she’d always trusted my mother in spite of her having an unsavory family situation. Everyone knew about my father. Betsy suggested that the thief, whoever it was, would do well to just put the money back before the police were alerted. They questioned Luís too. “They think we’re up to funny business together,” my mother said. “It’s ridiculous but I’m not laughing.”

“Luís is an old guy!” I said.

My mother, who was not that old for a mother, was weepy instead of loud and indignant. I did wonder if my father had managed to sneak into the hotel office without her knowing. Maybe her agony was in thinking this too. At the end of the week they left her alone but they fired Luís.

“Is he going to jail?” I said.

“Luís didn’t do anything!” she said. “You know Luís!”

Mr. Elegant Old Coot, Mr. Silver Fox, with his mustache and his deep, deep voice. He’d worked at that goddamn hotel longer than my mother.

“And nobody cares,” my mother said. “The union doesn’t care.”

The rank and stinking wrongness of it made me want to push the entire hotel into the sea. At the time, I saw the corruptions of the world as things to be trashed and slashed and ridiculed, I saw them from what might be called a criminal angle. Later I had other theories. I got my friend Dick, who was old enough to drive a car, to take me past the hotel at midnight, and we lit cherry bombs (what thrills of utter panic) and threw them — fast, fast — toward the empty lawn, where they landed in the bushes and exploded with great cracking booms, just as we peeled out of there. We could hear people shouting from the veranda above.

From the traffic light down the road, we looked back and saw flames in the bushes, which some poor sucker in a hotel uniform was going to have to put out. Dick, a perfectly nice guy, was slamming his hand on the steering wheel in savage glee. I whooped too, I did.

It scared the hell out of the guests — we knew this right away and heard for sure later. Let them leave, yes. Let this be the hotel’s worst October ever. The hotel told everyone it was pre-Halloween mischief, local kids gone wild. We lived in West Palm and weren’t even that local. My mother thought it was Luís’s kids, and maybe lots of people did.

A week later we all found out that the owners’ sleazy son was the one who’d made off with the missing money. And he was in some foreign country where no one could get to him. Luís was rehired, with apologies. But without his missing week’s pay. “They can never make it up to him,” my mother said. “Look at him. Look what they did to him.”

She was talking also about herself, the end to her cozy infatuation with her daily toil. She came home tired and sour. I was out of the house as much as I could be, pursuing my new hobbies. The elation of the cherry bomb attack was my gateway drug to further excitements of vandalism. We dumped human turds on somebody’s lovely private beach, we broke into my junior high and spray-painted Fuck Shit Cum all over the auditorium. It was pretty spectacular. Dick and I took a vow of silence, which we actually kept, and that was probably the only reason we weren’t caught.

If you’re testing your nerve, you need to keep going further. The next year, Dick’s friend Alan showed us how to break into and hot-wire a big fat white Pontiac parked outside the movie theater and we took it for a proverbial joy-ride, blasting the radio down the highway to Boca Raton and back. What I felt on that ride was a soaring belief, a white light of certainty, that we were really awake and most people were slaves and were asleep.

We did brag about that one. I was only fifteen, younger than the others, and I didn’t have girls to impress, but none of us kept our mouths shut. Which brought girls to me, in fact. Nicolette from my American History class started to hang around after the bell. She was okay, a bratty, complicated girl with a great rear end. Her friend Susan liked me too.

Once I was fooling around with girls, I had enough adventures at night to draw me away from mayhem with Dick and Alan. Somewhat. At the end of the summer the three of us set a magnificent bonfire on the beach and it took out a piece of somebody’s wharf. Well, that was fun to watch. I continued to do surprisingly well in school, much to my mother’s relief. This was partly because school was contemptibly easy, and partly because I still liked (as I always had) the privacy of reading. My mother said, “If you just remember you’re not the idiot you pretend to be, you’ll be fine. More than fine.” She said this fondly, patting my shoulder. She even laughed when I made an idiot face and pretended to drool. This may have been around the time she started having an affair with Luís, which made her quite happy for a while.

Luís was never going to divorce his wife. My mother (who got more confidential about the whole thing as time went on) was sure this was because he was Catholic, though it was clear to me he had plenty of other reasons. We were Jewish. (Even my father was.) They never sent me to Hebrew school or bothered with much of it, but now my mother proudly invoked Jewish tolerance of divorce. “What does the Pope know about marriage?” she said. “And birth control! Don’t get me started.”

What if you really thought there was a God (I didn’t) and you thought His rules were wrong? My mother said you could join another religion. “Let’s convert Luís to Muhammadism, and then he can have a lot of wives,” I said.

“Very funny,” my mother said. “Use your brain for something useful.”

Her thing with Luís went on for years. I went off to college (to Minnesota, where the winters were too cold and I had a scholarship) and I came home on vacations to find my mother all in knots about some new insult or frustration in her underground romance. My friends said, “At least she’s getting some,” which was a crude version of what I sort of thought. I did know, as well then as ever, what splendor my mother found in whatever she had with Luís, but I was too young to see why it would make her put up with all the other crap.

In college I myself had a lot of hot and fleeting romances. We enjoyed our drugs, in those days, and the mix of marijuana and sex was considered a personal revelation, a sacred message we each happened to decode. And I could never keep from talking about whether the mind was all chemicals and what that proved, conversely, about matter’s connection to spirit. I liked those airy arguments. In my head they were linked to the overwhelming evidence that the mundane world around me ran on hypocritical horseshit. Everything was in collusion to hide the truth, and my friend Dick from high school was drafted and sent to Da Nang on the word of government liars. I showed the kids from SDS how to throw a burning effigy of President Nixon on to the college lawn so that it torched some famous oak tree, which was kind of great to see. I engineered a small exploding rocket in front of the ROTC the next year, but I stopped there.

I never got into enough public trouble to risk my scholarship. I had to be careful. And by the time I graduated, I’d found my own sources for buying dope in quantity and was supplying a good part of the campus, at a very fair price.

I liked my day as a local big shot, but I knew from the years with my father the dangers of overestimating your own luck. My ambition in life was to go far but stay safe. Once I was out of school, I moved around, to Chicago and then to northern California, trying to get a handle on what I could do and not do. In San Francisco I had a girlfriend who was getting her master’s in art history and working as a stripper. What a strange and fabulous creature she was. While she slept beside me, after her night of professional display and private love, I rose from bed each morning, in a great act of will, and went to my steady gig at the state unemployment benefits office. They had me (what a joke) interviewing people about their job searches and approving their continuing payments. I was very lenient.