Fight Night(38)

To be honest, telling you all this is making me so tired because I already lived through it and that was tiring enough and Grandma thinks everything is a joke. So just believe me, we finally made it to Fresno. A woman on the plane sitting next to me had a baby on her lap who was one and a half years old. She said the baby was eighteen months old, but I did the math. The woman asked me how old I was and I said around a hundred months. The baby and I had to wave at each other the whole time. I couldn’t stop or the baby would look sad and bored and that made me feel guilty. I decided I wasn’t ever going to start this bullshit waving business with Gord or we’d never stop. Grandma snored and snored. It took one hour and five minutes of continuous waving and snoring to get to the raisin capital of the world.

Lou and Ken are old hippies! Grandma hadn’t told me that her nephews are ancient men. One of them was wearing short shorts and knee-high socks with pictures of bulldogs on them. That one turned out to be Lou. He had a ponytail. Ken was wearing jeans and a black t-shirt. He had a white square of hair under his lip the size of one of Grandma’s Scrabble tiles. They both had white hair! How could nephews be so old? They smiled the way Grandma smiles, as if they think everything is funny and the smiles stay on their faces for a long time and they peer at things closely and keep smiling and seem so amazed at everything.

Wow! said Lou. You’re Swiv!!!!! Man! Goddamn! I’ve been wanting to meet you forever!

Lou and Ken hugged Grandma a long, long time. They hugged me quickly. They were smart and knew things about hugging kids fast which is different from hugging your aunt. Lou did a lot of the talking but Ken talked too. They didn’t ask me stupid questions. I liked the sounds of their voices and the way they talked.

Grandma sat in the front of Ken’s car with Ken, and I sat in the back with Lou. Grandma was gleaming with happiness. She smacked Ken’s dashboard with her giant welding glasses. She did her sitting victory dance. Her head was bobbing away out of control. See the palm trees, Swiv? Obviously! I said. You know these palm trees don’t really grow here naturally, said Lou. A lot of them were transported in from elsewhere, you know. Really this is a desert climate, inat right, Kenny? That’s right, said Ken. And sometimes late at night, said Lou, or in the very early morning hours you can hear them crying … they’re not happy being here, you know, they’re homesick. Yeah, said Ken, you know I’ve even heard them screaming. That one time … remember that, Lou? We were towing John Friesen on his motorcycle. Oh YEAH! said Lou. That tree really was screaming, man. It sure was, said Ken. It sure was. Lou rolled a cigarette with tobacco and papers on his bare knee in the car while it was moving. He rolled it up and put it behind his ear for later because Ken wasn’t a big fan of Lou smoking in his car. Lou said one time when Ken’s kids were little Lou was sitting in the front seat smoking away and when he was finished he threw the cigarette out the window, but it was so windy and the cigarette got sucked back into the car and flew into the back seat and landed on Ken’s youngest son’s carseat. Man, said Ken, it wasn’t ’til ’bout five, ten minutes later we saw smoke coming off that thing. Luckily, said Lou, the kid was out, man! Slept through the whole thing and didn’t ignite. He wunt hurt a bit, said Lou. I threw my soda on him for good measure. Oh yeah, said Ken, he was absolutely fine, didn’t even know his chair was burning, but after that Lou stopped smoking in the car. Inat right, Lou? Yeah, said Lou, fair enough, fair enough, after that I stopped smoking everywhere, though, cuz I coont afford it.

Lou said he’d been working in Silicon Valley and really living the dream, man, Armani suits, collecting art, but then he made a decision to quit his job and travel the world. And right then, in that limbo period between his job and travelling, he had a massive heart attack and almost died, but he had no insurance anymore from work because he’d quit his job and he hadn’t gotten around to getting with a new insurance program so he lost everything. Every damn last thing, man! He only had a bike—not even with ten speeds—only one speed and no brakes, and flip-flops and a subscription to The Nation. He showed me his heart operation scar, which was a zipper just like Grandma’s.

Lou also told me that the Bulldogs were the Fresno State football team and that members of a gang in Fresno also called themselves the Bulldogs. Are you in that gang? I asked him. I pointed at his bulldog socks. No, he said, he just found these socks at an estate sale and really liked them. Then Ken said he had a friend who had once been in that gang and had tattooed a bulldog on his shaved head. It was frightening, man! I mean, yeah, it was effective, you know? Wouldn’t you say, Lou? It really was, man, said Lou. I mean he was a friend, you know what I’m saying? I remember him telling me about his dreams. Crazy dreams, man, orgies and … naked women, naked men, I mean literally hundreds of naked people all—

Then Ken said, Yeah but further to your point of the Bulldogs, this guy, this friend of ours, quit the gang eventually … you know, he got married, had a couple of kids, a straight job. His hair grew all over that bulldog, said Lou. Yeah, said Ken … you couldn’t see the tattoo anymore so—he became less terrifying, said Lou. Yeah, said Ken. I mean he was a teddy bear. I mean he was doing anti-gang outreach work then. He was a mentor, man. But then you know what? He got older, he started losing his hair … see, like mine? And that damn tattoo became visible again, said Lou. Was he scary again? I said. Nah, said Lou, by then there wunt nothing scary about him. But his former associates from the gang started seeing that tattoo and remembering things about this guy, our friend, some of the stuff he’d done and how he’d left the gang and you know, they were kind of miffed about that. And the rival gangs, too, they recognized him and wanted to, you know, man, settle scores and the cops … well, the cops, said Ken. There’d been some outstanding charges and, well, some misunderstandings … so long story short our friend was concerned about his head, man, about this tattoo reappearing. Could he wear a wig? I asked. Yeah, he did do that for a while, but by then, you know, the cat was outta the bag and he was getting scared … he was getting scared for his wife and kids too, even his mom, man, and she was one tough lady. She was a warrior, man, said Lou. Everyone he knew was a target, said Ken. So one day he just packed them all up and left town. Took everyone, his wife and kids and his sister and her husband and their kids, his mom … just disappeared.