The Fisherman - Part 1
by
Joe Mancini, Jr., Ph.D. © 2005

August, 1975          

I am putting on his clothes again.

Years ago similar mud- and blood-stained pants, bottom-rolled into cuffs, hung like two big balloons around my legs.  A blue, hooded sweatshirt with ripped elbows like this one drooped pregnant on my stomach.  He was still alive in his clothes when I wore them.  How could I make room for me?

“Here, wear these, too,” he says now.  “So your mother won’t have to wash yours.”

“I won’t get dirty.”

But he pulls the pants off the hook from the back of the basement’s door and dumps them on top of the sweatshirt he had already thrown to me.  A door slams shut upstairs, sending air billowing down the cellar steps.  “Shit!” I say; “I left it open again—she’ll be blowing.”  Hunching his shoulders forward and shaking his head, he flips both hands over into empty, outstretched palms.

Two hours ago, after coming down from Boston, I had taken off my shoes outside the door on the third-floor landing and tossed them against the shopping bag propped near the entry.  It was filled with empty tin cans my mother had thoroughly washed out.  He would be late taking the bag on his daily trash run to the fifty-gallon cans in the back alley.  Her muted “Damn you!” filtered through the door’s thin, wooden panel.  Feeling the rebuke intended for him, I stooped to arrange my loafers neatly beside the brown rubbers lying on several sheets of the Providence Journal.  The yelling stopped.  I rapped, heard her click open the lock, and then walked into my mother’s too fervent smile.  Her plump arms enveloped me.  When I was five, my nose against her perfumed and powdered neck, I had gazed just below my chin and imagined falling into the dark hole between the swells of her flesh.  Now she drew back, her hand patting the red Harvard insignia on my jacket.  “Wait’ll you see what I got you.  The olive oil was on sale, so I bought you a gallon.  And Nick says Hi; he sliced some nice cutlets for you.  And guess what?  There’s homemade macaroni drying on my bed and a meatball gravy I made last night—don’t forget it like the last time.”

He was standing behind her then.

I looked over her shoulder at him. “And I got salami and proscuitto and soft loaves from Crugnale’s for you two to take to the ocean,” she went on while he stood silently beside the stove, fingering a plastic bag filled with tubes of glue, a salt-water lure, and rawhide shoelaces.  Above the old Tappan on a knick-knack shelf he had built, I used to leave my straight-A reports from Providence College.  My mother would say, “He told me he’s proud of you—his father made him leave high school and work on the farm.”  He looked away, then pressed the bag, his own gift, into my hand as I came up and brushed his slightly stubbled cheek.

A half hour later, my sister Anne told me the yelling had started when my mother found a Playboy under the T-shirts she had carefully folded into his second bureau drawer.  “Remember the time,” I said to Anne, “when we couldn’t figure out how we’d ever been conceived?”  “You mean,” she said, “because they didn’t sleep in the same room for years supposedly because she couldn’t stand his snoring?”  I didn’t tell her that at fourteen I had still wondered about that even after his buddy, Ernie, sitting beside me on a battered rowboat at Fort Getty, had explained about the transparent balloon he had unrolled over his thumb.  Then he had chuckled, “Ask him,” jerking that thumb toward his buddy fifty yards away who was watching the rod tips and munching an apple.

“Go get the lunches,” he says now, “and I’ll get the gear together.”

I climb the sixty-two steps to the third floor—I counted them once on one of the many such trips I had made for him.  Lighting one of my Benson & Hedges, I recall the Camels he had chain-smoked until he found out about his angina and switched to cherry Lifesavers.  My mother would tell my sisters and me, “Don’t give him an attack.”  “Go help him,” she would say when he worked around the house, laying linoleum in each of their bedrooms or building pine shelves to store canned goods.  And I would go.  Occasionally, I would hand him an awl, a C-clamp, or the ripsaw he always had to identify for me.  Mostly I just sat, jiggling my leg, or stood shifting from foot to foot.  There had been one more message:  “He needs you to go to the ocean with him. To relax,” she would say. 

From age five, every Saturday and Sunday, even sometimes at night.  For twelve years.  At seven I tried to tell my mother I couldn’t go because I had to keep using the bathroom; she simply stuffed more napkins into our lunch bags.  In the car I would hand him one of those half loaves of bread filled with potato-and-egg omelet that my mother sent with us until his weight became another threat; munching them kept us from having to talk during the long drives to his favorite spots.  At Matunick, Beavertail, Fort Coney, and other places, timing myself with his cast away from me, I liberated the bait crabs, one or two of which would always crawl sideways, insanely back to the bucket.  In another place, for hours in the pelting rain, I stood with a rod sideways, cow-like, against the gusts, feeling invisible in a tent-like, borrowed poncho.  Or, at still another place, upon the water where it lapped against the barnacled pilings, my cone-shaped shadow lay undisturbed, except for an occasional plop from a sinker dropped by some red-haired kid on a family outing.

He counts two-and three-ounce sinkers into a bucket. He doesn’t notice me return from upstairs.  They are store-bought sinkers, somehow different from those he used to make, as I looked on nursing a headache, with a stinking, portable gas stove and various molds. I linger just outside the threshold with the two, neatly folded lunch bags.  And with her note crumpled in my shirt pocket: “He’s still upset about his father.”  Zippering his soiled jacket, he pulls the white bucket, bristling with sand spikes, off the cluttered workbench and negotiates the already rigged rods through the doorway.  Only the Sunday ones fresh from church, he always said, went with ties, jackets, green metal tackle boxes, street shoes, and already rigged rods.  His thinning hair, more white than gray, curls untrimmed down a neck much paler than it was during past summers.  As he ascends the wooden stairs to the screen-door, the clicking of his leather soles seems to rap out his erratic heart beat. 

II. 

The screen door to the backyard now whirs and pops shut.

My fingertips touch the blood-stained clothes.  I throw the pants aside and begin to lose my hands in the sweatshirt’s softness.  I hold my breath and plunge my head through the opening.  But I still sneeze.  Maybe it isn’t the salt.  Maybe it’s the sawdust yellowing the bench and cement floor or the mold and lint of this one place safe from my mother’s vacuum. 

1970

The sneezing had started five years ago, in Dong Ha, South Vietnam, eight miles from the border with the North.  Even fresh laundering by mama-sans could not rid my fatigues of the mold that smothered everything. A five-minute bout of whole-body sneezing stretched my lungs to the limit as I lay on my cot in the hootch that housed the Bird Dogs, the Colonel’s field escort.  When my chest stopped heaving, I inserted the tape into the recorder and pushed the PLAY button.  It was his first message.  It began with his own sneeze, a cough and a gargle and then his demand, “Shut the damn door!”

Then another shuffling sound and he began the already prepared script: he told me about the twenty-pounder he nearly lost at Beavertail—“Joey, it was so-o-o beautiful!”—when a Sunday one crossed his line, and chuckled about how Anne’s son wasn’t yet baiting his own hook—“He’s squeamish about blood like you were once”—and sighed about how the price of crabs had climbed twenty-five cents in one season.  He ended, “Take care of yourself.  Love, Dad.”

 I did my best.  Four months into my tour, wrapped in a bandoleer and fingering the safety on my M-16, I helped the Bird Dogs escort the Chaplain on a clanking APC to Quang Tri, eight miles away.  As the vehicle jerked to a halt, the spotlights of the descending chopper illuminated Tiny’s face.  He had done this before.  Our jungle boots soon clomped on the corrugated iron pad as we smashed our steel helmets down on our bobbing heads, defying the chopper’s whirlwind.  Six pairs of mud-caked boot soles faced us out of the chopper’s black hole, stacked on top of one another.

Our boots, I thought, we’re running toward our own boots!

Ahead of me, at the other end of the canvas stretcher, Tiny pulled me into position.  The door-gunner had been shaking his head, his helmet slipping over his Army-issue glasses.  “Damn bad luck to have ‘em in here!  Get ready.”  He bent down and  lifted with grunt and grimace; and then the long shadow attached to the boots selected for us bounced twice on our canvas trampoline.  Earlier that evening Tiny had pushed aside the blanket isolating my section of the hootch.  “You sly bastard, give me some,” he had said, pushing his mess dish into the steam rising from the small pot.  I had reached into the pot and lifted out a half dozen white Rigatoni, dropping them onto the plate and then dripping tomato sauce on them.   My mother had written, “I hope the gravy won’t spoil with no icebox there.”

“Where?”  “Into the freezer.”  But it wasn’t cold there.  Tiny left me staring at the boots.  They were dirty brown, not green and polished black like mine.  And they were laced with laminated string, not with rawhide like mine.  With a magic-marker in hand and label tags in his teeth, the attendant dismissed me, “That’s all.”  It was 2:00 A.M.  I was neither asleep nor awake. I had to look.  Beyond the boots.  I saw my mother, who had scrimped to buy an expensive steak, watch the butcher grind it into coarse, white and red shreds.  And sometimes she would supplement the hamburger with what he would bring home from the ocean.  But when he skinned and gutted them on the cellar sink, they never looked like what lay on the canvas stretcher.  He had been a more skillfull meat-cutter.  An hour later, back on my canvas cot, I stared at a pregnant spider on the two-by-four above me.

There was nothing real for me to cry about.

“Father,” I said to the legs clutching the beam.

“Father, Father!” 

I flew home in January, 1971.  I was allowed to keep my combat boots and duffel bag that served me well as a laundry case.  But it would hold more than dirty clothes.  When my newlywed wife went to work, I stuffed our kittens into the bag, their invisible furry bodies thrashing it into odd shapes.  Suspended from the bedroom door, the pregnant bag swung slowly from side to side.  Plopped on the bed and scratching a five-day beard, I listened blankly to their cries.  A month after my wife left, taking along with her the tortured animals I had given to her instead of a son, I watched him on the Matunick beach pull a four-foot scavenger out of the surf and past my combat boots.  Unhooked, it quivered its gills and ground its harmless sandpaper teeth.  He was re-baiting when I grasped its sickle tail.  I wound my arm into a whirlwind that knocked off my cap as sea-flesh thwoped against rock.  “Hey, that’s enough! It’s dead.”  Its shredded snout pointed at his sneakers.  “I know,” I panted, “I know.”

I was waiting for someone to die.  A kind of exchange.  His brother’s wife died of a brain hemorrhage on Holy Saturday and was buried the day after Easter.  I had known her, five years older than I; and I cried a little.  Three years later, my girlfriend’s dog, Ollie, was run over by a car and dragged himself to her porch’s stone landing where for two hours he slowly dribbled saliva and blood.  “He was like a person to me,” she sobbed over her uneaten dinner.  I had known Oillie and cried harder.  But neither of them was the one.

Then two months ago his father died. 

Joe Mancini, Jr., Ph.D., M.S.W., M.S.O.D. is a therapist, hypnotherapist, teacher, group leader, business consultant and presenter, executive coach, and national workshop leader in many areas.  For 15 years, in various venues, he has facilitated workshops in men’s issues using many intensive modalities.  He has also written articles on topics relevant to men, including one on the spiritual meaning of the sword for Wingspan.  He is also the creator of RoundTable Theatre, a fun-filled and also serious modality using improvisation to help men and men find new possibilities of mind, emotion, body, and soul to get out of stuck places.  Joe’s father, Joseph Mancini, worked as a foreman in a jewelry factory for 35 years and died in 1987 at the age of 77.

Read part 2 next month...

Copyright 2005 Joseph Mancini Jr., all rights reserved