The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait Read Online Free PDF Page A

914, the kind with the motor in the middle for a low center of gravity, the better to take hairpin turns at top speed, as Scott did with or without a licensed adult. Meanwhile I got it in my head that a hamster would solve my unhappiness, rather the way Algernon had helped my brother before he got muscle tone and pubic hair. My mother reminded me that my last hamster, Amy, had died of neglect only two years before, and my brother was glad to elaborate on this.
    “Her tiny paw was thrust into the cedar shavings for a last, piss-soaked food pellet,” he reminisced, and imitated the way Amy had looked in her death agony: little bug eyes glazed, paw gnarled, her once-pouchy cheeks hollow.
    But I was only eleven then, I pointed out.
    “I was eleven when I had Algernon,” Scott said triumphantly. He turned to our mother. “You know why he wants another hamster? So he can give that poor bastard a funeral too. Remember the cigar box he decorated for Amy . . . ?”
    And so on. One day as we drove away from the mall, sans hamster, I began to sob over the injustice of it all. “ Aye-lie-lie! ” said Scott, leaning over the front seat to put his face in mine. “ Aye-lie-lie! ” So my mother turned the car around and bought me a hamster I named Perkins, whose running wheel squeaked all night, all night, until he turned up dead in the laundry hamper a few weeks later.
    MY SELF-ESTEEM WAS buoyed somewhat by my mother’s friends, who were mostly gay and thought I was cute—that is, precocious-cute as well as cute-cute. I laughed at their naughty jokes, or rather I laughed at their compulsive way of telling jokes, of being naughty, as if they had all the time in the world and nothing much mattered anyway. One of my favorites, Uncle Ronny, used to tell jokes that were almost dimwittedly silly, but I liked the relish with which he told them. I can only remember one, but it’s representative.
    “. . . ‘Can you spell the van in vanilla?’ ” he said, working up to the punch line of a long story about a customer in an ice cream parlor who couldn’t seem to accept that they were out of a certain flavor. “ ‘Can you spell the fuck in strawberry?’ And the guy says, ‘There’s no fuck in strawberry!’ ‘Well, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you for the past five minutes!’ ”
    Actually I preferred Ronny’s boyfriend, Uncle Paul, whose wit was more subtle and whose company was an easier, quieter business. Paul liked me too, and was perhaps the first adult (apart from my parents) who gave me reason to think I was special, or at least different in a promising way. As a little boy I liked to dance frantically to the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth ( feuertrunken —“drunk with fire”—indeed), and that was a good thing, according to Paul, who also praised the simple but astute caricatures I liked to draw. He himself was the younger brother of a famous artist, and to this day I think Paul was almost as talented. Mostly, though, he was content to dabble. He went through a phase of making a campier brand of Joseph Cornell box, and one of these he gave to my mother: exquisitely arranged were a little ivory bust of Beethoven, a plastic pig, a five-pfennig piece, and a fortune-cookie slip on which he’d inked the following legend: “Beethoven pfucked a pig for pfive pfennig.”
    We were natural pals, and growing up I liked nothing better than spending time at his and Ronny’s trailer in the parking lot of a restaurant, Christopher’s, owned by Ronny’s white-haired, irascible dad. (Ronny had once married and sired a son—also gay—so perhaps his father couldn’t understand why the hell Ronny had plumped for this kind of life instead of that; on the other hand Ronny was a maître d’ par excellence, and rich old ladies would frequent Christopher’s expressly to bask in the moonlight of his flattery, so the arrangement was beneficial to both father and son.) Paul and Ronny were the best babysitters a kid