The Truth is Bad Enough: What Became of the Happy Hustler? Read Online Free PDF Page A

uncharacteristically intimate, told me what he believed to be true about Rick’s death. It may have been a couple of months or a couple of years after it happened.
    “The kid killed himself,” my dad said. “His father even managed to get the newspapers to lie.” It was an odd thing to tell me, although I appreciated it. In retrospect, I think that my dad, who courted the notion of suicide, envied Rick’s guts.
    My mother’s opinion of a person who chose to take his or her own life was dictated by her belief in the laws of the Catholic Church. She liked to say that she was “educated by nuns,” which seemed to suggest her moral and intellectual superiority. And while her intelligence was never in question, her moral code was blurry. She may have avoided meat on Fridays, but there were other temptations that she was unable to control. No longer validated by my father, she had a longing to be emotionally and physically appreciated by the opposite sex that was not quelled by her spiritual beliefs.
    Her inexplicable absences began slowly but gained momentum as the marriage unraveled. The more Daddy was away from the home, either hospitalized or living alone in a downtown hotel, the more Mommy cavorted the nights away. One night a week became two nights a week became three nights a week. No Daddy, no Mommy, at eight years old.
    Grandma Katie often babysat me when my dad was in the hospital and Mommy was “working late.” One night when she was watching me, the news came, a phone call that she’d probably been dreading for several years but I had never even imagined.
    I had a good and a bad grandma, like the good and the bad witches of Oz. Grandma Katie goodness.
    I could tell the phone call was serious by the lifelessness in her voice. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I understand. Yes, that’s true. Why, thank you. Yes, I will. Thank you ever so much.”
    She hung up the phone, gracefully made the sign of the cross, and whispered a quick prayer.
    “Your uncle John died,” she said. Her voice was flat, hollow sounding. Her flesh and blood had died.
    She then began pacing around the dining room table, where I had been attempting to put together a model airplane. She moved as if she had a destination to reach in a limited amount of time, negotiating the right-angle turns with a certain militaristic precision.
    The house was silent except for the sound of her breathing, which seemed to be increasingly labored. I was probably holding my breath, having never seen anything like this.
    I sat in the chair that my uncle John sat in when he had come to visit. While it was clear that she didn’t want me to talk, it was equally apparent that she didn’t object to my witnessing this expression of grief, hurt, pain and anger.
    After what must have been at least twenty minutes, she had worn herself out. Determined to restore a sense of normalcy, she said, “It’s time for a snack.”
    After our conversationless snack (popcorn and Pepsi), I asked her to tell me the story about Uncle John and the teddy bear.
    “Again?
    “He was always more questioning than his brothers,” she said. “And he didn’t believe everything he heard.
    “So one day I saw him, from the kitchen window, walking toward the railroad tracks clutching his teddy bear. He must have been six or seven years old.
    “He knew he was forbidden to get to close to the tracks. Even though I trusted him, he seemed to be on a mission that made me nervous.
    “So I followed him, keeping several yards behind him. He did not know I was there.
    “I couldn’t believe it when I saw him getting closer and closer to the tracks. I suddenly realized that this kid of mine had timed his walk to coincide precisely with an approaching train.
    “Even if I had screamed, I would have been drowned out by the loud sounds of the train.
    “The little scamp ran up to the tracks, placed his teddy bear on one of them, turned around and began running away from the train and toward me. You