grandma

He felt sick when he woke up, which wasn't unusual, hadn't been unusual for awhile now. He laid in bed for about an hour thinking of things.

He thought about his grandmother. Specifically, he thought about walking to his grandmother's house for lunch. He had special permission in junior high to do this. Knowing his limits, knowing what he could and could not handle, he had arranged it. He had received special permission to leave school for lunch. Certainly his mother must have been involved at some point in the negotiations, but he was pretty sure that he had been the primary dealmaker. He had tried. He had tried to make friends at the school. No he had not, he thought, still lying in bed feeling sick. He had not tried to make friends at school. He had not tried hard enough. A fat buck toothed boy, he was. An immigrant from California to a small town in Illinois.

His mind wandered. He remembered his attempts at making friends. Telling jokes that other sixth grade boys would not get. Jokes he had heard on Joan Rivers comedy albums that he had checked out over the summer from the library. These were not the kind of jokes that sixth grade boys were going to understand or appreciate. He cringed in his bed thinking about it. Why was he putting himself through this again? Worrying about what these boys were thinking about him? This was in the past. These boys were now working at insurance companies and construction sites. These boys now had one or two kids. By now, these boys had cheated on their wives once or twice. Maybe divorced. Maybe not. These boys had one or two DUI's. One or two of them had had a cock in their mouths at one point. One or two cocks, maybe. Two cocks, maybe, at the same time. Or maybe that was him, maybe he was that boy.

His glands felt swollen and he had a dry mouth this morning. He was half in and half out of the past. He smoked a cigarette, half asleep. Thinking about his grandmother. Specifically, he thought about the path that he took to get to his grandmother's house for lunch. "The shortest distance between two points is a straight line," he had learned in school. So he took this straight line from his junior high school, cutting through two backyards. His grandmother's house was not far away from the school.

What bothered him this morning was that he did not say hello enough to his grandmother enough. Why couldn't he just have said hello? It seemed that she was always doing laundry in the basement when he would come over for lunch. He was too concerned with the thirty minutes he had to make his peanut butter and jelly sandwich and watch the "The Match Game." He could have gone down there in the basement to say hello. She would ultimately come up to him from the basement to the kitchen to say hello. Knees disintegrating under polyester pants as she climbed the stairs carefully and methodically. Two minutes to climb the fifteen steps, it took her. He would be eating his sandwich by then, watching a gameshow on her tiny black and white television near the kitchen table. Hearing her ascent, this is what really bothered him, hearing her careful climb up the steps he would just rather she stay down there. Why even bother? He would just rather be left to watch "The Match Game."

"Ugly Sue was so ugly that when she got married she wore a blank." He loved this show. Not so much for the game but for the wacky celebrities. He loved celebrity. The celebrity panel was filled with B-List stars like Vicki Lawrence and Judy Tenuta and Nipsey Rusell. These stars were more important to him then his grandmother.

But as he lay in his bed, at the age of thirty, it was not the Match Game that was so important anymore (still a little important, he did wonder why they didn't play this version on the Game Show Network). But as he lay in bed at the age of thirty, what he really wished for was to say hello to his grandmother.

The last he remembered of his grandmother was visiting her in the nursing home shortly after September 11th and shortly before her death. His father was trying to explain the gravity of recent current events. "We have been attacked," he said to his dying mother, "the country is being attacked." This was of little concern to his grandmother. He remembered that she was very concerened with candy. He remembered that she had asked for candy or cake. Sweet things. They all laughed it off.

"Give her the candy. Give her the cake," he thought this morning with the dry mouth and the swollen glands. And fuck his memories of boys in junior high and his stupid homoerotic predictions on what they were doing now. Hello Grandma.