Mama's Boy

  Copyright © 2010 by Rick DeMarinis

  A Seven Stories Press First Edition

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electric, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Seven Stories Press

  140 Watts Street

  New York, NY 10013

  www.sevenstories.com

  In Canada: Publishers Group Canada, 559 College Street, Suite 402, Toronto, ON M6G 1A9

  In the UK: Turnaround Publisher Services Ltd., Unit 3, Olympia Trading Estate, Coburg Road, Wood Green, London N22 6TZ

  In Australia: Palgrave Macmillan, 15-19 Claremont Street, South Yarra, VIC 3141

  College professors may order examination copies of Seven Stories Press titles for a free six-month trial period. To order, visit www.sevenstories.com/textbook or send a fax on school letterhead to (212) 226-1411.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  DeMarinis, Rick, 1934-

  Mama’s boy : a novel / Rick DeMarinis. – A Seven Stories Press 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-60980-146-5

  1. Young men–Family relationships–Fiction. 2. Parent and adult child–Fiction. 3. United States. Air Force–Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3554.E4554M36 2010

  813′.54–dc22

  2010039364

  v3.1

  … as father had not been rooted in any woman’s heart, he could not merge with any reality and was therefore condemned to float eternally on the periphery of life, in half-real regions, on the margins of existence.

  from The Street of Crocodiles

  by Bruno Schulz

  My mother was a thinker

  who read her way to Zen,

  figured everything that happened

  would probably happen again.

  from Mineyard Blues

  by Edward Lahey

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Part One Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part Two Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Part Three Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Part Four Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Part Five Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  PART ONE

  1

  Gus Reppo joined the air force to get away from his doting parents but they followed him to basic training in Texas and then to technical school in Mississippi. They rented hotel rooms and moped outside the gates of Lackland Air Force Base near San Antonio and then Keesler Air Force Base outside of Biloxi. When Gus got a weekend pass they’d pick him up in their new 1957 Buick Roadmaster and take him to dinner in a cloth-napkin restaurant.

  “Are they treating you decently, Gussie?” his mother, Flora, said. She was sick with worry and disappointment. Her handsome blue-eyed boy looked thin and wan.

  His father, Fillmore Dante Reppo—called FDR by both Gus and Flora—said, “You look like a beached cadaver, Gussie. Don’t they give you proper food? Is starvation among the disciplines they teach? Mommy, I don’t think he’s getting the proper nutrients.” FDR and Gus had been calling Flora “Mommy” since Gus was a toddler. Flora and Gus had been calling Fillmore “FDR” since the war ended even though Fillmore was a staunch Republican.

  FDR and Flora, both heavyweights, dwarfed Gus. His unexceptional body made them uneasy. FDR sometimes wondered how a man of his height and heft could have sired this runtish assemblage of skin on bone. He’d look at Flora with an unaskable question in his eyes and she would laugh and say, “But he’s young! He’s a pup! He has years to fill out his frame!” They regarded him in silence at these times, each from their own uneasy perspective. Gus was a disappointing five-feet six-inches and 118 pounds. FDR and Flora were twin hills of loving and protective flesh, Gus the thin shadow between.

  When he enlisted his muscles were smooth, without definition. But now his once-undetectable biceps were mapped with veins and strung with cords of visible sinew. He was stronger than he’d ever been. He could do seventy-five push-ups, fifty chin-ups, and an indefinite number of sit-ups. He didn’t count his sit-ups, he timed them. A half-hour to forty-five minutes was typical. Once while daydreaming after a barracks inspection he did sit-ups for an hour and a half. He ran faster and longer with backpack and carbine than he once could in sneakers and gym shorts.

  In technical school he learned how to climb and then lash himself to the steel framework of hundred-foot radio masts while making practice repairs. He did this once during a tropical storm. He’d pulled himself through and around high voltage cables, avoiding electrocution, tool belt swinging from his hip. A forty-five-knot wind gusting to sixty tried to pull him free of the lanyard that held him to the mast. Bullets of rain stung his face and arms. For this he received a Trainee of the Week award.

  On another occasion he ascended through dense fog to find himself isolated in a soundless region above the top surface of the ground-hugging clouds and under the clear blue sky of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. It was as if he had entered another domain, empty and without defect. He lingered in that private space long after he completed his assignment.

  He had no fear of heights, no sense of danger. He felt weightless, dangling from a slim lanyard. He felt that if he unhooked the lanyard and let go he’d glide to the ground like a leaf. He knew better, of course. He wasn’t crazy. At least he didn’t feel crazy. But then, he often wondered, how do the crazy know they’re crazy?

  Some of his fellow trainees had to overcome vertigo. Gus knew the dictionary meaning of the word but he didn’t know it from experience. He was the opposite of an acrophobe. He was an acrophile. On the back of the group photo of his tech school graduation class he signed his name, “Gus Reppo, Acrophile.”

  Gus learned Newton’s law of gravity. The instructors weren’t trying to make physicists of the recruits, they were trying to issue a warning. You free-fall at an accelerating rate of thirty-two feet per second per second, they said. At a hundred and twenty feet it takes you a shade under three seconds to hit the ground. A little more Newtonian math and you discover the speed at impact is eighty-eight feet per second, or about sixty miles per hour. Splat.

  The instructors were fond of the word and the implications of its sound: Splat.

  “A careless radio tech is a dead radio tech,” they said.

  FDR had picked out a profession for Gus and the college in which he’d pursue it: The UCLA School of Dentistry. He’d drawn circles on a California map around the best urban centers to establish his practice.

  “Orange County,” FDR
concluded. “Orange County dentists get a lot of respect—well deserved, too!—and their patients can be relied on to pay on time. What a young dentist needs least are financially unreliable patients.”

  FDR was a retired dentist. His office was in La Jolla, California, a wealthy beach district north of San Diego. “A good dentist can retire at fifty here in La Jolla,” he’d said more than once. FDR retired at sixty and had put away a small fortune in thirty-five years of filling cavities, doing root canals, and fitting kids with braces and the elderly with dentures.

  But Gus didn’t want to become a dentist. He didn’t want to muck around in diseased mouths for a living. The prospect of drilling into rot-filled teeth sickened him.

  At Gus’s thirteenth birthday party, FDR presented a plan for his future. He shoved aside the birthday cake and set up a slide projector on the dining room table. Family practice dentists to oral surgeons at work; how bridgework was made; how the amalgam was mixed and inserted into drilled-out cavities; how Novocain was injected into the gums; how screaming children, having caught sight of the needle and drill, were calmed by the dental assistant’s mothering coos and clucks.

  “Your life, of course, is your own,” FDR said, “to do with what you will, but you must always keep this in mind: Dentistry, my boy, is in your blood.”

  FDR’s grandfather had pulled teeth in the mining camps along the American River in northern California during the gold rush days. His father had been an oral surgeon in San Mateo. Three of his father’s brothers held Painless Parker franchises in Los Angeles County. They all retired wealthy men of property, influence, and high standing in their respective communities.

  “Point out the flaw in my thinking, Gussie,” FDR continued, “if you are not convinced.”

  Gus, who’d had his first nocturnal emission the night before, was woolgathering. He’d dreamed he was a wirehaired terrier named Skipper lunging at the naked calf of a stout woman. Still vivid in his mind was the pressure and fragrance of the woman’s ample flesh, his avid thrusting, the woman calling his name, “Skipper! No, Skipper!” Her scolds were harsh but she did not, curiously, push him away. Recalling the dream made him blush.

  Flora broke his reverie. “Happy birthday, my darling boy!” she said.

  FDR and Flora had raised Gus as if they were grooming the heir to a fiefdom. They spoiled him deliberately, to make him accustomed to—and thus dependent on—the privileged life. But Gus never became a spoiled brat full of demands. Though he had it easy, he never asked FDR or Flora to satisfy his every whim.

  Gus didn’t have whims. Or the few he occasionally had didn’t take much to satisfy. He worked summers with a high school friend in his dad’s roofing business for a dollar an hour. He spent summers laying plywood decking and tarpaper. He hauled squares of asphalt shingles and cedar shakes up steep ladders and nailed them down in careful rows. He worked fast and he was good at what he did. Steeply pitched roofs and gables didn’t give him second thoughts. His friend’s dad called him “Gus, the mountain goat.” He lied to FDR and Flora, telling them his work kept him safely on the ground. With the money he made in roofing he bought his own stuff, from comic books to R&B records.

  FDR and Flora were distressed by his taste in music and tried to discourage it. They thought rhythm and blues, which they called “jungle” music, was destructive to a young man’s moral fiber. They believed there was a contrary element lurking in this music, a toxin that poisoned everything decent and worthwhile. One song in particular disturbed them—“Just Crazy.” Gus always played it at full volume. “Just Crazy” threatened to undo gravity as it pried the house off its foundations. It frightened Flora; it angered FDR. “Turn it down!” Flora said. “Turn it off!” said FDR. They made Gus listen to the sane violins of Mantovani to show him what civilized music sounded like, how it uplifted the spirit. They hoped it would imprint itself on him.

  Gus asked them what they meant by “moral fiber” but their answer was vague and abstract and seemingly lifted from the pages of Boys’ Life:

  Define your ideals and then live up to them. Respect the experience and authority of your elders. When in doubt, seek their advice. Trust your instincts but never act on them without first consulting a trusted adult. Never do in private what would disgrace you in public. Always speak clearly and with measured pace or keep silent: A quick tongue coupled to a slow wit reveals a blockhead. The silent, thoughtful boy eventually wins the prize. Above all, never disappoint your parents. They brought you into the world and nurtured you. What you are you owe entirely to them.

  Listening to Mantovani on FDR’s coffin-sized Stromberg-Carlson High-Fidelity Radio/Phonograph, Gus felt as if he had a front row seat at his own funeral.

  Gus loved FDR and Flora even though he and they were on different wavelengths. He was their only child, a “miracle” baby, born in their middle age. FDR, born in 1891, was a few years past middle age when Flora became pregnant with Gus, an event that shocked them both. They were elated but also anxious, believing the powers that dealt out miracles might see the gift as a mistake and take remedial action. Throughout his childhood, FDR and Flora acted as if there was something temporary about Gus: Maybe he would vanish out of their life as miraculously as he came into it.

  Gus came to feel that way about himself. He felt temporary. It wasn’t a bad feeling. In fact it was a liberating notion. Being a visitor with limited staying rights was ideal. A visitor did not have to shoulder the responsibilities rightfully belonging to the host. The routines of ownership were the source of boredom—like a record needle stuck in a groove, playing the same broken lyric over and over until it became as meaningless as a hiccup. Life had more to offer the visitor.

  The world was kinetic. It was happening with every breath, and it was happening fast. Time was like gravity. You fell through it, at a rate of acceleration similar to Newton’s thirty-two feet per second per second. At eighteen you are just beginning to see the fabric of the world pass by, but an old man can see the moon turning in its orbit, the stars inching up the sky, a rosebud opening. Your rate of time travel in old age becomes so great you hardly notice the passing days and weeks as you accelerate through them toward the inevitable stop.

  Splat, said the instructor.

  2

  Gus got on a plane in Gulfport, Mississippi. Tropical storm clouds out in the Gulf fluoresced with internal lightning. To Gus, they looked like gigantic Japanese lanterns, the windblown wicks flickering, flaring, dying, and flaring again. The usually flat water was showing confused crosscurrents, producing a potato-patch surf. Waves collided with waves and broke in conflicted patterns. Shore birds, outmuscled by the wind, flew backwards. The green sky was unnaturally green as if the physical properties of the spectrum had shifted. Seen in this light, the world became unreliable, even arbitrary. It made Gus uneasy. If the plane didn’t take off soon the storm would ground it. In the terminal an authoritative voice had said, “Bad one out yonder.”

  From his cabin the handsome pilot looked back at the passengers and winked. His dashing smile seemed deceptively reassuring, as if the approaching bad weather posed no threat to modern air travel. Gus didn’t trust the winking pilot or his reassuring smile.

  It was a small plane, a Dixie Airlines Lockheed Lodestar. Gus buckled his seat belt and waved goodbye to FDR and Flora who were standing forlorn out on the gusty tarmac as the engines turned over, spit flame, and roared.

  Storm-generated air currents mauled the plane, making it yaw and pitch once it became airborne. Earlier, Flora and FDR had taken Gus to lunch: shrimp scampi and clams casino followed by a strawberry milkshake. The undigested feast argued up his esophagus in the wallowing Lodestar. Gus kept a barf bag handy.

  During lunch, FDR had asked him where he was going to be stationed. “Montana, near the Arctic Circle,” Gus said.

  “Montana,” FDR mused. “Are you sure there are military installations there, Gussie?”

  “Several,” Gus said.

  “But you don’t
know which one you’ll be going to?”

  Gus squirmed evasively in his chair. He speared a clam and chewed it with vigor. “Radar squadron,” he mumbled. “Doesn’t have a name. No-name radar squadron. Dogsleds in winter. Rations dropped by parachute. Very remote, very cold, no roads. No visitors. My instructor called it the American Gulag.”

  “Don’t talk with your mouth full, Gussie,” Flora said.

  The Milk River Air Force Base was part of a string of early warning radar installations on the Canadian border from Maine to the state of Washington. A sneak attack by the Russians was anticipated. Early detection would give the Air Defense Command time to alert squadrons of interceptors. The interceptors, F-89 “Scorpions,” scrambled from air force bases such as Malmstrom in Great Falls, would meet the Russian bombers—Tupolev “Bears”—and shoot them down before they could carry out their mission which was to transform America, city by city, into radioactive rubble. Gus’s job would be to maintain the radios that kept the controllers at the radar squadron in touch with the Scorpions.

  The town of Milk River had ten thousand inhabitants. It had two movie theaters, seven churches, and two dozen bars. Grain elevators the size of ten-story buildings loomed over the railroad tracks on the east end. It was a morally self-satisfied town even though it had three brothels and a police force known for its corruption and brutality. It had been a frontier settlement with a violent and carnal history. Gun-wielding men had died in its streets. Some of the swagger of that era still smoldered in its barrooms. An impudent glance or triggering word could lead to bloodshed. Gus learned all this from the driver of the air force van that carried new personnel from Malmstrom to the Milk River radar base, forty miles north of the town. The driver was a graying sergeant who spoke in a slow whimsical drawl. He steered with the two fingers of his left hand, his right arm thrown over the back of the empty front passenger seat.

  “Tell you somethin else, youngbloods,” he said. “You got to mind these Milk River womens. They be hungry—you know what I’m sayin?”