I
During the summer I try to shave approximately one to three times a week, but in the winter I strive for four days a week—foregoing Monday, Saturday, and Sunday, as I tend to wake up 10 minutes, 3 hours, and 2 hours later, respectively, than I would any other day, no matter what season I may find myself in. By the time I reach 30, I hope to acquire a clean shave everyday before 7am, then follow the cleaning of my sink with a piece of warm toast covered in Amish butter, a fried egg cooked over-medium, and a cup of warm tea with just enough fresh milk to do what it’s supposed to do. No sugar.
In two months I’ll be 28 years old, making the transition from my idealistic mid-twenties into my realistic late-twenties. I welcome the thinning hair (less haircuts); the gradual loss of hearing (less annoyances); the emphasis of my impending gain of weight (something to talk about with my father and brother); and the idea that in 12 years I will be 40 years old, and two months after this day of symbolic and historic age achievement I will be giving the eulogy for a late childhood friend, Jack Pennrose.
It will hopefully be my first—not my last, since the amount of eulogies given is directly proportionate to how many times a person is chosen to be a groom’s best man. And it will consist of not one original thought of my own. Amen.
THE LETTER
February 10th, 2005
To my dearest friend Antoine Epstein–,
I hope this letter finds you well, as it’s been quite a long time since we last spoke or heard from one another. You’re probably the only person in the world I could write this letter to without being stricken with a nervous feeling of apprehension after I dropped it in the mail. I still may vomit butterflies.
Many mornings, as a child, I was woken, like this, by a reflection: The reflection originated from a bathroom mirror in any motel room, and the angle of the bathroom mirror projected the image of my father directly into the mirror stationed in front of my bed. After the reflection woke me, I heard the sound of the faucet handle creaking to the left, which allowed a continuous rush of hot water to fall into the clamshell-shaped basin. The sound of Barbasol foaming in the palm of my father’s hand followed as I watched the steam from the water slowly frame his face and cover the bathroom mirror. Most mornings it was 6:45—sometimes earlier—and as with other mornings, my eyes never opened until a split second after the reflection transported from the bathroom mirror to the bedroom mirror, forcing my closed eyes open. When C. Pennrose made the faucet handle creak to the right and ceased the flow of hot water from falling into the clamshell-shaped basin, I knew it was time for me to get up.
“Get up.” Always the words following the bathroom light being switched off, even when I had already made my move to the upholstered chair by the window. By now I was putting on my right sock, while turning right-side out my left sock, so I’d have my shoes on before my father turned on the lamp by the television.
“Good.” Next word in line after the light showed him that my shoes were on and I was taking sips from a Styrofoam cup full of lukewarm Maxwell House that he had gotten from the motel lobby earlier.
“Always drink it black.” The final words of morning wisdom from C. Pennrose.
I slowly gathered my clothes into my suitcase, a hand-me-down from my father—the one he took on his very first business trips after he and my mother were married—and grasped the handle. I picked it up, and with C. Pennrose’s hand on my shoulder we made it through the door of the motel room to breath the freshness of the new morning’s air.
A start of a new day, and journey, and new adventure with my father; one that found me gazing out of the window of the yellow ’79 Buick, watching the trees, the pastures, that quickly passed through my mind like a film fast forwarded. The windows were rolled down as C. Pennrose smoked Lucky Strike after Lucky Strike, and sipped stale gas station coffee. I sipped mine right along with him. We rarely spoke to one another on one of these car rides. Ten hours of this, of driving, stopping to pee, stopping for gas, coffee, and a meal, never sparked more than a three-minute conversation. The radio was usually tuned to a talk station, but when the radio chose not to talk we were forced—or maybe I was the one who was forced—to listen to the popular music of the time. Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine was my least favorite, and I always wondered how my father could put up with it. I thought he might be tuning it out by thinking about his next big sale, but I’d glance at the steering wheel and see his finger tapping along to the beat coming from the Miami Sound Machine. With those rhythmic finger-taps, I knew he was singing along in his head with Gloria.
The head of C. Pennrose was quite wrinkled for a man his age—either an effect of the cigarettes, or the perpetual squinting that resulted from the fact that we always seemed to be driving into the sun. An hour after the sun set, we’d pull into a motel parking lot, like the many parking lots we pulled into every night around this time, and in no time C. Pennrose and I would be watching boxing on the small television set. In a few hours the reflection of my father would be waking my eyes from the sleep, the same sleep, I had every night as a child.
I don’t know if you ever knew this, but the C. stood for Clyde, but he quit going by Clyde sometime in his twenties. He worked in a mill fabricating aluminum for use as beer cans, soda cans—for most cans that held beverages. He worked long hours, sometimes fourteen hours a day, and sometimes seven days a week. Clyde was known for his quiet disposition at the mill, and as a man who never complained. Many of the friends he made during his time at the mill—seven years—were no longer part of his life. When Clyde Pennrose became C. Pennrose at the end of his career as a fabricator of aluminum he amassed a small fortune from his long hours and thriftiness; hence the nice house we lived in.
It was a few years before he met my mother, Gail, an out of work actress who made her mark in small production plays in small towns in the even smaller Midwest. Gail and C. Pennrose never planned to have children, which I later understood to mean they never wanted children. My father told me this as he lay dying in the hospital from lung cancer in the late summer of 1996. (I’m sure you remember all this.) A few days later, on August 19th, he passed, and I understood that the reason he didn’t want a child was so that I wouldn’t feel the emotional and physical pain of growing up in this world. He told me he loved for the first time on the day he died, and I believed him, though I didn’t want to, for the pain I was going through watching my father decay was so immense I hated him for fathering me. A heat wave was passing through the south at the time and the hospital in that small town in North Carolina where C. Pennrose was to take his last breath—and have his last Lucky Strike—was nothing short of being twenty years behind the times. Had I realized it then, and had the means to do so, I would have picked him up and carried him to the hospital twenty miles north. They would at least have allowed him to die a more comfortable death, or live a more comfortable life, before he inevitably succumbed to the uncomfortable death that goes along with smoking cigarettes for 46 years.
C. Pennrose seemed to be proud of the fact that he had his first cigarette in 1950 at the age of 10. On one of our drives from one motel parking lot to another motel parking lot he told me about his first cigarette and howgreat it was. (What father tells his nine-year-old child how great his first cigarette was?) He should have been telling me how horrible it was, but this was C. Pennrose opening himself up to his son, Jack Pennrose, for the first and only time in his life. I thought nothing could be wonderful about a cigarette. I was nine and vowed never to smoke, let alone touch, a cigarette. I would become a vigilante of cigarettes, a superhero who would rip cigarettes out of people mouths right as they were lighting them, and they would thank me for saving their lives. I would tell them I didn’t have time to accept their gratuities because there were other men and other women on other street corners in other cities who were about to light up, and I needed to save their lives.
I had my first cigarette five minutes after I released the hand of my dead father. I walked out the hospital doors for the last time and went straight to my car, where I found the the pack of Lucky Strikes I had reserved for this occasion in the glove box. I packed the cigarettes just like my father had when we stood in a motel parking lot after a ten-hour day of driving. I ripped the cellophane off and shoved it deep in my pocket, then pried a cigarette out of the pack pulling it up a few millimeters with my finger then letting my lips do the rest. I leaned my head back as I put the pack in my left shirt pocket. Reaching my hand down deep into my left pants pocket, I grabbed the pack of matches I’d been storing there in preparation for this. I struck a match and slowly lifted it to the end of the cigarette. I took a deep drag, and as I dropped the match and watched it fall to the ground, I felt everything rise from my stomach. A moment later I was vomiting behind the car, supporting my body with my left hand on the trunk while my right hand still held the cigarette so I could finish it after I purged the personal pan pizza I had gotten from Pizza Hut earlier.
Your friend always,
Jack
P.S. You’ll be receiving this after you birthday so happy belated birthday. I hope to visit with you soon.
II
I received this letter ten days after my 25th birthday and what shocked me most about it was that it was typed. I hadn’t seen or heard from Jack much after the funeral of C. Pennrose. One of our last conversations was about how hard of a decision it was for Jack not to have an open-casket at the wake. “I just don’t think I can bare seeing him in the coffin like that. If it’s kept closed I can imagine that he’s not really in there.” I nodded my head in agreement.
We were both sixteen. C. Penrose’s passing was the closest I had personally come to a death. “My uncles are so pissed at me right now. They’re telling me I’m selfish. I didn’t even think about it when the funeral director asked me whether I wanted an open casket. I said no. I saw him die and I have no desire to see him dead. Seeing him dead has to be harder than seeing him die.” I just nodded my head and tried not to cry. C. Pennrose wasn’t my father, and I never saw Jack cry over his death–though I knew he must have at some point— but I wanted to cry for Jack all the same. I wanted his sadness so he wouldn’t have to hold it all on his back. I held the tears in as my mother walked up behind Jack and put her arm around him, and at the same time as she gave me a little teary-eyed wink.
“You know what,” he said to me as my mother left the two of us to make sure the refreshments were fully stocked and the food wasn’t running low, “I think all the dirt in the world comes from underneath my fingernails.” He lifted his hands up to my face, palms inward, so I could see all the dirt that was caked under his nails. He now wore his father’s wedding band on his right index finger. His nails had always been two weeks past the need for a nail clipping ever since I’d known him. Jack wasn’t a dirty guy. His hands were as clean as any other sixteen-year-old boy’s. He showered semi-regularly, as much as I did, and always; and when my mother made him the times he would spend the night. “Jack why don’t you take a shower. There’s some fresh towels in the bathroom,” my mother would say, and Jack—always the polite boy—obliged, and even thanked her afterwards. But even as came downstairs, hair still wet from the showers, his nails would be just like they were before he went in. After I left C. Pennrose’s funeral with my parents I couldn’t get what he said out of my mind. Maybe all the dirt in the world does come from underneath Jack’s fingernails.
After the funeral I saw Jack off and on, but never as much as I thought I would. The death of C. Pennrose changed things between us—not that we ever discussed it, or even realized our relationship was changing—but whatever the death of C. Pennrose instigated between us developed into—not necessarily a rift—but a certain level of animosity that weed never felt before the death.
The following two years were interrupted with intermittent phone calls or a passing wave in the hall of our high school where the two years prior we had been inseparable—taking every class together, sitting beside each other, being each other’s lab partners, and going after the same girls. The years left in high school following C. Pennrose’s death were busy for me, as I began taking honors and AP classes to compensate for my unflattering SAT scores. I also found myself with a girlfriend from the summer before my senior year through the fall of my first semester of college.
The death of C. Pennrose didn’t change things—Rosemary Pete changed things.
Rosemary Pete’s family owned a fast food restaurant much like a McDonald’s or Burger King, but better because Pete’s wasn’t a corporation.
Rosemary and I met like all people in the town we grew up in met: by way of that first day of kindergarten class with Ms. McCollum at South End School. Jack and I met the same way and day as I met Rosemary and my other childhood friends. I didn’t pay much attention to Rosemary from that first day of kindergarten up until the last week of my junior year. I never found her attractive. Not that she was ugly or awkward, but she was plain. We conversed through the years, as I would do with anyone that I had no feelings toward whatsoever. Thinking back about the apathy I felt towards her, and all girls for that matter through the years, makes it seem totally illogical that we got together at all.
A few months after the death of C. Pennrose I was walking around my neighborhood on a Sunday afternoon and stopped at the park where I spent the majority of my childhood—at first playing in the sandbox, then graduating to the slide, the swing set, the see-saw, and finally to the roof of the picnic shelter where, that afternoon, I had my first beer and cigarette with Rosemary.
She was there when I arrived, sitting on a blanket and reading an Edith Wharton book with her legs folded underneath one another. The skin exposing itself from her tank top was catching the rays of light preparing her for a nice solid summer tan that I would enjoy all the way through the end of October when her skin retreated back to its natural paleness. This park that I normally regarded as a large park quickly became small, composed entirely of Rosemary and me. I grabbed a swing and began to leisurely swing back and forth. The creaking of the chains must have grabbed hold Rosemary’s attention from Edith Wharton, because as I swung forward then back, her eyes looked up from the page and met mine, and the simultaneous smile between the two of us was what I consider the start of our relationship. It was that smile and that skin that I never noticed in her before, or noticed in anyone before, and as she got up from her blanket and walked over to grab the swing next to mine I felt the same nervousness and feelings of nausea reverberating in my stomach that I’d felt on the first day of kindergarten. But this time the feelings weren’t stemmed from an experience or situation, they were emanating from me because of another human being, a seventeen-year-old girl who for eleven years prior I’d always described in my head as plain. We swung together at the same rate and speed and spoke to one another about the unimportant things that seventeen year olds speak about. Soon though, after she asked if I smoked and I lied and said yes, we were on top of the roof of picnic shelter, sitting on the blanket Rosemary brought to protect her thighs from the itchiness that comes when freshly cut spring grass interacts with soft skin.
My first cigarette made me nauseous, as did the fear of deciding whether I should kiss her. The second cigarette I had along with the beer that Rosemary and I split felt natural. And the idea of kissing Rosemary felt natural. And so I did. My first cigarette, my first beer, my first kiss, and my first girlfriend all happened between the hours of 1 and 3pm on Sunday, April 18th, 1998.
The rest of my time in high school was a blur of semi-autonomy that my parents had given me in my senior year—no curfew, no calls saying I wasn’t coming home at night, a television in my room—things that as an adult I take for granted now, but at the time believed made me invincible.
Rosemary and I broke up after the first semester of our freshman year at State. Like most high school sweethearts, the sweetheart found another man, a twenty-seven year old senior in the art department. I planned to start my second semester like many males before and after me have done—as a single eighteen year old male with a taste for cheap beer, cigarettes, marijuana, pizza, and video games.
Jack didn’t enter college right out of high school and I was quite jealous of him. When I came home for winter break, sad and depressed after being dumped by Rosemary, I spent most of my time over at Jack’s trying to make up for the time lost between us when I was indisposed with a girlfriend. “I didn’t like her anyway,” were his words of encouragement after I told him about Rosemary and me. And that was that. We didn’t talk about it any longer and I think those words of encouragement, and forging a relationship again with Jack, got me over the first break up of many that I would experience.
Jack was working for a foreign car mechanic and spent most of his time—when not changing the oil on Saabs and replacing the transmission on Volvos—much opposite of the way I envisioned for him. In my first semester of college Jack became well read in the writing of the Beats—Kerouac, Ginsberg and the like—and also became very up to date with current events. He wasn’t drinking every night, but reading the New York Times in the evenings before taking a bath and sitting down alone to a freshly prepared home-cooked meal he’d orchestrated without the aid of a cookbook. At 18 years of age Jack Pennrose had the disposition and lifestyle habits of a tenured college professor.
I would show up at Jack’s house—the house that previously belonged to Clyde Pennrose—around 8:30 every evening during that month long winter break. Jack would be sitting on the couch reading the paper and when I would walk in he’d put the paper down in his lap and smile. Sitting down, he would begin to tell me about the conflicts in the world, the consequences of electing a democrat to the presidency of the United States if there were a republican congress—things I should have learned in my first semester of college and probably before.
As I started my second semester of college I couldn’t stop thinking about Jack and the life he was living. A few short years after the death of C. Pennrose Jack was able to pull himself together, both mentally and physically to become a decent human being. I on the other hand—who had led the perfect All-American life—was stuffing my face with Doritos, smoking pot and cigarettes interchangeably, and drinking beer everyday after 3pm. The first few weeks back to school I called Jack almost every single day, then a few times a week, and by exams it had been about 2 weeks since we last spoke. I decided to hold off on calling him. I figured I’d be home for summer vacation in a week and a half and I would be able to see him and catch up with him them.
Once exams were over and, after I ate my first healthy meal—prepared at home by my mother—since winter break, I walked over to Jack’s to say hello and catch up on world news. I came up to the house with its freshly manicured green lawn lined with spring flowers along the walkway to his front door. The mailbox was new and had some sort of flower with green vines painted on them. And to the right of the mailbox was a for sale sign. I walked up the flower-lined path to Jacks front door, grabbed the knob, and tried to turn it. Locked. I knocked on the door then rang the bell, which gave off a different ring that it used to. Not ding-dong, but now ding-dong-dong-ding-dong. Jack didn’t come to the door. I walked back a few steps and found a window that wasn’t blocked by a curtain so I could peer in. The living room was totally empty. I ran to the backyard and saw that Jack’s Volvo station wagon wasn’t in the carport. The backdoor led to the kitchen where I peered through the kitchen window and saw nothing in it. Jack no longer lived here.
I ran back to my house and questioned my mother, but she didn’t know anything. She knew the house was for sale, but that didn’t surprise her. Jack didn’t need all that space and he could use the money from the sale to finance his education, or a trip to Europe, or his own mechanic shop. My mother had big plans for Jack, so she was quite offended to hear that Jack had left and wasn’t living in the house anymore. My father didn’t know anything more than my mother did and neither could really remember the last time they had ran into Jack. My mother frequently saw him at the market in the evening after her knitting class ended, though she remembered it had to be over two or three weeks since she last had run into him. I grabbed a page from my father’s newspaper, opened it, and laid it over my face as I sunk into the living room chair.
III
What I most enjoy about shaving is cleaning the sink afterwards. There was a time when I would leave the whiskers in the sink to marinate with the used toothpaste, the occasional lugi, and the morning mouthwash. Cleaning the sink, I would find myself whining in my head about how bad my wrist hurt from the scrubbing and always promised that next time this would not happen. It wasn’t many weeks after I turned 28 that I started to clean my bathroom sink on a regular basis. After shaving I began to take roughly 5 sheets of toilet paper, and folding them neatly together, I would go over the surface of the wet-whiskered sink and wipe up what ever was in my path. Always a few loose whiskers survived, so a nice stream from the faucet and splashes of warm water with my hands would force the remainder of my beard down the drain.
