The Contortionist's Handbook Read online

  “Why is that?”

  “I’d been suspended. I got caught doing pot with some friends in the parking lot during free period.”

  Lots of parents overreact, but guys like the Evaluator know what’s normal for a teenager. The one positive side of smoking pot with your buddies is that it indicates you’re sociable. Loner equals sociopath. Mention sports. Plays well with others. A guy like me, not the right size for football or basketball, can say I ran track and it’s believable. If I got barred from trying out, it means that I have the skills to participate on a team although he can’t verify that participation. Team sports. Track and field. Barred from the tryouts. An infallible combination.

  I read marijuana, the underline is Evaluator Code to revisit a subject when I’m not braced for it.

  “Were you actually smoking marijuana, or were you just with the others?”

  “No, I lost the musical chairs. I was taking a long drag right when the vice principal ripped open the van door.”

  “Okay, so the school suspended you and wouldn’t let you join the track team. How did your parents react?”

  “They sent me to a counselor. He was an asshole.” I’m doing post-adolescent contempt as best I can. An authority figure mandated by my parents—if I say I liked him or that we got along, the Evaluator will be certain I’m lying.

  “Why was he an asshole?”

  I shrug. “Just was.”

  “A school counselor, then?”

  “No. Somebody else. Seigelman, or something.” A school counselor would keep a record and I never attended that school. Confidential or not, the Evaluator could still verify the visit. Keep the name vague—of course I couldn’t remember—and the trail is too long and too cold to follow.

  “When during high school did this occur?”

  “My sophomore year.”

  He’s probing, building a timeline to see if my fictitious adolescent problems coincide with the deaths of my non-parents. And I’m walking a tightrope between normal teenage trouble and coming across too straight. It’s a tightrope I’ve built from a mental table of medians and averages culled from stats on drugs, delinquency, academic and social behavior for white middle-class teenage males. I have to hover invisibly between future ivy league and future burnout. Magritte would have been proud.

  “Besides the marijuana episode, did you have any other difficulties with school officials?”

  “A couple of detentions for cutting classes. Nothing else, really.”

  SIX

  My first word was ‘light.’ Ite. I was five. I didn’t walk until I was almost two. Before I was talking I was drawing, on grocery bags and butcher paper, on anything, grinding crayons to their stumps one after the next.

  I started mimicking at seven, the year I repeated kindergarten. Mom gave me a half-used puzzle book from a yard sale that year. I finished all of the mazes so I started making my own. Bored, I copied elaborate, nonsensical tangles of lines the way other kids watched television or played Cowboys and Indians. I copied the faded, grease-fogged fleur-de-lys and surrounding embellishments from our kitchen wallpaper. I copied the border etching from my birth certificate, from Shelly’s birth certificate, from Mom and Dad’s marriage license. They were all kept in a Bible that nobody in the family ever read.

  I wasn’t doing well in school. A final, confiscated spelling worksheet, corner-to-corner covered in a labyrinth of repeating, symmetrical doodles with almost 200 intersections per square inch, and a school counselor sent for me during morning recess. She had a stack of my worksheets on her desk when I arrived, and a long list of questions and tests. She asked me to draw figure-eights with different hands, one eye closed, then the other. Right or left, with one eye open and the corresponding hand trying to draw, I couldn’t move. At best, I could drag my arm with a pull from the shoulder for a drool of irregular ink. But with both eyes open, I could copy the etching on a dollar bill with a ballpoint pen and a blank notepad, and had done so several times. But the counselor never asked me to do that. They transferred me to Special Ed after that, where my first headache hit.

  As I got older, I called them godsplitters after Dad said Boy’s been howlin.’ Got a headache that could split God’s own skull in two. I was by myself during free activity time—the other kids scared me—copying the swirls in the carpet onto a piece of paper when my head started to burn. Like when you jump into a swimming pool feet first and cram fire up your nose, makes your eyes feel like they’re bleeding and a thousand fingernails scraping at the inside top of your skull.

  They thought I was having a seizure. They forced something into my mouth, a stick wrapped in gauze like a dog’s chew toy, sat on my legs and arms and the nail scraping kept on while they waited for me to stop struggling. Through the burn, I felt out of nowhere the carpet chafing my bare ass with an aide sitting on my legs, they’d pulled my pants to my knees and shot a hornet sting into my hip. My arms, legs and throat turned to cement. Seven years old, wide awake and numb from the neck down, my tongue like a bloated wad of bread dough, my head burned like a shrieking chalkboard for three days. They thought they’d stopped it, but they had only stopped themselves from seeing what was wrong. It took time, but I figured out that these people could do whatever they wanted. Even jail has better rules.

  I can copy anything now. Straight lines—name the length to the centimeter—and perfect circles. Give me an angle degree and I can do it. Any signature, even the worst doctor’s scrawl. I’ve signed my own tickets, had the DMV OK a cracked windshield or broken tail light citation. I kept the sample of a signature and badge number from a speeding ticket years ago. I can’t afford to fix something, Officer Blaine signs off and I’m good to go. I can do fingerprints.

  ———

  1968, I’m nine. I’d been admitted to the fourth grade that September, following an inexplicable leap in my test scores after two years in Special Ed. On Speech and Vocabulary examinations, John has successfully achieved scores commensurate with his age group, and has displayed an improved ability to listen and follow directions. While there is still room for improvement in his socialization skills, we feel this can only be addressed within an environment on par with his improved intellectual performance. And so on. Followed by two months of Hey, kid, you’re on the wrong bus and chanting spider fingers, spider fingers on the playground. In truth, they didn’t bother me much. I’d learned to tune things out over the previous two years, corral events into a place in my head where they happened to someone else, like watching them on television.

  Dad was home for Christmas that year after having been gone for thirteen months. Shelly and I asked if he’d found any gold. Nope, still lookin’, he said.

  Christmas morning, Mom woke up early to make us breakfast before she went to work. I was on the porch with Dad, looking at my solitary present, Sleight of Hand Fundamentals for Beginners. Three hundred pages, the cover was creased with wear, separated from the spine a third of the way down, the back appendix pages falling out, yellowed with age and effluviating the rotting musk of mildewed paper. The text was written in arcane grammar that took multiple readings to decipher. Dad sat beside me, feeling my emanating waves of befuddled disappointment. I’d never expressed any interest in doing magic tricks.

  “Look here,” he said. “That’s a cup. And that,” pointing from one line drawing to another—hands wearing tailored cuffs holding cards, coins and kerchiefs—“is a palm. See here,” another drawing, “how he’s holding the card between two knuckles? That way, he holds his palm out,” Dad held his palm to me, “looks like the card’s disappeared.”

  “How does he get it there without them seeing it?” I asked him. I’d wanted a bicycle. A pair of shoes. My own room or a real bed.

  “Because,” another line drawing of a hand holding a kerchief, “he uses a misdirect, then a flourish. He makes them look away by distracting them. I’ll do a couple with you, then you can practice.”

  Nine years old, and I’m humoring my father and his best atte
mpt to give me something for Christmas. I hated the book, could hardly understand the language but kept at it to please Dad. I kicked furniture when a quarter slipped through a clumsy finger-palm or a three of diamonds fell loose from a clip. But those first two months after Christmas were the longest time I ever spent with Dad, the most words he ever spoke to me in a similar period of time, and the primitive coin tricks I did for him when he took me and Shelly to the doughnut shop on Sundays were the only times he ever smiled in front of me. So I learned how to pass, top change, bottom change, switch, steal, fumble, sleeve, screen, cuff, cup, palm, clip, flourish, misdirect, and force.

  By the time I figured out that Dad taught me coin and card tricks so I could conceal my hand and quit getting stared at or beat up, I’d already moved to shoplifting. Six-finger discount. A force, misdirect or flourish worked as well to help palm or pocket whatever I didn’t or couldn’t have. My first bust, Dad was gone again. He’d sent us a postcard saying he was off digging another gold mine, and he’d be back in a year.

  Polydactyly. An extra, half-formed digit, nubs of flesh and cartilage. A toe, sometimes a finger. They’re removed at birth with less formality than pulling a tooth or a circumcision. A perfectly formed digit with the skeleton reconfigured to match is almost unheard of, except in some house cats. With cats, it’s cute. With people, It’s Not Polite to Stare.

  My left hand fourth metacarpus—ring finger—is a duplicate of the third, a virtually non-existent variety of polydactyly. It’s not a deformity in the broader sense, said one osteopath. For what it is, it’s perfectly formed. As it is: fully formed, ossified bone tissue—base, first, second, and third shafts—with its own set of arches, loops and whorls on the print. Mom had told me the doctor attending my birth suggested amputation, in my case a simple procedure that takes only a few minutes on such a small extremity. Newborn, my fingers were like grains of rice. Mom asked how much the additional procedure would cost, and whether it was really necessary. The doctor said the procedure was elective, but they couldn’t predict how the finger might grow otherwise, and there were risks of complications both with the surgery and without. It was one more procedure Mom and Dad couldn’t afford. Dad said How do you know which finger’s the extra one? Mom told me the doctor laughed, then stopped when he saw Dad’s face. I can picture him looking for the joke in the hollow of Dad’s black shark-stare and coming up empty.

  Dad used the same logic with me when I was little, refusing to let me cave in to ridicule. How do you know the rest of us don’t have enough? His koans dumped me into my interior labyrinth of logic in search of a rebuttal and I’d get lost every time, ditching my anger or self-pity at some dead end while I looked for a way out.

  I remember how Dad would sit at the kitchen table, bite the filter off a cigarette and smoke it down to his knuckles, waiting for the phone to ring with his next job. His money gone, he drank enough vodka to muster the nerve to tell Mom that she couldn’t quit working just yet. But Dad never apologized. For anything. Neither did Mom. They almost never fought but when they did, neither one of them ever backed down and the screaming would last until sunrise. I guess that’s where I learned it from. God help me otherwise. If I came home from school scraped up from another fight, one flick of Dad’s fingers unhooked his belt and he’d start swinging if I apologized, showed any kind of regret about fighting. If I cried, it only got worse. Since then, the only person I’ve ever apologized to is Keara.

  Nobody sees my fingers anymore unless I’m careless, when I’ve had too much to drink and I’m hailing a bartender or lighting a smoke. Once, I reached into a bowl of matchbooks at the Dresden Room with my left hand and the girl next to me shrieked, the kind of razor-pitch squeal that makes every bottled-courage silverback stand up and look at you, and make certain that everyone sees him doing it. Shrieker flushed, her face redder than blood in the light of the bar candles, then laughed, covered her mouth. I put my left hand back into my coat pocket, used my right to open the matchbook and light a smoke. I’d practiced that one over and over.

  My left hand is a Rorschach blotch all its own, a six-fingered, skin-blood-and-bone ink splatter. People see it and fly their worst fears and secret fetishes at full mast when they think they’re being discreet. They see it as strange, fascinating, ugly, beautiful, disgusting or erotic depending on what’s behind their eyes.

  Grown-ups used to look right at me, point, tap each other and grab my wrist to get a closer look at my fingers. Kids can be cruel, they can ostracize you, but with adults, you’re a specimen. As I grew older, the comments changed to whispers and the stares went from my face to my peripheral vision to my back.

  Sometimes a person won’t hide anything, get a good look and act like it’s as common as a cloudy day. They’ll make conversation as if they see this sort of thing all the time. Tantamount to calling me stupid right to my face.

  Freaks get off on it. Like the bottle-blonde in the black mini with shotgun acne scars spackled over with foundation and blush. In her apartment, she dropped her keys, purse and clothes with all the ceremony of scraping mud from her heels. Eighty-seven minutes after Is anyone sitting here? at the bar. Later, she stared at my fingers in the half-dark while I smoked, said My friend has a thing for amputees. Her boyfriend lost his hand in an accident. She liked sticking his wrist stump inside her. I can’t lie. I take advantage of this.

  Models, I meet them in bars, they find out I’m not trying to take them home and are you a model? isn’t a pickup line. I ask them for hints—head shots, I need more weight, less weight, heavier eyes, lighter eyes. I want to shift my appearance a little for each new picture I have taken. I learned to fast for four days then wear clothes a size too large. Get bold and take a razor to my hairline, knock it back a half inch so I look good and skeletal for the camera. Or gorge on milk and pasta for two weeks, chew a serrano chili to flush my skin and make my eyes puffy.

  Models like talking about themselves because they have nothing else to talk about. I spend an hour asking them for cosmetic secrets, not paying for their drinks.

  They see my fingers, they run. Dominique. Alicia. Penny.

  They see my fingers, they want their hair pulled. Alex. Renee. Kristin.

  ———

  February 1972, I’m twelve. I was a regular at Boulevard Music, lifting about a hundred and fifty dollars in merchandise weekly, spending eight or twelve bucks during a visit to look honest. I rarely took vinyl and when I did, the plain sight approach was best, and only if I’d walked in with a few under my arm to begin with. Cassettes were easier, they weren’t kept in plastic security brackets, the eight-tracks were invisible from the front registers—the convex security mirror mounted all wrong, useless for monitoring the N-Z aisles.

  I paid for Stooges, The, had sleeved both Reed, Lou and T-Rex. At the door, someone shouted Hey! and I bolted. One of the cashiers, post-football fat but fast on his feet, grabbed me at the edge of the parking lot, dragged me back inside, clamped in a half-nelson.

  My delusion was that because I was only twelve, because it was only a couple of cassettes, that they’d call my parents and be done with it. Dad was gone, Mom would come for me but be too tired from working two jobs to care. After listening to seventy-four minutes of crap from the manager in his locked office, I spat on one of the cops when they showed up.

  “You’ve got to be kidding.” The booking officer at the police station was rolling my prints, right hand, left hand, stopped to make certain what he was seeing. “Look at this,” he called another cop over. The record store was pressing full charges, and a spit wad in the arresting officer’s face had made things worse.

  The second cop said, “You some kinda Martian, kid?” Ah, a joke. “That real?” He gripped my fingertips, squeezed them together—it hurt, but I didn’t say anything—tapped my palm and the back of my hand as though it were a drug-smuggling prosthesis.

  “It’s real,” I said.

  “Nobody is talking to you,” he snapped. They joked about cutting
it off, bagging it for evidence. He got a separate print card, stapled it to the others, and referenced it on the Distinguishing Marks section of the booking form as an Extra Little Finger.

  “The little finger isn’t extra,” I said.

  “You givin’ me a hard time?” Pressed uniform, biceps almost splitting through his sleeves, black leather gloves.

  “Nope.”

  “I said, are you giving me a hard time, boy?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I didn’t think so. Now, take off your clothes, including that sissy-ass rock-and-roll shirt.” He’s raising his voice at me but I’m three feet away and there’s no noise and nobody else in the room. I didn’t understand.

  “Quit staring, boy, and get to it.”

  My clothes piled on a metal table, two uniformed cops with surgical gloves turned them inside out—pockets, seams and linings—then me. Penlight in my ears, nostrils and mouth. Stick your tongue out. Now up. Move it to one side. Hold it there. Now move it to the other. Place your left hand under your testicles and lift. So I grip my nuts and lift them, they search with a light, then Bend over and spread your cheeks. Let me see the bottom of your left foot. You know your right from left, boy. We just might get along. Now your right. They rifled through my hair like grooming chimps, kept my belt, shoes and jacket, gave me back my shirt and jeans and a pair of canvas slippers like hospital shoes.

  The way Dad reacted if I buckled to a group of kids or a bully forced me to fight. Outnumbered or outsized, which was always, I fought because no other kid ever would or ever did hit me harder or longer than Dad. This was different. My defiance wasn’t going to call their bluff because they weren’t bluffing. I didn’t learn that as quickly as I learned other things, so it took a while. After a time, I learned to be invisible, learned not to fight because that makes you visible and you do not want to be visible in jail. I learned to do obsequious, passive.