The Manny Diaries, Chapter Fifteen: The Pushing of the Swing

“in the cupboard sits my bottle


like a dwarf waiting to scratch out my prayers.


I drink and cough like some idiot at a symphony,


sunlight and maddened birds are everywhere,


the phone rings gamboling its sound


against the odds of the crooked sea;


I drink deeply and evenly now,

I drink to paradise


and death


and the lie of love.”

—Charles Bukowski, “Soirée”

No more cliffhangers. No more chapters to be delivered. This is the final chapter. It’s the end of fifteen parts, both sad and fierce, and the end of a eulogy that began with the very first chapter, although I didn’t know it then.

The Manny died on Tuesday, July 7, 2015. We don’t know the hour. His relentless talking, both the internal dialogue and the external monologues, had already presumably gone quiet. He had left Mexico to renew his visa, which he did periodically. After crossing the border from Guatemala into Mexico by bus, he suffered a seizure, collapsed, and fell into a coma. A good Samaritan pulled his passport out and called the American embassy in Mexico City.

This is he.

Oh, you would so mad if you knew I shared any photos of you, but this one shows you at your happy, smiling best so i'm going to pretend you never said anything. You look happy. Besideswhich, you can't git after me me cos you are dead! (Oops, sorry, trying on a bit of your style of humor.) The text caption for this one read; "Look, Miss Jennifer, I got a haircut!"

My husband had spoken to Manny on the previous Friday afternoon and he was right as rain. Sober as a judge. They were catching up after not having spoken for a month, and they talked for an hour and a half. The conversation was so innocuous that my husband can’t clearly remember any specific details. There was no “Lupita the beautiful Mexican girl, who stole my Chipmunk puppet but whose skin was so soft, so very soft.” There was no talk of missing pants or missing chunks of tongue or angry landlords or roaming oxen or stopping up the toilets or avocados falling like manna from the trees. (When he was sober he might have, I dare say, been a bit more ordinary. But one might say that he was reasonably happy. A decent trade-off.)

On Sunday, my husband received a call from the embassy. Some years back, he had helped Manny obtain a passport, and his name was (eerily!) still on record with the state department as a result. They told him that Manny was in a coma and that the doctor had stated that, “the prognosis is not good.”

Two days later my husband placed a call to the embassy and received word that Manny was gone, his ever-present nattering and wild speculations silenced and darkened forever. He was dead of “unknown causes.” Unknown except for the dubious devil of drink, which may have finally killed him in the end. Perhaps he had tried to stop again. Perhaps he had tried to begin again. We don’t know, except that he had quite suddenly ceased to exist. It was what we had expected, all along. I knew I’d never see him again, and I won’t.

He had often said things like: “But what if I die, Miss Jennifer? What if I were to die?” He was truly afraid of dying. He knew in his heart it was a constant possibility. Some people are hyperbolic, prone to doom-filled mental wanderings, and hypochondria (myself included). He was all that and more. He knew he was going to die. It was just a matter of time.

You think you’ll have a chance to prepare, to say your goodbyes. You’re hoping for movie lighting. But then you step off a bus and fall down in a parking lot, or a dusty field, and no one notices but for a kind stranger. You’re there and then you’re not. You’re nowhere. You’re torso-deep into a bush with your pants missing and still have the grace to guffaw about it.

Manny, in the year that you lived with us, you crafted us near 100 meals, probably more. But you’ll cook no more. Where is your sunburnt smile under that ridiculous hat, and where are your 14 chickens that you bought for a song? I think you named three of them the Big One, the Middle One, and the Little One, after our boys.

His name was Mark. I’ll stop calling him Manny, but I’ll leave his last name off the records. His last name—the name we knew him under for many years—was real. He often went by another name, Frank, by which many of his friends knew him. But it wasn’t real. Many other things he told us weren’t real.

He was 54 years old, and not 63 as he often told us when he was drunk. (This had caused confusion, as my husband knew his true age by his passport. However, he [that is, Manny] had told us that Mark was also an assumed name. His real name, he said, along with the person had been when he was born, was long buried and forgotten. He had intentionally aged himself by 9 years.) He never served in Vietnam. He never killed anyone in combat. He was not adopted. His parents were not shot by Stalin’s goons as he cowered under the bed. He had a daughter, adopted, from a short-lived marriage. He adopted her in 1999. She’s sixteen now.

He had four siblings, all of whom (but for one) had washed their hands of him years ago. “We haven’t seen him in 26 years. Let him be buried in Mexico’s version of Potter’s Field,” said his sisters. One brother still cared, and we found that brother through the embassy. He hadn’t glimpsed Mark since 1990, when Mark had come by his shop to borrow $5,000. The brother wonders if that lousy $5,000 that he didn’t even care about kept Mark away for so long. Mark could have repaid the loan, too—he had the money many times over in the next two decades, when he was doing well financially. His brother would have gladly forgiven the loan just to spend more time with him.

Almost everything he told us, especially when he was drunk, was a lie. And his lies went even further. He had told friends that we owed him because he had paid for my husband’s law school education, and that, despite that, we were constantly “shaking him down for money.” No, simply not true, my husband’s mother paid for it. And we never shook him down for money. In fact, he owed us money. But we didn’t care.

I’m picturing rattling the poor man’s pockets as I “shake him down” and finding only some Dove dark chocolates and shards of broken pretzels and maybe a linty quarter.

Oh Mark, I’d like to swat you in the face with a sheeny-eyed red snapper now, but I can’t. Nor can I ask you what you meant to achieve with your wild fictions and your weeping over the dead you left behind in Vietnam. I now know that you had Muscular Dystrophy as a child, and they had to cut the muscles on the backs of your legs to help the condition (why I do not know; looking it up instantly hosed my computer, as if Mark is gleefully fiddling with the controls from the beyond to prevent fact-checking of his falsehoods).

We learned that your mother doted on you and you were always the favorite. “My sweet Mark. My poor Mark,” she used to say. You outgrew the condition, apparently. You got an apartment and your mother would deliver groceries to you once a week, out of love. But when your mother died in 2013, you didn’t attend her funeral, nor did you attend your father’s funeral in 1996.

And the “wetwork” you supposedly did. Did you ever actually hurt a single living thing? You had so much anger burning you up inside. You had so much pain. And so much love, too.

Why did you adopt a daughter and never speak of her? Despite that, why did you love our boys so much? I have videos of you pushing our children on a tree swing, and laughing. You had a great, big belly laugh. A real laugh that made fake cocktail-party titters seem shameful. You had a deep chuckle.

They amused him greatly, our boys. He let them climb over him and batter him like he was made of granite, despite his aches and pains. He was never dark then, during the pushing of the swing, although the darkness was in him.

I didn’t fully realize the fact of Mark’s death until I saw, a few nights ago, a photograph of the urn that carried his ashes. It had been delivered from Mexico to his brother in Detroit. It seemed awfully small to house such a big man. How can someone so massive be just…gone.  It was a wooden box, rectangular in shape. It made me feel scared for him, until I remembered: He’s not in there. That’s just all the ashes that are left from the pains and sorrows and hungers and loves of that big, ungainly body that never quite fit him.

Mark, you were a real physical presence. You used to startle on my stairs. You toasted tortillas on our stove and chopped endless “guavacados” on the cutting board. In our closet we have your old coat on a hangar, a “Dickies” brand coat. Your old winter hat is wadded-up in the pocket. You used to point at the logo and snigger, “Look, it says Dickies. Hee hee hee. Dickies!” That was your trademark sense of humor. A little juvenile, a little dirty, but we laughed all the same.

He was a mountain of a man—all crags and thorns and gullies and crevasses, a big bumbling sorrow of a man who loved his dog, Gus, so much that he carried the bulldog’s urn of ashes across the country. He cried his heart out over that dead dog, to us over the phone over many weeks. He wept like a baby.

Where is his wok, and his perfect citrus press? I covet that citrus press. All his meager possessions, left behind in Mexico with the landlord who grew to love him, too, even over a short period of time. Rodolfo wept on the phone while discussing the details of Mark’s final months.

Can I think that Mark inspired one of my sons (the “Middle One”) with a passion for cooking that has never wavered over the months? I’d like to think so, yes.

His art collection in the storage unit had already been sold for pennies on the dollar by the time we learned of his death. We have a couple of broken, antique lamps in the garage, and a collection of photographs he never bothered to return to the art galleries that had loaned them out to him. We have a handful of photos that contain him, the man, the Manny. We don’t have much.

I thought to write, “I wish I could have told him that I never hated him.” No, I loved him. But I think I did manage to tell him that. He read this blog once in an indignant fury (after my husband informed him of its existence) and told us to “fix it!” He wanted it all deleted. He wanted every piece of information about him that existed to be expunged from public record. My husband wrote back, “Suck it up!” We would never delete it, especially now. It’s a record of who he was, both sad and joyous. He didn’t leave much else.

You played a joke on the world, Mark, and maybe you’re still sniggering about it, and we’ll never know why. Lies and deceit and family estrangement and pain and heartbreak and drinking and more lies and even more drinking, but you did something right, because we sit here in the cricket song and the dark night thinking of you, and we are filled with sorrow. You fed us, you pushed our boys as high as the moon, you sent us stupid photographs day after day via text message with inane and obvious captions: Bunny. Groundhog. Fish in River. Goose. Sailboat. Bunny eating weeds.

You and your big fat smile, Mark. That stupid mustache. Those awful baggy t-shirts and your rangy arms. The way you flinched when someone dug their hand into the grated cheese instead of properly using a spoon. The day you wandered up behind me, silent, because I was playing Cat Stevens’ “Wild World” on the piano, and you said, “I always liked that song. I sang that song once.” The day you fixed the broken switch on an old lamp I had, and smiled proudly like a little child who has learned to tie his shoes, and I was grateful.

All of it.

  

The Manny Diaries, Chapter Twelve: Chippy and the Back Scratcher

He made it. The Manny made it to Mexico. He's really there, and he is really not here. I think I'm suffering from a fair amount of disbelief.

There's a residual effect in the air, like he left some ghostly effluvium here, such that I can almost hear him groaning "The pain! The pain!" as he treaded up the stairs at night. I still realize with a start, at 5:15 pm, that no one is cooking my boys a gourmet dinner, and now I have to toss some frozen lump of a thing in the oven to get them fed. I look out the window and expect to see him shuffling through the garden in his slippers, inspecting the pea shoots and looking for Bun-Bun, his special tame friend, who must have lost his (or her?) parents to a hawklike personage because the thing is FEARLESS.

This is Bun-Bun.

I once remarked that we shouldn't be so quiet and gentle around Bun-Bun because we were teaching him additional fearlessness that his parents had failed to teach him and he was gonna get snacked upon. I worry about the little fellow daily, as does, no doubt, the Manny.

Before he left, we suggested that he would be lonely without his special animal friends, Bun-Bun and Fatty the Groundhog, who lives under our shed. So we jokingly plucked a "lovey" out of the Vast Bin of Neglected Stuffed Animals and gave him Chippy the Chipmunk, who is a hand puppet,

He really took to Chippy. He walked around with him a bit, talking to him and working the hand puppet so that Chippy would "respond." I said it made him seem less crazy because at least he was talking to SOMETHING as opposed to just babbling to himself. In fact, he took Chippy with him to Mexico. But, he left the back scratcher (pictured below) behind. Do you know how I found out? When we were cleaning his room, after his departure, my husband gently scratched me on the back with it as I was bent over stuffing things into a garbage sack. glgflflh!!

Chippy and the Back Scratcher. Use your imagination to picture the scene with the Manny in it. 

The cleansing went on for quite a while. It took all morning to take down his blackout curtains and let the sun shine into the attic room, sweep the desk of detritus, and gather up a sackful of greasy and sticky coins. There was some half-gnawed peanut brittle. There were some half-empty Coke bottles, and a bottle of ear wax remedy. There was not, however, an empty liquor bottle of any kind. We figured he's gotten pretty savvy and spirited them out in the dead of night, or maybe poured the stuff into Coke bottles in the parking lot of the CVS and then tossed the evidence.

The things we leave behind.

Because there was no doubt—no doubt whatsoever—that he had started drinking with a feverish intensity right before he left for Mexico. On Friday morning, two days before his departure, he showed up in the kitchen at approximately 8:30 am as crocked as a monkey. He was mumbling and slurring and blathering about how dreadful his life was and how fearsome things had become.

"Someone's gonna screw my pooch!" he said dolefully. "Everything that could have gone wrong for me has gone wrong. All of it!"

I said: "Are you drunk?"

He staggered backwards into a doorframe as if I'd punched him in the gut, his eyes bugging out.

"Drunk? DRUNK? howonearthcouldibedrunk? Huh? Heh?"

"Well, even a child can see that you're drunk."

"No no no no no I'm not drunk! I don't drink! Why would I be drunk? My life is so bad...the pain, the pain." And he massaged his aching hip. He stumbled around, mumbling madly and bumping into things.

My husband had words with him. Well, they weren't just "words." They were bad words, spoken at a high volume. By the time we came back from a school concert event, he had gone into the city to conduct one last errand. Husband sent him a note apologizing for raising his voice, but Manny simply must not drink and lying about it just made it worse. He wrote back:

Not drinking  I'll have    a hotel Saturday  need to go don't trust you
What about thee quorts in your space you have your own problems 

"Thee quorts" referred to something he'd seen in our own liquor cabinet—intriguing, given that he had no possible reason to look inside that cabinet.  But then again, we'd been noticing a few things vanish from that cabinet now and again.

Here was a dreadful dilemma. How was he to get to the airport? How would we ensure that he was going to get on that plane and fly to a different country? And would he return in time to pack Chippy, his wok, the back scratcher (evidently not, in this case. glrk!), his French press, his lemon squeezer, and a handful of underwear?

Fortunately, he did. And he came back wearing this jaunty chapeau, which I think he imagined as a Mexican sombrero-like accessory but, on him, looked a little small atop his big ol' head.

Heisenberg Dos, in straw.

This isn't the last chapter, of course. You've probably figured that out by now. There is more. Indeed, there is more.

The Manny Diaries, Chapter Eleven: Mexico is for Lovers

On Sunday (6/15/14), if all goes according to plan, the Manny will be winging his way toward his new home in sunny Mexico. The odds that he actually makes it onto the plane grow increasingly slimmer, in direct proportion to his nervous nattering and hand-wringing, and the reality that he's drinking again. Yeah. His fears include:

• Being detained at the airport and made to pay exorbitant taxes on the few beat-up possessions that he's taking with him.
• Finding out that his landlords will put him in enforced servitude upon arrival, and that the Craigslist listing was an elaborate ruse to get a slave.
• Discovering that whatever suitcase he brings is exactly 1 inch too large to qualify for the one free bag (because of the wheels!) and being forced to pay more money to transport it.
• He will get waylaid by banditos at the local Wal-Mart
• He will accidentally drink the local water and get Monty's Revenge
• Since he can't speak Spanish, the cheap translation app he bought will say "pussy" instead of "gracias." When we typed in "thank you." Which it does. For real.
• And much more!

In the interest of a smooth removal, I took him to the local Goodwill to find a cheap suitcase of exactly the right dimensions. We found one right away! Here it is:

Manny accosted a fellow who was sorting girls' clothing on the racks.

"Do you work here? Or are you just some creepy guy who likes touching little girls' clothing?" he asked the man, then guffawed. "Anyway, do you have a tape measure?"

Manny opened the bag and reached into an inner pocket, immediately yanking his hand out and flinging a pair of dirty women's undies violently away from him. They landed on the end of the clothes rack and dangled there. Virginia is for Lovers, indeed.

"OH MY GOD I HAVE CRABS NOW!" he said, scratching his arm violently. "Look, do I have a rash starting?"

"Crabs don't jump that fast," I suggested.

"They jump FAST!" he said. "Like lightning! They hop. They leap."

He bought the suitcase anyway, but the whole way home he scratched at his arm and inspected it for crabs and fresh bites. He got home and obsessively washed his hands and then started on the dinner prep. Except earlier that day, my husband had hidden the salt, after an overly salty meal that had rather bloated and sickened us. (The cooking was starting to lose its shine, after we realized that the scale was telling a tale of buttery, greasy, salty, sausagey overindulgence).

So he went seeking the salt, becoming almost crazed in his hunt.

"Where's the SALT? I can't find the SALT. Could someone have HIDDEN the salt?"

"Maybe," I said cryptically. "Maybe someone did hide the salt. I believe that may have happened, yes."

"Who hides salt?!! That's a creepy, crazy thing to do. WHO hides salt? I mean...I just can't even understand why ANYONE would ever hide salt. That's troubling."

He scratched at his head and worried about the crabs again, a little bit. Then he went searching for the salt again, muttering and cursing.

Next, he decided that he wanted to have a tag sale and get rid of all his worldly possessions, but for a few treasures that he would take with him to Mexico. So he made some truly extraordinary craptastic signs and tacked them up around the neighborhood, and he sat on our lawn, sweating in the heat, surrounded by a panoply of strange goods, including the Aunt Jemima bookends from Part Ten.

This print, by the artist Niagara, greeted shoppers as they arrived at the sale.

Here are some things he said to people who dropped by:

Woman: Is this something to rest your spoon in while you're cooking?
Manny: You can use it to cook up your heroin, actually.

Man: I'll offer you $20 for that.
Manny: Don't screw my pooch! I'm not an idiot. Didn't the ad say "no crackpots"?

Husband's Frenemy who lives down the block (returning item that he bought for $10): I got home and the wife said "no." So I'm bringing it back. Can I have my $10 back?
Manny: Who the fuck DOES that?

He sorta had me in agreement at that last one.

Anyway, he managed to unload a variety of things and made some decent cash.

As his possessions disappeared one by one, I began to wonder about the mental state of a man in his 60s who is suddenly unburdened. Lightened. Free to travel to Mexico, and perhaps to never return. One of the few things he hadn't chosen to sell was the urn containing his beloved bulldog's ashes. That would go into storage, along with the bulk of his art collection. The cast iron pots, the spoons, the coffee grinder, the French press—all of it sold, gone.

And I did think of all our relentless, endless belongings in the attic, those things that we call home. What we cling to and what remains. Ashes and memory. And how my friend texted me today and said "Is Sunday a special celebration combining Father's Day and 'Get the Fuck Out of My House Day?'"
Yes, all of that.

The Manny Diaries, Part Ten: Tequila Farming!

I never thought I'd say this, but lately I have been finding Manny something resembling...invaluable. Every single day, he comes downstairs quite early, before we are even awake, and cuts up a plateful of fresh fruit for the boys. Then he waits, ready to spring into action and fry up bacon and make gourmet omelettes filled with things like fresh asparagus and feta cheese and some delicious sausage that he sourced out at the Italian deli.

By the way, he washes his hands religiously and insists on separate serving utensils for each dish. If a kid reaches out a hand toward a serving dish, he flinches and groans.

It's filled with Manny-ness!

Later, he has dinner ready on the table by 6:00 p.m. Skirt steak tacos, fresh salmon with dill and lemon, garlic mashed potatoes, roasted beets in some sort of astoundingly good salad with delicious unknown ingredients and pepperoncini poking out of the top.

One day, he made the boys a pork roast. It was absolutely fine and tasty, but one of the boys decided it wasn’t for him.

Middle son said, “I don’t really like this.”

Manny, distraught, said, “You don’t? You really don’t? Why? What’s wrong with it?”

“I dunno,” middle son shrugged. “It’s kinda flavorless and chewy.”

Manny wandered off in a tither, all the way into town. I got repeated text messages such as:

Should I try more spice??

Think they would like quiche???

Stir fry

Salad

Eggs??

I had the boys make a list of foods they wanted to try and the very next day, he set out to start cooking the items on that list, one by one. That night we had BLTs, except he used fancy prosciutto. They were awesome.

Let’s face it…aren’t you starting to wish that you had a Manny right about now? If you want one, you have to accept the whole package.

He hums while he cooks, and mutters to himself. He talks and doesn’t listen. He makes crass and unfunny jokes—and an occasionally exceedingly funny one. And he brought in these somewhat…unusual bookends to prop up his cookbooks.

We throw a cloth over these when people come to visit. Not that they are not, well, somewhat of conversation starters.

He mixes up his words all the time.

“I put the leftovers in the other refrigerator,” he says, gesturing at the oven.

“How about I make some guacacado?” he asks another time. “Oh! I mean, something with those eggstables. Eggpants! Eggplant hummos.”

“You mean baba ganoush, right?”

“Yeah, that!”

(The baba ganoush was excellent.)

But he is kind. He got in the habit of pushing the boys on the new tree swing that our neighbor built, and pushing them much higher than I ever could, such that they would call out for him to “give me another push” and he would comply, despite sore shoulders and aching back.

So when he said he was going to move to Oaxaca, Mexico, at the end of June and live on a tequila farm, I had some mixed feelings.

I can't wait to drink this!

One, hurrah! Two, the Manny Diaries may have to come to an end. Crap. And three, what kind of bonehead would choose to live on a tequila farm when he oughta know the one poison he should never, ever have is booze?

In fact, he got so excited about his new life as a tequila farmer that, on Sunday, when he was purportedly out buying some food for dinner, he must have wandered into a local drinking establishment. He came bumbling in at 6 pm with no food and with a bottle of tequila, made in his future hometown! He presented it to us as a gift. He stank of booze and slurred and denied having a drink, so we sent him to his room.

We can’t really kick him out now, with so little time between now and his departure. He has rented a place in Mexico and even paid for plane tickets. He says he’ll stay sober until he leaves, even during his four-hour layover on the way to his new home. If he makes that connection it will be a miracle.

I can imagine getting a tearful, drunken phone call from the Oaxaca jailhouse (do they even allow phone calls?) saying that we gotta bail him out because he insulted some Mexican dude and then got into a pistol duel over the man’s underage daughter. I can just kinda imagine that.  But I think that truth will be even stranger than my imagination can conjure at this moment. 

Don't you? WHAT do you think our Manny will do next?

The Manny Diaries, Part Nine: Conspiracy Theories

Perseverate: To repeat something insistently or redundantly; to repeat a response after the cessation of the original stimulus.

Conspiracy theory: An explanatory proposition that accuses two or more persons, a group, or an organization of having caused or covered up, through secret planning and deliberate action, an illegal or harmful event or situation.

Put two things together, and what do you get? The Manny, that's what. 

For three weeks now, he's been blessedly sober. At least he appears to be, and there's no hint of fumes on the breath or the eggy, bloodshot eye. He snacks on pounds of chocolate and pretzels in bed, by his own admission, and says that there's no way he's a drunk because "alcoholics drink, and I'm not drinking! See?"

He perseverates on various things. Someone hacked his files and stole all his contacts. Something in the universe is out to get him. The post office is up to no good and is out to destroy his career. Why does something named "Grumpy Cat" have a career and he doesn't and couldn't he do the same if people were not out to get him? Goody Longbottom down the way gave him the evil eye and soured the milk in the cartons and the cows' udders. No amount of logic and humor can address these fears, and they are brought up every single day, numerous times per day, unless I can avoid him through stealth and speed. 

"I don't know, Miss Jennifer. It just seems that an evil force is out to get me. I have been betrayed. I did so much for so many people. And they betrayed me. My feeling is that there's something suspicious going on, for them all to betray me at once."

"Maybe they noticed you were a blathering drunk and they were afraid to do business with you?"

"Ah, no, not possible! My customers are all idiot drunks themselves! Most of them, anyway. No one minds if you're a drunk with lots of money. People just mind if you're a drunk without money and out of luck."

He might have a point there, with that last one.

He natters and blathers and perseverates so much and so persistently that I fear I will go mad, and will tear at the curtains with my teeth and kick him in the throat and stand on my head going "yah, yah, yah!" until he runs and hides in the attic.

Oh, speaking of the attic. I had an acquaintance come visit yesterday and she wanted to check out our attic, because we always say it's cool and has lots of potential and space. I kind of warned her that there was a man living up there but I am not sure she was prepared. We wandered into his space and he was sitting there among some orange peels, surrounded by dirty laundry, on a carpet black with filth (crap-daddle, that is one of my old carpets and I hadn't had the nerve to walk in there for quite a while, but now that I saw it I can't un-see it. Aw jeez, can it even be saved? No, it cannot.) My acquaintance hemmed and hawed and made some polite throaty noises but I could see she was jarred. Why does Jennifer have a troglodyte living in her attic? She seemed like a normal woman, but now I am convinced otherwise. And, the creature sitting there in the dirt has a pornstache!

[Manny shaved recently. And he has a pornstache now. And short hair.]

I can cook a mean pork butt.

He has outlasted the two days of sobriety once predicted by my friend, and he has not nipped at the sauce. But I confess that we are waiting for that fine day when his conspiracy theories will coalesce into a singular notion: If only I had a cocky-tail, perhaps everything in the world would right itself?

Haven't you ever thought the same, those of you who have had a whiff or two of the bottle? And when that day happens, what will become of him? 

Meanwhile, he tends our new tomato plants and braises the chicken thighs and mashes the avocados into a guacamole of which I can't pretend I'm not jealous, even though I was once considered the Guac Queen in our household. And I watch our boys attack Manny with their small, ineffectual limbs, because clearly he's fun to try to climb aboard, as big and rangy as he is. They are like mosquitos to him; he plucks one up and puts him gently aside just as the next boy launches himself. He laughs. He seems happy. He is good with them. I swear it. 

Something rotten this way comes.

He says he is happy, but for, you know, that problem. The betrayal. The conspiracy. Everyone is against him. He's trying to get a handle on it, wrap his mind around it, move forward. And he's really worried about the Korean grocery in town, because the veggies there are wilted and why would anyone sell wilted veggies and are they about to go out of business and if he had recommended them to someone they would think he was full of shit, just plumb full of shit, and that would give him a bad reputation for recommending bad grocery stores, and some of the veggies in that store sink in right under your thumb because they are so filled with rot, and there's something wrong going on in this world and why won't anyone wake up and see it? 

If you ever read this blog, Manny, know that I acted alone. No conspiracy. 

The Manny Diaries, Part Eight: Back in the House

It's not over....

For all we knew, the Manny had been living comfortably on a pig farm for the last several weeks, enjoying the company of his new porcine brothers, reveling in the fresh air, and enjoying a snort of bourbon whenever and how often he liked.

Bliss!

So we were pretty dismayed to get a phone call from him on March 11th, in which his opening conversational gambit was: "I'm cold. I'm homeless! And I'm scared."

He was clearly drunk. He claimed he was sitting atop a grate in NYC with all his bags and baggage and was freezing to death. Interestingly, that day was a balmy high of 66 degrees with a low of 45, but "It's below zero out here!" he stuttered.

"Dude, what happened at the pig farm? Why did you leave?"

"Oooh, their son was really annoying. I couldn't tolerate him! He was crazy!"

Some information was clearly missing. Perhaps he had gotten too cozy with one of their pigs in the sty and they sent him on his way? Either way, he was sitting on the streets of NYC.

"You drinking?" we asked.

"Me? Nah! I've been sober for 15 days, at least." Except it came out a bit like: "I'sh been stober for fiteen days at leash!"

"And your choice to quit drinking was motivated by...?"

"I just didn't need it. Can take or leave it. Why bother?"

He didn't listen much to reason, including the suggestion that he check in at an AA meeting.

"Why would I do that?" he said. "I don't drink!" Except it came out a bit like: "I dunnn drinkuh!"

After a while, he hung up. We were worried about him, but what could we do? It wasn't like he'd even proposed a solution to us. He hadn't even asked to come back.

Then, a couple of nights ago, we got a voicemail at 1:30 a.m. "Dude, I'm homeless," it said. "I am homeless. And scared. And you fucked me. You screwed me."

I didn't really like that message. So when he called the next day we were prepared for the worst. But this time he was sober. Completely, rock-solid sober. He said that he had hit bottom and was prepared to do whatever it took to get help. He was terrified. He sounded like a scared little boy who had thrown a rock through a window.

What would you do? Really? Here is what we did. We drafted up a list of ironclad rules and told him to come back and take a shower and start attending a program for drunks and show us the chips they hand out at AA and blah-de-blah and, oh, by the way, pack up your stuff and get the fuck out ASAP or we will do it for you. The point was, Obey the Rules or Ye Shall Be Homeless Again.

Last night I was lying in bed and at around midnight I heard the front door open and he came in, huffling and shuffling. I hid beyond our bedroom door as he thumped and mumbled up the stairs on his way to the attic. I peered through the crack into the light but I couldn't see him as he passed. When he was gone I darted to the bathroom and back, on bounding fleet feet like a kid afraid of the dark.

I didn't see him today at all. And I didn't hear from him either, except for that one time he entered the upstairs bathroom and released a series of loud farts.

 I told the story today, in brief, to a friend who has some knowledge of alcoholics. "He's sober right now," I said. "And we've given him lots of warnings and all that. And he said he hit rock bottom. So, we expect things to get weird but maybe he'll make it this time, maybe—?"

As we were speaking she held up two fingers.

"Is that the peace symbol?" I wondered, briefly. "Is she wishing me peace for being a good egg for taking in this poor soul again?"

Then she leaned over and said: "I give him two days. Two."

The Manny Diaries, Part Five: What a World

The Manny was in the house.

For a couple of hours, we heard nothing. He was up there, sleeping it off. I wondered when I would see him.

Our upstairs bathroom has two doors. I had entered through door #1, while door #2 remained closed. I was putting my contact lenses into my eyes, when he lurched in through door #2, looking like he'd been deposited there by a tornado belching up its unwanted offerings. He was wearing a snappy new pair of pajama pants but otherwise looked unwashed and miserable. His eyes looked like fried eggs sprayed with shellac.

"Why, hullo," I said. He promptly screamed like a little girl who has seen a spider.

"I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry," he mumbled, and then he repeated one of his favorite maxims: "People scare me."

He used to say this a lot when he first moved in with us. You'd surprise him at a bend in the stairway and he'd shriek and flutter back against the peeling walls, whispering People scare me. We have two stairways in our house, front and back, and so he'd take to creeping down one when he knew the other was occupied, just to avoid unforeseen meetings. No matter how innocuous your behavior, if he ambled into the kitchen and saw you there frying up an egg he'd gasp and flail backward as if spying a predator with a baseball bat.

"What, you didn't expect to see me?"

"It's just that...people scare me."

He told me once why it was. He did it to stop himself from immediately beating the tar out of whomever innocent had startled him. His natural reflex was to launch himself into kill mode, and to arrest this impulse he had developed a highly-tuned startle reflex, so that the first impulse became "scream like a tiny girl in panties" while "destroy the enemy" moved into second place. While in Vietnam, he had been taken prisoner for several weeks. They had sliced both his Achilles tendons so that he couldn't run away, and then they punched and kicked him until he spat blood.

But on this morning in the bathroom, I didn't know that story yet. I turned to him and said, "So, I hear you were in the hospital?"

He shook his head vigorously. "No way, no way.  Hospital? Pffah! I missed my flight, man. It's my friend. The friend I was staying with. She got me all upset. She pushes my buttons, man, she pushes my buttons!" And he jabbed at the air vigorously.

"So you weren't drunk and strapped down by EMTs and carted off to Bellevue?"

"Crazy talk," he said. "Lies!"

"What about your tooth?" I said.

He said: "I am dead inside. I am just dead inside. My toof hurts."

I prodded at my contact lens until it made purchase with my eyeball.

"What will you do about your tooth?" I asked.

"That bitch ruined it all!" he said, running his hands through his now-short hair. "She was out to get me, let me tell you. She set me up. She ruined me. She ruined my life. Lies. I mean, she called an ambulance on me. Who would do that? WHO would do that?"

"Maybe she was trying to help?"

"Help? She was trying to ruin my life. She was trying to see me destroyed. This is what happens when you trust people, Miss Jennifer. This is what happens when you are a nice person. Oagh, my toof!" 

I couldn't look at him anymore, so I backed away and darted downstairs. I heard him shuffling and mumbling about upstairs. Then I heard him plodding back to the attic. My husband sent him an email. It told him that we knew the true story and, while we loved him, he must not drink one more drop of alcohol. If so, he would be out. Last chance. And he didn't come out of the attic—not at all—for two more days. I swear I didn't hear him come out to urinate, or anything. He didn't eat a scrap.

I asked a friend for some advice and she said: "He's up there detoxing. Your home has now become a halfway house, a rehab facility. With three kids under the age of 10 under the roof. I guarantee that you are not prepared to handle this. This man needs medical supervision. You should get him to a hospital."

I looked upwards, to the attic, and thought of the ominous and terrible task of extracting the Manny and delivering him to a nearby hospital, with no medical insurance. I thought of the only possible recourse if he should come barging down in a drunken apoplexy, which was calling the police. That would truly "ruin his life." I thought about the fact that it was only 6 degrees outside. Drunks die in the snow.

I thought about the fact that once, when Manny was a very young boy, he had seen an old man stumble off some apartment steps in the cold. The old man had fallen and his teeth had been knocked out—bang!—on the concrete, and he had died right there at Manny's feet. And Manny had wanted to tell someone, anyone, but his adoptive parents (distant relatives of some sort, as his biological parents had been murdered by Stalin) didn't love him and didn't care about anything he had to say or think.

He said to me, "What a world. What a world! I watched that old man die, and no one cared."

I looked up toward the attic and simply waited.

Oh, what a world! What a world!

The Manny Diaries, Part Four: Grey Gardens and Bellevue

People have been stopping me on the street and asking, "Why didn't the Manny make that plane flight?! Tell me now, or I'll have to wring your neck. Whaddaya been doing, writing more children's novels or something? Cease it now and write the MANNY DIARIES."

So the Manny had gone into the city, and his flight was the next day. On that day there was a snowstorm. But that's not why he didn't make his flight. In fact, we texted him during the snowstorm:

"Make it out OK?"

"A-OK! 70 degrees and sunny," was the reply.

But the very next day I got an ominous message from Manny's friend, to whom I had never spoken directly. She told me that Manny was in the hospital and asked that I call her immediately. Wild speculations flew through my mind. He had arrived in CA and had mixed it up with the criminal dentist, who had placed a hit on him that had misfired at the last moment. He was now on the run with a bullet hole through his midriff and the evil dentist's disembodied teeth implanted in his shoulder! All bets were off.

I called her back.

"Well," she said. "Manny was supposed to catch this plane tonight, right?"

"No, last night. He already caught a plane last night. He's in California, right?" I said.

"Uh, no. I think he might be in Bellevue?" she said.

As it turned out, Manny had gotten the date of his flight wrong by one day. That left him with 24 hours in which he thought it was, perhaps, a really grand idea to go out and buy a few bottles of Tito's vodka. He had apparently gargled with Vodka, washed down his eggs with Vodka, had a Vodka-induced nap, and proceeded to sample additional Vodka snorklings until his friend arrived home from work. He'd knocked over the shelf in her bathroom and was lying about in a stupor, mumbling about the evil dentist who was going to extract his molars without permission.

"You gotta plane flight to catch!" she said, helping him out the door. He retrieved his roll-aboard and promptly fell all the way down the stairs of her apartment building, his luggage clattering after him. A horrified neighbor popped out and said: "Call an ambulance!"

"He has no health insurance!" said Manny's friend. Manny was lying comatose at the base of the stairs, his exploded luggage of T-shirts and briefs around his ankles. Faced with little alternative, she called the ambulance. The EMTs arrived and tried to get Manny into the vehicle. He awoke quickly and resisted fiercely.

"You fat sons-o-bitches! You sons of pig-whistling cockmonkeys!" he shouted, as they tried to take his vitals.

Finally the EMTs subdued our Manny and strapped him down into a bed in the ambulance, where he continued wailing and thrashing and burbling about the criminal dentist who was out to pull every good tooth in his head.

They asked Manny's friend what his name was, but she didn't really know anymore. So she gave some random name that was an amalgamation of his "real name" and his "fake name." It probably sounded like "Maneerdaniel Smith."

So no wonder when, later, she called every hospital in the city and they didn't have him. They'd never heard of him. We did some searching and could not find him.

"He detoxed while at my apartment," said the friend. "He stayed in his room for a week and sweated and swore. I wanted to help but...it was like Grey Gardens. There were like 1,000 empty bottles of Tito's under his bed."

Just don't invite ANY tenants into your home, OK?

"Made in Austin," said I. "Titos, that is, you know. Good stuff!"

"He's out to kill me," said the sweating friend, who Manny had told me wore a leopard-skin bathrobe that didn't tie properly and revealed a naked tummy. "I seriously think he will take revenge on me because I knew he didn't have health insurance. But I was just trying to help."

"He's as gentle as a kitten," I said.

"Tell that to the bouncers at every bar on 10th avenue!" she retorted.

I said that I would investigate and, if I had any clues, I would report back.

I went to bed. I woke up the next morning, and went to open the living room curtains. The morning sunlight illuminated a rolling suitcase, seated by the door.

"Aw, honey?" said I. "Whose suitcase is in our living room?"

Husband came down and rubbed his eyes and looked at it.

"Why, that's Manny's," he said.

"He's in the house," I said.

The Manny Diaries, Part Two: A Drunk By Any Other Name

Two days before Thanksgiving 2013, Manny announced that he'd been invited to a friend's house in the city to join them for the family meal. He hemmed and hawed, wondering if he should go. The drunken debacle from earlier in the week was still bothering me keenly.

"I'll betcher they just want to take advantage of my cooking skills," he said. "People take advantage in this world, don't you know? It's a terrible world. Someone oughta do something about this terrible world."

"No doubt, you talented sot!" said I. "You are a culinary genius. Go, go, and spread your gifts."

"I dunno. It's kinda cold. And I'm an OLD man. I get pains in my hip, and here. And here." He gestured to various places. I feared he might be about to expose stuff.

I nearly packed his bags for him.

"Go, go, my friend! You'll have a simply wonderful time!" I said, helping him out the door with a well-placed boot.

He was never heard from again.

(This isn't quite accurate, but for a while it was. And it sure sounded dramatic.)

After he trundled off with his roll-aboard into the city, I had a rare and startling meltdown during which I leaned against a kitchen cabinet and screamed at the top of my lungs: "Get him out get him out get him out of my house now I want him out now! I want that barking mad ass-clown madman out of my house!"

Manny received a text. It said something along the lines of, "Sorry old chap, we've had a bit of a blow-out, and you'll need to seek alternate housing arrangements." He didn't respond, so another text went out: "Of course, we understand that you'll need time to find another place to live. Let's discuss when you return."

He didn't reply to that either. We tried calling him. It said his phone wasn't in service. None of his numbers were in service, even his work phone. We knew his friends in the city by weird nickname only: Tom the Cattle King, Johnny the Tax Auditor, Chicken-Fried Sadie, and so on, so it was impossible to contact any of them. Manny had completely vanished. Three weeks passed, and we wondered if we should file a missing person's report or check the morgue.

I finally tracked him down via a scrap of paper I found in his attic room, which contained the website of a friend. I emailed her, describing our situation and our friend "John Doe" and asking if he was okay.

He was, she replied. His phone had been stolen and he'd had trouble getting a new one, as both times he'd shown up at the AT&T store the police had quickly been summoned by frightened employees complaining, no doubt, about a boisterous drunk with a potato-shaped head that reminded them eerily of Bill Murray.

However, there was one small problem. Who the hell was "John Doe"? The man who was staying at her apartment had been known to her for the past 20 years as "Richard Roe," not "John Doe."

And, apparently, I'd blown his cover and his entire fake personality with one thoughtless email.

A Man in My Attic and a Rodent in My Ceiling

This past weekend we heard a scuttling and skittering inside the kitchen ceiling, occasionally rattling the lightbulbs in their sockets. The sound travelled, moving from the area right above the kitchen table, to behind the cheesy Nu-Econo Brik facade, then settling above the various cupboards. There was a lot of scrabbling. Something was alive in our ceiling.

"That's a big cricket!" said my five-year-old.

"It's a RAT," said my 10-year-old.

"It sounds like the Shawshank Redemption in there," I said.

"That's a RACCOON," said the man who lives in my attic, turning to me with dark, beady eyes that were alight with the scientific realization that he'd just stumbled upon. "And you know that raccoons are bad-ass motherfuckers. They have these little hands, like real little HANDS, and they just...jump at you without warning! They jump at your neck! And they clutch and bite. They have rabies. Oh, did I say motherfuckers? Fuck! I'm sorry about that."

Raccoons are real bad, whether you are drunk or stoned or sober as a judge. It doesn't matter! They'll tear you to bits!

"Whud you just say?" said the 8-year-old. He turned to me with glittering eyes and a wide-as-shit smile. "Did he say the F word?"

"Yeah, lil' what's-yer-name," said the man from the attic, huffing a mouthy breathful of bourbon at us. It was noon. "You. You. The Middle One. You're a real smart lil' shit. OH! I did it again." And he slapped his hand to his mouth and opened his eyes wide like a girl caught with her skirts blown up over a grate.

Why do I have a drunken, perhaps mentally unstable, 63-year-old man living in my attic? Well, he's not there at the moment, to be honest. He left on Saturday evening to go live on a pig farm.

Maybe I ought to back up a bit.

OK. So this fall, our friend wanted to move back east from California and he needed a place to land for a while. We needed a bit of backup childcare, so we agreed to make an arrangement. He'd stay here and work on selling his vast modern art collection, pick up the boys from school, cook the occasional meal, and so on. We'll call him "the Manny." Or Manny for short. We weren't thinking too clearly but, hey, we were willing to give anything a shot. Our long-term marvelous nanny had moved back to England in October and we were eager for an alternate childcare solution that didn't break the bank.

It started out pretty well. Manny proved himself to be an exceptional—nay, a gifted—cook. The man has a natural way with food and it's a true passion of his. He buys fresh food and turns it into genius creations. I think it's a calling that he might have missed thus far. Food was his art. He even dreamed about it.

It troubled me just a little bit that he couldn't remember my three sons' names after a week and that he preferred to refer to them as "the children of the corn." He also wondered whether, instead of "time outs," we ought to try "duct tape and dark closets."

I was horrified, but he grinned like a Lumpen Jack o'lantern.

"Kidding. Aw, I would die for those boys. Die for them."

His jokes were hardly appropriate and he had no linguistic filter, but I pretty much knew that he would, indeed, lay down his life if it came to it. But try explaining that to a local pal who wonders, "Who is that homeless man who shambles your boys to school? Is he some relative or what? Why does he look like crazy Bill Murray in Caddyshack but with long, dank hair? Is he, like, a Vietnam vet?"

Yes, he is, and you do not want to know what he saw while in service.

"I don't wike you," said the five-year-old to him one day, rudely.

"Willya listen to that shit!" he responded. "Lil' sons o' bitches. Man, I do love 'em, though! I really love 'em!"

But he also had other loves. Liquid loves.

When he first arrived he informed us that he no longer drank alcohol and that, when he quit months prior, he “shat his pants regularly, sweated his guts out, and had horrible shakes.” But, he’d be delighted to have a beer just tonight, thanks! One beer turned to two. Two turned to a bottle of wine. A bottle of wine turned to a bottle of vodka. Things started to go down the slippery slope.

One Monday afternoon, I received a phone call from him. He was about four blocks away and claimed that the “food was too heavy to carry home.” He sounded…off. Weird. He said his legs hurt. He was slurring and mumbling. I decided to leave my 10-year-old in charge and drive the few short blocks to acquire him. There he was, sitting by the side of the road, surrounded by deflated shopping bags, looking every inch a demented homeless man. I opened the car door and he started like I had shot him. I beckoned him in. He finally made his shambling way into the car, and, once he was in, I realized he stank of booze.

“Have you been drinking?” I asked.

“Oh no, I been taking some Vitamin B-12!” he said. “It messes you up real bad.”

Uh-huh.

Then he said: “A lot of these housewives around here got real fat asses. But you got a fine one. Oops, don’t tell your husband I said that.”

Right.

Once we arrived back at the house he asked me to unpack the groceries. He lurched around, hurling pork chops hither and thither as he attempted to get them into the pan. All the while he was guffawing and babbling, and the boys kept coming into the kitchen to see what the ruckus was about while they were supposed to be doing their homework.

I had to go and check email. (All this was happening during my workday.) While at my computer, I heard a suspicious “unscrewing and gurgling noise.” Our guest had poured himself a “cockytail,” as he called it, and was now lurching about the house yelling happy obscenities and hurling stuffed animals at the boys. I came in to arrest the chaos and was struck in the eye by a beady-eyed turtle puppet.

The boys got more and more excitable, as boys do. I smelled pork chops grilling. This could not be my childcare situation!

My eldest boy ran up and Manny said, “What’s the fuck is up with this little monkey?” My boy raised his eyebrows at me in a questioning manner that said "Who the fuck have you hired as our nanny, mother?"at which point Manny smacked him atop the head with a flat palm. Gently enough, but enough to register a small ticking time bomb in my brain: This situation must end, and end quickly.

The next thing I knew, my 5-year-old was wailing that Manny had smacked him on the buttocks with a plastic scimitar.

“I did not do that!” Manny protested.

“I saw you do it,” squealed the 8-year-old.

“Tattletale!” said Manny. And he lunged, guffawing and exhaling clouds of alcohol, at the boys, who squealed merrily and escaped. They thought it was a lot of good fun, actually. Fortunately.

I did something I never do on a weekday. I begged my boys to quietly watch television, while I furiously texted my husband. 

Next chapter: Manny goes into the city, and vanishes from the radar.

Postscript: The kitchen rodent has now been heard in the second-floor ceiling.