Will Not Attend: Lively Stories of Detachment and Isolation Read online

  Francisco: “Right. It was kind of trying to be something, but . . .”

  My stomach churned. I glanced at the elevator.

  Francisco: “I buy a lot of movies, you know, from Best Buy? Blair Witch, Crouching Tiger, Shawshank . . .”

  The elevator indicator was now fossilized and appeared fused to the dial.

  “. . . Seabiscuit, Chicken Run, Thelma and Louise . . .”

  My eyes found the stairwell. Only ten flights down. After all, this was a fire. But it would be insulting—like I was trying to get away from him. I’d obsess and feel guilty about it for weeks. I stayed put. He continued to rattle off movie titles, crescendoing with The Passion of the Christ and the Rush Hour troika. Chin up, I thought. The worst is over.

  Francisco: “Is it hard to write a movie?”

  I was fucked.

  “I mean, do you just make up the words?”

  “Well, yeah, you have to kind of figure it out,” I heard myself say.

  Like the rumble of an approaching express train, I knew what was coming.

  Francisco: “’Cause I have, like, seven or eight movies I want to write.”

  A chunk of my cranium blew out and sailed through the air. Sadly, I was still alive.

  “Really? Wow. That’s a lot.”

  Francisco: “The first one is about a ghost. Did you ever see Super Size Me?”

  I struggled to connect the dots.

  “Yes, I’ve seen it.”

  Francisco: “Okay, so this is like Super Size Me, but the man dies. My wife doesn’t like regular scary movies. She likes paranormal.”

  I jabbed the elevator button five times in rapid succession, fully aware it would accomplish nothing.

  Francisco: “So I’m going to write that one first. How long does a movie script have to be? How many pages?”

  “It depends. Roughly a hundred and twenty.”

  Francisco: “Well, this will be shorter. Maybe sixteen pages. What kind of paper should I use?”

  I felt like I’d been injected with a powerful drug meant for cattle. “Uh . . . just regular printer paper,” I replied.

  Francisco: “Yeah, I think I’ll just write it in a notebook.”

  “Yup, do that,” I instantly agreed. He could have said he was writing it on the shell of a Chinese box turtle and I would’ve given him my blessing.

  Suddenly, the sound of whirring. A slow whoosh. Creaking. The indicator was moving. It’s coming!

  Francisco: “’Cause I want it to be good.”

  “Of course.”

  “I want it to be something.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “And then maybe you can tell me where to send it. Maybe to Starz.”

  “Absolutely.”

  The elevator door opened. I propelled myself inside.

  “Okay, well, good luck with everything, Francisco.”

  I gently depressed the DOOR CLOSE button, trying not to be obvious.

  “Mr. Resnick!”

  The door started to close, scraping across the metal track.

  “Yes?”

  I watched as the wood panel slowly wiped him from view. In the final moment, only a sliver of Francisco remained. It was all he needed.

  “Does it have to be in English?”

  Boy 6

  Note: For the sake of my mental health, the names of my brothers have been omitted and my phone will remain off the hook.

  Dark clouds rolled across Beaufort Farms that day, turning the neighborhood into a cluster of shadows. Trees and lawns drained of color as a dusty wind picked up, rattling screen doors like an intruder. The neighbor ladies emerged from their houses, aprons fluttering, and dabbing at their eyes. Again they asked themselves, How could this happen? Their prayers had not only gone unanswered; they had been mocked. My mother was a woman of almost unearthly kindness and did not deserve such a fate. They looked toward Orchard Hill Road as my father’s car crested the summit and then disappeared down the steep driveway leading to the woodsy pit of land where our house stood. The ladies slowly walked back to their homes, dazed and muttering, aware that a measure of their faith would depart forever with the storm. This was the afternoon Joyce came home from the hospital with my twin brothers.

  There were already four of us Resnick boys, which was four more than the world ever needed. When my mother became pregnant for the final time, a collective cry echoed throughout Susquehanna Township: Please, let it be a girl. No one could have imagined a fifth, let alone sixth boy. Nor could they have fathomed the horrible, jangly mass of energy that had just been unleashed down in that pit. The monster was now complete. I was five years old and wholly unprepared for the cyclone of madness and testosterone that would shape me into the nervous wreck I am today.

  It would be inadequate to portray Merv’s reaction to the arrival of his new sons as mere fatherly pride; what he displayed was more like a profound and lofty arrogance. His magnificent balls had been set on this planet to produce males. It was as if nature itself, in all its ferocity, had chiseled two more glorious chunks from a monolithic rock, transforming his usual swagger into a one-man procession that announced to the neighborhood fathers, “Outta my way, faggots. Go pick some cherries.” Yet, in the midst of this gloating, a curious omen appeared: the custom license plate he’d ordered for my mother’s station wagon had arrived botched, trumpeting BOY 6 instead of 6 BOYS. BOY 6 sounded like a code name for a destructive compound accidentally produced in a government laboratory. No one picked up on the significance at the time, but as we know from history, prophecy is often recognized in hindsight.

  There were the twins, myself, and the three older ones. It would be unwise of me to identify or categorize beyond that. I will note, however, that 90 percent of the trouble came from the top half of the brood, whose callous savagery existed without wit or deliberation. Collectively, the brothers formed a nebulous blob that oozed and pulsated throughout my youth, creating a psychological house of horrors that still leaves me drenched in sweat in the hush of night.

  The adolescent years in Resnickland might have passed for a quaint Little Rascals two-reeler, with its misplaced amphibians hopping through my mother’s kitchen, firecrackers set alight in school lavatories, and stolen horse corn peddled by the roadside to suckers on their way home for dinner. Good old Huck Finn mischief-making in an age when kids were seen as pests rather than influential consumers. But as the elder brothers entered their teens, things deteriorated quickly and chaotically, producing a toxic hellhole of insolence, hostility, and freshly fucked hippie chicks smuggled out of second-floor windows on Sunday mornings by knotted bedsheets. The youthful bond between the brothers frayed and sparked, replaced by shifting alliances and checkerboard grudges, secrets and snitches, cruel jokes and disproportionate vengeance. There was no undertone of sibling rivalry or Oedipal muck; that was too highfalutin for the Resnick boys. We kept things bracingly simple: when the dust settled, no one really liked each other. And my heart never stopped racing. The enemy could be sitting right across the dinner table.

  Two things always struck me when visiting another person’s home: the civil tone in which family members spoke to one another and the sight of open doors. The latter implied trust, a concept that was as fanciful to me as the Batmobile. Thievery was rampant in the Resnick house, and every brother, at a certain age, installed a padlock on his bedroom door, leaving the upstairs hallway looking like a corridor in a storage facility. Most of the theft came at the hand of one particular brother who pillaged his way through our belongings with the quiet efficiency of airborne bacteria. Money was his preference, but he was content to steal anything that could be flipped for cigarettes, Penthouse magazines, Tastykakes, or other life-sustaining provisions. A framed collection of rare buffalo nickels passed down from my grandfather was dismantled and used to purchase a carton of orangeade. Angelfish from our aquarium were jarred and swapped with a neighbor boy for a copy of Hole magazine, a publication that, I can assure you, had little to do with go
lf. He once found a twenty-dollar bill I had hidden in the hollow leg of a Frankenstein model, and replaced it with a note that said, “Nice try, dumb fuck.” See, it wasn’t enough to just steal; you had to be a prick about it too.

  As it was, I was born nervous—a condition built into me the way brake lights come standard on cars. But even in the relative safety of my bedroom, behind a locked door fortified by a blanket chest stacked with dumbbells, it was impossible to relax. Physical barriers offered little protection against mental assault, and my privacy was routinely invaded in imaginative and horrific ways. One brother had a KGB-like obsession with the personal affairs of family members that kept the entire house on edge. I remember the chill that ran down my spine one evening as I passed his bedroom and heard the sound of my own laughter seeping through the door. It was second nature to presume my phone calls were being surveilled by someone on the premises, but in the depths of my paranoia I could not have imagined they were being recorded and archived. The unique experience of eavesdropping on yourself is not a pleasant one, made even more unsettling when hearing a mundane conversation long forgotten. Adding to the creep-fest was my brother’s compulsive rewinding and replaying of one particular word from the same snippet of conversation:

  ME: “The front of his dad’s car got totally fucked up.”

  GIRL (chuckling): “Well, that’s what he gets.”

  ME (laughing): “Imagine that big head of his banging into the steering wheel . . . CRACK!”

  Stop. Rewind.

  “CRACK!” Rewind. “CRACK!” Rewind. “CRACK!” The more I heard it, the more repulsed I became by the sound of my own voice. It was phony and animated, and sounded like a guy I would hate. No wonder nothing ever happened with that girl.

  “CRACK!”

  Why the sick fuck kept playing it over and over is anyone’s guess. “CRACK!” He had no idea I was even listening. “CRACK!” No matter, my lifelong phobia of talking on the telephone had begun. Just another piece of shrapnel for the ol’ brain. (Side note: It was eventually discovered this brother had a hidden recording device wired down in the basement that engaged the moment anyone in the house picked up the receiver. When my father confronted him with the apparatus, he claimed it was for a science project, later changing it to a sociology paper on “interrelationships and communication.” My dad smashed the tape recorder with a hammer, and the other brothers lined up, demanding “their tapes.”)

  The only sheriff in town was my father, who worked his ass off every day to keep the cupboards stocked with Apple Jacks and Ken-L Ration. He wisely left the house early and came home late. I always admired him for coming home at all. But when he was around, you could hear a pin drop. Merv was the only living creature the brothers feared. All he had to do was raise his ass an inch from the kitchen chair, and we’d scatter like roaches. He was both slayer and dragon. Yet even he had limitations; he could beat back the vermin, but no man can defeat bubonic plague. Joyce, on the other hand, was on the front line, all day, every day. She saw real action, most of which she kept to herself so the old man wouldn’t kill one of us or drop dead of a heart attack. She endured the calls from school, the shoplifting, the altercations, the drugs, the pregnant girlfriends. This woman was an angel, a gentle and compassionate soul admired by everyone who knew her, but she was forced into battle by the unimaginable behavior of her very offspring. How sad to see the startled look on her face when an alien voice leaped from her throat, ordering her loathsome sons to “shut your goddamn mouths and get out!”

  Like Lon Chaney Jr. bitten by a werewolf, I, too, transformed into a Resnick beast over time, becoming short-tempered and hostile. By my early teens I was taking my frustrations out on the neighborhood, vandalizing property late at night with some trashy kids from Bell Manor. We destroyed toolsheds, decapitated lawn jockeys, and made pornographic adjustments to Nativity scenes. As was their wont, the Bell Manor gang often capped off the evening by taking a dump in a birdbath or some other hapless receptacle. It’s worth noting that these were the waning days of milk boxes. It was all adolescent hijinks, but I felt real anger during these raids. Everyone else was laughing, but in my mind I was settling a score. With whom, I wasn’t sure. I certainly had nothing against the guy with the birdbath. The Clockwork Orange period ended one night with the inevitable ride to the police station. When my father learned that some of the other kids had beer, my new name around the house became “that fucking drunk.”

  Unlike most of my brothers I possessed something called a conscience that prevented me from following too closely in their sociopathic footsteps. For me, all it took was a little reflection to feel bad about inverting someone’s patio umbrella. But I had to be cautious about getting too soft. The ever-present threat of violence in the house required me to inhabit a perpetual state of readiness. It was not uncommon for a brawl to erupt over the most negligible circumstance. Brother #2 might enter a room wearing a sweatshirt owned by brother #3 and suddenly the shit was flying. Saltshakers, chairs, telephones—if it wasn’t nailed down it was ripped out. Dogs would flee the area, ears down and tails tucked, as my mother bravely tried to quash the maelstrom without catching an elbow. Invariably, the defeated brother would end up on the floor, wheezing, bright red, and exhibiting marks on his neck where strangulation had been attempted. Bloodcurdling threats of vengeance would bellow through the house and escape through the screen door, rolling like a dust cloud into neighboring yards, where happy families enjoying a game of Frisbee were treated to the echoes of “You’re fucking dead, you cocksucker!”

  The thing that separated the Resnick boys from other siblings who got into the occasional fracas was we literally fought to kill. I recall an episode that occurred when I was fourteen in which a brother teased me so ruthlessly about a bad haircut that I went after him with a kitchen knife. Promptly realizing he had no fear of me (he was a bulky bastard and quick to anger when challenged), the hunter became the hunted, and I swiftly retreated. Dropping the knife, I flew up one set of stairs and down another, only to be greeted by another brother who kindly offered his assistance: “Adam,” he said in a benevolent tone, “if you’d like a gun, look in the third drawer of my dresser.”

  So, let’s freeze this picture for a moment. Let’s suspend lunatic brother #1 as he rounds the corner to kick the fuck out of me, and push in on my bewildered face as I absorb the sales pitch of lunatic brother #2. Did he really have a gun in his dresser? Possibly. Nothing could be ruled out in Resnickland. Still, let’s really analyze the scenario, just for shits and giggles.

  Assuming brother #2’s offer was legit—which I’d put at fifty-fifty—he was proposing the following:

  He would supply me with a firearm, so I might thereby . . .

  kill brother #1, which would surely lead to . . .

  my incarceration and resulting suicide.

  Unfreeze.

  The chase continued as I sprinted past a German shepherd cowering in the fireplace and out the front door, scurrying into the woods like a pheasant at the sound of buckshot. Luckily, speed trumped size that day and allowed me to reach safety. Through the foliage I could hear a panting voice in the distance—“You’re fucking dead, you cocksucker!”

  For reasons I assume are obvious, I was in no particular hurry to return home that day. I stayed in the woods for hours, perched on a pile of moist leaves and collecting my thoughts. If events had gone a shade differently, would I have been capable of using that knife? When I grabbed it in a blind rage, I certainly felt committed—justified, even. Multiple stab wounds to the chest and abdomen. Just a few keystrokes of the coroner’s typewriter. I fished a bent Tareyton from my pocket. I had been trying to learn to smoke and chose this brand for its much ballyhooed charcoal filter, figuring it might taste something like barbecue. How many more years of this could I take? I wondered. How would I survive? I fixed my eyes on the bark pattern of a walnut tree. Soon there were visions of setting the woods ablaze and a rolling fireball that flared and expanded, engulfing m
y house, the neighborhood, and my school. I snapped out of it when I realized my pants were soaked through from the wet leaves. Seething, I took the glowing tip of the cigarette and burned an ant.

  Not then, not now, can I fully understand what motivated the behavior at the house off Orchard Hill Road. It was a revolution with no stance or purpose—a cockeyed flag lofted high by sadistic brutes. And in its shadow, I grew like a blighted sapling: stunted, half-rotted, and trembling in the wind, until, at last, I was freed by nothing more dramatic than legal age. I had spent nearly two decades barricaded inside my bedroom, daydreaming about my escape, only to limp off like a raccoon dragging a claw trap on its hind leg.

  • • •

  And so, there came to be another time, a time when my wife became pregnant with what would be our first and only child. I went into a kind of a tailspin when I heard the news, and a vulgar prayer bubbled up from the pit of my acid-filled stomach: “Please, God, not a boy.” I could not bear the thought of bringing another Resnick male into the world—or, even more alarming, into my home. My obsession for a girl consumed me, and with it came incredible guilt at the notion that I was rejecting a possible son before he was born. What kind of emotional damage was I already inflicting on him? This was sure to be the most fucked-up Resnick boy in history. Lorrie attempted good old-fashioned reasoning, assuring me I would find it impossible not to love my own child, regardless of gender. If it wound up being a son, it would be our son—not the dreaded “seventh Resnick brother” of my nightmares. I tried to take comfort in this, but as the creature inside her belly grew, I recognized something in those spastic kicks. They were crazed and full of hostility. The Hydra was forming, a ghastly five-headed boy-beast possessing the worst characteristics of each of my siblings. It was coming, unbridled and unrestrained, to blot out the sun, destroy my life, and record my phone calls.

  As Lorrie’s second trimester passed into the third, and my anxieties continued unabated, she finally conveyed that I was an “asshole” and “fucked in the head” and had “better get some fucking help” because she wasn’t putting up with my “psycho bullshit” anymore.