4.

In Malden, the streets were empty. Everyone was in church, brooding about their sins. Or they were home eating mashed potatoes with butter and salt. Or they were drunk on their ass in some alley somewhere. I entered the flat where we lived. I opened the back door, a door with frosted glass, and stepped into a hall that opened into the kitchen. My seventeen-year-old sister Reenie met me there.

"What are you doin' home?" she asked.

"Reenie, you ask me that question every time I come home."

"Yuh sure. Because every time you come home I wonder why you're home. So I ask. So why are you home?"

"I'm hungry. I need to eat."

"We got food. You come to the right place. What's the matter, no food in Boston?"

"No," I said. "Not a crumb. Even the rats are starving."

My mother was out working as a waitress, feeding rich people at the Hancock Inn in Peabody. But my father was here and my thirteen-year-old brother Jimmie. They were sitting at the kitchen table now with plates of food in front of them. My mouth began to water.

"So sit down," my sister said. "Make y'self at home."

They say that if you're starving and you see food, your eyes get bigger. They tested it on people. They put plates of food in front of starving people and their eyes got bigger. They proved it with the scientific method. It's science. Which makes it true. I looked at the plates of food and I'm sure my eyes got bigger.

My brother was wearing a black leather jacket. He was hunched over his mashed potatoes and pot roast and Birds Eye peas. I thought he was in a real hurry to eat and get back on the streets with his gang because he hadn't even taken off his jacket. I kept looking at the studs on the jacket as I ate. I also got the smell of the cheap leather.

My father said, "It's not right to wear a leather jacket at the dinner table."

My brother laughed. "What? If I take it off, all I got under it is my T-shirt."

"Well, take it off," my father said.

"No. It's cold in here. No."

"Take it off or I'll take it off for you."

"You and whose ole lady?"

Reenie said, "Pretend it's a tuxedo. He dressed for dinner. He's like Cary Grant. Ha."

We continued eating. Then all of a sudden my brother said, "Hey! Who cut the cheese?"

My father's face clamped together like the head on a wrench and he said, "Don't talk about things like that at the dinner table!"

"But you farted!"

"But we don't talk about things like that when we're eatin'."

"But how can we eat when you fart?"

"Keep quiet about it. A man farts, he can't help it. But it's wrong to talk about it." "It was a big smelly beer fart." "It don't care what kind of fart it was. Eat, don't talk. No talkin' at the dinner table."

"Should be no fartin', too."

"You keep it up, you're gonna get it, Bozo."

"My name's not Bozo. My name's Jimmie. You named me Jimmie. Can't you remember what you named me?"

"I shoulda named you Bozo because you're a bozo."

Reenie said, with a whine in her voice, "Please. Please quit. My stomach's upset enough already and I have to meet Mike on the corner in twenty minutes." Mike was her boyfriend.

We put our heads down and shoveled in food in silence. Then Reenie said to me, "What are you learnin' now in college? Tell me about it. I want to hear. We'll get something at this table besides what we're getting."

"I'm learning about different religions," I said.

"I don't want to hear about that," my father said. "No talkin' while we're eating. Eat and shut up or get out."

"Go ahead," Reenie said. "I want to hear."

"I'm sitting in on this class called Comparative Religion. I'm sitting in because it's not a required course for graduation but I'm interested in it."

"Can you do that?" Reenie asked.

"Yes, they don't care. I just sit in the back and listen. Last week it was about Buddhism. I guess I got interested because this Korean kid, this Kim, he has a room next to mine and he's a Buddhist."

"You're a Catholic, that's enough. That's good enough. What more d' you need? I don't want to hear. No talkin' at the table," my father said.

"Buddhism, shit. What next?" my brother said.

"Go ahead," Reenie said. "I wanna know."

"Well, one guy in the class said, 'What does rice taste like to the bowl that holds it?' Then he explained that taste is only an arbitrary conception of what he called our taste organ, the human tongue. Taste has no substantiality outside of our awareness of it. Taste isn't real."

"What the hell's that supposed to mean?" my brother said.

"It means nothing's real until your mind makes it real," I said.

"No talking," my father said.

I continued. "Suppose you're suffering. You're in pain. That's all in your mind. It's a conception. You can deal with pain if you realize it's just a conception. You can overcome it. What if you're hungry? Say you're starving. You can overcome the pain if you have Buddhist mind control."

"That's interesting," Reenie said, encouraging me. I could feel this menacing thing coming out of my brother and my father but she was encouraging me. She set me up. I took her bait and went on.

"Yeah, it is interesting. To me anyhow. Look, it's like, I can feel this table or this chair I'm sitting on but it's only an arbitrary conception of my dualistic touch-organ, my body and its touch-mind. The feeling of this plate, the smell of this food, the butter on the mashed potatoes has no substantiality outside of my mind. This whole kitchen, all of us sitting here, everything, it's just a conception in my mind. It's not real until my mind makes it real. The kitchen sink, the range, the boiler, the linoleum, none of it's real until I make it real in my mind."

"I think it's shit," my brother said.

I knew he'd say exactly that before the words came out of his mouth. It was as though I could see the words forming themselves in his mind. I shrugged. I'd anticipated it.

"Don't say shit at the dinner table," my father said.

I anticipated that, too.

"Shit," my brother said. "It's shit." Then he picked up his plate, turned it over, and dumped his food on the table.

I hadn't anticipated that. But everything that happened after that was predictable.

"Don't waste food!" my father said. "It's a sin, wastin' food!"

Then he stood up, leaned across the table, and slapped my brother across the face. My brother stood up. His chair crashed against the sink. He started crying.

Reenie said, "Quit! Quit now."

My father grabbed a handful of the mashed potatoes lying on the table and threw it toward my brother's face. It went all over his black leather jacket. My brother ran crying out of the kitchen. The door with the frosted glass opened and shut and he was gone.

My sister said something and my father slapped her. She started to scream and ran crying out of the kitchen. The front door at the end of the hall slammed, and she was out of the house, running to the corner to be with her boyfriend Mike.

I sat there looking at my father's face. It told me he was insane. That twisted-up face-it was the face of an insane person. But I'd known that for years. My father's insane. So what else is new?

"Are you satisfied?" I said weakly.

He didn't answer. He walked away, leaving me alone in the kitchen. He went into the parlor, picked up the Sunday paper, sat down, and started to read it. I could hear him talking to himself. He talked to himself for hours sometimes. My father the nut case.

But with my brother and sister out of the house, things were quiet. The front door had locked automatically when my sister ran out, slamming it shut behind her. I locked the back door, the one with the frosted glass. Reenie would be with her boyfriend for the rest of the day and Jimmie would be with his gang on the corner. So we'd have some peace in here. No one could get in. My father'd be off in his own nutzy world, sitting in the parlor talking to himself.

Peace, it's wonderful.

It didn't work out that way. Peace lasted as long as peace usually lasts-that is, about twenty minutes.

But before it ended, I cleaned up, in a calm, blissed-out trance. I was in a trance because I'd eaten. But also because putting things in order always puts me into a kind of trance. I found a plastic container in the pantry and put all the leftovers into it. I would cover the plastic container and bring it back to Boston. I'd hide it in my room. Then I'd have something to eat through Tuesday. I thought about the Buddhist insubstantiality of the container, of the pot roast, the peas. But I drew the line at the insubstantiality of the mashed potatoes. For an Irishman, mashed potatoes can never be insubstantial. An Irishman may come to doubt the existence of God and his angels but the nonexistence of the potato-never. Irishmen make piss-poor Buddhists and it's all the fault of that substantial potato. They can never get over the substantial hump of that ever-lovin' potato.

I was also thinking of my anima because a friend had given me Jung's Modern Man in Search of a Soul and I'd read it and knew I had a feminine side, my anima, as well as a masculine side, my animus.

It was my anima that enjoyed washing the dishes, stacking them in the plastic rack, wiping food off the kitchen table, wringing out the dishrag under the faucet. They'd always said I had too much of a feminine side. I was a sissy, a pantywaist. But Jung said that was all right. I shouldn't deny my feminine side. I should just try to balance it off with my masculine side so that I could attain harmony, unity, and wholeness. Okay, I'm all for that. But where did I put that masculine side? I knew it was around here somewhere. Can't find it, though.

I was also thinking of insanity because my father was insane and so that interested me. I'd said to Kim the Korean, "My father's insane. What does the Buddha tell us about insanity?" And Kim had told me, "Buddha says insanity isn't caused by anything. Insanity means the true mind hasn't been revealed yet. The false mind covers it."

"How do I get my father to his true mind?" I asked Kim. But he said he was busy, had to study for an exam, didn't want to give me the answer to that. I figured there was an answer because the Buddha had an answer for everything, but it was complicated and Kim didn't have time to talk to me about it right then.

So I was into these deep thoughts.

A violent pounding at the back door shook me out of these thoughts.

It's my brother, I thought.

I heard my father yell, "Son of a bitch!" Son of a bitch. My screwball father was up. He was out of the parlor. He was reeling down the hall toward the door. My brother knew enough to stay away. If he was foolish enough to come back and bang on that back door, I wasn't going to intervene. He'd brought it on himself. I heard my father turn the key in the lock. Son of a bitch. I heard the door open. I heard my father say, "Son...son of a bitch!" Then I heard a voice that was not my brother's voice scream, "You fucker! You ever touch her again, I'll kill you, you fucker! I'll kill you!"

I looked into the hall and my sister's boyfriend Mike exploded like a bomb through the open door, threw himself at my father, pinned him against the wall and started pounding him, pounding him, pounding him. When he had pounded him long enough, he dropped him on the floor. Standing over him, he said, "Fucker, you deserve to die."

That Mike, man! He was a big bruiser. No one fucked with him. No one. He had a big mop of red hair that kept flopping over his face as he pounded the bejeezus out of my old man.

My father looked up and said, "Don't say 'fucker' in my house." He was bleeding from the mouth. "Nobody says 'fucker' in this house. Watch your language in this house."

"Fucker," Red said, and he nudged my father's fallen body with his foot. Then he stepped over him and walked up the hall toward the front door.

My father got up and followed him, saying, "Let's talk this over. Can we talk this over? I wanna talk this over."

Mike opened the front door and stepped outside. My father knew that the door had an automatic lock. Once it was shut, Mike couldn't get back inside.

"Let's talk about this," my father said, approaching him.

"I don't want to talk to you," Mike said.

"C'mon. Let's talk." My father's hand was on the door.

"No. I'm not talkin' to you," Mike said.

With his hand on the door ready to slam it shut, my father raised his foot and kicked Mike in the balls. See, he figured he could get that door shut and lock Mike outside. He was wrong about that. Mike was fast. The shock of being kicked in the balls registered, and he threw him-self at my father, pushed him backward into the parlor, got him down and began to beat his head against the floor, screaming, "You kicked me there, you kicked me there, you kicked me there!" Bang! My father's head hit the floor. Bang bang! It hit the floor twice more. "You dared to kick me there, you fuckin' dared!"

My sister ran in through the open door, crying. "Stop, stop, for God's sake stop. Please stop. Oh stop. Oh, God, just stop."