It happened frequently. Within a few hours of our leaving the house, his mother began dialing numbers for bars, restaurants, people’s homes, wherever he might be found. She wanted to know when he planned to return to her. She wanted to know if he was drinking beer. She wanted to know if he would be out late. She wanted to know if he was telling her the truth. I could hear him speaking into the phone in Joel’s kitchen, answering her: “Yes, Don’s here. Yes, he’s having a good time. No, I’m not letting him drink any beer. Yes, he’s had something to eat. No, I’m not driving fast. No, we won’t be out late.” So it went. When we left Joel’s and drove with Roger and Joel and Joel’s wife in a caravan to shoot pool on the enormous pool table that happened to be pretty much the only item of furniture in Roger’s living room — in Roger’s entire house, as far as I could make out — the telephone rang and again I heard my uncle speaking to my grandmother:
“Yes, we’re playing pool. No, we’re not betting any money. Don’t worry, I won’t let him drink any beer. Yes, we’ll be home soon.”
It was around this time that I was learning, in imitation of my uncle’s adult friends, to call Eldridge Bob.
“Bob, what are we eating?” I asked him when, later that night, after tennis and billiards, after we’d driven out Fruitville Road to the house, parked in the carport, and checked the trunk one last time, we left the world of the car and entered the realm of Eldridge and his mother.
The stove lights were on in the kitchen. On the other side of the house my grandmother moved about. I could see her in the shadows. She was a pale shadow in her blue housedress in her dark bedroom, behind sliding glass doors that opened through curtains onto the porch, where I slept on a sofa bed.
“Pork chops.”
“What are we having with them?”
“Fries.”
“All right. Is it time for Johnny Carson?”
“Just about.”
“Should I turn on the TV?”
“Turn it on,” he said. He was cooking, using the broiler and a fork. I sat in his room, where the TV was, staring at his magazines. My uncle, I remember, always had in his room a certain game for one player, Labyrinth, basically a wooden box fitted with a pivoting top, on which was fashioned a kind of maze through which the player maneuvered a steel ball. My uncle could turn the knobs and guide the ball safely through. I drank a soda and played the game for a while, and my uncle opened another beer for himself.
Eldridge was a tall and beautiful-looking man. He tanned in the sun to a reddish shade characteristic among people of Scottish descent. His forehead had a scar from the time he’d walked straight into a forklift blade. His beer gut did not detract from his appeal. He wore a gold chain. He looked as if he’d be right at home at the Playboy Mansion pool parties pictured in the magazines beside the bed.
Johnny Carson came on the television. We ate with our plates balanced on our laps. My uncle blanketed his pork chops beneath a layer of pepper. I did the same. The pork chops were dry and hard, and the pepper bounced off them. The television’s reception was fuzzy; its antenna had to be adjusted periodically. I was aware that I wanted to be like my uncle, aware as well that I wasn’t so sure about that. I complained to him about my father, who had begun to worry absurdly over my prospects, if I kept going the way I was going, for graduate school. Sometimes, when I complained, Bob taunted me for not having the courage to drop out of school altogether. I must have felt, somehow, that my uncle and his brother had, throughout their lives, been at odds with each other. Bob and I watched Carson host guest after guest. In my memory, this was the night that the comedian Steve Martin came on and stole the show with a cheap prop arrow sticking through his head. Or was it the night that Martin came out and did the half-a-beard routine?
I put my plate down, got up, and walked through the open glass doors to the sunporch. I heard Bob in his room, undressing. After a moment he came out and stood beside my sofa bed. He was wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt, and he was making fun of me, but the joking had now passed the point at which it was pleasurable, because he had drunk so much.
I was standing beside the bed. He was standing beside me. He pushed me gently, and suddenly we were falling. We were wrestling on the bed. He climbed on top of me, and I squirmed beneath him. I was on my stomach and my uncle was on my back. He had my arms pinned. His movements were sluggish. We were wrestling, and then we were no longer wrestling. He forced me to stay still and be quiet. I could smell the salty, burned scent of his skin; and I could smell the warm beer on his breath as he exhaled against the side of my face. He stopped moving, and I stopped moving.
He breathed.
I breathed.
He was spread across me. His chest pressed me down into the bed. His face was next to mine.
How long did we stay like that, breathing together on the folded-out sofa? The moment did not last long. The time that elapsed was the time it took for our friendship to end. Had he passed out? Was he waiting for me to speak? Was it safe to move? I felt the dead weight of him on me, and my feelings about him, and about his way of life, changed. I perceived that this man on top of me was a drunk in his underwear, a man who ate the same food night after night in a room in his mother’s house, and I was terrified.
“Get up,” I told him. He lifted himself. He got off me. I watched him rise and walk unsteadily in bare feet to his room. The lights in his room went dark. I heard the springs squeaking inside his little bed; and I thought I saw, in the hours before I fell asleep, his mother, my grandmother, pacing behind the curtains drawn behind the glass doors leading to her room at the far end of the house. There had been a time, when I was little, that I had slept in her bed with her. But the far end of the house seemed to me, that night, after Eldridge had gone to bed, like a truly faraway place.
The next morning I told my uncle I had to leave Sarasota. I didn’t say why, and I don’t know whether he, in some way, understood. I just told him I had to go. He drove me to the station. He put me on a bus, and I rode the bus down the Tamiami Trail, stopping at the towns along the way, traveling south past Naples, southeast across the Everglades. After a long ride I saw, through the bus windows on the right, the enormous cement factory that, in those days, marked the end of the journey home.
When I was sixteen, I left Miami for boarding school in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Two years after that, I went north to college, and four years later I moved to New York, where I still live. During these years I saw my uncle only a handful of times. My mother, in the decade after she got sober, in 1983, made an effort to stay in touch with him. At some point, he and my grandmother moved from their house to a small apartment. It was in this apartment that Eliza died, and he was left alone. For years, he worked as a prep cook in a restaurant on Siesta Key. He used to go in late, after the restaurant had closed, and work until dawn, preparing and organizing food for the cooks who came in mornings to make lunch. My uncle liked this routine, because it protected him from ever having to see or talk to another person. He told my mother that he didn’t think he could go to AA and stop drinking, because he was afraid that his anger, were he not medicated by alcohol, might cause him to harm someone.