“Guys like us have to stick together,” he said. He was gruff, but he told me once that when I was old enough, I could come talk to him about a job. “Gordo doesn’t care” is what my dad said. Those days I would come home smelling of grease and oil and metal and I would dream late at night of having a shirt with my name embroidered on it. How to rebuild an engine for a 1957 Chevy Bel Air Coupe when I was nine.
He showed me how to change the oil when I was three. A mark of a great man, to have your name etched onto your shirt. I always thought that was the most amazing thing. Curtis stitched in reds and whites and blues. He had shirts with his name embroidered on them. He smelled like grease and oil and metal when he came home. I didn’t know what to do with me either.Īnd then he said, “You’re not going to see me for a while. They just didn’t know what to do with me. Not always.” I didn’t know that many people. He laughed, but it didn’t sound like he found anything funny. “I don’t need them to.” I wanted them to very much, but I could see why they wouldn’t. He was a big man with a sloping gut, thanks to the booze. People were scared of me, though I didn’t want them to be. “I’m bigger than most,” I said like it meant something. Wasn’t the first time he’d said that to me, even though Mom asked him to stop. He looked back at me, and I’ll swear until the day I die that I saw some kind of love in his eyes. When he finally started snoring in his old chair, I snuck back to my room and hid under my covers. He was deep in his whiskey at that point and started yelling and breaking things. I was not cursed with an overabundance of brains. He glanced back at his suitcase.Īnd it was true. “I know you’re not the smartest boy,” he said. A sweet devil with a laugh that rumbled like that old Harley-Davidson WLA we’d rebuilt the summer before. The plastic covering its face was cracked. “What’s that for?” I asked from the kitchen. I was twelve when my daddy put a suitcase by the door.
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