I look at the photos of Manuel neatly tucked into the envelope. Aunt Connie had sent a memory. It didn't matter that she had married a porn king, the fourth man in a string of getting over her father. My father Mannie called her a whore when he drank. "Three blacks don't make a white." Scotch is Mannie's current pick. He drinks this wild and hopes for praise on his San Diego semi-formal tan. He completes the look with a gold watch that will weigh his arm too heavy to write his sister back.

     I ask him about the poem attached to the photos. No, he won’t try out writing again. His eves are at the driving range, his weekends spent with golf carts. "Golf is the one sport where it helps to drink." He doesn't mind the snakes that live outside the fairway of Mile High C.C. He says the rattlers are there to remind everyone to keep their shot straight. Everything is a sport analogy for Manuel.

     Aunt Connie didn't say much in the letter. I hadn't seen her since the funeral in December. Her father passed from lung cancer, twenty years after giving up cigarettes. Too bad his wife didn't think to quit. She spent the week after my grandfather's funeral buying new curtains from Sears. A month later, she introduced me to her friend Earl at the Padres Pub. Mannie seemed unmoved. He took Earl's hand and bought him a drink. Then he talked to Earl about painting (something Mannie never did) and asked for the receipt, careful to write the man's name and their conversation on the back. I drank a virgin daiquiri.

     Aunt Connie had gone back to the large island in Hawaii. The most I had ever seen of that land was the weekend sunburns and the slideshows. It seemed more of a place of bragging rite than true paradise. The myth stretched from California to Japan. "Why don't you go visit Connie?" Mannie didn't like to leave the continent. He knew the rules here, he could drive for hours in thought. "You can't drive for very long on an island. "Mannie said that the best way to learn a new girl was just to take her for a long drive. "She can't escape, see?" I did but let him continue with all the details. "If you like her right away, make it an hour drive (or more.) If you’re unsure, then just drive up to the next town. "He looked at me while his head made the motions of a windy road. "You have to be sure!"

     I was sure that for all of the rosters of women, Mannie didn't have a good line-up. He only appreciated the details of relationship scoring, tenderly taking my neck and screaming to the bar what a whore his son was. Mannie liked to call his son a whore, but would fret that term on Aunt Connie. He didn't like to talk about her or the family much at all. "Pop, why aren't you closer to Connie?" He didn't answer but ordered another round. Over and over he tried to sell me on a shot of McCallen 12. Manuel believes that drinking with others dilutes a thing.

     I never took the scotch, not the cocktails, or the beer. I hated drinking with Mannie. It seemed to stamp his behavior with an approval seal. I rather think of how I would get him back to the hotel. We discussed drunk driving last christmas and my sister and I had taken off without him. Better he drive off his rage alone. He was sullen, and moody about such things. I knew that I could never chastise Mannie like he did himself. Still I waited near the problem, not willing to fix it, not able to avoid it.

     "Your grand-dad was a good man." He took up the glass and held it to the light without looking. It was a symbol and speech he did again and again. Mannie hated the dead man. For two generations, the lawn was mowed in perfect grid lines, wheels overlapping, else redone until the tire tracts were just right. Mannie was the son of a machinist who could not install a vcr, couldn't chuck a drill, thought calipers were for women getting medical examinations.

     "You can't reinvent the wheel, son." He doted on this phrase and for once I saw it different. While Connie did everything her father had hated, Mannie could never do anything his father wanted. "No, you can't reinvent the wheel boy." I took Mannie's car keys from the bar and drove off. Our drive together was over.

Nco
Philipe Nicolini. Enjoys writing about his rural upbringing in California's San Joaquin Valley. Once sold into educational slavery in Tokyo, now rinsing his days in Seattle; Nco works by night. In the night there is calm.

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