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ALSO BY PETER FARRELLY

The Comedy Writer

Dedication

For my parents and for Cordo Wilford

PART One

Dildo, that’s what my old man called me. Dildo Dunphy. I remember when he dubbed me. It was a muggy day in the summer of my ninth year and I’d run inside his radiator shop to borrow fifteen cents for a frozen lemonade. The old man blotted his forehead with the back of his hand and leaned against the counter, the tiny blood vessels on his nose gorged red with rancor. He scowled over a bogus Jimmy Fund bucket and said, “Until you earn it, Dildo, just stay the hell out of here!”

My Christian name is Timothy Brian Dunphy and I was born and raised in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, a rotting city bleeding off an anemic river just north of Providence. The old man loved Pawtucket. Claimed it had flavor. I couldn’t argue with that; the city smelled like a sour-cream-and-onion-flavored potato chip, on account of the Choo-Sum junk food factory a mile upstream. Factory City, U.S.A., that’s what Pawtucket was called in her prime.

My old man and brother and I lived on the first floor of a seventy-year-old triple-decker perched above the tire-and-barrel-strewn banks of the Blackstone River. The apartments above us had been condemned and were occupied by bats. Life as we know it had left the Blackstone years earlier, although occasionally there were rumors that someone had spotted a three-headed frog or a giant Siamese carp swimming near one of the factories. I never swam in the Blackstone.

My mother hadn’t lived with us since November 22, 1963. That’s when she blew her brains all over our garage. Don’t let the date weigh you down; it’s not the reason, just fueled her mood. On our front door was a handgun-shaped sticker that read: FORGET THE DOG—BEWARE OF THE OWNER.

The neighborhood consisted of Nielsen families, I suppose. Another lady on my street committed side-sui; my next-door neighbor was doing time for being an accessory to a murder; about one-third of the parents were divorced; another third were screwing around; there were a couple of wife beaters; a few child abusers; a possible husband beater; a good crew of alkies; and the nut at the top of the street was on probation for bumblasting a troop of Boy Scouts.

The intersection in front of our house was the most hazardous in the state. It was a five-wayer regulated by a huge, pentagonal traffic light that winked an enticing yellow in each direction. At rush hour it became a five-army battle to see which battalion of cars would blast through first. One year there were more than fifty fender-benders. To the old man’s chagrin, though, there’d never been a real grisly wreck—a lot of close calls but no corpses. We all knew it was coming. Sort of like living on a fault line; we were always waiting for the Big One.

I’m six feet tall with curly, dark red hair. I don’t have freckles. When I was younger, the old man used to proudly tell me that redheaded guys are supposed to have mean streaks. He was confident that I would sprout into a short-tempered wild man. Well, I didn’t have it. I looked for it, I prayed, I dug deep into my soul, but it wasn’t there. I used to stand in front of the bathroom mirror before bedtime and grimace and snarl and flex my nostrils and wrinkle my lips, but I couldn’t convince myself that I was to be feared. When someone would pick a fight with me, I’d get all set—stand sideways and crouch as if protecting a manly set of balls—and I’d be staring at the kid I was supposed to be wailing on; but all I could see was my own puffy face and my little grapes, and before I could shake the image the kid would knuckle me. After years of getting beaten up for not being mean enough, my face finally developed the thick mean look that the old man promised. Girls, for the most part, didn’t notice me, but the few I did hook up with credited my good fortune to the “cute chip” on one of my front teeth. My brother, Jackie, who’s three years younger than me, got the worst of the deal; he didn’t get slapped around as much, but he was cursed with thoroughbred buckteeth. A couple of them were chipped too.

The old man’s radiator shop was at the corner of Silva and Central streets in Pawtucket. It was a well-known landmark because of a once witty slogan the old man thought up and stamped all over the place, which I sometimes found embarrassing, like an old joke, and anyway not nearly as clever as the Rhode Island State Lottery ad which from the window proclaimed PICK A WINNER. The shop was called Pop’s—the old man’s nickname; he bragged that he’d earned the title “because I popped so many niggers when I was a boy.” He’d grown up on Federal Hill in Providence, the only Irish kid in an Italian neighborhood. In the good old days he and his paisans would venture into South Providence on Saturday nights and beat the shit out of black guys. “Now,” he said, “it’s crazy, you could get yourself killed going into South Providence. They’ve let the place go to hell.” For a long time my brother and I pretended to hate blacks. Figured we’d be fools not to. At some point, though, I realized that a lot of what the old man told me was bullshit. Like the time in first grade I asked him what the I.N.R.I. on the top of the crucifix stood for. He told me it meant “In Rhode Island.”

When I was thirteen, my old man wasted the family dog, Clops. It was inevitable. Clops liked to terrorize the neighborhood cats and had been identified as the cold-blooded savage who’d beheaded a local kitten. Later, when he was charged with ripping the jugular out of Mrs. Hanley’s Siamese cat (in front of the Hanleys’ horrified six-year-old daughter), the old man decided it was time.

My brother, Jackie, had found Clops down by the power lines two years earlier. The mangiest mutt I’d ever laid eyes on, he was the size of an emaciated fox and almost entirely bald except for blotches of fur scattered haphazardly on his body. He had only one eye and in the two years we knew him he never once used his right hind leg in our presence. Just let it hang there like an old man’s limp pecker. But love is blind, and Jackie believed that Clops was some kind of runaway royal pedigree. He once woke me in the middle of the night worried that Clops might be dognapped and exploited as a show dog. “Look at him,” he said. “How many dogs you know who can run on three legs?”

Right from the start the old man hated Clops’s guts. Not just the “You can’t keep the mutt” kind of hatred but the “Let’s put the fleabag to sleep” variety. Fortunately, Caveech loved dogs and said, “It’ll teach the kids maturity.”

“I’ll get them a real mutt then,” the old man said. “One with two eyes and four legs.”

Eventually he gave in, and we were allowed to keep him. Because of the one eye, Jackie named him Cyclops and, thus, Clops.

I always figured that a heavyweight alley cat must have been the one to gouge out Clops’s right eye because, despite it, he managed to ambush just about every cat in the neighborhood. Got so bad that I hung a big bell from his collar to tip the cats off, but it didn’t do shit. Clops continued to limp home at least once or twice a month with bloody fur around his mouth. Then came the fateful day when he snatched the Hanleys’ Siamese cat out of the loving hands of the little six-year-old. He was finished. A mob of hysterical neighbors came running over to the house, and Mr. Hanley shoved a bloodied clump of cat into my and Jackie’s faces as if we’d killed the poor thing.

That night when the old man returned home from a Local 57 softball game, Mr. Hanley gave him a call and described what had happened. The old man’s only words to the man were, “Don’t worry. He’s dead.” With that he hung up the phone, glared at Jackie and me, and said, “Where’s that bald-headed bag of dead cats?”

Neither of us answered.

“Well? Where is the little worm?”

“Outside,” Jackie said.

The old man went to the front door and whistled. Clops ran up but, upon entering the old man’s shadow, slammed on his leathery brakes and stopped. He turned his head to the side and looked at us. The old man reached for him but Clops jumped back and retreated to the sidewalk. My brother was ordered to call him.

“No,” he said, “you’re gonna hurt him.”

The old man grabbed Jackie by his shirt and picked him up on his tippy-toes. “You call that goddamn mutt or I’m gonna hurt you. You know I could get sued for this?”

Jackie started crying. “Come here, Clops,” he muttered.

The dog climbed back up the steps and stopped. I stood behind the old man and waved my hands over my head to warn Clops that it was a setup.

“Call him again,” the old man said.

“Here, Clops,” said Jackie.

With his tail limp, Clops started into the house. The old man slammed the door on the dog’s neck and fell against it in a rage. Clops’s eye bulged out of its socket. For thirty seconds the old man’s face bubbled with blood as he grunted and pressed his 250 pounds against the door. Jackie ran out of the room, crying. I stayed. First noise I heard sounded like the sharp crack of pool balls on a good break. Several lesser snaps followed.

Finally the old man released his hold and Clops slumped to our welcome mat.

“I warned you to keep that fleabag away from cats!” the old man said. “You don’t want to listen? This is what you get. Now go throw him in the river.”

I picked Clops up and walked outside. He didn’t move in my arms but I had a glimmer of hope that he was just playing dead.

“Make sure you heave him out far,” the old man called. “I don’t want no carcass washing up near here, capisce? He’ll smell up the fucking town.”

When I got out on the sidewalk, I put Clops down and examined him under a streetlight. He lay still, his good eye wide open. I heard little noises that sounded like his stomach growling. Reminded me that he hadn’t been fed yet. I felt awful. I petted him to get him to wag his tail or something. Anything. Finally he whimpered so I figured he was going to make it. When the old man went to the bathroom, I snuck Clops back inside. Jackie stopped bawling when I slipped into the bedroom carrying his dog.

“Is he dead?” Jackie whispered.

“No,” I said. “Gonna be okay, I think.”

“We better hide him good. He’s slunkmeat if Pop finds him up here.”

Jackie and I slept in my bed with Clops tucked between us beneath the covers. I woke up at five in the morning and turned on a pen flashlight that I kept hidden between the mattresses. Flashed the light in Clops’s face. His eye was open. Tried to stick my finger in his mouth to see if he was still warm, but his jaw was chilled shut. I pointed the light on Jackie. His arms were wrapped around his dead dog’s head as if Clops were a teddy bear. A dab of blood had dripped out of Clops’s mouth and stained Jackie’s undershirt.

It was getting light out so I climbed out of bed and pulled on a pair of dungarees and a Boston Bruins jersey. I gently pried my brother’s arms from around Clops’s head. When I lifted the dog’s body, Jackie woke up, startled.

“Take it easy,” I said.

“What are you doing?”

I laid Clops on the floor and tied my sneakers.

“I’m taking Clops out to the country. Gonna give him away to a farmer. Now be quiet, I don’t want him to wake up. He had a rough night.”

“What if he don’t want to stay out there?”

“He’ll stay. He likes the outdoors.”

Jackie wiped crusted saliva from his cheek. “Don’t let Pop hear you. He’ll have a conniption.”

“Relax,” I said, picking Clops’s body up in my arms, “I got it under control.”

As I walked out of the bedroom, Jackie whispered in an exaggerated falsetto, “Goodbye, Clopsy. I’ll come visit you baby.”

Once I got outside, I dropped the dog’s starched body into a white canvas Providence Journal delivery bag and headed down the street with the bag over my shoulder. Clops was so stiff that all four of his legs stuck out of the bag. Even the limp pecker-leg was now a rigid hard-on.

I crossed the Junction Street Bridge and passed a grim row of window-blackened mills. The stale breath of the river gave way to the fumes of the highway. Climbed a hill and hopped a guardrail to get on Route 95. Pawtucket was experiencing a July heat wave, and by six o’clock the temperature was already in the low eighties. I’d been walking and thumbing for thirty minutes when two middle-aged Italian men in a white Impala stopped.

“How you doing, kid?” the man in the passenger seat asked as I got in.

“Good, thank you,” I said.

He glanced at the legs sticking out of my bag but didn’t show any reaction. “Where you going?”

“Cumberland.”

“Well, we’ll get you about halfway there, buddy.”

We’d driven about a mile when the driver looked in his rearview mirror for the first time, did a quick double take, and glanced over his shoulder at Clops’s legs. “Hey, kid,” he said, “you know yooz got an animal in your bag?”

The passenger said, “No shit, Sherlock. It’s the kid’s dog, you pea brain.”

The driver looked blankly at his friend and then peeked back at the dog feet. “I got some bad news for you,” he said.

I caught his eye in the mirror and raised my eyebrows.

“I think your pooch is dead.”

“You fucking banana,” the passenger said. “You think the kid don’t already know that?” He threw me a compassionate squint. “What happened? He get hit by a car?”

I looked out the window and said, “Yeah.”

“Mind if I ask you a question?” the driver said. “How long you been carrying that corpse around with you?”

“Just this morning. Going to Cumberland to bury him.”

“Why don’t you just dump him in a trash can?”

The passenger told the driver to shut his trap and take me to wherever I was going. They turned off on Route 295 and drove me all the way to Cumberland. I thanked them and climbed out in front of a cornfield. Took me two hours to dig the grave with my hands. Just before I lowered Clops and the bag into the hole, I kissed his head. He didn’t smell dead yet.

When I returned home at noon, Jackie wasn’t around. I kicked around the city all afternoon looking for things to do. But there was nothing. It was a doomed day. The air burnt my nostrils as it had the day I was chased by several boys through a tunnel at rush hour. The sun shone but the sky was a pale blue, almost gray. The chaos of car horns, children playing, and dogs barking made me sick to my stomach. My fingernails were caked with dirt.

Heard the news as the church bells were ringing at 6 P.M. Jackie’d been messing around and grabbed the wrong wire, that’s all. The fluttery electrical charge wasn’t enough to even burn his fingers, but it scared the shit out of him and he fell thirty feet off the power line. A paperboy found him lying beside one of the metal skeletons.

The doctors said it was a miracle that Jackie survived after the way he’d shattered the bones in his neck. I was grateful to whoever had the final say in whether or not to finish him off; there were conflicting reports. My grandmother cried, “It’s the devil’s work! It’s the devil’s work!” Twenty minutes later she said, “Why, God? Why did You do this?”

I was allowed to visit Jackie three days later. He was lying upside down in Rhode Island Hospital. Metal screws were drilled into his skull, but he said he felt great. When the old man left the room to speak with the doctors, Jackie asked me to make sure nobody was listening.

“You find any farms, Dunph?”

“’Course,” I said. I sat and turned my head so that I was looking up at him. “I saw this farm with about ten dogs out front so I asked the guy who lived there if he could use any more. You know, I explained the deal with the old man and all.”

“And?”

“And he took him. You know, at first he said he already had too many dogs and he had a bunch of sheeps and stuff, too, so he thought it might be a problem feeding him and all. But, you know, I told him all about Clops eating cats and how he hardly wouldn’t have to feed him at all. Then Clops comes running around the corner and, I’m telling you, the guy goes wild. Should’ve seen his eyes light up.”

Jackie smiled, and I got carried away.

“He loved Clops right away. Said he was either gonna use him as a show dog or he might just keep him around the farm for fox hunts.”

“Fox hunts?!”

“Yeah, he said Clops would be great as a fox-hunt dog. Looks so much like a fox he could probably blend right in and lead a whole family of dumbshit foxes right up to a bunch of hunters.”

Jackie glowed. “I told you he was probably a show dog, didn’t I?”

When visiting hours were over, a nurse handed me a plastic bag containing the clothes my brother had on when he got to the hospital. At home I emptied it out and saw that Jackie had been wearing the same stained undershirt that he’d worn when he slept with me and Clops, but the blood from Clops’s mouth had dried and looked like chocolate.

I was introduced to Suicide by Joey DeCenzo and Mousy Town. Suicide was the steepest hill in Pawtucket. When it snowed, the guys who hung out there would slide down it on toboggans. Madness. Once you got going there was no stopping. You just had to pray that nothing would run you over at the bottom. In the sixties, two kids riding on the same toboggan had been flattened by a sanding truck; everyone was hooked. It became a test of courage called Rhode Island Roulette.

I never rode on a toboggan with DeCenz. No sane person would. I’ve seen him break a leg jumping off a sixty-foot-high trestle into a shallow section of the Blackstone River—just to see if it could be done without breaking a leg. Another time, at a party, DeCenz stood against a wall and allowed Drugs Delaney to throw darts around his head from fifteen feet. Didn’t even blink until he got drilled in the chin.

But DeCenz wasn’t your standard Pawtucket sicko. Although he was six feet four, covered with body hair, and 230 pounds by the time he was fifteen, he was a harmless beast. One time, five or six of us were hanging out throwing snowballs when this pissed-off gearhead with a wad of snow in his ear suddenly slammed on his brakes and came charging us on foot clutching a baseball bat. Nobody budged. Wasn’t as if we’d been throwing grenades. When the guy was halfway across the street he had to realize he’d made a grave miscalculation, but it looked as if he’d made a graver one when he went after the biggest kid in an obvious attempt to intimidate us. He raised the Louisville Slugger and took a mighty swing at DeCenz, actually cracking the bat over his shoulder. Anyone else would have been organ-donor material. There was electricity in the air while everyone waited for DeCenz’s reaction. When the crowd sensed mercy, they started yelling for the terrified gearhead’s scalp. DeCenz massaged his shoulder and said, “Hey, chicken-neck, are you fucking nuts?” To everyone’s disappointment, though, he just carried the gearhead back to his jacked-up Chevy and stuffed him in through the open window. The guy squealed away looking more confused than if he’d been pummeled. But that’s the way DeCenz was; he wasn’t out to hurt anyone but himself.

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