Birthday Boy
by David Blitch
part 1
I don’t know, maybe I’m picky?
It started this way. It was one of those days, like when you’re in the sun, and it feels real warm and pleasant, but in the shade you cool down real quick. I hate those kinds of days because you don’t know whether to wear a jacket or not. So you’re sitting there doing fine and suddenly a cloud passes by, and you’re freezing your ass off.
Maybe I exaggerate?
Anyway, from where I was sitting, I could catch all the goings-on in the dining room.
The room was knee-deep in balloons: round ones, long ones, red, blue, green, yellow, purple. It looked like a freakin’ circus. I was half-expecting to see an elephant walk by. Happy birthday banners were stretched all across the room. The place was full of people, and everyone was wearing one of those goofy pointed cardboard hats.
They were all standing around the dining room table, chatting away. On the table sat the birthday cake Mom had baked. The cake replaced the remnants of the cold-cut tray, freshly made potato salad and deviled eggs that had been devoured by the invited guests. There was only one candle on the cake, its blue wax molded into the number “1.” It was embedded into the vanilla cream icing that Mom had made from scratch.
None of the guests noticed Grandma Sylvia, who was decked out in her pink denim pants-suit that was all the rage of the senior crowd. She had found the lighter and waddled over to the cake. I’m sure that in her rush to get to Atlantic City on the last casino tram of the day, she fired up the candle to get things moving along.
When Uncle Tony saw the flickering candle, he told everyone to get ready. Family and friends got prepared for the big event with hole-recorders and cameras in hand. Everyone was there except for the guest of honor. Where is the birthday boy?
Mom stood at the bottom of the stairs. She screamed up the stairs, “George, wax is dripping all over the cake! Come down this instant!”
Right after lunch, I had hightailed it out of there. I needed some time alone, to calm my brain. I guess Mom thought I’d gone upstairs.
But there I was, sitting on the deck in one of the comfy lounge chairs pondering a jacket and finishing my third beer since lunch. I heard my mother though, even through the double-paned deck door. “Happy friggin’ birthday,” I said to myself.
I sat there gazing at the tomato and pepper plants planted next to the deck. It was late fall, and the weeds had taken over and the plants had gone to hell, all wilted and brown. I just wasn’t inspired to pull them out. As I contemplated the labor I’d need to expend in order to rectify the situation, I heard a light tap on the deck door window. I turned around and saw a face pressed against the glass.
It was my Uncle Tony. He yelled over his shoulder: “Hey, Tina, he’s on the deck. Should I fetch him?”
Tina’s my mom. She calls Tony the “Dim Bulb.”
It was one of those questions Uncle Tony often asks; questions to which the answer was obvious. This lack of common sense and indecisiveness was probably why he never made it out of Queens for the better life in Jersey.
Mom snapped, “For Chrissake, Tony, what ya need, written instructions?”
But then I guess she thought better, “Stay where you are, I’ll get him.”
She grabbed a sweater and put it over her shoulders and opened the deck door. She poked her head out. We had a little conversation.
“.Hey, George, come on in. You’ll catch your death of cold out there.”
“Ma, ya know, yesterday I might have actually given a crap.”
“George, don’t say those kind of things. It’s your birthday.”
“Yeah, I know, my last birthday.”
“All your cousins are here. Your Boss, Mr. Valenti, all the guys and gals from the pizzeria. They closed the restaurant so they could be here. Aunt Alice from Pasadena. They’re waiting for you.”
“Ma, get off it. You know they more or less got to be here. It is my last birthday. You know the way things are.”
“Yeah, and you know how much your aunt hates to fly.”
“Sure, nowadays, what is it; forty-five minutes from the west coast? That’s some kind of big deal? That’s nothing compared with what I’m facing.”
“Come on, you’ve had 25 years and 127 days of a good life. Why spoil it now? I’m closing the door. I’m not heating all of Leonia, you know.”
The deck door slammed and the questions erupted from all those fine people in the dining room — “Is he okay?” — “Is he coming?” — “Where’s the guest of honor?” — “Where’s the birthday boy?” All my mom could say was: “Give him time.”
So I chugged the rest of my beer and tossed the empty into the trashcan next to the tomatoes. I got up, tucked my shirt in my pants, and entered the dining room through the deck door.
As I approached the table, everyone sang that Godforsaken song.
“Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you. Happy Birthday dear Ge--orge. Happy Birthday to you.”
Then came the verse I despised.
“How much longer do you have? How much longer do you have? How much longer do you ha---ave? How much longer do you have?”
My lips began to quiver and I began to cry. I knew I was supposed to sing but little sputters came out instead.
“I have one year to go. I have one year to go...”
I collapsed into a chair, hands over my face, and sobbed away. Then I heard: “George, what’s wrong?”
Mom was standing next to me with her hands on her hips and a scowl on her face, more embarrassed than concerned. I needed to set her straight. Understand the gravity of the day in question.
“Yeah, Ma, sure, what’s wrong? What are you on? Twenty-two? And Chuck there, he’s on like thirty-three. Who’s next here? Dad’s brother Harry? Yeah, he’s on six, but he’s an old man. He’s got great-grandkids. Tony here’s on twenty-eight. I’m a young man, and I’m on one, Ma — I’m on one!”
Mom pulled up a chair and sat down in front of me face to face. She spoke in an emphatic tone, like a coarse whisper that I knew meant I was in trouble. All the guests gathered in close so they could hear what was wrong with me.
“It’s not like you didn’t know it was coming. The day you came home from the hospital we all knew. When they said you would only live to 26, your Dad and me had them check three times over. They showed us everything: your genome, the chart of historical variables, everything. The doctors said, that’s how long he’ll live. We were beside ourselves, but there was nothing we could do.”
Like that was some kind of revelation. I’d gone through a couple of surgeries as a kid and my little med pump was whirring inside me, dispensing the perfect dose of continued life. But in a little less than a year, the meds would stop working and there was nothing anyone could do. The docs told us I’d be pretty healthy to the very end, almost to the last week when the meds finally petered out, if that was any consolation.
“Son, be happy. It’s your last year and you don’t have to do a thing. The government takes care of it: a 365-day vacation courtesy of Uncle Sam. Here, this came in the mail today.”
It was one of those fancy envelopes with an embossed picture of the White House. It was my allotment card sent to me by the Government on my big day. Mom placed it on the dining room table and unloaded: “Think a minute: what a year this can be! A whole year to see the world, climb Mount Everest, meditate with Buddhist Monks in Tibet, bag some big game, live on the moon. But ya know what? I don’t give a rat’s ass what ya do, just get off your butt and be happy. You’re embarrassing the family. No one else in this family has ever acted this way. Did your Cousin Bernie act this way? Or Aunt Margaret? Or Cindy? Or Bill? Edgar had a wonderful last birthday and then went cliff-diving in Acapulco.”
Tony chimed in, “Tina, but how about Harold? Remember how he found that BB gun and went behind the shed...”
Mom glared at Tony. “When will you learn to shut up!”
Mom had frayed my last nerve, “You know, Ma, maybe I should be happy? Maybe I should be having the time of my life? But how can I have all that fun you’re talking about when every morning I wake up knowing that the clock is ticking, that I got no future? I ain’t accomplished nothing, and I ain’t gonna. I don’t see no fun in my future: pain and depression I know for sure, and it’ll only get worse. Why bother with any of this crap?”
I shot out of the chair and grabbed my jacket off the coat rack. Tony was about to say something, but he swallowed his words when Mom gave him a quick poke in the ribs. I stood at the deck door gathering my thoughts and options.
“You’ll be back. You just need some time, that’s all.” Mom picked up the knife and started to cut my birthday cake, my freakin’ cake. “We’ll save the rose for you dear.” She pointed to the corner of the cake, to a big blue rose made of icing. “You always want the rose.”
I left.
* * *
I didn’t have a place to go. I meandered around; crunching the fallen leaves underfoot. I finally found a tram shelter with an empty bench. I knew one person who had lasted three days longer than calculated. But lengthen it beyond that? You wish! No way! Ain’t gonna happen! Usually the calculation was dead on.
The only ways to shorten the projected life span were fatal accident, homicide, or suicide. I wanted something quick, to just get it over with. I mean, there is such a thing as slow suicide. I could always find a back alley butcher who would remove my Government Issue med pump for a nice pile of cash; but that ain’t no quick death. I could last a good while without my meds, not to mention the blood spilled in the whole messy business. I just didn’t have the stomach for that.
I thought about options I could deal with. The first one that came to my head: the new bridge in Fort Lee and how cold the water was this time of the year. Would that make my death come more quickly, or would the coldness preserve me somehow and prolong the suffering? I’d heard of kids who fell through the ice and were underwater for hours and then were fished out and revived. I wouldn’t want that.
I also thought of my cousin’s hunting rifle and my Ma’s gas stove; she was the last on the block who hadn’t gone totally microwave. But in those scenarios there was a good chance I’d be caught in the act. Then I’d be on my way to a “home.”
I thought about jumping in front of a truck, but with automatic collision avoidance systems, almost no one ever gets hit by a moving vehicle anymore. I thought about talking to Father Mike, my priest, but with my luck, he would report me and I’d be off to one of those “special places” that people are all hush-hush about, unless they’re about slinging mud.
It’s amazing to me that in the “Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave,” because of the birthday laws, the one thing you’re really not free to do is die when you want to.
I decided to take my chances with the river. It was a short walk from Leonia to Fort Lee. The jacket I was wearing wasn’t quite heavy enough. ’cause clouds and a cold front were rolling in. So I zipped it up tight, and raised the collar, and yet I still shivered. A stiff Canadian wind brought in snow flurries. A minute before the sun had shone like a beacon among the orange and red cotton ball clouds, approaching the horizon, just scraping the top of the Fort Lee skyline.
It was an impressive bridge, named the “Tricentennial,” designed to replace the aging and much-repaired George Washington.
I tried the pedestrian crossing level but was soon confronted with thick wire mesh. I rattled and pulled hard on the steel, but it would not budge; it was built to prevent just what I planned to do. I’d have to backtrack and risk walking along route 95, with the cars. Not that I’d care if a car hit me, but the Port Authority Police would be patrolling, and I wasn’t sure I could get far enough across without being caught.
There wasn’t a sidewalk, just a curb and a guardrail. Cars passed me but ignored me. When the patrol cruiser came up from behind, I was just about mid-span, and the wind had picked up so much that I was afraid I’d be blown over before I had a chance to jump.
But when I heard the siren, it all changed. I tried one sudden leap overboard, but I was frozen in my tracks. The Port Authority cop had a paralysis beam locked on. The next thing I knew, I was in the cruiser, past Riverside Drive on the Manhattan side. I heard something about dumb Jersey schmucks with brains up their butts and a warning, about using the footbridge the next time.
* * *
Copyright © 2024 by David Blitch
