Justin Vicari
MY FATHER HAS ANOTHER SONNY BOY ON THE SIDE
I didn’t develop musculature. Instead, puberty brought me
small breasts with enormous nipples, and a swollen paunch
that dwarfed my tiny parts. In the pool, everyone laughed when blue
water dashed and shimmied my tits. My cousin told her
mother, who told my mother, who tried to force me out of my shirt,
then dragged me to a geriatric practitioner whose eyes grew round.
By 16, a certain abstract surliness made me hard to pin down. My father,
in spite of smiling insanely over me when I was a baby,
hardly paid attention now, except to criticize. But one evening at dinner,
my father did tell me about his favorite customer in the stamp and coin department,
a 16-year-old collector who came in and had long talks with him,
about manly stuff like baseball and chess. He liked the kid’s firm handshake.
My mother said nothing. My father looked at me,
then didn’t. From what I knew, he hated his job.
My mother always told me, “Be good to our Daddeesees, because
he works for us and doesn’t want to. Be like the extra cheese on his pizza.”
I thought we would have been better off without him
going on and on about that manly kid, whose hand he liked to grasp
better than he liked the hand of me, his daughterson. Something
kept him tying his neckties every morning, getting into the car with my mother
so she could chauffeur him downtown to the department store. Every evening
she picked him up, her life one long wait for him.
For years he would mention that kid from time to time, always over dinner,
when the food could never stuff all the holes made in me. That man fed and tortured me.
When my mother always cried to me that Daddeesees was seeing someone else, was going
to be leaving us, I never knew why as a child, but now I looked at other boys in the locker room
and desired their lean athletic bodies so unlike my own. Much later, I learned that the men’s room
on the 11th floor of his work was a gay cruising spot. No one ever went there to take a shit.
Men sometimes lead two lives. I knew this from an early age. There is no center to this poem—
me either. Time and again in my fantasies, that manly kid gets the better of me. He
overpowers me, makes me serve his needs. I kneel, old acolyte. My father watches.
Will I die one day because of what he was? I will never be enough,
even when I slice and serve myself up like an extra-large pizza growing thick and cold.