Katie’s Thirteenth Birthday Party

Nobody expects their little sister’s thirteenth birthday party to turn into a failed exorcism.

            But there he was, Uncle Dom, standing there with a big wooden cross around his neck, holding it inches from my aunt’s paper-white face, bellowing, “You’re shit! You’re Satan! You’re shit Sue!”

            Uncle Dom was never very socially adept, according to accounts of his childhood by my mother and her siblings. He’s had a big unruly beard and long John Lennon hair since he was in college. Or high school. Never had many friends, always came off as the weird older brother, didn’t move out of the house. I’ve heard whispers of some fucked-up encounter with salvia.

            As little children, my sisters and I always knew he was kind of strange, but the word “creep” didn’t exist in our vocabulary at the time. We just knew that when he tickled us, it was with a weird indecisiveness, and whenever he spoke it sounded like he was clearing his throat for the first time in years. I always noticed something strange about how slowly he moved, or how consciously he blinked.

He’s an elephant of a man, about 6’3” and 240 pounds, and always something anxious about his movement. Likely because he’s almost always stationary. Always sitting on my grandmother’s blue gingham-print couch watching football or some weird community television program. Whenever you look to see what his hands are doing, he’s always rubbing his bone-dry thumb up and down each of his fingers, making this irritating sandy noise.

Kssshhh, kssshhh, kssshhh.

  Just sitting there and rubbing his dry, pickle-shaped fingers together.

             So to see him all animated like this was actually quite out of the ordinary. I looked across the living room to the birthday girl herself, Katie, then to my other sister Baby Emily. We all at the same time curled our lips up into our mouths and stuck our blocky chins out and fought in vain to not laugh or smile. It’s what we do when we’re in a situation like this, where you just can’t escape the imminent violence. We all three squirmed in our seats and just tried not to laugh.

To get back to the exorcism at hand: Big Bad Dom hunched over my aunt with his shoulders like a big tent. Shakily shoving the cross in her face, telling Satan to get out. The cross was huge and corner-y and bulky, almost looking like a Lego cross. I thought about Lego Jesus.

       And now to backtrack slightly:

He didn’t take any time to get to it.

 It was about noon, and everybody was gathered at my mom’s house: Baby Emily, Uncle Todd, Aunt Sue, myself, and of course Katie the birthday girl. The Red Sox weren’t in the playoffs that year, so we were watching somebody else, I can’t remember who.

            We were all sitting around saying, “Where’s Dom and Grandma? Where’s Dom and Grandma?” They were about an hour late, but Dom is always very punctual for family gatherings. More and more time passed, until we even decided to eat without them, which we all noted was unfortunate because we had a bunch of soft foods that Grandma would’ve loved, like potatoes and… mashed potatoes?

            Then finally, just as we were winding up to serve some lunch, the living room door swung upon and in shuffled Mr. Not-John-Lennon. He was bringing my bag-of-bones Grandma in on her wheelchair.

            A chorus of “There you are! Hi Grandma! Hi Dom!”

Grandma smiled back nervously from behind her big brown Dahmer glasses. By that point, she was already a couple of years into severe dementia. We were all still getting used it, as I remember.

            Like an elephant struggling to roll a pebble, Uncle Dom wheeled my grandmother into the center of the living room. Grandma grunted as the wheelchair creaked over every knot in the carpet.

            Click went the locks on Grandma’s wheelchair.

            Then in a flash, Dom was no longer an arthritic elephant. He whipped around like a feral cat, in one motion pushing that big fat cross practically right up Aunt Sue’s nose.

            Not that she was phased much.

            Aunt Sue’s been through it all. I start to lose my shit when I think about it. She worked with mental patients in an NYC hospital in the eighties. Her dad once tried to stab his cock off in the living room back when she was a kid. She stepped in to be a foster parent for me and my sisters when my mom went way off-track.

            So she wasn’t all that phased when her brother Dom started acting like a fucking maniac. But she did look very small. She’s about 5’2”, 100 pounds max. Wiry arms, skinny fingers, slightly Polish-looking nose. A pursed mouth where the difference between a smile and a frown is a matter of millimeters.

She looked real small in that loveseat while Dom just kept inching up closer and closer. I saw the condensation from Dom’s breath start to pile up on Sue’s horn-rimmed bifocals.

            There’s not much you can do but try to look strong and unintimidated when somebody really gets up in your face and you don’t know what they’ll do next.

            That’s what she did. She didn’t show a molecule of fear. I imagined her with an official-looking lanyard around her neck and a clipboard in her lap. I imagined Uncle Dom with a hospital robe on. I imagined we were in an NYC hospital in the eighties.

            Jesus. A little much, man, if I’m being honest.

            Uncle Dom kept yelling and yelling for about a minute, trying to get Aunt Sue to crack. She didn’t. She sat there like a statue of Elizabeth Warren, like she gave not a fuck in the world about the man trying to force Satan out of her.

            Dom eventually gave up on Sue and started trying to play to the masses.

            “She’s Satan, can’t you all see? It’s Satan trying to steal us all! Trying to steal Mom! Can’t you see?”

            He went in a circle around the room, begging everybody to see it.

            “Can’t you see, can’t you see, can’t you see?”

            We all just sat there silently. When he got to me, he kept going on and on about how Aunt Sue was trying to corrupt me. I looked past his eyes straight through his head.

            When he came full-circle, he lingered in the middle of the room with his flickering eyes locked onto Sue’s tiny throat. He licked his lips and a few drops of spittle stuck to his unkempt mustache.  He could’ve reached out, squeezed down on her trachea, and she would’ve been over with. She dared him with her eagle eyes to try it.

            Uncle Dom went and took a walk outside. The screen door slammed behind him. Grandma let out a childish chuckle. We all looked at her. She raised her eyebrows and shoulders in unison, as if to say, yeesh.

            I laughed for about a millisecond, but the room was silent so I stopped. Sue patiently rose from her perch in the loveseat, and handed her present to Katie without a word. Katie took it, also without a word.

            And then Sue went and picked up the telephone. And then she dialed three numbers.

            “Yeah, my brother is having a mental breakdown. We’re at 25 Bramble Bush Drive. If you could send somebody over, that would be great.”

            They actually did send somebody over. The cop got my uncle and my aunt together in the front yard and everybody was gathered around watching how he would handle the situation. I was so embarrassed because I could hardly imagine that many police officers know what to do when a sibling rivalry turns into a perceived battle against the Prince of Hell. I actually bet very few social workers would even know what to do.

             So the police officer said some stupid shit like, “You can’t pick your friends’ nose”, and then he fucked off, and so did my uncle, taking my grandma with him. We all waved goodbye from the yard.

            Then each one of us silently filed back into my home. We all sat back down and began watching baseball again. Nobody said much for the next fifteen minutes. Only passing comments about the game.

            “Bad pitch. Oh, he’s handsome. A hit!”

            Then after half an hour, like nothing had happened, Sue asked, “Well, I think it’s time to open presents, Katie. Why don’t you open mine first?”

            It was a nice enough birthday party after that. I think Katie actually was able to enjoy some of her gifts.

            A few weeks later, I was sitting on my aunt’s couch petting a cat while she made waffles in the kitchen. There was a ring at the phone, which Sue picked up right away.

            “Hello?”

            I could hear from the other room that somebody was talking to my aunt in a frantic tone. I peeked into the kitchen from where I sat, just in time to see Sue scurry off through the door. Her face was cold and tensed.

            After about ten minutes, I heard the screen door shut. I found my aunt leaning on the kitchen counter.

            “That was Uncle Dom. He just told me that he lost a bunch of your grandmother’s life savings on penny stocks and is about to turn himself into the police.”

            I didn’t know what penny stocks were, but it felt like the universe setting things straight in that moment.