Member-only story
Family Monsters and Kindness
A Gay Woman, and the Boy-Man Who Loved Her
“It’s supposed to squeak!”
He roared it at me. The first and last time ever. I had said it twice in my child voice, “Joe, it’s squeaking.”
I flinched from the shock wave of it hitting me, so loud his yell. It was too naked, that reveal of anger for himself that exploded at me for his botched saxophone practice.
Handsome, athletic, so much older it seemed beyond my measly six years or so then, that was my big cousin Joe. I could brag that he was on the football team at Pulaski High School not far off Eight Mile Road on the East side of Detroit. Everyone knew him. He was a star. Out of my two cousins and one brother, he was the oldest. Me, I was the youngest and the only girl. My constantly curled-lip brother would sneer “pampered” at me when no one could hear him. I think he hated me until the day he died, fifty years after Joe’s squeaky saxophone practice that only I heard. Joe had yelled at me that once but made up for the hurt. My brother never did for his sneaky attacks, never admitted.
But they’re all gone and I’m not the youngest anymore. And I know that because I’m preoccupied with my own dying. I rush to deny it, to keep living, and so I take exotic journeys with the rationale, “who knows when…?” But I still hate my brother, and love Joe.
Why wouldn’t I? He took me, his little girl cousin, with him to places I shouldn’t have gone. Beatnik poetry readings, Black jazz clubs downtown or on the deep West side. And he took me like a real person even when I was only a short twelve year old, like it was no big deal.
“She’s with me,” he would say to any question, and that was enough.
After all, he was Joe and everyone seemed to know it. He saved me from being raped without even being there. There in the high weeds around the Motor City Speedway at Eight Mile and Schoenherr… “Do you know who that is?” The boy who came late to the group holding me down said it. “That’s Joe Groppuso’s cousin.” And it made those dirty-nailed boys disappear.
Joe was special there in rough Detroit, the real world, not the linear cleanness of the suburbs where my family lived in blank-faced denial. My family — mother, father…
