Hopping and Fences by Rob Bianco

After high school ended for the day, my younger brother and I would go to a nearby park to practice hopping fences. We would stay there until dusk shed reds, yellows and, finally, black across the endless farms with their cast-down farmhouses surrounding us. Our practice fence was 10-foot, rusted and bowed, around an overgrown tennis court where we would climb and cheer each other on as we took turns scaling then jumping from the top bar. We did this for hours, occasionally stopping behind an old pavilion to smoke a joint or eat some chicken I’d swiped from the school cafeteria while the lunch lady turned her blind eye to our overdue account. Somedays we went home and our mother would say, “Why would I have made food if I don’t know when you’ll be home” and we’d say, “Why would we come home if there is nothing to eat” until everyone got heated and we left before our mom yelled, “Just ’cause your father left, doesn’t mean you can leave too.” So, instead of going home, we’d walk three miles to a pizza shop to watch through the window for people leaving behind slices or crusts that we would take before sprinting out of the parking lot. As we left, Sal and Vinny, the only other Italians in our town, would yell, “Bambino Bianco stari e manciari.” But we did not stop because we had never heard nothing like that before and we were only children. While we walked back with a few crusts, we talked about everything except how we were walking past our father’s house even though we both really wanted to be there most of all but didn’t know what to say about it. We both knew that if we went there our dad would see us coming from a mile off and would cook sausages and open sodas and give us a wincing smile and say, “You know you’re supposed to be with your mother” before calling our mother who would sit in her blacked-out car in the driveway stewing and honking her horn until we came outside to all get bawled out. Our dad for telling us to finish our food and not sending us out quicker and us for disappearing again. Afterwards, she would hurry us into her car where she would not say a word, but we would sit in an awful, cloying silence as she glared at us through the rearview all the way home, where we would be sent to our rooms without a word or a bite of food. So, instead of going to our dad’s house and eating, we would call a friend to pick us up so we could party and smoke weed and snort cocaine and Percocet and drink and fuck and start bonfires in far-off fields while talking about anything to not talk about our mother sitting in the front room waiting while Law & Order echoes through the empty cabinets or our dad with his quiet freezer full of sausages and his cups of soda a million miles away. And on the days I did not feel like partying, I would hop the fence to a cornfield and lay myself down alone to watch Orion roam across the Milky Way or the dippers and their mysterious contents or Polaris burning true and north and wonder which are the ones I’m supposed to be counting when people said to count your lucky stars. I would lay like this for hours charting the boundaries of the world until I grew tired and wet long after midnight. I would hop our back fences and climb through the backroom window, lowering myself down, quietly hoping to be invisible enough to walk into the kitchen and find something to eat, but instead falling asleep as Lenny Briscoe made another quip about the newest dead body he has found in an empty house. When we were both in our 30s, my brother called me, alcohol clear on his voice two weeks after leaving rehab, and said, “Do you think our jobs are our jobs because we are too fucked up and have been for a long time?” He said, “I mean, a writer and a social worker, are there any other jobs all ‘bout figuring out what went wrong?” as I traced my fading track marks in my studio apartment.

Image Credit: Flickr Creative Commons/Danny James Ford