I had a scary moment. Not a Freddy Krueger scary moment, but a real life, this-is-what’s-coming-next moment. Every year I put together an altar in the restaurant in the room where I keep my collection of Day of the Dead art. Every year there are more photos of those recently departed, mostly customers, since I come from a small family, the majority of whom I lost long ago. Starting with my father who died when I was 5, I never met him since my mom fled, pregnant, from a life in Mexico with a man who sometimes came home, usually didn’t. Who, soon after she left, ended up in prison. And, soon after he was released, ended up dead. My aunt Valerie died at 27 from a heroin overdose. My cousin was murdered in his apartment at the age of 34. Grandma Millie died at 93 from colon cancer. Grandma Aida passed away in bed with an open beer on her nightstand as she watched t.v.. And my dog, Maddy, that I lost last year to lymphosarcoma. The one that I have never included on the altar is my grandfather. I guess I figure that he should not have been allowed to mingle with the living, so the dead should be spared.

As a child I did love him, he took me to all the amusement parks and went on all the rollercoaster rides with me. He taught me to play pool and would only let me drink beer or seltzer, on occasion a Dr. Brown’s Black Cherry soda at a deli. My grandpa, Abe Sutain, was very talented and built a successful company. You can google Sutain Sunglasses. He liked to sit on his apartment’s terrace painting identical reproductions of masterpieces by famous artists. Da Vinci, Monet, Gauguin, Dalí, van Gogh. Elegantly framed to decorate his walls. He ate a macrobiotic diet for years and dark chocolate while watching opera in bed. He gave himself acupuncture and could stand on his head for a long time. He brushed his teeth with a powder of black, seaweed, long before people knew about the harmful effects of flouride. He hated both doctors and dentists alike. One afternoon when I was about 10 we went to visit his sister Shirley. Shirley had also invited her brother-in-law who was a dentist. I’m thinking, after my recent invisalign treatment, he was a good one. He met me for the first time and told my grandparents that I should be taken to see an orthodontist, because I appeared to have a cross-bite. My grandma made an agreeable comment, like,

“Maybe we’ll look into that.” My grandpa picked up her steaming cup of coffee to throw in her face. His sister Shirley grabbed his arm, the coffee burning his hand before he could splash it on my grandma, who sat so still, without a breath, as if she were hiding. Shirley pulled me into the bathroom of her tight apartment. She closed the door and told me to cover my ears while my grandpa attacked my grandma with spitting threats.

“I’m gonna leave you, you fucking whore,” he said.

That night I asked my grandma where she would go? I assumed that what he always said was true. That no one was worth shit without him. We, including me, would be out on the street without his money. Little did I know that he had already left his family for another woman who, along with a partner, swindled him out of his company and a good portion of his money. My grandma, even though she lived in denial about the abuse that occurred in her household, put money aside to secure her future. So, when my granddfather begged her to take him back, she did, with conditions, with a say on how the remaining money would be spent and saved.

“Nowhere, ” she said, “he’s the one leaving.” Of course he never left, until he died of throat cancer from a lifetime of cigarette smoking. Grandma had to take care of him and change his diapers, which he would take off and smear his feces on the walls between his paintings. Eventually she was left with no choice but to put him in the hospital, the last place he wanted to go. They had to force his emaciated body kicking, scratching and biting into the ambulance. And even after he was gone she was haunted by his opression and constant chatter that she had learned to quiet as she filled out crossword puzzles and chime in with “um hum” and “you don’t say” at exactly the right time to assure she was listening. Because his temper was like a mess of bare wires that could start to spark for no particular reason. During a family summer visit at my grandparent’s apartment in Santa Monica there was a discussion about bagels and lox and if we preferred Canter’s or Nate ‘n Al’s. My aunt Valerie, the one who didn’t make it past 27, voted Nate ‘n Al’s, maybe because of the quality or maybe just because it was more exciting to go to Beverly Hills and see movie stars. For whatever reason, probably because it was cheaper, grandpa preferred Canter’s. He grabbed Val by the hair and smashed her head against the wall. A few years later, when I sat in the car outside the morgue as my other aunt, Phylis, went in to identify Valerie’s body, my grandfather cried to me, saying that it was all his fault. Everyone agreed.

My mom came in for dinner, she went to visit the altar.

“Where did you get that photo of your father?” she asked.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“It’s not from my album,” she said.

“And what album would that be?” I asked almost choking on an oatmeal cookie.

“The album of the photos that were taken of Raúl and I in Acapulco.”

“Mom, all the photos we have of Raúl came from Aida.” Aida was the reason that I moved to Mexico, to be close to her the last years of her life. The reason that I tracked her down, really not expecting her to still be alive, was because I grew up without a photo of my father. No album of my parents in Acapulco. Nothing but anecdotes of my father as the life of the party pouring champagne down fountains of glasses, scaling his apartment building to climb through the window and his recipe for vinaigrette. I was almost angry about her memory lapse and her fantasy photo album before it hit me. She doesn’t remember.

Skeletons Out of the Closet