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When I was a boy, my
father cleaned up crime scenes.
Murders, suicides: after the police had sorted everything out,
he was the one the insurance companies called. "It's a hell of a
thing," he told me once. "To see what I see. Believe me, Telly. You
wouldn't want to know."
I was fifteen then, in 1961, and from time to time one of the
hoodlums at my school would press me for details, and I would
oblige, inventing Police Gazette stories of pulp and
gore. My
talent for spinning these lies disgusted me, but in those days, I
was strictly Varsity Club--I ran track, practiced debate, sat on
the student senate--and I used my father's job to win a hold
with a crowd unlike my own. These were the boys who had never
abandoned their ducktails and pompadours for the short bristles
of crew cuts and flat tops. They were juvenile delinquents, my
father said. Their lives, he assured me, would amount to squat.
But that didn't stop me from envying their sneers and
slouches, their motorcycle jackets, the very smell of them--Lucky
Strikes and Vitalis. It was the scent of back seats and
billiard parlors, of dark worlds I dreamed about, but never dared
enter. There were limits, I suspected, to how far someone could
travel into danger and come back healthy and whole....
Reprinted with permission
from The Least You Need to Know
Copyright © 1996
by Lee Martin
Sarabande Books
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My brother
was a man named Leonard Salk, but in 1955
he was known as Buddy Day.
"All of a sudden he thinks he's a Gentile." In the dead hours
of the afternoon, when it was only the two of us in the shoe
store, my father would remind me what a traitor Lenny was.
"Him with his bleached-blond hair and his fancy-schmanzy
clothes. Cowboy boots, for Pete's sake. Somewhere in Heaven,
your grandfather is cursing him. Your grandfather who sat
forty-nine years of his life, curled over a shoe last, pounding
leather, making an honest wage. Your grandfather, Julius Salk. A
name we should all be proud of. Salk. An honorable name. Like
the polio guy."
"Jonas," I said.
"That's right, Mr. Smarty-Pants."
The way my father saw it Jonas Salk had saved the shoe
industry when he invented his vaccine. If polio still ran rampant,
the fewer people there would be walking. And the fewer people
walking--well, there you had it....
Reprinted with permission
from The Least You Need to Know
Copyright © 1996
by Lee Martin
Sarabande Books
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Bibliography
