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Finding Tulsa 19

the beach. Him at a playground, holding his newborn son like a fidgeting
sack of flour.
Pittsburgh is a minefield of borrowed memories. We got out of
Pennsylvania before I became too big a mouth to feed. But I feel like I
have roots there. I feel like going back someday. I feel like retracing things,
finding things out, like why I feel like a redhead on the inside.
Sean O’Leary, the uncle, the redhead, paler freckled skin, his hair
brush cut like G.I. Joe, but thin, frail and a dim brassy glow. He was my
first real kiss.
Of course, at ten, a boy doesn’t completely get the function of parts.
I just remember one of Uncle Sean’s visits with his wife, May, and their
new baby, my little burble of a cousin, Mike. I was in my pajamas, sent
off to bed, and the round of goodnight kisses burned in by the scrape of
his cheek, by the tiny taste of spit from his lips, by the glance, the way I
had to pinch my PJs on the way up the stairs to stop the mistaken feeling
of having to pee.
At fourteen, what I gazed at in the attic and what I played with in the
basement came together, somewhere in the middle.

Our basement tried to become a den for a while. In one back room
were the washer and dryer, Dad’s tool bench, and other little rooms for
Christmas ornaments and spare boxes.
The front room of the basement was paneled in wood. Bookshelves
lined one wall. An old sofa sat along another wall, with a few leftover
end tables on either side. It was comfortable enough, but the boggy Ohio
floods of the 1970s kept interrupting, and we’d have to call the Roto-
Rooter guy and throw out any soggy thing left on the floor.
But at times, the space had a mystery, and when I invited friends over
for sleepovers, my short-term friends and I had enough privacy to run
around in our underpants, making sex jokes and peeing into the drain
below the washing machine.
It became my secret space for long self-play sessions away from Dan’s
interruptions. I’d walk around the room, peeking through health manuals,
old science journals, and Life magazines with nude hippies. A few times I
stole a carrot from the fridge’s crisper and, ever so delicately, inserted the
bobbed end into my ass, trying to figure out what the big deal was about
getting buttfucked.
Marty Keyhouser kept making jokes about a scene in Deliverance, a
movie my parents wouldn’t take me to see and I couldn’t sneak into. I had