Weird Norbie
by John Klawitter © 2008
Some monster blew away his whole family the other day, just before Christmas, if you can believe that. I saw it a few times on the evening news, the newscaster looking serious as he talked about how there was blood smeared over a lot of unopened presents, so I guess it must be true. They even showed some deputies wheeling out a few silent, blanket-covered humps on gurneys. The story was, this crazy guy nailed his wife, his kids, his grandkids, and some lady down the block whose pants he wanted to get into but couldn’t, and that was the reason why everything in the first place.
I don’t know if he was a veteran or not, but that’s the first thing people think when something like that happens. Now I was in Vietnam, and had my share of hard times, but I think that ticking time bomb syndrome, the theory that us vets carry around a lot of rage until we explode, is a little overrated. Old angers are one thing, and you can see a guy going ape over a piece of tail he’s not going to get, but murder is a very serious business, maybe a step or two beyond, if you follow my drift.
Have you personally ever wished you’d murdered anybody? I mean, actually wish you pulled the trigger and looked over the smoking barrel to see somebody’s head blown away like a smashed bottle of Ocean Spray cranberry juice? Or maybe nothing dramatic like that, but maybe just wished you were side-by-side on top of Grand Canyon with your uncompromising mother-in-law or wife or husband and you give her or him an almost undetectable little nudge with your butt and there’s one long, wonderful scream and you watch the tiny little body bounce a few times way down there on the rusty colored sandstone and then tumble like a lifeless scarecrow all the way to the bottom? Think about it honestly for a moment; everybody has somebody they don’t like. Could you dislike enough to pull the trigger, roll the boulder, hit the gas pedal?
The guys who deal with notions like that over at the Catholic Church say a killer’s going straight to hell to meet the devil and burn forever. I don’t know…even though I was baptized and raised in what they call the One True Faith, I’m not sure about all that devil-business. I have read a few things here and there that may apply. I’ve gotten most of the way to a Master’s Degree in Oriental Studies, and I guess I do believe in a sort of karma. Bottom line, I think it’s really bad to off anyone before their tune plays itself out. You’d better have a good reason, like at Tan Son Nhut airport that night the VC were sneaking through the night towards us with satchels of ep plastique on their backs. I think God may have a special dispensation for soldiers (At any rate, I hope He does.) Not that He ever takes sides, but when you shoot at somebody who’s going to shoot back or blow you up, maybe that’s a special circumstance. But I’m not talking about war; that could be killing, and still not murder.
Looking back to earlier times, to way before Vietnam, back to when I was just a silly, know-nothing kid, there is somebody I wish I had killed. I even had the chance—a couple of chances, actually. But I didn’t think about it then the way I do now.
And somehow I even think that if I’d blown this guy away, God might have understood and slipped me in on the special dispensation. Now that is crazy, isn’t it?
Back when I was growing up, I lived in a lunchpail house on Dixie Highway, about thirty miles south of Chicago’s Loop. It’s the same place where my dad grew up and where my brother still lives with his own family today. Houses like that one were built at the turn-of-the-centurey all over Chicago’s far South Suburbs. They were mostly do-it-yourselfers (except for those built by Sears, Roebuck & Co., to standard plans). They were plain wooden boxes with peaked roofs and humble gingerbread front porches. Most of them were deceptively simple, and their individual uniqueness depended on how the builder-designer interpreted what he saw in the actual houses he copied…and on how much lumber he could afford.
Ours was two stories high, with an added-on summer kitchen in back and a basement that was dug in by my Uncle Robert a few years after it was built. For reasons known only to my grandfather, who was a carpenter of considerable skill, the second story wasn’t as high as it might have been, and so the upstairs rooms all sloped in the corners, and even had big triangular crawl-in closets on the walls under the sloping roofs. There was a center closet, and this featured a wooden ladder that went up to a stuffy, windowless attic.
I shared my bedroom with terrible-tempered Tommy, my kid brother. It was the first one at the top of a rickety set of stairs. This worn wooden stairway led steeply up from the old summer kitchen. By that time the kitchen had been moved into the old dining room, and the summer kitchen served as a junk room.
I thought my room was the best in the house, even if I did have to share it with Tommy. In addition to a wonderful crawl-closet that could hold three or four whispering conspirators, it had a small window that led out directly onto the room. We kids were not allowed to actually go out there, but it made no difference; the window was exactly like the one David Balfour fired through when defending himself on the pirate ship Covenant in Kidnapped, the Robert Louis Stevenson novel. I actually had a hollow fake-sword in a battered old tin sheath, and heavy old hammerless musket-pistola that had been in the family ever since anybody could remember. So I lived in a pirate room, and whenever my cousins came over for summer picnics or holiday dinner we all gathered there, hiding under the bed or under the covers in a shaky, head-bumping little tent.
One warm and sticky July 4th at around noon, I and my two cousins Robbie and Jean were lying around my room trying to think of things to do in the depressing heat. We were so tired we even let Tommy hang out, with the stern threat that if he caused any trouble we would pull off his toe nails. Just when we couldn’t stand the boredom any more, there was s stumbling noise on the steps and my weird cousin Norbert made his awkward entrance.
We three cousins were all about the same age, but Norbie was twelve—two years older. Just looking at him, you suspected he had a gear loose somewhere. He was tall and gawky, with a long, curly head filled in at the middle of the front with a consistent blank look. We’d all been teasing Norbie ever since I could remember. I had the pirate pistol, of course, and automatically waved it in his direction.
“Norbie,” I shouted without a moment’s hesitation, “you miserable landlubber, I’m going to kill you!”
“Yeah, Swabbie!” Robbie shouted. “And I’m going to grenade you!” He pulled an imaginary pin from the steel head of a WWII mortar that I’d loaned him and shook it over his head like a grenade.
Jean crawled out from under the bed and waved the old tin sword in the air. His intentions were clear; he didn’t have to say anything at all.
Norbie took one look at the horrible gang of three, gave out a yelp of terror and went into full retreat. All arms and legs, he wind-milled his way back down the steps. We heard him thump at the sharp corner half-way down and then fall with a clatter the rest of the way to the junk room where my sisters were playing dolls. He landed in a heap and lay there as if he was dead, sending the girls screaming for help.
As you already suspect, it ended in disaster for the pirate crew. Norbie woke up with a lump on his forehead, screaming in terror that we were going to cut his arms and legs off. He blubbered and clung to his mother’s dress and glared wild-eyed at us while the whole family looked on, my aunts clucking and my uncles giving each other the knowing eye over their beers. Norbie was having trouble putting his words together into anything anyone could understand, and they probably never would have found out what happened, but snot-nose Tommy spilled his guts and the roof caved in.
We knew we were supposed to play nice with cousin Norbert.
“You could have killed him,” my mother said in her own fiercely determined way. She made sure my father took away all the pirate stuff. She gave me the special look that meant Young man, the case isn’t yet closed on this one, only delayed until our guests go home. And we were sent outside in the sultry heat to play baseball in the weedy vacant lot on the other side of 30th Street. There was a thick, evil-looking slab of leather known as The Number Seven hanging from its hook on the back porch. Its only purpose in life was correcting the habits of unruly children through its direct application to their backsides, and I knew that evening it would be mine.
Norbie was my Aunt Sophie and Uncle Norbert’s oldest child. They had two other children, a son named Richie who was about Tommy’s age and Maryann, and even younger daughter. We knew the way kids know things that Richie and Maryann were normal, just like the rest of us. On the other hand, to call Norbie strange was about as understated as saying the Creature From The Black Lagoon didn’t use toilet paper.
Talking about toilet paper, Norbie loved it. He had a bad habit of locking himself in the bathroom. Like the Creature, he didn’t use the toilet paper, either—except to start it on fire. In our house, that was always easy to do; my father chain-smoked Camels, and half-used boxes and books of matches were everywhere. Not a good thing, because Norbie loved fire the way a cat loves catnip.
And he was a special sort of problem. He was sneaky, often deceptively quiet. He would sit on the rim of any conversation he could find, and he would softly repeat the last words anyone said, repeating them with the same inflection and cadence. He was a perfect, natural, mindless mimic.
Uncle Joe would say, “Well, I don’t know—that old Chevy got me so far and no trouble!”
“Well, I don’t know,” Norbie would repeat in his perfect whisper, “That old Chevy got me so far and no trouble!”
“By golly and besides,” my dad would say, “this is the year for the White Sox!”
And he would be startled to hear a whisper over his shoulder.
“By golly and besides,” Norbie would repeat like an echo, “this is the year for the White Sox!”
Things said in the heat of conversation sound pretty silly when they are mocked like that, even if Norbie wasn’t doing it on purpose, which he wasn’t. He couldn’t help himself; that’s just the way he was. But it was so annoying that pretty soon even a patient and friendly guy like my dad would want him gone; and the next moment, he was missing, and that would be trouble for sure..
Norbie would eat at the table with us, not slopping any more on his lap than the rest of us kids. He would smile when spoken to, and would even answer questions with some degree of intelligence when the mood was on him to cooperate with conversation. But then, twenty minutes later he would be missing, and if we didn’t smell smoke, the house would be thrown into a full panic as we all fanned out through the neighborhood in searching parties. Sooner or later he would be found walking aimlessly through somebody’s backyard, drawing intricate patterns with a bread knife on the leather back seat of his father’s new car, or sitting on a spread of hazel nuts upstairs in our tinder-dry garage attic with a pile of burned out diamond self-strike matches all around him.
I was the one who found him humming to himself up in the room over the garage. He had spilled matches everywhere. I could have lit the stacks of old newspapers and magazines myself and been out of there before he knew what hit him. Norbie would have loved it. He would have sat there and watched while the whole attic went up in flames, and in thirty seconds it would have been too late. Pity I didn’t think of it back then.
Every Christmas season, my father used to pack the family into our rattle-trap old car and drive the twenty miles or so into South Chicago for our annual holiday visit to Norbie’s house. We would get there in the afternoon and stay through dinner. They had a full sized, green felt pool table in the basement. Beyond this, Uncle Norbert’s pride and joy was a huge, high-powered radio in a big cabinet that could pull in stations from all over the world. And, as if this wasn’t enough, Aunt Sophie made a most delicious, deep-dark chocolate cake, and there was always a nice present left under the tree for each of us by Santa .
With a visit like that before us, we would have gone if cousin Norbie ate people and spit out their bones…for a thing to be a monster, do you think it has to know what it is doing? I mean, a tiger may kill a dozen innocent villagers in the jungle before the brave men finally are able to surround it and stab it to death with their spears—we call a beast like that vicious, but is it really a monster? The wives and husbands and mothers of the victims all think so, but maybe they’re just counting their losses. The tiger must be killed; it isn’t a moral issue, it is necessary for survival of the village.
Another thing…don’t you think we make too much of killing our monsters? I mean, the way we shy away from it, like it’s always somebody else’s responsibility. The way we whimper and complain, finding excuses to keep the monster alive. Already we say let the state do it, let the courts do it, let the governor do it…but then, we tie their hands and hamper their consciences. Temporary insanity, society made him do it, the Twinkie defense…once upon a time, a monster could be convicted when found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Now defense lawyers are able to prove the system itself is corrupt. Killers with the financial resources are commonly set free. Yellow-eyed monsters let loose to strike again.
We want the protection of living in a civilized society. What we got made us soft, afraid to go after the tigers, who, in all fairness, are only looking for a square meal. Perhaps if we can’t openly and honestly take responsibility for the monsters among us, we should make it a ritual, as they have done with hunting tigers. We can put on face paint and beat drums and smoke the monsters out of the bush. If the church guys want to get in on it, good—we’ll invent a new sacrament. We’ll have the four big “C’s”…Communion, Confession, Confirmation and Commutation. Gather about for the Commutation. Let’s have a sacred hunt. It’s a Commutation Celebration.
But that’s just me talking, and maybe it’s all that old Vietnam stuff starting to tick. What do I know about what’s right for society? About all I’m sure of, the old An-Eye-For-An-Eye rule is dead. And I guess that kills off the Golden Rule, too, replaced with the laissez faire I’m Okay, You’re Okay.
Maybe that’s okay for some people, but for me, society has gotten too big and impersonal. Today it’s easy to argue away any ties that even scratch a little, much less tie or bind. Still, it’s a little different if you start thinking of one family attacked by a single monster…
I don’t know if I got across how much I liked my Uncle Norbert and my Aunt Sophie. We didn’t really see them much, but when we did they were always so friendly and eager to please that you couldn’t dislike them. Norbie’s dad would run to the kitchen to get us all big glasses of 7-Up practically before our coats were off; and we were guests, we got the best cue sticks and first breaks at the pool table. He ran a printing press down at Continental Can, and was always trying to explain the mysteries of four-color printing to us. Interesting, but not really. And Aunt Sophie… in her youth she had been the family beauty, and she still had the kind of inner presence that glowed. I don’t mean she was mushy or sappy; she was just nice, the way an aunt should be. She never gushed or pinched our cheeks, and then there was the matter of the superb chocolate cake.
At any rate, one cold and icy December about two years after the pirate episode, my father drove us to Chicago for the yearly gathering at Norbie’s house. I remember it well because we got a late start, one of our tires having been discovered flat in our driveway before we even left, and a second one picking up a nail about half-way there.
Dad did most of the work, but I stood there in the roadside slush, carefully putting the nuts in the hubcap so we wouldn’t lose them. My breath made big, steamy puffs, my older sister Mary wiggled her fingers in her ears and stuck out her tongue at me from the warmth of the back seat, and my toes were slowly turning into wet little ice cubes. I tried to convince myself that Mary was jealous, and looked the other way, pretending to enjoy myself out there in the open air with all that great snow around. Boy, would I have loved to hit her with a slushball about then! What with finding a station open on a Sunday that would patch the tire, and then putting the wheel back on, it was nearly dark before we arrived at Norbie’s.
They had one of those 20’s Chicago bungalow houses with a shadowy, deep-overhang front porch, the brick Mid-Western version of a craftsman style home. That year we’d had lots of freeze-and-thaw, and there were icicles big as my wrist dangling from the porch roof as we rang the doorbell.
Inside it was as cozy as I’d come to expect. All my uncles and aunts and their families were already there, and the house was alive with kids and friendly banter. Scholarly Uncle Bob and his wife Clara, flinty Uncle Bill and Tillie and their boisterous Bobby and young Richard, plump Uncle Eddie and his wife Margaret and their son Jean,
tall Uncle George and crisp Caroline with my cousins Robbie and little George.
We went every year, but this time there was something extraordinary in the air. Norbie had been going to a special school, and his mother was terribly proud of him. We had been warned about this by my mother, but I could see it in my Aunt Sophie’s eyes, a cautious, deer-like loving look mingled with a sort of desperate hope. Looking back, it think it was a Mother’s hope that (Please, oh please, dear God) that her son just might be about to regain his normalcy and take his place in the world with the rest of us ordinary kids.
The rumor was that this school had uncovered something incredible: Norbie the crazy one, the scatter-head that we cousins had teased mercilessly for years, actually had some sort of tremendous talent.
I forgot about it entirely from the moment we burst in the front door. Cousin Robbie collared me and we happily bounced the solid and striped balls around the green felt for a few games. Uncle Norbert raised a bit of the Boston Pops on his radio for us. He tried the Vatican, but we got nothing but a series of excited electronic gurgles and whistles. Moscow presented a strange, guttural monologue in between lots of static, and we all laughed like crazy at some Oriental gong music.
Supper was filled with anticipation; us kids for the presents we knew lay in wait under the tree, and poor, doomed Aunt Sophie and Uncle Norbert for something else, for the something else that they wanted more than anything else in the world. So after the main meal and before dessert, my mom collected my sisters and Terrible Tommy and I and positioned us in silent half-dread around the new upright piano that shone in the living room. The multi-colored lights of a short-needled Christmas tree glowed behind us and were reflected in the dark sheen of the piano’s surface like symbols of hope for a new and brighter day.
And then my cousin, Norbie-the-fool, was beckoned from his room. He seemed in a surly mood and it took a lot of coaxing, but he finally advanced to take his seat in the center of the gathered crowd. He gave us cousins a glance that might have passed for a certain aloofness. My mother shot me a totally unnecessary warning look. She needn’t have bothered, none of us was going to do anything to jeopardize the impending gift-dispensing ceremonies, and I personally was immobilized by curiosity.
I didn’t know what Norbie was thinking, but then, I never did. He cracked his knuckles, and they popped with a loud, startling sound that made us kids all jealous. He stared for a long moment at the out-of focus lights reflected in the polished walnut surface of the piano. His mother nodded encouragement, and he started to play.
It was some intricate classical passage, and his long, bony fingers raced impossibly over the keyboards. I don’t know how to tell you any other way than to say the piano sang! It was magnificent! We stood in awe as my uncle’s small living room was filled with rich and wonderful sounds. We were breathless, the lot of us, grown-ups and children alike, and we all just gaped at Norbie. I didn’t know it then, but it was Rachmaninoff, and it was a piece Norbie had heard only once on his father’s big radio. I forgot it was Norbie; I was swept away, thrilled that some one, that anyone could play that way.
I don’t know how long he played. I’m sure it couldn’t have been a minute. But in that brief time I saw the love flowing from his mother and the quiet, almost unbelieving, look of pride on his father’s worn face.
You see! They were saying. You see, we were right after all to keep him, to protect him from society! They would have ruined him, destroyed him in that bad place where they put people away! Look at our son, our son, the genius!
It couldn’t last, and it didn’t. Norbie stopped in mid-flight, like a heart-shot elk or a sea gull striking an invisible glass barrier high over Lake Michigan. There was a moment of silence, and then he destroyed it all with a sudden crash, his fists smashing down with no distinction between the ivory and the ebony keys. We all heard what happened next. You couldn’t miss it.
“Fuck!” Norbie slurred petulantly. He had stopped the music where his father had stopped it when he’d switched from Rachmaninoff to the Vatican, Tokyo or Madrid.
“Fuck!” He screamed, repeating the forbidden word clear as a bell, head down and pounding the piano harder and harder with the palms of his hands, “fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-FUCK!”
We kids sat or stood like statues, too stunned to grin or take any pleasure whatsoever from Norbie’s latest episode. We were Catholic kids. We’ve been told by serious nuns who had dedicated their lives to the baby Jesus that anybody who said that word would burn forever in the fires of hell.
My shattered aunt and uncle made some excuses, the adults in the family moved quickly around them to say how great it had been, and we all moved back to the dining room table for the famous chocolate cake, and then on to shuffle through the presents. I remember a later moment, as we were getting into our coats and boots. I overheard the pathetic sounds from another room. First, my Uncle Norbert yelling at Norbie; and then my Aunt Sophie yelling at my uncle.
It was a few days after that when my mother told me, with the serious tone that meant Family Secret, that Norbie was the product of a difficult, almost impossible birth. Mom didn’t like to talk about things like that, and I could see she could hardly say the words. She managed to tell me it was what they called ‘a dry birth.’ The bag had broken early, and Norbie’s head got stuck halfway out. The pain was enormous, and after many hours my aunt had weakened to where they feared for her life. It was then that the doctor resorted to a forceps, and in this way was able to pull him through. Mom said this was the reason Norbie had such a strange, elongated head, and why he was a little unusual.
The way I remember it, in those days we were asked to live in a somewhat simpler world than that which I personally see around me today. There was good and bad, honor and shame, reward and punishment. God ruled everything and everybody with an iron fist. Men were put on earth to suffer, to work hard, and to follow his commands so eternal rewards might be won. Each person was given his ‘fair share’ of hardships, and enough grit to live up to the tasks. In other words, you and I could both get to heaven. Anybody could, if you worked hard enough at it. Norbie was just my aunt and uncle’s fair share.
Someone who didn’t have to live with Norbie every day might have considered him a borderline case, one of those unfortunate have-nots who, with a great deal of familial support, could live and function at home. But for Norbert and Sophie, he must have been a daily hell on earth. I have the feeling my uncle would have institutionalized him, but my aunt wouldn’t hear of it, not even after the famous piano recital. He was her son and they would care for him at home, and that was that.
I think that sometimes we can become so concerned about the ones we love that we don’t pay enough attention to ourselves. I know that’s cliché, but that’s actually what happened to my dear Aunt Sophie. She had these little lumps growing inside her breasts, but what with all the things to do she never got around to having them checked out. By the time she did get concerned, they weren’t so little any more and it was just a little bit too late.
I saw her once before she died. It was only a year or two after the piano incident, and yet she was wasted and frail, and looked old as grandma had looked the year before she died. The cancer raced like wildfire through her body, and a few weeks later she was dead.
Unfortunately, Uncle Norbert loved her very much; he must have made one of those deathbed promises, because the King of the Bathroom Pyros stayed at home with what was left of the family. I can’t even begin to guess at the sacrifices my uncle, my cousin Rich and his little sister made over the next ten years or so. How many times did they have to rescue Norbie from burning his bed, the basement, the attic, his beloved bathroom, the little brick bungalow, their entire neighborhood on Chicago’s south side. It seemed that every month or so I heard another whispered story, the latest Norbie News. Uncle Norbert finally had a major heart attack, and yet, even while he was limping around and trying to take it easy, he still wouldn’t give in. He stayed true to his promise and Norbie stayed at home.
I’d always liked Norbie’s younger brother Rich. He was Terrible Tommy’s age, a couple of years younger than I was, but he had his dad’s easy-going ways. He was in his early twenties when I came back from Nam. I was decompressing fairly well from the war, working as a junior copywriter at Leo Burnett Advertising Agency. I was burning reality on a steady diet of Contacs and alcohol while I pounded out commercials for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, Nestle’s Crunch and Quik, the chocolate flavored milk mix. There was an opening in the projection department, the kind of little opportunity that could just possibly lead to somewhere, and I thought of Rich right away. I talked to the head of projection, and he said he’d hold the job open.
I think Rich appreciated the offer, but something held him back. I could see it in his eyes. He couldn’t commit; he had other responsibilities. He said he would let me know. Time slid by, and somebody else got the job. By this time, Norbie’s little sister had the good sense to marry and get out of that house. But Rich was left there, taking care of his dad…and Norbie.
Then Uncle Norbert’s heart gave out for good, and Rich finally had his older brother put away. But it was too late. Rich was running a tavern at that time, and would have been fairly successful, but he was drinking most of the profits. It was the only way he could find to calm his nerves. But the problem was, hard liquor was burning away the lining in his throat. The doctors warned him a time or two, and he had one scare that they handled at Little Company of Mary Hospital…but when the really bad bleeding started, he drowned with his lungs full of his own blood before they could get him to the hospital.
Norbie, Norbie, Norbie…I know you didn’t mean any of the things you did. You’re not really responsible any more than the yellow-eyed tiger down at the water hole who maims for the sweet taste of meat. But you were a monster, and you killed your own family just as surely as if you had put a bullet squarely between each of their eyes…and if I had it to do all over, I’d make sure you went flying down our old stairway so fast and hard that you’d never get up again. Some people will tell you that’s murder, pure and simple. But, knowing what I know now, I think I could live with it.