My Other Life Read Free

the book people knew until Uncle Hal laughingly told them that these men had all won the Nobel Prize for "lechera-chore—excuse me!"
    With the other party guests he took a different line. If they talked about art, he changed the subject and complained about the high price of cat litter, or claimed he had never missed a single episode of
Sesame Street,
or wasn't it time we espoused a keener interest in the future of the Kurds?
    "I didn't hear your poem," he said, tottering like a bear with his cheeks blown out and facing the man who had just recited the poem, "because I had a mouthful of crackers and I like to hear them crunching loud in my ears as I chew."
    They were Uneeda Biscuits, he said. Weed Wacker, Beard Buster, Froot Loops, Panty Shields, Odor Eaters, Sno-Pake, and Duck Tape were other names he liked saying.
    The Duck Tape he used for mending his glasses, and there was so much it made them lopsided. He squirted oil on his shoes, and boasted about how cheap it was, until his shoes caught fire when someone accidentally threw a match. He bought two-gallon jars of mayonnaise that were labeled "For Restaurants and Institutions." One Christmas he gave my forty-three-year-old aunt a baby doll with a crack through its wooden head and told her it was very valuable.
    That same year he gave me a pair of nutcrackers. They were rusty, but Uncle Hal said, "Made in Germany. The finest nutcrackers are made in Germany."
    For three years Uncle Hal had worn nothing but black clothes and—someone said—a cape. I never saw the cape. He was expert at table tennis, pool, basketball, and chess. He claimed to know the obscure rules of various card games. He was unbeatable at checkers and tic-tac-toe. He said he had once eaten kangaroo meat, smoke-dried, on the Gulf of Carpentaria, in Australia. You would have to marvel at this, because if you doubted it, he would go silent and vanish again.
    He could not swim, and once, out quahogging, he stepped in a mudhole and almost drowned. "Quicksand!" he said afterwards. He was afraid of spiders and loud noises—thunder in particular—and said he was disgusted by the sight of other people's feet. He hated high winds, and after a whole summer of wind he climbed on his roof and fired his shotgun into the gusts. Ice cream, he said, was his weakness. He would drive fifteen miles to a place that sold frozen pudding flavor. ("Howard Hughes was addicted to banana nut," he said, "which is another difference between us.") He had a fondness also for pumpkins, lobsters, and pistachios ("It means 'grinning' in Farsi, as you know"). He often snacked on dog biscuits.
    He had a habit of leaving notes for you—stuck in the window or shoved under the door or squeezed beneath the windshield wiper. The messages said
I totally disagree with you,
or
Do not make any attempt to communicate with me,
or
I will be unavailable until November.
The simple message was hurtful enough, and then you realized that in order for him to get the message to you in this way, he had to sneak over to your house in the darkness, sometime between two o'clock and five o'clock that morning.
    "I'm busy! I've got a million things to do!" he would shriek just before he left us. He had no wife, he had no children, he had no job, he lived alone, he never traveled. We could not imagine what he was busy doing.
Don't put Uncle Hal on the spot
was a family caution.
    On one occasion Uncle Hal began to reminisce, to an Irishman, about Dublin, Ireland. He named specific streets and pubs where he had drunk pints of ale, and churches where he had prayed. He lamented that it was all gone, replaced by cheapness and fakery.
    Afterwards it gave me a pang to recall the look on that Irishman's face as he listened. But some years later I discovered that Uncle Hal had never been to Ireland, nor had he been to Australia. He said he could speak Swahili, but since no one else in the family knew how, there was no way of verifying it. "Conversational