Wiseass

by Brendyn Schneider

My Uncle John’s a wiseass. He always has been. My mother says that when they were kids, they’d be jerking around in church and the older people would turn and around to shush them.

“Shut up!” he’d sneer. “Drop dead.”

He was 11.

At 6, he was charged with escorting their blind grandfather to Babicz Deli. The old boy had been walking up and down Kiefer Street for decades but in the 50s, the town had put in curbs, so he needed a guide to tell him when to step up and down. Payment for the escort service was a pocketful of candy. As soon as my uncle made his collection, he was out the front door and down the street, leaving his grandfather to navigate the curbs alone.

When John got back home, his mother asked, “Hey, where’s Gramps?”

“He’s on his way.”

Growing up, I always knew him as the uncle in San Francisco but he’d come back to Long Island for visits. One afternoon, my older brother Ed came home from McDonalds and our uncle asked what he ate.

“Oh, Uncle John, I was so hungry. I had a Big Mac, extra large fries, rings, another cheeseburger and a large Coke.”

“That’s great, Ed. Why didn’t you just ask them to take you in the back so you could rub your face right on the grill? Save a step…”

Now, the true wiseass, the devout wiseass, knows that there’s more to it than gibes and sheer nerve. On a later visit, a few of us were in my dining room, playing Monopoly. Uncle Bob (John’s brother) was drinking pretty heavily that night and I remember Ed and I being upset about it. Uncle John picked up on it.

“What’s wrong guys?” he asked when Uncle Bob was out of the room.

“It’s just bothering me that he’s drinking,” Ed said, “but I don’t wanna tell him what to do.”

Uncle John looked him in the eye, the way the adults looked at one another.

“Hey, listen. You’re upset because you love him. You care about him, and it’s your house. Let him know.”

Ed chuckled nervously.

“It’s alright.”

I’ll always recall the tension in the air when Uncle Bob walked back into the room. I tore my eyes from my little green house on Baltic.

“Uncle Bob,” Ed’s face was white, “I don’t think you should drink anymore tonight.”

Our uncle was upset. He put the beer down and left the room. I was 13 – still young enough to feel that if you said something that upset a grown-up, you were probably out of line. At 15, Ed wasn’t too far removed from that notion either.

A few days later, Uncle Bob called us. He didn’t yell. He wasn’t mad. He respected our opinion and apologized. It was Uncle John who taught us that it was alright to stand up to an adult and that when you walk through that fear, a measure of self-respect was waiting for you on the other side.

In the spring of 2003, my head was still cluttered from a breakup the previous fall. I called Uncle John.

“I’m not as doomed out as I was,” I told him, “but, man, some days…”

“Well,” he said, “here’s what I want you to do, Brendy (he’s never paid attention to that final “n” in my name). In your mind, okay, think of a giant book. Then I want you to stab it with a knife, right through the front cover. Now, when you open it, the first few pages are destroyed but the knife didn’t damage the whole book, right? As you get further from the front, there’s less and less evidence that the damage even took place. The tears give way to indentations then maybe, what, folds until your pages are clean again but further along, right? The story, your story is a little bit more experienced.”

“Wow, Uncle John. How’d you come up with that one?”

“Some friggin’ girl tore my heart out in my twenties, and that’s what I thought of to get me through.”

It’s no surprise that these days, he’s a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with a practice on Long Island and a master’s degree on the wall. He isn’t one of those “mmm-hmm,” steepled-hands-under-smooth-chin “professionals.” He’s a wiseass. Accent on the wise.

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More stories by Brendyn Schneider can be found at brendynschneider.com © 2011-2012, Brendyn Schneider, reprinted by Dadity.com with permission. Use or reprint not authorized without permission of the author.