This is Joe. Joe, he kept saying to himself, Joseph Robert Stravinsky. Junior. Hi, I'm Joe. No. Hey, Joe. No. Jope--with a little, barely discernable---peh--- at the end, as on a business call, with the certainty of a hasty 'nope'---Jope (while raising the face and pressing the top lip up a bit with the bottom one) Jope here. Joe, devoid of the antecedent 'Uncle': insurmountable, Patrick thought, impossible, while his Uncle Joe continued, left arm, beat, beet, red out the window, flailing out the strand of his tank top, a lever gone haywire, index and middle finger pinched together, not quite a pantomimed gun, wiping out whole houses behind it:
"Then pall ova ya' fahkin' dushbag---Pat, I tell ya'---I'm gunna snap this turkey's fuckin' gizzard---you better be ready kid!?!---Hey---hey you----pull the fuck ova, huh!?! I'm gonna…"
He smiles. He smiles and softens in the interims. Patrick envied this control, it wasn't a 'watch this,' it was an absolute and instant acclimation, dual and fluent citizenship between a gale of an exhaust smoke bomb guising enemies and a truck-cab with a sun-glassed and stoned pudgy nephew sucking on a blue dum-dum. Would the laughter stop without the 'Uncle'? Was Uncle funny? Would this be ugly? Was it ugly? If it was, what was Patrick, and if it wasn't, what was Patrick ? Moving on, Patrick though, moving on---now!
Patrick could empathize with the man in the rearview ahead of them: beady eyes, hairline obviously receding---receded. His Uncle would rip him out of the car. He would hit him with the tire iron. He would epitomize white trash and spit through the gaps of missing teeth, accidently, right before he punched or bit the guy, or covered his face in vice grip starfish because he happened to turn at a four way stop---when he was supposed to---two townships back. The newspaper would read Joseph Stravinsky, but the jail cell would be filled with someone else, and Patrick was never eager to see who, so he never went.
Patrick wondered how long this would last, it having been a year since he rode in a vehicle with his Uncle. He would die soon, if not soon, young. He undermined age. Patrick imagined these bouts in a man with flabby skin. Things would break, and the broken bones would be blamed on the person being hollered at, and the hollering from the floor would still be terrifying (what language he used to preempt violence---barbaric yawps---verbalized growls---a crazed, Medieval poet in his lusty youth) while he crawled to an object he could lift to throw, yet dense enough to hurt, and then weird plots of sabotage would get built during commercials, and his cousin would say, 'I'll take care of it,' and he wouldn't for some time, and then he would and then his Uncle would shame the cousin for not minding his own business and not getting over things and sit in his chair, curse the 'morons' on the news and tell his son he was a good boy for doing some type of yard work well.
"Hold the fahkin wheel."
Patrick grabbed the wheel with his left hand while his Uncle hit the gas.
"In the otha lane---get in the otha lane!---we're gunna get right up there."
Patrick veered into the opposite lane while his Uncle floored the gas pedal trying to get as far out the window as he could. He should have been a wrestler:
"…that dick-beaked face ayours ain't never had sores like I'm gonna give it…"
Road Rage Stravinsky. No, it needed alliteration: Joe "The… Maybe he could go with his whole chef-thing, he used to cook, and Patrick used to cook with him, and the line, being one-hundred and forty degrees and all, and Uncle Joe wearing his sunglasses to hide his kulattapinned pupils from Jimbo, sweat pouring---pouring---down his cheeks, mouth perfectly pliable for showing where all the teeth would be…It didn't matter what his name would be, but his move would have to be 'The Jumbalaya,' or maybe he could be 'Joe Jerky.' It was the Stravinsky that caused problems. Patrick tried to think of a Polish wrestler, but kept arriving at 'slinky,' 'dinky,' 'pinky', which, surprisingly, were also frequently used insults in his Uncle's repertoire.
He was glad they were out of Toma. His Uncle was not the craziest bastard in Toma. In Toma, Patrick knew he would've been scared, he was nervous to begin with in Toma, but if they were in Toma, the guy in front of them wouldn't have been looking for refuge in some downtown common, or convenient store parking lot, there wouldn't have been help, nor spectacle, but just down turned heads; the guy would've pulled over long ago, or there would've been a car that pulled up behind us, or we would've been led down some street where guys would've been waiting on the porch. That's what happened in '96---'96 was…
"Ova---ova---didn't ya see that car---who taught you how to fuckin' drive---get ya hands off the wheel---off the fahkin' wheel, june-yah."
And they drove, back beneath the speed limit. The same man was still in front of them, speeding, getting farther and farther ahead, but they were just coasting now. His Uncle adjusted his hat and fixed the rearview, changed the radio station.
"What channel the game on?"
Patrick was laughing, a blatant laugh that needed room to get out the window. His Uncle shoved him playfully, and then he laughed too. Patrick thought this was amazing and wondered how to condemn Uncle Joe, saying Joseph Robert Stravinsky over and over again, trying to drain its blood; he had tried to, he had tried to fight with him and he got knocked, he had tried to talk and got knocked, he had tried to refuse and got knocked harder than either of the two other times. He even tried to do so by staying away from his Uncle Joe for over a year, but even then he found himself laughing at memories of these occasions. It was only twenty-percent of the time that fisticuffs actually connected, that meaning, six---eight? Patrick didn't know, he knew that this was a sort of pastime, this hazing, this road-raging, after work ritual.
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