My cousin Fred is pretty fucking big.
He is not overly tall, 6′ 0″ or 6′ 1″, tops. And while he weighs over 200 lbs., the weight is stretched over a large-boned frame, so he doesn’t look fat at all. He is just one of those people who exude bigness. When you are around him, you think of this big person you have with you.
Fred is just plain big, in some ways. His feet are size 16, and he has most of his footwear custom-made, which he says is expensive. According to his first wife, a clinical psychologist who was crazy as hell, there is something to the foot size/dick size corollary; although I don’t remember anyone asking her about it at the time. Fred shipped her off to the loony bin years ago, and good riddance.
Fred and I grew up in different towns, but we saw each other fairly often, and we were pretty close, as kids. Not as close as brothers – we didn’t spend enough time together for that – but I would imagine we were closer than most first cousins, and we still are. Fred is one of those people who, whenever his name comes up, this warm feeling comes over me. He is about my age, he is a good guy, he thinks like me, and we have had lots of fun together over the years.
One time we were staying down at the beach for several days, in a rented cabin. Me, several of my school friends, one of my brothers, and Fred. It was probably Spring Break, I know we were around 18 or so. One night we were having this big party at our cabin, mostly friends of ours who were staying at the beach, too. Along the way, Fred OD’d on beer, and passed out on the floor in the middle of the cabin. No problem, people just stepped over him, or around him, and the party carried on. At one point three or four guys were standing there drinking beer, looking over Fred, and dispassionately discussing his present state. “I wonder if he’ll come to before the end of the party?” “How many beers do you think he had?” “I hope he wakes up before he pisses himself, that would be kind of nasty.” Then one of the guys, wholly unintentionally, dropped an almost full can of Natural Light, right on Fred’s head. It made a sound I heard clearly, over the music and conversation, all the way across the room. But Fred hardly stirred. A halo of beer and foam formed around his head on the rug, and someone said he would probably wake up and wonder if he’d gone to heaven. Up to then, I’d pretty much always called him Fredward, or sometimes Freddy if I was in a rush. But from that night on, my cousin was universally known as Fred the Hammerhead, or just Hammerhead. He seemed to like the nickname all right. Not that it mattered, we would’ve called him that regardless.
Fred was with us the night of the phosphorous ocean. That was an early spring night around that same time when a bunch of us were drinking at night down on the beach on Bolivar Peninsula, and a rare incursion of phosphorous caused the whitecaps of the breaking waves to glow greenish-white in the moonlight, shooting right to left across the horizon each time a wave broke. If you dragged your foot across the sand, the track where you’d dragged it would glow. At the time, none of us had ever seen that before, plus we’d been drinking for hours. The night, especially in retrospect, took on an almost surreal quality. I sometimes wondered if it had really happened at all. People who were there still talk about it wistfully. Most of us ran around like idiots, screaming and playing in the glowing water and sand. Meanwhile, Fredward went to his Silverado and reached behind the seat and pulled out one of those folding shovels like you’d see in an army surplus store. I’m not sure why he carried it, but it did not really surprise me that he did. Anyway, while the rest of us were acting like retarded fools, Fred calmly shoveled several hundred pounds of the glowing sand into the bed of his truck. He figured he’d take some home, spread it around his flower beds and such. Conversation starter. Fred was always thinking ahead like that.
I was with him the day his sister died. She was killed on the beach highway, on her way home. She wasn’t driving, it was her and three of her friends, and they were all pretty drunk, I heard; as was the guy who crossed the center line and hit them head on. And probably a majority of everyone else on that highway that day. Everybody involved in the wreck died at the scene, basically. We had been down at the beach for the day, and Fred and I headed back to town 45 minutes to an hour after his sister and her friends did. When we came up on the wreck, we didn’t know what it was at first. We were freaking out because there were cops everywhere. We were both pretty loaded, and we thought we’d come up on a DPS sobriety check roadblock. But it wasn’t; and when we saw what was left of the light blue Cutlass her friend had been driving, we knew what had happened. I don’t know my immediate reaction, I just remember that my emotions at the time were dulled by being intoxicated. So were Fred’s; I distinctly remember him being almost stoic when he found out his sister had been somewhere in the tangled mess of that Cutlass. Even though they were essentially D.O.A., Fred’s sister and another girl were life-flighted to UTMB. So we jumped back in his truck and turned around and hauled ass to Galveston. By the time we got there, his sis was long gone. I remember sitting in the hospital while Fred called his parents and let them know what had happened. We were sobered up by then, and I felt myself getting emotional, but Fred’s voice never broke. I admired him a lot for that. His little sister has been gone now 31 years, but I can still remember parts of that day very clearly. Too much, too soon.
Fred lives in South Carolina now, in Georgetown, near the ocean. He’s a civil engineer. We don’t see each other much anymore, but we keep in touch by e-mail and the occasional phone call. Fred is a big Astros fan, always has been, and he tries to follow the team as best he can; but he says even with his MLB package and the internet, it is not the same as living close by. I called him last week, on his birthday, and at one point he asked me, “Are things as bad as they seem?” Yes, I told him, maybe worse. That’s what he thought, he said, but he’d hoped he was wrong. But, he can see it all the way from fucking South Carolina. Fuck.
While talking last week, we remembered the night of the phosphorous ocean for some reason, and I asked him what he ever did with all that sand he’d loaded in his truck that night. He laughed and said some of it is in the pitchers mound on the AAA field at the Little League park in his hometown. The sand had never glowed at all after that night on the beach, and I was glad to hear that. What happened that night, if it happened, was fleeting. Only the people who were there are left to tell the story.
Fred’s sister didn’t make it past age 15, and so I will always remembered her as young and pretty and a little bit wild and really funny; and not as what she might have become, good or bad. I sometimes wonder if she was ever even here at all, if I didn’t dream her up like I sometimes think I dreamt up that glowing night on the beach, so many years ago.
But I didn’t dream her up, and I feel like I will see her again someday. On a night when the phosphorescent ocean is glowing in the background, the gleam shooting like lightning across the horizon, as the endless waves keep breaking and breaking, out beyond the first sandbar, before rolling up and washing over our bare feet and toes, as we stand together there on the beach. I will be with her there on the beach that night, and I will put my arm around her when she shivers in the wind, and I will say something clever, and then I will listen to her terrific laugh. Fred will be there, too, of course; sitting in his lawn chair next to his truck, drinking a beer and listening to the Astros game on the radio. I’ll be able to hear the broadcast in the background, over the sound of the breaking waves. The team will have pulled out another stellar win that night, moving decisively into first place.
Yes. From my dreams to God’s ears.
No one hears his lonely sighs
There are no blankets where he lies
In all his deepest dreams he flies
With sweet Melissa
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