I had a cool uncle. You know, the up-front kind of cool, the go-to guy for telling it like it is. If you had an uncomfortable question and you didn’t want to slug through all the antsiness and grown-up wordplay your parents would respond with, you went to him. He was that cool uncle your parents try to steer you away from at family gatherings, but that just made him cooler.

Uncle Jeff was a human powder keg, both in shape and attitude. My Mom explained to me since I was little what Tourette’s Syndrome was solely to explain his behavior. It didn’t, really, and I’d go on to find out there was a reason for that.

I remember when I was very young, maybe five years old, he showed up for the family Thanksgiving party. Uninvited, of course. My mother, normally the friendliest woman you’d ever meet, would go out of her way to not only ‘forget’ his invitation, but proceed to make sure everyone in the family knew not to mention it to him. The cover story was “We’ll be out of town.” Wrought-iron alibi there, Ma.

Of course, my family’s not very good at keeping secrets, which is why more than half of them are in prison for heroin distribution.

Uncle Jeff damn near busted the door down to make his grand entrance and bellowed a hearty, “SURPRISE, MOTHERFUCKERS,” then proceeded straight for the white meat. He didn’t even bother with a plate, he just stood next to the table shoving dry turkey breast into his heavily bearded mouth and forcing himself into the conversation.

I drifted off up the stairs to do whatever it was that five-year-olds do alone at Thanksgiving parties (my cousins and siblings were all too young to be entertaining at this point), and came clomping down the stairs a few minutes later upon realizing I hadn’t seen my Dad at the table.

“Hey, Uncle Jeff, where’s Dad?”

“Probably strokin’ his gremlin down at the Mansterpiece theater, that fucking faggot,” he said through a thick cloud of cheap cigar smoke. There was usually no smoking in the house, but I realized early on that rules don’t seem to apply to Uncle Jeff. I know now it’s because he is a psychotic juggernaut, but at the time I just thought it’s because he was well respected.

“… Oh,” I said, and drifted back off.

I came back downstairs when the door slammed and warmly greeted my father before inquiring about where he got a gremlin and why he needed to go to the movies to pet it.

Dad was beyond puzzled.

“What’re you talking about, bud?”

“Uncle Jeff said that you had to go to the movies so you could pet your gremlin.”

“I don’t understand.”

“What’s a faggot?”

That seemed to click it home for Pops. He stormed into the kitchen to confront his older brother.

“Jeff, what did you say to Ivan?”

“Hold on,” he said before slamming a double shot of cheap whiskey. Everyone else had fruity mixed drinks or beers. It wouldn’t surprise me if he brought the bottle himself. He winced, hissed a little, then turned his attention back to his brother.

“What?”

“What did you say to Ivan?”

“Oh. He asked me where you were. I told him you were jerkin’ your gherkin’ down at that gay place on 309.”

A hush settled over the kitchen, broken only by the raucous laughter of one of my far-too-drunk aunts.

“Jeff, I don’t appreciate you talking to my son that way, especially about me.”

“Dan, I don’t appreciate you sucking cocks all the time.”

“I was at the fucking shooting range!”

At this point, this was the first time in my life I’d ever heard my father drop the F-Bomb. My jaw dropped.

“Is that what you tinkerbells call it now?”

Like most of their exchanges, this ended in a fistfight. My mother would always wail and usher me out of the room when the eldest Nikolayevich brothers started exchanging blows. They’d make a great show of the apology later, and continue to tolerate each other for the rest of the night to “set a good example for the kids”. Seeing as I was the only kid of the family who wasn’t still eating strained peas from a jar and shitting my pull-ups, I suppose it was mostly for my benefit. And whenever he wasn’t fighting my dad, I thought Uncle Jeff was awesome.

He was a plumber. Mom would call him occasionally if the sink was leaking or the toilet was clogged. She wouldn’t tell Dad because he’d try to fix it himself and make an utter catastrophe of things. Electronics was Dad’s gig. Slogging through shit was Uncle Jeff’s department.

Mom would page him from time to time and he’d show up and make the same weird innuendo about “cleaning her pipes” twenty or thirty times. You’d think after a while she’d get used to it and lose that expression of vague discomfort, or laugh it off. Not Ma. She just twiddled her thumbs and bore it until the sink stopped dripping and Uncle Jeff left.

I remember I had just gotten out of the bathroom. My mother had left the room, presumably to avoid repeated propositioning, and Uncle Jeff called to me from under the sink.

“Hey, Ivan, come here.”

He whispered, “I don’t really have Tourette’s, kiddo. I’ve been faking for 40 years.”

Then he pulled out as switchblade and popped it open in one fluid motion.

“Tell anyone and I’ll cut out your eyes.”

I looked at him quizzically.

He burst into laughter.

Being 5, I joined him, figuring it was just adult humor that I didn’t yet understand. For years, I remained blissfully unaware of how fucked up and psychologically scarring that particular meeting actually was.

The peak of his weirdness, though, it had to have been when we were at the family reunion out in the country. Uncle Jeff offered to host it, which was weird enough. With his share of Grandpa’s limited inheritance, he’d invested in a few acres of farmland.

“Fuck this working shit,” I remember him saying, “I’m’a grow my own food. Live of the fat of the land and shit!”

He remained a plumber, however. He had set up a bunch of picnic tables on the land in front of his farm, some little cloth pavilions to keep bugs out of the food, the whole nine yards. Inconveniently, I was at that phase where kids demand to know where they came from, and my parents had been very gracefully dodging the question for about a week. I knew what I had to do.

I tugged on a pocket of his khaki cargo shorts. He looked down, slammed whatever was left in his bright red picnic cup, then crouched down next to me.

“What’s up, sport?”

“Uncle Jeff, where do babies come from?”

He smiled. “Do you really want to know?”

I nodded.

“Alright. Come with me.”

He took my hand and led me into the tool shed, where he had no actual farming equipment aside from a shovel and a rake. He did, however, have a quad. I sat in front of him and we drove out to one of the plots he’d already planted.

What he'd planted was a field of babies, infants of every race and shade, their little melon heads popping up from the dirt, some crying, some sleeping peacefully.

“Do you understand now, kid?”

I blinked rapidly.

“Babies come from… underground?”

“Hell yes! You grow ‘em! Just need some TLC, is all. I feed ‘em strained carrots all the fucking time! They love it. Gonna be a helluva harvest, I’ll tell you.”

“What’s a harvest?”

“Aroundabout October, I’m going to hire Sancho and those crazy fucking spic gangsters and we’re going to pick the newborns off the baby trees.”

I nodded sagely. “Oh. Alright. Let’s go back to the party!”

“Okey doke, kiddo. Keep this on the downlow though, huh? I don’t want the whole goddamn family to come running up in here stealing my crops.”

“Okay Uncle Jeff!”

Of course, I mentioned this whole affair to my parents, who dismissed it as a child with an overactive imagination.

Uncle Jeff was arrested a month later for kidnapping and child cruelty. In school I became the kid with the crazy uncle who got arrested. I remember, seven years later, I was eating dinner with my first girlfriend’s family. Apparently, they hadn’t known my last name. When I told them, the meal became incredibly awkward. I found out later her little brother had been one of the abducted baby seeds on Uncle Jeff’s farm. Needless to say, she stopped returning my calls.

I haven’t seen Uncle Jeff in almost fifteen years. My Dad mentioned something about him being up for parole, though… I think I’ll look him up when he gets out. That baby farm thing… he just wasn’t careful enough. We’ll know better this time.

Damnit, you can’t blame a guy for chasing his dreams.