by Byron Lane
In her pink socks, I was spinning in a circle, my arms free, my head rushing, the song’s simple melody imbuing me with drunk abandon as I spun, spun, spun, and then came crashing down onto the floor with a thud as part of my finale. Dad was instantly yelling.
“WHAT THE HELL IS ALL THAT BANGING AROUND UP THERE? CHARLIE, GET DOWN HERE NOW!” He was screaming for me from that recliner, with that crushed green material, I can still smell it, a football game blaring on the TV—football, his other passion, second only to TV news. Fear crept into me like a venom, but in my dizzy euphoria I assured myself: I can take care of him, don’t worry. I was thinking, I’ll just appease him, apologize, and be back to my routine for Ed McMahon in a few seconds. Funny, the times we feel brave. Funny, the moments we think we’re strong. I didn’t even have hair in my armpits yet, but so earnest was I in my artful mission that I wasn’t careful. Young courage—not always helpful.
Before going downstairs, I pulled the legs of my sweatpants as far down to my ankles as they would go to cover up the pink socks. I put on slippers to cover the rest. I was thinking, even then, that I needed to hide things from him, to protect myself from him.
I approached his recliner like the hand of the king approaches the throne, massaging the space closing in between us as if it were a living being. Finally before him, his gaze turning to me, I realized suddenly I was not an agent of a royal court but more like the jester, a clown, and the balls I was juggling scattered at my feet, rolling quickly away from me, away from him, smartly saving themselves.
Dad looked down at my socks as if they called out to him, as if bait on a fishing line, as if the hook were caught painfully deep in his gums. “YOU LIKE DRESSING IN GIRL CLOTHES?!” he screamed. He stood. He moved toward me.
Walking backward, I felt the socks, those pink terrors on my feet, moments ago sliding me across the floor in ecstasy, in another life, now sandpaper in my slippers.
“COME HERE!” Dad yelled, grabbing my Star Search wardrobe by the shoulder and lifting me slightly, bullying me to his bedroom. “UNDRESS!” he yelled. The same voice in my head that inspired my dancing had now turned on me, was now dark and cruel, and I obeyed it as it told me to obey him. I pulled off my sweatshirt, ashamed anew that I had no hair on my body, that I was nothing like the other kids at school who were growing their tufts of masculinity here and there.
When I stood shirtless before him, he yelled, “ALL OF IT!”
I pulled off my slippers and socks. I pulled off my sweatpants. I stood before him in my underwear, tattered, old, tarnished tighty-whities. He stared at me, the pores of his face so clear, and I knew he meant it. All of it. And I awkwardly slid down my underwear. They hooked on my right heel and I nearly toppled yanking them off. I couldn’t look up at him.
“Go get a pair of your mother’s panties,” he said.
I turned away from him and toward Mom’s dresser, the drawer where I borrowed her socks still open the slightest bit. I knew her underwear drawer was the bottom right; I knew where all her things were, my tears having dotted them like breadcrumbs in my secret visits to this dresser in the months after she passed. I chose a pair of her panties.
“PUT THEM ON,” he said.
I slipped them onto my body, eager to hide my nakedness. I had to hold them up so they didn’t fall off my thin frame.
“YOU LIKE THAT?” he yelled. “YOU LIKE DRESSING LIKE A GIRL?!”
I was utterly paralyzed.
A football game blaring.
And he left me there, crying.
He left me there, seeds of failure and disappointment and separateness not just planted inside me but blossoming, with roots stretching out, reaching deep.
And I never did make it onto Star Search. Another of my life’s failures. Now my literal star search—for Kathi Kannon’s employ—seems ended in flames, too.
I’m deep in expensive therapy about all this. Every session is a buffet of my childhood, my career, my suicide fantasies. My therapist is a petite woman, mostly a listener—rarely does she give me advice or conversation, preferring instead to stare at me, even after I ask a direct question, waiting for me to find the answer on my own. She has a habit of, occasionally and without impetus, quickly glancing down at her clothing, pulling her sweater closed, brushing flat the folds of her dress, clutching her collar, as if by some act of God one of her breasts or an edge of her nipple may be randomly, mysteriously exposed. Perhaps it’s her clue, her signaling what she really wants most from me. She wants me to bare my vital organs, my breast, or what’s beneath it, my heart. She’s my Therapista, a warrior of my inner world.
Therapista says what you don’t discuss is what you fear most.
Therapista says everything comes out eventually.
Therapista says everyone we meet is a teacher.
In our weekly sessions, I sometimes play her own trick on her, staring at her as if I’m confused or mute, waiting for her to elaborate. “What I mean,” she says, “is that the slow driver in front of us is teaching us patience. The stressed-out waitress is teaching us the merits of inner peace. The broken heater is teaching us to find other ways to stay warm.”
I don’t mention to her that a broken heater can be deadly.
Therapista wants me to journal, to track my thoughts and feelings. “Get a little notepad,” she says. “Or take notes in your phone. Just to get thoughts out of your head.”
Hey, Siri, take a note. Are you there? Are you the one person listening?
Therapista says it’s a friendly universe, that things happen for you, not to you, that if I don’t get the Kathi Kannon job it’s only because something even bigger and better is waiting for me.
Hey, Siri, are you getting all this crap?
I always nod and smile. Even when Therapista is wrong—the universe has failed me, Kathi Kannon has escaped me, and there is nothing that can replace her.
* * *
I’m dreaming I’m drowning in quicksand—except it’s more like slow-sand, and no one is around to help me. I’m clutching my phone in my dream as in real life, waiting for a call from Kathi Kannon, and it starts to vibrate, and I realize it’s not just the dream. The wind-chime ringtone finally wakes me. I bolt up in bed: Is it her? Am I in? Did I get it? I reflexively hit the green button, only to accidentally answer a call from my father. I freeze, as if maybe not saying anything will make him go away.
“YOU GONNA ANSWER?!” he yells.
“Hello.”
He lets out a sigh, a hot breath of air. “A CAT scan found FOUR polyps in my colon! I thought that you, OF ALL PEOPLE, would LOVE hearing about it.”
Silence on the line. Both of us starkly quiet, suddenly serious, our chat quickly leading us onto thin ice, a tiny crack away from an entire conversation about how my father wrongly thinks being gay means I have an obsession with the workings of every human anus.
I’m thinking, He’s calling to tell me he’s dying.
I’m thinking, He will die and I’ll be officially, profoundly alone.
I’m thinking, Maybe I’m still dreaming.
“Don’t worry,” Dad says. “I don’t have COLON cancer.”
“That’s good,” I breathe.
“But while they were doing the CAT scan, they found a tumor on my KIDNEY!” He drops the news like he’s ordering a number three at McDonald’s, and I’m not sure how to react.
“Wait. You have kidney cancer?”
“Yeah,” Dad says. “Well, it’s a kidney tumor. They have to cut it out and do tests and all that.”
“Dad, I’m sorry. What can I do?” I ask out of habit, out of the politeness he bred deep in me. I regret it even before the words have escaped me.
What can I do?
Hey, Siri, how do I get out of this?
* * *
One moment I’m angling for a new life with Kathi Kannon, and the next I’m heading home to Louisiana to help my dad through kidney surgery. My life is actually going backward.
I meet Dad at his truck,
parked at the curb outside baggage claim at New Orleans International. He looks me over, not a mystery in his eyes. “TUCK IN YOUR SHIRT! JESUS CHRIST!” he yells.
I shove a clump of my T-shirt into my waistband. I avoid his gaze, again, as usual. By this point in our lives he must know me best by the whites of my eyes. I get in his truck for the long ride to his house, the house I grew up in.
“I REMEMBER WHEN PEOPLE USED TO DRESS DECENT TO TRAVEL!” he shouts over the hot wind gushing in through the open windows—he says the AC burns too much gasoline.
Huge green metal signs on the highway chronicle our journey to my childhood home north of New Orleans. Those green metal signs, with white block letters, are announcing my fate: PERRIS: 200 MILES, and then 100, and then 50. Those signs, they jeer me toward my hometown, that little country speck-on-a-map with its cliché one traffic light. Those green metal signs, they’re morbid taxpayer-funded mileage countdowns to my old house, to my dad’s house, that rural home where I grew up so quickly, too quickly, me and him and, briefly, Mom, a dead woman I more and more realize I barely knew.
Dad moved us “to the country” to get away from the government, he says. He bought a gun. He unbanked. He buried gold in the backyard. His nightstand is a 370-pound fireproof safe full of bullets and silver and a tattered, dog-eared book about Freemasons. He sold us the idea of living in the country with talk of tree houses, canoeing, animals, and adventures on the five lush acres we would own, only to discover the land is crap. The pond in the back barely holds water, maybe mud, at best, in the winter, and in the summer, it’s dry and cracked like the surface of Mars. The land is mostly red clay, so nothing grows. Chunks of the driveway wash away after a hard rain, our gravel and crimson clay trickling down the street like blood. The developer who put the subdivision together planted pine trees in straight rows for miles. He wasn’t even trying. Nothing looks natural, nothing like the wild, real country we all imagined. I’m so, so far from Beverly Hills. My dad’s neighborhood is called Jolly Pines Estates, though there are no “estates,” and there’s certainly nothing jolly about it. When I was a kid, I’d fool myself that living here was fun, then I downgraded it to interesting, then to harmless, at the very least. But now I look at all this, the pines and the red clay and my father, and all I see are lies.
“THE FUCKING GARBAGE MAN RAISED RATES AGAIN!” Dad yells as we pull into the driveway, past a pile of trash that will sit there until Dad or the trash man concedes.
My mind is racing, retreating into itself to cower from my father’s random rages, longing to be anywhere but here in Perris. Over and over, I’m rewriting my awards speech, the one Kathi asked me about. If only my speech were better, maybe I’d be there, with her, in her employ, with a great excuse about why I can’t be home helping my father through his medical moment, forcing him to inconvenience his neighbors or drinking buddies or church friends into helping him. Kathi, I should have told her, grabbing the imaginary microphone and screaming at the imaginary audience, I’d like to thank my father for teaching me I don’t matter!
Therapista says change your thinking, change your life.
Therapista says emotional maturity is questioning our thoughts.
Therapista says hating others is hating yourself.
I hate it here, the house my father built, the home he never finished. The cobbler’s kids had no shoes and the contractor’s kids had no doorknobs, no paint, no carpet. The floors were (and still are) particleboard, strips of thin wood glued on top of one another that leave feet splintered and socks shredded, nothing like Kathi’s smooth wood floors. My mom would complain about having to eat dinner while sitting on empty upside-down five-gallon paint buckets instead of chairs. My father would shout, “IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT, THERE’S THE DOOR!” He’s not the kind of guy who could easily, mindfully handle criticism, or stress, or, finally, his own private nightmare when my mom did choose “the door.” She told Dad she was leaving him, divorcing him, though she never had the chance to do it, never had the chance to be free, never had the chance to either regret it or revel in it. I was twelve when she died, just a week after announcing she wanted out but with no time to even file the paperwork. She collapsed at church, of all places. Her sweet, kind heart had a defect no one knew about, and her life, her suffering, was over in an instant. My father changed after that, becoming kinder, softer, rewriting their time together as something sweeter than it was. Over the following months, we moved on without her, and eventually Dad moved on, too, but backward, to become the same asshole he was before she died.
Therapista says how you are right now is how you will be forever.
My dead mother now lives in Dad’s basement, all her stuff piled high in a corner, her clothes, her toiletries, her ashes. Everything was moved down there years after she died. It’s not so much a shrine as it is an inconvenience. Dad uses the basement to store his construction-job tools and generally fix things—his relationship with my mother, the most perpetually broken and unfixable of them all. Across from a steamer trunk of her childhood memorabilia is a tractor engine, an ironing board that needs a new cover, a box of trampoline springs. Mom’s boxes, marked DRESSES and TOILETRIES, are all in the way, but Dad won’t part with them. He both hates them and treasures them. I feel the same way about her stuff. I like that everything is down there. It brings me comfort sometimes to see her hairbrush and flash to a happy memory—anything to disrupt the memory of her death, in the middle of offering the sign of peace, her collapsing, congregants screaming, me praying. And at the same time, I hate it that she’s down in the basement, still trapped in this house she wanted so badly to flee.
I’m looking through a box labeled MOM JUNK, paying my respects in the basement, digging through and finding the old partially melted spatula she used to make me French toast on Saturday mornings. I find the scissors with the blue handles she used to trim my hair between barber visits. I find magazines with pages dog-eared for makeup or dresses she never had the chance to buy. I find her purse, the one she was carrying when she died. It’s a peach-pink color, shiny and warped from age and the sad fate of being stuffed in some basement box. Inside the purse is her wallet, the cash gone—if there ever was any—but it’s still full of change and balled-up cough-drop wrappers. There’s her key chain—her house keys and car key still snugly on the metal spiral. Dangling from the spiral is a little fake-gold locket, oval shaped, about the size of a quarter. It was a gift I’d given her in second grade after my elementary school held a shopping fair. Every parent gave the school a bit of money for their kids to go shopping for Christmas presents for their family and friends. I hold the locket in my hand; it’s cold and smaller than I remember. It has engraved swirling on the front, as if it’s almost someone’s name, and profound scratches on what was once a smooth back, before it was tarnished and scarred by the chaos of Mom’s purse. A tiny clasp opens the locket—empty. There’s no picture of me or lock of my hair. Maybe Mom didn’t even know it opened. But she carried it with love. Inside that empty trinket, the metal shines and I see my reflection on both sides, a man nearly thirty years old, still missing his mom.
“JUNK!” Dad yells, startling me as he kicks a partially used box of bathroom tile at the entrance to the basement. He pauses when he sees me standing at Mom’s shrine, my hands holding her old locket. Dad walks up to me and I shift in my shoes, the young coward still in me, still bracing to absorb whatever tantrum he may throw at me.
Clutching Mom’s locket, I jam my fingernail under the spiral of the key ring. With each step Dad takes toward me, I spin the locket, spinning, spinning, spinning, until it’s free of its binding. I slip it into my pocket as Dad approaches me, my fingertip throbbing under the nail.
Hey, Siri, I want to kill myself with this in my hand.
“I think about your mother every day,” Dad says.
“I’m sure,” I say, putting the rest of the key ring back in Mom’s purse and the purse back in the box, burying it with magazines and kitchen utensils and
feelings. I close the box tightly, my little effort to protect her from him. I put pieces of a tractor carburetor on top exactly as I found them.
Hey, Siri, I want out of this basement.
“I think if this kidney cancer kills me,” Dad says, “the only good thing will be that I can be up there in heaven with her.”
“I’m certain she would not want that,” I say coldly, Dad not being one to catch the subtext. We’re quiet for a moment, the house above us feeling so big, sounding so quietly loud. I wonder if Dad is happy he finally got the silence he demanded of me all those years. If, after I moved out, he finally reveled in not hearing my footsteps, not hearing my music, grateful that I’d never dance in that home again.
Kathi Kannon haunts this home I grew up in. The tiny plastic molds of her franchised co-stars still exist—sans her—in a toy box tucked deep in a closet in my old bedroom. They mean nothing to me. It’s her I always treasured, taken from me years ago, gone at Dad’s hands, and now feeling gone from me again, this time at my own hand, my own inadequacies. If only I had been more charming, more prepared to meet her, briefed on how to manage a celebrity. Ugh, Bruce.
I’ve considered telling Dad about my interview with Kathi Kannon, trying to share with him some of my unhappy life, but what’s the point? I don’t need lectures about careers and money and liberal Hollywood. But I do ask him: “Dad, remember that action figure I had? The lady from the movie Nova Quest? Priestess Talara?”
In that basement, all the moisture and memories stick to our skin, leave a taste in our mouths, our warm breath filling in the space left by our few moments of silence. I can’t look at my father. I wonder if he heard me. I wonder if he’s ignoring me. I wonder, if I did look at him, would he see my childhood face, remember my screaming when he took Priestess Talara away?
“Do you remember her?” I ask again, pressing gently. “In Nova Quest she was played by that actress … I think her name was … Kathi Kannon?”