Important Things That Don't Matter

by David Amsden

  But this, Dad’s working there, was before Yummy Yogurt became something ridiculous like Café Crème. The mall was not yet packed with stores selling thousand-dollar candles that stank like two-dollar Glade air freshener. Super Sandwich, I think, became Bologna Bistroteque. Then it went out of business.

  He didn’t work in the back anymore, Dad had no office. He said this was more freeing, gave him room to breathe. “A man needs his space,” he said more than a few times—but his space was always right there in front of the cash register. A guy in a toll booth has sweeter accommodations, and doesn’t have to bother with the uniforms Dad had to wear: purple-and-white stripes at Yummy Yogurt, that canary-yellow chef’s hat at Super Sandwich. Not that any of this bothered me much. See, I was still young enough that a parent working in fast food was this spectacular phenomenon, like something to brag about at recess. Besides, there was this tunnel in the back, connecting all the food court restaurants. I was into skateboarding then, and could bring my board back there, just like Tony Hawk. That’s what I’d do while waiting for Dad to get off, which was pretty much all I did when I hung out with Dad, wait for him to get off. But it was great. I’m not even kidding. I’d skate through that metal tunnel, over the smooth concrete floor. McDonald’s. Roy Rogers. Saigon Surprise. Bagelrama. Boardwalk Fries. You’d catch slivers of conversations, people complaining about their bosses, about the spoiled kids they serve, about ketchup refills. All of it kind of zipping past me, flashing bright, shooting by, smelling like shit.

  You should have seen this guy at the end of the bar, how pissed off he was right now.

  “Look at ’m!” he was yelling. “A goddamn sellout!” He was talking about the man on the television screen. He was old-looking, with a guitar and one of those devices that suspend a harmonica in front of your mouth. “Sold out when he went electric! Goddamn no-good sellout!”

  “Cool it, will you?” the bartender said.

  “For Pete’s sake! Bob Dylan looks like Vincent Price,” the man said. “Look at that! Eur-goddamn-reka! Bob Dylan’s Vincent Price! With an electric guitar!”

  A commercial came on and the guy went back to his drink. I was still looking at his face. Around his eyes you could see these thin veins, this purplish webbing. You didn’t want to stare at the guy for all that long.

  There would never be many people in the bar at this hour, two or three maybe. It all depended on the day and, like pretty much every bar that’s open before five o’clock, whatever was going down in a million other people’s lives who either took things too seriously, or not seriously enough.

  And you never knew exactly what time it was in that bar. Some light came in through a small window in the doorway, but this was the only window in the whole place and it was stained glass, red, yellow, and blue, a distorted image of a fat lady with a pint glass in her hand. I think she was dancing. The red glass had absorbed so much sun that it was faded, sort of bleached. So the light coming in was thin, always covered in dust, which was always moving, like cells in a microscope. Like it was alive. The light may have been coming from the sun, but here’s the thing: If you insisted it was moonlight, no one in this place would have called you crazy.

  “What’s in a martini?” I was asking Dad.

  “Ah feller,” he said. Then he didn’t say anything for a while. Sometimes Dad would do that, just forget he was talking to you in the middle of a sentence. But I was a patient kid and didn’t care. “Great drink,” he finally said. “Vodka and vermouth. Just the tiniest bit of vermouth.”

  I’ve never been good at holding grudges. What I mean is, he was still so happy-looking, but now I liked him for it.

  “What’s vermouth?”

  “Pretty much nothin’,” Dad said. “A little somethin’ for flavor.”

  “Like maple syrup?”

  “Exactly,” he said. “Like with pancakes.”

  “Goddamn Vincent fucking Price!” the man down the bar was saying to the ice in his cup.

  “It looks just like water,” I said.

  “That’s the point. Water in a fancy cup,” Dad said. “Wanna give her a sip?”

  “Bobby Dylan, you no shits good-for-nothing sellout!”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Well, it’s here when you decide.”

  “Who’s Bob Dylan?” I asked.

  “Shut up over there, will you?” the bartender was saying.

  “A famous singer,” Dad said. “From when your mother was a kid.”

  The bartender was now coming over with his silver canister. I loved watching this. Looking from down low, it all seemed sort of monumental. All these big hands and bodies. The bartender had hairy fingers—I remember that now. These deep voices. The liquid so clear. And the way it filled the triangular glass, right up the sides, like an hourglass being used in space. Just up to the top, about to spill. But somehow it never did.

  I had gone back to my Coke for a while, but watching Dad’s ninth martini being poured I was reminded of my interest in the drink, so I asked—

  “What’s it taste like?”

  “What’s that feller?”

  “That martini.”

  “You mean this martini right here?”

  “Your martini,” I said.

  “Depends on who you ask.”

  “Can I try?”

  “Gimme a second.” He took a sip. He took another. Then he zoned out for a minute. “Just testin’ her out,” he now explained. “Okay feller, go for it.”

  I didn’t get much, but I understood the importance of what was in there. So as Dad slid it down to me, the cocktail napkin damp and shredding, I shifted on the stool. This way I was sitting on my legs again, getting those traction-less extra inches. I could come down on it now from above and just sip the littlest bit. That was the idea.

  But, God, it really was like gasoline, that smell—

  “Go for it,” Dad was saying. “Won’t bitecha.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on! It’ll put some hair on your chest.”

  “But you don’t have any hair on your chest.”

  “Not for lack of tryin’.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  I leaned in now.

  Oh, but that taste—

  How it bit down all over the insides of your mouth, scraped the lining of your throat, singed holes in your stomach. I felt my eyes watering up now, and even the tears hurt—this stuff had already got to my tears. I knew the answer now: yes, Dad would have blown right up.

  “Hang on to the ball there,” Dad was saying to me. “Don’t lose the ball.”

  “Fucking no-good-for-nothing Bobby Dylan!”

  “Shut up already, will you?”

  “Serious stuff martinis, huh feller? It’ll pass, just hang on.”

  “Ah, fuck you!”

  “Get the hell out of here. You’re through!”

  “Fuck you, you hear me? Fucking Vincent Price piece of nothing.”

  “See there,” Dad said. “Not so bad.”

  “You’ve got two minutes. Hear me? Two minutes to shut up or get the hell out of here.”

  “It just takes a second, partner. Then you’ll want another sip.”

  “Fuck you!”

  “Take a deep breath,” Dad said. “Yeah, there ya go. That a boy. Yeah, yeah.”

  I was wondering why was Dad talking so funny the whole time, ever since I took the sip. Even in my near-death state, I could hear that his voice was all distorted. Now that the feeling of being ripped apart was passing, I saw what it was: Dad was laughing, he’d been laughing the whole time, really losing it. From the second I took the sip, and still going right now.

  I looked over at him. You should have seen it.

  I mean, look at the guy: his face on fire, eyes in their sockets like hot coal about to explode. He was laughing so hard, like all over me, not even making sounds, which is why the first thing out of my mouth was—

  “It’s not funny.”

  “Oh it is!” h
e said. “You’ll see how funny it is!”

  He was going crazy, quaking, all bucking on his stool, falling over, grabbing the vinyl piping so hard the drinks down the whole bar shook like they were possessed.

  “Bobby fucking Price!”

  And this guy hadn’t left yet.

  “Will you shut up already? Will you?”

  This wasn’t the bartender talking. It was Dad. He was still laughing, still all scathed-looking.

  “This got nothin’ to do with you,” the man said to Dad.

  “Damn it doesn’t,” Dad said. “Wanna know somethin’?”

  “Goddamn sellout!” The guy had turned back to the screen, but Dad was still looking at him. And laughing still.

  “Hey…hey, I’ll tell you somethin’,” he said, sounding all anxious. Then suddenly his hand was grabbing my shoulder, practically shaking me to death. “See this boy? You see this boy? Do you see this boy? This boy’s gotta mother. This boy’s gotta mother who used to be my wife.”

  “Dad?”

  He was laughing so hard I don’t think he even heard me. And I just wanted him to ease up his grip.

  “She was my wife, but not anymore. His mother was. She was my wife. That’s all,” Dad said. “And I’m just sayin’ that I’d still love her if she’d let me. That’s it—”

  “Dad, you’re hurting me—”

  But suddenly he wasn’t gripping me anymore, not at all. And when I looked up at him, he was actually gone. It took me about one second to find him and when I did he couldn’t even speak anymore he was laughing so hard.

  He was on the floor.

  He was making that wheezing sound that people make when something is so funny it starts destroying their insides.

  And then, it was the strangest thing. Like that he just stopped laughing. There he was, on the linoleum floor, on his back, legs bent. Like he was on a doctor’s table or something. His face was going back to normal, but unevenly, some parts bright red now, others so white they almost looked blue. His eyes got really big, like coated in some kind of thick oil, and he started looking around. It seemed as if there was something very definite he was searching for, the only problem was he had no idea what that something was.

  Then his eyes found me, way up towering above him now, and they narrowed.

  “Gimme a hand here, feller,” he said. He was pretty much whispering.

  “What?” I was whispering too. I don’t know why.

  “Just a little nudge.” He looked very serious now. I was scared. “Please, feller?”

  But when I reach down and take his hand he yanks hard, pulls me right into him. I felt all his ribs bending under me, like about to crack. You were always feeling Dad’s ribs, if you ever got this close. I hated it down here on the floor, but I couldn’t tell him because now it was me laughing so hard I couldn’t speak. There were a lot of things I wanted to say just then, like so many, but they weren’t coming out. That’s how hard he was tickling me.

  EDUCATION IS OVERRATED

  Dad points to the guy, says that’s what happens to someone who drinks too much. We were walking out of Jiffy’s and in the parking lot we run into this guy. He’s in one of those cheap toy-looking pickups, the kind made in Japan or Korea. It was cream-colored, all kinds of dirty, shot up and gnawed at by rust. The guy was in the driver’s seat, his head sort of hanging out the window, somewhere right between being asleep and being dead. I think he was Mexican or something. He had that kind of skin, hair so black it looked dyed with ink. I looked real close at him when we passed. His eyelids were shaking.

  “Oops, feller,” Dad says right as I’m looking at him. “Watch out there.”

  But it’s too late. I look down and find my brand new Air Jordans surrounded by a nuclear-green halo of this guy’s vomit.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Dad says. “We’ll fix ’em up soon as we get back home to Faye’s and you’ll never know.”

  I’m too embarrassed to say a thing. No matter what I do for the rest of my life, this actually happened. I could become the President, or some famous movie actor even, and still I couldn’t take back that I once stood inside this guy’s throw up.

  “I’ll tell you what that was,” Dad says once we’re in the car. The tone of his voice is funny, adultlike, which was rare. “That is what happens to someone who drinks too much.”

  Then he gets the engine started, and we head over to the drive-thru liquor store.

  Around this time I couldn’t go anywhere without someone telling me about what happens when you drink too much, or do even any drugs at all. This was 1990, still Reagan Time for all practical purposes. The Just Say No Era, the D.A.R.E. Years. You know, when the government did anything they could to turn a million ten-year-olds into drug addicts by the time they hit fourteen. There was that damn television commercial running every three minutes, with the dazed beautiful brown-haired woman that every boy eight and up wanted to get with. You know the one. She’s up there on the diving board, in this plain white one-piece, rocking lazily on the end. Her hair’s in her face so much you can barely see her eyes. She looks sexy. Then she leaps off, with this sort of ragtag grace. But when the camera zooms away it turns out the pool is empty, nothing but concrete, some wilted leaves. Because that, that right there, is your life on drugs. The part that twisted you up the most was that you’d still make out with her in a heartbeat if you were given the chance.

  And the year before there had been this assembly for all the kids at College Gardens Elementary, where a cop came in and told us all about drugs. I remember his uniform, light brown, the left chest all smeared with medals that looked like arcade tokens. You knew this was a man with a mission. His voice was polite and stern, almost accusing. Like he was looking at a bunch of four-to eleven-year-olds sitting Indian style, in red-and-orange Jamms knee-shorts, the girls with those jelly sandals suctioned to their feet, convinced we were the ones peddling heroin—at recess. He told us all about how drugs were evil, evil as anything, the root of all evil. Evil with a capital E.

  I felt smarter than everybody else because I already knew this. See, me and Dad had seen this one movie—another that he told me not to tell Mom about—where a bunch of pretty, tan-skinned women in skirts go into the bathroom after getting off some plane. In the stalls they pulled these little plastic balls out from between their legs. The camera kept cutting back and forth between shots of their faces, all grimaced and sweaty, and close-ups of these little balls coming out from between their legs, all shining and dripping. You could tell there was something wrong, but I was still so confused. Then Dad explained that one way they got drugs into America was by putting them into condoms, tying them off, sticking them inside the women. The same place where babies came from, is how he put it. I still had no idea what a condom was, but didn’t bother asking.

  When the cop finally finished his sermon that day he passed around this clear plastic case. It was sectioned off into little cubes. Each one held tiny samples of all the drugs he had talked about, labeled with neat little white stickers, black type, the real name of the drug and then what the cop called the street name. It was just like show-and-tell. PCP (“ANGEL DUST”). MARIJUANA (“GRASS,” “POT,” “WEED”). METHAMPHETAMINE (“SPEED,” “CRYSTAL,” “CRANK”). Since a lot of the younger kids couldn’t really read yet, they just crowded around, scanned the plastic with their little fingers. These were little fingers that in class were learning to make lowercase printed Ys and uppercase cursive Gs, papier-mâché ashtrays, origami geese, pinch pots.

  The case wasn’t all that different from the incubators in our classrooms, where we watched eggs turn into drowsy-eyed, golden-furred chicks. These little birds that walked around like drunks. Life happening. HEROIN (“SMACK”). CRACK (“ROCK”). COCAINE (“BLOW”). Be careful: Life could unhappen, too.

  And then there was Mom, who was also pretty into making sure I knew about drugs. It was actually that same day the cop came to the school that she first mentioned them. I started telling
you about this, before I got all sidetracked.

  It was like this: I walk home from the bus stop, go downstairs to say hi to Mom. She’d moved her office, her little graphic design firm, into the house by now: Mom and three other employees drawing up things like company logos all day long. She did this to spend more time with me, but a lot of the time it seemed more like she just wanted to work all the time. Anyway, I go down to say hi, and I don’t know what I did, can’t remember, but whatever it was ended up getting Mom so angry she starts yelling. You should have seen her. She hardly ever yelled, I want to be clear on that. So when it happened, it was pretty intense. Standing right in front of that blue metal desk, the one with the curved metal handles, going off about Dad, saying—

  “Do you know something? Do you? Let me just make sure that you know something, young man. That your father’s doing cocaine. Do you hear me? Do you?”

  I said nothing, prompting her to continue, making sure I understood completely.

  “Your father takes cocaine. And he’s an alcoholic. Do you even understand that? Do you even know what that means?”

  I didn’t bother mentioning the assembly.

  “And do you know what kind of debt I have?” Mom was saying. “Because of him? Because of your father? Do you think he’s ever going to pay child support? Do you?”

  But I had nothing to say. I wanted to answer her, really, but I didn’t know what either debt or child support was.

  “Do you have any clue, young man? Do you?”

  I wasn’t saying anything. I could hear her fine, and I could even see her talking, right there in front of me, her face red and quaking. But all I was thinking about was Dad and the cocaine, and that movie we saw, and that police officer, and that little plastic case. It all just tightened in on my brain, images too potent to turn into coherent thoughts.