by David Amsden
Right there I hated that I’d been given no choice but to have all this crammed into my head. No one ever asked my permission. I mean, you guys could have at least asked. When you’re a kid, no one ever asks your permission about anything. It’s funny. Then you get older, and you end up wasting a lot of time trying to remember exactly what everyone said.
Me and Dad were pulling up to the line now, outside the liquor store. It was this small place on the side of a stripmall. The window was thick plastic, you put your money in this metal drawer, shut it, and when you opened it up again there was liquor inside. The same as bank tellers, or David Copperfield. We went here pretty much every time Dad got off work.
And we played this game most every time. Like this:
“Whadya need partner?” Dad asked. “Bottle of vodka?”
“Umm,” I said, scratching my chin all dramatic. “Two. Two bottles, please.”
“That’ll hold ya?”
“I think so. I don’t want to end up like that guy back in the parking lot.”
“You’re a smart kid,” Dad said. He was always telling me how smart I was. “Mind sharin’ some with me, or should I get my own?”
I was going to tell him that it was best he pick up his own, but just as I’m about to, this guy comes out of nowhere and starts pounding on the hood of Dad’s car. Dad never had a car very long, and was driving this white VW Rabbit then, a little four speed that, with this guy banging on the hood all maniacal, felt like it was made of recycled soda cans. Real cheap ones, too. Not Coke or Pepsi, but RC Cola and Fanta. I was nervous. He’d hit the hood and I could feel it in my seat. It was the closest I’d ever come to being in a car wreck. And we weren’t even moving.
He was tall, this guy, and, like everybody else in Landover but Dad, he was black. And strong-as-hell-looking. It was already dark out but he still wore mirrored sunglasses. He had on a blue leather trench coat. All of his teeth were gold, and he was so upset with Dad, really pounding on the hood now, and yelling—
“Whatha fuck you doin’? Whatha fuck you doin’?”
“He doesn’t look very happy,” Dad said to me, all calm.
“Whatha fuck you doin’? Whatha fuck?”
“People are crazy in this neighborhood,” Dad told me.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“You wanna fuck with my car?” the man said.
Dad rolled down the window, leaned out. “What’s the problem here?” he asked.
“You fuckin’ with my car’s the problem.”
“Dad? Dad, what’s wrong?”
“Everyone in this neighborhood’s messed up on drugs, feller,” is all he said.
Jiffy’s Subs & Pizza, where Dad was now working, was this skuzzy rip-off on Jerry’s, just stuck in even poorer neighborhoods, dingier stripmalls. Just another prime example of one crappy chain giving birth to an even crappier offspring, fast-food inbreeding, the pizza parlor equivalent of one-eyed sisters with two tails.
So Dad worked at Jiffy’s for about three years, until the place went out of business after a guy was shot dead out back. But here’s the best part: it wasn’t the murder that shut the place down. What happened is, the guy who shot him ended up killing himself right afterward, by accident, when he tried to run from the cops by climbing up on the roof, which was nothing but these bright shearing clumps of razor wire. The police informed Dad that the amount of razor wire up on the roof was against the law, not in accordance with some code. The place would have to be shut down. That’s the kind of luck that never leaves Dad alone.
But until all that, Dad had the manager job again. He had the office with the fake wood walls, the plastic bags with the thick zippers and padlocks. He got to count the money, and, far as I know, he was counting it right this time around.
He seemed happier, but God I hated Landover, the neighborhood where Jiffy’s was. It was just east of Rockville and I hated how it smelled, how there was trash everywhere, how the one time I walked somewhere alone three kids circled around me and poured my own Coke over my head.
And I was getting to know Landover well, because Uncle Ray was about to get his divorce from Aunt Edie, and, to give them their space, Dad moved out of their house and into this Landover apartment with Faye, this lady who I swear to you was flat-out crazy. This was the beginning of a trend: shit would explode in Ray’s life, Dad would have to move out temporarily. And with Dad the only places he seemed capable of finding were ones already inhabited by some crazy woman.
I think Faye and Dad met at Jiffy’s, but I don’t know. I never really knew how Dad met the women he did, never really cared. Faye was like a mannequin in almost every way—from her smooth, bright skin, her tight little mouth, her almost invisible eyebrows, her cocked hips—except that Faye was black, and back then there was no such thing as a black mannequin, far as I knew. And I don’t joke when I say her apartment was in the projects, raw hallways smelling like urine, empty dime bags in the vestibule, neighbors beating each other up at all hours. It was a very tense place, especially after spending most of the week at Mom’s. Her house was feeling more like a mansion each year, without her having to add even one room.
But whenever I would say anything skeptical about Faye, something about how I didn’t really like her, Dad would bring up her body. You should see her without clothes, he said, as if offering her to me for a night. You should see the things she can do. I never really got this until this one time I walked in on them together. It was funny. I mean, him so pale and her so dark, and God knows where her other leg was, or why she was using that language if she actually liked Dad, but, still, it made enough sense.
She had these two kittens, named Ollie and Ollie Two. I thought they were named after the skateboarding trick, the one I could never manage to pull off, where you kicked the back of the board into the pavement in order to jump. But it turned out they were named after Oliver North. At the time this meant nothing to me. I remember when I realized how peculiar this was, that this sort of crazed black lady living in this violent apartment building named her kittens after Oliver North. I mean, I still barely know who the hell Oliver North is. Do you?
Faye was also always screaming. Sometimes it was magnificent, most of the time just loud and annoying. Everything that came out of her mouth was earsplitting and scratchy. She’d scream hello at you, scream where are my keys at you, scream at the television any time it was on. She drove one of those Nissan 280Zs, the kind that talked to you, told you in this feminine robotic voice that the right door was ajar, the trunk was open, stuff like that. She yelled back at it. I know my door’s open! Who do you think opened the damn trunk! How about you try saying shut the hell up!
It was always so odd to me, this constant battery of yelling. But right now, with this man going off on me and Dad, it was starting to make sense. I was thinking okay, it was maybe just a Landover thing. I mean, this guy was really going at it still, yelling—
“Do you not fuckin’ hear me? You deaf in there? Do you not fuckin’ hear me?”
“This is a funny place, huh?” Dad said to me.
Dad opened the door now and stepped out. I looked at the guy’s car. It was a maroon Camaro or Thunderbird, one of those with the T-top roofs and the plastic slits running down the back window, all the stuff meant for teasing desperate women into thinking they’re getting in a Ferrari.
“Whytha fuck you tryin’ to hit my car?” the man was yelling at Dad, right up in his face now, so much taller that Dad’s mouth was right up level with his Adam’s apple, which was convulsing like it was possessed.
He reached past Dad, slammed his fist into the hood again.
“Listen here—”
“Listen to nothin’,” the man said. “You tryin’ to drive right into my fuckin’ car.”
“Look,” Dad said. “I’m at least two feet from your bumper.”
“Fuck that.”
“Look right there….”
The guy didn’t even bother looking, but even I could tell fr
om inside the car that Dad was right. I could even see the guy’s bumper, which meant we were nowhere near running into it. Not to mention we weren’t even moving.
He took off his sunglasses now, looked right into Dad. God his eyes were huge, perfectly round, all backlit with mayhem.
“Fuck that,” he said. “You fuck with my car again you don’t even wanna know what’s gonna happen.”
I could not figure out why this man was so convinced we were trying to drive into the back of his car. The cop never mentioned this as a side effect of drugs. It made no sense to me, but still, there did seem a high chance that this guy was going to kill Dad. You could tell he was certainly interested, that he had it in him, that he’d do it and only realize later, like the next day, what he’d done. And he still wouldn’t mind, even then. But Dad was so relaxed, like he was talking to anyone. That’s the thing with Dad. He’s always so relaxed. I guess people who get used to being the one who messed things up have trouble ever getting that angry. I guess they always feel too pathetic placing blame.
“Okay, okay,” Dad was now saying.
“Okay nothin’. Get in your car and back the fuck up.”
“All right,” Dad said. “Sure thing.”
“Whytha fuck you tryin’ to hit me in the first place?”
“All right,” Dad said again. “All right.”
When Dad turned around to walk back toward the car, the guy slammed his fists down on the hood one more time. I felt it rattle all through the car, all up through my seat, up through me, pulling at my bones, like someone wanted me cut in two. I took a deep breath, like I had to make sure I could still breathe. He left some dents but that didn’t really matter, because that Rabbit was already more dents than smooth surfaces.
When Dad came in he lit a Vantage, pulled on it, looked at me and grinned. There was a part of me that wanted to ask for a cigarette, to prove something. I don’t know what.
“Neighborhood’s always good for a little adventure, huh, feller?” Dad said. He was always so pragmatic. He put the car in reverse, gave the man his space.
“You weren’t even close to his car,” I said.
“Half the people in this neighborhood are all messed up on drugs,” Dad said again. “Take the right drugs, and every car you see is tryin’ to run you over.”
It was strange getting drug lessons from Dad, but I just nodded. I never brought up that I knew he was messed up on drugs too. That way he was like a secret experiment of mine. I could use Dad to test out things people like that cop and Mom told me about drugs, and the things they do. It was sort of confusing though, because Dad never once acted like any of the screwed up people we watched in the videos. Dad wasn’t black, wasn’t living in the streets like them. Dad seemed smart enough. Dad never said anyone was trying to run him over. I mean, Dad never dove into any empty swimming pools.
He still hasn’t.
BELATED THANK-YOU NOTE
When Cousin Mike came in and started freaking out, me and Dad were watching Beverly Hills 90210. Uncle Ray was through getting divorced with Aunt Edie at this point, had moved into this house in a nearby Rockville suburb that none of us really knew existed beforehand. This meant that after something like two ridiculous years, Dad could finally end things with Faye, which is exactly what happened. So he was living with his brother again, no wives to worry about, a couple of too-old bachelors, Dad thirty-four, Ray forty. You should have seen their fridge. It was always empty but for at least two boxes of pink wine.
The neighborhood was one of these mid-seventies suburbs. One-story look-alike homes of wood and moldy aluminum, small driveways leading to clapboard carports, cul-de-sacs framed by scraggly dogwoods. People’s initials were carved into the sidewalk. It was the type of place where married American families had once lived, where kids like me were conceived, but had now given way to ambitious Koreans and Indians, these very polite families that kept to themselves. If you weren’t an immigrant in this neighborhood you were a divorced Jew, and if you weren’t a divorced Jew you were Ray and Dad, two pale half-assed Catholics from a farm up in Maine with permanent five o’clock shadows, who were divorced from Jewish women.
Everything about the house was tweaked, somehow off. The carpets, a sort of industrial blue-gray, were stained when Ray bought the house. Like bruised bruises, and no one ever seemed to entertain the idea of cleaning them. It had a funny smell too, subtle and acrid, as if in some undiscovered alcove there was something rotting. There was hardly any furniture, all of it secondhand, leftovers from Ray’s divorce. In the living room there were two pink pleather loveseats, made even uglier with platinum vinyl piping. The dining room table, tusk-white plastic covered unevenly in dime-sized teal polka dots, was too scary to eat at. Basically, Ray got all the stuff that epitomized mid-eighties JAP cheekiness to such an extent that even Edie was embarrassed to hold on to it. And let me point out to you here that Edie, with her frosted gold-brown hair, her gargantuan gold-brown sunglasses, her treasured gold-brown leather blouses, her cubic-zirconium smile and LeBaron convertible, was the local representative of the American JAP circa 1985.
Even the towels in the house were funny. They were so starched they sort of felt like damp cardboard when you were drying off, like rub too hard and they’ll disintegrate. None of them matched, all were covered in the logos from the various hotels from which Ray stole them on business trips. The silverware was equally mismatched, and for the same reason: every time Ray and Dad went out to eat they’d swipe the silverware, pulling it out of their pockets on the way to the car, laughing until their faces were all splotched with red. Over the years they had acquired enough to accommodate an enormous family feast, Thanksgiving for a thousand. The only problem was that no one really had much of a family anymore. This was not a bad thing. It just ended up meaning we didn’t have to do the dishes very often.
All I cared about were two things. That Dad was done with Faye, because spending even just two days a week at that apartment of hers never got to feeling normal. And that he still had that waterbed mattress. And he had his own room now, like a legit bedroom, his first really since I’d known him, with a television, which right now was tuned into Beverly Hills 90210. This was early on, 1993, before the whole cast was jumping into bed with each other, when it was just Brenda and Brandon trying to cope with how difficult it was to live someplace where there were no real problems.
Then Mike comes in, and it was so funny how he just lost it. All when Dad asked—
“So, whadya boys think we should do about dinner?”
Mike’s quiet at first, just sort of looks at me and Dad like he doesn’t know who we are. Like why are you guys in this room in my house? And then, suddenly, his whole face just rips wide open and he starts crying, like someone had just sprayed tear gas all over the room. It was the oddest thing. Me and Dad turned away from the television completely and just watched him. Mike kept on trying to speak, but kept on choking on himself, on his own words.
“What’s up, feller?” Dad said.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Mike?”
“You okay, Mike?”
“Everything fine?” Dad asked.
But Mike didn’t seem too interested in providing an answer, not just yet. He just kept on shaking. I mean really shaking. He was doing that thing where people can’t look any more pathetic, that thing where their mothers are the only people in the world who won’t look away in shame. But the thing was, Mike’s mother was Edie, and she decided long ago to look away, permanently. He was trying to say something, but it was all clogged up, plunged far down inside him, and still expanding. Me and Dad just watched, intent, like it was some movie we’d paid for and were now regretting. We looked at each other, hoping the other would have something to say, know what to do.
Mike was such a smooth, lanky kid. He had these big, confused brown eyes, cowlicked hair the same color. The kid wet his bed until he was ten, sucked his thumb until Ray decided it was best to coat it in some r
ancid poison, so if he went at the thumb in his sleep this foul taste would bite at the inside of his mouth, hijack his dreams, turn them into nightmares, wake him up and remind him just how stupid he was for sucking his thumb in the first place. By the time he kicked the habit, he was stuck with these screwed up bright-blue teeth, ended up having to be put in headgear, this purple rubberband muzzle pulling his face in ten thousand directions, worn in the day, not at night, like punishment, postponing his chances of ever getting a girl even to smile at him for at least three years. He also had these big, disclike ears, jutting straight out of his head like some NASA prototype. When he hit thirteen Edie forced him to get plastic surgery, to pin them back. That’s the kind of mom Edie was—she had to fix him up so she could stand looking at him when she had company.
During those four years Dad lived with Ray, Dad only got me Wednesday nights and every other weekend. Mom had cut down my time with him. Anyway, me and Mike hung out all the time. We could do pretty much whatever we wanted, because our parents were either working, laughing so hard they couldn’t see, or passed out. The best part of the house was that it faced out onto this enormous field, acres and acres of flat earth leftover from when Maryland was a mill state, from when D.C. was a nothing city fizzing out into nothing country. Not that it was of historic significance to me and Mike. We played football back here, walkie-talkie spy games, crabapple baseball, freeze tag. We were also into peeping on this one fat neighbor showering, and other petty delinquent shit, like reading people’s mail or sneaking into unlocked cars, stealing the cigarette lighters, then putting them back an hour later.
Since I had a year on him, I was the faster one and the stronger one, the smarter one and the less clumsy one. Because Ray was that kind of dad, a man who valued the Redskins and the bench press above all else, he’d often point this out to Mike when we were together, how compared to me he was basically nothing, scrawnier than an anorexic pigeon is how he put it more than once. And I had put on some weight finally, it’s true, but I was no linebacker. Still, back then, Ray’s chief philosophical question in life was, essentially: Why the fuck could his son not be more like me?