by Robert Riche
Flinging aside the tie-dyed seraglio sheets, I expect the worst, my son lying on the floor, wired body twitching in time to a rock beat, wrists floating in pools of blood.
He is not there.
He has sneaked out. Is it possible he is inside our house, having entered, for who knows what reason, through the front door as I was letting myself out the back? A last straw to grasp at. If it is, indeed, the case, it will be difficult explaining why I broke his window.
I let myself out his door, making sure the lock is left open, and in the dark accidentally manage to boot the pie and ice cream off the landing. I make it to the house without further mishap, minding, of course the ladder in the driveway.
“Hello! Anybody here?!” I sing out, as I come into the kitchen, and find my wife at the kitchen table reading the Sunday Times.
“Hi!” Annie pipes up cheerily. “How’d he like the pie?”
“He’s not in here?”
“No.” The first look of alarm enters my wife’s face.
“The little bastard has sneaked out!” I roar. “I had to break his window to get into his room, and he’s not there!”
My wife’s eyes go over me quickly, focusing a moment later on the blood that has soaked through my sock and is drying on my Chinos.
“You cut your foot,” she says, in some alarm.
“That was on the ladder!”
“What were you doing up on the ladder?”
“It doesn’t matter! He’s not in his room!”
Her eyelids close slowly over her eyes, and she lowers her head in anticipation of the coming storm.
CHAPTER XV
I can’t believe this. In deliberate defiance of the rules we have laid out expressly, my son has sneaked off. No. I can’t believe it. He is out there, in his room. I simply missed him somehow, he is in hiding there, or sleeping, possibly engrossed in study, ensconced behind a particular sheet, some trompe l’oeil scrim of fabric which I failed to look behind in the labyrinth of his den.
Peering out through the kitchen sliders, I can see the lights on in his room. Did I leave them on, or has he returned already? Grabbing a flashlight, I take myself back out to make another check.
At his door, I knock, and call out, and push into the room, all in the same instant, expecting this time, certainly, to find him standing there, most likely scratching his head, and looking at me, like he’s supposed to, like a hobo interrupted by his campfire.
He is not there. Of course, he isn’t. The fact that I have known really that he wouldn’t be doesn’t lessen the disappointment. Maybe he has left a note. Or, at least, some kind of evidence. Of what, I have no idea. I poke behind and underneath the ripped black leather sitting chair that he favors, that he slumps down in to hold court when his pals are over. God knows what they do, listen to their music, I guess. My son and I together hauled that chair from the local dump one day, toting it in the back of the station wagon, I have a ripped triangle of fabric in the ceiling of the car to remind me.
I don’t see anything that would be of any help. The eternal flame flickers from the candle in his coffee can cover. That’s dangerous! Leaving an open flame burning. I pinch the wick, noting as I cool my thumb and finger with a whiff of breath little blackened shavings scattered about the base of it. They look like chars of burnt-out tobacco, droppings from a pipe. Though not tobacco, I have a sneaking suspicion. Something rougher cut. I could kill him. I lick a finger tip and adhere one to it, splicing into it with my front teeth, somewhat surprised not to detect the expected burnt hemp taste. I chew on it a little more vigorously. Perhaps it isn’t hemp. There is very little taste at all, actually, perhaps a hint of something salty, a bit sour, with the texture of wax, something like feces.
“Shit!” It’s a mouse turd. Exclaiming and blowing it out in an explosion of spit across the room. I’m not a connoisseur of mouse turds, but you don’t have to be a genius to know that that’s what it is. It’s a mouse turd, a whole plate full of them. I fling the coffee can top with the affixed candle through the open door, mouse turds flying in every direction about the room.
Furious as I am at having bitten into a mouse turd, I am at the same time relieved, I suppose, that it wasn’t a hashish ash. Still, I am in an unforgiving mood. He should have told us, at the least, that there were mice running around his room. What kind of irresponsible, filthy behavior is that, to live in harmony with mice running around your candle? He probably watches them in a hallucinatory state, and thinks he’s Cinderella, or somebody. He’s been smoking weed down there. I know it. On a heroic high, he has summoned up the courage to defy us, and leave the compound, most likely in a search for more dope.
“He’s not there!” I exclaim to my wife, going immediately to the kitchen sink and rubbing ivory liquid onto my front teeth.
“Why are you putting dish-pan soap in your mouth?” my wife asks, irrelevantly, and with a puzzled expression.
“I’m cleaning my teeth,” I growl at her. And back to the point, “He’s run off!”
“He’ll probably be back in a minute. Maybe he ran his bike over to the store for a soda.”
“It’s Sunday night. The store’s closed! He’s gone over to the parking lot to score dope!”
“Oh, Bill!” my wife exclaims.
“Don’t ‘Oh, Bill’ me! He’s been smoking down in that room. And there are mouse turds all over the place!”
My wife looks at me again with that same puzzled expression. “Mouse turds?”
“I bit into a mouse turd!” I run a paper towel over the front of my teeth, spit a few times into the sink, and take a glass of water. It still seems as though I can taste mouse shit. “I’m going after him.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know! Wherever he hangs out! The parking lot! The bowling alley! The arcade!” As I reel off the list of places where most likely he might be found, it occurs what a dismal gallery of choices he allows himself. It is that outlaw mentality I have noted, the desire to immerse himself in sheer ugliness, ugliness for the sake of ugliness.
“Why not wait for him?” my wife says. “He’ll be back probably before long.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I find myself jeering at her. “Maybe we should greet him with a reward, a medal when he comes skulking back, thinking we don’t know that he’s gone.”
“We didn’t tell him he couldn’t go out,” my wife says.
“We did! It was explicit. He was to study in his room, without music, without visitors. Is that permission to sneak out and score dope?”
“He’s not going after dope!” my wife says, showing impatience with me.
“He is! And even if he isn’t, he is acting totally in defiance of the rules we set down for him!”
“He’s only fifteen, Bill!” my wife exclaims.
“And about time he learned some respect!” Which I think is absolutely the point of this whole business. And I follow this up with a rigid finger aimed in a direct line with her eyes, to say, “This is it, Annie! We let him get away with this, and it’s over! He’ll feel he can do anything he wants. We’re some kind of joke! He doesn’t have to listen to us. He can do whatever the hell he wants. Well, the hell with that! I am not a joke. I am not a joke!” And, whatever her answer is to that, I don’t know, because I am on my way out the door, and if I do say so, I feel better, at least for having said what I had to say.
Before I can get into my car, there is an importunate cry from my daughter from the front porch.
“Dad! Are you taking me?”
“What?!”
“To the movies! You promised to drive me to the movie.”
“Hurry up!” I call.
“I got to get my jacket.”
“Never mind your jacket!”
But she doesn’t listen. She’s getting like the rest of them. She runs back inside the house. She’s probably right, she really needs a jacket, it’s getting nippy, but for Christ sake, I’ve got more important things to take care of now than to chauffeur her to
the movies.
She’s with me in another moment, smelling strongly of the splash of perfume she must most certainly have dumped on herself when she ran back in to get her jacket. So. There will be boys there.
I back out jerkily, and spin the tires heading up the street.
“Wrong direction, Dad!” my daughter says, somewhat condescendingly. She is getting to sound more like my son every day.
“I know what I’m doing. You’re going to have to wait a minute,” I tell her. “I got to check out something first.”
“I’ll be late,” she says, and she slumps down into her seat, reaching a left arm forward and flicking on I-95, which around here everybody knows plays the craziest rock music.
“You don’t have to have it that loud,” I say.
“If you can’t hear it, you might as well turn it off,” she says.
“I didn’t say you couldn’t hear it, I asked could you turn it down. Never mind. Leave it up.” And by that, I hope to shame her into turning the volume down, but she doesn’t fall for it. She accepts what she has been allowed, and the music blares.
Our town is small enough so that there are clearly defined areas where particular groups of kids go to hang out at night. The jocks, of which my son is not one, tend to gather inside and outside on the sidewalk in front of Mario’s Pizza Parlor, on Main St. (where they can be seen, at least, if their parents should care to ride by just accidentally, and want to wave at them). On Saturday nights there are dances at the high school, and the jocks usually go there. After the dance, they go to Friendly’s and have cheeseburgers and ice cream. (McDonald’s and Burger King have been trying to get a franchise in town for years, but every time they apply, there is an outpouring of solid opposition from the community, I am glad to say, the point being that we don’t need yellow arches behind the steeple of the Congregational Church.) After they have pigged out on banana splits, they pull into a side lot of Hibeck’s all-night Mobil station and variety store, where they sit and smoke cigarettes and listen to milder forms of rock and roll and disco and look to see who else is doing the same thing. I get all this information from my daughter, who has had dates with some of the jocks. She is au courant as to what goes on, and as we pass Mario’s now, the group is gathering there, and I suppose my daughter has plans to meet some of them later after the movie.
“I want you home right after the flick,” I say. “Do you have a ride?”
“We’ll get one,” she says snippily.
For years she has been my ally, and this new nastiness is still something I am not accustomed to dealing with yet.
The non-jocks hang out mostly in the aforementioned downtown park, summer and winter, rain or shine, at the edge of the Grand Union parking lot; also, as noted, at the bowling alley, mostly in the Johns, where they pass around joints, and at the video game arcade, also repairing frequently to the Johns. It is a mostly masculine fraternity, though there are no overtones of homosexuality implied, I don’t think. Once in a while you will see in their midst a couple of girls looking as raggedy as the boys. Sometimes at night, they will move their campsite into the nearby town woods, and light bonfires, and sit around and tell ghost stories, and smoke weed, and roast squirrels that they catch in homemade snares. All of this in grudging bits and pieces I have gotten from my son, who in a different area is as au courant as my daughter.
Parked near their parking lot enclave there is usually a truck or two, a beat-up old Ford LTD, and a couple of street motorcycles. Every so often one of the gang will mount a motorcycle and with an ear-splitting roar do a racetrack run on one rear wheel in front of the supermarket entrance, usually managing to terrorize some old lady with a weak heart trying to get from her car to the store without falling down. There have been letters of complaint to the weekly newspaper on this.
At night, they are there, too. As some slink away to eat or defecate or rob houses or stab their parents or do whatever else they do besides stand in the parking lot, others come to take their places, the glow of their cigarettes in the dark flaring and making little arcing movements as they shuffle about, doing nothing, waiting. If you think much about them, as I do, at least I do whenever I go to the supermarket and catch sight of them, their constant presence in the parking lot is a torment, whether because of Peter’s attraction to them, or simply because of their disfigurement of the landscape, or both. And I am convinced they know precisely the kind of terrorizing effect they have upon us all, and I wonder if that has not become their single most important purpose in life at this time, to make the lives of the rest of us a little big uglier, like their own.
Although it is illegal, on warm summer nights some of them sleep out in the park under bushes. If you should walk through the park on any morning, the detritus of their night’s bedding down is all about, beer cans under bushes, cigarette butts on the gravel paths, empty corn chips bags and yogurt containers crumpled up. I am reminded that it is about time that I wrote a letter to the editor of The Courier on this.
Even on rainy days, they are stationed there. Going to the store, you look over in the direction of the park, and there they are, shoulders hunched under the dripping trees, wearing a variety of floppy hats and dirty bandanas on their heads, smoking whatever they are smoking, and peering out at the world, looking cold and bitter and wizened, like Andean peasants waiting for a day’s ration of coca leaves.
We have persisted in believing that our son is different from the others, that despite his attraction to them, he has not yet become hardened into the same disaffected mold as the others. On my way to the parking lot now in the Pontiac, with my daughter, the thought crosses my mind that we may have been wrong. My son has pulled back from his school, deliberately gotten himself suspended so that he can be sucked up again into their midst, hardened perhaps by this experience. Harder now than before. It’s possible. I hope I’m wrong. We’re going to find out, though, and soon. I don’t intend to go on indefinitely living with this indecision hanging over us. If, indeed, he is determined to flaunt his independence in our faces, if he wants to challenge us to see how weak we are when he challenges the power, he may get a surprise. Does he think I won’t come down on him? I am not going to be one of those fathers who becomes silent and defeated and walks around the house disappointed and at the same time afraid of his own son. Fuck that! I may have to take some crap now and then from Frank at the office, but I don’t have to take it from my own kid. We’ll see about dignity. I run my house, and I do what I can to make our lives as civilized and sane as possible, and if that’s not the way some punk kid who happens to be my son wants to play it, go ahead! Sleep under a fucking bush! Don’t come home for a shower, though. Stay away! Get out of my life!
I am thinking these things, and making myself sick, as I almost run into a Pinto in front of me that has stopped short for a light. Jesus! I give that idiot the horn.
Somewhat embarrassed at having my daughter see me in this agitated state, I look over at her for a reaction. She is looking straight ahead, and snapping hard on a wad of gum she has slipped into her mouth. Without offering anybody else any, of course.
I pull into the Grand Union parking lot, which is mostly empty because it is Sunday night. I glance over to the edge, toward the park. There they are, the gang, waiting, watching.
“What are you going to do?” my daughter asks, a note of dismay in her voice. She turns off the radio.
“I’m going over and have a talk with some of those guys.”
“Oh, Dad, give it a rest, will you?”
“What do you mean, give it a rest?”
She turns away, and looks straight ahead, snapping her gum. “Never mind,” she says.
“I’m going to talk to those guys!”
“Fine,” she says. And she slumps down in the seat so that looking into the car from outside you would never know anyone was in there.
There is no reasoning with her, at least not now. I plan to have a few words with her later, though. She is definitely getting
out of line, in my opinion.
I get out of the car, and head over in the direction of the gang, keeping a dignified bearing about me, taking my time.
They are bunched together, about ten of them. They make no move to part as I approach and edge my way carefully into their midst. The feeling I have is a little bit like it might be were I to wander into a terrorist enclave. They look me over, very little expression on their faces. I am not afraid, actually. I know they won’t bother me, not in these circumstances, in the center of town. It might be different if I were to stumble across them sitting about one of their bonfires in the nearby woods, roasting a squirrel and smoking dope. It is not clear what this roasting of squirrels is all about, but my son has indicated they catch these animals, and roast them over fires, and eat the meat. Squirrel is all right, something like rabbit, though tougher, but I’ll bet these guys are not eating squirrel for the delight of it, or even because they are hungry. (They always seem to have enough money to buy corn chips and yogurt from the Grand Union.) Their intent has to do more with outlaw ritualism of some kind. At least, that’s what I surmise.
I know a couple of them, from past encounters. I have been here before. Their ringleader, one Rasky, is present, standing in the back. Sometimes he is sullen, at other times expansive (depending on what drug he is on, I suppose). Our eyes meet. To me, his eyes look glazed and possibly hypoglycemic. He steps forward, a big grin breaking across his unshaven, stubbly face.