“Did you hear about Paul Briggs?”
“Hear what?” I shook my head no.
“He got killed, a head-on collision on Highway 95. He had just moved to Phoenix. He flew back here to get his car, and he was driving back there to start his new job.” She paused. “His mother’s in bad shape. The doctor has her on something to sedate her.” My mother shook her head and looked down at the table. “I don’t know what I would do if something like that happened to you or your sister.”
“That’s terrible,” I said, and I meant it, but I really didn’t feel too upset. Maybe I was too tired to feel deeply about the tragedy. I sat down across the table from my mother and began to think about Paul. He was only six months older than me but had skipped a few grades, entered college early, and had gotten a Masters in chemistry before he was twenty-one. He was the ultimate achiever, good at sports, straight A’s all through school, didn’t smoke or drink, never liked to waste a second, and was always in a hurry like there was so little time and so much to do. Now all those things he was so worried about doing just wouldn’t get done.
“The funeral’s Monday. Your grandfather is doing most of the arrangements. He’ll probably need you to help deliver them.”
“Sure,” I said, and right away, though I needed the money, I knew Monday was not going to be a good day. My grandfather owned one of the two floral shops in town. My mother still worked there part time as she had for as long as I could remember. I had worked there, here and there, since I was a kid, and though I love my grandfather dearly, I just couldn’t work for the man. He was, like my mother, as hyper as a hummingbird, always hovering around you waiting to correct your mistakes, making you hyper and nervous. Finally through my mother I let it be known that I would help out on the real busy days—Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, maybe a big funeral or wedding—but otherwise I was done with the store. It was the one time my father didn’t bug me about quitting a job. It was the one time he seemed to understand.
I went into my room, automatically turned on the TV and flopped down on my bed. I purposely left my door wide open so when my mother walked by she could look in and see I wasn’t asleep. I didn’t want her to know I had been awake all night, and that I was so tired I felt dizzy and weak. I planned to just lie there feigning sobriety and consciousness as best I could until she finally left for work when I could finally let go, pass out and enjoy some deep, deep slumber. It was the longest hour of my life. I acted like I was interested in whatever was on TV even though my attention span was down to about half a second, and I couldn’t tell now what I had been watching if you put a gun to my head and demanded the answer. All I could remember is listening to my mom, listening to her every move as she fluttered around the house doing this or that before she left for work. In my frame of mind it was slow torture, every second, every sound. Every time she opened a squeaky drawer or turned on a faucet or made a noise in her bedroom or the living room, it just served to heighten my anticipation of her departure; stretching tighter the lingering pain of my guilt and fatigue until, just as I thought I could no longer bear any more suffering, I heard the tinkling of her car keys, and I figured she was on her way to the garage. But the tinkling noise became louder until I looked up and saw her standing in the doorway of my room.
“Just thinking about Paul and his poor mother.” She stood holding her purse, shaking her head, and looking down. “It’s hard to understand why things like that happen.” She looked at me. “He had so much to look forward to, his whole life ahead of him. When things like this happen, it just…. it just makes me feel so confused.”
“Well, his parents, his whole family is real religious that’ll probably get ‘em through. God is the concept from which we measure our pain.”
My mother pulled her head back. “That’s pretty profound. Where did you come up with that?”
“John Lennon, it’s a verse from a song on one of your old albums.”
“The Imagine album, that’s right.” She jiggled her keys and righted the strap of her purse on her shoulder. “Here.” She handed me a fifty-dollar bill. “Happy birthday, honey. You can buy your own present that way you’ll end up with what you really want.”
“Thanks.”
“And if you see your father before I do, remind him I’m not cooking anything for dinner. He said he was taking you out to eat for your birthday, and there were no chicks allowed. He thinks that’s so cute.”
“Will do.”
She said good-bye and went out into the garage, letting the door slam shut behind her.
I went to sleep for about four hours, an uneasy sleep, my head still full of the events of the previous twelve hours. I got up and took a shower. While I was drying myself I began to notice the first inkling of soreness deep in my throat, the first sign of gonorrhea or syphilis or whatever from the oral sex? Ridiculous, I was just being paranoid, being stupid, but no amount of self-consultation could make me shake these terrible thoughts, and I began to dig deeper to try to rationalize against the paranoia. Wouldn’t there be some kind of incubation time? We had a medical dictionary somewhere. I put on my shorts and set out to search for the book. I needed hard facts to either confirm or alleviate my dire questions.
I looked all through the big bookcase in the living room but couldn’t find anything. I went down into the basement into my dad’s little office, looked through all the books he had in messy stacks on the floor, almost all of them books on gambling systems for craps, blackjack, and playing the horses. I stopped when I came across two tall awkward-looking books with identical red covers. I held one in each hand and compared them. When I finally realized what they were I was surprised I hadn’t ever noticed them before. They were my parents’ yearbooks from 1967, their senior year.
The first one I opened was my mother’s, full of signings from her classmates in almost undecipherable handwriting, telling her what a great girl she was and how they would miss her. Like everyone in this little town from this little high school would never bump into each other after graduation. I opened my father’s book and was surprised to see it packed with even more messages, most of them calling him ‘Scooter’ and telling him how cool he was. What was even stranger was the book’s index. My mom was listed four times: her senior picture, the swim club, the Spanish club, and a picture of her in a tiny skirt, holding pom-poms in a group of cheerleaders, all of which seem appropriate. But then I looked for my dad’s name and I was shocked. He was listed more than anyone else, some ten or eleven times. I looked them all up. He was on the basketball team, the baseball team (with a separate picture showing him swinging a bat, calling him the star player), the forensics club, the Latin club, the science club, the ecology club, the lettermen’s club, mixed chorus, and he was the Senior Class Vice President.
I sat there stunned. I couldn’t believe this guy in the book was my old man. A guy who was too anti-social to join a bowling league, a guy who never mustered up more energy then it took to do the minimum of chores around the house so he could have the time to sit alone down in the basement reading his gambling books and working on his systems or sit on the couch in the living room vegging out and watching TV. But in his yearbook he was everywhere, involved in everything, a scholar and an athlete, a politician and a singer. I just couldn’t figure it out. How could I have lived with these people for twenty-one years and now feel like I didn’t know my old man at all? I remember him being called Scooter once in a while, and I knew he had played sports in high school, but it was just casually mentioned. I remember him playing catch with me when I was a kid until I got sick of all the begging I’d have to do to get him off the couch to go outside. I distinctly remember being surprised when he wasn’t mad when I quit the football team junior year, which automatically kept me off the baseball team. Him telling me I really wasn’t missing much. But as far as I knew his main connection with sports was trying to find a way to consistently beat the point spread. I never before had pictured him dug in next to the plate ready to rip s
ome guy’s fastball. The whole situation didn’t make any sense to me until I reasoned with myself and thought how different I would look in twenty or thirty years, and then I thought how this small town was even smaller back then and being the stud duck in a class of one or two hundred probably wasn’t that big of a deal.
I purposefully swallowed and didn’t feel any twinge of discomfort. I wondered if the rough feeling I had before had just been my imagination or maybe if this venereal disease thing sort came and went until it sneaked up and hit you head on. Sort of like God stretching out the fear and discomfort just to burn into you the lesson that you shouldn’t be out having sex with strangers, no matter how gorgeous or tempting they were. I looked awhile longer for the medical dictionary, was unsuccessful, so I went back upstairs.
I watched a little of the daytime talk show crap that was on TV. Then the mailman came bringing a Newsweek magazine, which I loved to read because it was a respected national magazine which helped to reinforce my opinion of how screwed up everything on the planet was.
I was sitting at the kitchen table reading when my old man walked in.
“Had to work an hour overtime,” he said. “Let me take a shower then we’ll get something to eat, and we’ll have a few beers and talk about some things.”
I looked at him standing there in his postal uniform, and I think it was the first time I had ever noticed that, despite his receding hairline and the little gut he had hanging over his belt, he did look athletic with wide shoulders, big wrists and forearms on a six-foot two-inch frame. He started towards the bathroom.
“Hey dad.”
He stopped and turned.
“This going out sounds fun and everything,” I said, “but just because it’s my birthday and now I’m legal it’s not like I’ve never had a beer before.”
“It’s just something my dad did that I’ve always planned to do with you. I didn’t drink in high school like you kids. I had my first beer in the army when I was eighteen, but when I was home and turned twenty-one me and my pa went out. Like he did with my brothers. It just seems like something we should do.”
“They let you drink in the army at eighteen?”
“We were in the middle of a war.” He looked off blankly for a moment. “Worrying about whether somebody was of age never came into play. Let me take a shower real quick and then we’ll go.”
We had dinner at a Mexican restaurant, stuffing ourselves but saying very little. The food was good, but I suppose I didn’t fully appreciate it since I still felt off center from lack of sleep. I kept thinking about Rita, wondering if my dire thoughts of disease would come to pass. Wondering why I wouldn’t let myself enjoy any part of the memory of our brief affair.
“Mostly what I want to tell you is you got to learn how to drink, just like you learn anything else.” My old man pushed his empty plate aside. “You got to learn how to pace yourself, to back off before you get too buzzed because what you’re drinking at the moment takes a while to hit you. And you shouldn’t ever drink on an empty stomach. That’s why we started here. This stuff should stay with us the rest of the night.”
We got into my old man’s twenty-year-old Chevy. The car was a glaring reminder that I was clearly my old man’s son because we both kept our cars running good but looking like shit. In high school when all the other guys were spending who knows how many thousands of hours keeping their rides cleaned and waxed, trying everything that came on the market to keep the vinyl and chrome shiny and clean, I was almost a legend for having the worst looking ride in the parking lot. A car I never washed, which usually had several weeks’ worth of garbage empty cans, cups, and food wrappers scattered all over the floor. Since I’d had a steady girlfriend I’d cleaned up my act a bit, at least I kept her reserved spot from looking too repulsive, but my old man had never given in to such change. If my mom didn’t want to ride in his car that was fine, she would bitch to him about getting things done around the house, and he would eventually get them done in his own half-assed way, but when it came to his old Chevy, it was his. He kept it the way he wanted, and if my mom or anyone else didn’t like it that was tough.
Lately his car’s headliner had begun to sag. He had just taken staple gun to it so it wouldn’t hang down low enough to bother him, but it still looked like hell. The bad part is that is probably how I would have solved the problem if I’d thought of it first. White Trash repair work at its best.
The twilight was settling on the valley as we started on a road that leads you out of town.
“The thing is.” My old man didn’t look at me as he drove. He seemed to be uncomfortable to be talking at all. “The one thing I wish I would have done a better job of is instilling religion into you kids, something to believe in. I guess I should have set a better example.”
“Katie got confirmed. She might not have been too serious about it, but you can’t say she didn’t turn out okay.” My sister, four years older than me, had moved out of the house at eighteen, put herself through college with scholarships and jobs waitressing and was already settled into a career teaching junior high school in San Diego. “Just because I haven’t done as well as her doesn’t mean I don’t have as good as beliefs.”
“Didn’t say you didn’t.”
“But church, and all that crap, it just isn’t any fun.”
“Who said it was suppose to be fun?” My old man looked at me, briefly, coarsely; then back to the road. “It’s not fun. Life’s not fun.”
“Don’t tell me. When it is fun I worry. But when it’s not fun I worry too. I guess I worry all the time.”
“Worry?” He looked at me, surprised. “I never thought you cared enough to worry about anything.”
“Maybe you’re right,” I said, but I was thinking, I do care. I care a lot, maybe more than I should.
There are only four bars in town. Three for whites and English speaking Mexicans, and one for hardcore Spanish speaking border brothers. By the direction we were driving, east, away from the dying sun, I knew we were headed for the Roadhouse. The place my mom always suspected my old man of hanging out for a couple of hours after work, though she never confronted him with her suspicion.
We pulled into the parking lot of this beat-up old building, and after we walked inside, my first time inside any bar, I have to admit it felt really strange. Not because it was so dark and smelled like smoke and some sour smell covered with disinfectant, but because I suddenly felt like I’d entered another world. Like I’d suddenly been given a little taste of a special freedom in this unique world that allowed you in but wasn’t about to give you any easy answers to what it was all about. I guess the last twenty-four hours of my life had been washed with that feeling, where strange was normal, where the unexpected was too common place to get weirded-out about.
When we sat down at the bar I looked around and noticed that not only was I the youngest person in there by far, my old man might have been the second youngest by five or ten years. This place had live music on the weekends so eventually a lot of people in their twenties or thirties would be there, but that was several hours away. Still, instead of feeling out of place in this room full of old-timers it actually felt pretty cool once it sunk in that I was there legally, not doing anything wrong.
“Two beers, Gus. This is my son, Billy, it’s his twenty-first birthday today,” my old man sounded as proud as he ever had about anything I’d ever done. I felt a little embarrassed that he would be so proud of me for doing absolutely nothing but gaining a measure of time.
We sat there drinking for a while just slowly sipping our beers when my dad finally spoke again.
“I guess I’m just concerned about you. About you making some decisions before it’s too late. You got to get serious about school or a job. You can’t just keep screwing around.”
“I know. I’m not that dumb.”
“I didn’t say you were dumb. You’ve always been a smart kid. But who quits a job at McDonald’s over a matter of principle?”
“Do you want fries with that? Do you want fries with that? Hey, if they wanted me to be a salesman they should have paid me a commission. I was just asking for what was right. Just ‘cause they get away with screwing everybody else over doesn’t mean I should have to put up with it.”
“It does if it’s part of your job.”
“Shouldn’t I stand up for what I feel is right?”
“Not if it’s the same as beating your head against a wall.” My dad finished his beer then signaled the bartender for two more. “Look, I’m not saying that McDonald’s was a good job, but anything you do for a living you are going to have to make sacrifices. You always seem to work harder figuring out reasons to quit than you do working.”
“Well, I guess I’ve always thought I had some kind of hidden talent that would surface someday.”
“If you did it would be in full flower by now, and believe me, eating, sleeping, and watching TV aren’t the most marketable of skills.”
“I did once give about ten seconds of thought about being a TV critic. But then I thought what a drag that would be, like writing book reports for a living. I used to really hate writing book reports.”
Nobody Bats a Thousand Page 20