The Reason You're Alive

by Matthew Quick

  Hank went on to talk about Eggplant X’s paintings related to “the Asian experience in America.” Lots to do with dry cleaning and martial arts being racist, which I don’t quite understand because Bruce Lee types and every Chinese dry cleaner in America have historically made big bank.

  Asians are the best when it comes to martial arts and dry cleaning—every single moron in the entire world knows that. I use Asian dry cleaners exclusively. White people are shit when it comes to dry cleaning. And if I were making a kung fu movie, I’d make damn sure the lead was Asian. There is no white Bruce Lee. Period. I like some of Chuck Norris’s politics, but he is the minivan to Bruce Lee’s Corvette.

  And yet I kept all this to myself and let my son puff out his pretty feathers and strut his stuff. He didn’t have any other angle to run on women, and sometimes it’s best to go with what you do adequately rather than try to attempt something beyond your skill set.

  I could tell Hank was uneasy about Sue’s reaction. He gets tense talking about race-related subjects in front of people of different ethnicities. I don’t understand it, because he’s always so fucking sure about his opinions in a room full of whites. If Hank knew how many times I said the word gook in front of Sue, he would have had a heart attack right there and then.

  There was no dessert, because Hank was trying to keep me “heart healthy,” and I don’t count cut-up fruit as dessert. So I said, “Someone has a bedtime that expired a long time ago,” meaning Ella, get your ass to bed now. I volunteered to tuck her in so that Hank and Sue could be alone and hopefully get down to business.

  Ella managed to milk more time out of her father by being cute and telling stories about how she was learning about Chile, “one of the skinniest countries in the world,” which prompted me to ask Hank if Chile was a “heart-healthy country” being that it was so skinny, a good joke that he ignored completely. Because he is weak when it comes to raising a child, Ella’s stall tactics worked for a good fifteen minutes, but eventually I got her to give Hank and Sue kisses on the cheeks, and then I was in the upstairs bathroom with Ella, making sure she washed her face and brushed her teeth.

  This next bit of information might shock you, but I actually combed Ella’s hair. Her mother wasn’t there anymore to do it, and Ella had only just met Sue—and, truth be told, I like combing hair. I find it soothing. I used to comb Jessica’s hair when she was depressed. Her mother used to do it for her when Jessica was little. She’d get dangerously sad back then too, especially in the winter, when there was less sun. It was in her genes. Whenever my wife started to slide south, you could see it in her hair, which would get greasy and matted-looking. I couldn’t stand seeing that, and because I didn’t know how to cure depression, I started combing hair. It was something I could do. And combing Ella’s hair was also something I could do.

  Don’t tell anyone about this shit. Both about my dead wife’s depression and the fact that I like combing my granddaughter’s hair. The first part is none of anyone’s goddamn business, and the latter might give people the wrong idea about me. I’m not a fucking pervert or anything like that. A little girl needed her hair combed, and so I did it. Period. If Femke hadn’t abandoned her own flesh and blood, it wouldn’t have been necessary for me to step up, but that Dutch whore left, and I do what needs to be done.

  While I was combing out Ella’s long brown hair, holding the roots, making sure not to hurt her, I said, “Do you think that Ms. Sue would make a good mother?”

  “I like her,” Ella said. “She isn’t a mommy?”

  “No,” I said. Then, just to test the water, I added, “She would probably love to have a kid around to take care of. You know of any little girls who need a mother?”

  Ella thought about it for a few seconds and then said, “Will Ms. Sue be coming back here?”

  I told her I sure hoped so.

  Then Ella asked if Sue was my friend, and I said Sue was maybe my best friend lately, but more like a daughter.

  Ella spun around here and said, “I know you hate my mother, and I’m mad at her for leaving Daddy. But I miss her. I really miss her!”

  There were tears in her little brown eyes, and I thought up a million and one ways to kill Ella’s Dutch bitch mother, but I had to push all that deep down inside of me because Ella was sobbing into my chest. Her little forehead was pushing the dog tags into my breastplate and it hurt, but I didn’t say anything about that or even move Ella’s head. I just put my arms around her until she cried herself to sleep, at which point I tucked her in and then tiptoed out of her room, shutting off the lights and closing the door behind me.

  I went into stealth mode here and crept down the stairs just enough to get a view of Sue and Hank, who were now on the couch.

  Sue kept touching Hank’s forearm as they talked, which could only mean one of two things. Either she thought Hank was a homosexual—I could honestly understand why, the way he went on about art all night and insisted on being called “Henri”—or she was actually starting to fall for him.

  When a non-lesbian woman reaches out and touches a non-homo man on the arm more than once in a sixty-second interval, that means she is considering doing the nasty with the man. Any half-wit with a working pecker knows that. And so I smiled. I could hear them talking—mostly about me, their only common interest.

  Hank was doing bad impressions of me, exaggerating my mannerisms, voice, and conservative political opinions, making me out to be some crazy right-wing buffoon. Always easy to pick on veterans when no one is invading your country. But when the Taliban infiltrates Philadelphia, Hank will be the first to come crying to his military-trained father for help.

  Normally I would have gone down there and kicked his ass for displaying his ignorance in such a cavalier manner, but I had a little girl in need upstairs. That was the mission now. And Sue was smiling, which at the time seemed to indicate that I was winning, no matter what the fuck Hank thought.

  I was just about to go to bed when my son asked Sue why she hung out with me. He asked the question in a way that implied he couldn’t believe anyone would willingly spend time with his old man.

  Sue laughed and said she enjoyed my company.

  Then Hank asked why, saying the word why like Sue had claimed she liked having her toenails pulled out with pliers.

  “Don’t you ever feel like everyone is bullshitting you?” Sue said. “Just saying what they think you want to hear? Like everyone is constantly lying, and we never really know a single person at all? I don’t feel like that when I’m around your father. I might not always agree with his point of view, but I’m always certain I at least know it.”

  Sue gave Hank a chance to respond here, but he didn’t take it. “You’ll miss him when he’s gone,” she said.

  “Didn’t he tell you?” Hank said. “He’s not buying the bullet. He’s going to live forever!”

  Sue said again that Hank would miss me when I was gone.

  For some reason, Hank got nostalgic here and started talking about this great day we had all spent together as a family in the Poconos—Hank, Jessica, my parents, and me. I’ll tell you about that day later on. I don’t want to talk about it right now. But as Hank described it to Sue in vivid detail, I knew there was a part of him deep down that still loved his father, and that made the girly-man tears want to start leaking from my eyes.

  So I went back upstairs and lay myself down in the guest room. The brain meds had me feeling like someone had squirted crazy glue on my eyelids. I was snoring in no time at all.

  When I woke up the next morning, I checked Hank’s bedroom, hoping to find a little yellow woman in bed with him, but no such luck. Honestly, I would have been a smidge disappointed if Sue had played hide-the-egg-roll with my son on the first date, because that would make her a little slutty, giving it up so easily, especially considering the fact that he didn’t really have much game when it came to women. Sue wasn’t the type of broad who would be easily impressed by Hank’s money or his art-dealer lifestyl
e or his fucking hybrid car that he plugs in every night like a pussy.

  Women are highly influenced by their fathers, who become their default standards for a decent man. Sue’s father, Alan, was a top-tier man—battle-tested by the nastiest little yellow bastards on the planet. My son would have his work cut out for him if he wanted to impress Sue.

  I met Femke’s father once. Now that man’s mother cut off his nuts at birth and then handed them over to Femke’s mother when they got married. Probably kept them in a velvet pouch with silver tassels. I don’t think he was allowed to open his mouth once during the few dinners I was forced to sit through with those foreigners. I felt bad for Mr. Turk and even worse for my son, who was too dumb to read the blueprint for his wife, seated across the table from him in the form of one incredibly crusty old Dutch cunt, aka Femke’s mother.

  I should have felt bad for myself who was gaining a bitch daughter-in-law preprogrammed to explode like a suicide vest, only she took off the metaphorical vest and put it on my son right before she escaped back into the crumbling economies of Europe. I saw it coming a decade away, but back then I didn’t know how much I was going to love my granddaughter, who would make it impossible for me to steer clear of Femke forever.

  I walked over to my sleeping son and poked him in the ribs.

  “Stop!” he yelled as he tried to swat my hand away as if it were a mosquito.

  It was almost six o’clock. Real men are up at five. I poked him again.

  He asked what I wanted, and so I asked if he had fucked my genetically Vietnamese friend.

  “What?” he said, stalling for time, so I repeated the question, saying, “After I went to bed. Did you nail Sue?”

  “What time is it?” Hank asked, playing dumb.

  So I said, “I don’t mind if you sleep with her just as long as (a) she wants to sleep with you and (b) you don’t break her heart. She’s a good woman, Hank. Trust me.”

  Hank sat up and rubbed his eyes.

  Then he said, “Are you insane, Dad? Because sometimes I seriously think you are absolutely fucking bonkers. People might think it’s the brain surgery, but only the ones who never met you before they cut out part of your conservative brain, which just might have made you a little less racist, actually—which is also insane, because you are still the most offensive and the absolute most politically incorrect person I have ever met.”

  Hank’s saying I was a little less racist was a good sign. It meant that he was hot for Sue, or at least that’s what I thought.

  So I said, “What happened last night? Tell me you didn’t fuck it up. She’d make a great mother for Ella.”

  Like a dumb thirsty horse that can’t find the giant freshwater lake whose edge sits less than a yard behind his own ass, Hank asked if I had seriously tried to set him up.

  So I told him that I may have set up the pins, but he would have to knock ’em down, and then I asked if he had rolled another gutter ball or what.

  Hank shook his head and laughed. “We had a good chat over wine, Dad. She’s a lot of fun. I really liked her. I can see why you thought the two of us would get along.”

  I asked again what had happened, and he said nothing. “Something always happens,” I said. “Don’t bullshit me.”

  Then Hank went on about how they had only finished the wine and talked about all sorts of things, but mainly yours truly. Hank said that Sue really cares about me and that he was glad she was there for me when he and I weren’t speaking. She had filled him in on a bunch of stuff that happened when he was ignoring his father. Then around ten she said she had to leave. She wanted to say good-bye to me, according to Hank, but he’d told her I was surely sleeping, which was accurate.

  “There was one other extremely interesting thing Sue told me,” Hank said, making eye contact, evaluating me. “Clayton Fire Bear. The name you kept repeating after your surgery—you knew him during the war?”

  I didn’t remember telling Sue that, which scared me. What the fuck else had I admitted while my brain was healing? Hank wasn’t ready to hear the story, so I looked away.

  “You can talk to me about the war, Dad, if you need to. I’ll listen. Do you want to talk about it? Do you need to?”

  That question caught me off guard. I had always wanted to protect Hank from the horrors of Vietnam, so instead of answering, I asked if he had at least kissed Sue good night.

  Hank’s face dropped for a second. Then he laughed and said, “Nope.”

  I shook my head. My son was never very good with women. “There aren’t exactly a lot of cars on your freeway, son. I really hope you didn’t blow it.”

  “Blow what?”

  So I told him that he needed a new woman ASAP. “You can’t afford to fuck around now.”

  He said he was still married, and that Femke was still Ella’s mother.

  “Being married didn’t stop Femke from screwing a weatherman,” I said.

  Hank winced because the truth hurts. Then he said, “Can’t you understand that I’m grieving?”

  “You don’t have time to grieve. You have a daughter to raise. She needs a mother here in America. One who will put Ella’s needs first.”

  Hank started running his fingers through what little hair he has, like he always does when he’s stressed out. Then he said, “You’re right.”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. It was the first time he had ever said that I was correct about anything since he was three feet tall.

  “And I have a father to get healthy too,” Hank continued. “Sounds like Sue could be a fantastic ally.”

  I asked if I was dreaming.

  Hank smiled and offered to cook me a spinach and feta omelet, and when I asked if I could have toast and butter, that request was denied.

  “Heart-healthy breakfast?” I said.

  “Whole-being-healthy, Dad. Body, mind, and soul. What do you say? Both of us need to work on that.”

  Then Hank hopped out of bed and put his arm around my shoulder. He smiled as he gave me a manly squeeze. If he had quoted the second amendment and told me I was allowed to carry a concealed weapon in his home, I wouldn’t have been more surprised.

  It was hard to believe this sudden good turn in Granger father-son relations was legitimate. I felt like my son was trying to trick me, and I couldn’t find his angle. Hank has historically always been a complete bastard to me, I kept thinking as I watched him cook the heart-healthy omelets.

  Finally, after looking at every possible angle, I concluded that there was only one logical explanation. Hank must have really fallen head-over-heels in love with Sue Wilkerson. And yours truly had brought that fantastic woman into his life. Finally, after forty-some years of bickering, Hank and I found something we could both respect: a gigantic love for a genetically Vietnamese registered Republican named Sue. Or so I thought at the time.

  9.

  I’ve heard that a man only really falls in love one time, and I believe that is true, which is why I never remarried after Jessica died. What was the point? I wasn’t going to do any better than I already had. Jessica was real mashed potatoes and butter. To me the rest of the women in the world would always be the equivalent of Hank’s mashed cauliflower, bland and unsatisfying. He might call it “heart healthy,” but the heart knows what it fucking wants, and it’s hardly ever cauliflower.

  Most men, of course, never manage to marry their true loves. Some wait too long and miss the opportunity. Others think with their dicks and fuck it up by sleeping with any old floozy who will open her legs. And then there are those who miss out because they are too busy chasing other dreams at work, trying to add zeroes to their bank accounts, which is always a good idea, don’t get me wrong about that, definitely add a zero whenever you can, but you have to add metaphorical zeroes to your love life too, make it grow, keep it safe and true. Believe me, I know about these things because I used to be married to the best woman in the entire world.

  Pretty much everything good after I returned from the land of little yellow
bastards happened accidentally and because I had a Vietnam buddy named Roger. We used to call him Roger Dodger, because he used to drive a 1966 Dodge Charger. V8 engine. Badass. Roger Dodger was a good man who—like many of us—got really fucked up in Vietnam. Came home addicted to drugs and convinced that we were all part of some social experiment conducted by higher beings, which he liked to call Light People, at the time. Needless to say, he was pretty fucking crazy back then, always high. And when he was lifted, as the brothers say today, he’d spout his theories like he was a young Jim Jones with Kool-Aid plans for his future rainbow family in Guyana.

  From his grandfather, Roger inherited some money and a little house in a run-down neighborhood. He turned said house into a drug bungalow where he did an after-school business. Basically, he allowed high school kids to party there, charging them a nominal fee to smoke weed with him, take acid, do heroin when he had it, and drink themselves silly. These were kids whose parents were both working to make ends meet, and so they were pretty much unsupervised. Roger Dodger took advantage of that.

  He also had a bit of a thing for underage girls, although back in the late sixties having sex with a young woman in high school wasn’t the headline-grabbing crime that it is today. Roger had another Vietnam vet living with him for a time, who I didn’t like. One of the few vets that I didn’t get along with. His name was Brian, and he was a real fucking piece of shit, let me tell you.

  When I was with Tao in the jungle, I promised myself that if I made it home alive, I would never ever eat another fucking snake for dinner, I would never again sleep in a tree, I’d never walk around for weeks in wet rotting boots, and I’d never take shit off of any man because I was an underling, if I could help it. Great motivation for making money here in America, let me tell you. Motivation is what enables you to do what other men will not. My competition in the banking world had never killed anyone, let alone had their mental endurance tested by the little pricks in Vietnam. When you have watched your friends die in your arms, felt the flesh rot off your feet, and gone nose to nose with pure evil, going the extra mile with an investor—laughing at his dumb jokes, having that extra late-night drink when you’d much rather be home with your family, and sniping the in-house competition by inserting the right word at the right time into the boss’s ear—is like R&R in Hawaii compared to day-to-day wartime Vietnam. I used to just laugh when my fellow bankers complained about their imaginary stress. I was the apex predator in any jungle or boardroom, and I made sure everyone was damn sure aware of that fact. Since I was bringing in big-time money, my superiors looked the other way whenever some pussy colleague complained about me. People in power take care of the apex predator. Always. Doesn’t matter if we are wearing suits or camouflage. The rules are the same.