Price of the Haircut_Stories

by Brock Clarke

  “Thank you, Bryan,” my mother said, petting Jugular, who looked up at her fondly while still gnawing on the slipper. “It was a very thoughtful gift. You’re a wonderful son. I’m so lucky to have you.”

  “OK,” I said, not really listening to what my mother had said. Because I was thinking about the dog chewing on the slipper that my father had given my mom just last year. He’d given it to her just last year; that’s one of the things that bothered me. Was this the way my mother treated her gifts? Was this the way she would treat Jugular in a year? Would Jugular end up in the mouth, so to speak, of next year’s gift? After all, my dad had probably spent a lot of time rummaging through the slipper bin and picking out those slippers, and here they were, just a year later, in a dog’s mouth, and no wonder no one gave my mother birthday presents. Did she ever think about that? And then there was the dog on the couch. On the couch! Where I wasn’t even allowed to put my feet, a plate of food, a glass of milk! Was this to say that I was less important than Jugular? That I was less important to my mother than a dog she had just met? It made me never want to give my mother a gift again, and I nearly strung that choke collar around Jugular’s neck and dragged him back to the pound, where fate would deal with him a lot sooner than next year’s present would.

  But, no, I wouldn’t do that. My mother looked so happy, sitting there on the couch with her dog, so happy and so grateful and so close to contentment. So I swallowed my many legitimate grievances, or tried to, and when I was trying to, I had this very thought: Who knew it would be so difficult to be good? Who knew that the people you’re trying to treat well would make it so difficult on you? Who knew that supposedly good people could tempt you into meanness, could actually force meanness upon you? Who knew that you could watch your mother, on the couch with her dog, so happy that she was glowing, the way she never glowed when she was sitting there on the couch with her husband or, for that matter, her son, as if the dog were a better companion than her own flesh and blood? Who knew that you would have to ignore your mother’s lack of simple human consideration and that it would be such a struggle just to be happy for her, to be able to give her such happiness and expect nothing back in return? But I didn’t expect anything in return, I didn’t, and was truly happy for my mother, even when Jugular finished with the left slipper, spit out its remains right on the couch, and started in on the other slipper.

  Because that’s what the dog did for the next week: he ate slippers, on the couch, with my mother sitting next to him, saying, “That a boy, Jugular. Good boy.” Luckily, that’s what my father had always given to my mother for her birthday when he remembered it—slippers—and so my mother had plenty of them to spare. But it’s not like she had an infinite supply of slippers, and one night she finally ran out. It was a night when, as it happened, my mother had gone out to dinner and a movie with a few of her “lady friends” (and I was happy for her, that she was finally feeling good enough to get out of the house and have a little fun; it was a positive development for her, and I was pleased to have played such a crucial role in bringing it about with my thoughtful gifts. But why “lady friends”? Did anyone even use the expression “lady friends” anymore? Had anyone really ever used it at all? I actually asked my mother these questions (because I’d written two poems—“I Gave My Mother My Heart and She Fed It to the Dog, Which I Had Also Given Her” and “It Is Difficult to Be Good”—for extra credit for Mrs. Tooley’s class, and after she’d read them, Mrs. Tooley told me that it was ingenious the way I challenged the conventions of rhyme and meter by not using rhyme and meter at all, and then she gave me a little lecture about how I was right, that it’s easy to be mean, and hard to be good, but that nothing good ever came out of meanness, and that I needed to be nice to my mother, nice to everyone, of course, but especially to my mother. And speaking of my mother, Mrs. Tooley suggested that my mother and I talk more often and more honestly about our problems, so that our life together would get better and maybe my poems about our life together would get better, too), and my mother said, “Fine, ‘girls’ night out’ then.” When she said this, I snorted and, before I could stop myself, said “Girls, ha!” My mother stared at me, ashen-faced, as if seeing an unwelcome ghost. I knew whose ghost it was, and so I recovered somewhat and said, “Have a good time!” But Mom kept staring at me and staring at me, until finally she said, “Just take good care of Jugular. OK, Bryan?”).

  And that’s the point: I would have taken good care of Jugular, except we ran out of slippers. He spit out the remains of the last one in the house not ten minutes after my mother had left for her girls’ night out, and so we had a little problem. Because that dog and I were like two guys who got along better when they were in the company of women (or ladies, or girls), and now that Mom was gone, we just sat there on opposite ends of the couch. After a while, I began hearing low growls coming from Jugular, from somewhere deep inside him and rising up through his jowls, his teeth, and I kept saying, “There are no more slippers. Do you understand, you idiot dog?” But whether Jugular understood or not, the growls kept coming, and I didn’t know what to do.

  So I called my dad. He hadn’t given me his and Julie’s home number, but I had his work number down at Kahn’s, where he was the night foreman. I called the number and made my way past and through a series of female secretarial voices (I thought one of them might have been Julie’s: it was a happy, high voice, and it filled me up with this longing, the kind of longing that sometimes made me do things that got me in trouble at school, like scrawl flattering obscenities on Tracy Carpenter’s locker, to name one of many; her voice made me want to say “You might know me: I’m Bryan Reid,” and have her say, “Oh, Bryan, your father talks about you all the time, and your voice, it sounds so much like his, except kinder, more full of goodness”) until I finally got to my father. I knew it was my father because, upon answering the phone, he said, not “Hello,” but “What?”

  “Dad,” I said. “It’s me, Bryan.”

  Which started my dad swearing—at me, I thought at first, but then some of the swearing was punctuated by instructions about casings and packaging, and I realized he was talking to some of the guys on the line, who were fucking up, apparently, and at least I wasn’t and that was something in my favor—and then my father came back to me and again said, “What?” I told him about the dog, and his slippers, how they were all gone, and then I paused, thinking that maybe this would rile him up: that he would throw down his rubber gloves and whip off his protective mask and come home and avenge his slippers, and maybe stay home to ensure that no further harm came to whatever else he might have given us, or what he might yet give, and maybe in the bargain save me from trying and failing to be good and like my mother all the time—because I knew now it was easier to seem like a good person when my father was around, with him so obviously not being one. Plus, I missed him: for those reasons and for a bunch of others I didn’t exactly understand, I missed him and wished he would come home. But my father didn’t say anything when I told him about the sorry fate of the slippers, and so I went on and told him about the dog right now, his growling, his drooling, his teeth, and then I paused again. Still, my father said nothing, and so I was forced to be direct: “So what do I do, Dad?”

  “What?” my father said. “That’s why you called me at work?”

  “Yes.”

  “At fucking work?”

  “Jugular’s a big dog, Dad. Mean, too. I’m a little scared,” I said. “Please.”

  “Think, Bryan,” my father said, and I almost expected him to reach through the receiver and tap my forehead, hard, with his forefinger, like he used to do during happier times when we were in the same room and he wanted me to think. “Aren’t there any other shoes in that house?” Then he hung up.

  “Thank you,” I said to the dial tone. I hung up the phone, told Jugular to stay, got off the couch, went upstairs, gathered all the shoes in the house—all the sneakers, work boots, dress pumps, loafers, deck shoes, baseball cleats,
flip-flops, and the golf spikes my father had left behind, even the old hockey skates that I’d grown out of—and threw them in a pile on the couch, in the place where I’d been sitting. “Go ahead,” I told Jugular. “Chew.” Then I went upstairs to work for a few minutes on my English homework (Mrs. Tooley was making us write a short story, and mine was very short, and it was about this man, this mean bastard, who was a mean bastard not because it was easier to be a mean bastard than it was to be whatever its opposite was but because being a mean bastard gave him a certain critical distance, a perspective from which he could find the solutions to all the most difficult problems, and for that reason he also lived in a cave deep in the woods, where he waited for his only son to find him and assume his birthright, which had something to do with being a problem-solving mean bastard who lived in a cave) before I fell asleep at my desk, only to be awakened four hours later by my mother’s screaming.

  Because the dog died, too. It must have been the golf spikes, or maybe the baseball cleats, or possibly even the hockey skates. Something sharp, that was clear. Whatever it was, by the time I got downstairs, Jugular was dead, and there was blood everywhere—on Jugular, obviously, and also on Mom from her hugging his corpse, and all over the couch, too, which was pretty much ruined from the dog’s blood, which was poetic justice if you ask me. Although my mother didn’t ask me: she was too busy screaming, screaming about poor Jugular and how everything she cared about up and left, or died on her, and that she was doomed to be what she was now: alone, all alone, for the rest of her life.

  “All alone?” I asked—yelled, even, to be heard over my mother’s wailing. Because, OK, my mom was upset, what with the dog dying a bloody death so soon after the Korean lilac shriveled up, and dying so soon after my father left her on her birthday. But was I not there, standing right there in front of her, in the same house, next to same bloody dog and couch? Was she saying that being with her son, her only son, was exactly like being all alone? “Are you saying that being with me is like being all alone?”

  After I said this, my mother closed her eyes and shook her head, then opened her eyes again. “I can’t believe it,” she said, sucking back a tear. “You sound exactly like your father.”

  “The hell I do,” I said. And then: “But you know what? Maybe Dad was right to leave you. I bet Julie doesn’t take him for granted like this.”

  This was probably the wrong thing to say, because it made Mom hold Jugular closer and start wailing again, even louder than before, certainly loud enough for our neighbors to hear. If she kept crying this loudly, sooner or later the neighbors would come over to see what was wrong, and there my mother would be, with the dead dog and blood all over both of them, and me standing over them, with my fists clenched (my fists were clenched) and that I’m-so-mad-I-might-kill-someone look on my face (I knew that look well enough from my father’s face, could feel it settling onto my own face, and, sure enough, I went to the mirror and there it was), and I knew that I had to do something, and so I said, “I have school tomorrow. I’m going to bed.”

  My mother didn’t answer me, didn’t look at me, either; she kept holding the dog, rocking back and forth, whimpering until she got tired of whimpering, wailing until she got tired of wailing, but not paying attention to me no matter what sorry sound she was making.

  So I went to bed. It wasn’t exactly a restful sleep—in part because of Mom’s crying and, later, a loud, protracted thumping, which I assumed was Mom dragging Jugular’s lifeless body across the living room and then the kitchen, and then outside to the backyard, where she would bury him; but also because I was thinking, wondering how I’d gone so wrong with Jugular. That’s what I asked Mrs. Tooley the next day, after she’d read my short story and kept me after class, because it was so very short and apparently wasn’t really a story, either, and so I was going to have to rewrite it, and I asked her, “How did I go so wrong with Jugular?”

  “Who?” Mrs. Tooley asked. “What?” She looked at my story, as though maybe Jugular was a character in it she’d forgotten. So I told her: about the dog and the slippers and my father’s advice and the shoes I’d fed him and how he died chewing on them and about my mother wailing and saying she was all alone and that I sounded like my father, and then me saying my father was right to leave her for Julie, and whatnot.

  “Wait a minute,” Mrs. Tooley said. “You got mad at your mother?”

  “Sure,” I said. “For saying she was all alone.” Mrs. Tooley looked over her glasses at me, as if she didn’t understand what I was saying, and so I clarified: “She wasn’t alone. I was right next to her.”

  “Bryan,” she said, in that kind, patient tone teachers use when they’re preparing to stop being so kind and patient. “You fed that poor dog ice skates. You fed him golf spikes and baseball cleats.”

  “He liked to chew on shoes,” I said. “That was his thing.”

  “You killed your mother’s dog and then blamed her for feeling lonely,” Mrs. Tooley said, then slid my very short story across her desk toward me. “And then you wrote a story praising your father who left you and your mother, and who suggested you feed the dog the skates in the first place.”

  “He never said ‘skates’ per se . . . ” I said, but Mrs. Tooley put up her hand to stop me.

  “You know what I think?” Mrs. Tooley asked, and then, before I could say whether or not I wanted to know, she said, “I think your mother is right. I think you probably sound just like your father.”

  “I don’t,” I said.

  “I bet you do,” Mrs. Tooley said. She took her pencil out of the crook of her ear and jabbed it in my direction. “Do you want to sound like your father?”

  “That’s the thing,” I said. “I don’t know how not to,” and then I started crying: because it’s a terrible thing, not to know how not to do something you know you shouldn’t do. It’s worse than not being able to conjugate a verb, to solve for pi, to memorize all the symbols for all the elements in all their tables. “I don’t know how to sound like my mother, and I don’t know how not to sound like my father.”

  “Why don’t you try to sound like yourself?” Mrs. Tooley asked, her voice kind again (because, as the standardized tests would have us put it, a student’s crying is to a teacher as water softener is to water). She put her pencil back above her ear and handed me her teacher’s box of tissues, which I took. “Why don’t you use your own voice?” she suggested.

  “My own voice?” I asked, still sniffling. “What’s that?”

  Mrs. Tooley opened her mouth to answer, but then the bell rang and the classroom started filling up with students from Mrs. Tooley’s advanced class: the tide of smart kids came in, and I was washed out, into the hall, with Mrs. Tooley’s box of tissues and the advice she’d given me. Why don’t you use your own voice? This was good advice, no doubt, and like most good advice not entirely useful. How could I find my own voice? How does one do that? Wouldn’t it be easier to find another person, someone who wasn’t either my father or mother, and use his voice? That seemed like a more reasonable plan. And since I knew my mother felt all alone, and since I missed my dad, I decided I would find a new man for her, and a father figure for myself, and then make my voice sound like his.

  Notice, I said new man; notice I said father figure. Because I knew that neither of us wanted my actual father, from whom I was trying to distinguish myself and by whom my mother had been persecuted for so many years and was to trying to forget, and in the same way trying to remember what it was like to be loved and appreciated and to feel like a real human being again. No, the trick was to get a man who was the opposite of my father. My father’s name was Richard, and his nickname was Dick. So I thought that maybe I’d start off by finding a man whose name or nickname was the opposite of Dick.

  The thing about such a quest is this: it’s time-consuming, and so I had to take a week or so off from school while I looked for this guy. I looked at the public golf course, the downtown mall that no one ever went to, the aft
ernoon movies at the arty movie theater near the university, and the coffee shops in the same neighborhood. I kept coming up to strange men more or less the same age as my mother, coming up to them singly and in groups and asking, “What’s your name?” and then “What’s your nickname?” And what did I discover? I discovered that there are lots of strange men, who, if you come up to them and ask these questions, will ignore you or tell you to bug off, and I also discovered, from the men who did answer my questions, that the world is full of men with dull, depressing nicknames, like Spook, Stutz, Link, and Shoe. It took me ten whole days until I found someone good, in the IGA, scrutinizing the bratwurst selection: a man who was maybe a young sixty. He was wearing an Irish-looking wax jacket and a red scarf and penny loafers, and had healthy red cheeks and a good head of white hair, and I came up to him and asked, out of the blue (this was my method), “Hey, what’s your name?”

  It’s odd what will or will not get someone’s attention. When I asked him this question, he didn’t turn around to answer; he simply said, “Champion,” and kept pawing the sausages. But when I asked him, “What’s your nickname?” he actually turned to face me.

  “My nickname?”

  “Yes,” I said. “What do people call you?”

  “People call me Champ,” he said, and then he smiled at me, as though he knew he’d given me the right answer.

  “That’s perfect,” I said. “Come with me.”

  He came. Because it turns out Champ was a widower, a new one, and he was as eager for companionship as Mom was, as I was, although soon he would regret being so eager, and this is one of the things I’ve learned: there are plenty of sad and lonely people in the world, and if you’re unlucky enough to be one of them, then sooner or later someone even lonelier and sadder will find you and bring you home with them, and then you’ll regret it.