As You Were

by David Tromblay

  Light glints through the crack where the porch pulls away from the house, allowing ants and flies and hornets and all sorts of winged things to congregate in, on, atop the bags. They get drunk on the skunky, syrupy brew and forget about stinging or biting you. But God help you if one comes into his house when you open the door.

  The reason for all the keys is a simple one: ever since the judge ordered Dad to pay child support, he’s worked on a barter system of sorts.

  Everything with him is under the table.

  One of his drinking buddies, Roger, owns AMO Automotive, an auto repair shop that’s mingled amongst a liquor store, a pawnshop, an adult bookstore/peep show, a bathhouse, and an abortion clinic—you know, historic downtown Duluth. At the shop, Dad welds whatever is needed. In return, he’s given free rein to use the shop’s tools, as well as access to Roger’s expertise whenever whatever is ailing the Reliant’s engine proves beyond Dad’s mechanical understanding. Sometimes you get free entertainment, when his sweaty hands slip from the slick chrome handles and smash into sharp, greasy pieces of metal under the hood.

  He comes and goes from Roger’s shop when he pleases. That’s where one set of the keys come from. It’s not as if he punches a time clock. Mostly, he loiters there throughout the day and drinks cup of coffee after cup of coffee. You too find employment there. Dad won’t let another man teach you about cars, but you’re allowed to push a broom around the shop and take out the trash once school is done for the day.

  If you don’t have detention, that is.

  You tell Dad it’s track practice, but it’s detention. When you don’t have detention, and Dad’s not home, and the fridge is little more than beer and A1, ketchup and Miracle Whip, or a bag of frozen French fries and a brand-new box of Banquet chicken in the freezer, which you don’t dare touch, you take the bus downtown to where you’re given the key to the vending machines in exchange for some end-of-the-day janitorial work.

  Once the bus crosses from the west side of downtown to the east, you ding the bell to let the driver know you want off. You have to make your way past the pro-life protesters and take a left once you see the bongs and dildos in the windows of The Last Place on Earth, never lifting your head until you come to the alley after the Family Sauna, which is a little different than the Yoshiko Sauna, which is where grown men go to get a backrub and jerked off by thirteen-year-old Chinese girls. The Family Sauna is where family men go to be homos before they go home to their wives, according to Dad.

  Some days you do dumb shit, like pop the oversized bubble wrap the engine parts come in while Roger adjusts the timing on some foreign job. He sends you to the public library for a Chilton book, so he can figure out what the fuck is wrong with the imported piece of shit, his words, but once you break the rhythm of the popping, Roger stops looking at the engine and searches around the garage and sees what you’re doing and sends a pair of channel locks sailing toward your head.

  “Knock it the fuck off,” he says.

  So you take the trash downstairs and out back to the dumpster in the alley. Before you head back upstairs, you head to the bathroom and beat your meat to the pair of tits hanging over the toilet tank courtesy of this month’s Easyrider centerfold. But first, you make sure to wash your hands. You lather up with two full pumps of the Gojo natural orange pumice hand cleaner—a combination of baby oil, scrubbing particles, and citrus scent—which moisturizes the skin and leaves your hands softer than any girl you’ve ever met.

  Another set of keys belongs to the bar where Dad works. He wakes you and takes you to the bar after closing time. Sometimes the two of you arrive in time to see the owner closing out the register before heading up the stairs to the apartment above. Dad and the bar owner always exchange pleasantries. They share the same first name. They are both Dick(s).

  Dad calls the bar owner Little Dick because he looks so skinny it seems like he lives off caffeine, cigarettes, and lite beer. The bar owner calls Dad Big Dick because he tips the scales at two hundred and fifty- plus pounds. They even have their nicknames embroidered on the front of their dart league jackets. Together they look like Laurel and Hardy if the fat one was Indian.

  You sit at the bar with a Dr. Pepper and nibble away on Harvest Cheddar Sun Chips, staring at yourself in the gold-flecked mirror while Dad sweeps the whole place down and cleans the tabletops with a rag which is anything but.

  Sometimes you fall asleep with your forehead resting on the bar, and Dad will wake you, saying, “Hey, ya lush, go find a booth to lie down on until I’m done.”

  Before you nod off again, you watch him wipe down the entirety of the dining room, mop every inch of the floor. He’s methodical. One by one, he sets the dining room chairs atop the tables, counter-clockwise. He does the same with the barstools, spinning them until they sit aligned with one another in a perfect row.

  In the kitchen, he cleans the bar glasses, then the grease traps, followed by the rubber floor mats, all of which are sent through a monstrosity of a dishwasher that belches a cloud of steam each time Dad opens the side door. The cloud billows out into the barroom, leaving a sheen of moisture on every surface.

  It’s said you sleep like a cement truck. You slide off the vinyl bench seat onto the floor and stink of Simple Green well into the next afternoon.

  For years you had it in your head how Dad brought you along to show you how you’d need to put your all into whatever you do, even if it is nothing more than cleaning up a tavern come closing time. But that’s not the case. Later, you learn how he didn’t do it to put food on the table or keep the lights turned on, or to make sure you stay warm in the winter, either. No, in exchange for services rendered, he’s allowed to drink all he wants during their regular business hours. It’s how he pays his tab, in other words. There’s no lesson about grit and spit and elbow grease or a hard day’s work here. Dad most likely brings you along because he doesn’t dare leave you behind, in fear of Grandma learning he left you by yourself when he took you for the weekend, so the two of you could do whatever fathers and sons do when killing time together.

  It helps him do more than keep an eye on you. If the food stamps run out, he can make you something to eat for dinner before he dumps the deep fryer grease. If you can call it dinner at two in the morning, that is.

  The inside of Dad’s house is sad. The kitchen table is barely visible beneath a collage of empty Banquet chicken boxes, microwave TV dinner trays, beer cans and bottles. Styrofoam meat trays still stuck to their blood-soaked pads sit in a stack on the edge of the stove. Some harbor green bits of mold. The more recent are decorated with tiny craters from being pelted with scalding-hot grease—a result of him cooking at far too high a temp or being far too drunk to bother looking for a lid, which is impressive considering how many memories you can call to mind of him swaying in a figure-eight while bellied up to the stove, shirtless, fixing something to eat.

  All this filth and clutter is waiting for you. All of it has yet to find its way into the plastic bag hanging from the doorknob on the back door.

  To get to the spare bedroom, you climb the spiral staircase. The search for the spare room is short-lived. Neither of the bedrooms have doors, only doorways. Dad’s room faces the street. On his wall, there’s a gun rack housing Grandpa Gene’s four rifles and a shotgun. The tiny three-inch-deep drawer in the bottom, where Dad keeps his spare ammunition, is left open with the skeleton key in the lock. It’s been that way for so long the entire thing is covered in an eighth inch of dust. His walls are plastered with a decade of centerfolds. They mask the peeling paint and cracks in the concrete as well as the shit stains left by Sam back when his favored medium for his artistic expressions was feces farmed from his Pampers.

  On the backside of those centerfolds, each woman lists their turn-ons, likes, dislikes, hobbies, hometowns, measurements, etc. It’s from these lists you learn what sort of man you’ll become simply by fantasizing about what sort of woman you want to one day fuck.

  The spare room is l
ittle more than a storage room, a place where Dad tosses the crap he doesn’t want anymore but doesn’t have the time to dispose of properly. There’s a bed, of course, but it’s folded in half and latched into its metal frame. It’s a cot, really, and all the way on the other side of the room. Before you can get to it, you have to high step through mounds of musty clothes and maneuver around piles of Penthouses and Playboys and some British magazine featuring extraordinarily hairy women. To unlatch and unfurl the cot, you’ll need to muster enough strength to move two Beta players from the floor. Only then do you get a chance to take in the room around you and launch into a sneezing fit.

  The sheets are damp and smell of mold. They’re heavy with the humidity trapped inside the house. If you look behind the blackout curtain, you’ll find the window frame covered in black spores and painted shut with Dutch Boy institutional white latex exterior. The cans still need to find their way to the dumpster. Your arm and shirt get wet from the little droplets collecting on the rubbery backside of the curtain, so you close it again and wipe your arm off with a dusty pillowcase.

  The dresser is covered with spare microphones for Dad’s CB radio, what’s left of his CB radio, an ammo reloading press, a bag of gunpowder, a box of brass, and a cracked and dented aluminum baseball bat stained with what looks an awful lot like blood. You don’t dare ask what he hit hard enough to do that to the bat. It’s not the only one in the house, however. There’s one within an arm’s reach of the front and the back door, too. Both look as though they’ve seen battle.

  The living room is no better off than the spare bedroom. The floor is covered with a dark brown and gold shag carpet—as are the walls, for that matter. The carpet proves oppressive, not because of the color scheme, but because of how the rug absorbs, muffles, deadens the noises of the living room. Walking in there reminds you of walking into the booth at the doctor’s office when you go get your ears checked.

  There are hundreds of vinyl records, hundreds more of the eight- track variety, and dozens of VHS movies—a good number of which are bootleg XXX-rated films. That last bit proves fortuitous considering you never had the talk. In fact, the closest you came was when you brought home a permission slip asking a parent or guardian’s okay for you to watch a boys-only sexual education video, which promised to explain the changes your plumbing would soon be undergoing.

  “When is it?” Grandma asks.

  “Next Wednesday, at school.”

  “Do you want to watch it?” she says, her voice idling at a low growl, her eyes never shifting from the television screen.

  You want to tell her yes, but you don’t dare open your mouth. So you sheepishly nod your head. Fortunately, you’re in her periphery, but unsure if you’re hidden behind the frame of her glasses. If she turns to look at you and has to ask again, you get a chance to change your answer. But to be safe, you moonwalk away from her, contemplating whether it’s a good time to run.

  “You...filthy...pervert!” she says, snatching up the metal-handled flyswatter. The plastic flap meant for killing mosquitoes and the like falls off and flies across the dinner table. The flogging continues until you recant your earlier statement and return to school the next morning with a permission slip lacking a signature. You, along with a few other fifth-graders, spend the following Wednesday afternoon in the gym instead of watching the video and learning what an erection means and where babies come from. Instead, your first sex ed video comes from Dad’s collection. The Devil in Miss Jones teaches you about buttfucking and blowjobs and men in diapers and girls drenched in cum and a thousand other hellish delights you’d rather forget.

  You take a seat—once you move a pile of junk mail and bills to the footstool, that is. Dinner waits on a TV tray, though, admittedly, it’s difficult to find your appetite. Dad’s cowboy boots sit between the two chairs, and their stench overpowers the aroma wafting from the plate each time the fan oscillates. Still, as you sit, you’ll notice there are places where the carpet on the walls sags, and, when the light hits just right, the strands glisten as if damp or oily. Once, when you dare put your nose close enough, you notice how it’s taken on the smell he can never seem to wash away.

  Each day he puts baby powder on his balls and under his pits, splashes cologne into his palm, and pats it onto either side of his neck before slicking his hair back with a dab of Brylcreem without bothering to wash his hand first.

  Some mornings you get to witness this ritual, thanks to the lack of bedroom doors. The whole process only takes seconds—the same as a car wreck. You only see him standing with his back facing the door, his legs spread, his pants down to his knees, his shirttails covering his ass cheeks, and a white billowing cloud, which freshens the stale air for a fleeting moment. But you know what exactly is happening.

  He calls this a Tijuana shower.

  But it’s time to dig in; this is your life now. A commercial comes on, so you stab your fork into the Hungry-Man and watch him peer out of his sheer curtains. They seem so out of place in his house. They look like oversized lace doilies, though they serve their purpose well enough: he can see out into his yard, but no one can see in. He loathes the thought of anyone stepping a foot into his yard to cut through the empty lot between his building and the next—so much so, he drives green metal gardening stakes into the corners of the lot and strings caution tape between them, giving it the look of an abandoned crime scene. Later, when the caution tape proves ineffectual, he replaces it with a live 110 wire. No one traipses through his yard then, save the occasional loose dog. For them, he keeps a pump-action pellet gun on the end table and aims through the tattered screen of the opened window. Their yelp is followed by a disembodied voice echoing between the two bare concrete buildings: “Get out of my goddamn yard!”

  But that’s not what is echoing in your ears. It’s Dad’s last words to you: “The day you can take me is the day you can move out.”

  It never stops echoing.

  Echoing is the wrong way to put it, though. Echoes fade. Echoes become distant. “The day you can take me is the day you can move out” repeats the way a skipping record does. It skips until you recognize it’s a gauntlet tossed at your feet rather than a way to tell you you’re trapped here.

  Amongst the clutter sits an unassuming leather Brunswick bag with a fourteen-pound bowling ball inside. It’s the only thing in the room that isn’t dusty. He hasn’t bowled in a bowling alley in years. But he does take it out sometimes, and flings it into the wall he shares with the neighbors whenever they grow too rambunctious.

  Dad likes the quiet. The neighbors like to entertain and argue and yell at their kids. There are times when he’ll get too drunk to send it into the wall on his own, so he’ll have you do it for him. Though you’ll never throw it hard enough to make him happy, so you keep doing it until you are so sweaty, you can’t grip it any longer.

  In the drawer of that end table is a Mexican switchblade. They differ from the ones most people are used to seeing on TV. They take a bit more finesse to operate. He claims he took it off a man who groped Mom while she was pregnant. A fight ensued, and a knife was produced. He hospitalized the man sometimes and got away on self-defense when he tells this story. Other times, Dad says the guy died right there in the parking lot.

  How he came to claim ownership of the knife is anyone’s guess, but Mom will nod her head a single time when you ask whether it’s true. That, or she is just looking at the floor, diverting her eyes away from yours, trying to avoid the subject.

  A pistol lives in that same drawer, loaded and ready to go. It isn’t his only pistol. He has them all over the house. Some are in plain sight. Others are tucked away. He keeps two in the living room. Another hangs from his bedroom mirror, snapped into a leather belt that looks like something out of an old Western. There’s one atop his dresser. It’s as monstrous as it is comical-looking, a .357 Magnum with an eighteen- inch barrel. It looks like the one The Joker, Jack Napier, wielded in the last Batman movie. A forgotten pistol sits in the c
loset of the spare bedroom behind a broken bifold door and beneath a garbage bag filled with his old pastel disco leisure suits.

  Yet another sits on his bedside nightstand. There’s no counting the number of times you wielded that one, standing over him while he slept, wondering whether you’d be tried as an adult.

  PAY YOUR LAST RESPECTS

  YOU COME FACE TO FACE with death well before you’re ready to contemplate mortality. You’re made to wear your Easter suit, which is not quite a khaki color—it’s more the shade of chocolate malt. It’s the last time you should ever get to wear it, since you’re still a growing boy. Except Grandma Audrey wants to get her money’s worth, so she’ll make you wear it a little longer than you should, and she’ll have to say something like “Suck it in” while she’s helping you zip the pants or button up the shirt. You’ll have to wear it well after you hear things like, “Where’s the flood?” from those who talk in cliché and are convinced their jokes are funnier inside their head than when said aloud. Grandpa Bub, mostly.

  Grandma will say, “Leave him alone, Bub.”

  He will say, “Buy him a new suit, Auddie.”

  The new suit, vest, and clip-on tie won’t come until after she ushers you into a wake for the first time. It must have been somewhere in West Duluth, probably the Bell Brothers Funeral Home. Unless you’re going to the cabin or to the mall to see Santa or across the bridge to the Chinese restaurant after church on Sundays, you don’t remember leaving West Duluth, so Bell Brothers is a safe bet, being you can’t think of another funeral parlor in Spirit Valley.

  “I don’t know this man” is the only thing you can think to say when Grandma walks up to the coffin, holding you out in front of her. Her hands are on your shoulders, and she pushes you up close to the casket so others can see as well—“To pay your last respects,” she says, but it feels like she’s using you for a walker.