“Please, Laura.” I hold back tears. Man, I am one enormous pussy. Please? Is that all I can come up with?
Laura, though noticeably flustered, is steadfast. She keeps her distance, committed to not giving any pretense of hope. “We’re obviously no good for one another.”
My voice cracks. “And when did that become a unilateral decision?”
“Please, Hank.” Laura reaches out to me. She squeezes my arm, more calculating than compassionate. “You’re still the sweetest guy I know.”
“Sweet!” I give her a sarcastic thumbs-up. “Good to know I got that going for me.”
Laura continues to hold on to my arm. “Don’t say that.” She gives my arm a patronizing shake. “Come on, guy. I’m a senior, you’re a junior. You and I knew this was inevitable.”
“Bullshit!” I wrench my arm out of her grasp. “You could have fucking clued me in on the inevitable part before I wasted the last four months of my life.”
“They were special to me too, Han—”
“Don’t you fucking say that!” My finger is in her face, almost touching her nose. “You’ve lost the right to say that.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You sure are fucking sorry.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“What do you want me to say?”
All I can do is throw it back in her face. Laura wants to feel okay about what she’s done. She wants absolution. Fuck her. I’m not her fucking priest. She isn’t even Catholic. I’m not getting dumped by a slut—I’m getting dumped by a Protestant slut.
I finally turn my back on Laura after another profanity-riddled diatribe. By the time I settle down enough to face her again, she’s halfway to Lee Barnes. He puts his arm around her. Just as they start to walk away he glances back at me with a smarmy look of satisfaction on his face. He tries to pull Laura in for a kiss, but she pushes him off. “Not now, Lee,” she says.
Not now. I walk past the front passenger side of the Subie. I see the rose I brought for Laura in the front seat. I brought Laura a red rose, and she brought me a fucking pink slip.
Not now. I approach the rear of my car. A scene is looping in my head. Laura is naked, playing with her tits, pumping her bare ass up and down Lee’s shaft and screaming, “Now, now, now!” I cock my fist back and then bring it forward, straightening my arm as I hit the tailgate. I get my hips into it for good measure. I remove my hand to reveal a dent in the back hatch of my car. My knuckles are bleeding. I know Dad is going to be mad, but I don’t think about that. I think about how much this hurts. And I’m not talking about my hand.
My stomach clenches. The ham and eggs come up in three rushes of bilious fluid. I drop to one knee and steady myself with my good hand. The vomit covers my shoes. It smells of ham, pineapple, and vinegar.
All I can think about is Laura’s bare skin. The tears. The blood. The vomit. Her touch. Why can’t I get a handle on this? She could turn around, walk up to me, reach down my pants and say, “One hand job for the road?” and I’d readily accept the invitation.
What the fuck is wrong with me?
Chapter ten
Dad was cool about the dent, although I lied and told him I backed into a tree at the 7-Eleven. Monday at school was unbearable. I couldn’t handle seeing Laura in the hallways—trading bronzed smiles and inside jokes with her girlfriends, all of them wearing their matching white hemp bracelets and airbrushed T-shirts reminding us all to “Never Forget Room two-oh-four.” So, I got Mom to let me skip class on Tuesday.
No big deal. She’ll walk into the office today and tell one of the deans, “Hank’s not feeling well,” and they’ll mark me down as absent, no questions asked. She’ll run into one of my teachers later and say, “I think he has that flu bug that’s going around.” Never mind we’re a good three months beyond flu season. Mom has lied for me my whole life.
I’m so depressed I didn’t even have the heart to masturbate this morning. I tried. I pulled the big guns out of my father’s Playboy stash—the January Holiday Anniversary issue with Kimberly Conrad, the just opened April “Star-Studded Spring Spectacular” issue with Vanity. But nothing. Flaccid city.
I sit at the kitchen table. The smells wafting up from my stained white undershirt and torn jeans beg me in vain for a shower. I yawn, scratch my face. I’ve already started into Dad’s Maker’s Mark. I pick at the red wax on the bottleneck. I haven’t eaten since Sunday, so I’m buzzing three drinks in. After about a dozen shots, I get bored with whiskey. My balls itch, so I scratch them. I unscrew the cap off the Popov, an inexpensive vodka packaged in a plastic half-gallon bottle. Evidently I’m not too drunk to get disgusted by cheap vodka. I gag after one shot. With nothing but an unopened bottle of vermouth left in my parents’ liquor cabinet, my options are limited.
I remember the bottle under my bed.
I’m back at the kitchen table. I remove the family-size bottle of cough syrup from the plastic bag. I had bought it a couple weekends ago. Someone told me that drinking a whole bottle had the same effect on you as dropping acid. I figured I was still a couple years away from my serious experimentation phase, so I went to the drugstore and scored me some cough syrup.
I struggle with the top of the box for a few seconds before I rip the box in half. An empty bottle of whisky and a full bottle of vermouth bear witness to my inebriated struggle. I remove the bottle from the box. I push down and rotate the childproof cap with the palm of my hand and remove it. I notice my nails need trimming. Ten crescents of dirt work to pull back the childproof seal.
Improved taste promises the label on the bottle. I doubt the manufacturer anticipated someone drinking a full twelve ounces in one sitting when they were touting its palatability. My first swallow is a big one. I gag a little. The taste of so much cough syrup in my mouth is just as I imagined—stale maraschino cherries mixed with Listerine, only not as pleasant. The cough syrup is thick and warm on my throat.
My second swallow is almost as big. I already feel a little drunk from the alcohol. It takes me three more pulls at the bottle to finish the entire twelve ounces. I think about raiding the medicine cabinet, but I’ve heard a cough syrup buzz takes about a half hour to kick in. That gives me time to think about her. Too much time. My heart races. My chest hurts.
I stumble down the upstairs hallway. How long has it been? A half hour? An hour, maybe? I feel like I’m rolling along the side of a wall. Did I chase that last swallow of cough syrup with vermouth? My mouth has a dry sweetness to it. Yep, vermouth. Definitely vermouth. I’m in Dad’s closet now. I know where he keeps his gun.
The gun is on the top shelf to the left, beneath a stack of sweaters. I reach under the sweaters, feel the cold steel of the Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum. I bring the gun down to eye level, look at myself in the mirror as I hold the revolver to my head.
The gun isn’t loaded. It’s never loaded. Except for maybe once. That one time in Louisville when the basketball rolled into the log pile and a copperhead snake had coiled itself around the ball. Dad ran upstairs to his bedroom. It took him at least five minutes to find the bullets and load the gun. He came outside and blasted the snake—and the basketball—into oblivion.
I’ve pulled the gun out and looked at myself in the mirror holding it easily a hundred times. I don’t even know where Dad keeps the bullets. I’m not angry. Just sad. Just thinking about what it would be like to pull the trigger for real. But not acting on it. I just want to be somewhere else.
Mom wakes me up. My head is in a pool of saliva and bile on the kitchen table. “I’m fine, Mom.” At least that’s what I think I say. Judging by the look on Mom’s face, my diction is less than precise.
Mom is no toastmaster herself. I can’t understand a word she’s saying. I giggle. “Whatever.”
Mom leaves the room. Wait a second. Am I in a hospital? What the fuck? I thought I was in my kitchen. What happened t
o Dad’s gun? I’m confused.
I hear voices outside the drawn curtain around my bed, bits and pieces of a conversation:
“His pupils are still very dilated…”
“He ingested a tremendous amount of alcohol…”
“…no telling what it’s doing to his system.”
“…stomach pumped.”
“…stupid.”
“…teach him a lesson.”
“…father.”
I don’t know who’s saying what. I try to concentrate. The more I relax and let it take over, the worse I feel. The room is rubbery, waxy, everything in it contracting and melting at the same time. I find a fixed spot—the wall clock—and stare at it.
Ten seconds… Twenty seconds… Thirty seconds… One minute…
Two minutes…
I talk myself off the ledge by the time Mom and Dad enter the room. An ugly nurse follows behind them carrying a metal tray. On the tray are two white plastic bottles and a large paper cup.
Mom approaches me, but Dad doesn’t. She runs her hand through my hair. “How you feeling, honey?”
“Fine, Mom.” I’m more sluggish than intoxicated by this point. “Really, all of this isn’t necessary.”
I catch the nurse out of the corner of my eye pouring one of the plastic bottles into the paper cup. A black, tar-like substance rolls out of the bottle. Dad walks over to the nurse and takes the cup. He turns, handing the cup to me.
I grab the cup. “What am I drinking here?”
She picks up the empty bottle and looks at the label as if she forgot why she was here. “It’s activated charcoal in liquid form.”
Dad bites his lip, nods his head, and exhales like he’s been holding in a breath the whole time he’s been in the room. “Bottom’s up, son.”
The nurse sets the bottle down. “It’s not that bad, Hank. More or less tasteless, really.”
I hold the rim of the cup to my lips and tilt it. The black ooze starts to roll down my tongue.
Yeah, nurse, if this shit is tasteless, you’re attractive. The twelve ounces of cough syrup was impressive enough, but that’s nothing compared to a nice room temperature cup of liquid charcoal. The concoction is slightly sweet and very gritty. It tastes as if someone mixed sand and melted black licorice. My teeth are soon charred black. I can’t swallow.
Mom starts toward the door. Dad has already left.
Chapter eleven
After the hospital discharged me, and after my fifth pure black shit in as many hours—which henceforth I shall refer to as The Great Black Butt Incident of 1988—I find myself walking down the hallway toward my bedroom. My body is covered in beads of sweat.
“How you feeling?” Mom asks, ascending the stairs with a cup of decaf in hand. She’s wearing Dad’s old blue robe, his initials “JHF” on the left lapel.
“I’m okay.” I shrug. “One more stupid-ass stunt for you to tell the world about, I guess.”
“Hank!” Mom says. She switches her cup of coffee to her opposite hand as her right hand grabs me by the elbow. “Is that what you call yesterday? A stunt?”
“Come on, Mom.”
“You could have killed yourself!”
“Jesus Christ.”
“I’m being very serious here.”
“Glad to see someone cares.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“You tell me.”
Dad hasn’t spoken a word to me since he left my hospital room. He volunteered his trumpet at a Tuesday evening mass at St. Benjamins and then snuck out of the house early this morning for the dealership. And I noticed.
“What’d you expect, Hank?”
“Anything,” I say. “Being pissed off as hell is better than no reaction at all.”
“Oh, he reacted,” Mom says. “You just didn’t see it.”
I roll my eyes. Mom squeezes my elbow harder. “Don’t you for a second question your father’s love,” she says.
“Take it easy, Mom.” I shake her hand loose.
She’s crying now, her tears more angry than sad. “Do you have any idea what he said to the doctor yesterday?”
“What do you mean?”
“They were going to pump your stomach!” Mom shouts. “I think they wanted to teach you a lesson.”
I’m quiet.
“And you know what your dad said?”
Still quiet.
“He looked that doctor straight in the eyes…”
My throat hurts a little.
“And he said, ‘You stick to being a doctor, and I’ll stick to being a father.’”
I look down at the floor’s dark oak hardwood planks. You can see hundreds of footprint watermarks if you catch the floor in the right light. A casualty of living on a pond. Mom keeps saying she’s going to carpet over everything. I wipe the sweat off my brow. The room is cooling down, the hangover passing.
“Dad really said that?” I say.
Mom sips her coffee, nodding. “Yep.”
I don’t know what to say next. My martyr complex is subtle, nuanced. It usually works for me. The eldest son, trying to live up to his father’s expectations, woe is me—I can do the damn thing in my sleep. But Mom’s bullshit meter is pretty sensitive today.
“Can I stay home one more day?”
Mom scowls, walks by me and into her room. She starts to shut the door behind her and then stops herself at the last second. She peeks through the crack. “Not a chance, mister.” She shuts the door.
Chapter twelve
I’m the son of a car dealer, and I don’t know a dipstick from a chopstick. I have a surprising disregard for automobiles in general.
I got my driver’s license the Monday after my sixteenth birthday. By that Thursday, I had totaled my first car. It was the family car even—a brand-new ’87 Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser station wagon with simulated wood grain paneling. I took a turn at about thirty-five miles-per-hour in a rainstorm, hit the sidewalk on my right, the median, and a Bradford pear tree on my left. I busted three of the four axles. I worked half the summer at the dealership pro bono to pay it off. And yet Dad still saw fit to give me Grandpa’s restored ’68 Oldsmobile 442 Coupe.
“The Beast” isn’t your average Oldsmobile. A couple years back, Grandpa Fred traded it in for a newer Cutlass Supreme. Dad sent the old car over to the community college so the students could experiment on it. They had plenty to work with, most notably the 455 CID engine backed by a modified W-45 rated at 390 horsepower. In order to generate more rpms, they retrofitted her with cylinder heads from the W-30 and the camshaft from the W-31. They also installed new bucket seats and a Hurst Dual-Gate shifter in her walnut mini-console. Granted, I have no fucking clue if what I just said is accurate, but Dad kept a laminated copy of the’68 442 brochure in the top drawer of his office desk that I halfway memorized just so I would sound cool. The Beast’s finishing touches were largely cosmetic: her deep-maroon paint job restored to its factory-original sheen, her faded vinyl top replaced with a textured black lid that smelled of shoe polish and great expectations. A white vertical stripe ran up both sides of the car just behind her front wheel wells, the number “442” bisecting the stripe like a watch on a watchband as if to say, “Time to get some pussy and kick some ass.” If only Dad had not installed an obnoxious air horn that played the chorus to “In My Merry Oldsmobile,” each note fractionally diminishing your pussy-getting, ass-kicking potential until you were just another lonely teenage boy with a cool car and a cramped hand.
Dad took the Beast away from me before the summer was even over. A doctor had run a stop sign in front of me. The police report and the insurance companies said he was at fault. No argument from me. But I could have been going a little slower than sixty-five down a residential street, and I could have let off the gas in lieu of cutting the good doctor’s Honda Accor
d in half. Although it didn’t look it, the Beast was almost as unlucky with a cracked engine block and a buckled frame.
The Subie is a fire-engine red ’77 Subaru DL Station Wagon; her distinctive feature a massive white steel brush guard running the full width of her front bumper. I’ve had her almost a year. When we got our first real snow in December, some friends and I tested out the four-wheel drive by sneaking onto the airfield at the Empire Ridge Municipal Airport. We hit the iced-over runway at about sixty miles an hour, at which time I jerked the wheel hard to my left. The Subie stayed on her feet, but she slid off the runway a good hundred yards into a cornfield. I found random pieces of cornhusks under my car for weeks.
I have to hand it to the Subie. Up until a lovesick dumbshit tried to punch a hole in her ass last month, she’s survived me fairly unscathed. Four of us are piled into her at the moment. There’s a party tonight at Martin Neff’s house. Neff is our age, but he lives with his older brother. Translation? Booze, and lots of it. There’s even rumor of a keg.
“How’s your hand?” Beth asks.
Hatch and I started hanging out with Beth Burke and Claire Sullivan a couple weeks ago. We’ve known them since we were freshmen together but, like all high school boys, endured our customary two-year waiting period during which freshmen and sophomore girls hang out exclusively with upperclassmen. The irony, of course, is that Hatch and I are now those upperclassmen making time for them and the freshmen and sophomore girls.
Our first night out together started after Claire flagged us down at McDonald’s. Beth was trying to break up with her boyfriend in the parking lot of the First Baptist Church, and he was being, according to Claire, “uncooperative.” Hatch and I swooped in to the rescue. Beth’s boyfriend was berating her, refusing to get out of her face. Tyler was his name, yet another Prepster. After a couple veiled threats, spoken while I held a not-so-veiled baseball bat, Beth was soon very much single.
Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride Page 7