Hollywood Park

by Mikel Jollett

  Tony’s eyes fill with the injustice. He shakes his head and says, “But it’s mine. It’s not yours. Why do I have to have your values?”

  “Because you are my son.”

  “I wish I wasn’t.” He throws the hat on the ground and stomps on it, running to the front door where he turns and says, “You know, you’re not always going to be bigger than me.” He slams the door behind him. Through the front window I see him get on his bike and disappear up the street.

  The stereo plays “The Load-Out.” The song was written for the roadies who travel with the band to set up the stage every night. Dad always says it’s a good life and an honest living, working for the band and taking it on the road. Mom takes a heavy breath, leaning against the door frame with her forehead on her hands. The *B*O*Y* of the crumpled hat stares up at her from the ground. She picks it up silently and walks out, leaving me alone in the living room with Jackson Browne, wondering if Mom is going to put me on another diet.

  CHAPTER 15

  THE SCAPEGOAT AND THE SUPERCHILD

  The beatings have gotten worse. It used to be mostly wet willies or flat tires or Indian burns, the kind of cruelty with a flashy name you could pass off as a joke. Tony would grab my head and say, “Noogie!” as he scrubbed his knuckle against my scalp until it was raw. The names themselves, “wedgie,” “pantsing,” “charley horse,” seemed to justify the behavior, as if you could rename murder something like “knifey chests” and we’d all have a big laugh.

  But it’s gotten worse. Tony will pull my hair and tell me I’m such a “little mama’s boy.” He pins me down and puts his whole weight on my shoulders, letting a strand of thick spit dangle in a string from his mouth while I scream, “Get off!” He lets it nearly touch my face then sucks it back up into his mouth. Sometimes it’s too late and the spit falls into my eye. He holds my hands down so I can’t wipe it. I struggle to break free which only makes him madder. There are endless headlocks. Sometimes he simply trips me when I walk by. I’m not sure why he’s angry but there’s an old grudge hanging over it, something wounded in his voice as he pounds his finger on my chest with my arms pinned under his knees and says, “You’re such a sneaky little kiss ass.”

  Mom says he’s dealing with “a lot of anger” because he’s not used to having an authority figure and that he’s going to need to learn to deal with “his issues” soon or he’ll end up going down the “path of addiction” just like his father did. She says this in front of him. She’s always quoting some book or repeating some phrase that sounds like something from the group therapy she conducts with the prisoners at the Oregon State Hospital.

  Tony will get mad and scream, “I’m not your fucking patient!”

  But instead of screaming back, Mom will just say he needs to find a “more constructive” way to deal with his anger. This only makes him madder.

  After he walks out, Mom will say it’s a phase, that he’s got too much of his father in him, that they are exactly alike. I know she’s right because she knows our feelings better than we do, but it’s weird because Dad is funny and nice to me. He never puts me in a headlock or spits in my face while I squirm.

  * * *

  THE BIKE ON the rack at Fred Meyer is a Huffy Pro Thunder with yellow mag wheels, blue rubber tires, and bright yellow handgrips. It’s elevated five feet above the others, bathed in bright fluorescent light like a halo. It costs $150. I know we can’t afford it, that we are not the kind of family where a boy gets a new bike every Christmas then rides over the trails behind the school in his brand-new Jordache jeans with the fancy white stitching on the back pocket like my friend Jesse. But when I see it on display at the store, an idea takes hold, the beauty of the thing, the way the space-age yellow paint lights it up beyond all imagining of lesser bikes, of rusty Goodwill Schwinns and my too-small red mini-Moto that makes my knees hit my elbows when I ride.

  Tony sees me looking at it. “You wish.”

  When I bring it up with Mom, when I patiently explain my plan to save money to buy the $150 space-age dirt bike which is, after all, only seventy-five allowances, she offers me an extra dollar a week to clean the bathroom, sweep the stairs and mop the kitchen floor. Paul says he’ll help me with the project, that I could mow lawns around the neighborhood or collect cans that he’ll take to the recycling plant. It seems strange to me there would be money lying around like this, lawns to be mowed and cans in the garbage that could be money in a pocket. But it also seems like an impossibly large amount of money, like $150 isn’t an amount of money that exists in the real world.

  When school lets out, I go into the alley behind the house to look for cans. I find some old beer cans in a puddle next to the back of the barn. Fifteen cents. Good. Only $149.85 to go.

  I go to the Plaid Pantry on Center Street and look around the dumpsters. There’s an empty soda bottle sitting on the ground so I put it in the shopping bag I’ve tied around the frame of my mini-Moto. I open the lid to the dumpster and smell the sweet, rotting decay of old beer and sandwiches, milk cartons and used soda cups. I have to stand on a milk crate to look inside. The trash is in big black plastic bags. I look around before opening one because I know people will think I’m one of those Child Protective Services kids like the ones we see at the Boys Club who flinch when the basketball comes near them. I tear open a few bags. One has some bottles in it, so I put them into the shopping bag and move on. Okay, that’s a dollar.

  After a couple weeks I don’t care who sees me. I don’t care what they think. Sometimes it’s fun to pretend to be homeless, to be wild like Timothy Manning and his friends, always covered in dirt and ready for a fight. I like the look of pity the old man from Plaid Pantry gives me when he finds me in the alley rooting through the dumpster. He says, “Listen, you can’t go in there,” like he’s talking to an animal. I feel the urge to hiss or bare my fangs or scurry away on all fours.

  I walk my mini-Moto around the neighborhood with a plastic bag tied around the frame, and when Derek sees me, he says, “You look like a bag lady! Ha-ha!” He chants, “Mick-ell, you smell, you smell like fuckin’ hell!”

  Paul says to ignore him because he’s just a little shit anyway, and even though he’s not supposed to tell me this because it’s “anonymous,” he says Derek’s dad was in the program but disappeared and nobody’s seen him for a long time.

  When Christmas comes, I have seventy-five dollars of can, bottle, lawn, and chore money saved in a barrel-shaped piggy bank that Paul keeps at the top of the closet in their bedroom. Grandma and Grandpa send me a check for fifty dollars that’s supposed to go to my college fund but Mom says we can put college off this year. Dad and Bonnie send me a check for another thirty-five with a note that says, “For the bike!”

  Two days after Christmas, Paul takes me to Fred Meyer and we return at last with one yellow-and-blue Huffy Pro Thunder dirt bike in the back of his black mini-truck with the camper shell. I crawl into the back to wheel it out, careful not to scrape the new reflective pedals against the black metal truck bed. I bounce the rear tire lightly on the ground and pedal it up to the top of the hill on Breys Avenue to test it out, riding it down the block like a golden chariot. I feel the hot sweat on the back of my neck go cold in the crisp air as I fly down the street, the wind in my hair, the lightness of the frame, the feeling of escape, of freedom, an endlessness, no road too long, no destination too far. My world expands in front of me.

  Tony is angry, standing arms folded on the porch when I get back. He says, “Why does he get a new bike?”

  “He saved for it. He earned it. That’s how it works.” Paul closes the tailgate, replacing the blanket he keeps in the back just in case he needs a place to sleep.

  “But why does he get one and I don’t? I could’ve earned it too.”

  “You still can if you want.”

  “He’s such a sneaky little shit. I do more chores than him. He doesn’t deserve a bike.”

  I ignore him and pedal toward the school.

&nbs
p; There is a circular concrete fountain the size of a swimming pool in the center of the wooded park behind Englewood Elementary. In the summer, on the weekends, the pipe that sticks up from the center shoots water ten feet in the air while kids gather under it to run and scream. Tony and I ran through it last year on a hot day, taking our shoes off to jump in. He was nicer then. We were on the same team. Now the fountain is empty and the park quiet, filled with the hush of wind through the needles on the big evergreens. Patches of sunlight cover the ground in yellow splotches as I ride down the dirt trail, jumping over the big knotty roots that cross it. I’m surrounded by the smell of pine and fresh mud. I ride back to the school.

  I’m twisting through the hopscotch courts painted on the asphalt, in and out, over the three and around the five, when I see them. Timothy Manning and two older boys, both in dirty T-shirts, tossing a chewed-up green Nerf football in the center of the field. Timothy is skinny and small but carries himself like a much larger boy, his head high and his arms out. I heard he lives in a group home. Though they don’t look related, there’s a resemblance between him and the two boys as they toss the ball between them, a kind of low-hanging weariness to the jaw and the eyes, always a little dirt on the cheeks, alert like a pack of dogs.

  They see me.

  “Hey, man, nice bike!”

  I pretend I can’t hear them and study the hard plastic yellow mags on the front tire, which are so much sturdier than the metal spokes on my old red mini-bike.

  “I said nice bike. Can I see it?” Timothy Manning walks straight toward me.

  “I just got it. It’s not broken in yet.”

  “I don’t care. Let me see it. C’mon.” He grabs the handlebars. I yank them away and take off toward the back of the big yellow school building. I can hear their footsteps behind me, trying to imagine it like a game of tag, like everyone’s just messing around and I’m in on it. I cut through the rear parking lot and make a left into the breezeway between the school and the gym, thinking I can cut back through the park and get away but when I look up, the two boys block my exit in front of me. I stop.

  “Don’t be such a wimp. We just want to see your bike. You should learn to share.” Timothy Manning walks up behind me, pushing me sideways on the concrete. I get up, holding my bike unsteadily as he grabs the seat. I don’t know what to do.

  Behind the shaggy black hair of the boy in the dirty purple shirt, I see Tony emerge suddenly in the sunlight of the breezeway. I can’t believe he’s here. There’s a cosmic sense of timing to it. My big brother. The sixth grader. He’s twice the size of Timothy Manning.

  I scream, “That’s my brother! Leave me alone!”

  Tony has a strange look on his face. A kind of blankness as he walks, arms down as if in some kind of trance, right toward Timothy Manning and me.

  “Oh, so you’re the big brother? You here to stick up for this little bitch? We’re supposed to be scared of you?”

  Tony’s face reveals nothing. He is calm. He walks in slow motion right up to Timothy Manning and says, “No, I hate that little shit.” He picks up my yellow-and-blue Huffy Pro Thunder that I dug through trash to buy—seventy-five allowances, three thousand aluminum cans—and throws it into the brick wall of the gym. I watch as the handlebars break in half and the bike falls lamely on the red painted concrete. He walks away.

  “Haaaaah ha aha ahah ha!” the boys scream. “Your brother hates you! Ha aha! What’d you think? He was gonna help? Whatcha gonna do? Cry? You gonna cry, you little bitch? You little baby.”

  There’s a kind of cracking, something like a brittle bark that breaks in two while I stare at the bike on the ground and catch the back of my brother’s long blond hair as he disappears behind the gym.

  I don’t understand it. I can’t form words or thoughts. My busted bike. My brother who is not on my side. I push through the boys to the corner where I stare at the broken Huffy. After a moment, I feel a rock in my back. Then another. I don’t move. I don’t even mind the rocks. I feel their hands on me as they each push me and walk away. I can’t take my eyes off the bike on the ground.

  When were we together? Did I imagine that? Did I just imagine we survived something? That we came here to hide? He yells at Mom and she corrects him, telling him to control his temper. She uses those words she uses for the patients she treats at the mental hospital, those soon-to-be ex-con Dope Fiends from the state penitentiary in her “recovery” program. Terms like “borderline,” “violent,” “impulse control,” and “attention deficit.” She tells me about them because she tells me too much. She sees it in Tony. She tells me not to tell him but he knows. Of course he does. He sees it in her eyes. He is her science experiment, her personal psychology project. Like an animal in a cage, he’s supposed to respond to “positive reinforcement” or the establishment of a “token economy” with “strict boundaries.” He’s supposed to learn to say the sentence “I’m sorry, Mom, you are right and I am wrong.” When what he probably wants to say is, “Where were you? I was alone in that place for seven years.” I know he thinks I am on her side because of it. Because of the lines I say, the ones she wants to hear about what kind of family we are, what kind of mother she is, the lines I know to repeat since watching Phil nearly die in the street knowing there are worse things and fearing those things more, to be like those family roles that children take on, the ones we read about in the Al-Anon literature for “children in families struggling with addiction” that she leaves around the house. I am the chosen child, the superchild, the one who can fly. Tony is the angry child, the scapegoat, the one who must sink.

  But he sees it. He has to. He sees behind the curtain. He’s the only one who does. And beyond the script is something else, the desire he has in this moment to destroy my new bike, my cherished and most prized possession, and in doing so, leave me to feel exactly as he does in the world. Alone.

  I walk the broken bike home, wobbly and sobbing.

  Paul is on the back porch tending to holes in the chicken wire that Pepper dug beneath the makeshift pen he built for her and Mork. He sees me. “What happened?”

  I tell him the story. The park, the school, Timothy Manning and the boys from the group home, Tony, my broken bike. Paul is furious, dropping the hammer, spitting the nails in his teeth onto the ground. “He did what?”

  We go into the kitchen, where Tony sits at the big table. Paul asks him if it’s true.

  “No. He broke it himself,” Tony says. “’Cause he wanted me to get in trouble.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Because he’s a sneaky little shit. That’s why.” There is so much hatred in his eyes.

  “I don’t believe you,” Paul says, trying to catch those angry eyes. “He spent months saving for that bike. He wouldn’t just break it.”

  “Yes he would! That’s how sneaky he is!”

  “He’s lying!” I scream.

  “I know he is.” Paul turns to Tony. “He’s your brother, goddamn it! I just don’t understand this. You are going to pay to have it fixed!”

  “You can’t make me! I won’t do it! He made it all up!”

  He runs down the stairs with a face full of tears and slams the door to our bedroom. Paul sits with me. He says we’ll fix my bike, not to worry. It’s just some light damage. I think of Tony and there is a split, a new idea of him emerges in my mind less like a teammate and more like an enemy or a force of nature, innately bad, like a sickness or the rot of an apple. When Mom gets home, she says she’s sorry I have to deal with Tony’s “impulse issues.” I wince, even though I’m angry. Something feels wrong.

  She takes away Tony’s allowance and tells him she’s going to give it to me until the bike is fixed. Tony says, “I don’t care! Everyone here hates me! This is unfair! I hate all of you!” He refuses to do his chores. He sulks in his room. He never apologizes. He has made up his mind that this is a war and I am his enemy. But I’m just so sick of the noogies and headlocks, the spit in my eye, and if it’s a war
he wants, I decide I’m going to give him one.

  CHAPTER 16

  THE WAY OF ALL GREAT DRUNKS

  On the day the crate of chimney sweep tools arrive, the air is crisp with a chill. As I walk down the street at dusk, Breys Avenue smells of burning wood. Fire means warmth and warmth means shelter which matters in a place with cold winters and two hundred days of rain every year. It’s a good day to be a chimney sweep. A big white truck parks in front of our house and two men unload the wooden crate the size of a piano which Paul signs for. One by one he removes the tools and places them on the blue tarp: a black circular brush as big as a cat, a series of six-foot iron poles, steel wire brushes attached to a hemp rope, a wooden scraper, a wire-frame fan, a vacuum that looks like a rubber garbage can, and one black felt top hat. Paul puts the top hat on his head, covering his wild patchy black hair. “How do I look?”

  “Like a bearded turtle going to a dance,” Mom says.

  “All those chimneys,” Paul says. “Someone’s gotta clean ’em.” This is his contribution, one that allows him to keep tending to the rabbits, one that doesn’t require him to leave the house for some “square nine to five” that he could never hold down because of “all the goddamn holes in the résumé.”

  Once they are set up with a call service and place an ad in the local Yellow Pages that reads “Stone Soup Chimney Sweeps” next to an outline of a man in a top hat hanging from a brick chimney, once Paul has read two books about the process and cleaned our chimney with Mom’s help and we’ve heard for weeks about how this “new income” is going to “help out a lot around here,” a call comes in for a job and we wave goodbye to Paul one Saturday morning after he packs the brushes, poles, vacuum and fan into the truck and drives away with that black top hat on. He’s whistling as he climbs into the front seat. Mom says, “Isn’t it amazing how you can still make a living with wood and fire in this age of jet planes and space travel?”