Hollywood Park

by Mikel Jollett

  He pulls up to the house on Breys Avenue on a Saturday morning in a blue Pontiac sedan and walks across the street holding a bouquet of flowers. I see him from the front window. He looks so formal, so out of place on this street of gravel driveways and broken-down cars where we live. He’s wearing a brown tweed jacket with patches at the elbows and baggy jeans. His brown hair is parted neatly on the side above a face that seems to have no defining characteristics, like it isn’t so much a face as an average of other faces blended together to create a person. He looks like one of those 1950s dads on Leave It to Beaver, swimming in his blazer as he peers around nervously walking up the front steps to knock on our door.

  He’s what Dad would call “a white dude.”

  “You can’t trust ’em,” Dad always says. “Those guys got secrets. Always. How can you trust someone who can’t dance?”

  “Hello, I’m Doug Brennan,” he says, extending a hand for me in the living room.

  “Hi.”

  “Your mother and I thought it was time I met you since you are very important to her.” I have no idea how to respond to a statement like that.

  “Cool.”

  He takes us to lunch at a place called Chalet that is like a fancy Denny’s. I order eggs and sausage and toast and get to work coloring a cartoon ski house with the crayons the waitress brings me. Doug Brennan orders black coffee and oatmeal with raisins and brown sugar. He sips slowly from the cup, saying, “Mmmm,” or “Whoa” as if diner coffee is the most surprising thing in the world.

  The rhythm of his speech is odd. There are long pauses between sentences, as if he’s allowing room for us to catch up, endlessly asking us if we understand him, as if what he’s said requires some time to sink in before he can proceed. “Do you get that? Are you following?” He wipes his mouth with his napkin and folds it gently on the table, saying, “Miss, miss,” to the waitress on the other side of the room carrying a full tray of food, “I’d like a refill.”

  It’s like the trips we take to the zoo with the Talented and Gifted Program, to learn about exotic animals and observe their behavior up close. The sign next to this cage would read, “The North American White Guy.”

  “It’s important to build trust with an employer,” he says, telling us about his secret to success in the jam business, the advice he gives all of his minimum-wage employees just entering the job market. “Anyone can apply for a job from the phone book or an ad in the newspaper. Do you get that? Are you with me?” That pause. “But the thing people don’t understand about seeking employment is that the most important thing is trust.”

  He takes a sip from the thick white mug, looking back and forth between Mom and me. “Whoa. Hmmmm. This is good.

  “Anyway, I tell the people I interview, ‘No one should ever ask for a job. Never look for work. Never…’”

  “What should they do?” Mom asks finally, trying to fill the pause.

  “Build trust with potential employers.”

  “But what if they have a job available? Should they not ask for it?”

  “No. Trust is all that matters. You sit right down and you say, ‘Can you introduce me to five or ten people in your field with the power to hire and fire?’”

  “What if they say no?”

  “You ask them questions about their business. What is the bottom line? What is the most important thing in the jam business? for example. Are you following? You just ask them these sorts of things and then shut up and let them talk.”

  “Why?”

  “Because no one ever asks them about their business and that makes them feel important.”

  “So you’re learning to kiss ass,” I say.

  He studies us a moment, looking back and forth between Mom and me. “No, do you see why it’s important to feel important? Does that register? Plus maybe you’ll learn about the difference between marionberries and wild blackberries or how much fruit pulp is necessary for a proper jam to distinguish itself from a jelly. Anyway, when you’re done you can ask for introductions again. And this time they might say yes to hiring you because now they trust you. Make sense?”

  “So it’s a scam,” I say.

  “No.”

  “But you really are looking for work so to pretend you’re not is dishonest.”

  “You sound like you’re thirty, ha-ha. Anyway, all you do is convince yourself on that day that you are not looking for work.”

  “Isn’t that lying?”

  “No. It can be true that day.”

  In the four breakfasts we have before he moves in with us, the ones where he tells us endlessly about canning and marketing at local craft fairs, about his philosophy in which he tells people to lie without calling it lying and Mom tells him about how “mature” I am for my age and how I’m going to grow up to do “great things,” how Synanon was going to change the world and it really is too bad for all of those who started it how it fell apart, it never occurs to me that I might share a roof with this man in tweed who pauses between sentences.

  Occasionally, I say something like “Can you believe Thatasshole Reagan thinks mental patients should run through the streets without any help? What a fuckin’ shithead, right?”

  Doug Brennan says, “Stop interrupting the adults. And you should not swear like that.” There’s a firmness in his voice, something like a threat.

  When he moves his things in all at once and the house is suddenly filled with White Guy pictures of ducks and old airplanes and a new clock, a toaster oven, a waffle maker, when he brings in box after box of plaid ties and faded tennis shoes, V-neck sweaters, and an entire stamp collection while Mom flutters around him asking where this should go or that, when at last he goes to the grocery store and buys whatever food White Guys buy, he puts the groceries on a single shelf and calls me into the kitchen. He stands on a step stool with a small pair of reading glasses on his nose as he leans into the cabinet over me. “This is my cabinet with my food. I’m going to be living here with you guys and I need my own food, so you’re not to touch this food in this cabinet.” He gets down off the step stool and opens the fridge while I nod and observe the feeding habits up close. “And the food on this shelf is mine, okay? You’re not to eat it or touch anything. Do you follow?” He points at a bottle of orange juice (which Mom says is pure sugar), a quart of yogurt, English muffins, and some plums.

  “Got it. Don’t touch your food.” There is a bike to be ridden and cigarettes to be smoked and I have a date with Jake and a deck of cards.

  * * *

  THERE IS A strange silence in the house when I’m home. A formality. It’s as if Mom wants me to act out a part for him, one in which I am the future doctor or lawyer or head of state she is training to change the world and she is the hard-fought, long-suffering woman bravely raising me against the odds instead of two survivors of a kind of wreckage.

  I don’t mind it so much. It’s fun to inhabit yet another character in yet another script, to say things like “Thank you. I’d love some tea,” and “I did not know the state bird of Iowa was the American goldfinch.” Doug lapses into long explanations of the Inverted Jenny or a certain stamp-size portrait of Abraham Lincoln that sold for millions of dollars.

  Two months into the new arrangement, I come home from school to find Mom on the floor of the living room crying. The pictures, the clock, the toaster oven and the waffle maker are all gone. I’m impressed by the speed at which he moved all of his things out of the house, like a thief in the night. Paul never touched anything when he left. It was probably because he didn’t have room in his truck. He needed the space to sleep. “When I got here, all his clothes were gone. He didn’t say where he was going. He just left. What is it about me that makes men leave?” She lays her head on her hands.

  “Aw shit, Mom, I’m sorry.” She’s put Bob Dylan on the stereo, so you know it’s serious.

  She looks precisely like a girl who’s fallen off her bike. “Well, he’s no damn good if he’s leaving you, Mom. You don’t deserve it. I didn�
��t eat his food. I swear.”

  Where have you been, my blue-eyed son?

  “I know, sweetie. It’s not your fault. I guess I’m just going to have to figure how to stop making this same mistake. I thought we were finally gonna be a real family. That you were finally gonna have a real father figure.”

  Where have you been, my darling young one?

  She gives me a hug and goes into the bedroom to lie down. I go to the fridge to drink orange juice and make myself an English muffin.

  I don’t understand it. The whole point of the North American White Guy is that he’s supposed to stick around, that he won’t end up drunk in some ditch, running around after some woman or blowing the mortgage on a tip about a horse. That’s why you put up with the boredom. So his sudden disappearance violates the whole spirit of the arrangement. I didn’t mind so much if that’s what she wanted. But she doesn’t deserve this. It feels like a dirty trick.

  I can feel her pain. I don’t want to. I want to sit and listen to the Cure tape Jake gave me because it made me feel cool to scream, “Boys don’t cry!” Robert Smith with his wild hair and lipstick, his cooing and groaning and “ah ah ahhhhhhing…” all over the place making me feel like my weirdness is cool, like I share a joke with the other weird people of the world who meet in our Secret Places, us imaginary boys who say we don’t cry when we know we do.

  I want to ride my bike to the park and do jumps off curbs, to bunny hop over cracks and puff my dirty old Winstons, to make it romantic like a pirate at sea, my mother home crying, my dad somewhere on the other side of the world, Paul dead (or not dead, nobody knows), and this dumb shit my mom fell for off doing God knows what while I eat his food.

  Cigarettes kill. Everything kills. You shouldn’t leave your mom alone. She needs you. Gotta smoke. Gotta bunny hop. I can’t hang with that shit, man.

  But I can feel her pain. I can precisely feel her loss as if it’s my own. How empty it makes her. How needy. Desperate. I know how much this hurts. I hardly even know Doug Brennan but he means something to her. His presence calms her in some way and his absence devastates her. It’s an incredible power to give somebody, I take note as I smoke, a pirate alone at sea, my bike leaning against a tree in the park, thinking,

  The men who leave.

  The women who stay home and cry.

  The men who leave.

  * * *

  ALATEEN IS THE Al-Anon for kids they hold at the club on Friday nights. I go to the meetings while Mom goes to hers. Most of the kids at Alateen are older than I am, but there’s one boy named Billy who is the same age. He’s got huge yellow teeth that take over his face when he smiles and long nearly white blond hair that hangs over his head in a shag like David Lee Roth. He lives with his mom in West Salem. When we say the Serenity Prayer, which everybody knows by heart, he looks at me and rolls his eyes and says the words with his hand like a puppet. Someone then reads the traditions (no politics, this is self-supporting, don’t fuck this up for us) and somebody is the chairperson. The chair runs the meeting and calls on people to talk. I’m too young to be the chair, but the older kids listen when I share and sometimes they ask me dumb questions like I’m a dumb little kid. “Did your mommy ever tell you to hide his drinking? Did she ever blame you? You know it’s not your fault. It’s a disease.” Yeah, I know that. Everyone knows that.

  I mostly listen because what does a kid know? Besides they’re the ones with real problems. I’m not drinking like they are or having sex or an abortion like Kelly J says she had one time after she got pregnant because she was “too young to have a kid” and “didn’t want to make the same mistakes as Mom.” We say the Lord’s Prayer and then we chant, “Keep coming back, it works!” I’m not really sure what it means for it to work. What am I working? What is broken? Is it me? I just like the words of the prayer and the stories from the older kids and having somewhere to go when no one is home.

  Steps four and five are all about admitting what is wrong with you. About giving these things to God like a tray of dirty dishes after a meal. Step four: “Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.” Step five: “Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.” The word “God” is short for “higher power,” which we all know can mean lots of things like the overwhelming force of nature, not just a guy with a beard in a chair. But if you can talk to him, if you can ask him things, doesn’t that mean he’s listening? A big endless sky doesn’t listen to you. It just sits there and reminds you how small you are. So really this God is a listener and that means he’s like a person so we’re back to the man with the beard in the chair.

  Billy says, “So if I admit what’s wrong with me, if I tell God about the times I was bad, like the time I poured hot candle wax into my brother’s Millennium Falcon, that’ll stop my dad from drinking?”

  “No, no. That’s not how it works,” Kelly J tells him, with her curly brown bangs poofed out like Madonna. “The steps are for you, to make you feel better.”

  “But I only feel bad when my dad leaves.”

  “That’s not true, Billy. You said you felt bad when you hurt your brother.”

  “Not really. He deserved it. He threw my Chewbacca out the window of the car last week when we were driving to my aunt’s house.”

  “Well, it sounds like maybe he should make amends too. Has he worked the steps? Is he in the program?”

  “He’s seven.”

  Billy and I talk on the phone on nights when Mom is gone because she needs more meetings now that Doug has left to “try to get her head together.” Billy says his mom has dried parsley in her cabinet and you can roll it up and smoke it and it’ll get you high. When he comes over to spend the night, we roll a giant joint with the parsley he swiped inside a piece of notebook paper. We go into the barn and he hands me the joint which is eight inches long and as fat as a summer sausage. I light it. The notebook paper catches fire and the parsley begins to smoke. I try to take a puff but the three-inch flame is getting closer to my face so I panic and drop it on the ground and stomp it out with my feet. Billy shakes his head and says, “Damn. There goes some good weed.”

  We make a plan to run away. Between us we have tents, a hatchet, sleeping bags, boots, some rope, canteens and backpacks. We figure if we can just get a canoe, we can float away down the Willamette somewhere and fish for our dinner, cooking at night around a campfire. All we need is the right day, the right weather, because you wouldn’t want to do that in the rain and it’s always raining. Maybe in the spring. It never occurs to us that the trip would have an end, that it would take us somewhere, that we would have to figure something else out when we got there. In our plan, there is only the river and our fishing poles and smoking Winstons around a campfire as we fry our fish in the woods.

  I write a story about this for Mrs. Wolfe’s class. She says she liked the one I wrote about the bunnies who take over the barn and start a war against the man who comes to thump their babies on the head. Bonnie likes my stories too and sometimes she asks me to make one up when we’re “having a convo” on the bed while Tony and Dad watch the Dodgers. She put one up on the fridge. Mom never says anything about the stories because she wants me to grow up to be like John Lennon or Martin Luther King. I say, “But they got shot.”

  Mrs. Wolfe doesn’t like the story. She calls me up to the front of class and asks me if I’m planning on running away and don’t I know that’s dangerous and should she talk to my mother about it? Her eyes are cross. She stares at me with that concerned look the adults get every time you let them know what you’re really thinking. “It’s just a dumb story.”

  “So you’re not really planning on going?”

  “No.” Maybe I am and maybe I’m not. The point is to plan. For Billy and me to have a plan because rivers take you places and we want to be anywhere but this dumb town.

  “Okay. As long as it isn’t real. You scared me. I won’t tell your mom if you promise not to run away.”

>   “I promise.”

  One time when I talk to Billy on the phone, when we speak for hours like I do with Bonnie sometimes or Dad, at the end of the phone call he says, “Okay dude talk to you later.”

  And I say, “All right. I love you.”

  “What?”

  I feel a hotness on my cheek as I realize I made a mistake. “Aw shit. I thought I was talking to my mom for a second.”

  “You love me?”

  “No. I was just confused. Like how you say goodbye to your mom.”

  “Ha-ha. You love me. Fag.”

  “Shut up. I got to go.”

  “Later.”

  He lets it go and doesn’t tease me about it because he’s a good friend like that. We just want to get high together or run off somewhere where we don’t have to deal with gutter drunks or teachers or dumb parents who never listen or mean what they say. “Friends ’til cigarette butts wear pants,” we say, even though we drift apart when he starts smoking the real weed he buys from another kid at Alateen.

  When Mom later tells me Billy shot himself, I never get any details about why, nothing about a funeral, no Big Talk. It’s just something she mentions once in passing.

  “Your friend Billy killed himself” is all she ever says about it.

  “Isn’t there something we should do? How could he do that?” I don’t know how to feel, just that my friend is gone and I start to cry. I can’t help but wonder if things would have been different for Billy, for me, if we had just left. I picture his smiling face with his fuzzy yellow teeth, the easy way he slapped me five like a brother, like a skin-on-skin pact to keep our secrets from the adults who prowled around our lives. He knew I loved him and he was cool with it. Friends ’til cigarette butts wear pants.

  She puts a hand over her mouth, searching for something. “Why are you crying? He was a disturbed kid. Just be glad that you guys didn’t know each other that well.”

  She doesn’t know about our plan to run away or how nice he was to me, how I told him I loved him and he never even teased me about it. She doesn’t know that Billy and I just wanted to be somewhere we didn’t have to pretend anymore and how he’s gone and he never got to go and I’m still here.