Hollywood Park

by Mikel Jollett

  We grab a couple books and I practice aiming for Dad’s big Italian schnoz.

  “You’re getting it. The other thing you want to do is get yourself a roll of pennies. Wrap some tape around it and hold it in your right hand. It’ll make your punch heavier and keep you from breaking your knuckles.” He winks at me.

  “Whatever you do, don’t get stuck talking shit in some kind of rooster fight. He’s bigger, so that helps him. Just catch him off guard and knock him on his ass.”

  I find an old roll of nickels in my desk drawer and wrap them in masking tape. I stay up late listening to Jane’s Addiction, picturing the fight, trying to contain my fear.

  I can hardly feel my feet beneath me as I walk to school with headphones on. A thousand scenarios run through my head, most of which end with me in the hospital. The worst ones don’t even involve physical pain. It’s the idea of being humiliated that really scares me, that I will be exposed for being precisely the “pussy” he says I am. That I am not Dad. I am not the battle-hardened ex-con who spent years in prison. I am the sensitive one, the cross-country runner, the president of two clubs, the writer whose stories go on the fridge, the one with a “bright future” even if beneath that there is a sense that none of it can last, that I will be discovered for the fraud I am, for the scared-shitless ball of anxiety, shame, nightmares and confusion I hide with all my might.

  When I finally see Greg Bauer, leaning against a table with his cronies in trench coats in the cafeteria, slouching carelessly with a cocky smile, he yells out, “I’m gonna fuckin’ kick that dude’s ass.”

  I’m scared but I have the roll of nickels in my pocket and Dad in my ear and those banging drums from “Three Days” by Jane’s Addiction echoing through my head and without thinking, I hear myself scream, “You’re not gonna do shit!”

  He jumps up, walking toward me in rooster fashion, chin forward, chest puffed. There is a commotion, the kind of din that happens whenever there is a fight at school as people start to gather, and I hear someone yell, “Take it upstairs! Too many teachers down here!” Greg Bauer gives me a hateful look as he turns slowly to walk up the stairs with the crowd of students. I follow.

  When I emerge from the top of the concrete stairs, I see a large crowd of perhaps a hundred people gathered on the Senior Lawn in a circle. Standing at the center of the circle with his fists up and his chin down, hunched over with the sharpened rings on his fingers and his steel-tipped motorcycle boots, is Greg Bauer.

  I put my head down and move straight toward him, squeezing the roll of nickels in my fist. As I approach him, I hear him say, “What’s up then—”

  But before he can get the words out, before I can think and slink away like I’ve done a hundred times, before the fear can paralyze me and tell me what a pussy I know I am in my heart, I gather all the rage and fear and anxiety, every ounce of my skinny frame, rock forward on my heels, and punch him as hard as I can, flat-fuck in the jaw.

  “Deeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaamn!” I hear a chorus of voices around me.

  I square up, raise my fists and scream, “Fuck you!” as loud as I can, just as Dad told me to.

  Then something strange happens. Something unexpected. I stop thinking and feel myself transform, as if no other thing exists in the world, as if there are no consequences, no yesterday and no tomorrow, as if all the taunts and slights and months of fear have, like a ball of gasoline, suddenly ignited into screaming, blind, pure, unadulterated rage.

  I hear the words falling out of my mouth: fucking-loser-piece-of-shit-motherfucking-dickhead-asshole-bitch-you-want-to-fucking-go-let’s-go-I-will-fucking-kill-you. It feels like speaking in tongues, like my mouth is disconnected from my mind, which is floating above, watching.

  He throws a halfhearted jab and I dodge left—it was in the notes, after all—then follow with a right cross to his nose. I hear a crunch. He looks stunned. I feel myself bouncing but I don’t really know why. There’s no plan. Only the fight, the fist, his face, my desire to inflict harm, to hurt him, to destroy him, to destroy something in myself.

  I wonder if this is how Dad felt in jail. That all the tough-guy talk I grew up with, the volume of his voice, the stories of his fighting prowess and that big, masculine exterior were just a shield for a fear. I wonder if this makes us the same. If we could switch places and he could be the straight-A student and I could be the ex-con.

  Greg Bauer kicks me in the leg and I feel the steel tip of the boot sink into my shin, which starts to bleed. He swings at me with the box nail ring and I know I must avoid it, to keep the point of that nail away from my face. I dodge and pounce and scream and hit him again and again in the eye, the nose, the jaw, the throat.

  There’s a calmness in the center of my head. Everything is moving in slow motion, like I’m watching it unfold on television, the camera panning through the faces of my classmates as they stare at me: Monica Zuniga, tall and pretty with her thick black hair. She looks at me like she is confused, a little disgusted. Charles King from the track team in his loose white T-shirt, holding his fists low in front of himself as he screams. Drew, puzzled and curious, like he’s staring at someone he doesn’t know.

  By the time we are broken up by the girls’ soccer coach, Greg Bauer’s face is covered in blood. There are jagged red streams flowing from his left eye, his swollen nostrils, the cut at the corner of his mouth. He looks tired as he walks toward a bench to sit. The frenzy of onlookers has turned to wild abandon, a kind of David-beats-Goliath glee in the air as I hear guys from the track team running down the hallway, jumping and yelling, “White boy from the crew fucked shit up!”

  I retreat to a corner, breathing hard as I sit down on the steps. I can’t stop trembling. I put my head between my knees and soon feel Laura sit down quietly next to me, draping herself over my back. I start to cry. I don’t want to. But there is no way to hide it. It’s all living outside me now.

  This face is a lie. This life is a lie. I want to go home. I want to talk to Dad, to tell him I understand. There is something terrible about all of this. A man who lives in us both, to compensate for the fear. He stands guard over a weakness, a scared naked child, telling him not to show himself, that he is too weak, too pathetic, too fragile.

  Is this, when you get right down to it, what it means to be a man?

  Laura keeps saying, “It’s okay, babe. It’s over. It’s okay.”

  I hear voices: “Why’s he crying? What’s wrong with him? He won.”

  I can’t move. I wish I could. I am empty and I don’t know what is happening and I just think, It’s a hard thing to have to know.

  When I get home from track practice, Dad is home as he is every day since he quit his job so he could be home with me while Bonnie works. I tell him about the fear and the fight, how I blocked and counterpunched, how I followed his instructions and won.

  He takes it all in with that tan, weathered face of his, a curious look in his eye, clarifying details, asking for specifics. I know he wanted to protect me. I know he’s happy for me, but there is something else. I’m surprised to see it, the kind of thing you can only spot if you’ve spent thousands of hours together. It’s in the pauses, the way I can see him searching me for something between sentences. Sadness. I realize I feel it too: this mixture of pride and sadness as we see each other as men for the first time and realize how alike we are.

  There was a golden field of chaparral behind the School at the Tomales Bay compound in Synanon. When we were still very small, we would run through it with our shaved heads, unaware of the world beyond the big road, stopping to dig for worms or chase jackrabbits when they stuck their faces up from their burrows. We had these experiences alone or in small groups. We missed our parents, who came and went from our lives like a certain shape of the moon, familiar and faraway at once. Some days when Dad would come to see us, I could feel my heart pound at the sound of his Harley in the driveway. I’d run toward him, seeing the mustached smile as he got off the bike and lifted my brother and me
to tickle our bellies and kiss our cheeks. He was not so many years out of prison then, not so many years from the needle and the couch and all that violence. But his future was in front of him and his boys were with him and I know it steadied him because it steadied me too, to be so close, to feel this connection like we are branches of the same tree joined at the trunk, to sense his warmth, an affection I interpreted as a promise: that he would give whatever he had to give to us, even if he didn’t have much to give. I spent years judging him for that deficit: for his flaws and errors, his limitations, cataloging all the ways I vowed to never turn out like him.

  But something changed. The resentment is gone and in its place is a simple understanding. I don’t want him to be like my friends’ fathers with their degrees, their clean records, their pressure, and I know—as much as I know anything in the world—that this flawed, angry, funny, wise and affectionate man is on my side no matter where I go or what I do.

  It’s the greatest gift anyone has ever given me.

  CHAPTER 35

  THE LUCKY ONE

  Dad used to worry I would get stuck-up. It’s nothing he wants to admit. If Bonnie holds up a report card and says, “Wow. Just, wow. Where did all these As come from?” Dad will smile too. He’ll play along. But he didn’t always feel this way. Before I started getting good grades, he used to say educated people were mostly full of shit. “Some guys think they know everything because they got some fucking degree. Meanwhile, they got their heads up their asses and they can’t even change a flat.” I used to hear this all the time. “Why do you want to go to college so badly? We didn’t go and we turned out fine.” I’d say, because I want to learn new ideas and meet new people even though secretly I knew it was because I wanted to be a thousand miles from a prison yard and an AA meeting.

  But he doesn’t say those things anymore. When I’m up late studying, he brings me a snack and says he’s proud of the work I’m doing, that it takes “heart.” He lingers a minute in the doorway while I flip through my calculus textbook.

  He likes to look through the brochures I’ve collected for the colleges I’ve visited. UC Santa Barbara with its beautiful campus near the ocean. UC Berkeley with its history, its intensity. Stanford with its massive white satellite dish sitting on a hill above its Romanesque architecture housing endless Nobel laureates. “This don’t look half-bad,” he says, turning the pages of the brochure while we watch a game in the living room. “You really got a shot at this stuff, huh?”

  “I think so. We’ll see.”

  Maybe it’s because he’s sick. He was feeling tired and nauseated for months, so he went to the doctor for blood tests. When they came back, the doctor said he had hepatitis C. He isn’t sure how he got it, whether from a blood transfusion or from sharing dirty needles in prison. He needs to take interferon, which causes severe flu symptoms. He’s weak and he can’t sleep. He has to shoot the stuff into his stomach with big needles wrapped in yellow plastic that he keeps in the fridge next to the eggs. It gives him diarrhea and he’s never hungry, so he loses weight. When he takes a shot, he winces in pain and he looks at me with a dark laugh. “Fucked-up, right?” I laugh too because the man can find a joke in anything. What is a son? What is a father? What are we to each other now? He’s grown weaker and I’ve grown stronger and we see each other and neither one of us is the person we thought we were.

  Hepatitis C causes cirrhosis of the liver, which is the same thing Grandma Frieda has now. It eats the liver bit by bit until there is nothing left but a wad of scar tissue. Dad quit drinking immediately because the liver can no longer process alcohol and alcohol only makes it worse. But Grandma didn’t quit. Mom says she just sits in her chair with her mountain of pills, the highball glass of scotch sweating beads of water on the tray next to her. Mom is worried because Grandpa’s back cancer is much worse now and it seems like he can’t take care of her much longer.

  Dad is trying his best to take care of himself. Doing his exercise every morning, eating healthy food, wrapping himself in a blanket as he sits in the empty stands at my track meets to root for me when I run the mile.

  “Not bad,” he says, closing the college brochures, putting down his reading glasses as he lowers the volume on the game. “I mean, shit, if you became a lawyer, you could make your whole living just defending the family.”

  I know he’s worried about Tony. We all are. He’s drinking again. He and Tiffany split up and three months later he was told that she was back out on the street using drugs. When the baby wasn’t with Tony, she would leave him with people for weeks at a time. Sometimes it would be a friendly couple with children but sometimes it was strangers she hardly knew. One of them fed him nothing but corn syrup from a bottle which ruined his little teeth, making them brown and yellow with rot.

  One of the people called Child Protective Services and the baby became a ward of the state. Mom intervened so that he wouldn’t end up in foster care. But that didn’t last long and eventually the baby ended up back with Tony, in a tiny apartment at the edge of town. Jake and Tony have become friends and Jake says that when he visits him, there are beer cans everywhere and a small child in diapers walking around while his father drinks on the couch.

  Tiffany has disappeared. Nobody knows where she is. Jake said he heard a rumor that she has a new man and all they do is “party.” It’s a strange word to describe something that causes so much sadness.

  When I talk to Tony, he seems distant, broken. He says, “I’m proud of you, little bro. You go make a mark on the world. Tell ’em where you came from.” I can hear the sadness in his voice, like he’s given up or just doesn’t know what to do. It seems like too much for one person, to have a child and an addiction and the memory of all that time alone. “I tell everyone about you. My little brother’s gonna be a brain surgeon or an astronaut or some shit. I believe in you, Mick. Seriously, it’s like the only thing I do believe in.”

  * * *

  ON THE DAY I receive my acceptance letter to Stanford University, Dad is the only one home. He’s waiting for me in the garage with the radio on, working on his truck. “A packet came for you,” he says with a smile. “You might want to check it out.” There is a big white envelope sitting on the shop table next to the jigsaw. I tear it open, letting the paper fall to the floor where Dad has his tools laid out—a socket set, some pliers, Allen wrenches, glass jars filled with bolts and nuts. The letter on top says, “Congratulations! It is with great pleasure that I offer you admission into Stanford University.” Before I can read another word, before I review the glossy brochures with pictures of students sitting in those Romanesque archways, before I review the financial aid scholarship I am offered that covers my tuition and housing and books, before any of it, I throw my arms around Dad’s neck and we both start to cry.

  I’m not sure if it’s joy or sadness. It feels like something achieved but also something survived. Something found, maybe, a strength together that we did not have apart. I smell the Old Spice on his neck, feel his thick gold necklace against my head. I know he quit his job for me after the motorcycle accident. For this. I know Bonnie has worked to support us, for this. So it feels like it’s ours. I let out a scream and Dad pumps his fist and we’re jumping up and down with our arms around each other’s shoulders. “You did this,” he says. I run into the house to call Mom but she’s gone so I leave a message that I have big news and go out to the front lawn to yell for the whole neighborhood to hear.

  When I return to the garage, Dad is sitting on the floor with his elbows on his knees, an arm on the front fender of the Chevy, his head down, a hand over his eyes. I ask him what’s wrong. He shakes his head and waves me away, a painful smile on his face. It’s just the two of us there among the oil-stained rags and balled-up shop towels, the neat drawers of his red Craftsman toolbox. I know what he’s thinking because I’m thinking it too.

  We’re still alive, you and me. Them sonsabitches ain’t buried us yet.

  * * *

  TWO HOUR
S LATER Mom calls to tell me Grandma Frieda is dead. I can hear the tears through the phone as she explains that her mother’s liver finally gave out, that despite the advanced cirrhosis she never stopped drinking until four days ago, when she quit cold turkey and the shock killed her.

  I tell her I’m sorry and I love her and it’s going to be okay. I listen quietly while she sobs. “I couldn’t be close to her,” she says. “She was so hard on me. But it’s still difficult to lose my mom.”

  I think about the Dutch family that moved to America, the father who fought in a war for two countries, the mother who sat and drank every day, the three children, the oldest of whom was raised by nannies and grew up playing alone in the bombed-out craters of a war.

  “So what’s your big news?”

  “Oh, well. I don’t know if now’s the time.”

  “No, tell me. I could use some good news.”

  “Well, I got into Stanford, Mom. A scholarship and everything. I can’t believe it.”

  The line goes quiet and I wonder briefly if we lost the connection. “You there? Did you hear what I said?”

  “So you’re not going to go to the University of Oregon? To Eugene, like we talked about?”

  “Mom, I got a scholarship to Stanford.”

  “But you promised me. This is going to be a very hard year for me. I was really excited you were going to be close.”

  I tell her I’m sorry. I tell her we’ll talk. I tell her I feel bad for Grandpa and sad about Grandma. I tell her I love her and I have to go.

  We hang up and I go for a run along the bike path. The whitecaps dot the water beyond the break of Dockweiler State Beach with its raised sand dunes fifteen feet high. I can hear my footsteps on the smooth concrete, see my shadow on the dunes. The excitement I felt has died down and in its place is a new thought, a lonely one.