But, in Phoenix, people kissed my ass because I’d been in the army. They grumbled about how shocking it was that someone like me should be homeless, while continuing to vote for the pricks and cunts who made it that way.
If you enjoy pissing into the wind, try getting welfare in Phoenix. Arizona is a “Right to Work” state, which means that everyone has the right to a miserable job for an unlivable wage. I applied for food stamps, but they fucked around so much that I told them to shove it.
My years as a soldier came in handy when I lived in my car. The fear and isolation were worse than anything I’d ever experienced in combat. In the combat zone you have people you rely on and who rely on you. On the street I had no one. I could only sleep for an hour or two at a time before being wakened by a cop who wanted to hassle me or a bunch of assholes who wanted to ridicule me—and sometimes the one was the other. I heard stories about gangs dousing homeless people in gasoline and setting them on fire as they slept. I took to driving out of town, to North Mountain or the Verde River, and parking there. But that used up about ten dollars of gas a day, which I couldn’t afford. I only had about five hundred left in my bank account, and I was afraid I’d be denied access to it if the bank found out that I was no longer at the address they had for me, and that I had no current address. I lived mostly on the dollar hot dogs from Circle K. When I let myself splurge, I’d get a five-dollar combo—burger, fries and coke—from Jack in the Crack. On chilly evenings, I’d sit in Denny’s and drink hot tea.
No one will come near you if you’re homeless. If you approach someone to so much as ask them what the time is, they shake their head and walk away from you just as you start to speak. I tried panhandling a few times, but I couldn’t do it. A mixture of shyness and embarrassment stopped me from going up to people. Everything I thought of saying to them sounded so stupid—that I was a soldier, that I’d served my country, that I was having a hard time... Even when it worked, the amounts they gave me were too small to make it worth the time and effort.
I dropped contact with the few friends I’d made since coming back to Phoenix. I just didn’t know how to deal with them from the position I was in. I’d few real social skills, and I’d no experience of being helpless. My misplaced pride made me afraid that people might want to help me. I heard that Mara was looking for me in the cafes she knew I frequented, so I stopped going to them.
Sometimes I’d drive to South Phoenix, to where the trailer park I grew up in used to be. My mother and father were dead now, and the trailer park was gone. It was now a barrio, and sometimes I drove around it, trying to remember exactly where the park had been, exactly which spot our trailer would have occupied.
I wasn’t the first child my parents had. There was one before me. His name was Stewart, and he died a few hours after being born. My mother loved to talk about him when she was drunk, which was most of the time. Sometimes she’d tell me, “I wish Stewart had lived instead of you. I wish you’d died.” Sometimes I shared her sentiments. I never knew what it was that Stewart died of; maybe he popped out of the womb, took a look at his progenitors and found a way to commit suicide.
The only time my mother hid her mean streak was when she milked Stewart’s death to elicit pity from people—thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years after he’d died. There were two young women who used to visit the trailer park, proselytizing for the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Neither of my parents were religious, but my mother would invite the women in, let them preach at her while she drank, and then she’d burst into tears and ask them why God had taken Stewart away from her. They’d give her the standard Jesus-freak explanation, and she’d hug me in front of them and say that at least God had seen fit to give me to her. When she was alone with me she’d tell me that I was a useless fucking bastard and that Stewart’s afterbirth was worth more than I was.
Even as a kid I knew it couldn’t be my fault that my parents hated me, because they’d hated me since I was too young to have done anything to earn their hatred. The memories I have of being an infant are of my mother punching me in the face. I also remember being about three or four, being alone in the trailer with my father. He was lying on the couch, drunk, and I was crying because I was hungry. He kept yelling at me to shut up, but I couldn’t. He was too drunk to get up and batter me, so he threw the couch cushions at me, one at a time. He was a strong man, and each time a cushion slammed into me I’d stagger, coughing, trying to catch my breath. Eventually he fell asleep. I was still crying, but he couldn’t hear me anymore.
My father was held in high regard around the trailer park. Many people pitied his situation—being married to a poison-tongued lush, and working a miserable job in the post office, sorting mail six days a week for ten and sometimes twelve hours at a time. He was known for his generosity—he would lend people money if they needed it, even when he was short of it himself. He was good at carpentry and house-painting, and he would give up his time to work on neighbors’ trailers for free. He told jokes and he laughed a lot.
But the neighbors didn’t see him hold me by the hair and kick me in the face. They didn’t hear him call me a “black bastard.” The name made no sense, but I understood: he hated black people and he hated me, and in his hatred my white skin was invisible to him.
I never owned a toothbrush until I was fifteen and bought one myself. That was after all of my back teeth were pulled.
I had never been taken to a dentist before then. My parents never brushed their teeth, and never seemed to care that their teeth were brown with decay and partly dissolved by vomit. They seemed impervious to toothache, but I didn’t inherit that trait. By the age of nine, about half of my teeth were rotted black. If I pressed hard on a tooth it would crumble, until finally it would be a broken stub sticking out of the gum. I couldn’t chew with anything but my front teeth, which somehow remained white and had only a few minor cavities. When I had toothache, my mother would give me an aspirin or my father would let me gargle a mouthful of his whiskey. Both worked at first, but by the time I was fifteen they had no effect.
So I lay on my bed and cried from the pain in my teeth. I couldn’t stop crying even when my father threatened to solve the problem by kicking the teeth out of my head. My mother said she’d take me to a dentist. She didn’t even know how to find one at first. They definitely weren’t going to pay for one. So, after a lot of phone calls, my mother figured out where the county place was, and we got in her car and drove there.
We had to wait for hours. My mother had a bottle of vodka in her bag, and she kept going to the rest room to drink from it. By the time a nurse examined me, my mother was barely coherent.
The dentist said I’d have to make a couple more visits, because I had so many teeth that had to be pulled. He said he was only supposed to freeze one side of the mouth at a time. I pleaded with him, telling him that it felt like all my teeth were hurting at once. Maybe he took pity on me, or maybe he was so freaked out by the state I was in that he didn’t want to have to deal with me again. Whatever the reason, he decided to give me a general anesthetic and do the entire job in one go. He said he couldn’t do it if I had any food in my stomach. I said I hadn’t eaten at all because of the pain.
I hadn’t been feeling nervous, because the pain was so bad that I just wanted it to be gone. But, as I lay back in the dentist’s chair, the pain disappeared and I was scared. The dentist’s assistant put a mask over my face and I breathed in the gas. The smell of it was sickening, a smell I can remember even now. I felt like it was choking me. I told them to take it away, but they ignored me. I didn’t know where my mother was. I reached up a hand to pull the mask off my face, but the assistant was holding it there and I couldn’t move his hand. The dentist made some joke about me, and his assistant laughed. I started to kick my legs in panic, and then a black substance seemed to fill my head and I was gone.
When I came back I was lying face-down. Someone had arranged some paper towels under my head to soak up the blood that was dribbling from my mouth
. I sat up, and a sticky slaver of drying blood plopped onto my shirt front.
A woman in a white coat was in the room with me. I think she was the nurse who’d examined my teeth, but I was so groggy I couldn’t be sure. I looked at her and didn’t say anything. She said, “You’re all right.”
“Where’s my mom?” My voice was gurgley from the blood.
“She’s all right. I’ll go get her.” Even in my stupefied state, I thought that was a weird thing for her to say.
Then I found out what she meant. She left the room and came back pushing a wheelchair. My mother was slumped in it.
“What happened? What’s wrong with her?”
“She’s all right,” the nurse said again. “She just drank too much.”
My mother seemed to be asleep. Her head hung forward, her chin rested on her tits. The nurse said she had to go and do something, but she’d come back soon and we’d figure out what to do. Meantime, I should just sit there and let my head clear. “And don’t yell at your mother,” she said.
Just before the nurse walked out of the room, my mother opened her glassy eyes and watched her leave. Then she looked at me. “Who was that?” she asked.
“You fucking alcoholic cunt.”
“Yeah. That’s right. Same to you.” She closed her eyes again.
I was ready to cry with shame.
I went through my mother’s pockets. Her orange stretch pants were wet, and I realized she’d pissed in them. She kept mumbling, probably telling me to stop, but I kept searching until I found her car keys.
Then I opened the door and stumbled into the corridor. Swallowing blood and trying not to trip over myself, I ran, past the reception desk and out the glass door, into the heat and light and dust.
My mother’s car was an oxymoron back in those days—a Ford that ran well. I started it and pulled out of the lot. I didn’t have a license—I was too young—but I knew how to drive, more or less. It took me a while, but I made it back to the trailer park without causing a wreck or getting pulled over.
My father was standing in the kitchen, doing something with a can of paint. He didn’t say anything when I went in. He just stood there as I told him what had happened. Then, with both his hands and all his strength, he threw the can at me. It hit me in the face, breaking my weak and bleeding jaw. He stepped over me as I lay in a puddle of paint. I heard him turn on the TV in the next room.
Six months later I dropped out of high school. I’d just turned sixteen. I had some nebulous idea about going back to school someday, but for now I’d had enough of my parents’ asking me why I was wasting my time in school.
For the past year-and-a-half, I’d held a part-time job in a store. When I left school, the owner let me work full-time. The money was shit, but there was nothing else I knew how to do.
On a Saturday afternoon, I was sitting on the couch in the living room, reading a newspaper. The TV was on, but I wasn’t watching it. My father was out somewhere, drinking with his friends from the post office. My mother was home, but she was half-drunk and we were ignoring each other as usual.
Then my father came home. He got in a fight with my mother almost as soon as he was through the door. She was being sullen, and he kept asking her what was wrong and she kept saying, “Nothing.” This was one of her favorite routines, and it always set him off. He asked her again, and she stood up and walked toward the kitchen. He followed her.
I hadn’t said a word to him. I was just reading the paper, or trying to. But, as he walked behind the couch on his way to the kitchen, he slapped the back of my head.
It wasn’t a hard slap. It was nothing compared with the beatings he’d given me over the years. But there was something about the way he did it, the gratuitousness and the contempt, that just finished it for me.
I wasn’t all that angry. I’d just had it with him, with all of him. I wasn’t afraid of him. There was nothing he could do to me that he hadn’t already done.
I’d been drinking a bottle of root beer. It was on the floor at my feet. I picked it up and went to the kitchen. They’d stopped yelling at each other and were talking calmly now. They both looked at me as I came in. My mother didn’t say anything. My father said, “Get out of here. We’re talking.”
I didn’t say anything either. I just swung with all of my weight and smashed the bottle of soda on the top of his head. He was lucky that it shattered on impact, or it might have fractured his skull. Some of the shards tore his face open. Root beer sprayed over us both. I was still holding the neck of the bottle, which was no longer attached to anything. I let it drop as he fell on his hands and knees.
“Get out of here,” my mother whimpered, covering her face with her hands.
“Tell him I’m sorry,” I said. I didn’t know why I said that, because I wasn’t sorry at all. I walked out of the trailer.
I got my bicycle and rode away. It was getting dark. The sky in Arizona always seems huge, like it’s farther from the ground than it is anywhere else. I don’t know why that is. I looked up at it as I rode my bicycle.
I rode for hours. I prayed that my father wouldn’t die. I didn’t care about him, I just didn’t want to face a homicide charge. I was afraid that at any moment a cop car would appear behind me and turn on its siren.
Late at night, and with nothing else to do, I went back to the trailer park. Everything seemed normal, just the lights from the trailer windows, some dogs barking. No cops waiting to grab me as I approached the trailer and let myself in.
The TV was still on. My mother lay in a drunken sleep on the couch. My father was still lying on the kitchen floor. He stank. His face was covered with dried blood so thick that it looked like a red plaster cast. He wasn’t dead. I tried to wake him and get him to bed, but he mumbled something and kicked at me. I cleared away the broken glass that surrounded him, then put a pillow under his head. I turned off the TV and the lights and, leaving my parents in their respective stupors, I went to my room.
I took off my boots and lay on the bed. There wasn’t much in the room. Some books and records and a cheap stereo I’d saved up for and bought. Some pictures on the walls, clipped out of sports and music magazines. A girlie calendar. A mirror. My clothes.
I lay there for about a half-hour. Then I got up and put my boots on again. I went back to the living room Nothing had changed there. I went into my parents’ room, and looked through their closet until I found a large bag. I took it to my room and stuffed it with my clothes and a few books and some personal papers. I went back to their room and found my father’s coat and took his wallet out of the pocket. There was some money in it, I forget how much. I pocketed the money, adding it to my own. Then I took the coat and hid it under the mattress on my bed. If he found his wallet missing, he’d know right away what had happened. But, if he couldn’t find his coat, he might think he’d misplaced it while drunk.
I took my mother’s car keys. I picked up the bag and took a look at my room. All it had now was clothes I’d outgrown, and things I didn’t need. I walked out and shut the door.
I put the bag in the back of the car. It was one in the morning, full moon on the trailer park. I could count on getting a 24-hour start. They’d sleep all night, and, when they woke up and found me missing, they’d wait for me to show. It wouldn’t be until late at night when they realized I wasn’t coming back.
And I wasn’t. I knew that what was ahead of me might not be better, but it would be different. And I left them behind and I never went back to them, not ever.
The car got me to LA. It would have gotten me further, but I knew my luck had to be finite. Sooner or later I’d get pulled over, and when the cops asked for proof of title and registration, I’d have a problem. So I abandoned the car in LA, with a real feeling of regret. It seemed like the only friend I had. I parked it in a dark, quiet street in East Hollywood, and got out. I patted the roof of the car and quietly said, “Bye-bye, pal. Bye-bye. Thanks a lot,” in a little kid’s voice. I actually felt myself nearing
tears, so I hoisted my bag and walked away.
I didn’t have much money left. I hadn’t had much to start with, and I’d spent most of it on gas. I slept in a park that night, and it was cold, but I wasn’t sorry about anything.
It took a while, but I started finding work. I worked any casual job I could get. The pay was low, but there was nothing I wanted to spend a lot of money on. I lived in single-occupancy rooms, the kind of places everyone dreads living in, but that were better than anything I’d known before. I spent my seventeenth birthday in one of those rooms, singing “Happy Birthday” to myself
Not long after that, I got a job in a gas station. It was an okay job; when I worked the night shift, I had plenty of time to read, which was the only hobby I had. But the job I had before that was as a laborer on a construction site, and it was so backbreaking that it got me in good physical shape. I didn’t miss that job, but I’d enjoyed being fit. And, after a few months sitting on my ass at the gas station, my fitness was gone. I asked a guy I worked with if he knew about any cheap gyms nearby, and he said all the health clubs were expensive, but that there was some kind of martial arts place just around the corner. It looked run-down, so it might be cheap.
It was, though it still stretched what I could afford. The first time I went there, I’d just finished working a shift. I walked around the corner and looked for the place, then saw the sign. CHOI’S HAPKIDO. Under the sign, someone had written with a marker pen, Home of the Cheap Shot.
Mr. Choi was Korean, like the martial art he taught. Hapkido is a street-fighting form incorporating kicks, strikes, grappling and throws. Before coming to America, Mr Choi had worked for the North Korean government, torturing spies to turn them into double agents. He’d use hapkido to break their arms and legs, their fingers, whatever. Then the government would let the guy heal, and then get him a woman. He’d be so glad of some gentleness, some sex and affection, that it wouldn’t occur to him that the woman was a professional, no different than Mr. Choi. She’d get inside his head, figure out whether he could be trusted to turn on his old bosses. If so, they’d send him back. And, when he returned from his mission, he’d be killed. They usually just conveniently forgot to tell the guards that he was now on their side.
How Do You Like Your Blue-Eyed Boy? (Phoenix Noir Book 1) Page 3