Flash

by Jim Miller

  I remember when, as a young boy, Hank would ask me an endless series of questions, from the mundane to the profound. It was everything from “Why do elephants have long noses?” and “Why are clouds big and small?” to “What is God?” and “Why do people die?” Sometimes I’d come up with crazy answers to make him laugh, but I knew when I was serious that Hank trusted me totally and that I couldn’t let him down. So while we had great fun with some of his queries, I’d sometimes be hit by a terror that my answers would harm him somehow. When he asked, “Why does grandma say bad things?” I knew those things were about me, and I fought a gut-wrenching mixture of rage and shame and helplessness, as I looked into his earnest little face, his big eyes watching my every move.

  Other than our too-infrequent visits, I knew my son through letters, first in crayon, then pencil, then pen, then word-processed. I had them all in binders: colorful, primitive sketches of baseball players, guys playing guitar, animals at the zoo all with captions and short stories like “The Hippos eat lunch at the zoo and miss their families in Africa” or “Rock stars make people dance and sing.” Then, later on, I would get confessions about crushes or philosophical musings about something he’d read. That was one thing I’d credit Trish with, she always had him reading. In one letter he told me he’d read “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin, back when he was in high school, and said he thought he understood what the jazz player meant by “the storm inside”:The brothers are talking about suffering but I think it’s more than just Sonny’s heroin addiction. It’s about the fact that everybody suffers and there isn’t any way to escape it. The only thing that people can do is use their pain to create something beautiful—otherwise it will eat them up or kill them. That’s why Sonny’s brother finally comes to see him as royalty. His music is how he lives and connects with the world. Maybe it’s that way with your writing ? I don’t know yet what my thing is. Maybe I never will. Who knows? Anyway, it was a good story. Better than what I read in class.

  Stuff like that always floored me. He was a remarkable kid, but how the hell could I respond to that? My son, musing on the meaning of suffering in his middle teens. Was I the source? I would always write back and treat him seriously, but I never knew if I was doing any good.

  Perhaps I was so unsure of myself as a father because I didn’t really have one myself. My own father died of a heroin overdose in 1975 when I was just a kid. Mom, or Sandy as I more often called her, left him, with me in tow, sometime in the early seventies. So I only remember my father vaguely in flashes of memory—running with me on the beach with his long hair and shaggy beard, playing guitar for me in the basement of a large Victorian house in San Francisco, carrying me on his bare shoulders on a hike in Topanga Canyon. I had a picture of him that I kept in the drawer next to my bed while I was growing up. It was a shot of him standing beside a big psychedelic school bus wearing a plain gray t-shirt, smiling a beatific smile. On the back, my grandmother (on my dad’s side) had written, “Your Dad.”

  The story I grew up with was that Joe—that was his name—had gotten hooked on drugs and “abandoned the family.” He was a bum, a bad man, just like his granddad “the radical” had been. Both my mother and her family spouted that line as did Chad, my stepdad from the time I was thirteen or so. Since my grandfather had died in World War II they spared his memory. I never heard any version of Dad’s death from his family since Sandy had cut off all contact with them when she left him. Later, in my teens, I was told that he had died in the back of a bus while he was following the Grateful Dead on their 1975 tour. When I looked up the Dead’s tour history in a book at the library and found out that the band had been on hiatus that year, Sandy had to confess that she didn’t know or care when or where he died, that she had simply gotten a note from Joe’s mother informing her that he had overdosed. She hadn’t gone to the funeral or even bothered to tell me for a couple of years. It was then, during that confrontation, that I learned that Sandy had left him, not the other way around. He was still a bum though, that was not in question. Even my great grandfather, whom she had never met, was a bad seed. Somehow Joe and his grandfather’s brief, shadowy reunion was to blame for my father’s drug addiction. Some shit like that. It was all stacked against me. What were my chances?

  So I grew up with a gaping hole in my family history that Sandy thought she’d plastered over when she married Chad. When we moved into his house, Chad had only met me briefly, a handful of times, before leaving on dates with Sandy, but still he proclaimed, “Well, looks like I’m your Dad now, Jackie.” I told him that he wasn’t and he told me not to “disrespect him,” and we were off to a flying start. Chad’s strategy was to make a point of how my real dad was a “hippie loser” and that he had stepped up “like a man and a provider” to save the day. He was a world-class asshole. I hated his guts at hello in the way that only a thirteen-year-old boy can hate—full of passionate intensity.

  As I got older, I made a point of finding ways to irritate Chad and expose his hypocrisy. The day after he gave me a “just say no” lecture, I stole his pot and smoked it in my room. When he talked about developing a work ethic, I skipped school and got drunk. After he stuck a “Ronald Reagan for President” sticker on our car, I peeled it off. You see, Chad was one of those self-indulgent baby boomers who did the sixties and disco thing and then, seamlessly, in the eighties, got amnesia to go along with their greed and vanity. His Achilles’ heel was that he still liked to party with the boys from the ad agency and this hypocrisy made him a ripe target for an angry teenage boy looking for trouble. When I stole his vial of cocaine and lined the coke up to spell “Chad” on the living room coffee table, he hit the ceiling. I could hear him screaming at Sandy, who was at her wit’s end, for hours about what a worthless piece of shit I was, etc. Finally, they came up with the solution of sending me to Catholic school to get me some discipline and a good value system. “You mean you don’t want me to go to school with black kids, right?” I snarled. Chad slapped me, and told me that I could leave now and he wouldn’t mind. That led to another brawl with Sandy, but I ultimately submitted to going to Our Lady of the Sorrows after she begged me, with tears and all, to do it for her.

  Our Lady of the Sorrows wasn’t nearly as bad as I had imagined. Growing up, we’d never spent a second in church so the whole thing was pretty amusing to me. It turned out that I liked the short skirts that the girls had to wear. I liked talking to Father Hatch about philosophy after Religious Studies class. I even enjoyed doing bong loads with Brother O’Hara after Literature class. Lit was in the final period, and we’d meet at his apartment a mile or so from campus (not all of the brothers lived in the rectory). He was gay and looking for a little I’m sure, but I was pretty wise to it and he had really good weed. “Dude, I’m no Altar Boy,” I said one time after an awkward hand on the shoulder moment. After that, we were cool. It was bong loads, rapping about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance or some other book, and no funny business.

  Hatch, on the other hand, was straight and had a bit of a roving eye at that. He was a Jesuit who had a Ph.D. in philosophy and used to loan me books on existentialism and say, “It’s my job to tell you not to take this too seriously.” We’d look at girls sometimes and he’d asked me who I thought was the prettiest so he could enter the conversation through the side door and say something like, “I see your point, Wilson.” The rest of the priests and brothers were pretty hardcore alcoholics. Sometimes a brother would get shipped off to rehab and they’d tell us that “Brother So-and-So had been reassigned by the Diocese.” That happened to Father McNulty after he made the local news for drowning the stray cats that’d been keeping him up all night by howling outside the rectory. A local trouble-shooter made him “turkey of the week.” Stuff like that went on all the time. It blew my mind at first, but I got used to it.

  It wasn’t just the priests and brothers who were a little off center, either. The president of the school got busted for tax evasion while I was there, and anot
her teacher got caught in a drug scandal when the police found her buying coke from Jared Stone in the back of his bitchin’ black Camaro. To me, the oddest thing was “Father Chardonnay Week” when they’d have us write letters to the Pope to ask him to canonize Chardonnay, the founder of the order of brothers who ran the school (Hatch and O’Hara were free agents of a sort). Apparently, Chardonnay had refused to pay taxes to the French after the government demanded them following the Revolution. He was kind of the Howard Jarvis of aspiring saints I guess, a perfect spiritual exemplar for the Reagan Revolution. I used to get detention for writing letters to the Pope that started with lines like “Hey Big” or “Your Super Holiness.” An exercise like that was just hard to take seriously.

  What I liked best was football. If I had gone to a bigger, public school, I would have never been able to make a team. But with only about 500 students in all, Our Lady of the Sorrows had to take all comers. I was small, fast, and fearless, but my hands were useless. Hence, I wound up on coverage as a gunner. I’d jet down the field and hurl myself recklessly at the return man. I loved the contact, the pure violence of the hit. And the coach loved me. He called me “Smackin’” Jack Wilson. It was stupid, but amusing. Coach would make me take it easy in practice, but in games, he’d slap me on the helmet and say, “Knock ’em dead kid.” He left the God stuff in church, too. I liked that. We were simply there to play football. Not that we won many games, but I appreciated the honesty of his approach. And on Friday nights, I’d dole out vicious hits, balling up all of my unfocused rage and hurling it at some poor kid from St. Mary’s or Blessed Heart.

  My best friend on the team—and in school, for that matter—was Shane Black. Shane was bigger than me and could catch, so he played tight end, and even started. He got me into punk rock and helped me get a fake ID. We shaved our heads, which allowed us to move easily between the vastly different worlds of Catholic school, football, and punk clubs. I loved the pit; when the crowd was at its most frenzied, I’d be at the heart of it, slam dancing, jumping on and off the stage. I felt at home in the community of alienated kids I met at shows. It was a beloved community of sorts. Still, at some of the shows it would get nasty, particularly at the Olympic, downtown. I remember coming home with a split lip from the slam pit at a Black Flag show and telling Sandy I did it in football practice. Chad was puzzled by this phenomenon. He couldn’t understand what wasn’t cool about Foghat, Foreigner, and Bad Company. “Why don’t you listen to normal music?” he’d whine. “Is this what they’re teaching you at Our Lady of the Sorrows?” He tried to send me to a psychologist, but Sandy got me out of that by noting that my grades were still good.

  It was at a Dead Kennedy’s show at a roller rink in the East Valley that I met my first long-term girlfriend, Beth Stein. I ran back from the pit when some idiot started pulling the tube lights down from the ceiling and raining shattered glass on the crowd. I got a bad cut on my head and Beth came over with a handkerchief and helped me stop the bleeding. Afterward, we made out in the parking lot and had sex in the back of her Volkswagen Bug. She had big , warm brown eyes and full lips. Her hair was blue and she was wearing an oversized, white DKs t-shirt, a long black skirt, and Doc Martens. She had a nose ring. Her parents lived in a large ranch house in Tarzana in the West Valley, not far from Chad’s place in Northridge. They disapproved of me because I wasn’t Jewish, and they refused to speak to me when I came over to pick her up. It was like being invisible. Her mother was waiting for her to get over this strange phase and marry a doctor, so she’d set up dates for her with men in their early thirties. Beth would tell her mother she was going to meet them and drive over to my house. It was a weird scene, but I liked her a lot. We’d talk about music mostly and books we’d read. Joy Division and Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse. Beth was on the pill so we had lots of sex too. She was a fantastic girl, full of life and keen intelligence. I was enthralled.

  So life went on merrily for me and, in my senior year, I actually got accepted to UCLA, as did Shane. Unfortunately, Chad and Sandy were fighting all the time and, just as I was getting ready to graduate, Chad started humping some bimbo in Santa Monica and Sandy was going crazy. She’d drive over the hill and sit in her car outside the bimbo’s apartment. Chad, heartless bastard that he was, would come over to the window and wave to her before he drew the drapes closed and got busy. He moved out in my last month of high school and, during one of their last arguments, he made it clear that I wasn’t going to UCLA. “That little shit can get a job and pay his own way,” was how he put it. Soon afterwards, Chad sold the house in Northridge and kept the money. Sandy’s friends told her to sue him for alimony and get the house, but Sandy wouldn’t do it. “I don’t need anything from him,” she’d say. I couldn’t blame her, though her nobility cost me a shot at going to a four-year school. About the same time, Beth told me she was going to NYU. I couldn’t blame her either.

  Sandy moved into a two-bedroom apartment in the East Valley and I stuck with her for a while. I forgave her for her bad choices and shoddy mothering and she forgave me for being a total shit. We bonded in our regret. I even grew my hair out to make her happy and started calling her Mom once in a while. The thing I came to understand was that she had married Chad because she really believed I needed a father. Sure, it was a train wreck, but it was a well-intentioned one. Sandy kept her job as a secretary in some generic office park in Thousand Oaks and we shared the rent. I had to pick up the costs for the classes I was taking at Valley College, which meant working at whatever I could get. It was in the middle of the Reagan recession so I did a little bit of everything—mostly shitwork.

  My first job was as a stock boy at Auto World, a cavernous warehouse where retailers and auto shops came to buy parts wholesale. I spent eight hours a day unloading trucks of auto parts. The trucks would come in, one after the other, and I’d meet them on a forklift at the loading dock. At 8:00 AM, it was a single truck full of brake shoes. Two trailer loads of mufflers at 10:00 AM, a truck of radiator hoses after lunch. Then it would be more mufflers in the early afternoon and a semi full of rims at 4:00 PM. The culture of the warehouse was hard and profane. Everyone had an unwanted nickname. My name was “College Boy” because I had stupidly mentioned my pathetic attempt at education on the side. This led to my getting tossed into the worst jobs, if at all possible.

  “I bet College Boy has never unloaded a crate of mufflers in a hundred degree heat before,” Big Frank would say sarcastically before sending me out on the forklift at the peak of the midday inferno to meet the truck and then sort the mufflers after they had been sitting in the sun getting hot enough to burn my hands through gloves. I did it and didn’t grouse about it. This gained me some grudging respect. Frank called everyone else by an ethnic slur or a demeaning insult. So “the kike” and “the spic” worked alongside “Lard Ass Larry” and “Shit for Brains,” as Frank lovingly referred to them. If you bitched, it only got piled on thicker. When the fat trucker who always ate our last few donuts got to the box before Frank could grab his jellyroll, he made sure to load up the next day’s batch with a box full of Ex-Lax, so fatso had to call in sick and get his pay docked. When the delivery guy from UPS cussed us out for making him wait, Frank made sure he had to wait five minutes longer each subsequent day that week. “Fuckwad” was the driver’s name from then on out.

  After work, we’d grab a twelve-pack and sit on the loading dock, staring at the teenage girls at the bus stop across the street. I began to see that the dirty jokes and the tall tales the guys told masked a longing and a sense of dread that the joys of their high school days might have been their lives’ high-water mark. Frank, the floor boss, was older and made more money, but his coarseness covered over the fact that he’d never be a “college boy” like the suit in the front office who worked in air conditioning and got to order Frank around. One day, after Frank had been particularly tough on me, I was hanging mufflers on the top tier of the catwalk in the airplane-hanger-sized warehouse, when he came up to m
e and pulled a vial of coke out of his pocket and offered me a snort. I took it and he said, “Now work faster, you little asshole.” It’s strange to say, but the gesture was almost tender, which I found a little moving. Unfortunately for everyone, Frank’s generosity with the crew was caught on the surveillance cameras the suit had installed over the weekend, and we were all on the street within a week.

  My stint at Auto World was followed by a job in an insurance records warehouse in Pacoima. There, my job was to unload boxes from a huge truck that came every morning at nine. Once I had my mountain of boxes, the truck left and, for the rest of the day, I was supposed to shelve the boxes in numerical order until there were no more boxes. My “supervisor” was a cool Chicano guy in his early thirties named Cheno. Cheno sat at a desk by the door, read the newspaper, and listened to the radio. If it wasn’t for the music, we would both have gone crazy. We listened to rock stations, the news, even “Literature Hour” on public radio. I could easily do the entire load in half a day, so I would lag, stop and sit on the boxes, or walk over to rap with Cheno about whatever was on his mind at the moment. Cheno was a philosopher of sorts so he would frequently have some big thought on his mind like, “If everyone decided there was no God, would people be better or worse?” Cheno’s take was that they would be worse. “It would be the war of all against all man. People are low, you know what I mean?”