by Andrew Roe
“Don’t eat yet,” he instructs us. “It’s not much farther. Just wait.”
So we wait, the bags of food on our laps. The bags are warm. We can smell what’s inside. Suddenly, though, I’m not so hungry anymore. It’s another one of those things: You think you want something, then you get it, then you don’t want it anymore. It loses something between the wanting and the having.
“I feel like I’m always failing you somehow,” he said one time.
They have these conversations that are really the same conversation over and over, with different words but the same meaning.
I’ll be in my room reading, listening.
“Please don’t tell me that,” she said back. “Please. I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to know.”
The parking lot is empty. In front of us is the place where my dad works. It’s one of those buildings where the windows are black on the outside so you can’t see inside. Next to it are two other buildings exactly the same. There’s grass and plants and trees and flowers. Everything wet from the night before. The asphalt, too.
Like I said before, we know our father works in an office, and that he also complains about having to be there all the time. Other than that it’s up to our imagination. Work was just a place he went, like we went to school, you didn’t have a choice about it. When he comes home and plops down on the couch or drags himself upstairs, we all know to let him be, to let him settle in before we say anything. Sometimes it’s five minutes. Sometimes it’s longer.
Still, I’m curious. About what he does all day, what he says to other people and what they say to him. In movies and TV shows I keep an eye out for anyone who acts like him and dresses like him so I might discover some clues.
“They forgot the fucking syrup,” Ryan announces. And Dad just shoots him this look like: That’s my territory, don’t even think about it, bub. Ryan gets quiet, eats, licks his fingers like he’s in a commercial.
It’s silent then as we sit and eat in the truck. The smell of the food is heavy: the sausage, the egg, the pancakes, the grease. It’s hard to think of anything else but the smell. My dad isn’t drinking the coffee because it’s too hot. He takes off the lid and the steam rises up and mixes in with his breath, which I can see. It’s that cold.
And then my dad says, “I wanted you guys to see this. It seemed important a few hours ago, earlier, back at the house. For some reason. For some reason it seemed important. I had something I wanted to tell you, too. But now. Now I don’t know. It’s just a building. It doesn’t mean anything…”
And his voice trails off, drifts away. The thought dies. He stares down at his lap like he’s maybe searching for it, the thought. I try to think of the times when we have actually looked each other straight in the eye, longer than just a glance, the smallest recognition before moving on.
We eat some more. Ryan scarfs. But I’m going slow. Like I said, I’m not even hungry. So it’s eating just for show. Because I wanted it and now I have to follow through. Not eating would be admitting I couldn’t finish what I said I wanted. And there is always the possibility that this will not go unnoticed.
He starts again with: “This is it, though. This is where I come, every day, day in day out, rain or shine. Right here. Where we are right now. I drive, I park, I walk. I take the elevator or sometimes the stairs if I’m feeling a certain way. The same people, the same faces…”
Only he’s not talking to us, he’s talking to someone else, maybe my mom, maybe just himself, maybe Jim Morrison, who he’s always listening to and who my mom says my dad kind of looked like when they were younger and he had long hair down to his shoulders. But he’s definitely not talking to Ryan and me.
He’s still going: “But when you stop and think about it, what I do, what I’m doing, not just work but more than that, the bigger picture, the facts of it, the grand scheme of things…”
Ryan farts, something he can do, magically, whenever he wants. We wait for a response. But it doesn’t come. Our farts, our fighting, our fears—he’s a long way from all that now.
“This…”
My father shakes his head. This what?
He’s digging for the words, the right words. I’m thinking that he might get there if he keeps going. It’s like he’s about to break through. But then, no. He stops, pulls back. The words are gone, lost in his throat.
“Your grandfather, my father,” he backs up, starting over, “he worked with his hands. With his hands. He helped build homes, buildings, things that mattered.” I watch him stare ahead, at the office where he works. “Me, what do I do? What do I do? I process claims forms. I get paper cuts.”
He looks at his own hands, like they have let him down, one of many disappointments he’s had to live with.
“This is stupid,” he finishes, firing up the engine. “This is fucking stupid. This isn’t working. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
Then a pause. He picks his teeth again with the toothpick. Then a little later, after the toothpick has been tossed on the dashboard: “Look. I don’t expect you guys to understand this. This is all way over your head. It’s complicated. I remember when I was your age, or ages, where I was at then. There’s only so much you’re capable of absorbing. You’re kids still. But things happen. Things change. People have their reasons, okay? People do things. It’s just the way it is. And sometimes, most of the time, you don’t even know why they did what they did, not until a long time after. Way down the road. And even then, when it’s way later, when years have gone by, sometimes you don’t know even then, not ever. You just don’t know.”
And that’s it. He stops. He doesn’t say anything else, though for a while I think he might. So we finish eating, crumple up the bags, and drive back home. Above us, the sky continues to come to life.
The gas, I want to tell him. We should get gas. He won’t make it back to work, no way. But I keep quiet because I know sometimes that’s best.
When we get home my mom is up, freaked, saying she was worried like crazy, she just woke up and everyone’s gone, what was she supposed to think. Her hair is all tangled and wild and sad, and there are places where it’s no longer blonde, patches that are not cooperating. Cigarette smoke sits in the air. She was just about to call the police. Good thing we got back when we did.
“Where were you?” she asks him, not us. But he’s walking, in motion, not stopping to make this a full-blown conversation.
“Out,” he says. “Out in the world. I wanted to show them something. Now I need to shower and get to work.”
“I was worried. First you don’t come home till I don’t know when. Then I wake up and the boys are gone. I know you’ve been home at some point because of the empties on the kitchen table and the toilet not flushed. So what—what was I supposed to think?”
But that’s it; he doesn’t say anything back, just continues his march through the kitchen and heads upstairs and then we hear a door closing. The sound echoes and the three of us stand there and listen to it until it fades and is gone.
School hasn’t started yet but it will soon. I get the sense that this could be one of those days where we didn’t have to go and my mom writes us a note. She was good at writing notes. They were very detailed. Sometimes she even looked stuff up in medical books to come up with new illnesses and viruses. The people at school seemed impressed by this. Is your mother a doctor or nurse? they asked once. No, we said. What does she do? Silence. Should we or shouldn’t we? Ryan took care of it. She works at Photo Barn, he said. Then they were like: Oh, I see.
“What about school?” I ask.
She’s pacing in the kitchen in her ratty old-lady robe (she’s got a brand-new one, leftover from Christmas, but she’s never worn it), the pack of cigarettes showing through the front pocket like always. But she’s not smoking. But thinking about the next cigarette, you can tell. And you can tell this, too: She’s also been up for most of the night. On her face is the blurry mask of someone who hasn’t slept. That, plus the idea�
��stretching across the forehead, curling around the mouth—that there’s some kind of decision being made. Right now. At this very moment. Her eyes are narrowed, focused, like a pitcher eyeing the outside corner of the plate. Her face says, is saying, whatever—it says she’s moving from one thing to the next. Today, tomorrow—they would be different. Maybe. Because, you know, I’ve seen the look before. It doesn’t necessarily last.
“What?” she says.
“School,” I repeat. “It’s starting soon. Are we going?”
“Go upstairs,” she tells us. “Both of you. Now. I’m thinking. I’ll let you know. I’m thinking.”
Upstairs in our room, I can hear the shower running in my parents’ bathroom, and right away Ryan dive bombs onto his unmade bed.
“This is fucken bull-twat,” he says into his pillow.
I’m not sure what he means: our parents, getting up early, driving to my dad’s work, not going to school. Or maybe none of the above.
I want to tell Ryan the dream about the horses but I’m pretty sure he’ll say dreams about horses are for wusses—fucken wusses. So I don’t.
But I think about the dream again. I try to relive it as I lie down on my bed and close my eyes. I try to get back to that place in my mind when I’m moving and the wind is in my face and things haven’t already happened yet and the world spins and shines just for you. It’s a long, long time before I open my eyes. And when I do I look out the window. I see that the sun is up and it’s completely light outside and I’m only a little bit afraid.
JOB HISTORY
One time I worked as a grocery store bagger. I hated it when people said paper. It threw off my whole rhythm.
My shift was almost over when I heard “Clean up aisle six” mumbled over the loud speaker, and when I got there with my wheeled blue bucket and gray mop, there was puke everywhere. I’d never seen so much puke. A kid was kneeling down, pointing at it. The mother was saying, “Don’t touch, don’t touch. Let the man clean it.”
Another time I worked at a dentist’s office. I did the molds for people’s teeth. Me and this other guy (Dave? Daryl?). We got through it by getting high in the mornings. We’d sneak out to the alley. Then we’d do the molds. It was summer and ninety-five degrees in the room where we worked and Black Sabbath ruled.
The dentist fired Dave/Daryl after he was late four days in a row and then it was just me. The dentist asked if I thought I could handle everything by myself. When I said sure, he asked if I’d considered a career in dentition.
And then there was the time I delivered telephone books. My trunk loaded down with yellow and white pages, lugging plastic bags through neighborhoods with chained dogs and scorched lawns. That only lasted three days.
My job now is different. Yet the same. I’m married. I have kids. Blah blah blah. These are just the facts.
At night, after my son and daughter are bathed and in bed and the house is once again ours, my wife asks me questions. She asks if I’m restless.
“No,” I say. “I don’t think so. Not restless. Not that.”
“You seem restless. Is it work? How was work today?”
My wife has her own tortured job history—mall jobs, fast-food jobs, office jobs. Her current boss may be hitting on her. We’re still analyzing everything he’s said and done since she started working there, three months after she got laid off from the daycare place.
“No,” I say. “It’s not work. Work is just work. Blah blah blah. Can we talk about something else please?”
“Okay,” she says.
I am maybe paying a bill, or thinking about paying a bill. The sprinklers on in the backyard, the long, slow descent of water.
And then we talk about something else, and I feel better, and I think my wife does, too.
It’s just a matter of convincing yourself, one way or the other.
SOLO ACT
The classified ad that Kenny ran, which was how we all met, mentioned bands like Green Day, Nine Inch Nails, the Sex Pistols, the Replacements, Fleetwood Mac, ABBA, and Parliament, plus a few others I’d never heard of. We refused to label ourselves, but if you had to lay a reductive classification thing on us you could do a lot worse than heavy post-punk pop industrial garage funk. Our foundation: juxtaposition and rage.
It was the thick of summer, and the Arizona sun was like kryptonite, making everyone weaker, stupider. Motivation became an issue. We kept at it, though, working nights at our respective wage-slave service-industry jobs in and around Scottsdale—delivering pizzas, barbacking, enduring the graveyard shift at 24/7 Video—while during the day we’d sweat through practice, playing three-chord songs like “I Wanna Be Your Dog” and “Wild Thing” over and over. The band didn’t have a name, but we weren’t worried. There wasn’t any hurry. We were all in our early twenties, sliding because we could.
We practiced at Brandon’s apartment complex, Sunscape Apartments, which everyone called Shitscape, and rightfully so. It wasn’t the kind of place where you’d ever picture yourself living—the depressingly drab beige and dark brown color scheme, the serial killer building manager, the neglected landscaping, the broken laundry facilities, the chlorine that burned the shit out of your eyes if you dared to swim in the pool—but what could you do? The inhabitants said little, kept low profiles, like parolees not wanting to draw attention to themselves.
One late night/early morning we sat holding court around the pool after we’d all gotten off work, shirts off, pounding our MGDs, wondering, vaguely, what “cold-filtered” meant anyway, and debating, even more vaguely, which Darren was better on Bewitched. Then Brandon swallowed a sizable gulp of hops and barley, burped, and said, “Hey, check out the naked chick on the bike.”
And we turned to behold just that: a naked girl navigating her way (drunkenly, or druggily, or both) through Shitscape’s network of cracked sidewalks and gravel paths on an old Schwinn ten-speed. She was pretty hot in an obvious, porn star kind of way, and older, maybe twenty-eight. She was also pretty royally screwed up. Psycho mom. Incarcerated brother. Broke. In heavy debt. Credit cards maxed. She’d gotten so many DUIs they’d finally taken away her driver’s license. So she had to rely on a bike—a bike, in this eyeball-splitting desert/retirement community heat—for transportation.
She had temporarily moved in with her aunt, another lowly Shitscape resident, to “chill” and “reevaluate” and “figure shit out.” Because she couldn’t drive she’d been forced to quit one of her part-time jobs: dancing at The Lasso over in Tempe. There were rumors, too—about a kid and some trouble in Albuquerque, among other things. We found all this out later, as the summer stumbled on.
She rode past us on the other side of the pool, a streak of flesh and spokes and nipples. Briefly, the aroma of peaches and cream cut against the water’s primordial, sludgy stench. Then the brakes let out a scrotum-curling squeak and she halted in front of a Coke machine, inspecting her choices. Suave fucking dudes that we were, we tried to be as subtle as possible about our collective gawking (but how could we not stare?), speculating where the change would come from, knowing that the machine would yield only Diet Sprite no matter which button you pushed. In the moonlight, naked and wet like she’d just exited the shower, she resembled some kind of—I don’t know—goddess, I suppose, a vision from dreams or movies or music videos or the Playboy Channel. At the time none of us had what you’d call girlfriends.
“You saw her first,” Alex told Brandon, who had just popped open another beer and was rolling the can across his forehead like in a TV commercial.
“Yeah, so?”
“So go on over and talk to her. Tell her you’re a rock star.”
More prodding, more coded masculine encouragement, and Brandon lugged over to the Coke machine and the naked girl.
The very next day she started coming to our practices in the Shitscape rec room. Lips perpetually glossed. Eyelids forever shadowed a sultry, supermodel blue. There was immediate tension. She made suggestions. Wouldn’t Alex’s voice sound
better if he wasn’t singing through my bass guitar amplifier? How about an actual guitar solo every now and then instead of just chords?
We nodded like idiots. Then we turned up the amps louder, played harder. We—that is, everyone except Brandon—did our best to ignore her, which wasn’t easy because of the knit tube tops and spectacularly tan legs, along with the tattoo of a flaming sun that orbited the smooth expanse of her equally spectacular stomach. Brandon seemed embarrassed at first, plucking errant notes on his guitar to fill the uncomfortable silences that followed one of her critiques. As he and Clarissa hung out more and more, watching pirated cable and smoking coma-inducing amounts of Clarissa’s aunt’s pot, he started to change. It was inevitable—he was a sweet, mellow, mumbling guy who slept until two in the afternoon and never missed an episode of South Park. Now he was worrying over his abs and whether or not his goatee was holding him back professionally, musically.
One afternoon Brandon showed up at practice late, clean-shaven and without Clarissa or his guitar. We were jamming on a Led Zeppelin (or was it Jethro Tull?) riff.
Brandon signaled for us to stop.
“There’s something I need to say,” he said. “To everyone. All at once. If you got a sec. If now would be okay.”
This was weird. Brandon was the quiet one. I was, by default, the smart one. We didn’t really have a cute one.
Delivering the news like a child who’s been instructed by a parent to apologize for lying or stealing, he said, “I’m not being allowed to fully express myself in the band.”
We all looked at him like what the fuck. Brandon only knew about five songs straight through and still hadn’t figured out how to tune his guitar. I had to do it for him.
“What are you saying, Brandon?”
“What I’m saying is, is I’m leaving the band. I guess.”
He paused.
“Sorry,” he added.
It was quiet as we absorbed the information: No more rock and roll, which meant the possibility of sex and drugs was greatly diminished. Everything we’d worked not very hard for, gone.