Gorilla and the Bird

by Zack McDermott

  Butch the bulldog—born in a trailer park, purchased for $900 of Clyde Nerlinger’s alimony—limped over to me, stiff with arthritis, as I entered the Denmark house through the garage. He head-butted my leg and ran his giant slobbering jowls over the outside of my knee, then snorted with pleasure as I grabbed a handful of excess skin dangling off his face and tugged on the beautiful beast’s wrinkled folds.

  Over the course of just a few weeks I’d gone from soaring (the co-creator and star of what I assumed would become a hit TV series that would drive me to fame and fortune) to psychotic (parading through the streets of Manhattan in front of imagined television cameras and crew members) to jack shit (back in Wichita, the place I’d spent my whole adult life trying to escape), with no prospects and a mind veering quickly toward the land of depression.

  I decided I’d get drunk. What else was there to do? I grabbed the Bird’s keys and jumped into her black Dodge Caliber. I missed driving, and the six blocks to the liquor store made a pleasant little field trip. Once I stepped inside, I immediately recognized Mark Hitchcock, an old friend from middle school. Hitch was too smart to be working at a liquor store that sold airplane shooters of Jack by the barrelful. Fucking Wichita sure knows how to keep a good man down.

  “Hitch, how are you, man?”

  He shrugged his shoulders, as if to say You’re looking at it. But he actually said, “I’m good.”

  “That’s good.”

  “I saw your mom a while back. She said you’re a lawyer in New York? That’s awesome.”

  “Yeah. That’s right.” I was embarrassed to see him. Neither of us belonged on either side of the J&B Liquor counter.

  “Better than fucking here. That’s for sure.”

  It seemed like we were both jealous of “my life.” I could tell he thought I was sailing in a better boat. I wanted to tell him that it’d sprung a pretty fucking big leak. The Christmas bells on the exit door jingled as I stepped out. I went to the smoke shop next door and bought a pack of Marlboros. It was sweater weather, but there was a guy in a tank top playing Keno. I lit one up in the car and dangled my arm out the window on the way home. Driving while smoking: a great Midwestern pleasure.

  The Bird sauntered into the kitchen and eyed my twelve-pack. “Twelve beers, Gorilla? Isn’t that a lot of root beers?”

  “It might be just enough.” I couldn’t accurately gauge my own level of sarcasm. “You want to smoke with me?”

  “Let me see if I have any menthols.”

  The Bird is not a smoker, but she normally had a pack of More 100 menthols on hand for when Terry—“my third husband, my fake husband, my best husband”—came over. One pack would last her six months. She and Terry played gin rummy, listened to Al Green, and toked a little weed. The Bird would get buzzed and Terry would get lit. “I got me a fake common-law husband” was her catchphrase on Terry. “Brother won’t quit smokin’ and drankin’ and he’s gonna make me a widow.” Bird acknowledged that he loved her and marijuana equally, but that was more than enough.

  Addiction issues aside, the man had an incredible beard. Solid white, it rose high above his cheekbones. The moustache slightly longer than the rest of the beard and curled upward at the ends. He liked to call himself Black Santa Claus, and he was not wrong. I also knew him to have a nipple ring—the Bird listed it among his assets.

  I was initially leery of Terry. Seven years earlier, just a few months after they started dating, he flat-out disappeared for weeks. The Bird was afraid he was dead. She wasn’t far off: his brother had died and Terry set out to drink himself into that better place alongside him. When he dragged himself back to the Bird after he’d dried out, she asked me if he was worth another shot. “As long as he’s not abusive, it’s your call,” I told her, knowing she’d take him back. “A dead brother is a pretty good excuse for a bender, but I’ll just say ‘Fool me once.’”

  “By God, shame on you,” the Bird said. “I’ll just sic my Gorilla on him if he needs an ass whoopin’.” She’d need a bigger gorilla if it ever came to that. Terry was a former bodybuilder. He wouldn’t even need to put his Newport down to drop me. He drove her crazy with his drinking and smoking—he had a lung condition and a bad ticker from injecting steroids in his twenties, but he still smoked like a stack and put down booze by the 32 oz plastic QuikTrip cup.

  Truth was, I was glad the Bird had Terry. And she was crazy about him. Hopelessly in love, really. She loved watching him work our barbecue grill on the weekends; he flipped burgers with his bare hands and refused to use tongs. His grilling outfit was a red bandana underneath a floppy straw hat, and a white cotton tank top. He made his own barbecue sauce, which he kept in a bucket next to the grill and slathered on by the paintbrush. “I love watching that man grill,” the Bird would say. Terry would say, “Don’t talk to the black man while he’s working that grill.” Somehow they made that exchange sound nauseatingly sexual. He took the Bird to see plays and jazz shows. They drove out of town for chili cook-offs. She loved that he had decided to go back to school late in life to pursue a degree in psychology. The man thought he’d make a good drug counselor.

  And I could tell he cared about my mom. When he showed up post-bender and found out the Bird had gotten a grad student teaching job while getting her PhD at Kansas State, he wept as she revealed her new ID card—the one stamped FACULTY under the picture. “I knew you’d be okay, Cabbage,” he told her. Terry would call her at least three times during her two-and-a-half-hour commute to the Kansas State campus. “How’s the construction, Cabbage? How many dead deer have you seen? Sit in front and take lots of notes. I’m so proud of you.” Terry was no angel, but after what she’d been through with Mack and Clyde, fuck if Terry wasn’t all right with me.

  I cracked my second beer and stuck my leg out to keep the bully at bay as he tried to head-butt his way into a garage invite.

  “When does my brother get home?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  Adam had gone to California to visit our dad.

  “Will he ever learn that the well is dry?”

  “I hope so.”

  “I think he still suffers from ‘I don’t remember living with my dad’ syndrome.”

  “He certainly does. Goddamn Hollywood Peter Pan sperm donor.”

  The Bird and I enjoy talking shit about Mack. His list of wrongs is not short: the leaving; the utter lack of support; the time he visited me at KU and grabbed some coed’s ass in the bar and got us kicked out, then screamed at me the entire walk back to my apartment—“You were on the bouncer’s side!” and “Oh, you’re so fucking smart, Mr. Lawyer, so fucking smart!”—while kicking me in the back of my foot until I felt it was imperative that I punch him in the face. Once I started punching I couldn’t stop until I was sure he felt pain. One punch, two punch, three punch. Still not bleeding. I needed him to feel me. I knew thirteen-year-old me was hitting him every bit as much as twenty-one-year-old me.

  I picked up my brother from Mid-Continent Airport early the next afternoon. Adam’s 220-pound mass shook the car as he plopped down in the passenger seat and fired up a Parliament. His outfit and the longboard strapped to his backpack told me he was back in his skater phase. I took off his L.A. Dodgers hat—new, I assumed—and rubbed my hands through his hair. “Hair looks good; not sure you’re going bald after all.”

  “Fuck you. I’m not.”

  “You wanna hit up some Applebee’s? Chicken tender, riblet pick three?”

  “Too fancy, kid.”

  He wasn’t kidding—we’d thought Applebee’s was fancy as shit for so long that it still figured in our psyches as a cost-prohibitive slice of luxury.

  The lower middle class is precarious territory—it feels closer to lower than middle, and its inhabitants are allowed to refer to themselves as “poor” even if they aren’t missing meals. We weren’t starving; we filled up on Rice-A-Roni. We had shoes and clothes, even brand-name outlet merch at times, but the checkout counter excitement over a new discounted pair o
f Nikes was accompanied by a stomach-twisting guilt. Can we really afford these? Mom or Granny would usually say yes, but there were always pursed lips and deep exhales during the deliberation process. “Okay, but it’s your birthday present.”

  The Bird didn’t mind wearing Payless in order to make sure our wardrobes never created a barrier to social acceptance. We wore Payless too, but not a day longer than was acceptable. Once it started to matter, we had the right gear, even if it took a little ingenuity—Alexa wore white canvas shoes from Payless and glued on the blue rubber Keds logo ripped from one of her friend’s old pairs. It was tough to see the Bird sacrifice for us, even though she played it off well. “I like Payless. It doesn’t matter what brands moms wear. Who am I trying to impress?” She could make us believe she preferred cheap, generic shit: “This way I won’t care when they get torn up.”

  Back at the house, my brother tossed his giant skater bag down the stairs and we descended after it into his domain. Adam had just moved back to Wichita and into the Bird’s basement after some drug-induced academic troubles at KU in Lawrence. He was trying to wrap up his sixth year of undergrad. On the way downstairs, I surveyed the walls, taking in the laminated Black Jesus picture. There is a wide variety of laminated horseshit in our house; the Bird has a soft spot for any quasi-official document that nods to an academic or employment-related achievement: a Legal Aid business card, for example, or a badge from a teachers’ conference. She laminates to “make them look nice.” Her signed photo of Alex Haley—author of Roots—is displayed between Black Jesus and Terry’s last Christmas gift to her: an old lantern affixed to a slab of petrified wood. Terry had slapped a sticker of Jesus on the lantern. I tied my brain in knots trying to imagine how he thought this gift would be received. Had he purchased the Jesus sticker with the intention of decorating the lantern? Had he purchased the lantern at all or did he have it lying around the house already? How long had he known this would be her gift before he handed it over: months, weeks, days, hours, seconds? Was there any internal debate or was he instantly certain that this was just the thing she needed in her life? Did he really think showing up giftless was such a bad idea? Because Terry had laid down a whale of a bet that the Bird landed squarely in the “It’s the thought that matters” camp.

  The orange shag carpeting starts at the top of the stairs and continues downward and throughout. Fake wood paneling running halfway up the walls enhances the seventies vibe. Since moving back home, my brother had undertaken a few home “improvement” projects piecemeal in the basement. The first to catch my eye: an assortment of hooks drilled directly into the faux wood paneling supporting an equally heterogeneous collection of electric wires, most leading to the far corner, where he’d attached the cable modem to the ceiling with some Velcro straps and a staple gun. It was difficult to imagine any possible aesthetic justification for this new setup.

  He’d also installed a “walk-in closet,” which he created by knocking a wall down with a sledgehammer so that his formerly closed bedroom now opens into the tiny basement bathroom. A general contractor would call this modification “structural damage.”

  “So you’re basement rich these days, huh?” No rent, free groceries…

  “Dude. Are we gonna talk about how you were just in the fucking psych ward, or what?”

  I didn’t know what to tell him. He considered me his half father—his only decent male influence at any rate. I taught him how to shave, dress, drink, smoke, and talk to girls.

  “You should move to New York with me when I go back. I could help you find an apartment in Brooklyn. Get you the fuck out of here.”

  “Bro, you are here right now. On some Uncle Eddie shit.”

  We are both keenly aware that our genes come with a few shallow land mines—the most dramatic case in point being Uncle Eddie. Growing up, my brother and I had kind of a morbid competition to be—and not to be—our uncle. Obviously neither of us wanted to end up where he did—institutionalized for life, home for the holidays and the occasional weekend visit, then dead—but if we could just tone him down a bit, erase the schizophrenia and distill him into the bearded wild man with the badass 1970s swag, chain wallet and long hair, smoking hand-rolleds, running from the law, and blasting Pink Floyd so loud it hurt your soul, then what was left was essentially a rock star minus the musical talent.

  There were things about Uncle Eddie we both emulated while trying to avoid getting the impression too spot-on. My brother latched on to the druggie part. By age eleven, he was smoking weed every day, then a little coke, then freebasing coke, weed 24-7, alcohol by the bottle in college, more coke, pills. Before I lived in New York, pot was never really my thing, but I have always liked my booze. And, like Uncle Eddie, I’ve had my nose broken multiple times and run—successfully and unsuccessfully—from the cops on a few occasions.

  My mom used to tell us about how Uncle Eddie would eat ice cream so fast that it gave him horrible ice cream headaches, but when Granny would tell him “Slow down, son!” he’d say “I can’t! I can’t!” and just keep shoveling it in. She said he looked possessed. My ice cream analog was banging my head on the wall and crying for up to an hour about the prospect of dying, starting at age four. “Granny’s old—she’s gonna die! Then you’re gonna die! Then my sissy’s gonna die! I don’t want to die!” It happened a lot. That scared the Bird. She’d started researching early signs of schizophrenia when I was still in diapers.

  Adam started pounding his drums, so I retreated upstairs to watch a little TV. On SportsCenter, Tiger Woods either made or missed a putt in China and LeBron James scored a lot of points against the Wizards. There was something funny about the feed, though; it wasn’t talking to me per se, but it was maybe trying to tell me something. The channels weren’t changing quickly enough when I hit the button. And the highlights seemed to contain subtle subliminal messages that summarized my situation: Yeah, you just missed a big putt like Tiger, but you’re LeBron! You’re going to be a scoring machine again in no time. I wasn’t sure; I kept testing the remote, changing channels rapidly and paying close attention to how fast the TV responded. But nothing was so definitively out of order that I felt like I needed to tell anyone. Crazy man thinks TV is giving him messages. Better to sit on this one for the moment. The Bird hollered at me from the kitchen: “This is the town crier, announcing that it’s time for the big grumpy gorilla’s psychiatry appointment.” The woman keeps the trains running on time.

  In the car, as Kanye built to the line “I bought my whole family whips, no Volvos,” a black guy in a VOLVO! passed us in the right lane. He was laughing his ass off and he looked a little bit like Kanye—same goatee and complexion. Could it fucking be? It wasn’t Kanye—I knew that. But what if, just what if, the Bird was in on this and The Producer was still pulling strings from New York? Maybe they wanted me to go to the psych ward but only because they knew I was exhausted from burning the candle at both ends all summer and that I needed help before our pilot could move forward. Maybe it was a test, and now The Producer was telling me I’m waiting for you. You’re still going to buy your whole family whips—they just might be Volvos because you’re simple ’Ta trash, and that’s good enough. Funny.

  “Did you see that?” I asked the Bird.

  “What?”

  “The brother in the Volvo just now? Right as Kanye said the line about Volvos.”

  “Nope. I’m not paying attention. This is Kanye?”

  Is she playing dumb? Inconclusive.

  As we continued the short drive across town, I saw one, then two, B-2 bombers fly overhead. It wasn’t unusual to see military planes from the air force base in the sky over Wichita, but I’d never seen two in such quick succession. They were headed east, same direction as New York. “Did you see that shit?” I asked her.

  “What?”

  “The fucking bombers! There! You see ’em?”

  “Yes, those are bombers, Gorilla. So what?”

  “So fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”


  “Jesus, what?”

  “Today is 9/11, part two.”

  “Today is 11/6, part one, isn’t it? What do you mean?”

  “Did you see the news yesterday? Fort Hood. Terrorist attack on 11/5. Today is 11/6. Flip it over, 9/11. There’s going to be another terrorist attack. And those planes are flying east. New York.”

  “We are—yeah, I said it: we are!” The Bird was singing along with Kanye. Inconclusive.

  Inside the waiting room, Fox News blared on the mounted TV. FORT HOOD. JIHAD. HOMELAND SECURITY. MUSLIM. TERROR. AMERICAN SOIL. But I didn’t bring up the bombers again. Before I could decide what to say, it was my turn to see the psychiatrist.

  We started with a quick rundown of my mood, progression, mental health history, and current symptoms. Symptoms? Oh, for example, was I hearing messages on the TV or anything like that? I wasn’t ready to say yes and I wasn’t ready to say no, so I split the difference. “What do you mean by hearing messages?”

  “Do you believe the TV is talking to you, for example?”

  “Well…” I paused for a beat. The doctor’s expression informed me that the correct answer was definitely No. As in, No, please don’t throw me back in the loony bin. I played it off. “Well, the TV is talking to all of us, isn’t it? But if you mean do I think it’s tailoring its message to me? Then, no, of course not.”

  She wrote me prescriptions for Depakote and Risperdal, and we were back in the waiting room. There was a sizeable stack of paperwork to complete and follow-up appointments to schedule. The Bird got down on the paperwork and told me, “You look like a low-blood-sugar gorilla. Go get us something to eat.” As I pulled out of the hospital parking lot, I switched from iPod to Power 93.9. Greg the Hitman announced that I’d found “Wichita’s home for hip-hop and R&B!” Then he played guess who: Jay Z and Kanye. But it was old Kanye—“Never Let Me Down.” I drove to Spangles through tears, crying and singing along to what was almost certainly an intervention and reassuring message from The Producer: “When it comes to being true, at least true to me. One thing I’ve found, one thing I’ve found. Oh no, you’ll never let me down.” I was still in the game. Be brave. Get help. I’ll never let you down, he was saying. But why such an indirect message? Why not just call me and tell me we’re still good, that he hasn’t given up?