I looked up from the pinewood table at the man who was apparently my superior, my boss, mentor, and better. He wore a three-piece suit, which looked like it had been woven together using old cardboard from the assembly line. He moved with the same rigidness as was expected for a man wearing a suit quite possibly two sizes too small for him. His pudgy face was accented by a pair of rounded glasses that sloped down the fat ridge of this gluttonous piece of muscle you would be reluctant to call his nose. Atop his head, sat a thinning crown of dyed black hair. The kind of deep black that you would use as shoe polish. His squinting eyes continued staring at me, patiently waiting for an answer. Beads of sweat, like tiny black raindrops, trickled down his mountainous forehead before being caught in the wild bushiness of his untamed eyebrows.
“Why do you want this job, Mr. Clayton?” he repeated.
He shifted awkwardly for the third time since the moment we had sat down. He carried himself like a bloated king in a peasant’s house. The walls of his office were damp, cold concrete. Motivational posters hung like exotic tapestries behind him.
Hang in there, kitty. Hang on for a shitty life of boredom and misery.
“Well, I believe I am a team player and that based upon my skills, I would be a good fit for your company. Teamwork is one of the keys to success,” I found myself reciting from the posters hanging behind him. “Leadership demands respect.”
All these inspirational quotes were merely road signs to direct your attention elsewhere from those suicidal or murderous thoughts lurking underneath your social mask. The table was the only thing that separated this room for what might have been mistaken as a prison cell. Vertical beams of light caught me in a simple array of light and dark greys. The dusty smell and impending sense of claustrophobia was starting to numb me. His beady eyes continued staring, pressing me to continue. I needed a release, a fix, something.
“Well, as you can see, my résumé pretty much speaks for myself,” I suggested.
His stubby index finger pushed the fleeing glasses back up onto its perch. He hunched his head down to read the two neatly-printed pages, which sat before him on his pine podium.
Two pages . . . those very two pages, which represented all that was Peter Clayton, all that I had accomplished—my supposed value as a human being.
He pursed through the two pages before letting them flutter back to the table like falling leaves. He let out a wheezing breath, which set my teeth on edge. His chair groaned in protest beneath him as he shifted his weight, hands crossed in an awkward attempt at looking relaxed.
“Is there anything else you would like to add?”
Aside from the fact I would love to shove you into one of the cutting machines.
But no. Calm the rage inside. Tame the beast. One deep breath at a time.
“Truthfully, no. I don't see how adding me to your workforce is any different to adding anyone else. If you hire me, yeah, I'll work for you. I'll always be punctual, attentive, always following and never questioning and basically I'll continue working until the day I die or simply get replaced, so yeah, that's all I would like to add.”
He let out another loud wheeze. My hands curled up into fists. I tried to hide them under the table, but I could tell that he saw them. If his tired, squinting eyes cared, then he gave little indication. He sat there, judge and jury, examining me with casual disinterest before fixing the two pages of paper. Those two pages with their gaps in education and work. Those same two pages which under achievements and awards were left blank. Those pages, which upon their soulless white canvas, said how I was home-schooled for fourteen years; how I take Prozac, Ritalin, and other assortments just to keep me relatively in check. Those pages, all two of them, are me.
At least the parts I want him to see.
He fixed them before placing them to the far side of his table, well out of reach. He shifted his weight again under the eternally suffering chair before uttering the rehearsed phrase that so many others before me have heard:
“Thanks for your time, Mr.Clayton. We’ll be in touch.”
CHAPTER 11
I awoke the next day as I usually do: cold from the lack of heating in my studio apartment and hungry from the eternal shortage of food in my fridge.
Looks like it’s another day of beans and toast for dinner again.
I needed to arrange another Playdate soon or I’d be late for rent again. I had my savings sure, but that’s exactly what they were for. Hoarded away for the day I could finally leave all this behind and begin my life anew. Just me, all alone on a deserted beach or some tiny fishing town—it didn’t matter if I could speak the language or not. All I would need is the sun, food and total isolation from the eternally noisy society that I was born into.
I wouldn’t work. I’d have enough money to survive. I wouldn’t have to deal with people or their annoying little problems. All I would need to do is eat, sleep and relax until my end finally came. Just a little bit of sun and I would be happy.
My father always told me that it was a stormy night the night I was born. That it was one of the worst storms he had ever seen in his life. The electricity had been knocked out over half of the city. Telephone masts crashed to the ground. Tiles blew off the roofs of houses. And far away, waves smashed against the shoreline. All over the city, people huddled under their blankets or next to flickering candles. The homeless and beggars of the city scurried to wherever they could find shelter.
Under the low hum of emergency lighting, my mother’s screams, and the flashes of lightening—I was born.
No matter how I spent each birthday, I would always get a reminder of that rain and the rage of the thunder that brought me to earth. It seemed that in every occasion in my life there was always rain. All I ever wanted was just a little bit of sun. It hardly seemed like too much to ask. As I pulled open the curtains in my apartment, I saw grey clouds rolling out over the hills—that day looked like it might never come.
I looked up at my calendar with its picture of a calm, isolated beach and saw a big red circle marking August 14th. Shit. Three days until my father's birthday and I'd arranged to go visit him. We rarely spoke, except for occasions like this:
Birthdays, Thanksgiving, funerals, Christmas.
Repeat.
I guess we just didn't have much to talk about anymore. He was a bitter old man who paid more attention to the scotch in his hand or the cigar clenched in his sad, dry lips. He blamed me for my mother’s death. After my birth, her health never fully recovered.
He'd hardly ever voice it, but it was how he felt; there was no denying it.
My caretaker, Maria José Gonzalez, mostly raised me. While my father ran his business, and sought to buy my affection with toys and gifts and other little material things that would grow old and be cast away—Maria José taught me many things about life and the world. She tried to instil a belief in me, a belief that if you preserve—life will improve. That God or the universe or something would simply hand you down all the help you needed.
And for a while, I bought it. Until I saw that no one is going to help you in life unless you help yourself.
It was all empty words and hollow faith—I was just too naive at the time to question any of it.
My father would give her terrible abuse while drastically underpaying her. And she would sit there and take it, telling me that some people in this world are cruel or evil, and to forgive them. Let them be who they are, but hold no grudge. She would cling onto her beliefs that somehow life would improve for her. That somehow it would all change if she did absolutely nothing other than believe; that somehow, someone or something would fix it all for her. As sad as it made me, I can’t blame her though—we all want something for nothing.
It’s just part of human nature to be lazy. To want others to fix our messes.
He would yell and shout at her to clean and she would smile, apologise, and continue working—humming or singing to herself all the while.
She only ever sang or hummed whe
n she was sad or angry. Always old folk songs that became the adopted soundtrack of my youth.
A boy of ten and I knew practically every sad folk song from Mexico. Ask me any of them and I can hum the tune back to you. I barely understood any of the lyrics and still don’t, but then again, I hardly understood anything of what was going on back then. And so, she would sing and clean, adding a new notch of pain to her back while my father puffed away at his cigar or drained another scotch before disappearing for days on business trips. Meanwhile, I would sit there and play with another toy until it broke or I got bored and threw it away, knowing that in a few days the next toy I wanted would come along. I could smash and break it in any way I wanted because there was always the next one to play with.
In my childhood home, there was always the next dirty spot to clean, the next scotch to drink, the next toy to break and above it all—the next sad folk song to sing.
Like an old vinyl caught in an infinite loop.
Repeat.
Repeat.
Repeat.
* * *
The journey was not too pleasant to California where he had finally settled down—a bitter old shadow haunting the sunny state. The drive took longer than I'd expected. My car groaned and protested the entire way, but I didn't mind. It had felt good to get out of the city and feel the clean air upon my face. I turned the radio all the way up to the first station I could find, rolled down every window and let the journey take me there. I laughed as people glared at me or shouted insults at me to lower the volume; I didn't care. Let them be mad.
I felt free, soaring on chrome wings and Mariachi guitars. Voices of my childhood singing in a language I’d never learnt and about times I’d never understood. I shouted along to the lyrics in a tongue that was never mine. From a language I’d never learnt. Yet I felt alive.
I was grounded.
I was a modern-day Johnny Appleseed: spreading my rage seed across America.
Let them be mad; let them get angry at my sudden interruption into their precious lives. Let them take this rage home with them. Let it grow and branch into every aspect of their lives and sprout into a mighty tree, which one day might spread forth its own hate-filled seeds.
Let them get really mad, so mad that they can’t stop thinking about it. So mad that they can’t sleep at night. So mad that they have to do something about it to get it out of their system.
She had been sitting in front of my building for the good part of the past four months now, used more as a makeshift rubbish skip and apartment for rats. But now the old rust-bucket was back from the dead and ready for a proper trip and she was mighty pissed at me for the neglect. Sure, she got some attention every now and then when a Playdate would come up, but it was rarely any quality bonding time.
It was a loving sort of hate.
This trip was to be different. One which didn't involve driving to interviews I knew I was going to get rejected for or driving out to locations to unleash hell upon an unsuspecting Playdate.
For once, I didn't have to think about my crippling debt, my shitty apartment or my junkie rage-addict friends.
I was free—true, unbridled freedom. For now, it was just me, the road and my ‘87 rust-bucket.
On I blazed down this lonely stretch of asphalt like a two tonne steel bullet; music blaring, windows rolled down, and a big 'fuck you' attitude to anyone who looked at me the wrong way. For the rest of the journey I would eat, sleep, piss, and probably even shit in this car, yet it didn’t bother me in the slightest.
It was a little over seven hundred miles of freedom until I would meet my father again.
CHAPTER 12
Maria José looked twice as old as I’d last remembered her. She was a shambling skeleton of a woman, crippled by severe arthritis. She was always short, at least a head and shoulders shorter than me, but now she looked even worse, like she was slowly being sucked down into the earth below. Her shoulders hunched forward as if she were perpetually cold despite the blazing heat outside. Even the sun-kissed colour of her face seemed faded. Her thinning grey hair was pinned back into a tight bun and her large, sad brown eyes regarded me with a warmth she reserved for a select few. She moved from behind the door with a slow, pained gait in her every step.
Her hands shook as she stretched them out for a hug. Her whole body was the anatomy of melancholy. A slow smile swept up her face as some life came rushing back to her.
“Peter, I'm so glad to see you again.” Close to thirty years of living at my father’s home and still her accent was as strong as the day she had left Veracruz.
Her voice was warm, but stripped of life, barely above a whisper, stripped of the tinder that used to burn in her passionate words I used to listen to.
“It is good to see you, too.” I almost had to kneel to kiss her on both cheeks.
She took the flowers awkwardly in her old, calloused fingers and held them close to her chest.
“Thank you, Peter.” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath inwards. She was a woman unaccustomed to receiving any such gifts. A faint tear rolled down her sun-kissed cheek.
“How was your journey?” she asked. I extended my arm and she held it gently as we crossed the threshold.
“It was okay,” I answered politely. “Sorry I have not visited in so long. I would have written or called, but—”
“Peter, you don’t ever need to apologise to me. You’re here now and that’s all that matters.”
At a loss for words, all I could do was smile back at her. We had known each other so long that I didn’t need to say anything; we didn’t need to rely on language as much as others do. Back when she had first came to my family home, she had so little English that all we would do is smile and wave at one another, and that was all we needed.
Alone in the house, I would play with my toys and she would be cleaning, or hoovering, or mopping, and yet every time I would look at her, she would look back with a warm, loving smile. I would try to talk to her, or demand food or to go outside, and she would always just smile and listen, never once raising her voice or never getting angry. Always so calm and content. The opposite of me in every way.
Her head rested against my forearm as we walked the short distance in silence. At once, I could picture my old home before I left. I vividly pictured the halls I always remembered her walking up and down day after day with a can of polish in one hand and a cloth in the other, sometimes singing so loudly that it seemed to echo throughout the entire house as if trying to drown out the silence with her voice.
We came to a stop at the end of the hall. She gently let go of my arm and the image faded. She clutched her back, wincing under her breath as she bent down to retrieve a dirty, yellow cloth and a can of wood polish from the coffee table they lay upon. Her eyes dutifully moved from the door and then back to me.
“Well, I hope you enjoy your stay, Peter. You should probably go say hi now. And Pete?”
“Yeah?”
“Try to be nice to him on his birthday, okay?”
She managed a sad smile.
“I’ll try,” I promised.
* * *
My father sat in his favourite armchair in front of a crackling fire despite the heat outside. The heavy blinds were drawn closed. Thin shafts of light crept through a small opening in the blinds and traced down the length of the room before disappearing into the surrounding shadows.
I announced my arrival, but he did not stir. He looked deep in contemplation as the last of the fire bled its life out. I moved closer to his side until he slowly turned his head towards me.
“Didn't think you were coming it took you so long.”
He was drunk as per usual. His bushy brow furrowed to make out my blurry outline.
“Nice to see you too, Dad.”
Maria José bowed her head and peeled away from the threshold, humming a sad verse of some unrequited love song from a place I had never been to, and of a story I had never known. Just another song to the soundtrack of a youth I
never knew.
I sat opposite him. He poured another glass of scotch for himself and then one for me. He forced it into my hand before slumping back into his chair.
“Still not working?”
“I'd rather not talk about it.”
“I should have figured.”
Everything was about work to him. Telling him you didn’t work was like telling a priest that God doesn’t exist.
He drained most of his drink in a single gulp. He winced as the golden liquid warmed its way down into his bloated belly. He licked his lips before pursing them open again.
“What amazes me most is how unwilling you seem to be to move or to change. When I was your age, I was head CEO, I'd bought the old house—”
He waved his arms in a drunken grand gesture before dropping them back to his side like two dead weights.
“I'd even married your mother.”
“I know.”
His small green eyes, the kind of green like the ocean on a stormy day, looked sombrely down into the sad little puddle of scotch left in his glass.
“Now all I have left is you . . .”
I didn't say a word. His sad little self sank deeper into his cushioned throne. He let out an exasperated sigh.
“So, what have you been doing lately, Pete? Are you still going to your meetings?”
“Yeah, Dad,” I answered.
“Good. But keep some of that anger burning; you'll need it. You want to survive in this world, don't you? You want to create the better future you've always envisioned, right? Then stay angry. How else will you grasp your slice of this world? Nobody worth their damn is just going to hand down everything on a silver platter to you. How will people even know who you were if you don't build something in your name? This is why I insisted on having you home schooled, Pete. School doesn't teach you the things you really need to know to survive in this world.”
Rage Page 6