by Mick Foley
“That way, Andy, no matter what happens after that, you’ve always got something over them.”
I tried to speak, but my jaw was locked in the open position, like one of those Dickens carolers, with their top hats and scarves. Ol’ Tietam Brown, for his part, was beaming with pride. His great secret out, his seriousness left him and his demeanor became that of a buddy, a comrade, a pal.
“Andy, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been out on the town and I run into some babe who’s had her three strikes, and you know what I’m thinking?”
My jaw was still locked, so Tietam kept the wisdom rolling without skipping a beat.
“I’m thinking, I know what she’s thinking, and I sure as hell know what I’m thinking.” He gave me a wink and plowed right ahead. “And do you know what she’s thinking, Andy?”
I tried to talk once again, and after a few seconds of stammering answered his question the only way I knew how.
“Um, uh, she’s thinking that she licked your ass?”
“There you go, son. Now what am I thinking?”
“That she licked your ass?”
“You’re damn right she did, Andy, you’re damn right she did. But hey kid, just remember that there’s an art to it, okay?”
“An art to the licking?”
“Well, actually yes, but that’s not what I’m getting at. I’m talking about talking her into doing it . . . that is an art.”
“It is?”
“Sure, look, for me, I like to have had a good time, one, two, three strikes you’re out, and then I have the comfort of knowing that I own them, but for you, you really like this girl, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Even better. Once it’s done, she can’t break up with you. She can’t because you’ve got the power.”
“What power is that, Dad?”
“The power to tell people about it—it’s the same principle that’s kept our country safe since we blew those Jap bastards to holy hell to end the big one, World War Two. We had the bomb, we weren’t afraid to use it, and everybody knew it. It’s the same thing here. You’ve got the goods on her, you’re not afraid to use it, and she knows it.”
“But Dad, aren’t our butts gross?”
“Well of course they are, Andy, of course they are. But that’s their problem, not ours, right? I mean, personally, kid, I find all asses gross, females’ included. But some guys can’t get enough of them. Like to take the Hershey highway, if you know what I mean. I had a buddy like that. His name was Masters, Luke Masters. But you know what we called him?”
“Uh, let me see, uh . . . Ass Masters, Dad?”
“Yeah, Ass Masters,” he laughed. “Ass Masters, that’s a good one, huh?”
“Um, yeah Dad, it is pretty good. But all the same, I’m not so sure that I’d want Terri licking me . . . there . . . anyway. Do you have any . . . um . . . other advice?”
“Sure, sure, of course I do.”
“Well . . .”
“Well here goes, kid. Don’t treat women like sluts. It’s cliché. It’s unimaginative . . . What you want to do is get them to treat themselves like sluts.”
“That sounds a little crazy, Dad.”
“Crazy, Andy, crazy?” my dad exclaimed. “What’s crazy is all these people who think sex is about the body. It’s not. It’s about the mind. Once you own their mind, their body will follow. And the only way you can own their mind is to get the ladies to tap into the slut that’s inside of each one of them.”
“Gee thanks, Dad.”
“Listen Andy, when I’m upstairs, how many times do you hear the F word?”
“Lots of times,” I said, thinking about a few particularly loud ones.
“But how many times have you heard it coming from me?”
I had to think on that one. For a while. And then said, “None.”
“Exactly!” my dad said. “I don’t have to, because I lead them to the F word like you lead a horse to water . . . Always remember, son, the F word is a verb. A strong, powerful verb. Use it sparingly, but use it with force. It’s not a noun or an adjective, understand?”
“Yeah.” And to tell you the truth, I thought that I did.
A strange look then crossed my father’s face, a look of pride and knowledge. He put an arm around my neck and chuckled just a bit. He patted my head, then playfully grabbed me and gave me what kids used to refer to as “noogies.” Maybe still do.
“Andy, my boy, I think it’s time.”
“Time for what?” I didn’t have any inkling of what my father had on tap, but I knew it would be weird.
“Come on, let’s head downstairs.”
Downstairs meant the basement, with which I was familiar. Our washer and dryer lived down there, where I did the family laundry once a week, making sure to wash his nasty sheets, all by themselves so that they wouldn’t touch my undies. The basement also had a separate room, which was always locked. On several occasions, my dad had made it quite clear that my entry into that room was forbidden.
But on this night, the forbidden zone was exactly where we went. Tietam fumbled with his key chain for a moment, then unlocked the door, insisting that I close my eyes before he swung it open. He escorted me into the room and pulled a string that turned on a bare lightbulb. He granted me permission to open up my eyes, which on first impression revealed relatively little.
A weathered furnace. A pair of old dumbbells, collecting cobwebs on the concrete. A rusty ax leaned against the wall, casting a thin shadow on a large book, which lay unceremoniously amid two rattraps in the corner of the room.
I was disappointed momentarily. I had expected something more. Coming from my father, something much, much more. I turned to face my father, whose eyes were gazing upward. A happy gaze. A proud gaze. I decided that I too would gaze.
Within a fraction of a second, my disappointment disappeared. My expectations were surpassed. My faith in Tietam was restored.
Two ropes hung from the ceiling like an X, from which some clothes were hanging. Panties, hundreds of them, were hanging from these ropes.
“Not bad, huh, son?” said my father, sounding content and peaceful, bordering on serene.
I was unable to respond, my jaw being once again locked temporarily in Dickensian caroling mode.
“Andy, this here represents my hard work. Every girl I’ve Teitamized since I began collecting back in ’76, our country’s bicentennial. With the exception of a few who bitched so much that I let ’em have ’em back . . . Now, kid, what do you notice about these panties?”
Luckily, I had just concluded my silent carol, enabling me to offer up an astute observation. “Um, that there are a lot of them, I guess.”
“You’re damn right there are,” ol’ Tietam gushed, but then quickly became serious. “What else, son?”
I shrugged my shoulders, unable to absorb the deeper meaning of the panties. My mind was starting to wander away from the collection, as magnificent as it may have been, and I found myself thinking about the book in the corner, wondering what it was. The increasing urgency in my father’s tone brought me back.
“There is quality in almost every pair. This stuff isn’t cheap. Hardly any cotton in the lot.”
I nodded my head, but Tietam knew appeasement when he saw it, and it made him cry out in frustration.
“Ohhhh! Don’t you get it? These aren’t a bunch of strippers I’m banging here, these are high-class women. They’re not sluts until I get them here, and then I turn them into . . .” His thought tailed off into the air, as if he saw that his cause was lost. Then a big smile filled his face and he shot a finger in the air.
“Never mind, come upstairs with me. I’ve got a better idea.”
He turned off the light, closed the door, and took the basement steps two at a time. I followed him, a good deal slower, thinking about the book, and the door no one locked.
Tietam ushered me into the living room and told me to sit down. “I’ll be right back,” he announced, and he
took off out the door. He sped off in the Fairmont to whereabouts unknown, and I thought about my horrible, wonderful, miserable, ridiculous dad.
Five minutes passed. Where had he gone? Tietam’s couch was saggy. Kind of ugly. My father didn’t strike me as a reader. More of a look-at-the-pictures guy. I thought about the book in the basement. Oversized and thick. Like a scrapbook, possibly. A book that might shed some light on my father’s past so that I could better understand my own.
Five more minutes passed. The book was calling to me. Like Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart,” this book was a living thing; it wanted me to hear its stories, to see its ghosts, to share its secrets. I had to look. I took the stairs two at a time.
I pulled the bare bulb’s string and followed the ax’s shadow to the book. I took it gently from the floor, taking care not to disturb the rattraps as I did so. But the springs were snapped and caked with rust; their intended prey had taken refuge a long time ago. I brushed dust and rat poop from the book’s brown leather cover. Old traps and new poop.
I opened up the cover, my pulse racing as I did. The first page fell out from its binding and fluttered to the floor. A black-and-white photo of a soldier. World War II I guessed. A soldier who now lay amid feces and mildew, underneath a canopy of panties. The soldier deserved better. I picked up the photo and placed it back inside the album. The photo had been torn in half and yellowed tape in thin neat strips served to reconcile the soldier’s image. My grandfather? I looked for some family resemblance, but I couldn’t really tell.
I turned the page. My father. No guessing here, although he was obviously a good deal younger. Maybe eighteen, nineteen, twenty at most, and in a fighting stance. Maybe he was a boxer, it would explain the scars and broken nose. But in this photo, Father Time and human hands hadn’t yet left their mark on Tietam Brown. His smile was sly, and full of hope, as if there was no goal he couldn’t reach. I think I could have stared for hours if not for the fear that I’d be caught. He could come home at any second. I had to proceed with rapid diligence.
A simple headline filled one page, reading RIOT IN MONTGOMERY. No story, no date, just three words.
A page from Ebony magazine came next, a strange choice for a white guy like my father. A guy who listened to Barry Manilow. Although I think there was a black guy in the Village People. I wasn’t really looking when the eight-track went whistling out the window.
The picture was unsettling. The beaten face of a teenage boy who’d been killed in Mississippi. Why would my father have this photo in his scrapbook. Did he know the boy? Did he know the killer?
Another strange photograph, this one from an Augusta, Georgia, newspaper. A woman wrapped in a bloody sheet, talking to police. A headline reading PECAN HEIRESS FENDS OFF ATTACK, and a story I was in too big a rush to read. My heart was pounding beneath my flannel. Butterflies flapped inside my stomach. I couldn’t let my father catch me here. What did all this mean? Was my father some kind of lunatic who kept photos of his victims, or just a practitioner of naked exercise who kept the panties of his conquests?
There were other articles, all from southern newspapers. Birmingham, Nashville, Greensboro, detailing the fight for civil rights. Sit-ins, marches, and a troubling one of a fireman with a fire hose blasting a black child off his feet.
Then the New York Daily News, the only entry from the North. A two-page story of a man who had moved up from Atlanta and was trying to feed the poor. A black man with quite a biceps on him, holding a small child. The man’s name was Eddie Edwards. Maybe Tietam knew him. Maybe they had boxed together, even if the guy looked much bigger than my father.
Finally a story about the first landing on the moon. All in all quite interesting, although it wasn’t quite what I had hoped. Not a single thing about my mother, or what my father did for work. Unless he’d been a boxer.
I put the book away exactly where I’d found it. I wouldn’t mention coming down, but if he asked me, I’d admit it.
My heartbeat had just regained its rhythm when the Fairmont came roaring back, a sleek, black Trans-Am close behind.
My father, who was now walking toward the door with his arm around a blonde, his free hand pointing to the “Boo” sign in our yard, had been gone for thirty minutes, give or take a few, and had come back with a female companion. Where had he gone, Sluts “R” Us? Except the woman was not your standard off-the-rack white-trash specimen, the type I imagined my dad did his best with. No way. She was beautiful, in a shimmering red dress that hugged her hips tight. Classy, too. Or at least as classy as you can be while still getting picked up in record time by a middle-aged bald guy who has fuzzy dice hanging from his piece-of-crap car.
Then Tietam and his new friend were in the door, at which point my dad ran into the kitchen and brought forth a glass, which he told me to “hold up against the wall, with your ear to the bottom.” Then said, “Listen real close, kid, your dad’s gonna put on a show.”
“The hell he is,” said the blonde, who turned to my dad with fire in her eyes. “You promised me a good time, not a circus sideshow, Tikki.”
“Tietam,” my dad corrected her, then turned on a charm that I can only describe as eerie, and said, “Hey, we will have a good time, baby, I promise, but look at the kid, he’s lonesome and it’s his birthday. He just wants to listen. He won’t even be in our room. He’ll be next door, just innocently . . . listening.”
“Promise?” the blonde said.
“Promise.”
The blonde grew defensive and said, “I wasn’t talking to you, Tatum.”
“Tietam,” my dad said, correcting her again.
“Whatever,” the blonde said with a shrug. “I’m talking about him. No surprises, kid, right?” I nodded. “You’re not going to do anything stupid like try to join in, are you?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Oh southern boy, huh?” she said, sounding a whole lot less repulsed than she had just eleven seconds earlier. I never have considered my accent to be all that strong, but apparently she disagreed. She sashayed over to me and put her thumb on my lip, rubbed it gently, and said, “Southern boy, you go ahead and listen all you want, and I’ll try to put on a little show for you, okay?”
I nodded, and I’ll admit right now that the thought of Terri Johnson was a long, long way away from me at that particular point.
“Happy birthday, southern boy.”
“Thank you, maaoohh.”
The word “ma’am” is a simple one to say, and a short one as well, but somehow right in the middle of spitting out that short, simple word, the blonde caught me in midsyllable with her lips, and she momentarily explored the inside of my mouth with her tongue.
“You go upstairs now and listen real close now . . . ya heah?” she said with those last two words done in a pretty convincing southern belle drawl.
I did as I was told, and went upstairs to my little room and put my glass against the wall so that Tietam Brown could explain the art of the deal.
“Speak into the tape recorder now,” I heard my dad say. Wait just a second, ‘Speak into the tape recorder’? Was this guy for real? How could you possibly get any lower than tape-recording women licking your ass? Unless of course you are standing next to a wall with your ear on a glass, listening to your father tape-recording women licking his ass. Which is, indeed, a little lower.
“What the hell was I thinking?” I said out loud to no one in particular except maybe my conscience, and put the glass on my desk and laid down on my bed, a pillow on each side of my head to drown out the weirdness. I lay in that position for a good five minutes, hoping that the night’s session would be a brief one, and that I could get some rest after what can only be described as the strangest day in the history of my life.
I put down the pillows and sat up in bed, and thought for a moment that my house was the epicenter of a midsize earthquake, as the room was literally shaking. I rushed for my turntable, thinking that maybe Nat could drown out the show that was being put on for my benefi
t, but my hormones betrayed me and I turned from the turntable, and in a moment found myself up against the wall, my ear cupped to the glass.
“Tell me,” Tietam said, “tell me what I’m doing to you.” I’d returned just in time.
The blonde in the red dress, who I guessed was now simply “the Blonde,” picked up on her cue and told my dad exactly what he wanted to hear. My goodness, that woman could swear. A group of drunken sailors would have covered their ears in the face of her verbal barrage. Just for a moment I turned from the wall to catch my breath, then went back to my observation post, where, to my amazement, the tide had turned. The blonde was no longer talking, being momentarily unable to for a reason I was about to discover.
“Worm that tongue, baby, yeah worm it real good,” my dad commanded.
I had turned from that wall for at most fifteen seconds, and the deal had transpired in my absence. I had missed out on the art of the deal!
I wish I could say that the whole thing repulsed me, but I can’t. I thought of the blonde in the red dress, a woman of money, a woman of beauty, but a woman so utterly lacking in that special something in life that she had to find solace in my dad’s hairy ass.
When the show was over, I waited for the sounds of Tietam Brown’s special ritual, signaling intermission. The cracking of the Genny, the whoosh of his breathing, even the steady commentary he delivered as he defeated the decks. But the sounds of this night were new, and a little bit sad, and I found myself missing the stability of my father’s strange ways. In a way, it was the only constant in my life, a constant that was now replaced by the sound of high heels clumsily navigating the stairs and the spray of the shower in the bathroom down the hall.
Perhaps my father was right. Maybe he’d just been helping the blonde in the red dress play out a role, and she’d return with new vigor to her husband and kids, or her job, or her mom, or whatever she did. I knew nothing about her, except I’d heard her bad words, and I’d tasted her tongue, and it smelled like strong whiskey and a life unfulfilled. Maybe my father wasn’t doing any favors. Maybe, in fact, the favors were for him, filling a void in his own sorry life. I pictured my father in his room with his tapes, and the art of the deal. And then I thought of Hanrahan, and his put-downs and jokes. Maybe, I thought, they are almost like twins. Predators both.