My old man in the bathroom. A hulk of a man leaving little space to
move. A small plastic bucket with the words Joint Compound full of gray
sludge hardened white around the rim like the toothpaste dried at the
corners of his mouth. I can't see his eyes. Two ragged holes like
gunshots in the yellow painted drywall where the towel rack once lived.
Behind the sweating toilet, a rusty ring at the base where the linoleum
has been boxcut away jagged, sits an empty bottle of Beefeater. He sits
on the floor wheezing loudly, and in the doorway the waves of gin sting
my eyes and the back of my throat like a punchy expectorant. I
suppress a cough. My old man stirring the bucket, stabbing at the
strange mud with his pocketknife. He doesn't look up to see me. He
isn't going to.
I study the calendar mouthing the names of emerging months,
hypothetical ideas that crudely take on the physicality of my
surroundings, then die, are replaced. Twice a week I mow the grass,
Sunday and Thursday, whether it needs it or not - I won't risk the
consequence of deciding on my own to let it go. The scent of my sweat
is new this year and mingles with the sweet rot of grass clippings I've
been dumping behind the shed. Summer has grown long. The glazed air
a tired affliction that has settled inside our very personas like the ticks I
dig out of our Lab's neck and ears every evening before dinner. My
mother, my old man, me, and the dripping summer air - the visceral
backdrop to this daily torment of the mind, an itchy humid fear, this
stupid aggravation over a forgotten appointment, a misplaced boot, the
shouting, and how could the neighbors not have heard it that last time,
fomenting to a cruel rage.
My mother would take me shopping for collectible sports cards when
my old man was in the throes, and this expression, this sweet tonic of a
mixer - while my old man, abandoning even the cut of ice, even a glass,
then the shield of indoor anonymity, stumbling hairy and shirtless out
onto the front lawn brandishing above his red scalp the clear bottle
flashing like a torch in the summer sun - this soft euphemism utterly
wasted on my burning ears for I understood as well as our peeping and
gaping neighbors despite my preadolescence the hell from which we had
yet to emerge.
My old man on the back porch sitting in his own sopping sweat of
booze as August mounted its final assault. The weather-worn gray
planks cracked and splintered, dull razors beneath my bare feet. A
familiar shoebox setting next to him, my shoebox, a beloved shoebox
usually secure in the cool shadows beneath my bed, the home of Pete
Rose, Larry Bird, Eric Lindross' Fleer Rookie. Flames licking from the
dented pail between my old man's feet. What the hell is he doing? But
even my latent denial of the horror, my naïve ignorance of his disease
cannot save me from the immanent realization of this cruelty which slaps
me like one of his broad callused palms. Why does he hate me? And I
cannot stop the thought for I am not at that moment even conscious or
reflective of the ease with which the kids I've met at school and around
the neighborhood use the word, but because what is this if not hate?
Only I am hardly given a chance to react; her voice hoarse from
screaming, my mother's right eye will be completely swollen shut by the
end of the day, the dog, silenced earlier by my old man, huddled in my
bedroom between the wall and nightstand.
I remember him leaving, the dog barking again incessantly and this
time my old man with a case of Michelob leaves the dog be. He drops the
beer in the bed of his truck. He climbs in and the engine kicks and roars
so loud and long I think he might be trying to make it explode and maybe
he was, but by the time I make it to the front of the house and slide over
the curtain in the kitchen he's throwing forward the shifter sticking out of
the floor and the tires bark, the dog ceases and flips his ears cocks his
head, his black eyes excited and puzzled, then my old man is gone.
Many summer suns will wither my youth. I grow into an obsessively
careful man trying often without knowing it to prevent my own
unconscious maintenance of the old man's legacy.
I find women to play with. We have our fun. One of them wants a
ring and round and round we go until I'm spackling fist-size holes in the
bedroom walls. My son brings me another beer when I look at him the
wrong way; I use the corner of the spackling knife to pry off the cap. He
lingers in the doorway while I tilt the bottle back a few times until I say
"What?" and then he disappears. He asked me to help him build a tree
house a couple weeks ago and I told him why not, but he hasn't
mentioned it again since. I finish patching the holes and in the living room
my wife is reading her magazines in front of the muted television. I could
go pass out on the bed, but instead I decide to examine the front screen
door where the hydraulics are shot to hell and after I swing the door back
and forth a few times I just let it go and it slams behind me.
I'm not angry. I don't even know what that word means. No, I'm just
taking a walk. The evening air is like hundreds of lovely cold little fists all
over my body and I realize I've made a circuit of the block already and
now I'm back in the front yard, and on my knees I look up into the black
summer sky like I'm expecting something. But what? What I think to
myself at that moment is that we do not grow up into preconceived
notions, we do not come to embody that which we may try to convince
ourselves has been reserved for us. What I think to myself is that we
run. We run headlong through a stuporous fear, run until all we can do
is crawl - home to bed. If we're fortunate there will be dreams to
examine in the morning, and if we're terribly fortunate those dreams will
lay bare what fools we are and have always been.
move. A small plastic bucket with the words Joint Compound full of gray
sludge hardened white around the rim like the toothpaste dried at the
corners of his mouth. I can't see his eyes. Two ragged holes like
gunshots in the yellow painted drywall where the towel rack once lived.
Behind the sweating toilet, a rusty ring at the base where the linoleum
has been boxcut away jagged, sits an empty bottle of Beefeater. He sits
on the floor wheezing loudly, and in the doorway the waves of gin sting
my eyes and the back of my throat like a punchy expectorant. I
suppress a cough. My old man stirring the bucket, stabbing at the
strange mud with his pocketknife. He doesn't look up to see me. He
isn't going to.
I study the calendar mouthing the names of emerging months,
hypothetical ideas that crudely take on the physicality of my
surroundings, then die, are replaced. Twice a week I mow the grass,
Sunday and Thursday, whether it needs it or not - I won't risk the
consequence of deciding on my own to let it go. The scent of my sweat
is new this year and mingles with the sweet rot of grass clippings I've
been dumping behind the shed. Summer has grown long. The glazed air
a tired affliction that has settled inside our very personas like the ticks I
dig out of our Lab's neck and ears every evening before dinner. My
mother, my old man, me, and the dripping summer air - the visceral
backdrop to this daily torment of the mind, an itchy humid fear, this
stupid aggravation over a forgotten appointment, a misplaced boot, the
shouting, and how could the neighbors not have heard it that last time,
fomenting to a cruel rage.
My mother would take me shopping for collectible sports cards when
my old man was in the throes, and this expression, this sweet tonic of a
mixer - while my old man, abandoning even the cut of ice, even a glass,
then the shield of indoor anonymity, stumbling hairy and shirtless out
onto the front lawn brandishing above his red scalp the clear bottle
flashing like a torch in the summer sun - this soft euphemism utterly
wasted on my burning ears for I understood as well as our peeping and
gaping neighbors despite my preadolescence the hell from which we had
yet to emerge.
My old man on the back porch sitting in his own sopping sweat of
booze as August mounted its final assault. The weather-worn gray
planks cracked and splintered, dull razors beneath my bare feet. A
familiar shoebox setting next to him, my shoebox, a beloved shoebox
usually secure in the cool shadows beneath my bed, the home of Pete
Rose, Larry Bird, Eric Lindross' Fleer Rookie. Flames licking from the
dented pail between my old man's feet. What the hell is he doing? But
even my latent denial of the horror, my naïve ignorance of his disease
cannot save me from the immanent realization of this cruelty which slaps
me like one of his broad callused palms. Why does he hate me? And I
cannot stop the thought for I am not at that moment even conscious or
reflective of the ease with which the kids I've met at school and around
the neighborhood use the word, but because what is this if not hate?
Only I am hardly given a chance to react; her voice hoarse from
screaming, my mother's right eye will be completely swollen shut by the
end of the day, the dog, silenced earlier by my old man, huddled in my
bedroom between the wall and nightstand.
I remember him leaving, the dog barking again incessantly and this
time my old man with a case of Michelob leaves the dog be. He drops the
beer in the bed of his truck. He climbs in and the engine kicks and roars
so loud and long I think he might be trying to make it explode and maybe
he was, but by the time I make it to the front of the house and slide over
the curtain in the kitchen he's throwing forward the shifter sticking out of
the floor and the tires bark, the dog ceases and flips his ears cocks his
head, his black eyes excited and puzzled, then my old man is gone.
Many summer suns will wither my youth. I grow into an obsessively
careful man trying often without knowing it to prevent my own
unconscious maintenance of the old man's legacy.
I find women to play with. We have our fun. One of them wants a
ring and round and round we go until I'm spackling fist-size holes in the
bedroom walls. My son brings me another beer when I look at him the
wrong way; I use the corner of the spackling knife to pry off the cap. He
lingers in the doorway while I tilt the bottle back a few times until I say
"What?" and then he disappears. He asked me to help him build a tree
house a couple weeks ago and I told him why not, but he hasn't
mentioned it again since. I finish patching the holes and in the living room
my wife is reading her magazines in front of the muted television. I could
go pass out on the bed, but instead I decide to examine the front screen
door where the hydraulics are shot to hell and after I swing the door back
and forth a few times I just let it go and it slams behind me.
I'm not angry. I don't even know what that word means. No, I'm just
taking a walk. The evening air is like hundreds of lovely cold little fists all
over my body and I realize I've made a circuit of the block already and
now I'm back in the front yard, and on my knees I look up into the black
summer sky like I'm expecting something. But what? What I think to
myself at that moment is that we do not grow up into preconceived
notions, we do not come to embody that which we may try to convince
ourselves has been reserved for us. What I think to myself is that we
run. We run headlong through a stuporous fear, run until all we can do
is crawl - home to bed. If we're fortunate there will be dreams to
examine in the morning, and if we're terribly fortunate those dreams will
lay bare what fools we are and have always been.
| r.kv.r.y. quarterly literary journal spring 2008 shorts on substances if we're fortunate by adam lilienthal |
