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from Contest #2

All the trouble began when my grandfather died and my grandmother - my father's mother - came to live with us. I had been out of juvie for only two days and was less than thrilled to give up my bedroom for the basement couch. But when I learned that grandma was as much of a boozer as me, and had pissed off my dad almost as much, I was glad to share the spotlight usually reserved for yours truly.

It had been my third stint in juvie—the first was for beating a kid with a fire extinguisher for calling me a faggot in seventh grade. After that, I managed to stay under the radar until my sophomore year when I dropped out to begin my hands-on scholarship of narcotics and malt beverages. After getting picked up trying to sell blow to these stuck-up girls from Johnson County, I did a token sentence on condition of a year of community service and voluntary drug treatment. My most recent experiment, involving a half ounce of KB, an opium rock, and an off-road adventure in a borrowed car, landed me an extended vacation in a substance abuse pod at Boysville Training School outside of Topeka.

When I passed through the locked door with the wire-enforced window into the lobby of Boysville, my dad wouldn’t look me in the eyes. I would never admit it, but I hadn’t had any physical contact in six months other than being patted down and slapping skin with my pod-mates and kind of hoped the old man would offer me a side hug or a handshake. But he kept his arms crossed tightly over his faded Mizzou sweatshirt. Everyone this side of the state line had been cheering for the Jayhawks since John Brown fucked up those slave-owning bastards in the 1800’s, but not my pop. He grew up in the Ozarks, got rejected from the Missouri Highway Patrol, and bedgrudgingly took a job patrolling I-70 in Kansas.

That’s right, my dad’s a cop. He’s always been a law abiding citizen, except when it comes to public intoxication, drunk driving, and domestic abuse. Other than those, he has an unshakeable belief in law and justice.

“Your grandmother will be here on Thursday. She’s staying in your room. Make sure your shit’s outta there by then.” He looked at me sideways as if he were matching my face against an expired license. “All your shit.”

If I had been using, I might have snapped, but I had been sober for months and my psychology was kind of fucked up and sentimental, so I kept the peace.

“How was the service?” I asked.

“All the family was there,” he said, leaving out the obvious.

The night of the funeral, I had cried a little into my pillow in my cell. I knew my dad thought he had lost both his father and his only son, and there was nothing I could say to convince him otherwise.

He stared straight ahead and I watched the flat-fuck land pass by my window, broken only by the occasional silo, farmhouse, and the rare thicket of trees lining a stream or artificially created pond. I wanted a cigarette but wouldn’t allow myself to ask for one of the Marlboro’s I knew he kept in the glove box, and I knew he wouldn’t indulge in my presence either.

 

 

I had expected grandma to show up mourning in all black, but she ambled through our door wearing a sweater embroidered with a fuzzy jack-o-lantern, which reminded me of the Cheshire Cat in pumpkin form.

“Hi, grandma,” I said and gave her a hug and kissed her papery cheek, which smelled like cheap perfume and whisky.

“How was China?” she asked.

My dad frowned at my mom, whose face turned red.

“I told her how you were teaching English in Hong Kong, which was why you couldn’t make grandpa’s funeral.”

My dad’s brow wrinkled and his lips tightened.

“Are they still having human rights issues over there?” Grandma asked.

I shook my head, trying not to grin. “No prisoner rights whatsoever. Keep their citizens locked up like animals, and for no reason at all. You’d be lucky to get a half bowl of rice, let alone a fortune cookie in one of those prisons.”

“Okay, that’s enough,” my dad said with a look sharp enough to cut lines of coke. “Why don’t you take her bags into her room.”

 

 

As I carried her bags into my old room, I heard a familiar clinking of glass. I pulled out the half-empty fifth of Jameson and sat down on the double bed where my mom used to  tuck me in and tell me stories about animals and furniture that talked and acted like real people. Her stories always had a moral or happy ending: a koala who learned to carry his school books and his rodent friends in his pouch; a radio who serenaded a TV until they fell in love and got married (and probably had retarded electronic babies).

On my breaks at Sonic, before my latest sabbatical to juvie, I would smoke cigarettes behind the dumpsters and dream up stories about the customers who came in for foot-long conies and forty-four ounce limeades. Later, I would get stoned and write tales about the hot ones whisking me off to North Dakota or Colorado or Maine—anywhere we could hole up in a cabin and get fucked up on whatever drugs we wanted and fuck like crazy and write about it afterwards.

Over dinner, when grandma asked what I wanted to do, now that I was back from China, I mentioned nothing of this.

“What exactly are you planning on doing?” my dad asked, his jaw tensing around a piece of steak. “I told you Rick’s looking for guys to fill his crew.”

Rick was his contractor friend who, I knew for a fact, smoked his share of herb.

“I want to see what else is out there first,” I said.

“The hell you think is out there?” he slammed his fist down on the table, making grandma’s china rattle. “Plenty of decent men can’t get a job, and you think you got the right to be picky?”

I wanted to react but acted smooth as butter, something I’d learned in juvie when the guards made comments under their breath about sucking a dick or taking one up the ass. You couldn’t respond to them the way I had to the boy in seventh grade, but you could get a rise out of them by acting like you didn’t give a shit.

“Grandma, could you pour me some wine please?” I asked, pushing my empty water glass in her direction. “Someone must have forgotten to give me some.”

Both of my parents glared as she poured an inch in my glass and topped off her own. I swirled the wine around delicately, sniffed it, and took a modest sip—the kind of stuck-up routine my dad hated more than anything else.

“So what are you going to do?” he demanded.

“I might be able to get my job back at Sonic. With tips, I could probably make a lot carhopping.”

“Carhopping,” my dad repeated as if I had said “dick-sucking” or “performing-partial-birth-abortions.”

“He does have experience,” my mom said.

“Do they still have those banana cream pie shakes?” grandma asked, sounding a little saucy.

“Sure do. I could take you there for dessert if you want.”

My dad lowered his eyes at me, then suggested that grandma was probably tired and might like to have some Eddy’s from the freezer and catch a television program or the news.

“I’ll be fine,” she said, and before he could respond, she had her walking shoes on.

 

 

Halfway there, we stopped to rest on the flat rock in front of the McDougal’s house, which was now owned by a young couple with a baby and one of those little gay dogs the size of a cat. When the McDougal’s still lived there, she and grandpa had rested on the same rock during our after-dinner walks, as dad ponied me around on his shoulders while I snatched fireflies out of the air and plucked off their glowing bulbs.

Grandma pulled the Jameson out of her purse and took a swig straight from the bottle.

“Don’t tell your father,” she said.

“I won’t. You mind if I try?” I asked.

She squinted at me. “You turn eighteen this month?”

I nodded and she passed me the bottle.

“Your father did the same thing when he was your age—always stealing nips from his father’s bottles. We probably should’ve kept a better eye on him, but we didn’t know better then, and grandpa was drunk half the time himself.”

I tried to imagine my father in the old pictures when he was my age, always looking small and meek squished between two bigger cousins or uncles—men who were firefighters and policemen and did other manly types of work. I couldn’t reconcile his boyish image with my own memory of him looming larger than life over me with a fist or belt and a voice as loud as a megaphone.

“Do you miss grandpa?” I asked.

She patted the jack-o-lantern on her chest, as if it were his face she were caressing.

“You want to know a secret?”

I nodded.

“I ended his life.” She paused. “He was suffering something horrible and I signed the form that stopped all the machines.” She chuckled as if she had just shared the world’s biggest inside joke, but her eyes were blurry.  “He would have kept on suffering if I hadn’t stopped them.”

It was probably the saddest thing I’d heard, and even I could feel a tear or two coming on. I pictured her and grandpa in the hospital watching Dancing With the Stars or playing gin rummy or just sitting there because they couldn’t go anywhere else, kind of like me up there in Boysville. Sometimes alone in my cell at night, as my mind reeled through memories of past trips and binges and crazy shit I’d done but wished I couldn’t remember, I wondered whether I had been living hard all those times or just slowly killing myself. Maybe grandpa had wondered the same thing.

We walked up to an empty parking spot between two cars and buzzed the intercom.

“Drugs!” a familiar voice called out. “Welcome back to the real world, dude. Hope nothing bad happened inside if you know what I mean.”

I ran inside and told my old co-worker Mark to shut the fuck up because my grandma didn’t know about me being locked up. Then I made her banana shake myself, on the house of course, and made a big show of delivering it to her.

We sat at the picnic table on the grassy lot behind the parking lot, briefly illuminated by headlights every time a car pulled in. After putting a dent in her shake, she pulled out the Jameson, and I gave her the PG-13 version of some of my Sonic stories. I ignored two phone calls and one text message from my dad ordering me to get my ass home.

“Grandma, I wasn’t in China,” I confessed. “I was in jail.”

She nodded, and I got the feeling she had known all along.

“Do you think I’m a bad person?”

She looked up at the glowing Sonic sign as if the answer could be found in the flickering ad for milk shakes. “You’re not perfect,” she said. “But nobody in this family is. Not your grandpa, nor your dad. And if you ever have a son, he won’t be either.”

 

 

The next morning, my parents held a Gitmo style tribunal in the living room, with my dad acting as the interrogator and the judge. Grandma, clutching her terrycloth bathrobe with one hand and cradling a mug of coffee in the other, listened guiltily as he handed down my verdict.

“You drink or do drugs in my house ever again,” he concluded, “and I’ll report you to the parole officer myself. You won’t go back to the kiddie jail where they hold your hand and sing Cumbaya. They’ll take your ass to Leavenworth. And if you plan on staying under this roof, you better get a job. Fast.”

Not wanting to spend the winter stuffing insulation with my dad’s jerk-off buddies or worse, I promised to get my act together for the millionth time and headed back to Sonic.

Sarah wasn’t supposed to be in for another hour, so I sat down at the picnic table. The place was fucking depressing. Empty ketchup packets and burger wrappers plastered to the pavement. Minivans with lonely overweight moms and baby seats in the back. Service vehicles with tired looking dudes in jumpsuits. Teenagers laughing about some party. All of them boxed into their cars, rolling down their windows long enough to order their shitty food and stare at me like I might rob them. I tried to imagine myself catching a ride with a couple of college chicks, but I couldn’t pull it off. After finishing my cig, Sarah hadn’t shown up, so I walked home.

 

 

We celebrated my eighteenth birthday at the Renaissance Festival. If you’ve never been before, it’s basically a bunch of weirdos with beards dressed up like King Arthur’s Court, having sword fights and blowing fire out of their mouths and shit like that. You can get a turkey drumstick the size of your face and, if you want, arm wrestle a midget. I did. He won, but I swear to God the bastard cheated.

Grandma was looking at princess outfits, modeling frilly dresses and tiaras for my mom. I’ll be damned if every woman deep down doesn’t want to be a princess.

My dad took me aside and almost smiled. “Your mother and I are proud of you.”

I usually hate that kind of corny talk, but I’m not gonna lie, it felt nice for once.

“But getting a job is only the first step,” he said.

Anyone who’s ever had a dad knows how the rest of that conversation went.  But I was in a real good mood, so I nodded like an idiot to everything he said, pretending to be the kind of son he could be proud of, and I wasn’t entirely faking it either.

Before leaving, I took a picture with grandma and me in one of those wooden harnesses, like we were about to get hit with rotten tomatoes or something. My dad bought me a pair of leather moccasins for my birthday, these real legit Native American joints, which apparently they wore in the Middle Ages, too.

Afterwards they dropped me off at Sonic and I thanked them for everything.

My dad said he’d be on patrol if I needed a ride later.

“Be safe, honey,” grandma said and winked at me in her sparkling tiara.

 

 

I told Mark I didn’t want to hit anything. One or two drinks at the party after work, and then I had to go home. But on the ride back, this hot brunette Lucy offered me a pipe and slid her hand onto my thigh. Mark told her I went soft in jail, so she should just pass.

I caved. “Fuck that noise. Let me show you how it’s done.”

I immediately started coughing. It was the same opium-herb combo that had gotten me in trouble. But before I could freak out, the inside of the car started morphing into one of those shoe-box panoramas you make in elementary school, but with a roof for a sky, herb clouds, and four stoned figurines. Then the walls started closing in on us and I started to think I might never escape, and then there were white lights. It was too late.

“License and registration please.”

My dad.

He went back to his cruiser with Mark’s ID without looking in the back seat, and I suddenly became very religious. I swore to God, to my grandpa’s grave, to my unborn children that I would never touch alcohol or drugs ever again.

When he returned, he leaned over and flashed his beam right into my bloodshot eyes for the longest ten seconds of my life. “Son, get outta the fucking car.”

The weight of the universe and Leavenworth pulled me back into that seat, but the pull of my father’s command was even greater.

I followed him back to the cruiser, expecting at any moment to receive a billy club to the face. He didn’t tell me where to go, so I slid into the back seat, separated from him by the metal grate. I thought I smelled booze on him—we hadn’t been drinking—but it could have been from the drunks carted off to jail earlier that night. He lit up a cigarette, holding it between his thumb and forefinger like a joint, and took a massive pull.

I wished he would say or do something, even smack me around a bit. I was more scared of what his silence meant, even more than the day he picked me up from juvie. I didn’t know if I was headed back there, or somewhere worse, but I kept my mouth shut and stared down at my new moccasins until the car slowed. I finally looked up and saw the front of our house with the light on in my bedroom. When he turned around, his eyes were more tired than I had ever seen them, as if he hadn’t slept once in eighteen years. He opened his mouth barely, began to form a word, but instead let out a sigh.

“Your grandma stayed up for you. She wanted to wish you happy birthday again before you went to sleep.”

He unlocked my door and, without waiting for me, headed back to our house.

 

 

 

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