Welcome to Oakland

by Williamson, Eric Miles

  “Everyone has better tits than me,” Rhonda said.

  “Fake,” I said.

  “How do you know?”

  I said, “My mother.”

  “Well shit,” Rhonda said. She spat on the lawn. It was substantial. She wiped her mouth with her forearm. I loved her.

  The congregation was so quiet you could hear the chain banging against the flagpole, the soot filth flag wagging like a greasy shop-towel.

  Blewer drove up, his Rambler backfiring like gunshot. My mother and her man ducked, but none of us did.

  “Fine party you got going here,” Blewer said.

  He took his flask from his pocket and slammed one. He passed it to me. I took a pull. Blewer’s Everclear with lime juice. Rhonda took it from me. “Bottoms up,” she said, and she smiled a nasty smile that would have killed any man on earth and sent him home jacking off like a chimp for days and days.

  Pop’s face stretched into a grin. I could tell it hurt his face. It was the kind of grin you don’t like to see on a man, a creepy show of teeth that made your own smile sink down into your throat, the kind that means some bad shit is about to happen, and if not soon than sometime before long, and when it happened the grin would still be there hurting his face because it was the kind of grin that wasn’t face deep but went clean down to the bone.

  “We aren’t too late, are we?” my mother said.

  Pop just stood there grinning.

  “T-Bird?” my mother said. “Is that you? Is that really you? You’re such a hunk! Hunk hunk hunk! I hardly recognize you. Do you like my new dress? What do you think of your ol’ ma now?” And she walked right on up to me, her man trailing along behind in his sunglasses like a politician’s hired goon.

  People started talking again, and Lura and Tura packed their titties away in their halter tops. The guys in the band flipped the power and tested their mikes, warmed up their horns with quiet scales and whole tones. The beer bottles were already running low, so one of the Markstein guys cracked a couple kegs.

  “Well, I just couldn’t miss your father’s wedding. I heard about it from one of the old gang and since I just got married again and found the love of my life, I thought, to myself I thought well, if Bud’s getting married he certainly wants me there to witness his bliss and joy because I am the mother of his children! My children would want me there!”

  “Kent’s dead,” I said. “So’s Clyde.”

  “If Bud’s getting married, he must be as happy as I am! And I know he’d be just so happy for me too.”

  “They’re dead, and I’m not his son.”

  “Gail is the perfect man,” my mother said. “He’s kind, and he’s handsome—as anyone can see—and he has the means to provide a proper home for a lady. Where are Kent and Clyde, my other two darling little boys?”

  “Dead,” I said.

  I put my arm around Rhonda’s waist and turned toward the kegs and then I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t move. My mother stood behind me saying, “What? What?” and her voice got more and more quiet and the sound of the party rose and Rich Kuam pulled his 4-wheeler onto the lawn and cranked up his stereo and opened the doors and the ground shook with Creedence Clearwater Revival and I’d never before felt anything like what it felt like to have my arm around Rhonda’s waist. Her waist was slim and soft and beautiful and I could nearly wrap my arm all the way around and touch my own ribs. My forearm touched the undersides of her tits, and I couldn’t see anything at all even though my eyes were open. I could only feel her tits, her waist, her hair over my shoulder, the heat of her body shimmering and the bass guitar and drums of Kuam’s stereo, the rimshots of the bandman’s snare as he tuned it, the rumble of a train and Jell-O shake of the landfill beneath my feet. Rhonda leaned her head on my shoulder, and her mother, my soon to be new step-mother, looked at Rhonda and winked. A flock of seagulls swooped toward the linguisca vats, and broken-haunched dogs sat drooling in the street.

  The wedding party was assembled, the band was ready, the preacher—Father Camozzi—set down his beer, and the ceremony began, Mary with Lura and Tura at her side, Pop with Louie the bartender as his best man and Joe Fernandez, Pop’s boss at Joe’s Tire Service, as Pop’s other man. When Father Camozzi opened his Book of Common Prayer, Lura and Tura, at the same time, turned and flashed their boobs at the crowd, and we all cheered, and Pop and Mary looked less nervous. Tits count, even if they’re attached to pigs. Don’t try denying it.

  Pop tugged at his coat and tie and even though I’d only once before seen him duded up like that he somehow seemed natural that way, seemed as though in another life he could have been some fancy real-estate guy or a salesman, someone who didn’t come home from work and wash his hands and forearms and neck with Ajax, someone who got to talk on the phone and have expensive sandwiches and beers with people and call it work.

  My mother’d somehow sidled up next to me and Rhonda, and she leaned against my arm as if I was her man.

  “T-Bird,” she said. “You need a bath.”

  “I work at the dumps,” I said. “I stink.”

  “Dead?” she said.

  Father Camozzi was getting on with it.

  “Dead,” she said, and she kept on saying it, dead, dead, dead, dead. Dead, dead.

  “Dead end road and Mexicans,” I said. “Same difference. Dead. A long time dead. But don’t worry, it wasn’t painless.”

  I didn’t know why I said that, why I intentionally made it sound as bad as it was, since they really did die rotten deaths. I wanted to make my mother hurt. I wanted the bitch to feel the neighborhood again, feel what she’d evidently escaped. I wanted her to remember where she’d come from, her roots, us. I wanted her to know that just because she’d married some rich fuck didn’t mean the world she’d brought children into didn’t still exist, and wasn’t still chewing its own legs off and chewing off the legs of any nearby animals just for spite. I wanted to demolish her. I hated her for bringing me into this spinning hairball we call earth.

  So I told her all about it. I told her about it while Pop was standing there straight-backed and proper and proud and finally with a woman who would stay with him and sometimes even be nice to him, who would make him some goddamn coffee in the morning and crack a can of chili for him and have it hot in the pot after work, crackers and cheese shredded on the side, beer fresh from the fridge.

  I started with Clyde, told her Clyde died after getting drunk one night with me and trying to drive back to Pop’s place, wrapped his car around the barrier at the end of my dead end street. No one reported that kind of shit in my neighborhood, because that means the cops will have to talk to you and you’ll have to scour your place for stuff they’ll bust you for, which might be anything depending on how dark your skin is or how long you keep your hair. So Clyde sat mangled in his car until noon the next day—about eight hours—with a steering wheel carving semi-circles in his throat and belly. Died on the stretcher.

  I didn’t tell her that I’d always hated that little fuck, that every time he ever came to visit me I always got him drunk, that every time I ever got him drunk I hoped he’d get in his fancy Camaro and drive head-on into a semi. I didn’t tell her that somehow I’d always known that I wasn’t Bud’s kid because of the way he treated Clyde, how he loved on Clyde, how Clyde would get a report card full of Cs and Ds and Pop would snap him a c-spot for passing and when I’d bring home straight A’s he’d say, “You might get straight A’s in school but you flunk out in real life.” I didn’t tell her that every time I saw Pop’s boy I wanted him to get so drunk he’d hyperventilate and convulse and quake and choke and die swallowing his own bile and puke. I didn’t tell her because I can maintain. I can be cool when I need to.

  And Kent, well, I didn’t tell about it in the last book because an editor said it was too gory. Editors don’t come from neighborhoods like mine. When you tell th
e truth about the shit they say it’s “over the top,” so you have to tone it down and leave out the real shit. Here’s what really happened.

  The way Kent died? Mommy, here’s how. He walked out of a 7-11 and saw a low rider, and the car was stuffed with the same Mexicans that had cut off Clyde’s ear and beat the living fuck out of him for fucking their sister, and when Kent saw the car he said, “Mexicans.” And they jumped out of the car, and wham! they’d knocked him to the ground and they were stomping his chest and neck with those Mexican shoes of theirs, the ones with the heels. A little shit, after Kent was down and after I had a knife to my gut, wrapped Kent’s chest with a chain and then it took three of them to drag Kent to the trailer hitch welded to the ass-end of the Chevy Impala low-rider. Then they got in the car and backed up, and I don’t know if they ran over him or not, because I didn’t hear him scream and because one of those fucks had sliced my arm across the vein—that’s the scar I have, see it?—and they drove off, drove with those little 78-series low-rider tires and ass-end of the car dragging even lower from the weight of Clyde being towed behind across the asphalt.

  I tied-off my arm with my tee-shirt, and it was dark and foggy and the streetlights made nimbi like schmaltzy angel halos and I wear glasses, you know, and my glasses were misted and wet and fogged but I could see the taillights red and fuzzed and I could hear Clyde being carved and sliced by the asphalt rough. I got up and I ran, and I ran and I saw the asphalt ahead shine with the bloodslick of Clyde’s life reflected in the taillight haze and candleflame from Catholic ceremony and dread in bayframe windows. I kept running, my arm leaking, and then I saw ahead a lump dark and heavy and when I came to it the lump was Clyde’s leg, jeans shorn, legbone gray and sticking out of the pantleg like a plastic piece of PCV pipe, drooling with red gobs of curd. I nudged it with my foot, Mom, and it rolled over, and then I think I might have howled, but I’m not sure, because howling is not a thing one can be certain one has done, not if it is a proper howl. Have you howled? If you have, you’re not sure, not absolutely certain that you have. You haven’t howled if you’re sure you have.

  And I kept on after them. I don’t know why, since Clyde was either dead or going to die, and since if I caught them they’d kill me too, as is their custom.

  I found more body parts, but the more body parts I found, the less I was able to tell them apart. The more body parts I found, the more they started to look like car parts soaked red in transmission fluid, springs, wires, gobs of grease, rubber hoses.

  When I found Clyde, what I saw was not something I will describe. I don’t want you to vomit while you’re reading my book.

  We buried him with a closed coffin funeral.

  Telling my mother about Kent and Clyde, I knew what was going to happen. She was going to flip out and make a scene. Years before, when she was married to some other dude—an airline pilot who made a shitpile of money and had a health care plan—my mother cooked up a great scam with a shrink. That didn’t surprise me. Rich assholes all go see shrinks so they can blame their shitbaggery on someone else, anyone else, anyone other than their own fucking selves. My daddy spanked me too much, and so I’m a fatass pedophile adulterer. My mommy never let me play with the other girls, and so I beat my husband with a frying pan and fuck his friends silly whenever I can. Shrinks.

  The Self-Help section of the bookstore is bigger than the Literature section. Have you ever looked at a Self-Help book? Crap, that’s what. I know, because nearly every bitch I’ve ever boinked has thought it necessary to give me one, handing it over with emotion and a stupid look they suppose resembles philosophy, holding the paperback like it was a gold-gilt Gideons. They read like horoscopes, catch-all bullshit that applies to every simpering dupe who flips through the pages:

  Are you lonely? Are you sad? Do you feel like your parents didn’t love you enough?

  You are a co-dependent whose Inner Child was not nourished enough!

  Horseshit. My Inner Child wants to pop bugs with a magnifying glass. My Inner Child wants to toss cherry-bombs down the toilet at school. My Inner Child wants to spin the old family cat around over my head like a lariat. My Inner Child is a serial killer I have to keep in check. He doesn’t need nourishing: he needs a life-sentence in Quentin, or one helluva spanking.

  I met a girl one time, a Self-Help addict, a twelve-step devotee, little rich bitch who never had to worry about a thing in her sheltered pampered cable TV life except deciding which college her dentist parents were going to pay for her to attend, what clothes she was going to buy for the new season’s fashions, what goddamn dress she was going to wear at her parents’ dinner party with the neighbors. This little cooze got pissed off, fucking wept, because her parents didn’t buy her the kind of car she wanted. Bought her a Honda instead of a BMW.

  “Rich people have problems too,” she said.

  “Too?” I said. “I don’t have problems. You see me having any problems?”

  “I’m trying to work things out from my childhood.”

  “Get over it,” I said.

  “You’re just in denial,” she said. “You’re ignoring your problems, the issues you should be working through. That you don’t acknowledge the problem is proof of the problem.”

  “Get over it,” I said.

  That’s what I said, and that’s what I say now. Get the fuck over it.

  For you rich fuckers having existential crises, I’ve got a recommendation: Get a fucking job.

  Poor people don’t see shrinks.

  They get a fucking job.

  And that’s what you should do, you fuck. Build a fucking pyramid. You won’t need a shrink to help you with your angst and dread. You’ll need a bath, a meal, and a fucking beer.

  My mother called me when she and her shrink cooked up her excuse for bitchery. “T-Bird!” she said. “T-Bird, there’s a reason I was a bad mother and used to beat you boys. It’s because it wasn’t really me doing those awful things!”

  “Of course not,” I said.

  “It wasn’t really me! It was the bad alters! I have M.P.D. That stands for Multiple Personality Disorder. My bad personalities were the ones doing the bad things, not my core personality. I have 95 personalities in all!”

  Most of my mother’s gang were bitches. When we were kids, if me or my brothers woke her up, she’d scream like she’d been set afire, and she chased us through the house, her robe flopping open, eyes twitching, calling us little fuckers, little assholes, little sons of motherfucking bitches. When she caught us she dragged us by the arm, or the leg, or the hair, to her room, where she kept her special whipping belt—a belt studded with metal rivets and a buckle the size of Texas. She beat us until we bled, our legs and arms and asses torn open and one time my brother Kent’s arm broken. I once popped a bicycle tire while riding through a thorny field, and when I came home, one of my mother’s husbands doled out the punishment: he trapped me beneath a bed and blasted away at me with a BB-gun.

  She had a nice alter who popped up every other Christmas or so, bought us some candy or came out of the bedroom after having been awakened and gave us a hug or took us to the grocery store. The nice alters didn’t stick around for long, though.

  When my mother’s alters began to surface, her shrink told her she needed to call everyone in her past she had a gripe with. So she got on the horn and told off some of her ex-husbands, her father, her step-father, her half-brothers and sisters, her former bosses. The shrink also told her she needed to get things out into the open with her three sons. She called me, and wanted to come to visit so we could have a heart-to-heart chat and so I could tell her everything I remembered from my childhood. “Not a good idea,” I said. “I’d rather not.” She insisted, and said she was coming to town.

  She came, brought her husband (I can’t remember that one’s name) and about 8 bottles of wine and a couple bottles of Scotch. She was ready to t
alk.

  So I let her have it. I told her some of the shit I remembered, and not just the woe-is-me bullshit about the times she’d beaten me and my brothers, the burns and broken bones and bloody noses and whip-marked backs and fronts and faces from the garden hose she used on us, the weeks of deafness from getting our ears boxed over and over again, the time she ripped all Kent’s hair out of his head and how his head looked like he’d been scalped and how he had to wear hats and grease his skull with Vaseline for months, how the scabs leaked green pus onto his forehead and down into his ears and down his neck while he sat sniveling on the schoolbus with the other kids calling him the creature from the black lagoon, the time she pounded my head with a ballpeen hammer and knocked me out cold, no: Hey, Mom, feel right here, just next to my shin: I still have a B-B there. Feel it. Touch it Mom. You stood watching, Mom, and you screamed, “Show the little fucker. Show that little fucker to respect his possessions.” Hey, Mom, you remember when I didn’t do my homework before dinner, and so you stabbed a pencil into the back of my hand, cranked the pencil sideways and broke the tip? The lead’s still there, Mom. Hey, Mommy, remember when I came home from school and told you my tooth hurt, me a first grader, and so you got a pair of pliers and yanked my tooth out and I bled for days? Hey, Mom, remember how at night I used to fall off the top bunk of the bunkbed and how one time when I fell off and cracked my head and I was bleeding while you were fucking a bunch of dudes in the living room you came into the room naked with one of the men, naked too, and you beat me for making a fuss, bloodied my thighs with that belt of yours, made me bleed for, as you said, “interrupting your grown-up time,” and how you told me if I fell off the bunk again you’d make me cry forever and wish I’d never been born? Hey, Mom, remember how you used to tell me it was all for my own good, that Jesus would save me, but how Jesus wouldn’t save me if the Devil was in me, and how the Devil had to be beaten out of me if I used a fork with my left hand? By the way, Mommy, I don’t need a fucking shrink to deal with this shit. I need a shotgun.