The Knockout Queen

by Rufi Thorpe

  “I’ve been reading,” Mr. Lampert said, “about the founding of the Jet Propulsion Lab at NASA, and you know, back then rockets were considered sci-fi, and basically they were just these three guys, amateurs, who were obsessed with rockets. They spent two years just trying to launch a rocket, you know, but they had to invent rocket fuel basically, in order to make a rocket. And they wound up working with this expert at Caltech, who said, you know what, you guys are going about this in the right way, I’ll help you and you can use some of my grad students. They used to call themselves the ‘Suicide Squad’ because the open joke was that they were probably going to blow themselves up. But they did it, they successfully launched a rocket, about the size of a soda can, and that was that, and they got absorbed by the Department of Defense. But none of the generals would take seriously anything with the word ‘rocket’ in it, because it sounded too sci-fi, so they became the Jet Propulsion Lab, because that way they could get funded. Then after the Second World War, the government said: Do you want to be a defense company or do you want to join this new thing we’re starting, called NASA? And they opted for NASA.”

  “Wow,” Bunny said, though she was clearly bored and not really listening.

  “Can you imagine that?” Ray Lampert said, and ordered another drink from the waitress before continuing, “Just three guys obsessed with rockets, no background in aerospace, and they wind up part of NASA? Just monkeys shooting shit at the moon. Wild, you know?”

  “Wow, you’re like a little museum in person form!” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say, though I did find it genuinely interesting.

  “Oh, not really,” Ray said, waving away what I’d said as though it were a compliment. “I never went to college, you know that? But no one, I mean, aside from the founders, but I’m saying in contemporary times, I’ve had a really unparalleled influence on the town. I mean, I really can’t think of another single individual who has more directly influenced the development of the town in the last twenty years. I got the new high school built, I got the building code changed so now we finally have some development. Did you know I’m behind that new Italian place that opened up on Main? I convinced the chef to move there, I said, ‘Screw L.A., I’ve got rich people who don’t want to drive to get decent pasta, live the good life, put your kids in decent schools,’ you know what I mean? Were you born in North Shore?”

  Even as he asked me this question, he was loading his plate with fried rice and cashew chicken and some kind of honeyed shrimp, and his eyes were roving the restaurant as though he was looking for someone he was expecting to meet. “No,” I said, “I moved here when I was eleven.”

  “See?” he said, and smiled at me. “Everybody’s moved here. Nobody is from North Shore because everybody wants to move here, I mean, except her mother.” He gestured at Bunny with his thumb. She sipped from her Shirley Temple, sucking hard on the straw, then grew frustrated, pulled up the straw, showed us the cherry stuck on the end of it, and laughed like a kid.

  Her father continued, “They were from here, very serious people, her dad was a machinist for Boeing. Used to have this huge shop in his garage, the guy could fabricate anything.”

  It took me a moment to track that we were discussing Bunny’s mother’s father, Bunny’s grandfather. “Is he still around?” I asked.

  “He passed,” Ray said. “But he lived a good life. Yeah, he passed when Bunny was, what were you?”

  “Nine,” Bunny said.

  “Helluva thing, being able to make things with your hands. That’s a real loss in the digital world, I think. Making things. Don’t you think so?”

  The dinner continued on in this vein, Bunny occasionally queuing up her dad to tell an interesting story, almost as though he were a jukebox and she were playing me her favorite songs. Occasionally she would try to steer him away from dangerous topics: “I’m not against immigrants, but I’m just saying they should come here legally—” and she would pipe up, “Tell him about the pool, tell him about the pool you’re going to put in,” and he would seamlessly switch tracks and begin telling me about the Olympic-size swimming pool he had convinced the city council was vital to the town’s growth. “I mean, think about it, how are we going to have kids that grow up to be Olympic swimmers if we don’t even have a damn pool for them to swim in?”

  Both Bunny and her father were putting away shocking volumes of food and drink, and I thought perhaps this was normal for them, the way that André the Giant could drink forty beers with dinner. She had given him a pleading look when he ordered the fourth Tom Collins, but he had ignored her, as though he could not feel her eyes boring holes in the side of his face as he told me about a guy he had known in construction who had a pet chimp, and wasn’t that incredible? It used to wear little overalls.

  Aside from that single warning look Bunny had given Ray, she appeared to be at ease with the situation, and Ray’s conversational alacrity had never ceased, so I was disoriented when he was visibly weaving as we made our way out to the parking lot for the car after dinner.

  I looked at Bunny, who would not meet my eyes. Oughtn’t we not allow him to drive? Shouldn’t we suggest that we taxi home? But she was already casually getting into the car, as though everything were fine. I could not fathom a polite way to decline, and so I got in and buckled my seat belt nervously. Perhaps he would be somehow more able to drive a car in a straight line than he was able to walk in one.

  “A funny story about Bunny’s grandpa,” he said, looking over his shoulder as he backed out of our space, when suddenly the car lurched forward and we slammed into a pole. The force of the impact was surprising, considering that we had been at a stop. He must have had his foot slammed on the gas, and the car in drive instead of reverse. I was breathing hard and the backs of my hands were prickling with adrenaline.

  Ray Lampert popped the car back into park, yanking on the gearshift. “Fucking bloody shit hell fuck motherfucker,” he said, and got out of the car to look at the front bumper. Bunny and I stayed in the backseat, and she turned to me and said, quite casually, “This is not the first time he’s done this,” and then laughed.

  Outside the car, he was yelling and kicking the tire of the car repeatedly, but the noise was hushed by the expensive car, almost as though we were sealed in some kind of space pod. I could see the spittle fly out of his mouth, lit up by the streetlight. Mostly, I was confused. My entire childhood had been a training exercise in alcohol tolerance mathematics, and it didn’t seem to me possible that Ray Lampert could be this drunk from only four cocktails.

  “Best to wait,” Bunny said. “Until he wears himself out.”

  She reached over and held my hand again, and we watched her father kick the car some more. I had assumed the damage could not be much, considering that we couldn’t have been going very fast, but it seemed the bumper was more seriously dented than Ray Lampert wished it to be. Finally, as Bunny predicted, he seemed to tire out, and then he just sat on the hood of the car and stared up at the stars.

  Finally, Bunny decreed him calm enough and opened her door and popped her head out. “Do you want to just cab?” she said, since this was before the days of Uber.

  “What?” He swung his head toward her, surprised, and I realized he was in such a blind drunk that he had not remembered we were in the car. “Sure, sure, honey,” he said. “I’ll call you a cab.”

  She got back in the car and we watched him as he did things on his phone, and when that seemed to be concluded, he lay down on the hood of the car, put his hands behind his head, his phone resting on his belly, and then fell asleep. Had he called a cab through some sort of web form? At first I was not sure he was asleep, except for the incredibly slow and steady rhythm of his stomach rising and falling, the phone balanced precariously on top of it. I kept expecting the phone to slide down and hit the windshield, but it did not.

  “Do you think the cab will find us?
” Bunny asked me. I had no idea. We waited for perhaps twenty minutes, during which time Bunny became visibly more anxious. She kept apologizing. “This is so embarrassing,” she would whisper as we watched her father sleeping on the hood of the car. “I can’t believe this is happening. I’m so sorry. I thought tonight would be fun.”

  Finally, she felt she should at least check his cell phone, and so she carefully cracked her door open and crept around the car. But when she leaned over to snatch the phone off his belly, she was forced to put some of her weight on the crumpled bumper and it sheered right off the car with a tremendous clang, causing her to jump back and Ray Lampert to sit bolt upright, already yelling a kind of Viking war cry without words. He looked around frantically and saw Bunny with her hands up, cringing.

  “What the hell were you doing?” he asked.

  “I was trying to get your phone,” she said, pointing to his phone, which had fallen off his belly when he sat up and was now wedged against the windshield.

  “Get your own fucking phone,” he said. “I’m going home.” And then he slid, awkwardly, off the hood of the car, grabbed his phone, and fumbled with the driver’s-side door. I scrambled to unbuckle myself and get out, and I went around to where Bunny stood by the lost bumper of the car and the lamppost we had hit.

  “Daddy, don’t,” she said. “You’re not good to drive.”

  He started the car.

  “Daddy, don’t!” she said again, both hands up at her mouth like a little mouse gnawing a crumb, but she was not little, she was already almost as tall as her father.

  He rolled down his window. “Get in,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “I won’t let you drive Michael like this.”

  “Get in, Bunny Rabbit,” he said. His left eye was only half-open, but the right one was functioning normally.

  “No, Daddy,” she said, and actually stomped her sneakered foot.

  “Fine,” he said, and backed out of the spot and then drove away. We watched him as he exited the parking lot and turned onto the street without so much as jumping a curb, and then he was gone. Bunny covered her face with her hands, breathed in and out, then turned to me and said, “My purse was in the car.”

  “That’s not good,” I said.

  “Do you have any money?”

  I admitted I did not. I had about seven dollars in my wallet, but that would not get us a cab back home.

  “We’ll have to walk,” she said, which sounded crazy to me. I had no idea where we were or how we would get home, and I could not understand how she was being so calm about it.

  “It’s not hard,” she said, “we just need to go north, and the ocean’s right there, so we just go that way.” She pointed into the darkness.

  And so we wound up walking the four miles from Manhattan Beach to North Shore, taking Highland Street, which wove along the coast beside the sea.

  “I’m just so embarrassed,” Bunny kept saying as we walked. “He must have been drinking before he even picked us up.”

  “Don’t be embarrassed,” I said as we puffed up the big hill that led out of Manhattan Beach.

  “How can I not be embarrassed?” she asked.

  “My dad was a drunk too,” I said. “Nothing new to me.”

  We walked some more, and the ocean came into view, its oil tankers glittering with pinpricks of light off the shore. Suddenly we could hear the crash of waves.

  “Was?” she asked.

  “Oh, he’s still alive,” I said. “I just don’t see him anymore.”

  “Is that why you live with your aunt?”

  And so I told her, even though I had never told anyone in North Shore what had happened, and was so unused to telling the story I wasn’t exactly sure where to start. What was hardest for me to ever adequately explain was how collaborative my father’s violence had been, how we had all conspired in it, to hide it from him, to hide it from ourselves, to edit out the frightening sequences from the filmstrips of memory. The way when I was five and we were at some family barbecue, I had frustrated him, begging for candy or something, and he had grabbed me so suddenly that I fell and scraped my back on a tree root, and how for days we all wondered aloud where I had gotten that scratch on my back and each concluded that we didn’t know where I had gotten it. I really wasn’t sure how I had.

  Or when he was too drunk to hold my baby sister and he dropped her, badly, and how she cried all night, screamed, and yet no one took her to the doctor, and then how my mother observed the next day that she seemed to be fine and she wondered what that had all been about. And I had told her, quite innocently, that the baby had fallen, that my father had dropped her, surprised that she didn’t know because she had been in the room at the time, and she had said, “Oh, I don’t think she was crying because of that.”

  The crux of the problem was that my mother was in love with my father, and while he was terrifying when he got too drunk, when he was only a little bit drunk he was so much fun, and when he was sober he was profoundly depressed. Because we were poor. Because raising little kids is hard. Because he hated his job as a line cook at a seafood restaurant. And so my mother, without ever consciously realizing it, did not want him to get sober. What she wanted was for him to drink without getting too drunk, in part because she drank too, and her own drinking was indispensable to her as a coping mechanism. The scarier her life became, in fact, the more she needed it, and the less able she was to suggest that either of them should be steering toward the shores of sobriety. But it was impossible to keep the worst episodes from happening, and so the easiest thing to do was to pretend they weren’t happening at all.

  I told Bunny all of this as we walked, and she listened without offering sentimental interruptions or reassurances, and I was grateful for that, was so tired of earnest social workers telling me it hadn’t been my fault, or my sister’s fault, when I wanted to scream at them and tell them it was all our fault. Every single one of us participated in it. I loved my father when he was drunk. I could always tell when he was the good kind of drunk and I would run to him and climb him like a monkey and he would tickle me and body-slam me into the mattress and tell me I was a good boy. How good I was, how strong, how handsome, how smart.

  I could tell these things to Bunny only because they did not strike her as scandalous but as factual. And Bunny’s very unfamiliarity with guile, her inability to dissemble to even the slightest degree, somehow gave me permission to be my unadorned self as well.

  “Did your mom fight back?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “They were like alley cats, it was crazy, it would just explode and he would be hitting her and she would be hitting him, and we would just hide in the bathroom or lock ourselves in the bedroom and watch TV.”

  “My mom didn’t,” she said. “Fight back.”

  “So he hit her?” I asked.

  “Not really. I mean, I’m sure he did, I’m sure some amount of hitting occurred, but it was more like he would just keep explaining to her that she didn’t love him, and then he would take her favorite vase and smash it and say she loved the vase more than him. He would stay up all night, just torturing her like that. Setting up, like, these psychological tests. He would get kind of stuck in a loop and wanted to have the same upsetting conversation over and over again. I think part of it was that she had grown up very middle class, like, safe and nice, but nothing fancy, and he had grown up much poorer than her, and I think his parents were really, I don’t know, I never met my dad’s family, he was estranged from them and he didn’t even go to his mom’s funeral when she died, but I think he got it in his head that to make my mom happy he had to earn all this money. And then he did, he earned this crazy amount of money, and it was really like he made it all appear out of nowhere, but then he hated her for it and he hated the money even though he loved the money. I don’t know. I was just about to turn eight when she died, so
a lot of this is just putting pieces together and guessing.”

  “Did she love the money?” I asked.

  “I don’t think she did. I don’t think she gave a shit about the money.”

  “How did she die?” I asked, though I already knew.

  “Car accident,” she said. “Unrelated. To the drinking.”

  “And your dad still drives like that? Drunk like that?”

  “I never really thought about it, but I guess that is kind of weird.”

  We were quiet then, walking along a long stretch of road that bordered the oil refinery. Every now and again, a car would rush by, blinding us with its headlights and making us dizzy with wind, and we would pause. I had a terrible blister developing on my baby toe from where it rubbed inside my shoe, and she laughed at me when I mentioned it. “Wuss,” she said. “Want me to carry you?”

  “You can’t carry me,” I said, and to my surprise she picked me up and swung me into her arms like I was a bride crossing the threshold, and walked easily with me like that, even as I kicked and yelled at her to stop and put me down. When she finally did, I was breathless and a little thrilled. I was so confused by her. By her naïveté mixed up with her worldliness, by her beauty that was so unattended by vulnerability.

  “So what happened? Why did you move in with your aunt?” Bunny asked.

  “Oh,” I said. This was the part of the story I had been most dreading, since it was the sharpest fork in our diverging experiences. “Well, one night they were fighting, and she just stabbed him, in the chest, with one of the kitchen knives, not a big one, like a little fruit knife? So she went to prison.”

  “Oh my god,” Bunny said. I worried she would think I was trashy or low-class for having a mother who had been to prison. I myself was very ashamed about it. It seemed an inherently shameful thing to me.