“What do you like about him?” Mrs. Pfeil asks, like a straight man feeding me lines.
“Austin was the toughest SOB in the WWE,” I say, echoing the phrase I heard every Monday night for years. “He’s the kick-ass good guy who gets the last laugh.”
“But Bret, isn’t all of that fake?” She asks the unavoidable question.
“August 1997, Summer Slam. I own the video, and I’ve watched the match against Owen Hart at least ten times. Austin gets dropped on his head accidentally when Hart screws up a move called a pile driver. Austin is lying in the ring, not moving. Yet, he somehow manages to finish. He sits on the shelf and is told never to wrestle again. But Austin doesn’t listen to anyone, except his own head and heart. Not wrestle? You might as well call the priest to say a few choice words in Latin. Stick a fork in him, he’s done. But wait—he pulls the fork out! Not only that, he comes back, tough as ever!” I tell her, words falling over each other.
“You seem to admire this character,” she says softly, then fills the room with silence.
“When Austin’s music hit, when you heard that sound of glass breaking, he walked in and owned the place. He never backed down, he always got up when knocked down, and he always beat up the bad guys.”
“That’s very interesting,” Mrs. Pfeil interjects.
“Really?” I’m unsure what she is getting at but eager to open up to someone. My father is impossible, and while my mom listens, and supplies sympathy, there’s no real understanding. Mom lives her life in the soft, safe center of a Wal-Mart world. This is the kind of real conversation that I might have with Kylee’s parents and long for with my own.
“Let’s talk about someone closer to home. Your brother went to school here. He dropped out I recall. What’s he like?” she asks slowly. I stay silent, but she’s waiting me out.
“Cameron is okay, even though we have nothing in common. He lives in a trailer park, works a dirty job, and has a couple of kids already, even though he’s just twenty-three.”
“Tell me about your relationship with your brother,” she says, once again taking notes.
“Cam’s older than me. He was into sports and I never was, much to my dad’s disappointment.”
“What do you mean?” she asks, no doubt proud she got me to say the magic word—dad.
“I was a sickly kid. I had ear infections, asthma, allergies, and except for watching wrestling on TV, I had no interest in sports. I never played baseball or football with the guys.”
“What kind of stuff did you like to do growing up?” She’s really good at this.
“I liked to read, watch movies on TV, that kind of stuff. Sometimes I’d see neighbor kids outside playing ball, but it just never interested me. I spent lots of time in the house, and when my little sister, Robin, was born, I became her best friend. I babysat a lot because Mom and Dad worked all the time, whenever they could find work, but now Robin’s into her own friends.”
“You work a lot here at school, like in theater. Tell me about that,” she says.
“When I got in sixth grade, we had a teacher who wanted us to put on a Christmas play. I figured if I did the play, then I had a reason to give my dad for not playing basketball, which he was pushing me to do. Then we did another play, and this time I got a chance to sing, and I found something else that I could do pretty well. All through junior high, I did everything I could to be onstage or perform. Then, I got the lead in a couple plays here.”
“Your father must be very proud of you.”
“Not really,” I say, shaking my head. “He’s not proud of me at all.”
“I’m sensing a lot of anger at your father,” Mrs. Pfeil says, acting as if she has discovered some big revelation. She may as well jot down in her notes, “Bret breathes air.”
“I love him because I have to,” I announce, giving words to all this hurt, saying to Mrs. Pfeil what I hold back from my father, like he holds back from me. “I respect him because he demands it, but I don’t admire him, and he certainly doesn’t admire or respect me.”
“It seems like the two of you don’t understand each other very well,” she offers.
“That’s what I hate the most,” I confess. “He doesn’t understand me. It’s such a cliché. I think I hate that most of all. I want to avoid acting out any cliché. And I hate that he hates me.”
“That’s pretty strong, Bret, don’t you think?”
“If you ask him, he’d say that he loves me, but the only reason for this is because I’m his kid. That’s not love, that’s obligation, and I don’t want it. But personally, I know he hates me.”
There’s silence, because there’s nothing left to say. I’m glad I got it out in the open. I don’t talk about home much with Kylee because it just bores her, and I can’t say that I blame her.
“Bret, I think it would be helpful if you brought your parents in to talk with me,” Mrs. Pfeil finally says. “Or maybe I can recommend a good family counselor?”
“Riiiiiiiiiiight,” I say but she doesn’t get the reference. “Who is going to pay for that?”
“If you can’t talk to a counselor about this, then you can always talk to me,” she says with genuine warmth, as she rises from her chair, signaling that I need to get back to class. “You can come and see me without Mr. Morgan telling you to. You know that, right?”
“I guess,” I reply with a shrug. I get up to leave, feeling both weak and powerful.
“There is one other person I think you need to talk to about this,” she says in closing.
“Who?”
“Your father,” she replies firmly.
“He doesn’t listen and you must not, either,” I respond sharply, feeling almost betrayed.
“I heard everything you said and your father would too, if you would talk to him,” Mrs. Pfeil says. “I know you can do it. The person you told me you admire is resilient and fearless.”
“The only thing I need to learn is to fit in, get along, and go along!” I’m almost shouting now. “That’s what everybody wants, isn’t it?”
“No, that’s not right. It’s about what you want,” she says. “It’s your choice, but you still have to learn to obey the rules. School is like any society and you have to follow the rules.”
“What I want is to get out of Flint. That’s the bottom line because Bret Hendricks said so!” I throw my arms up in the Stone Cold salute once again, but this time she’s not laughing.
“Bret, this isn’t wrestling, this is real,” she counters, trying to calm me down.
“Whatever,” I say, then gather my books. Maybe today I learned the answer to my dad’s question of ‘Bret, what the hell is wrong with you?’ What’s wrong is that I’m sixteen and my father hates me. Mrs. Pfeil may know her stuff, but she doesn’t know shit about my dad.
Eleven
November 4, Junior Year
“I’ll see you in about thirty, okay, K?”
“Too cute, cutie,” Kylee whispers, then I hang up the phone. I shoot Robin a dirty look as she and her friends giggle at me. Hell, they giggle at everything. Kylee, my source of laughter and love, is coming to take me to the opening night for my school’s fall play. She’s driving her mom’s car, an old Honda Civic we call the snotsmobile, due to its ugly mucous green color.
Sometimes I think her voice is all that gets me through the days when we are apart. I kind of like the whole mystique of the girlfriend at the different school, but it would be great if I could see Kylee every day. I’m hungry for her, and she’s starved for attention. Unfortunately, my refusal to bend to my father’s will is still keeping me from getting behind the wheel, and that combined with play practice is killing our chances for one-on-one time. Ever since our first gig, she’s been hanging out at Sean’s place during band rehearsals, but it’s not the same.
My mom can’t come to the show tonight. She just started working a new night shift at Wal-Mart and can’t ask for it off, but she says she will come to the matinee next weekend. I had left t
wo tickets on the kitchen table, and as I talked with Kylee on the phone, I noticed that one remained untouched.
It’s Friday and Dad’s in the garage working on the Camaro. Under the hood, he listens to the engine hum; that’s the music he cares about, not mine. He could listen to those pistons sing all night long, but not to me. I take the ticket in my hand; for a thin, little piece of card stock, it seems so heavy. I’ll take the first step, just to let Mrs. Pfeil know she’s wrong.
I walk out to the garage through a light rain. He got home from work a few minutes before I got home from school. He had his coffee, looked through the mail, cursed the bills, mumbled a few words to Mom, then headed to the garage. He’ll be in for dinner at 5:30, clad in overalls, grease, and bliss, but I can’t wait. We have a 5:00 stage call, and Kylee is coming over at 4:00 for some foreplay. I walk inside the garage but stay near the door of his domain. He’s allowed in my room anytime for any cause, but I need a reason to enter the Camaro kingdom. I stand by the bumper, waxed so thoroughly it reflects me better than any mirror.
“Dad, here’s your ticket for tonight’s show.” I say each word slowly and with meaning.
He grunts, so I know he hears me, yet his head remains obscured by the hood.
“Dad, I want you to come see me in the show tonight.”
“Busy.”
“Please.”
“Busy.”
I take a step closer, keeping my distance from this distant voice and the scratchless surface of his most loved object, which is so obviously not me.
“Dad, please, this is important to me.”
“I said I’m busy. Maybe, if you want to help me clean this carburetor?”
His sentence fades out, transforming itself into an odd marriage of disbelief and dismay. He knows I not only can’t clean a carburetor but that I can’t even identify one.
I want to grab the keys from his pocket and drag them across the pristine paint job. I want to smash the windshield glass that’s so clean it’s almost invisible. I want to slam the hood, and if his head’s underneath … then all the better. I want him to stop killing me by being dead.
“I have to go. We have a five o’clock call and Kylee’s on her way over to pick me up.” I move two steps closer, my hand outstretched. “Here’s your ticket.”
He sticks his head out from under his church of worship, but never looks at me, the heathen in his Camaro cathedral. The grease transfers from his hands to a rag, but his eyes never transfer to me. The cement at his feet seems to captivate him more. He keeps his hands busy working the rag back and forth, but he never reaches to take the ticket.
I don’t say anything. The engine purrs, and the rain taps against the garage windows, creating a sad vacuum of silent sound.
I say with my voice cracking, “Please.” But the words don’t matter. He’s deaf to me or I’m dumb to him. Dumb, and becoming dumber as I continue speaking with far more emotion than is usually allowed in my father’s presence. “Please, just this once.”
“Are you crying?” My father asks few real questions of me. The less we talk, the less we argue. Sometimes I hate the silence more than I hate him screaming at me. Even after sixteen years, I’m still not immune to his elevated volume or his escalating indifference.
I stop speaking when he takes the greasy rag and rubs it under my eyes, taking the damp stain he finds as evidence of my disgrace. I catch a glimpse of myself in the Camaro’s bumper; I look like an accident victim with two black streaks under my eyes.
“Be a man, Bret. For God sakes, be a man.” He tosses the rag into the corner, as if it’s contaminated with my little boy—no, my little girl—tears. “Stop crying.”
“I just want—”
“Want? Who said you get what you want? Not me.” He makes eye contact, but it isn’t about comfort, it’s about power. He digs into his overalls and fires up a Marlboro.
“Just this once,” I sputter, no music in my voice, only discord. My theatrical ability to project so the back row can hear me is useless. My acting skill is now just another tool, like the ones scattered around this garage that I am too stupid to know how to use.
“You look like … like … hell,” he spits out. “I don’t even know what you look like!”
I’ve let my hair grow longer, and my ponytail now has a blue streak for Kylee to tug.
This is not a conversation, it’s the script for a two-man play starring my dad and me. It’s a script I have memorized. He blows out a perfect circle of smoke. The shape fits him, since my father loves going around in circles. Most summer Saturday nights, he’s out with his poker pals at the Dixie Speedway watching cars spin the cement loop. On Sundays, he watched the same thing on a larger scale, courtesy of NASCAR on TV. And, of course, there’s the circle of this merry-go-round we find ourselves on, as he again asks me, “What are you doing with yourself?”
I don’t have an answer, and he doesn’t want one. My silence shouts at him, but he doesn’t raise his voice, since he’s so lowered his expectations of me. “If you’re going to swim upstream, don’t expect it to be easy. Life is hard enough, why you want to make it harder is beyond me.”
“I know,” I reply meekly, showing no strength, even as I pick the hard way.
“So what, you think you’re gonna be some Hollywood star who squats to piss?”
I once made the mistake of blurting out that fantasy ambition of anyone who ever stepped on a stage. I had also made the mistake of admitting that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in Flint, Michigan. I’m not sure, in my father’s eyes, which sin is worse. Both, for him, are acts of outrageous arrogance, revolution to his rule, and rejections of his life.
“I don’t know.”
“Jesus H. Christ, Bret, why can’t you just act normal?” The head shaking starts, making his cigarette bob up and down like a conductor’s baton. I’m supposed to follow.
“I don’t know what that means,” I say, deliberately escalating this battle. Let him hang on the cross of nonconformity, I won’t make myself a casualty. He’ll have to hammer those nails himself. I don’t know why I’m different than what he wants; I just am. I just am.
“Normal, like your brother, and just lose all of that,” he says sharply. The smoke and flickering ashes from his gesture make it seem like he is performing a magic trick: trying to make me disappear. My dad is a fine actor in his own right. His reading of the word that brilliantly reduces everything I care about to insignificance.
“I’m sorry, but it’s who I am.”
“I didn’t raise my boy to be a freak!” His voice is now louder than the Camaro. He snorts and then turns his back to me, extinguishing the cigarette into the ashtray.
“Don’t call me that,” I mumble.
He turns around quick, his expression remorseless. “I can’t wait until you get out into the real world, and you don’t have your weird friends or your mother to protect you.” He’s smiling; thoughts of my failed future amusing him. “Boy, you’ll see I was right then.”
“Maybe I will, maybe I won’t.” I find myself lost for any more words.
“Don’t you have someplace to go? I need to get back to this,” he says, almost shouting. His face is as red as that pack of Marlboros in his overalls. A three-pack-a-day man, his future hooked up to an oxygen tank seemed assured.
Before I can answer, he has a wrench in his hand and is back under the hood. Maybe I’m such a good actor because I really don’t know the answer to my dad’s question, What did I think I was doing with myself? I don’t know who I am. However, as I crumple up his ticket, I know part of the answer. Looking straight ahead, I know exactly who I don’t want to be.
I exit the garage and stand by the street, waiting for Kylee. Waiting for her to pick me up and take me away from this. I know there’s a middle ground between Dad’s harsh isolation and Mom’s kind protection, but that part of the human highway is still under construction.
“Hey, cutie!” Kylee shouts. I’m so lost in my thought
s that I didn’t see her pull up. She’s dressed to kill in short black dress opening-night attire, but the way I feel she may as well be in mourning. She greets me with a kiss as I slowly climb into the car. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, now that you’re here.” Before she reacts, I pull Kylee close to me. As we head out into the night, there are ten million ugly thoughts running through my mind about my dad, and three wonderful words unsaid to Kylee on the edge of my lips, as I soak in the sweet smell of clove cigarettes.
As we back out of the driveway, I look over behind me, into the garage. In this ongoing battle with my father, I’ve come to realize that I’ll never be the victor, but tonight I’ve finally decided that I won’t be a victim anymore. I know that no matter what I do, I can’t please him or make him proud of me. Yet, even as the garage gets smaller in the rearview mirror, his image somehow looms larger and larger, and I realize that no matter how much I deny it, I can’t stop wanting his approval.
Twelve
November 25, Junior Year
Dear Kylee,
Happy 18th birthday. Let me say this: I live you. I can’t say I love you because I don’t know what those words mean. In my house and history, they ring false. But most of all, those words—love, in particular—fall very short, even if I am much taller than you. Bret lives Kylee.
Your other presents are manufactured goods, but this is from me; from the heart. Let me be your Walt Whitman sampler. Let me sing and celebrate you. Or rather than Whitman, how about Browning who asked, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” Rather than counting from one to ten, how about I tell you from top to bottom?
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