Hollywood Park

by Mikel Jollett

  Some nights the music fills the place and there’s nothing to do but dance. Bonnie puts Michael Jackson on and Thriller booms through the little apartment. Let’s put on a show! So we go into the back bedroom and work out a dance routine.

  It’s close to midnight, and something evil’s lurking in the dark …

  We coordinate jumping jacks and push-ups, rolling on the floor in unison, high-fiving when we get up, moonwalking away from each other then spinning back together to grab our elbows and drop to our knees for the big finale. When we are ready, we go out into the living room and Bonnie drops the needle next to Michael Jackson’s head as he lies there in his white suit. We stand with arms stretched downward and eyes closed as Vincent Price’s voice comes out of the speakers until the moment the beat kicks in and we launch into our steps, dancing around the living room, moving in unison, our long blond corn-silk hair, our deeply tanned, ice-cream-fat tummies hanging out as we jump and spin and Bonnie sways her hips in her blue silk robe and Dad pumps his knees and fist in rhythm from his perch on the couch.

  We dance, thinking only of the music, the steps we’ve memorized, the fullness in our chests as we leap across the carpet with wild abandon in nothing but our matching tighty-whities.

  * * *

  AT THE END of the summer, Dad takes us to Hollywood Park. Bonnie says he goes almost every Sunday when we are in Oregon. He has a bunch of phrases he likes to say, things he picked up from horse racing. “I’d rather be lucky than good.” Or “Nothing like a day at the races. You got the world by the ass.” Or “Favorites usually lose.” This one is like a slogan to him, the kind of thing you’d put on a poster if he was famous: Jim Jollett … favorites usually lose.

  Dad is a fan of the underdog. That’s what he says. I think maybe it’s because he thought he’d be dead by now. Between the heroin and the prison and the disorganized crime, he can’t believe his luck that he’s “still kicking.” He says he feels lucky he gets to live in an apartment with Bonnie, work six days a week in an auto shop and take us to the beach or the track on Sundays.

  Sometimes he comes home from Hollywood Park and hands us each twenty bucks. “I caught a horse,” is all he’ll say with a wink. We can’t believe our luck. But he says not to be too happy, if the horse had lost, he’d be taking twenty bucks from us but he never does.

  He says he’s going to teach us how to bet, that he’ll “stake” us, which means if we win, we get to keep the money but if we lose then we don’t have to pay him.

  The grandstand is enormous, rising like a spaceship from the sea of blacktop of the parking lot. Dad is chatty as we walk from the car to the gates, he keeps his hands on my shoulders, the heat from the asphalt warming our feet, the smell of hot dirt and car exhaust and the distant sound of a bugle filling the air. “Okay, we’ll get some food. We gotta have some lunch. Then we’ll lay some bets.” He’s got a pen in his mouth and little reading glasses on the end of his nose as he pays our admission and we buy a racing form.

  A few of the men recognize him when we walk in. They’re studying racing forms in their old hats, visors. An enormous white man in an old blue windbreaker, his huge gut hanging out, yells, “Hey, Jimmy. Those your boys?”

  Dad introduces us.

  “Ehhh, Jimmy! Who you got in the fifth? I’m twelve ways into the Pick Six, but I ain’t got a horse in the fifth.” A skinny, older black man in a purple hat yells from the next table.

  Dad looks his way and tells him his pick and then, turning to us, he says with pride, “These are my boys.”

  “You gonna teach them the fambly business?” The man laughs. I feel a swelling in my chest like a warm wave that washes over me with Dad’s hands on my shoulders. I watch their faces as they look at him and me, comparing our sizes, looking for the resemblance. I wonder if it’s hard to see.

  To be a son, to have a father, to be out at the track, with the men all trying their luck. Is this what the men do?

  Dad has reserved a box for us near the finish line, on the edge of the perfect dirt oval surrounding an infield of palm trees, hot dog carts, a playground and a small lagoon with white waterbirds swimming in it like a postcard. The smooth brown oval of dirt is a mile around, slightly wet and combed by three green tractors after every race. A man in a green jacket and top hat with khaki riding pants and knee-high boots lifts a long bugle to his mouth in front of the starting line:

  buh buh buh bup buddah bup buddah bup bup bup bup buhhh

  buh buddah bup buddahdah bup bup bup buddahdah buhhhhh

  Dad once told us he came straight to the races the day he got out of prison. He just wanted to be outside and free for a day in the sun. He wore a new hat and came with his brother Pete. They had a few beers and laid some bets and he always remembered that moment of freedom.

  He buys us two corned beef sandwiches, some chips, a drink and a chocolate ice cream. We take the food to our box where he opens a racing form and shows us how each page is a different race and each name is a different horse. He says the numbers say how likely it is a horse will win. So if a horse is five to one, that means you get five dollars for every one dollar you bet.

  Tony says he already knew that because they studied fractions last year and I’ll learn it in a few years too. Dad takes his pen and circles the odds. “Five to one. Does that make sense.” He does this a few times, with a few horses he bets. “So this one is eight to one. So how many dollars do I win for every dollar I bet?”

  That’s easy, I say. You win eight. It seems as good a way as any to learn fractions since I’m usually bored in school.

  He lets us choose horses for the two-dollar bets he’s going to place for us and gets us tickets we can hold when he goes to lay his bets from the wad of twenties in his wallet.

  It’s impossible not to scream during a horse race. The horses march like royalty to the white starting gate. Everyone goes quiet once the last horse is in place. The bell goes off and you hear “and away they go” through the tinny speakers. You watch as they tear down the far straightaway into the final turn, and then your horse jumps forward, right to the front of the pack. You scream, “Go, Seven! C’mon, baby!” Because your dad is next to you and he’s screaming it too since you bet the same horse. You can’t help it. The queen of England would scream at that moment. It’s instinct. All animals understand speed. So number seven crosses the finish line and you go to the window with your dad’s hand on your shoulder and you hand the man your ticket and suddenly like magic your two dollars has become ten dollars and at that moment the future seems different. Like anything is possible. There’s just the crowd and the track and the horses and your dad picking you up and squeezing you and telling you it’s good to have some luck. “You and me, kid, we got the world by the ass.”

  CHAPTER 11

  BINGE

  When we get back to Oregon, Mom takes one look at me and says, “Wow, you got fat!” She pats my tummy, the one Bonnie calls my “cute little boy belly,” since it sticks out from beneath my cutoff shirt.

  I suck in my gut since I know I’ve done a bad thing.

  “We’re gonna need to put you on a diet unless you want everyone thinking you’re fat.” When we get back to the house, back to the moldy bread and four-day-old rabbit, she says we don’t need snacks in the house since it’ll be unhealthy for us to eat too much.

  When we go out to the grocery store, she points at a woman and says, “See that lady right there with the tight top? She’s too fat to wear something that tight. She shouldn’t do that in public.” She’s always saying things like that. “Some women don’t understand how to dress. Aren’t they embarrassed? Jeez.”

  I know she knows more about these things than I do but Bonnie is a big woman and we all call her bubby because she’s chubby but cute and she says women should dress however they want and we’re beautiful boys, exactly the way we are.

  It’s strange because Mom says that Grandma always told her that she and her sister were fat and that she didn’t like it so
I wonder why she does it too. My aunt Pam doesn’t look fat to me and when we go to visit Grandma and Grandpa in San Jose, she’s there with my cousins. She watches us while we play with those kind eyes of hers, like she wants to protect us. When one of her kids cries, she rushes over and hugs them and tells them it’s okay and I wonder why Mom doesn’t do stuff like that.

  Aunt Pam had a husband but they got divorced and now she works two jobs to put herself through school full-time studying computers at college, all while taking care of a two-year-old and a five-year-old. She seems like some kind of superhero to me.

  Uncle Jon got married and when he gets to the house in San Jose, he has his pretty wife, Andy, with him and their two little boys (they are also called cousins) named Logan and Bryce and their older sister, Heidi, who was from Uncle Jon’s first marriage. Uncle Jon still has the beard and the long hair and he seems like the coolest guy because he and Andy built a whole house in the mountains for their family to live in. He seems like Grandpa, like they have the strongest hands in the world.

  Grandma takes more pills now because since her car accident she is in a lot of pain. It’s hard for her to walk and she always tells us, “Don’t ever get old. It’s no fun.” She was driving her GTO (which everyone says she liked to drive fast even though she wasn’t driving fast on the day of the accident) and a car hit her head-on and crushed her spine. She didn’t want to do the exercises or surgeries that were supposed to help her so now she drinks Dutch all day in her chair and takes pills and seems to sink into the chair more and more as the day goes on.

  Everyone is sad because the doctors told Grandpa that he has cancer in his bones but he won’t talk about it and always says, “I’m fine, I’m fine,” and that his job is to “take care of Mother.” Mom says he was always like that because Grandma had nervous breakdowns when they were still living in Dutch and Grandpa always took care of her. His family wanted him to marry someone better than the daughter of a coal miner. His mother died and his father remarried within three months and Grandpa Frank was so angry about it he stopped talking to them and devoted himself to Grandma and that’s the kind of thing that also can happen in something called a family.

  * * *

  WHEN I GET back to school, I wonder if the other second graders think I got fat too so I remember to always suck in my gut because it’s bad to be fat. At lunch I eat only half my sandwich because I don’t want people to stare at me even though it makes me dizzy and it was good in California to just be able to eat when we were hungry.

  By the winter, Paul disappears. We come home from school one day at the end of fall and Paul’s truck is gone. There is no trace of him in the house or the backyard where we find him most afternoons, tending to the rabbits or doing chores in the garden. We go down the street to play and when I come home at dusk, Mom is sitting at the kitchen table with her hands in her lap. “Have you seen Paul?” We don’t say it but we know where he is. A kind of silence falls over the house. We all retreat to our corners knowing not to name the thing we see in our minds.

  Mom wakes me early the next morning. It froze overnight which means the rabbit water is frozen in the barn and must be replaced. I take a flashlight outside and one by one remove the water dishes from the cages, listening to the thump of feet on wire as the rabbits scurry in the dark. I fill a pitcher with hot water and walk back and forth between the kitchen sink and the rabbit barn to melt the ice. The sun rises as I feed them, putting pellets in each of the fifty cages with a plastic scoop from the feed bag. The sky has turned a kind of orangish blue in the crisp morning air. When I go inside, Mom and Tony are still sleeping so I pour a bowl of cereal and pack my lunch for school.

  When I get home, Paul is still gone. Mom is sitting on the couch. She says, “I have to get back to the hospital. I’m taking you guys to the Boys Club. I’ll pick you up after work.”

  Tony and I sit on the edge of the basketball court at the Salem Boys Club while the other boys play basketball or go upstairs to race the electric cars on the big track in the loft. We keep to ourselves, playing War silently with one of the huge combined decks from the toy bin as if scared that if we open our mouths, our secret will come flying out.

  Mom picks us up at six. We eat dinner quietly, the sound of forks on plates drowning out the thoughts in our heads: that we have been left again. We are alone and it is winter and we are cold. We’ve run out of firewood for the iron stove in the basement that heats the house. A cold snap comes in and we forget to leave the water running so the pipes freeze and there is no water for baths, no tap from the sink. We watch our breath as it comes out in white puffs, lying under a pile of blankets in our room in the basement with socks on our hands and winter ski hats on our heads. Eventually, Mom orders a cord of wood and asks Tony to split it into kindling with a maul and hatchet.

  Once the wood has been chopped and the house warmed up, I find Mom lying on the floor next to the woodstove, sobbing. She says Paul called. He was drunk and told her he thought he deserved a “prettier” woman. He didn’t want to act like he was married anymore, he was too broken, he wanted to leave Oregon and go be a forest ranger in Washington State. “It’s just the disease talking, Mom,” I say as she lies there in a ball with her face in the carpet.

  She looks up, an awful expression of helplessness on her face. “How do you know how to talk like that?” I shrug. I’m only repeating something I’ve heard her say a hundred times. I don’t really know what it means.

  Mom has the blank look on her face like the one she says the men in the state mental hospital get. She can say only two or three sentences at a time before her voice trails off and she loses concentration and you can see her go into the deep-russian.

  She goes to Al-Anon meetings at night “to cope.” Each morning I get up at five to tend to the rabbits in the dark then watch the sun rise before school.

  Paul is gone a month. We come home from school and he’s in the living room sitting next to Mom. His hair is wet and combed, his beard trimmed, revealing a nose that looks like a red lightbulb and a patchy pink face that deserves a beard. He’s wearing clean clothes. It’s clear they’ve been crying. He stands up and puts his arms out. We hug him and he says he’s sorry, that he is going to get help and get better. We can’t help but cry because he is back and we know that’s what we’re supposed to do in this scene, that’s what the script says in all the stories we’ve heard about broken families where the alcoholic comes home filled with tears and regret. But mostly we are relieved because we know there will be food tonight and the house won’t freeze.

  CHAPTER 12

  F-A-M-I-L-Y

  “Hi, I’m Frank. I’m an alcoholic.”

  “Hi, Frank!”

  I am swaddled in a wool blanket sitting at the edge of a big circle of fifty people around an enormous campfire. Above us is a canopy of pine trees, beyond that a clear night sky filled with a thousand dots of light. Tony is sitting on the dirt ground whittling a stick with a pocketknife. Everyone here is an alcoholic, I’m told, who’s trying to go through “recovery.” When Paul returned, we spent the winter being told that it was time that we all started acting like a “family.”

  It’s a strange word. F-A-M-I-L-Y. It’s big and comforting and each letter is different. Just look at it. The F is for father right there at the front. The M for mother is in the middle, connecting all the others. It’s a long word but usually people say it in one breath, like “famly” as if the I doesn’t matter. Without the F it’s just an “ambly,” a thing that ambles around from place to place. Without the M it’s just a “Fably,” which is a story about something that does not exist. For months after Paul got back, that word was all we heard. It was time to “act like a famly,” to learn to “talk like a famly,” to eat together “like famlies do.” The word seems to me like a cave, something big and simple you can walk inside to get away from a storm called loneliness.

  Frank’s got a big nose that erupts from his face over his red cheeks. On his head is a fishing
cap covered in lures, like the ones Paul showed us on our trips to the Willamette under the West Salem bridge. His big belly sticks out from under his buttoned overalls and blue flannel shirt. This is Frank’s fire. He lit it by placing a roll of black toilet paper, soaked in motor oil, beneath a structure of kindling and logs. It burned slowly for thirty minutes as the dry kindling caught and smoke poured out of the wet, mossy wood. “Me and Barb been comin’ up here to Detroit Lake for twenty years now, sittin’ round these fires, listening to old drunks talk about forgiveness and serenity.”

  Barb is his wife. She’s a very kind, large woman with short brown hair who sits next to him nodding and smiling. She looks like she’s been inflated with air, her thighs bursting, fighting against the blue denim of her jeans as she sits in a fold-up chair with her hands clasped in her lap.

  Mom told me that Barb was a popular speaker in Al-Anon, that she traveled as far away as Eugene and McMinnville to “tell her story.” When I asked her about what she meant by story, Mom said, “Everybody has a story in AA and Al-Anon. You know, what you went through with the disease and how it ruined your life before you found the program and admitted you were powerless and your life was in the hands of a higher power.” I asked her what a higher power was and she said, “Like God.” The point is to have a personal relationship, a “conscious contact,” with him. I asked who him is? Jesus? Does he sit in a chair? Does he have a beard? She said some people say Jesus, some say nature and some say it’s just “knowing the universe is bigger than all of us.” I didn’t know what she meant. I heard about how people go to church and that’s where God is but we’ve never been to one except to get the government cheese. We knew some of the stories about him and at that point I know there’s a God because whenever something good happens I look up at the sky and say thanks. I can feel that I’m talking to something real whether it’s Jesus or a guy with a beard or just an enormous blue sky stretching out beyond anything.