“Yeah. Do you guys play football here?”
“Every day at recess.”
“Cool.”
We talk about Michael Jackson and heavy metal, the Hardy Boys and fishing in the woods along the Santiam River. I take him to the football game at lunch, like he’s my recruit, this six-foot-three, corn-fed, midwestern boy. He proves to be the best athlete on the field, moving swiftly among the child-size bodies trying to get around him or catch him or block his pass. It isn’t just that’s he’s man-size. Even for a man, he’d be large. He’s also just a nice guy. He makes jokes. He uses the power his size gives him to be generous, complimenting other players, saying, “Damn, bro, you run just like O.J. with that move,” and “What can I say? The kid can flat out catch.” His energy casts a friendly spell over the monkeys on the grass field in front of Englewood Elementary. As one of the smallest and least coordinated football players, I spend most of the time retrieving the football when it goes over the fence.
When the game is over and we walk back toward the big yellow school building, I expect him to move on to other friends, better football players, older kids. But instead he just sidles right up to me, my own personal giant, and says, “Damn, these guys don’t know shit about football. You wanna come over after school?”
* * *
“THIS IS MIKEL. I met him at school.” Jake’s mom stands over a stove in yellow shorts and sandals frying something that spits grease on a range packed with dirty pots and coffee grinds. The house smells of two-day-old food and cat pee.
“Go find your sister. I think she’s in the back. And I thought I told you to take out the trash. That fuckin’ trash is taking over the house, damn it. Do some goddamn work for once! Mikel? What kinda name is that?”
“I don’t know. Just one my parents gave me.”
“You Russian?”
“No.” I want to say I’m from “Dope Fiends” and was born in a C-U-L-T and raised in a school that’s like an orphanage since that’s the closest thing to the truth but I just give my stock answer. “It’s like Miguel, but there’s a k.”
“Well, hi, Mick-ell. Are you staying for dinner? You gonna help my lazy-ass son with his chores?”
“Sure.”
“When you’re done with the trash, these goddamn dishes need doing. They been sitting here two fuckin’ days already. You can wash while your friend dries them.”
A little boy in a diaper watches us warily as he grasps onto her leg with his hand in his mouth.
“Jesus, Mom. Okay. I got it. C’mon.” We go to the porch and grab the trash bags, then come back inside to wash the dishes. I quietly take note of the sugar in the house. Since we’re not allowed to eat sugar because Mom says “it’s a drug that’ll kill you same as heroin,” it has become my habit to catalog whatever sweets might be found in other houses. This one’s pretty good: One box of Froot Loops, some Fig Newton–type cookies, and what’s this? Knockoff, generic Hostess chocolate donuts in the plastic sleeve?
“Are you allowed to eat those?” I point at the chocolate donuts.
Jake stares at me. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, are those for you or your parents?”
Again, the look. “They’re for everybody. You want a donut, man?”
“Sure. I mean if you’re having one.”
He grabs two donuts when we finish the dishes and leads me to his room in the attic. It’s got a low ceiling, so he has to duck his giant head just to walk around in it. A queen-size bed fills up the middle of the room. On the makeshift shelves of milk crates and shipping pallets is a stereo and two speakers with a stack of vinyl records on top.
“You play hearts?”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a card game. You bid on tricks and the one who bids right at the end and gets the most tricks with hearts in them wins.”
“No. Never heard of it.”
“How about cribbage?”
“No.”
“Gin rummy?”
“No.”
“What do you do?”
“I don’t know. Ride my bike and watch TV. Sometimes we smoke cigarettes behind the school.” After the fights, as a kind of peace offering, Tony and I started smoking together. Now that he’s in Los Angeles, I don’t have anyone to smoke with.
“Oh. Well, you could smoke behind the fence in the alley. Nobody goes back there. But we don’t have TV. We should go to your house next time.”
“Hmm.”
Jake puts a record on. It’s got strange guitars that sound like they’re underwater. He shows me the record cover. Three Imaginary Boys by the Cure. “Robert Smith is a fucking god,” he says.
“Who?”
“The lead singer of the Cure. This guy.” He points at a poster. It’s a silhouette of a man with big wild hair and a guitar slung around him. Next to him are the words “Boys Don’t Cry.”
We listen to the weird guitars fill up the room, Robert Smith’s strange warble floating over the band like some kind of wailing spirit. It’s weird. But good weird. I like it, but I don’t know why. Who are these imaginary boys?
We go into the kitchen to make noodles with canned tomato sauce, which we drown in butter, black pepper and the rubbery yellow government cheese that he must’ve gotten from the food bank. “This shit ain’t bad in noodles, but you can’t eat it straight.” Jake laughs as he stirs the wedges into the pot. It’s nice to have someone to joke with about government cheese.
We go back to his room. I tell him about Paul leaving and how we skin and eat rabbits for dinner and go to AA campouts and my brother who lives with my dad and Bonnie in L.A. He tells me he never knew his dad so I should feel lucky. All he knows is it was a man in Nebraska and how his mom was married to Craig and Craig has been in prison too. Sometimes Craig gets mad and threatens his mom but Jake gets in the middle so Craig screams at him. “He’s a scary fuckin’ dude when he’s mad.”
Craig is Alex and Ashley’s dad, Jake’s little brother and sister. Even though they have different fathers, he just wants to protect them and help them and you can tell he thinks it’s his job. He says he found a little packet of white powder in the dresser once so he thinks Craig is still on drugs or holding them or selling them. “I’m not sure which to be honest but hey, at least when he’s home, we got food in the house.”
Jake says people come by the house looking for Craig, sometimes in the middle of the night. He answers the door in his white tank top and creased khakis then reaches into his pockets to get a baggy which he’ll toss across the porch as he lights a cigarette. “Say what you will, the dude can sell and I’m not asking questions.”
He tells me the Cure is the best band in the world because Robert Smith plays all the guitars and writes all the songs and they’re not just about partying and whatever “bullshit Mötley Crüe or fuckin’ Ratt songs are about.” He says they’re about real life, about how things get fucked-up but that it’s okay to be fucked-up because at least you got other people who are fucked-up too. I nod and pretend to understand. We listen to three Cure records. I quietly decide to take down my Mötley Crüe poster as soon as possible.
He makes a tape of Cure songs for me on his stereo. I play it at night in bed on the Walkman Dad bought me. The songs are all so sad. He screams sometimes and he whispers sometimes and even the happy songs seem sad.
Yesterday I got so old I felt like I could die.
It feels good to feel bad. There’s a relief like something I can’t name, like something I can’t talk about is finally being said. Mom tells us how happy we are and I know it’s my job to pretend. If I tell her I’m sad, she just shakes her head and corrects me, telling me all the reasons I’m luckier than other kids. So I go to a place in my head where I can be alone. Listening to Robert Smith sing his happy songs about how sad he is feels like he’s there too, like he has his Secret Place in his head where he goes and since he wrote a song about it, he’s right here in my headphones, so we’re in this Secret Place together. Me and Ro
bert.
It’s a place where we are allowed to be sad, instead of feeling like freaks of nature, us weirdos and orphans.
I pull my eyes out, hold my breath and wait until I shake.
Jake and I push our desks together in class so we can crack jokes about other kids or the crush he has on Miss Cork, the young blond PE teacher with the puffy bangs who Jake swears he’s going to marry someday. We play football at lunch, and after school we go to his house to play cards and listen to records. Sometimes we shoot hoops and sometimes we get stuck watching Alex and Ashley while his mom goes shopping. She says she’ll be right back but then disappears for five or six hours at a time, leaving us to figure out what to feed a couple of two-year-olds for dinner. When we go to Plaid Pantry, he buys something at the counter to distract the old man while I steal cigarettes from the Winston display. He doesn’t smoke, but he seems to take a certain pride in the fact that I do, like it proves something about me, despite how small I am.
Everyone thinks he’s older. Sometimes they think he’s an adult so it’s like having a special power because nobody messes with you when you’re best friends with a giant and Jake is my first best friend and my best best friend in the world.
CHAPTER 21
THE GHOSTS THAT CROWD YOUR CASTLE IN THE SKY
Mom needs to start dating again. That’s what she tells me. She needs to meet a good man and she can’t be alone all the time. Paul still comes around to pick me up and take me places on weekends. Mom says, “It’s important we have a relationship. After all, he was your first father figure.” Paul doesn’t seem to see it this way. I think he just likes taking me to Chuck E. Cheese or the water tubes out in Keizer. I think Mom gives him money but I prefer the trips when we don’t spend any money, when we go fishing under the West Salem bridge or take long walks that turn into jogs and sprints in Minto-Brown Park. We decide I should be a runner since I love to run and that’s usually a good start. We both like to see how far we can go before we have to cut through the fields and head back to the car from exhaustion. He takes me somewhere every weekend. We never had the money to go to these places as a F-A-M-I-L-Y, so it feels like the two of us are trying to make up for something. He’s more distant now and he seems sad when he talks about the house on Breys Avenue. I can tell he misses us.
One Saturday, he doesn’t show up. We are supposed to go down to the 4-H fair to check out the cows and the crafts. He thought it would be good for me to learn more about nature. Instead, he calls the next day to apologize. He says he had some work to do and couldn’t make it, but Mom and I both know he’s probably drinking again. He comes just once more, taking me to the school to play baseball but forgets a glove and a bat so all we have is one ball and one glove. He stands at home plate and throws grounders to me which I try to field and toss back to him. He’s goofy about it, throwing the ball backward over his shoulder or throwing his glove in the air to knock it down when I throw it over his head.
When we get back to the house, when we say goodbye on the gravel path at the bottom of the six wooden stairs that lead up to the porch, he kneels down to give me a hug, his face right in mine, bushy and black and turtle-like. He has a tear in his eye that he wipes from behind his thick glasses while Mom stands over us. When he gets in his truck, the one Tony and I slept in on the way home from the Oregon coast, the one he drinks in alone and probably lives in now that he’s “too sick to function,” when he heads up Breys Avenue with his hand out of the window holding a wave to the street and turns right on D, Mom says he got sober just to come see me for the day.
I never see him again. The calls stop coming and so does his truck and later Mom tells me he’s dead. He drank himself to death. There is no catch in her voice and no tears and no funeral to attend. It’s not even a Big Talk. She says it matter-of-factly, like she’s describing a tragedy that happened to people in another part of the world. A natural disaster that could not be avoided.
“How? What happened?”
“It’s just something I heard,” she says. “He was really sick.”
The vagueness of the information, the sense that he is both alive and not alive, both a living father, a friend, a man in our house and someone who disappears to drink alone in the woods like some kind of sad ghost, always existed with him.
It seems there are ghosts everywhere. People who are both present and not present. They’re real then gone until I see them in a dream, sitting up in bed in the dark thinking, Did I imagine him? Where did he go?
I can’t stand the thought. Did he die holding a bottle in his hand in the back of his truck? Or in a car crash? Is he lying frozen right now in a riverbed under a bridge somewhere in Portland? Did he miss me? Did he think we wanted him to leave?
Did he even die at all? Why don’t we ever talk about it?
But Mom never says a word about him and I don’t know where to put all the things I know I’m not supposed to talk about anymore, the things I’m supposed to pretend never happened because they never happened in the World According to Mom. The list of things that don’t exist is growing: there’s the School, the bad men from Synanon with their clubs, the long depressions when she can’t be moved from her bed, Dad and now Paul.
“It’s just something I heard. He might just be drunk in a gutter somewhere. I don’t know.” That’s all she ever tells me and now there is another ghost.
Our parents were like ghosts in Synanon, haunting us then disappearing again, leaving us to wonder what their connection to us was supposed to mean. What is a mom and what is a dad and what is a family and if it’s so special then why did you leave me?
How long can you live with ghosts before deciding to become one? How long until the walls become clouds and the floor opens up like a clear blue sky and there’s nowhere to go but your stone tower where you are the one who chooses who to haunt and how to haunt and when to haunt? You learn to act, to pretend, to inhabit different forms in your mind, different faces to the world, some of them terrifying, some charming, some cunning, some innocent, some a hundred feet tall, godlike and invincible, others tiny and frail, beseeching and ironic. Five, ten, ten thousand different ghosts of your creation, one for every person you meet, one for every occasion, so many that they crowd the hallways of your castle in the sky.
But somewhere within those imaginary walls, sitting alone in the dark above the clouds, you are aware that you are none of these things. Only sad.
CHAPTER 22
THE MEN WHO LEAVE
Mom still goes to Al-Anon meetings even though Paul is gone. She tells me about an Al-Anon conference where there is a dance and she stood against the wall watching the men, noticing that she was attracted to the loners, the ones standing off by themselves, leaning against the wall. I wonder why she thinks this is something I need to know.
The twelve steps in Al-Anon are basically the same twelve steps as Alcoholics Anonymous. It’s not clear why but it’s something like once you build a ladder to the moon, you don’t ask questions about why it works. You just climb it. There’s a philosophy: don’t look down and don’t question. Which was the precise philosophy of Synanon before it went bad.
Step four is “Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.” Maybe that’s what Mom is doing leaning against that wall at that dance and maybe that’s why she tells me because I’m supposed to be following the steps too, taking inventory and admitting the nature of my wrongs to people.
When I say I miss Paul, she says, “It was really hard for me to let him go. All of this has been very difficult for me. Sitting at home waiting and wondering if he’s going to come back is not easy stuff, kid. It was hard but it’s better that he’s gone and you guys were never that close anyway.” I tell her about Minto-Brown Park and fishing and the long walks and watching cartoons with him and she says, “I just remember him leaving all the time and how hard that was because you stayed awake thinking about him.”
“That was you, Mom. We were cold because there wasn’t any firewood.
I had to get up early to change the water in the frozen rabbit cages.”
Her eyes wander away somewhere and when they return, she squints and lowers her brow like she’s overwhelmed, rubbing her temples, confused as if staring into a mirror, surprised to find something other than her own reflection.
“No. You weren’t cold. Were you? Stop exaggerating. What are you saying, sweetie?” She tilts her head as if searching for a word, scanning her mind for it. Then a calmness settles over her again. “No. It’s better now. He was too sick and you’re happier now that he’s gone. This has been hard. This has been so hard on me. I need to lie down.”
When I sit down to watch TV, she sits next to me and puts her hand out like I’m supposed to hold it. I don’t know what to say so I hold her hand for a minute then try to make up some excuse to leave the room. I don’t know how to tell her I don’t want to sit on a couch with our fingers interlocked like those couples on TV and I know that if I did, it would hurt her feelings and I’m not allowed to do that.
She tells me a man approached her at the conference. “A nice man,” she says. They talked for a long time. His name is Doug. He asked her to dinner. He’s the vice president of sales for a local company that sells jams. He’s “a normal guy. For once.” He has a job and isn’t a functional drunk or even a recovering drunk, a drunk that tries to be something else before doing the things drunks do again. “He’s not an alcoholic. So that’ll be new.” He went through a divorce from a “very religious” wife. They have two kids.
“But why was he at a program conference?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean if he’s not using drugs or whatever, why was he even there?”
“Oh. Well, he’s, um, dealt with some addiction issues.”
“What does that mean?”
“There are different types of addiction and they all follow similar patterns and alcohol is just one of them but families can get sick from them anyway.” I know she doesn’t want me to ask what his addiction is.
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