Gorilla and the Bird

by Zack McDermott

  “Zack, don’t be an ass.” The Bird wanted me out of there, and quick. She seemed nervous that the whole thing could fall apart at any minute.

  “Okay, I think we’re good. Can my flaccid penis and I be on our way now?”

  I’d forgotten what the sun felt like. It was better than I remembered, and I wanted to soak up as much as possible before it got dark outside. We decided to make the eighteen-block trip back to my apartment on foot.

  That Manhattan is loud and fast is hardly news, but after a week with the zombies it felt like the Indy 500 was being raced on the street and the New York City Marathon was simultaneously under way on the sidewalk. Dizzying. I needed the Bird with me; there was no way I could’ve navigated it alone.

  We walked the final few blocks back to my apartment, retracing in reverse the beginning steps of my TV shoot. Outside the little Australian meat pie spot on my corner, I suddenly remembered that, on my jaunt, I’d hoisted their five-gallon water jug over my head, fully intending to smash it through the window. I was saved only by the Aussie waitress, who gently said, “Don’t, mate.”

  I looked across Tompkins Square Park and stared at the basketball court. Could Daniel Day-Lewis really have been there? Could he really not have? Occam’s razor says what? I decided I didn’t need to know right away.

  The walls of my apartment were still covered in red Sharpie. Anyone—even I—could see that a tornado of madness had blown through here; the wreckage was everywhere. Twelve days earlier, I had been proud enough of my work that I’d expected my roommate to thank me when he saw it. I didn’t understand when he sighed and went back to his room in a huff.

  And, holy shit, it wasn’t just my pothead roommate who’d seen all of this—I’d brought my fucking intern from Legal Aid into this place! Worse, I’d also shown him a good chunk of the ten hours of home video I shot while wearing a sombrero, first dancing and then crying. What was Scottie thinking while he sat next to me at counsel table the next day?

  I paced my apartment for a few more minutes and went into the bathroom. I looked in the mirror and saw a stranger. My metabolism had been burning like a furnace for months from not sleeping or eating. I’d thought I looked ripped, but now it was clear I was just emaciated. The dark circles under my eyes were so pronounced it looked like I’d been punched. I’d aged five years in a few months.

  My pupils were huge, dilated beyond belief. The pretty doctor’s voice saying the words “psychotic break” played through my head on a loop. These eyes looked psychotic. Something was not right with the face I was staring at. I had a psychotic break. I had a psychotic break. I had a psychotic break! I was now in the same league as Charles Manson and Uncle Eddie. Eddie was the scarier proposition—we looked similar enough that it felt like he was staring back at me from the mirror. Psychotic. You are psychotic.

  I wanted to shatter the glass. I wanted to bleed. But instead I collapsed in the corner. The incomprehensibility of the situation overwhelmed me. There was no TV show. I’d become a fucking crazy man.

  The Bird came in and rubbed my back.

  “I’m insane,” I sobbed.

  “You’re going to be okay, Gorilla,” she said.

  “Psychotic!”

  “You’re okay.”

  “Have I been crazy my whole fucking life?”

  “No, baby. You are okay. This is going to pass.”

  We flew home to Wichita the next morning.

  Chapter 6

  In 1989, when six-year-old me watched the Bird walk into our small A-frame house—a $19,000 box with a triangle on top—after a long day at work, he saw a tired young woman in oversized round glasses, hair either in a perm or due for one, the straps of her brown Dillon’s apron dangling at her sides. Her weariness was palpable to me even then.

  The day the letter from Grow Your Own Teacher came, she tore it open while standing at the mailbox, then took off running down the block, yelling, “I got a scholarship! I got a scholarship!”

  “What’s a scholarship?” I asked. I’d never seen her that happy before.

  “A scholarship means I am going back to school.”

  That sounded weird. “Will you wear a backpack?”

  “I will wear a backpack.”

  She got a full ride to Wichita State University. Almost exactly ten years behind schedule, the Bird was finally starting her life, pursuing her dream of becoming a teacher.

  She had to work full-time throughout. Her boss made her fry the doughnuts every morning at 5 a.m., even when she was pregnant. It made her throw up; that’s why he made her do it. Within an hour of getting home from work, she’d be seated at her desk, reading beneath her green-and-gold legal lamp. It could be Shakespeare or Zora Neale Hurston or John Updike, but whatever it was, it was getting her a page closer to her bachelor’s degree in English literature. She finished in four years, magna cum laude.

  She was turning her life around but, unfortunately, still not exercising great judgment in the man department. She didn’t speak ill of our dad to us back then, though there would have been plenty to say: he didn’t pay child support, he was ripsnorting the shit out of some cocaine, he wasn’t working, and, perhaps worst of all, he thought he was going to become a famous producer when he moved to Hollywood.

  Still, the Bird choosing Mack might’ve been more forgivable than the man she settled on next—she was, after all, thirteen when she and my dad started dating. They were children. By the time Clyde Nerlinger showed up—about a year after the divorce—she had lived some life.

  Alexa knew he was bullshit from the jump. She met Clyde when he came to pick up the Bird for their first date. Alexa was practicing scales on her violin when he knocked. We didn’t even know the Bird had a date planned that night, but when Alexa opened the door, Clyde snapped off a formal salute, like a Marine addressing his commanding officer. “Howdy! I’m here to pick up your mother!” He wore a purple satin bowling-team-style jacket with his name embroidered in gold cursive on one breast and a patch that read WAM! over the Chrysler symbol on the other: Wichita Area Mopar Car Club. Parked in our dirt driveway was his membership credentials: a mid-seventies Dodge Charger, bitchin’ cherry-red, pretty good condition. That car foretold a future of countless requests to “just drop us off here.” We didn’t want that thing anywhere near our school. Holy shit, my sister thought, I hope she doesn’t marry him.

  “Partner!” he greeted me in a clearly put-on folksy drawl as he brushed by Alexa. He smelled like musky cologne and his jeans were acid-washed and too tight. Also, he had a legit mullet. But I was fixated on that jacket. On the one hand, I couldn’t judge his style too harshly. I too owned a satin bowling-team-style jacket. Mine showed that I belonged to the Wichita Force Soccer Club, but it was black, not fucking purple. Also, I was seven. My goalie jersey was covered in Puff Paint and said ZAK ATTACK!

  Clyde was a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, deeply beholden to the tenets of both Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous—a proud and altogether not anonymous “Friend of Bill W.” Pa liked that about him; my grandpa had been sober himself three years now and had become heavily involved with “The Program.”

  A year later, I was the only one to congratulate the Bird when she told us she was planning on marrying Clyde. At that age, I thought that’s what you were supposed to say, what a grown-up would say. I felt manhood creeping one step closer as the words left my mouth.

  “Congratulations.” I nearly laid a firm handshake on her. Cigars? Champagne? Anyone? My little brother was five; he didn’t get it. Alexa was eleven—she cried; she got it.

  “When will he be moving in?” I asked politely.

  “Next week.”

  Truth is, by the time the Bird dropped her bombshell, Alexa had already learned the news. In 1991, the first thing an eleven-year-old girl—even a violin-playing, straight-A kiss ass—did right after school was check the answering machine. “This message is for Clyde and Cindy. We are thrilled to inform you that you’ve been approved to get married
at the Rainbow Event during this year’s River Fest!”

  “Just tell me why?” Alexa cried. I’d never seen this much pepper out of my big sister.

  “That’s the choice I’ve made,” the Bird said, sounding a little too resigned to her fate.

  But I don’t have any trouble understanding why she did it: she was divorced with three kids and worked at a grocery store while taking a full class load. In those days we ate a lot of baloney sandwiches. One slice of baloney, two slices of “cheese,” Miracle Whip, white bread. In the summer, there was always Kool-Aid in the fridge—preparing a pitcher of purple was the first culinary art I mastered. Packet of purple, one cup of sugar, stir and refrigerate. Generic mac ’n’ cheese on the regular, hot dogs, and ramen—lots of ramen—rounded out the staples. There were more groceries in the fridge after payday than there’d been the entire week before. We didn’t have enough money, not even close.

  And you don’t have to be the most perceptive seven-year-old in the world to see that when your mom puts that brown Dillon’s apron on every morning and comes home just in time to tuck you in she is exhausted. That where she’s just been has taken something out of her. That it was going to be tough to pull the chain dangling from the green glass shade on the legal lamp.

  Clyde, a telephone repairman for Southwestern Bell, could transport us into the security of a squarely lower-middle-class lifestyle, and she liked that he too was a single parent who seemed to care a great deal about his daughter and son. The marriage felt almost arranged, with the Bird as both the bride and the one marrying herself off. For the well-being of her children, He’ll do, I guess. Her kids needed a man in the house.

  River Fest is Wichita’s white-trash Mardi Gras. The Arkansas River—pronounced “OUR-Kansas” by the locals—isn’t much of a river. When the river is low, an elite long jumper could clear it. So it’s a somewhat odd focal point for the city’s yearly expression of civic pride. Wind Wagon Smith is the festival’s official mascot, played by a prominent member of the Wichita Chamber of Commerce—preferably a fat man, late middle-aged, with a white beard. Santa Claus in a Cap’n Crunch costume, basically. It’s an elected position. There was rumor that WWS might grace the Bird and Nerlinger’s wedding ceremony with his presence; alas, he had to fire the starting pistol for the bathtub races on the other side of the river. No matter—what the wedding lost in his royal absence was more than compensated for by the enthusiasm of the unwashed masses. Shirtless, sunburned men in frayed cutoffs and baseball caps purchased with Big Tobacco loyalty points crushed Busch Lights on the riverbank while they whooped and hollered throughout the ceremony.

  Clyde insisted on wearing full traditional Scottish garb to the wedding: a kilt, knee-high socks with the little garters and flags at the top, a boot knife, a frilly pirate shirt, a jacket that would have looked quite smart on a magician or lion tamer, and a fucking fur pelt. The Bird did not want him to wear a kilt. She reminded him he didn’t even know for sure that he was Scottish, that he’d never been to Scotland, and that he’d never met his biological father (from whom the Scottish blood was allegedly passed). It was embarrassing to her but Clyde was a catch, at least relatively speaking given her current circumstances. The Bird wore a frilly ivory-colored number with lacy sleeves that she found at the Salvation Army for $50. She called it “Spanish.” Adam and I wore whatever we’d worn to Easter Mass the previous year, certainly purchased on sale from JCPenney. Alexa wore her violin recital dress, which looked like it was made from the fabric of an old lady’s couch. Clyde’s two kids rounded out our “white-trash, mutated Brady Bunch,” as he liked to call it.

  The River Festers on the hill were yelling “Get it!” and cheering like the Chiefs were about to win the Super Bowl when the bride and groom sealed their vows with a kiss. Five or six of them tried to form a human tunnel—the kind parents make for five-year-olds to run through before a soccer game—but it never really caught on. There was no reception after the wedding; the Bird sent us off with Granny and Pa for the night, and the two newlyweds hit the Wendy’s drive-thru.

  There are two ways to approach the role of new stepdad: You can go the friendly route—soft-pedal, build some trust. Don’t worry, I’m not trying to replace your dad. Or you can seize the opportunity to lead that totalitarian regime you’ve always dreamed of. I am your parent! You will respect me!

  Clyde opted for the latter. He immediately instated something he called Heavy Chore Day—aka, Saturday. Like Sunday Mass, attendance was mandatory but HCD lasted much longer. The whole family was up and working by 0800 and the workday lasted eight hours. Duties were segregated between men’s work (in the yard) and women’s work (in the house). If there were any holdover friends from a Friday night sleepover, they were welcome to stay, “but if you’re here, you need to contribute.” Our friends quickly learned to request early pickup times.

  Clyde’s vibe was all drill sergeant. “Police the lawn for anything that ain’t grass or dog shit. Shovel the dog shit. After you mow, edge the perimeter.” Half the jobs didn’t even make sense: “Move this pile of rocks to the other end of the yard. Dig a hole over here, cart the dirt in the wheelbarrow over there and make a dirt hill.”

  Absolutely no water breaks until he said “Take five for water, boys!” Unsanctioned trips to the spigot were viewed as obvious attempts to lollygag. Clyde never served in the army, but he did start cutting his hair into a high and tight military flattop; the mullet stayed and he usually wore it in a braided rattail.

  Even when it was a hundred degrees and humid as all hell outside, we put in eight-hour days. Light snow, windchill below freezing? “Bundle up, boys!”—eight-hour days. And if it was just too goddamn cold, we’d join the women in the house; even with the added hands, the workday somehow still stretched to a full eight hours. “It’s training for when you’re an adult!”

  “I could clean all of this faster than you,” he liked to say. “Me and your mom could knock it out; it’d actually be much easier. But you wouldn’t learn how to do it. This is how you become a man.”

  Since Adam was just five years old when HCD started, he only had to pick up rocks. I was eight, so I mowed and edged. The yard was full of goathead thorns, which would get stuck in my shoelaces. Rocks would shoot into my shins from the mower.

  But the women’s work was worse. “Empty all of the dishes out of the cabinets and scrub the inside of the cupboards with warm, soapy water. Shop-Vac the living room! Not vacuum, Shop-Vac!” And laundry—oh, the fucking laundry. I learned that a week’s worth of clothes for seven weighs about fifty pounds. When the weather was nice, Clyde insisted that the clothes be hung on the clothesline, even though we had a perfectly good dryer. Also, my stepbrother couldn’t properly wipe his own ass; Clyde was still giving him tutorials well past his eleventh birthday. The girls weren’t allowed to throw his Hanes briefs away either; after all, we couldn’t exactly afford for him to wear a new pair every day. Instead, they had to scrape his caked-on shit into the trash before washing his clothes—thankfully, at the Bird’s insistence, in their own private, contaminated load.

  The house wasn’t even all that dirty to begin with. Monday through Friday (Sunday being the Lord’s day) we received our assignments from the CHORE CHART—a matrix Clyde created with the days of the week running across the top and our names, but not his, running vertically down the side. He was exempt because “My job is to pay the bills and put food on the table. If you want to do that, you can get off the CHORE CHART.” We couldn’t—child labor laws and all—so it was an empty offer.

  The most infuriating part of all the housework was that he acted as if there was some voluntary component to it. “Buddy,” he’d ask, “would you mind loading the dishwasher after dinner?” If I said “Yeah, kind of. I have homework,” he’d say “Buddy, when I ask you to do something, you do it.” If I then said “So, it’s not really an ‘ask’ so much as a ‘tell,’” he’d say “I am the man of the house.”

  The Bird had been nearing gr
aduation when she married the new “man of the house.” In addition to navigating all the expected difficulties of combining two households, she also juggled forty hours a week at Dillon’s, a full course load at Wichita State, and student teaching. As soon as she graduated and began working her “dream job”—teaching language arts to seventh graders at the worst middle school in Wichita—the Bird began to fear that she’d made a horrible mistake. Many days she wondered if she’d done the right thing by leaving Dillon’s. My mom worked at that grocery store for fifteen years, through three pregnancies, a husband, a divorce, and a new husband. Just before she left, they offered her a management position. She felt stupid for not taking it—maybe Dillon’s was a good enough job, and she was good at it.

  She cried every single day after school. Because she loved to read and write, she thought she’d love to teach others how to read and write. Not true. As soon as she started grading her students’ journals, she realized she wasn’t an English teacher, just a glorified spell-checker. The kids thought she was fun—she planned her lessons around Ricki Lake and let her students play music in the classroom—but she was too nice. And in these early days, her kindness was exploited as weakness. The gangsters were her favorite kids—the Vato Loco Boys, Folks, Sur 13, Bloods, and Crips—but she couldn’t teach the eight parts of speech to kids who read at a kindergarten level. She cried because their parents didn’t care if they had four or forty unexcused absences; she cried because she knew what black, blue, red, purple, and green bandanas hanging out of a twelve-year-old’s back pocket meant; she cried because she knew her kids had cousins in high school who’d been shot and she knew they were two blocks and two years away from the same; she cried because she was terrified of the parents discovering she was a grocery-bagging fraud who lived in a shit house and had to borrow sugar from the neighbors. But mostly she cried because every day felt like starting a new job—a job she felt she didn’t know how to do properly, a job that had cost her four years of sleep-deprived hell on earth to land, a job she thought she hated.