Gorilla and the Bird

by Zack McDermott

  Inside the home, with the addition of Clyde and his two kids, her obligations more than doubled. In the mornings, instead of getting three kids off to school by herself, she now had to get five out the door. Plus Clyde. She was up at 5 a.m. to pack seven sack lunches, including a giant Coleman cooler for him. Her new husband slept until the last possible minute, and once he got out of the shower, he’d stand in a towel in their bedroom doorway and ask, “Honey, can you come braid my tail?” Then he’d insist we all circle up and say the Serenity Prayer or an Our Father. He’d lead us into the Lord’s Prayer with “Who makes us a family?” To which the seven of us would collectively answer “Our Father, Who Art in Heaven, Hallowed be Thy name…” At the conclusion of the Lord’s Prayer, he’d say, “One day at a time. Keep coming back. It works if you work it!” Between Pa and Clyde, I’d heard it enough by the time I was ten that I started to think I might be a recovering alcoholic myself.

  They fought about me regularly. The Bird promised to keep a united front and not undermine him—especially not in front of me—but she tended to take my side when controversy arose between us. For instance, Clyde took issue with the number of hair products I owned and the absurd amount of time I spent on my morning hair routine. In those days I was a Suave man through and through—shampoo, conditioner, gel, and hair spray. If I’d showered the night before, I used a spray bottle to soak my hair from brow to neck. This required a towel to be wrapped around my collar to keep from soaking my shirt. (I couldn’t undergo the procedure topless since pulling my shirt on afterward risked ruining the perfection I had labored so diligently to achieve.) I used a fine-tooth black comb that had been handed out by the good folks at Lifetouch photography on picture day. Once I was good and spritzed up, I would slick back my jet-black hair. It was always tempting to stop there—who doesn’t like a good ol’ fashioned slick back? But that’s a bold move, requiring a certain panache few eleven-year-olds possess; it’s a villainous look, best worn by switchblade-carrying street toughs. My favorite shirts featured either Disney characters or soccer—ideally both.

  After the slick back, it took eight to ten minutes to find the perfect part on the left side of my head, making sure not a single strand trespassed to the wrong side of the part. Then the final touch: the Swoop. I’d hold my comb parallel to my hairline and run it backward as if I was going to slick back again, but at the last second I’d take a sharp turn off to the right. It’s a flick of the wrist, really, and it’s this last bit of flair that separates good from great. Finally, I’d preserve my work with twenty to thirty seconds of continuous hair spray. Voilà!

  “Do you want him to turn into a faggot?” was Clyde’s near daily refrain to my mother. “He uses more shit in his hair than the girls. And he fucking cries if he ‘messes it up.’” That all was true. My shit was windproof. And I did occasionally cry. I also carried the Lifetouch comb with me just in case the do needed a freshening up after recess soccer. I let the comb peek out of the back pocket of my jeans a bit too—seemed like the right thing to do.

  “He cares about how he looks; that’s okay,” she’d tell him.

  My hair was a huge point of pride for the Bird. I was her “Beautiful Black-Headed Baby Boy Born in February” before I was the Gorilla. B.B.H.B.B.B.I.F. “I always wanted a beautiful black-headed baby boy born in February,” she told me every February 9. I never questioned the absurdity of wanting such an oddly specific amalgamation of traits. Ma’am, would you take a beautiful black-headed baby boy born in March? We also have a nice January model available. We could offer you a February, but I’m afraid his hair is just very, very dark brown.

  Another epic battle was fought over the Breyers ice cream that Clyde loved so much. When he discovered that in my twelfth year I too had cultivated an appreciation for Breyers mint chocolate chip ice cream, he reacted as if I’d found a way to siphon off his pension and bleed him dry.

  “Seems like I had more ice cream than this,” he said one evening, genuinely perplexed.

  “That’s ’cause I ate some,” I told him, completely unaware that I was walking into a bear trap.

  “You ate some?”

  “I did.”

  “When?”

  “After school.”

  “When after school?”

  “Uh, right after school?”

  “What day?”

  “Hm, every day? Most days? No, every day. Pretty much every day.”

  “You are eating my ice cream every day after school?”

  “I’m eating the ice cream that’s in the freezer every day after school, yes.”

  “The Breyers?”

  “Do we have another one? Yup, the Breyers.”

  “That’s not acceptable. We’re going to have to get you a different ice cream.”

  I didn’t really think about the exchange again until a few days later, when a gallon of Dillon’s-brand mint chocolate chip appeared in the freezer, placed in front of the Breyers. If the placement of the block-shaped carton was too subtle, there was a note written in Sharpie taped to the lid: FAMILY. And just to remove any lingering ambiguity, on the Breyers: CLYDE ONLY.

  I went for the Breyers.

  When he got home that night, he went straight to the freezer and saw that neither the high-end Breyers nor the generic cube were still wearing their new signs. This did not sit well.

  “Buddy, can you come here a minute?”

  I was in the living room, looking over a little algebra, pretending not to hear him. Nestled in my lap: a cereal bowl coated with a few melted drops of white ice cream.

  “Buddy? Come in here! I need to speak with you.”

  I continued to pretend to solve for y. You’re gonna have to walk over here, motherfucker.

  “Did you eat the Breyers?”

  “The Breyers? Like, all of it?”

  “What’s that in the bowl?”

  “Mostly nothing.”

  “What was in the bowl?”

  “Might have been some ice cream.”

  “It was the Breyers!”

  “How did you know that, because it’s not artificial mint-green colored?”

  “Did you see the sign on the ice cream, goddammit?!”

  “The signs that said ‘Family’ and ‘Clyde Only’ in black Sharpie?”

  “YES!”

  “Yeah, saw them. Did you write that?”

  “Who the fuck do you think wrote that?”

  “A very selfish person, I guess.”

  “You are not to eat the Breyers!”

  By the time I entered high school, tensions between Clyde and me had reached an untenable level. I noticed my friends’ parents weren’t bitter and resentful. No one else had Heavy Chore Day. The food in their pantries was fair game for everyone to eat. Their parents seemed proud that they played sports, whereas Clyde seemed to view me as the ghost of bullies past just because I was athletic. “Old age and treachery will always overcome youth and skill” was a favorite non sequitur of his. (I’m still not sure what that means.) We’d go days without talking to each other. I tried to set records—fifteen days was as far as I got before I really needed him to pass the salt.

  I wanted him to hit me and egged him on at every opportunity. I knew that would end it. And I was pretty sure he’d be up for it. He once told the Bird, “The only thing keeping me from taking that boy into the yard and stomping him is you.” The Bird told him, “If you ever touch him, I will have you arrested, but before I do, I will sew you into your bedsheets and beat you with a cast-iron skillet.”

  By then she knew we needed out, but she didn’t know the exit strategy. Money was tight with two incomes. Could we really go back to one? By the end of my freshman year things hadn’t been good between them for a few years. I was always the main point of tension.

  Finally, he made it easy for her. I’d just come home from soccer practice and was exhausted and starving. He was in the TV room watching Star Trek, sitting on his ass, eating Breyers. Didn’t even bother with a hello before
he said, “Buddy, need you to unload and load the dishwasher. You didn’t do it this morning.”

  “Fuck you! But seriously, fuck you!”

  Now he was off his ass—he came at me quick enough that I was sure it was going there, to the yard.

  “Go ahead, big boy. Go ahead if you can do it! Fuck me!” He turned around, stuck his big ass into me. “It would be a two-hit fight! I’d hit you and you’d hit the ground!”

  I very much did want to go to the yard, wanted nothing more than to be able to beat his ass, but I was about twenty pounds short of capable. He grabbed me just below my shoulders and pinned my arms to my sides. “Old age and treachery will always overcome youth and skill!”

  Maybe it was the direct threat of violence, or that he threw the cat off the porch and broke its leg, or that he told my mom she should consider joining a gym and looking up the calorie counts in our meals, or When you call this house, you need to say, “Hi, this is State Your Name. May I please speak with Zachary?” or that he plastered the hair from his mullet to the shower wall and made Alexa clean it off, or that he insisted Alexa have her door open at all times, or that he threw the Bird onto the bed and called her a crazy cunt after she told him Zack doesn’t need to ask permission to take a bath in our bathroom, or the affair, or the accumulation of it all. Hell, maybe it was the fucking Breyers. Either way, we moved out the next day.

  On the way out the door, Clyde told her, “You’re going to fall flat on your ass without me.”

  Chapter 7

  Wichita (n): tobacco, chewing tobacco, cigarettes, Bud Light, Keystone Light, Crown Royal. Muscle-car envy, Camaro, Chevelle, Fucked On Race Day. Join the army. Serve your country. Church, gun shop, pawnshop. Meth. Baloney, generic cereal, mac ’n’ cheese. Can you lend us a pat a margarine? No shirt, no shoes, no problem. All you can eat. God hates fags!

  No matter where I’m coming home from, the Wichita-bound flight is always a puddle jumper with a low ceiling and passengers smiling like they’re boarding the Titanic. Officially licensed NCAA and NASCAR apparel is one uniform. A different uniform is worn by soldiers heading back to McConnell Air Force Base, who are thanked often and profusely for their service. The earnest, idle chitchat between weary travelers flies fast.

  We’ve got family in Dallas, so we was just visiting.

  Oh yeah? Well, we’re going the other way—we have family in Wichita!

  We are a simple folk.

  I was two rows in front of the Bird but I could feel her stank eye when I ordered my first, then second, then third rum and Coke.

  It’s only ten minutes door to door from the airport to our house, and along the way memory lane is paved with Outback, Target, Pizza Hut Italian Bistro, Village Inn, and the Applebee’s where I went for prom. Before dinner, my date and I took pictures in front of my 1994 Z-28 Camaro and I thought I looked pretty sweet with my frosted blond tips and a diagonal line shaved through one eyebrow. I did not get made fun of for any of that. Pa dropped me $50 for the evening and instructed me to “tell that little girl to get whatever she wants on the menu.” That turned out to be the pick-three deal: mozzarella sticks, Bourbon Street Steak, and a Chimicheesecake for dessert. We consummated the special evening at a Holiday Inn Express.

  It’s a damn near certainty that in any given ten-minute drive in the ’Ta, you will end up at a stoplight with a fella revvin’ up a Chevy with a 350 or better under the hood—the unspoken question being You wanna go? People are quick off the line, and allowing someone to merge in ahead of you is simply not done. Confederate flags, Calvin and Hobbes pissing on the Ford logo, dangling fake nutsacks, John 3:16, and Kansas City Chiefs arrowheads are the more popular vehicular accoutrements. There was a time when I non-ironically wanted nothing more from life than a full-size K5 Chevy Blazer with thirty-three-inch mud tires, a six-inch lift, and a BIG DICK’S SUSPENSION sticker plastered across the back window.

  As we made the left off Ridge Road onto Denmark, our street, I felt a little pang of nostalgia to see the bowling alley at the end of our block. There is something quintessentially Wichita about a packed bowling alley on a Wednesday night. The attached sports bar, Crummie’s, hosts nightly karaoke where you can count on hearing an off-key rendition of “I Hope You Dance” followed by a botched “Baby Got Back.” There are never more than five audience members, including the three indifferent drunks stuck to their barstools.

  I spent my whole life trying to get out of this place. It’s as familiar as an identical twin, and yet I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that this is the factory where I was assembled.

  The Bird’s current house on Denmark Street, though far from luxury living, is a huge upgrade from The Palace, where we lived after Clyde. I don’t remember packing and we didn’t bring much—no bowls, plates, or silverware; a few towels and bedsheets, our beds, the Bird’s desk and Gateway computer, a yellow metal folding chair, and the TV. The hulking wood-encased RCA with no remote was worth maybe $50.

  Mom didn’t tell Granny or Pa that we were moving out until we were gone. Not that there was much time, given that the decision to move and the move itself were separated by fewer than twenty-four hours, but she’d intentionally concealed from her parents how bad her second marriage had become. One divorce was hard enough to own up to.

  We needed a new place to live, and we needed it cheap. The Bird was $30,000 in the hole to creditors, soon to file for bankruptcy. The Palace was the best she could do. There was no deposit and there was no first and last. The Bird had a friend who had a friend who was also in need of a housing switch—her husband was getting out of jail and she didn’t want to be there when he came back. We took over the $300 rent payment and agreed to store the belongings she didn’t have time to pack.

  It stank when we walked in. I’d smelled this place before and didn’t need to go downstairs to know what the basement looked like: crickets everywhere, wet floor, water-damaged walls, soiled concrete, exposed insulation, galaxies of cobwebs, and a sump pump. Useless for anything but a tornado shelter, and terrifying to children under the age of ten.

  The bathroom floor was moist, rotted, and carpeted. When we stepped out of the shower, the floor sunk in several inches. It was clear to all that if we stayed there long enough one of us was going to fall through. Some electrical oddity caused the bathroom sink to shock us every time we turned the faucet on or off. Three of the windowpanes were broken, and the backyard looked like a jungle. It would definitely be a loud and painful mow, with sticks shooting into my legs. But at least it would be a voluntary mow—I’d be doing it as a favor to the Bird, not as Clyde’s servant.

  “Don’t think this place is up to code,” I told the Bird the day we moved in as we lugged boxes out of the bed of her friend’s pickup.

  “What are you talking about? This place is a palace,” she said.

  Granny nearly fell over the first time she saw our new digs. The filth in the kitchen, the musty smell, the heat—she immediately called for a bucket of soapy water and began scrubbing down the cabinets with a washcloth. Pa was pissed. “Goddamn asshole. Why didn’t you call the police and make that sumbitch move out?” He had liked Clyde, but that flipped quick. No AA aphorism was pithy enough to excuse this bullshit. “Seems to me you need a goddamn air conditioner,” he rightly observed. The Palace was a sweatbox—and it ain’t a dry heat in Kansas neither. Pa picked up an old-school window unit—300 or 400 pounds of real mett-ul that blasted. “They don’t make ’em like this no more. Real mett-ul.”

  The Palace had two bedrooms, and the Bird gave one each to me, fifteen, and Adam, twelve (Alexa was away at college by then). But the Bird’s “room,” which was the “office,” which was also the “dining room,” which was also the “living room,” was the only one in the house with AC, so from that first night on all of us slept in that one room. The Bird slept on Adam’s twin, formerly the bottom half of a bunk bed set he’d shared with our stepbrother. Adam took the blue crushed-velvet couch that the battered woman had left
behind. Dust clouds would scatter if you smacked the cushions; he liked it. She had also left an orange pullout, which we christened the meth couch. It looked like it’d been acquired at a police auction after a methamphetamine den raid. I took the meth couch.

  My mom started graduate school at Wichita State that fall and once again became a fixture at her desk, the green legal lamp back on every night—busting double shifts again, but at least her day job was no longer sacking groceries. In her second year of teaching the Bird found her stride. She was so good with the “bad kids”—particularly the Vato Loco Boys and other gangbangers—that her classroom became the default destination for students serving “in-school suspension.” Send ’em to McGilvrey became a popular policy among her colleagues who’d rather not deal with the bullshit.

  For the vatos that loved to draw, she’d bring in intricate pictures of the Virgin Mary and say, “I bet you can’t draw this.” After they’d produce some pretty solid replicas, she’d say, “You traced this. I know you did. It’s just too good.” She started a break-dancing group and an after-school gospel choir. She’d bring in a boom box and big pieces of cardboard for the break-dancers and let them do backflips out of her classroom window. For the gospel singers, Kirk Franklin and the Family albums: “Do you want a revolution?! Woop-woop!”

  Her colleagues accused her of making ISS too fun. It’s supposed to be a punishment, you know? The Bird didn’t care. She loved the bad kids. Midway through that second year, she figured out why. “It’s because I had to raise your stubborn, obstinate ass. They walk slow, cock their chins, trust no one, are viciously loyal to a few. Adults totally write them off, but, thanks to your gorilla coconut-headed ass, I think I get them.”