Gorilla and the Bird

by Zack McDermott

  The girl at the counter was pretty—a little too pretty to be taking burger orders at Spangles. But everything else was business as usual: fry grease smell, large Wichitans huffing burgers and guzzling Oreo shakes. I looked around for additional reassurances that a local R&B station playing Yeezy and Hova meant something more than the fact that local R&B stations tend to play singles from the two hottest rappers on earth. None came—the pretty Spangles girl tried to upsell me a larger combo and tack on a strawberry shake for only $1 more. Never before or since have I cried my way both into and out of a Spangles parking lot.

  I couldn’t make heads or tails of this thing. Is this what hearing voices was like? Maybe when schizophrenics “hear voices” it doesn’t mean they literally hear the voice of God or Fat Albert telling them to stab an infant or murder their son on the top of a mountain. Maybe it means they “hear” all the “voices” that are present in the world—songs on the radio, talking heads on the TV, customers in the Spangles express line—and they just make a mess of them.

  Later that evening, once the Bird had packed it in, I took a survey of the fridge; since starting back on my meds, I was constantly starving. Hell, yes: hot dogs, ketchup, 2 percent milk, Nesquik, Dillon’s sour cream and chive dip, baloney, and some leftover sopa from my grandma’s house. In the cabinet: Cheerios, Lay’s potato chips, white bread. I was staring down a white-trash madeleine de Proust. I wrapped a slice of white bread around two hot dogs and put the bundle in the microwave. While I waited, I threw one slice of baloney down the hatch and grabbed a Kansas Jayhawk coffee cup for the Nesquik. I garnished my hot dog plate with chips and dip and saved the sopa—best for last—for round two.

  Fishing for a big spoon for my Nesquik and bowl of Cheerios, I pulled open the silverware drawer and froze. The first night I’d spent in Bellevue, fully convinced I was on a disguised soundstage, I’d opened the top drawer of the small wooden dresser next to my bed and heard a nearly onomatopoeic creak. Creeaaaak. Slow and spooky, it sounded like a creaky dresser would sound in a movie; that is, perfect—but nothing like a real-life creaky dresser. I was hearing the sounds that we’ve artificially assigned to certain actions, movements, or objects—like how a bare-knuckle punch in a movie sounds like a mic’d up Mike Tyson knockout blow. I’d laughed at the Bellevue drawer because it was unexpected, but of course that’s what it should sound like; we were on a soundstage, after all.

  The silverware drawer in the Bird’s house, however, was not on a soundstage. And yet it sounded just like the dresser at Bellevue. I probably could have tolerated the sound if not for what was inside: a serrated steak knife with a scratched-up wooden handle. It looked like a murder weapon. More specifically, it looked like something Bill the Butcher, Daniel Day-Lewis’s character in Gangs of New York, might bury into his adversary’s ribs. I turned the knife over in my hand and set it down in front of my plate on the kitchen table. Wait a second, I thought, staring at the blade. Aren’t all of our knives shitty old knives like this? I’ve cut a hot dog with you before.

  I went downstairs in search of something I couldn’t mistake for a message or a symbol or a planted artifact: my brother. His bedroom is in the back of the basement, a solid forty feet from the stairs, but I could still hear his grizzly snore from the steps. I stood over him in his bedroom and watched him sleep for a minute or two until he sensed my presence and woke up. “What’s up, man?” He was groggy enough that he didn’t startle.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing. You’re just standing over me watching me sleep?”

  “Yeah, sorry. I was scared.”

  “It’s okay. You need something?”

  “Can I lay down for a second?”

  “Sure.”

  He smelled like himself. But his face looked puffier than usual. Fleshy but in an artificial way, like it was made of rubber. “You’re you, right?” I asked.

  “What the fuck does that mean? Yeah, I’m me.”

  I grabbed his face.

  “What the fuck are you doing, dude?”

  “I just had to touch your face. To make sure it was you. Sorry.” His stubble reassured me. His whiskers were sandpaper-ish but not as thick as mine.

  “Sorry. I’m just struggling, man.”

  “It’s okay. You know, sometimes when I’m alone too long I feel like I’m seeing shit that’s not there too. Go to sleep, okay?” I dozed off next to him for a few hours before relocating to the meth couch—the freebie from The Palace had made the move with us. The meth couch was authentic, I decided; can’t fake the meth couch.

  Chapter 8

  In the morning, I had to convince myself that, no, there weren’t Lollipop kids in the garage, as Lollipop kids were fictitious characters from The Wizard of Oz. It was just a coincidence that the red Suburban that drove down our quiet street when I stepped out of the garage was the same model as the one my friend’s mom drove in the early nineties. The old people puttering down the sidewalk could look funny unintentionally and effortlessly; no one had to plant them there. Old people do look funny.

  I took a deep breath and headed over to Granny and Pa’s. I have to check in with them within twenty-four hours of landing and I go over to their place every day when I’m in town.

  Before he went to rehab, Pa’s garage always smelled like Miller Lite, owing to the fifty-five-gallon Rubbermaid trash barrel filled to the brim with empties he can-crushed into hockey pucks. Pa’d jumped at the chance to take Boeing up on their offer of early retirement. “My plan was to just drink. Drink and maybe fish. Sounded like a pretty good plan.” Granny finally put a cork in his plan when she found him passed out on the back porch in the middle of February with his head split open. The next day, he asked her, “Are you going to check me in?” Granny said no, she wanted him to do it himself.

  I was five when I visited him in the hospital and the nurse told me, “Your grandpa is in the hospital because he is going to quit drinking.”

  I laughed at her assertion and said, “Yeah, right. All my grandpa does is drink beer, drink beer, drink beer!”

  The Bird hit me on the head and told me to cut it out.

  Pa took step nine seriously: Wherever possible, make direct restitution to all persons you have harmed. He’d been a shit father to the Bird, but he used his grandkids as an opportunity to make it up to her. He told her that she belonged in school, that she must take it when she got her scholarship, and that he and Granny would do anything she needed for her and the kids, financially and otherwise, so that she could finish. We spent most mornings and afternoons after school at their place. Pa was different, no longer grumpy and to be avoided. He hung a basketball hoop in his driveway and taught me how to play H-O-R-S-E. Without them, I wouldn’t have been able to play soccer, Alexa wouldn’t have been able to take violin lessons, and Adam wouldn’t have owned a drum set. I barely remember the North American grizzly. To me, Pa has almost always been a honey bear. Our biggest conflict was usually who would get the gravy first at Sunday dinner.

  While I love them both deeply, Granny and I have an extra-special bond. My mom went into labor with me the evening of February 8, 1983. The labor was sixteen hours long and intense. My mom refused drugs and wouldn’t consider a C-section. When the Bird was certain it was time to go to the hospital, my dad had carefully rolled and leisurely smoked a joint. She wasn’t even all that mad; a joint on the way out the door was par for the course. She was angrier later when, after she’d endured hours of excruciating pain, he left for another quick toke. The man returned to the delivery room and started blowing dank gusts into my mom’s face in an ill-timed gesture of assistance. “Breathe, breathe, breathe.”

  Granny didn’t make it to the hospital until hour thirteen of labor. Independent of the birthing difficulties, it’d already been a bad day. All afternoon she’d waited at home for the white coats to come and pick up her son. To Granny, I was his replacement.

  Fifteen years later, I had to tell my mom that her brother had died. Granny was crying
so hard when she called me that I didn’t recognize her voice.

  “Granny? What’s wrong?”

  “King Edward,” she said.

  “King Edward what?” I knew.

  “King Edward is dead!”

  “What do you want me to do? You want me to come over?”

  “No. No. Not yet. Where’s Mama?”

  “At school. She has a teacher conference.”

  “Will you go tell her?”

  “Of course.”

  “Okay, thank you, son.” She said thank you. Her cries were primal, but she said thank you.

  “We’ll be over in thirty.”

  My car was always Edward’s favorite car; that was the only reason it was still in the family. Every time Pa drove to Topeka to pick him up for a visit, Edward had two requests: first, “Bring the piss cutter”; second, “We’re going to Godfather’s and I’m eating a whole goddamn pizza.” A 1974 Dodge Dart Swinger, 318 engine, white hardtop. It was a fucking piss cutter. I shouldn’t have been allowed to drive it—way too much car for a fifteen-year-old.

  John Marshall Middle School was four minutes away if you followed the speed limit. My aim was to get there in under two. Anything slower felt like an affront to Uncle Eddie, not only because this news was so awful it demanded to be relayed instantly but also because he was so newly dead that it almost felt like his spirit was still fresh enough that he might be able to feel that piss cutter roar one more time. I J-turned out of the driveway and proceeded to cut piss.

  In two blocks, I had her up to eighty. In three more, I’d need to stop and make a right turn. Before I got there, a woman in a Buick LeSabre failed to recognize that I was doing four times the speed limit and thought she could make a lazy left turn out in front of me. The piss cutter was rear-wheel drive, of course, and she locked up immediately. My back end fishtailed left, then hooked right, and I exploded into the curb. It was a one-car accident, but I hit the curb so hard that I felt lucky I didn’t go through the windshield.

  The cops were there quickly; I assume the crash was loud enough that a neighbor called them. That or the yelling.

  I was still yelling “Fuck!” when the first cop pulled up. Of course everyone assumed it was about the car.

  “I have to get out of here! I have to go!”

  He must have been among the most reasonable officers in the world, because if not, I’d have been on the ground. It was my fault, I was flipping out, and there was a middle-aged white woman pointing a finger at me.

  “My uncle is dead! My uncle is dead! I’m going to tell my mom! She’s at Marshall! She’s a teacher at Marshall!”

  Paperwork was filled out, and soon enough I was dropped off in a squad car at the Bird’s school.

  I went to the library on the second floor. The place smelled like seventh grade and Coach Nash, but I’d never felt more like a grown-up in my life than when I walked into the library. I wasn’t crying—tried to poker-face it—but before I could ask anyone if I could steal Ms. McGilvrey away, the Bird was out of her seat. I made a head nod toward the hall.

  “What did you do?” She was frantic.

  “King Edward.”

  She knew, just as I had known when Granny told me, but she made me say it.

  Middle school hallways echo loudly. I could see the other teachers through the library’s portal window. Her screams left no doubt that someone had died. They’d have come running otherwise. I made eye contact with Mrs. Farley, my algebra teacher, and motioned that we were leaving.

  I practically carried her downstairs and to her car.

  Even though I hate it when Granny smells smoke on me, I smoked two cigs as I made the drive over for our morning routine. Eggs, bacon, Wichita Eagle, twelve o’clock news. Pa was eating his grapefruit at the bar when I walked in through the kitchen door. Granny was ironing in the basement, blasting Pink Floyd. You wouldn’t know it by looking at her, but the eighty-year-old with the beehive hairdo worships at the altar of Mick Jagger, Jimi Hendrix, and Roger Waters. She fell in love with the soundtrack to her son’s hell-raising days and she’s been ironing to acid rock ever since. Her perfect day starts with a load of clothes in the washer and the Stones or Floyd on the radio. Her dryer is fifty years old and weighs half a ton, but it still works as well as the day the Maytag man delivered it—probably because it doesn’t get much work. If it’s over thirty-five degrees outside, the dryer gets the day off and our laundry is pinned on the clothesline. Then she irons. Everything.

  While it’s nice to have someone willing to wash every stitch of the entire family’s soiled clothing, the favor does come with a price. First, you load up forty or so pounds of laundry in various old bags that are not fit to serve as a carry-on—old denim Winnie-the-Pooh gym bag with a missing strap, for example—and drive them to her house. You throw the giant sacks and bags and hampers down the basement stairs. Imperative: do not forget to leave explicit instructions not to iron T-shirts, jeans, or underwear. “Not even the jeans? Just a little touch-up? Just a touch-up, son. Please.” Omit that warning, and your jeans will be returned heavily starched with a razor-straight line running down the middle, Granny pleading innocence all along: “Oh, you didn’t say no crease, did you?” Depriving her of the pleasure she gets from putting a firm press on a pair of Levi’s feels almost sadistic. But I make it up to her by letting her feed me a lumberjack’s breakfast every morning when I’m in town.

  Granny rushed up the stairs, gave me a half hug, and took my and Pa’s orders: bacon, eggs; no toast; okay, juice if you insist; yes, coffee. “Can I talk you into a tortilla on the placa?” The placa is a heavy, plate-shaped iron artifact from the farm where she grew up in Tonkawa, Oklahoma, that she uses to heat up tortillas with melted cheese. Granny thinks she’s Mexican—and she’s at least half—but she also never met her mother, who may have been Native American. She looks more Lebanese than anything, but she rolls her r’s when she pronounces “Doritos.” Dorrrritos. I agreed to the tortilla on the placa.

  Pa treats being waited on hand and foot as a huge burden that he somehow overcomes. “William! Are you ready for breakfast?!” For years he’s claimed to have “selective hearing” but it’s now undeniable that he can’t hear much—Granny shouts everything at him. “William! Do you want sausage or bacon!? Turkey bacon or regular bacon!? Oatmeal!?” “Did you wash up, William?!”

  He buried his head in his hands as Granny rattled off the day’s specials. “Help me, dear Lord. Help me accept the things I cannot change. This woman.”

  “Pa, it must be awful having someone who lives to serve you, does all the cleaning and laundry, and cooks whatever you want for your every meal,” I teased him.

  “Weezy’s a pretty good ol’ gal,” he said as she clucked and sucked her teeth.

  “Mm. That man. I swear.” It’s quite an act.

  Over breakfast, I read the Wichita Eagle, or at least what was left of it. Wichita’s paper of record felt like a pamphlet; it was down to four or five pages. My favorite is the Opinion Line: “Obama still has not produced a birth certificate.” “We need to have mandatory drug testing for welfare recipients.” “Liberals want to take away the Second Amendment, but they can pry my guns from my dead, lifeless fingers.” “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.”

  After breakfast, Granny finishes the dishes and it’s over to the couch for the twelve o’clock news, which is basically a recap of the previous evening’s five and six o’clock programs. I usually doze off halfway through the newscast. Pa sleeps in his chair. Neither of us is allowed to touch the dishes.

  He falls asleep at the slightest lapse in conversation, but he’s not offended if anyone does the same, even if he’s in the middle of one of his stories. I know them all verbatim. “We once went out and got pretty tuned up, and old Captain Bobby knew about it. He got our asses out of bed at six in the morning and took us on a full-pack, twenty-mile field march.” Or “Madre’s father was a tough ol’ S.O.B. He was an old farmer—that’s the way they had to be.
” Or “I went to New York one time. We were staying in Danbury, Connecticut. We drove into the city and tried to go to TGI Fridays, but we couldn’t find it so we went back to Danbury.” There are a few more in the regular rotation—one about how when he was in “Ki’rea” the “Ki’reans respected us for our arms and we respected them for their legs. They had powerful kicks.” Another concerning how there really is no such thing as friendly fire. Also, never forget that the number one thing to do with your car is to “make sure there’s ’erl in it—good rubber is important too.”

  It was depressing to be there, watching Pa grow increasingly frail and more and more dependent on Granny to get through his day. And Granny, while still stout as a mule and sharp enough to espouse passionate opinions on the artistic merits of Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus versus Taylor Swift—loves the former two, loathes the latter—no longer possesses the stamina she did in her seventh decade. Their house has always been a sanctuary for me. I spent countless grade school mornings getting ready for school and eating Cheerios and eggs at that breakfast bar before Granny dropped me off at school; an equal number of evenings sleeping with Adam and Alexa on pallets of blankets on the floor before the Bird could pick us up at the end of her grocery store shift. In high school, before I could drive, it was six eggs and six pieces of bacon after soccer practice. Now, with their mortality front and center, I wanted to spend as many hours as I could with them. But I also wanted to flee after breakfast.