Gorilla and the Bird

by Zack McDermott

  Most days I made it through at least the five o’clock news and checked out before sports in the middle of the six o’clock rerun. Between the paper and the two and a half local broadcasts, I stayed pretty well informed on Wichita current events, hanging out with Granny and Pa. On my way out the door, Granny would laugh while piling hangers of ironed gym shorts onto my fingers. “I’m going to load you down like a burro, Zachariah.”

  My evening routine was as formulaic as my afternoon with the old folks. Garage. Beer, smoke. Beer, smoke. Sit in the kitchen, stare at bulldog. Garage. Beer, smoke, smoke, smoke. How many cigarettes can I smoke in a row? Four or five spread out over three beers felt about right. Then two more. Around beer six, I’d start thinking, Okay, two or three more, then let’s call it.

  Remnants of high school are jammed into the back corner of the garage: a stack of goalie gloves, Northwest Grizzlies posters the cheerleaders made when we went to State, a thirty-six-inch plyometric box turned upside down—inside that box, several pairs of soccer shoes, a jump rope, a weight vest for running wind sprints. Relics that used to define me. It was hard to believe that I once used peroxide to dye my black hair blond in a show of team solidarity; or that we used to hold freshmen down and slap their bare bellies until they bled; or that I’d been proud to be one of only two players my freshman year to receive a red belly; or that I had a letterman’s jacket on order before they even handed out the patches. The boy who wore military fatigues on game day had become a different person.

  But who?

  Ever since my stepdad started calling us poor white trash when I was eight years old, I became obsessed with proving him wrong. Speak for your damn self, buddy. My mom goes to college and we all make straight A’s. I play soccer, my sister plays the violin, and Adam will do something too when he gets bigger. You’re the one with a flattop and a mullet that you braid into a rattail. You’re the one who barely graduated high school. You’re the one who goes to the Taco Tico and orders “just a cup o’ meat, partner.”

  I was proud that the boy who’d once been called a faggot for styling his hair in the ’Ta went on to live with gay guys in Brooklyn. Hell, just not being racist felt like an accomplishment at a certain point in my life. I never imagined I’d someday have heated discussions about transgender rights or know what “cis” meant. But where was all that now? I was living in the goddamn garage. A week earlier I’d been involuntarily committed to a psych ward. Mr. Fucking Lawyer. Sure as my brother was in the basement snorting Addies, I was staring at the NORTHWEST GRIZZLY WINNING FORMULA, kicking a flat soccer ball against the wall, so tipsy I could barely make contact, and drinking the same cheap beer we shotgunned after games. Good job not thinking it’s awesome to wear camo cargo pants anymore. Good job getting over subwoofer envy. Good job not getting in a fight for a couple of years. But fuck—what’s a JD worth in the fucking garage? Pretty good résumé you’ve got there, bub. Overqualified for making ash heaps on top of Coors Light cans.

  The Bird popped her head in the garage and did a few head rotations. “Just a reminder for the gorilla in the lawn chair surrounded by beer cans and smoking like a trucker: you have your second psych appointment tomorrow.”

  “Appreciate it. Night.”

  “The town crier will be sounding her trumpet at nine a.m.”

  The teenager sitting across from me at the Via Christi Behavioral Health Center annex was wearing huge wide-legged jeans and a black wolf T-shirt with purple and white lightning bolts shooting down from the moon behind the wolf’s head. He looked like he was no stranger to a Mountain Dew for breakfast. I imagined we were looking at an oxy addiction, maybe meth too. His mom sat next to him, purse lipped and scowling before muttering something about “Last time, goddammit. Last chance, mister. Ya understand?”

  He reminded me of the kids that lived next door to us growing up. The ones that smelled like piss and child abuse. Shirtless in February and covered in dirt and Kool-Aid and screaming at us to stay off their fucking property—when they were six and four. And the Bird used to have to borrow margarine from them.

  A medical assistant walked out dressed in sea-foam-green scrub bottoms and a white top covered with teddy bears holding balloons. She had straight bangs, a wet perm, and a yellow dye job. “Zachary McDermott, the doctor is ready for you.”

  The psychiatrist, a middle-aged African American man, was jacked. I wondered if he worked out at the West Wichita YMCA or Gold’s on Central. As he started to ask questions, I pictured him bench-pressing 350 pounds while his lifting partner stood over him and screamed Lock it out, bro! There was a framed copy of the Serenity Prayer on the wall.

  He started the interview in a doctorly monotone.

  “How is your mood?” he asked.

  “I don’t have a mood.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I can’t feel anything. Nothing. I’m not here.”

  “Every drug has side effects.”

  “I hear that. But—and I’m just going to lay this out here in the interest of time—my hair is falling out. I’m drooling. I’m impotent. I can’t ejaculate. I go minutes without even realizing I’m awake. And I’ve gained ten pounds in a week.”

  “The sexual side effects—the libido, the impotence—are common with Risperdal. As is weight gain, but that’s primarily coming from the Depakote.”

  I knew where it was coming from; I just wanted to know where we go from here. “So what’s the solution?”

  “In three or four months we can maybe reevaluate.”

  “Three or four months? And reevaluate? Maybe? I can’t be impotent for three or four months. I’m twenty-six. I know this might not sound like the most important thing, but it’s important.”

  He continued with what felt like a standard questionnaire—much like the one I’d filled out before I entered his office.

  “Are you using any drugs—cocaine, marijuana, heroin, methamphetamine?”

  “No.”

  “Drinking alcohol?”

  “Yes.”

  “How much are you drinking?”

  “I don’t know. Minimum four, more like six beers a night. Sometimes eight, sometimes ten.”

  “That’s a lot.”

  “Can we get back to that medication for a minute? What happens if I go off it?”

  “You can’t quit taking it.”

  “And if I do?”

  “Severe depression is almost certain. And you’d be at high risk of having grand mal seizures.”

  “What are the odds of that realistically happening?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Can’t or won’t?”

  “I cannot.”

  “Because you don’t know or because you have a legal obligation not to tell me so you’re not tacitly endorsing the sudden cessation of medication?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Well, thanks, that really helps me make a rational decision on this topic.”

  “Zachary, are you going to quit drinking or not?”

  “Certainly not while I’m in Wichita.”

  That goddamn Serenity Prayer really pissed me off.

  Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

  the courage to change the things I can,

  and the wisdom to know the difference. Amen.

  Was this supposed to be an “accept the things I cannot change” situation or a “courage to change the things I can” situation? Accept what? Impotence, drooling, a brain firing at half capacity? Yes, I was drinking too fucking much, but my mania was precipitated by insomnia and at least the booze was knocking me out. Binge drinking felt safe. It was the devil I knew.

  I did go to one of the substance-abuse meetings the doctor had pushed on me, the following Wednesday night, back at the clinic. The Mountain-Dew-for-breakfast kid was there, along with some folks who reminded me of characters from my first neighborhood: the tweaker who used to blast Whitesnake and rip tits in his Trans Am down our street, the dude wit
h the boa constrictor. So much meth face, including a few that looked to still be tweaking. The guy sitting next to me smelled like my dad’s brother, Uncle Randy, who shits in Folgers coffee cans. For a second I thought I really did recognize my friend Colt’s sister, who, last I heard, was stripping at Jezebel’s. I thought about leaving—I was still not ready to consider quitting drinking—but I wanted to gawk.

  We watched the Michael Keaton movie Clean and Sober, where he drinks his life away and then recovers. There was also free pizza. I tried not to eat it at first, as I judged everyone else in the room for being too excited about free junk food. But eventually I caved and ate two slices of pepperoni. If I was going to quit drinking, this wasn’t going to be the route. You can’t feel superior to everyone in the room and simultaneously address your own problems. And in this room I didn’t see people with problems; I saw people who were problems.

  The Bird picked me up. “How was it?”

  “Ridiculous. Absurdly white trash. Watched a movie. More than two tongue rings, both sexes. Not going back.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  When we got home, I started drinking.

  A week later, I quit taking my meds. I couldn’t even follow the plot of 30 Rock, and the Bird had to dab drool off my face several times a day or say “Gorilla, look at your shirt.” I’d sit alone in the basement with my hand on my penis and jiggle it around just to see if he had any intent of ever having any intent again. My hair was coming out by the handful in the shower, and I’d put on nearly twenty pounds. I told the Bird I was going to go off the meds before I pulled the plug. She was worried about a lot of things, but seizures were pretty high on her list. She told me, “I am terrified for you to go off your medication. But I see what this is doing to you and I can’t tell you not to.”

  While the seizures never came, the doctor’s prediction of severe depression was no joke. I began to have contests with myself to see how many hours I could sleep each day. Getting to twelve without a nap was no problem. With naps I was able to get to fourteen and, occasionally, even sixteen. My days became a countdown to an acceptable sleeping hour. To fill the gap between my final nap and bedtime, I drank and smoked. Beer. Cig. Beer. Cig. Cig. And so on. Now I understood how so many men I’d known growing up could burn through a twelve-pack every night. What else do you do here? People say that excessive drinking is often used as an escape from reality. In my case, I felt erased, so why not erase myself? It was easier to chip away at what was left of me than to try to recover the self I’d lost.

  Chapter 9

  The Bird shouted down the stairs when he came in through the garage: “G-O-R-I-L-L-A, your B-R-O-T-H-E-R B-O-B-B-Y is in the kitchen.” Bobby had been out of prison a little more than a year and I hadn’t seen him in six, but other than a little prison bulk and a hairstyle change from S Curl to shoulder-length braided pigtails, he looked exactly as I remembered him.

  “What up, cuz?” Sounded the same too.

  I’d been staring at the ceiling, in and out of sleep for several hours.

  “You look like a sad old butthole,” he told me. We hugged and I told him he was huge.

  “Swole, cuz,” he corrected me.

  “Prison swole.”

  Bobby Prince Jr. was born a Crip in the same way that many Irish boys in Boston are born Catholic. The Bird called him B-O-B-B-Y but he usually corrected her and said “C-O-C-C-Y—Bobby got too many b’s, cuz.” B as in Bloods.

  Bobby—two years younger than me—was patient zero at Power Hour, the Bird’s informal after-school tutoring group that she started when I was a senior. From the beginning, it was populated exclusively by young black men, each with one gang affiliation or another. Warring factions coexisted peacefully as the Bird fed everyone and tutored two or three kids at once while a handful of others shot hoops in the driveway or lifted weights downstairs.

  Bobby’s powder-blue 1990 Nissan Maxima was a fixture in our driveway every afternoon. You knew he was coming before his whip came into view because he bumped Lil Wayne or Birdman so hard his trunk shook. The car had plastic hubcaps posing as chrome rims and he was saving up to get a portrait of himself painted on the hood. “Gotta show ’em the grill, cuz.” He was proud of the gold outlines on his front teeth, and he pulled off the look.

  In those days, Bobby’s backpack overflowed with letters from Division I colleges offering him full rides to run track—Arizona, North Carolina, Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Clemson, Ohio State, and nearly every school in between—but when he came into our lives, it appeared he had no hope of being able to accept any of them. He was a sophomore in high school, but his ACT score was several standard deviations below the NCAA’s minimum requirement and Bobby couldn’t read for shit. One reason being, he didn’t start going to school until third grade. He struggled to get through Dr. Seuss books for the first few years.

  Bobby was born in a trailer in rural Oklahoma, or as he put it, “deep, deep in the country, country.” Anywhere between three and six cousins, along with his grandparents, slept together in the main room of a double-wide. There were a couple of other rooms, but they were filled with junk—“like hoarder-type stuff, cuz.” They had no electricity, running water, or plumbing. When he had to do his business, it was in The Bucket—which is exactly what it sounds like. Six to nine people pissed and shat in a big white bucket that was kept in the bathroom and emptied not near frequently enough. “When you grow up doing that as a child, you look at things different when you become an adult and actually get to sit on a toilet and shit. I can do my business anywhere. Put some paper down, bro, I’m good. Some people say that’s disgusting, but what’s disgusting is The Bucket.”

  Bobby learned pimping from his father when other kids his age were learning their ABCs. After his mom got out of prison, he moved to Kansas to be with her. But in the summers, she’d drop him off with his dad at the Kansas-Oklahoma border. What she didn’t know was that she was leaving him at the “Ho House.” Bobby Prince Sr. dropped him off with his women while he handled his business. They took him shopping, buying him clothes and Nikes. Before his voice dropped they were asking him, “You trying to get that wooty, B.P. Jr.?”

  Power Hour grew fast, thanks to Bobby. Week after week, new faces showed up. Bobby started calling my mom “Moms.” The Bird stacked pyramids of cheap beef and generic shredded cheese soft tacos in the fridge. It was by no means decadent, but Bobby always said, “You know Moms can cook.” He grew up on SPAM and rice, so the Bird’s meals seemed gourmet. One day the Bird overheard him telling a new recruit, “This like a real home, bro. You come home from football, you get food in your belly, and you take care of your school business.” He put in hundreds of hours with the Bird; eventually, he could work his way through Lord of the Flies. When the Bird explained to him that the character Piggy was tender, he asked her what that meant. “He’s vulnerable—asthma, glasses, people always pick on him.”

  “Oh, I got it,” Bobby said. “He a tender booty.”

  The towels were emptied from the cabinet next to the bathroom and replaced with cheap peanut butter and jelly, bread, canned ham, crackers, Vienna sausages, ramen noodles by the case, and tuna for protein. When word of Power Hour reached Holy Savior—the Bird’s predominantly black Catholic church—Alfred Wright, a beloved church elder, brought over fifty-count boxes of frozen corn dogs. Bobby called Mr. Wright “Shoe Booty” behind his back because his left leg was almost a foot shorter than his right, forcing him to wear an enormous platform shoe on one foot. It looked extremely heavy and gave the impression that Mr. Wright’s limp stemmed from the difficulty of lifting that damn shoe with every left step.

  Once Shoe Booty said hi to all the boys and filled the freezer, he’d often give the Bird $50 or $60 to use as she saw fit on the Power Hour crew. As soon as he was out the door, Bobby would grab a jar of peanut butter from the pantry and put his foot on top of the lid while he herked and jerked across the room, deftly dragging the peanut butter beneath his foot. It was a pretty co
nvincing act, especially given the difficulty of the prop work—he never tipped the peanut butter onto its side, or lifted his foot off the top of the jar.

  “What’s a corn dog?” Beast—another Power Hour regular—asked.

  “Nigga, you know what a corn dog is. Your lips is corn dogs.”

  Bobby had a full set of lips of his own, but that didn’t stop him from holding two frozen corn dogs to his mouth and doing a pretty spot-on Beast impression: “What’s a corn dog? Nigga said he don’t know what a corn dog is!” He flapped the dogs as he talked. “Here, Beast, I’ma put your lips in this microwave for you.” And then he prepared a corn dog for Beast.

  After a little more than a year of Bobby coming to Power Hour, he was doing well enough on ACT practice tests that it looked like he might score high enough on test day to accept one of his scholarships. The Bird couldn’t sleep the night before his test. She knew Bobby would need to have one of his good days to qualify, and she did a rosary in hopes of giving him a divine edge. Bobby didn’t leave his fate to the gods, though.

  If he was going to have someone take the test for him, there was only one high school where that’d be conceivably possible: Northeast Magnet. They didn’t have an athletics program, and anyone who knew anything about Wichita football, basketball, or track—a good chunk of the Wichita population—would have recognized Bobby Prince. If he was four inches taller he could have played in the NFL. He thought he could score high enough on his own, “but dawg, I had to get that scholarship. You think a kid like me is supposed to go to Arizona? You gotta make sure.” And make sure he did. “Bobby” scored six points higher than his best practice score.

  An administrator actually tried to get him to admit that he cheated, that he’d paid someone to take the test for him. But Bobby wasn’t about to buckle under a threat of fingerprint testing from an assistant high school principal. He told the guy, “Y’all think I’m dumb, and this is starting to feel a little bit racist.” They dropped it.