by ed. Pela Via
Gordon-fucking-Gekko he was not, but the old man watched Wall Street one day and figured himself an expert in stocks and shares. He started buying the broadsheets and checking the FTSE index. One of the sots from the local pub told him he knew a guy who knew a broker who worked in London. At this stage, the alarms should have been ringing, but he believed, or chose to believe, anything that involved making money quickly. In exchange for the scar that runs across my chin, the dislocated fingers, the bloody noses and the hairline skull fractures, my father was given cash from the television company, which he then gave to strangers to invest in stocks. It took him a month, and five hundred pounds to realize that broker was duping him, if he was a broker that is. The only person who truly suffered the loss of money was me because it meant more time in front of the camera.
Every Sunday morning my mum would drop me off at his place and when she picked me up, I had a new bandage. To deflect any negligence on his part, he told her I’d bumped into the door, fallen off my bike, tripped over the rug. When the cuts got deeper, he told me to go home and drink as much cola as I could. Once I’d finished all the cola, ask for water. I had to tell my mum I felt dizzy, always before dinnertime. She took me to see the GP in Dogmael who, after Mum explained the constant thirst and dizzy spells, checked me for diabetes. The results came back negative, so they figured I had a bad ticker. The old man did his bit and attended all the referrals to cardiologists at the Royal. He would sit with my mum, biting his nails as they drained my arm to check for high levels of lipoprotein. The results were always the same. I was a fit young boy, with no reason to be suffering blackouts.
The woman from social services reminded me of a bloated aubergine. She wore thick woolen tights that gathered in pleats around a pair of black court shoes, and if there were ever an episode of Tom and Jerry that revealed the upper half of Tom’s owner, then she would be it. During the cardiologist visits, one of the doctors had noticed bruising along my arm where they’d taken blood. This same doctor referred my details over to the social services, and a week later, there was a knock at my mum’s door. She explained to Mum that if any child presents the three stages of bruising, red (fresh), purple (ripe), yellow (healing), all at the same time, social services has a legal right to conduct a full assessment of the household. Clara Hornthorn had moved in with us by then, and being proficient in matters of oral pleasure had developed a tongue that could make the most cutting of lawyers jealous. Accusations of discrimination based on same-sex relationships was a gambit that proved very effective in forcing the social services woman to back off and accept I was in a well-balanced and caring home. Clara’s proactive leaning also helped imply the problem lay elsewhere, and perhaps she should make inquires with my father. To secure the deal, she added that it would be best to visit his house before noon, before he had time to go to the local boozer. Two social workers arrived at the old man’s home one morning to find five VHS-C tapes containing varying degrees of child cruelty and neglect being copied onto VHS tapes ready to be sent to the television company. They also found his notepad, open with a pencil drawing of a matchstick kid falling through a ceiling, and another involving a homemade swing and a small fence. Backed against the wall, instinct took over and the old man reverted to mocking that woman, calling her a fat old snooping bitch. He replayed that scene over and over to me over the phone, choosing to adopt a Deep South American drawl whenever he impersonated her. Clara was pushing for a restraining order, and I’m sure she could have convinced my mother to get one had he not told them he was going to live in Florida. The last words he ever spoke to me were over the phone: “The oranges in Florida are said to be the best in the world, Jonah. Once I get settled, I’ll send a box over.”
It was rumored he fell fifty feet, but from what Mum told me, I figured it was more like a hundred. The idea was simple: park his Austin Allegro on a precipice near the top of Keighley Crag, forget to apply the handbrake, and get out of the car. The videotape would show him running toward the moving car, grief stricken as it fell over the edge of the cliff. What the tape captured that day was his sleeve caught in the door, and the car dragging him over the cliff with it. It took a helicopter and five men to lift him off that hill. When they removed what was left of the car, his shirtsleeve was still stuck in the door. The doctors told Mum he had bilateral damage to the reticular formation of the midbrain. They talked her through all the machines that were keeping him breathing, and used something called the Glasgow Coma Scale to determine how far into the great beyond he’d reached. Comas don’t last more than two to five weeks, but the old man was like Sleeping Beauty for five years. That coma slapped a gag on his mouth, stopped his hand from scribbling plans, and his brain from formulating them. For the first time in his life, my old man was actually there for me when I needed him. He didn’t judge me when I told him I’d smoked my first cigarette, nor did he criticize my hair or clothes. There was no pressure to go to university and get a career. And he never uttered one word of frustration when I flunked out of school and got a job selling vacuum cleaners house-to-house. He just lay on that cold hospital mattress searching for God in the ceiling. Routine got me through some hard times. Used to be I would envy my friends and the relationships they had with their fathers, all the time spent going out to football games, throwing ball, building models, all while my old man was throwing me down hills or building ramps out of weakened wood. But over time, whatever tethered them together, the pursuit to bond and all that crap, well, it got severed by monotony. Not me and the old man. The tedium of habit brought us together. The longer he stayed in that coma, the closer I felt to him. I told him about the Berlin Wall falling, and how the Americans and British were kicking ass in Kuwait. And every day his muscles weakened and tightened. The atrophy meant he was shrinking, centimeter by centimeter, and I wondered if one day I’d turn up to find him so small I could slip him into my pocket and sneak him home. By the time that junkie rock star in Seattle blew his brains out, the old man finally turned a corner and reached a PVS. To mark the occasion, Clara came to the hospital and handed me a padded envelope containing the VHS tape of him falling off the cliff. She said it was high time I let go of the past and move on.
The television company got back in touch a week ago saying they thought the clip of my father falling off the cliff was hilarious and that they hoped no one was injured during the process. Enclosed was a check for two hundred and fifty pounds, and their best wishes.
When the old man first arrived in hospital, I asked Mum why he wouldn’t wake up, she told me he was dreaming of something really special and he didn’t want that dream to end. I would just sit there and watch him breathing in and out, in and out, wondering if in that dream he was peeling back the rind of a Florida orange while the sun burnt his shadow into the ground. And when there were no words to share, no heartache, sadness or regret spilling from my mouth, I would close my eyes and see him splitting that orange apart, his teeth biting into its sweet flesh until it stained his shirt.
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Bad, Bad, Bad Bad Men
by Craig Davidson
“Don’t let the door hit you where the good Lord split you.”
That may have been what I said, or something equally banal. Make like a tree and get out of here. Nice knowing you, fruitcake. I’m not exactly a titan of wit, besides which, I happened to be dogshit drunk.
First you take a drink, next the drink takes a drink, next the drink takes you. Don’t know who said that, but I admire the sentiment. They say the first step to getting better is admitting you got a problem. I care fuckall for that, but who wants to live in denial? There comes a day where it’s: screw it, fine, I’m a juicehead.
For me, that was when the mechanics of fixing a drink got so imprinted I could make one blind. Two tablespoonfuls sugar in a Collins glass, sprigs of mint, muddle, pulverized ice, bourbon to taste. The point arrives where you’ve made so many it’s reflex-memory. You could be robot arms on an assembly line.
It’s only fair to mention—really, it’s a crucial corollary to all this—that by then I’d taken to drinking mint juleps. Primarily as ‘bourbon to taste’ could mean half a pint.
Mint-fucking-juleps! Ought to invest in a string tie, get me a touch of that Colonel-Sanders-Kentucky-Fried southern class.
Now the guy I’d said it to, he turns back. We—and when I say ‘we,’ I mean the nameless shambles I bend elbows with at this scratch-ass bar, Honey’s, on Pine Street—we are rather stunned at this development. Me especially. This guy—who, I should hasten to add, was by then stalking to where I sat slumped next to a promotional cutout of Oscar De La Hoya; Oscar hawking Tekate—beer of Aztecs!—Oscar’s skin yellowed with smoke, Oscar’s eyes torched out with a Zippo, anyway, this swinging dick was not a regular. Which is why I said what I said, right? The guy was an outsider and should expect to be scorned by us regulars, who have built up our cred simply by participating in this grotesque carnival of human misery for much, much longer.
99% of the time they say: Fuck it, what do I care what these degenerates think? Which was the whole angle of my gambit: you gauge the chances you’ll get away with it versus the possibility it’ll earn you five in the eye.
Fuck me, why would I yearn to impress these assholes? It’s not like we pass a peacock feather around and recite our favorite passages from Iron John. Fact is, I hated them the way you hate your own face in the mirror the next morning. But here I was lipping off a stranger in hopes it’d elicit a chuckle out of these candy-colored dildos.
“What did you say?”
I was staring at the face of a flinty Norse God. Not a shred of compassion in the guy’s shark-grey eyes.
“What did I say?” I parroted back, giving him a wonky smile in hopes he’d peg me for a useless hairbag not worth bruising his knuckles over.
His punch was telegraphed from next week. His spine arched and his fist nearly touched his heels—like how old movie cowboys threw a punch. I’ll get out the way, I said to myself. Shift my chin a smidge, or hell, slide off the stool, slip out the back door—Sayonara, shitheels!—and be halfway down the block before this guy even
I woke up on the floor. My feet were tangled up in the brass footrail. My nose all mushy, plus the taste of blood in my throat. The guy who’d cold-cocked me had taken the pains to turn me on my side so I wouldn’t choke to death on my own puke—which, to give him his fair due, was a pretty sporting move. Thanks, masked stranger!
“Anyone calling the paramedics?” somebody said, without much enthusiasm.
“To the best of my knowledge,” said the bartender, “he is the paramedics.”
I snuck into the bay at Niagara Falls Memorial, hugging the wall like a safecracker. Acid-core halogens scorched my corneas as I ducked into an ambulance. After licking the head of an extra-large Q-tip I’d dug out of an Ambu-Care tackle box, I tore open a pouch of hemostat coagulant powder, dunked the Q-tip and swabbed out both nostrils. The busted capillaries fused shut—it felt like a rug burn.
I considered my face in the steel mirror above the brace kits. Blood in the chinks of my teeth. I tried to root it out with a fingernail but when that failed I unscrewed a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. It fizzed the chancre sore on my tongue.
I hunted up a baggie of Dextrose 30%—sugar water, basically, but if I mainline it into your cephalic vein it’s a $200 connection fee, billed to your HMO—snipped the stint-plug with surgical shears and squeezed the warm treacle down my throat to jack some glucose into my anemic cells.
“I remember different days,” I said to my reflection, and smiled. “Do you?”
Exiting the ambulance, I felt vaguely human. I showered alone, sucking down another baggie of Dextrose to quiet the keening scream in my blood. Fingers knit together, I hung off the showerhead like a prisoner in a Turkish gulag.
After donning my paramedic’s whites, I found Lassiter in the cafeteria. He stood with a cook at the kitchen pass. Lassiter was tight with the cooks and janitors, the shipper-receivers. The cook was handing Lassiter a brick of leftover meatloaf.
One of the Emerg nurses had been demoted to skeleton shift. She was ragging out her Charge Nurse to a table of bored orderlies.
“Man comes in with three fingers in a handkerchief, sawed off at a construction site,” she said. “Another man comes in with mild chest pains. No-fingers man gets first. Man with chest pains takes a seat. Now if that man told me he was taking nitrogen pills, like he’s s’posed to . . . so that man’s heart explodes”—in her mouth it’s esplows—“in the waiting room and that’s on me?”
“I heard it was on his chart,” said Lassiter.
“What was on?” said the nurse, a hot coal in each eye.
“That he’d been prescribed nites.”
“On a Post-it stuck to it, is all.”
Lassiter said, “Right where you could see it.”
“What do you even know, meat-wagon jockey?” She angled her boneless face at Lassiter. Her feeble defiance stirred pity in me. “You even know my CN? Even know who we’re talking about?”
“She’s the frumpy bitch with a face like a rotted hornet’s nest, right? No, wait, that’s somebody else, that’s, that’s, that’s . . .” Snap! went Lassiter’s fingers. “That’s you, you ghastly old lesbian.”
Next we were in the light-washed ambulance bay, Lassiter licking the juice from the tinfoil-wrapped brick off his fingers.
“You drive,” he told me.
I cranked the wheel left, motoring north. Summer dusk in Cataract City. Down Pine Street, past the spot of my most recent humiliation. College kids colonized the patio at Unc’s, sucking down ice-filled buckets of creamy cervezas. The muscles knitted at the back of my neck as tension spread across my clavicles. We passed Sharkey’s, a biker bar. Last week, we’d responded to a 9-1-1 call there. A young hogger beat half to death in an initiation ritual. His scalp was covered in bloody ant hills. Lassiter pinched the kid’s incisors off the floor and bounced them in his palm like a pair of hot dice.
“These aren’t your milk teeth, dummy.”
The kid’s license said he was seventeen. The bikers leaned on blood-streaked pool cues with thick blue elastic bands cinching their goatees.
“Did they sell it as an act of deep nobility?” Lassiter asked the kid. “What fun it’ll be to fetch splits of Rolling Rock for these Easy Rider fuckos. Pulling bitch position on the train.”
The kid said: “I fell.”
“You fell into something,” Lassiter agreed. “Enjoy life with these muffins, huh?”
The bikers just blinked slow, assigning Lassiter’s face to their mental Rolodex. In all likelihood Lassiter wouldn’t have been so bold if he hadn’t been hooped on diethyl ether. It wasn’t uncommon for him to swallow pills from the Ambu-Care kit or strap the Nitrox mask over his face. A few months ago I’d even found him dipping his finger into a pouch of Pethidine powder and sucking it off—the opium-eater’s version of Fun Dip. Eyes: two pissholes in the snow. “They should do something about these ants,” he’d said, waving a hand round his face. “Why would God, in his infinite wisdom, grant ants wings?”
It was January. Flying ants aren’t native to northern New York state.
And now . . . ether. May as well chug laudanum, or get ballsed on Doctor Pennyfeather’s Wondrous Nerve Elixir. Lassiter’s gone all Cider House Rules on the shit lately. The janitors had been cleaning out the hospital basement when they came across a box of paper-thin glass ampules. The little fuckers were packed in wood: a solid block drilled full of holes. They looked like sniper’s bullets bedded in foam. They were supposed to be incinerated, but of course Lassiter cadged a whack of them.
Lassiter popped the glove box and pulled out an amp. He put it under his nose, held it in place with his upper lip. The sound of snapped glass: an ice cube fracturing in a cocktail glass. Nice. The air in front of the windshield went swimmy, like a stretch of desert highway.
“Ah, yes . . .” Lassiter rucked his shoulde
r blades into his seat, nestling in like a hamster into cedar shavings. “. . . there’s the flavor.”
The problem with ether is it seriously impairs an individual’s fine motor skills. Which is a problem when said individual may be called upon to manually intubate a toddler or inject full-spectrum psychotherapeutics into a carotid artery.
I parked at the Niagara Reservation. Through a gap in the pines the sun set over the Falls. Quivering spears of sunlight met the spume boiling off the cataract, a billion-trillion miniature suns tumbling over and over. The sun set tortuously slow.
When we were kids, Lassiter and me, we’d ride our Schwinns down into the basin, sneak through a flap snipped in the chainlink fence and fish for rock bass in the shadow of the Rainbow Bridge. We baited our hooks with maggots: they came packed in sawdust in a styrofoam cup, same as KFC gravy comes in. We’d cast our lines into water so cold it numbed our toes. We sat on the rocks in the gloaming with the monofilament wound round our finger to sense the slightest nibble. Our faces lit by that glittering disco ball of a city on the other side of the river.
