People who claim New York is the city that never sleeps should really come to New Orleans. New Orleans never sleeps and makes sure everyone stays awake as well. It’s one giant half-floating carnival perpetually inhabited by jazz and blues artists who try to hit all the notes at the same time with no regards whatsoever for the listeners’ sanity.
I was born into a working-class family of five, though when I arrived it was just the two of them. My mother was a former musician turned schoolteacher. My dad used to play the sax for this band that got big for a year and then sank back into obscurity. He had managed to leverage that little escapade and got himself a job at a recording studio as a technician. Much to the chagrin of Mom, all three of her children were born tone deaf. Dad often said he preferred it that way. He hated the music industry and resented all the big shots of music, labelling them as hicks and cheats. Mom, bless her, didn’t give up on us though. Kept dragging us, kicking and screaming, from one music class to the next, but ultimately nothing came out of it. She never showed, but we knew she was disappointed. Every time we quit a music class, Dad would give us a little treat when Mom was not looking. He still kept the one record his former band had done, but he never played it for us. For him, the era of artistry was over, the alcohol and drugs part of it had remained with him though. The alcohol, we knew, the drugs we would find out later.
Mom was the free spirit of the house. If you entered our house late in the evening after dinner, you’d see her dancing to the tunes of some jazz artist, either alone or with one of us, or even occasionally on his good days, earlier days, with a reluctant and yet smiling Dad. Dad told us a few times that there wasn’t an instrument she couldn’t figure out how to play if you gave her an hour with it. In retrospect, I think that’s the most affectionate thing he ever said about her.
She used to play the cello professionally, piano, violin, and guitar casually. She’d sing on occasions too. She had a lovely voice. Tone-deaf or not, we still enjoyed music—her music and singing above all—but as hard as she tried, music just never happened for any of us. Sue was top of her class, straight As and all. She was the smart one. And though it had cost us many radios and fans and one TV, Danny was good with his hands. Of the three of us, she had been holding the highest hope for me. I don’t have a clear recollection of it, but I was told I had shown some small measure of potential with the piano, yet it fizzled out somehow. Or maybe it was never there, and I was just trying too hard to impress her. I was good at stories, that is, creating intricate systems of lies. I needed alibis for when I wanted to go smoking and later drinking with my “entourage” so I made up a number of imaginary people I needed to run errands for so I could make some money. No one in my family had seen these “people” but the lies were so well-organized and detailed that nobody ever questioned their validity.
On Tuesday afternoons, I’d be tutoring Jim Nelson with his American History. Jim Nelson was the relatively slow nephew of Mrs. Bolton, who was at her book club at the time and whose husband, Henry, an insurance inspector, was constantly out of town, travelling for work. My mother hated book clubs, so she never bothered to check whether there ever was a Mrs. Bolton. On Thursday evenings, I was running this delivery run between houses of the elderly who were too old to do it themselves. Mrs. Paxter was a retired nurse living on the other side of the river, and the only kind of pudding she could eat was sold at this supermarket on the opposite side. Mr. Thane, a retired army veteran in a wheelchair, needed someone to take him to the record shop, the vet for his cat, and his own doctor. Some of these people lived conveniently on the opposite far side of the river, some close by in large apartment blocks inhabited by hundreds of people, and to top it off, I had a little notebook with their names and addresses and a number of fake old photos I had found in an abandoned building. The notebook and the photos were for my own protection. I had no problem inventing these people; I just needed to make sure I told the same lie three months later.
While Sue was thriving at school and Danny couldn’t wait to come home and pick the new radio apart, I was doing alright. I was getting by. I was stronger in some subjects than others. When it came to history and literature, I could run circles around even Sue. History is lies that a nation tells itself about itself and other nations, and literature is lies told to the whole world about made-up concepts, so naturally those two were within my milieu. Anything regarding facts and truths such as physics, biology, and chemistry, and I was lost. Still, I managed to get by well enough to look at graduation, and when I turned sixteen, Mom started the college talk. She had all these brochures and pamphlets and future plans.
As I turned sixteen, I also started to notice Dad, the way I hadn’t noticed before. I remembered him smiling years ago, and these days he was never smiling. He’d come home, grab a beer, crash on the sofa, closing his eyes between beer gulps until dinner was ready. When I was a kid, I thought he was just tired from work. Now I knew. Now I knew why he kept sniffling when he didn’t even have a cold. I knew why he was occasionally so otherworldly happy for no reason. The other two were in their little worlds. Sue was already preparing for college, though she was two years behind me. And Danny, you could give him a transistor and the world would stop turning for him.
One afternoon I got back home and saw Danny holding Dad’s record. Our house had a number of rules that we followed: don’t be late for dinner or you’ll go hungry, clean your room or you’ll go hungry, don’t smoke or you’ll go hungry (Dad broke that one all the time and never went hungry, mind you), but the one we feared the most was “don’t touch Dad’s record.” There was no consequence clause to that; we just knew to never touch it. I had once picked up the record when I was about twelve, just to look at it. Everyone was in the living room: Mom was reading, Dad drinking, Sue and Danny were watching TV. I’ll never forget the look Dad gave me when I touched the record.
“Honey, put it back on the wall,” Mom said, not taking her eyes off me.
Dad’s breathing started to get intense. Still not saying a word though, just looking at me.
“Put it back up, NOW!” she whispered as if in the middle of defusing a bomb.
I gulped down and put it back. Sue and Danny never noticed.
Now, four years later, fucking Danny had suddenly decided to rebel like that instead of smoking like Sue and me.
“Danny! Put that back! What are you doing?” I said, legitimately scared.
“What’s the big deal anyway? I wanna listen to Dad play. Bet he’s good.”
“Danny, put it back NOW!”
Fear was giving way to anger. I could pin him to the ground and beat him. I saw it in my head. Dad could be back home any minute, and the fucking moron had decided NOW was the time to “listen to Dad play.”
“Danny! I’m gonna count to—”
Too late. I heard someone open the door and prayed to God for it to be Sue or Mom. Granted, either one would have been a disaster of a different kind. Sue was a snitch and Mom, well, was Mom. She was the enforcer. God didn’t listen. He stepped into the house and, as he usually did, went for the fridge to get a beer. I saw his silhouette passing by the living room and my blood froze in my veins. Before I could look at Danny, Dad was in the living room, glassy-eyed and beer bottle in hand, looking down. Then his eyes rolled up on Danny and the fucking record. My breathing went down, and his went up. He took a step towards us.
“Put that fucking shit away,” he growled low like a wounded animal.
He had this weird look about him I had not noticed before. It almost looked like he was here but not entirely here. Danny, the fucking moron, was just standing there.
“Dad, I’m sorry. He just wanted to look at it. We’re putting it back up, right Danny?”
I don’t know if it was instinct or brotherly love or what, but I realized I had stepped between Dad and Danny, holding my arms up in surrender. I was the bomb defuser now. Danny was still standing there as if frozen in time. My back was to Danny, and I didn’t dare put my back to Dad.
Dad raised his voice at us, Sue included, on a regular basis. And occasionally, we’d come home to a screaming match between him and Mom. But none of it had prepared me and Danny, especially me, for what came next.
“PUT THAT FUCKING SHIT AWAY!”
Dad’s guttural primal scream jolted my soul out of my body.
“PUT IT AWAY!”
I heard the beer bottle explode on the floor into a million tiny pieces as he took another step. His nostrils were flared, face twisted into a snarl. He wasn’t Dad. He was a total stranger, and he was going to kill us both. I took a step backwards, getting closer to Danny. My father wasn’t big, nor was he a scrawny little guy. He’d grown up on the streets. I’d seen him fight. Hell, I’d seen him beat other men. I’d watched him with pride and a smug look on my face as he had beaten other kids’ dads.
“Dad, we’re sorry. Danny, put it away.”
I risked turning around for a second, and Danny was still frozen, mouth agape, still holding the bane of our existence at that moment.
“DANNY!” I yelled with all the courage I could muster, trying not to challenge Dad to a screaming contest.
The idiot finally came to and threw the record on the sofa. It didn’t work. He was still advancing.
Out of options now, I started pleading, “Dad, he put it away! Look! He’s sorry.”
My heart had jumped up to my throat, pounding. I couldn’t figure out how to make him stop.
“THAT’S HOW THEY FUCK YOU!”
What?
“THAT’S HOW THEY FUCK YOUR LIFE!”
Oh.
“THEY TELL YOU YOU’RE ONE IN A FUCKING MILLION!”
His head went down, and I finally exhaled after I-don’t-know-how-long. Seeing him momentarily distracted, I turned back to Danny again, and motioned him to get out.
“THEY FILL YOUR HEAD WITH ALL THIS SHIT!”
Danny scurried away sniffling. I stayed. I thought I could stop him if he ran after Danny.
He walked over to the sofa, holding his head in his hands, and sat down next to his record. I just stood there, terrified he would explode at any minute in the vicinity of the damned thing.
“They put it all together for you. And you think this is fucking it! This is it. It’s my ticket out.” His breathing grew slower. “They give you the shit you need to make it happen. You get hooked on it. And then they give you heavier shit cuz last month’s shit ain’t making it happen anymore.”
He kept scratching his eyes and face.
“I’m so fucking tired, man.”
He just lay on the sofa, not even noticing that his precious little fucking record was under his ass.
“Don’t tell your Mom,” were his last words before he disappeared into whatever place whatever he was on was taking him.
I slowly backed away. Grabbed the mop and cleaned the living room floor as best as I could. Then I went to the bathroom and threw up as quietly as I could. Washed my face and got out of the house. Danny was standing across from the house on the other side of the street. I wanted to punch him so bad. Got the fist ready as I walked towards him until I saw his face. Pale, with tears running down his cheeks. I just looked at him for a few seconds, no words, no yelling. He hadn’t abandoned me. I stood there a second more and then hugged him as he cried into my chest. No words. I checked my pocket and found a ten-dollar bill.
“Let’s go get a hot dog and Coke,” I said, putting my arm around his shoulders.
Over the next year, Dad got worse. We had this emergency cash box in the house. It was no big money, just about a few hundred in case there was a need for a late-night hospital visit or something. Nobody touched that cash box but Mom. Nobody. It wasn’t even a rule. It was a fact. This one afternoon, I saw Dad rush into the house in a frantic state, hands shaking, eyes darting this way and that. He walked in the living room and looked around, panicked.
“Dad?” I said as I got up.
I was a year older, more confident. Plus I had dirt on him. He owed me.
“Where … where’s … the box?” he asked, breathing fast as if he’d been running.
“What box?”
I almost knew. I knew. I was playing for time. Maybe Mom would get home earlier before he could find it.
“The BOX! THE FUCKING BOX! Don’t fuck with me!” he exploded.
The others were in their rooms upstairs.
“Dad, what box? I’m not … What box?”
I played innocent, but deep down, something was brewing. He had scared me the year before, had made me vomit out of fear. I wasn’t going to give him that this year.
“THE CASH BOX MOTHERFUCKER! DON’T FUCK WITH ME, BOY!”
He wouldn’t back down. I was a year older, sure, but he was still the dad that beat up other kids’ dads. He walked toward and past me. That last scream had alerted the others. Sue was walking down the stairs, and Danny was right behind her.
“What’s going on?” she said, concerned.
She had never seen this side of him, no. That privilege only belonged to Danny and me. And I was sure, Mom, way before us.
“Dad, the cash box is for emergencies only.”
I didn’t acknowledge Sue’s question. I didn’t want them involved in this. Danny definitely not again. This is between you and me, old man, I thought to myself.
“Dad, only Mom touches the cash box,” I taunted him.
He was so out of his mind he couldn’t even remember the box was on the shelf behind the TV. Like it always was. I just stood there and watched him stumble through the furniture, making a mess of the living room. He finally found it, and that was my cue.
“Dad, it’s for emergencies only!”
I stepped towards him, planning my offense and/or defense in my head. I knew he was fast, but I knew he wasn’t as strong as he used to be after the burnout from whatever he was on. He was disoriented and distracted. I was focused. I’d seen this in nature documentaries: some predators prey on other predators when they’re distracted eating their own prey.
Sue and Danny didn’t come all the way down the stairs. Danny even took a few steps back up and just watched as Sue tried to find words to reason with Dad. I motioned for her to go away. I didn’t want them to see this but couldn’t help it if they did. Part of me really did want them to.
I bid my time and walked carefully behind him. In my head, I could have him in a deadlock from behind and then push him face first towards the wall. Then me and the wall would keep him there until Mom arrived.
“Dad, please. We’re gonna need this.”
I gave him, my dad, one last chance but he wasn’t even there. So I pounced.
In my head, my strategy was sound. Use his distraction to grab him from behind and then pivot and pin him to the wall. He’d be caught between two places. He’d scream, kick and try to wiggle out of the armlock, sure, but I have the wall and my own weight. Plus, he’s weak from the withdrawal. It’s basic physics and biology.
Well, I sucked at those subjects. I miscalculated the feral strength of withdrawal. I grabbed him from behind, and he wiggled out of my closed arms with such a force that when his back bumped into my chest, I was sent flying backwards. Then the last thing I saw was the back of his fist, and then everything went dark as this white noise exploded in my head. The white noise lasted for about an eternity and, weirdly enough, transitioned into the sound of Sue’s screams. I couldn’t see where they were, but in the one second that I got my consciousness back, I thought I’d heard her scream from the same direction as the stairs. They hadn’t come down. Good, I thought. Or maybe I actually said that word out loud. My brain was all jumbled from the impact.
“FUCK!” I heard the predator I was supposed to hunt say. “LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO! FUCK! FUCK YOU!”
He was standing over me, screaming to my face. Pure survival instinct brought up my arm to protect my head from further trauma. I still couldn’t see. Oh fuck, did he punch me blind? I thought to myself with absolute dread. I heard him walking away, screaming out words that I probably couldn’t comprehend even if I weren’t just punched in the head.
Next, I heard the broken voice of Sue, sobbing, “Oh my god!”
Why am I still blind? I willed myself to open my eyes—eye, actually. One was shut, the one near where Dad’s backhand had landed. I started seeing blurs. Sue was right in my face. And Danny, he was behind her. Pale, with tears running down his cheeks.
“You’re bleeding!” Sue said between tears.
Oh no! Blood was nowhere in my plan. Mom could walk in any minute.
“Oh my god! You’re bleeding! Does it hurt?”
“Can you stop it?” I mumbled.
“I’m sorry,” Sue said, still crying.
“No, I mean can you stop the bleeding?”
“I don’t know … Danny! Get a towel!”
Danny rushed off and came back with a towel. She shoved it into my scrotum. Well, not literally, but that was what it felt like because I jumped back with pain and groaned.
“Sorry!”
“It’s ok. Don’t worry. It’s just a bruise.”
“Bruises don’t bleed. It’s a laceration.”
Great. Now the smart-ass is getting technical on biology, I thought. But as annoying as she was, that made things weirdly better.
“I fell down the stairs,” I declared.
“What?” they asked in unison.
“I fell down the fucking stairs,” I said slowly and gave them both a look with my one good eye.
They fell quiet.
I slowed down my breathing, trying to calm down. “I … fell … down … the stairs.”
Our breathing slowed down in unison.
A moment later, I heard the door. We all froze. Of the two people possibly walking into the house, I wasn’t sure which one I wanted it to be. It was Mom. She took one look and ran towards me, eyes wide open with horror.
“I—”
“He fell down the stairs.” I heard Danny’s testimony.
Mom blinked twice, her breathing now slower. She held my face in her hands, her warm breath on my face. She looked around. I wanted to do the same to see what she was looking for, but her hands were holding my face, so I looked at Danny and Sue, following her gaze.
The box. Shit!
I looked into her eyes, unblinking. Just staring at the empty box with the lid a few feet from it on the floor. The jig was up. Her hold on my face never stiffened; she kept looking at the empty box. She closed her eyes and let go of me.
She turned back to Sue. “Take him to the hospital. All of you go.”
She was calm. It scared me more than Dad had.
She looked into my eyes. “Just for tonight, you’re sleeping outside the house. Can you take them to Mrs.Bolton’s house?”
Oh fuck me!
I was about to pass out again when I heard Sue say, “Aunt May’s place is closer to the hospital.”
Sue, my sweet little snitch, my savior. I fucking love you. I wanted to hug her. Aunt May wasn’t really our aunt. She was Mom’s best friend and fellow schoolteacher.
“Yeah, ok. That’s better. Take your books and stuff too. You’re still going to school tomorrow.”
Danny groaned, and I gave him a look.
“Mom, come with us,” I said, the thought of her alone in the house with that animal just unsettled me.
“No, there’s something I need to take care of. You kids go, and I’ll call Aunt May’s place later tonight to say good night.”
I’d argue, but I didn’t see the point. And for some reason I had this feeling that she was going to be fine. She is Mom, after all.
We left the house with our stuff on our backs and headed for the hospital. The bleeding hadn’t stopped yet, and I was wondering how much blood I’d lose before I died, while leaning on Danny.
“Mrs. Bolton’s house is way too far, and I don’t think she’d be comfortable with us staying anyway. Plus, Jim is a creep.”
I don’t know why I said that. Maybe it was the blood loss. Or maybe I just wanted to talk about something other than Dad.
“Oh, shut up,” Sue scoffed.
“What?”
“When you make people up, do you ever bother to look into the phone book to check the names?” she fired back, still teary-eyed.
“I …”
I had nothing. Up to that point, I’d thought I’d had them all in my web of intricate and infallible lies.
She laughed bitterly, almost tearing up again. “You’re so fucking stupid.”
First time ever I heard her use the F-word. And she had a point, but still, I was the big brother.
“Hey! That hurts!”
Her voice dropped. “You should’ve just let him take the money.”
Hard to argue with someone when they had just called you on your bullshit of which you were immensely proud of.
Danny tried his luck. “Sue, you don’t understand.”
“Oh, I’m sure I understand plenty more than you.” She was having none of it.
“Listen, you don’t know—”
“I KNOW ENOUGH! I know when a bottle breaks, the glass pieces go everywhere.” She gave me a look. “EVERYWHERE.”
Oh. Maybe I was really so fucking stupid.
We spent the night at Aunt May’s and waited anxiously by the phone. Mom called about an hour in. Everything was fine, she said. She’d see us back at home tomorrow.
About a decade later, she told me what happened that night at our home. Mom cleaned up the living room. Dad came back, pretending nothing had happened. He didn’t even ask where we were. Went straight up to the bedroom and crashed into the bed. Mom went to the kitchen, picked the biggest knife she could find, went upstairs to their bedroom, climbed on top of him, and put the knife to his neck.
“If you touch any of my kids again, I’ll slit your fucking throat in your sleep,” she whispered to him and then went downstairs.
She said at first she wasn’t sure if Dad heard her or understood what she had said. She stayed awake all night, sitting at the dining table, knife in hand.
The next day after school, we went back home. No one talked for a while. Mom was in the kitchen making Mac and cheese with bacon bits sprinkled on top. Dad didn’t show up. Not for dinner and not even later that night. And then not for a few days. And when he did, he wouldn’t talk to us or even look at us. For a while he was like this street cat that’d go away back to the streets in the morning and come back to sleep at night. On the sofa.
About two months later, he moved out. We came home one day and all his stuff was gone, along with his record. After a couple of weeks, it almost felt like he had never lived there. Life moved on. We moved on.
Next year, I graduated and picked a college in Los Angeles. Sue decided to pursue calling people on their bullshit as a professional career and went into law. Danny started hitting the gym and took boxing lessons, he eventually ended up in the army as a mechanic.
My last day in the house was quite ordinary. No goodbye party, no celebrations or farewell gifts. Between Mom’s income and our part-time occasional jobs, we couldn’t afford it. Mom was at the piano playing Chopin or something. I couldn’t tell. It was nice piano music. Sue had just returned home from her actual tutoring job, and Danny was fixing the neighbor’s radio for the ten bucks he had paid him in advance.
When it was time, I grabbed my measly luggage of one backpack and one duffel bag and walked to the door. Took one look around the house I’d grown up in. All the good, all the bad, and all the shit. I was never going to come back, I’d decided. Mom stopped and came towards me, held me in her arms at length, and just looked me up and down as if checking a piece of equipment to see if it was ready to work. I just looked at her. The most beautiful woman in the entire fucking world. A knot was forming in my throat.
“My boy,” she whispered. “My big boy.” Her voice broke, tears forming in her eyes.
“I’ll be fine, Mom. Don’t worry.”
I kept the knot at bay, barely.
“Oh, I know, honey. You’re all grown up. Look how big you’ve got.” She drew me in for another hug, and I was the world’s smallest dwarf sunk in the arms of the world’s biggest giant.
Sue was already crying by the time I got to her. She gave me a tight hug and held me.
“Stay smart,” I said in her ear.
“Don’t stay stupid,” she shot back.
Danny got up and stepped away from the hopeless radio situation. He avoided eye contact for a while. Just stood there like an idiot, looking around as if he wanted to be done with the goodbye.
“Hey!” I said with as much of a stern, masculine voice as I could muster after my encounters with Mom and Sue.
His eyes finally settled on me. “Yeah…”
His voice hadn’t broken yet. He was still fourteen. Just a kid. I grabbed the back of his neck and pulled him in for a hug. His head rested on my chest as my arms enveloped him completely. He let go of the knot in his throat. I fixed my eyes on the radio he was working on. It was in really bad shape.
“You really fixing that thing?” I asked.
“Oh fuck no. That thing is gone,” he said, sniffling.
“Danny! Language,” Mom shot back at him.
“Sorry. No, that thing is gone. I’ll make him a new one. I’ve got plenty spare parts.”
I tussled his hair and let him go.
I’d wanted to say our goodbyes at home and not at the bus station. One last wave goodbye and I was gone.
Part of me, a very small part, wanted Dad to somehow make it to the bus station and just see me off. No words, and no fucking hugs for sure, but still, just his presence. But I didn’t see him at the bus station, and why would I? He didn’t come to the graduation, birthdays, or anything else. He didn’t know which college I had picked or where. And he didn’t know when I was going away. And that was that.
