Nothing's De Facto
Some things are just too fucked up to tell. This is one of those things; so twisted and bent I’m not sure it’s worth the spit. But as I write the first sentences onto my 64 paged notebook with my cheap Staedtler stick 430 M blue ball pen; I decide finally that I would tell you all and omit none. I was twelve when my dad died. He had been coming home to his wife and two kids from work after a long Friday. He wasn’t my version of Superman, I’ll give you that. Drinking problems. He would get up in the morning, red eyed and slurred speeches from the previous night’s bad hangover, go to the fridge, pour himself some milk, grab a couple of toasts, fish himself a pack of Winstons and he was out the door. He was no fan of his kids, and we were no fan of his, either. Seemed fair to our family. No one drank at work, and my dad didn’t dare draw a new line to that. But he would, however, buy himself a couple of bottles at every work break and leave some (and only some) for home. Fuckin ripe arsehole, right? You bet, my friend. But I got use to it, like toilets get use to shit. Progress. That Friday after work wasn’t much different. He stopped at the liquor store, got some low-cost bourbon to loosen him up a little; fumbled his brown pockets of his leather jacket for his car keys, found them, screwed it up the key hole of our blue Cadillac and drove off. Whatever cheap magic that had guided him home safely everyday stopped working, I later reasoned. The white pair of fluffy dice dangled infront of Jack’s red eyes as he drove. He was makin’ a turn. Jack Denker never flicked the lights when he turned corners in the blue Cadillac. ‘Daddy, why don’t you use the lights like everyone else does?’ I had asked some time before, my six year old still chubby fingers busy playing with a Spiderman plastic figurine. It had been a cold and breezy afternoon, and the window was fogged up every time I had looked, or tried to look, outside. I settled on playing with Spiderman again. The bit of red and blue plastic I had taken sacred. It was my favorite little guy, that toy. He slept in the same as bed I did, he bathed in the same waters as I did and he was my good friend. The only good friend who didn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t lie to me like everyone else had. Nope, he wasn’t like daddy. Dad looked at me through the rear mirror. There was the usual liquid shine in those two eyes that haunted many of my dreams. ‘You wanna drive, Chris?’ ‘No, sir.’ ‘Then shut the hell up, or I’ll rip that goddam mouth of yours off it’s hinges and stomp on it til’ yer won’t even recognize it no more, and yer fuckin’ mom can’t even sow it back on your little shit face,’ case was closed, and I never spoke of it again. That was many, many years ago and as I feel some of the details fogging up like the windows had that afternoon in the car, I had a sudden impulse on coughing those lines up before they had totally self erased themselves from my mind. It was probably just another few fruitless lines of the story to you folks, but even if it could have been totally crossed out on my notebook, I didn’t, because I had told you I would tell you all and omit none. No drunk drivers survive, I believe. My dad turned, naturally, and an orange truck squashed our car as we would squash mosquitoes on the window glass. El smacko. I can’t tell you on paper how close I felt to a pile of dung that sat under the unmerciful sun and rejected by the usually loving dung beetles. Sure, there hadn’t been many happy times when he was around, and he didn’t beat me up just once. But my old man had taught me baseball; not much, but enough to keep me behind the thick long bars of home. Baseball was something every kid would know, and if you had a drunk as your father, you had to grin and bear it and accepted all the little he had to give. Brian taught me that on an early age. He was the best brother I ever knew, and certainly the best I ever will know. Since The Accident, things changed. Hell, they did. For one, school was never the same. I hadn’t been the Men’s magazine cover guy I was when I married Katie, that sweet perfection of a lady. Twelve was one of my Skinny Years. I had short, baby fine brown hair; rough little hands that were devoted to my pack of cards (I think they now sit at the very pit of my desk draw, the red backs faded to an unripe pink, only two of the four kings and three of the four aces remaining along with the rest of the deck), and my two meatless legs did nothing but holding the rest of my body up. I got beaten up a lot at school. Often by Merron, the school bully. But once word got out about my morgued father (sorry ’bout yer old man, Chris) things took a one eighty. Not that I needed the buckets full of thick sympathy, no; I really could have done better without it. The pats and sorrowful speeches served as a constant reminder of my dad, and my grades pummeled. But they weren’t the core of my worries. Huh uh. Like an average family, when Mr. Denker died, most of our family income died with him. We didn’t inherit any grave shit; he had nothing. Nothing but a dusty bottle of whiskey under my parents’ bed. Dad’s death didn’t bring as much happiness I had expected; because instead he turned into a drill and bore a hole into our piggy bank. My old man hadn’t earned much at forty five, not at his job anyway. And my mom at that time forty two worked in some sewing factory as far as I recall. I was never too involved with my mom’s business; we all thought women were pussy back then. I guess they sometimes still are. I’ve just read over what I had written previously tonight. My wife left ten minutes ago- Girls’ Night Out, I reckon. I’m fine with those icky girly things, as long as there ain’t no bag loads of testosterone around. So anyway, we fled, three chickens from a farm. Ended up at Mildew Hotel. We had been fugitives, I would like to think. I had always thought crims were fuckin’ aces all the way. The hotel was real big and I mean it, sincerely. A guy called Michael Rowwen owned the place- he let us call him Mike, or Mikey. We got room 128, up the cobwebbed elevators and nine doors down the dark corridors- simple. How could we have afforded this? To be utmost sincere with you, to this day, I’m not wrong to say I have no fuckin idea. Perhaps Mikey was being nice. If he had been, then I thank him for it- to hell we had needed it. Mr. Rowwen was a short man with black hair brushed back into a ducktail, always wore the same (or so I suspect) fuckin pinstriped suit, and hazel eyes just underneath a loaf of heavy black eyebrows. In the curls of my linen bed sheets, I’m drinking some beer. I still have another six-pack in my fridge but I don’t think I’ll open ’em yet. There was always a soprano voice at the back of my head screaming haven’t you learned anything from your dad’s death? He goddam died drinking that stuff, boy! You wanna die and leave you kid like your fuck of a dad left you n’ Brian? I take another swallow and put it on my night table. Oh, did I tell you I had a wonderful daughter? No? Well her name’s Connie, and she’s seven months old; light brown hair, chubby little fingers, and so much like her mother. Cutest little baby in the world. I squint at the digital Sony clock my wife got me for Christmas two years ago; it read off nine fifteen. I lift the still cold bottle of beer and swallowed, then sucked on it awhile, rememberin’ what happened next. We kept our little hopes high, but somewhere in me I hadn’t like the Mildew. Why were the long corridors covered with black and blue rose wallpaper? No reason. Why did the elevator seem to go off at different times of the night, when no one used them? Dunno. For a twelve year old boy, still innocent of wet dreams and underarm hair, I was fuckin’ Petrified. I’m sorry I can only retrieve chips of the past, my friend, but it has been about thirty years since I decide to relive the details. And thirty years is a bit out of my memory’s reach. So anyway, One night Lydia, my mom, was doing the washing in the cube of a sink. We used that same small cube for brushing our teeth, washing undies, clothes and hands. We had three rooms, to be exact. There was a thin white cardboard slicing mom’s half from Brian and mine; if you count that it’d be four. One room was the shitter; one room had the cube sink, the two stoves, the fridge, the six inch black and white TV, the shabby dinner table and the lone closet. We had to travel four floors down to the public shower. It wasn’t pretty, mind you. The other room had two beds in which my brother and I slept, and across the privacy of the white cardboard was my mom’s bed. Life was tough in the hotel, I tell you now. We’d just had dinner (steak and chips with two glass bottles of coke) and like I said, mom was doing the washing. Brian had gone to have a quick shower. Now I may be wrong about this in total, but I think only us three occupied the hotel during those times. Apart from Mike, that is. But like I said, I may be wrong in sum- and there were things to back it up. This was probably our third night in the Mildew, and I grew to hate it- cat and mouse. But what could we do? We were three starving mouse forced to eat cat food simply because we wanted to see another dawn crack. The Mildew had given us the incompatible food, and we had to take it; like it- then good for you. Don’t like it- then go eat my turd, the hotel seemed to say. The sky hanging above always seems willing to let darkness steal the light at early hours, and that really scared me. Sincerely. ‘Have you had your shower yet?’ mom asked me, her back bent over the sink. I had no urge to go wash up. ‘No, but I showered just yesterday. Can I shower tomorrow?’ it was a plead, really. I wasn’t being a pussy; I just didn’t want to face those endless corridors again. Lydia piled another plate onto the table and dried her hands on her dirty white apron. The opening and closing of the refrigerator was heard as she put in the remains of the steaks. She started ridding herself of the apron and looked at me simultaneously. ‘Alright, Chris- brush your teeth and go to sleep.’ ‘Yep.’ ‘Night honey,’ she kissed me lightly on the forehead. I went to my bed and pulled out my blue backpack under it. Mom had hung the apron on a little hook protruding from one side of the wall and called out to me: ‘Chris I’m going to go take a shower,’ I replied okay and she left. I trusted my brother and mom. Not because I only had them to trust, but because I knew them as the bushranger knew the bush. I brushed my teeth, mouth canopying over the cube sink, froths of Colgate toothpaste drooling lazily down and finally splashing in a flat splat in the sink. I jumped into my pajamas and slipped under the thin sheets of my narrow single bed. Brian slept in the bed next to mine. And he snored. Why, of course he did. Every guy at fifteen did, I suppose, but his snoring was fuckin’ extreme. And the time he had major nose shits up his nostrils- fuck, those snores reminded me of a woman in labor. I think I fell asleep waiting for Brian and mom coming back. I’m sorry my tale’s going a bit slow, and I’m not going to speed it up by writing they never came back and the end, tadaa- no, because they did come back. I heard the keys, the squeak (to this day the squeak of door pains my thoughts) and the whispers of the blankets as they both slipped into bed. I had a dream, or nightmare, whatever. Yep, still remember it- fresh as a daisy. My mom was murdered. No- butchered, rather- by Brian when they were coming back up to our room. Brian had his Little League baseball bat and was bashing Lydia with it. Up and down it went, each strike angled differently at her convulsing body. I was invisible, I think, because as I watched them I was nothing more then another shadow cast by one of the four walls. There was something else- yes, definitely- an axe head was installed on the tip of the baseball bat. It was then I knew why the walls were covered in red splatters. From the middle of nowhere I suddenly saw two glowing white dots, and I woke, still in my bed, my pajamas clinging onto me, damp. And I think what makes all of us fascinate over dreams is because what you see and hear are actually linked to the reality around you when you sleep. And the sounds and sights always thread themselves neatly into the dream. Dreams were never complete, for me. So as I had opened my eyes, I froze. I must have turned in my bed, because now I was facing my brother’s bed. At first I didn’t know what the fuck I was seeing, or believed I was seeing. Some kind of déjà vu settled around my mind. But I was quiet sure I had never seen this. What I saw was my brother, looking at me. His pupils were of a milky white, merging with the whites around his eyes. I screamed like a girl being raped in the middle of the night. God, I screamed. I didn’t like it here I fuckin’ hate it here I despise this hotel oh my dear god saint what have they done to my brother I hate you hotel oh dear fuck you’ve killed my brother you goddam murderer oh crap shit how can you do this to me I’m just a boy I still wanna live to the fuckin day I start shavin’ please god spare me from this evil hotel. Stuff like that came and went throughout my head like spears. I snapped my eyes shut and pulled my bed sheets up to block the glowing rays of my brother’s eyes. I was shaking up pretty bad. I’ve just finished another can of beer and its ten o’clock, exacto. What happened next? I shrug. I don’t know myself. Well like I said, this is a fucked up piece of rotting shit. I didn’t want to tell you this on instinct, as I recall telling you at the very beginning. I apologize to you, my fellow, if you had wanted to know what the hell happened to our little family. You see? Dreams aren’t always complete, are they?
Copyright © 2003 Ben S D |