Dad's Gotta Brand New Bag

family matters..

It was quite immediate after my mother had died in the burning of the town library that my father lost his sanity. I remember the way his mouth fell open when he picked up the ringing phone, saliva dripped onto a puddle in the floor and then he dropped the phone and lay in the puddle. He pissed his pants too. At first I was sure he was fooling me and my sister, pulling our legs or whatever, and then the lime yellow puddle surged out from beneath my father lying unconscious on the floor. The smell was what told me there was something really wrong. 

My father took the news the worst out of the three of us. He didn't sleep. Even my sister slept soundly throughout the night, even with the fact that she no longer had a living, loving mother, and what remained was just an emotionless brother and a father who denied the current reality. He didn't even watch TV. He stared at it. When I would ask him what he was watching he said he didn't know. He was oblivious that he was watching an infomercial or a porno. Reclined in his chair he rejected the truth.

He lost weight too. I never saw him eat. I honestly don't even know how he is alive right now. I guess he ate the fruit growing on the trees outside. That was the only thing he did other than stare blankly at the TV and sleep, he watered the trees. They became his best friends. I guess because my mom had planted most of them. They were her only remnants. He probably thought her soul lived in them.  

Haley and I would wake up every morning on our own and go to school, while Dad slept on the couch or the recliner. When we would get back from school he would be in the same spot. And the expression on his face when he slept. God, I cant even explain. He looked dead. His eyes appeared to have never been opened. His lips grew crusty and pale. Even his mustache looked sad.

I was relieved extraordinarily when he first got up off the couch and went outside. I watched him through the kitchen window as he stood in the grass and ignored the dogs jumping joyously at his legs. He turned on a hose and set it in a bush, or a pot, or a tree. He stood there with his hands at his hips and his head down, and his cap on, and the same clothes since last week.

That was another thing completely. He didn't shower and he didn't change clothes. This terrible smell grew and lingered in the living room .He slept in his shoes. He didn't go to work. He didn't eat. He ignored me and Haley. He watched TV like a dead person. He never, ever spoke.

He didn't even go to the funeral. 

This is a story about my father.

It was about two months later that my Dad finally snapped out of his melancholy funk. He would wake up at a normal time, he showered and ate. He even started taking off his shoes when he went to sleep, in his bed. When me and Haley would go to school, Dad went to work. We would come home and find the house vacant, and sometimes quite nervously dial Dad's phone number to make sure he didn't drive his car off a cliff or shoot himself in the head. But he would answer, a voice that seemed busy and preoccupied with his business.

Dad started cooking too. Before Mom died, he never even went in the kitchen. He jokingly called that Mom's territory. He even bought a metal sign and put it on the kitchen wall that said Women Only. Mom thought it was funny but it only stayed in the kitchen for about a week. She said it was tasteless. Dad bought a new laptop for himself and said he was researching different recipes for dinner. He only cooked dinner. For breakfast we strictly ate cereal.

I don't really even think that Dad realized anymore that Mom was gone. He never brought her up. He never said her name. His eyes didn't have that tired, hopeless glaze on it anymore. Also he maintained his hygiene and shaved regularly. This morning at breakfast Haley said she had a dream about mom, hoping to get some sort of reaction out of Dad. I looked up from my corn flakes and pretended to watch the television but looked for any sort of facial expression on Dad's face that would give away any interior thoughts or feelings that he had locked away. But he showed no emotion. His jaw clenched as he chewed and his mustache bobbed up and down. We left for school.

Kids at school ask me how I'm doing, but I don't have an answer for them. Sometimes I'll just lie and say I'm fine. Other times I'll glare at them or walk away or flip my finger at them. Sometimes I'll see Haley with her friends at lunch, sitting at a table with her head buried in her arms and her friends hands consolingly searching her back for an off button. But now, I'm glad to say that most of the pain has left us. The memory is still there, but only in dreams.

After school Haley and I drove home and found Dad in the living room on the recliner with his new laptop in his lap. When we opened the door he shut the lid so we couldn't see what he was doing. He turned and looked at us, his mustache smiling.

“Hey kids, how was school? Did you learn anything?”

Haley still had sorrow written on her cheeks and pain drenched in her eyes from lunch, so she didn't say anything. She dropped her backpack on the floor and walked to her room.

“Really, Dad? Do you really think that we learn stuff at school? I haven't learned anything in years. High school is just day-care part four.”

“Well I guess we'll just have to take you out and send you to work in the fields with the Sanchez's and the Gonzalez's and the Garcia's and the Guadalupe's.”

“And the Rodriguez's.”

“Yes and the Rodriguez's.”

A racial inside joke between me and Dad.

“What's wrong with Haley?”

I took my backpack off and sat on the couch, grabbing the remote. “Just a bad day at school I guess. I didn't ask her but I already know whats wrong just by looking at her.”

Dad had an inquisitive look on his face, as if he was very confused, then he shrugged and opened his laptop.

Dad made pasta for dinner, with garlic bread and salad and it was actually really good. After we finished eating Dad sat at the table and stared at the television as me and Haley did the dishes. Sometimes I felt like I was the adult. As if me and my sister were the parents of my father. But it was always like that. Even before the death of my mother. Dad wasn't the brightest light. He was colored outside the lines. He wasn't too good in his vocabulary. He never graduated from high school. Dad was a little slow. He wasn't retarded, he just wasn't that smart. Don't get me wrong, there are some things he knows way too much about, like cars. He knows everything about cars. He can listen to a motor run and tell you that you're low on gas. He can squeeze the steering wheel and know that your brakes are decaying. Don't ask me. 

The television was on mute. Dad liked to stare at the faces without actually hearing what they had to say. He did the same thing with my mother. Now, my mother was the smart one in the family. My mother breathed in books and exhaled beautiful words and stories and jokes. She read magazines and dictionaries and novels and thesaurus's and autobiographies and biographies. Her brain nourished off of words and information. Her eyes danced with words every night, tangoing and spinning and dipping them in her brain. My mother was the smart one.

Mother worked at the library. She would sit behind the counter and a name plate sat on top exclaiming her name in elaborate text: Julie Sanders. And below that: Librarian. Mom always said she had the easiest job. All she ever did was read. Sometimes after school I would walk to the library and find her behind the counter with her legs crossed and her head down staring into the book in her lap.

She loved her job, I believe because she got to read all day and because there was rarely anybody in the library. It was quiet all day and the air was laced with tranquility. All around her lingered the inked minds of brilliant people, and even though there was never anybody around to talk to, she could always pick up Ask the Dust and talk to John Fante. Charles Bukowski always had something to say about women. And she was always charmed by F. Scott's lyrical dialogue.

Her position as a librarian was static. It was a government job, so even if nobody went to the library she still got paid. Nobody goes to libraries anymore. I always told her that. Don't you ever get bored, Mom? She said she never got bored, and that the library was filled with all sorts of interesting people, most of them dead. She was mostly alone with Hemingway. I didn't trust the two of them alone together. Or Henry Miller.

Mom got to the point, she told me once, where she would get annoyed by the occasional students lingering in the library. She was so used to the silence and the private dialogue reeling in her head, that when anybody came in the library she would put her book down and smile and stare at the people in the library, trying to make them as uncomfortable as possible until they left. Then she would return to her books.

Her downfall was the cigarette. When the library would close she would sit by one of the windows and open it and smoke away, looking down on the town below. I caught her once, and she nearly had a heart attack. I came into the library from the back where she parked her car and rode the elevator to the top and got off and found her desk behind the counter vacant. Eventually I found her by the window and I said Mom, what are you doing?!?  and she jumped out her chair and dropped the cigarette out the window. 

I don't have to explain how she died, its obvious, but I'll go over it again. The library was closing. It was Friday, and Mom was trying to finish Tropic of Cancer. She was smoking in her chair by the window, reading Henry Miller's mesmerizing words. The chair she was lounging in had just recently been cleaned by the janitor. Some kid had vomited on it while reading Chuck Palahniuk and the janitor cleaned the mess and then sprayed a flammable cleaning substance onto the tainted leather chair. You can guess what happened. The entire library building burned.

That's the story the detectives told us. They interviewed me and Dad and Haley, they questioned the janitor, they even questioned the kid who vomited in the chair. Eventually they came to the conclusion that she was smoking in the cleaned chair and when a floating piece of ash made contact with the fire hungry leather she went up in flames. But what I don't understand is why she chose to sit and smoke in the chair that had just been vomited in.

Dad was on his laptop all the time. All the f*****g time. In the mornings at breakfast. Outside in the hammock, while the dogs sniffed at him. He took it to work with him even though he had an office computer. And every time me or Haley would come in the room he would shift himself so we couldn't see the screen, or he would switch tabs or he would just slap the screen shut.

At school things had completely resumed their dreadful, haggard, tedious routine. Everybody had forgotten that my mom had died. It was in the past, and they could give a s**t. S**t, they could give two s***s. 

In gym we were given papers that declared that try outs for track had begun. I took the paper regardless. Our gym teacher explained that we would need to get out parents signature signed on the paper if we wanted to try out, and as he said this he looked me right in the eye and I felt that an ugly smirk might cringe out of his face.

After school had ended I drove home by myself. Haley went to her friends house and I lit up a cigarette in recognition of my Mom and drove home with the radio loud. I pulled into the driveway and got out of the car and pissed behind a bush. I took my keys out and unlocked the front door. Dad was still at work and he wouldn't be home until a couple hours.

Inside the house there lingered an acrid odor, like an Chinese restaurant. I walk in the living room and there is music playing, the ting ting tong of Asian melodies. Then I see the paper lamps with the Chinese scripture on it. I don't understand. 

I walk into the kitchen and I am absolutely confused and bewildered at what I see. I want to laugh, I want to scream, I want to run out of the house and I want to cry. The kitchen has been revamped with oriental décor, modified in an extremely obnoxious manner. There was a grill on top of the counter with a simmering fish basking in the flames. Laughter sounded, a foreign laugh; following the foreign laugh the detestable, chortling chuckle of my father, a sound I have not heard in a long time.

Through the haze of steaming fish I made out two apparitions. The cloud cleared momentarily and I saw my fathers face, the face of Pain but now the face of Pride. Who is the other figure?

My father must have sensed me in the room, so he walked over and put the lid on the flaming fish and the steam cloud cleared and he smiled at me. Just by the squeeze of his hand on my shoulder, I could tell he had changed. He was entirely another person to me at that moment; that overwhelmingly brief instance where my self loathing father suddenly seemed overcome with acceptance and pride. He guided me with his hand on my shoulder to the side of the kitchen, and his words seemed to evaporate along with the steaming smell of the fish.

“Son, I want you to meet my new wife.”

And out of the acrid steam the exotic face of a Southern Asian girl surfaces on the screen of my sight; about twenty two I would guess, and absolutely, incredibly flawless. Her eyes waved, not tilted, her eyes light brown, not black, her hair curly dark-brown, not straight jet-black. Her lips parted, revealing oriental pearly fangs. Her voice, a broken (shattered) English, yet somehow mysteriously seductive. 

“Haro, you must be Max. My name is Zonteoquiloosoaunzjitjitzii Hooshikamooshoo.”

My first impression is that this is a prank, a complete and total joke being played on me, as  Zonteoquiloosoaunzjitjitzii Hooshikamooshoo embraces me with her petite feminine body and giggles as she hugs me, her milky skin caressing my face and neck. A feeling of exhilarating excitement overcomes me. My father leans over and whispers, his mustache tickling my ear, “I found her on the internet. Mail order brides. She's from Thailand. What do you think, son?”

Author's Note

Another idea, no where near finished

Reviews

[Imogean Tweetie]

Well, I would seriously con sider completion of this piece were I you. The beginning was so engaging, You are quite refreshing to find in the Cafe. A cut above the rest in here. I saw some wordy moments but that is what editors are for. Great use of dialogue and imagery. A solid read if never read one. I would consider writing a book were I you. You have talent, and not the ordinary kind. It is not easy writing true stories. They can be emotionally taxing but I can see that you are unafraid of honesty. The end was only a beginning and the portrait you paint of the characters are engaging enough to make them interesting.

[Chadvonswan]

Thank you very much for the positive commentary, I very much appreciate it!

[ZackOfBridge]

HAHAHA! Can I get one from Amazon? Good story Max, I especially liked the part describing the mother. I really hope you continue with this one

[Chadvonswan]

Haha thanks man, thanks for reading!!