"We never got along, Dad and I, and now that he is always at the hospital, he will sometimes even try to punch me when we argue when he gets home, we have always argued, the way some Gothic characters have always lived in the castle, but now when we argue—when he never did this to me when I was growing up—he tries to really knock my lights out, like he's making up for missed moments, the way he says now he wishes he had taken me fishing, the way he used to tell me he wished he had taught me to fight." |
Marcel Duchamp, Marcel Duchamp Cast Alive, 1967
My wife emailed how it was going; we are separated but not legally separated, because I wrecked her car and kept getting wrecked at home and then wrecked our marriage by getting wrecked at 11:09 a.m. on the 11th anniversary of 9/11, walking away from the house then all stoic after weepy to replace the empty bottles of beer she got me to drink at home so I wouldn't have to go out to get blitzed on my own, then buying the new booze, pushing all that luck away by walking into some afternoon bar like I needed a break from a terrible day, sitting down alone at first, but then next to some blue dress girl: red hair, hot freckle face, asking me what my story was, talking to me as I drank more, buying me a drink now, offering me a ride home even though I say I can walk home, end even though I brought those bottles in a brown bag with me like I was afraid to run out, keep it close to my left foot and tap with my sneakered toes and keep on like a toddling town fool; I make the political decision to ask hot freckle face what she does for a living, and this girl has an admirer in denim who wants to ask me what I do for a living, keeps asking even though me and freckle face are in our own world: What do you do, sir, that you can be here in the day? at this hour? because this guy does lawn work and this is his 6 p.m.. Hey, I think and then counter aloud: I did lawn work for years, man, for years, and could get back into cutting grass and weed whacking at any time, no prob, and all of this all ends in me being asked to leave, this guy is a regular but they don’t know me which would be fine but I brought in that brown bag of replacement bottles which I had just purchased next to the bar stool, and when the owner of the place tells me to split I just launch them to the floor tiles like sudsy grenades, and then let fly an extra bottle of red wine I had purchased for Gina and I, for that night to be romantic on this day of national recall and observation, and everyone has a cell phone now, so I am walking back to my home to wait for my three-year-old son to get dropped off in an hour, he goes to daycare so I can drink all day, and the cops find me on my saunter home. I fit the profile, though they all likely had a cell phone picture of me too, so where is the cop work in that kind of ease? Me wearing the blue plaid and navy blue pants and blue shoes even, look for the man in blue description, and later the one cop who tries to act like he cares about me said I was acting belligerent and that's why they took me in, but really it's the hair, it is always the hair, just should have walked into a barber shop right then and had it shaved; there is a red and white stripe shear spot right across the street, or I could have climbed upon the bar roof slowly and stayed put, or I could have taken off the shirt and got into the constant river water that surrounds the streets toward where Gina and me and my boy once shared a home, and gone for a fugitive swim, so many options now that I think about it, and so it is the second time I will have been arrested since Easter, here in this town where a waitress I know has a kid at the same daycare with my boy, and every time I see Claudia who for the three years poured me glass after glass of wine as I dined alone sitting at the bar with a book I was reviewing in hand, she didn't know I was with anyone and oh how we flirted, now she knows for sure I am married and says she wants to know when we can all hang out together like couples with kids, her guy and my pretty wife. Cop who cuffs me looks like he's biting down hard on a smile, I can tell he hates his job, makes me think I wish I could just be friends with people, like that Claudia waitress, like this cop, without wanting to fall in love, without wanting to fight for my life. And I know the downtown drill. So used to the chill and the chide of the jail cell here that I even know what to say so that I get my special room alone, with no one cuddling up for warmth or trying to talk and maybe with my own roll of toilet paper to sleep my head on, and unwind over my eyes to gauze out the fluorescent light; so: no one asking what I did; which is unjustifiable and makes no sense, disappointed so, to be moved into the general population of warrantless warrant offenders and guitar thieves, guys caught running and guys who just fell asleep, and me with my P.I. charge, and me who was actually hired out a few times as an actual but unlicensed P.I. when the writing was water, when the writing was murk and prone to quick evaporation leaving only the murk and no mole of aperture—I had to look for some guy's old crush once, found her, found out what junior high school she taught math at and what Dairy Queen she swung by off work and on her way to her apartment, but didn't let my boss Siren Jimbo know any of it, took pity really is what happened, let Ms. Stacey Goodnight live in peace without my client; had to make this other guy who had run over a few nurses on purpose go away, found him fast and he did go away, a week after I let myself into his house and asked him those questions that made his eyes wide and scalp red, it was raining and I was wearing a black coat and pair of blue-tinted goggles with puffy Smurf stickers along the rims, so that kind of dark night cape thing works, the nurse killer moved and sometimes I walk by his house to remember, took no money for either job because the first was a cash on delivery gig and the second, no one was ever supposed to know about anyway, but biker dudes did get a room to stay in for six months, shack by their church, my room in case I needed to lay low after the night, but going home again to Gina and my baby boy was a better hideaway, could of course use that room now, now that I am trying to pretend I know nothing of my surroundings. Always getting the looney bin first here—it sounds like a shortwave show upstairs but it’s one hallucinating ham hemmed off his ham radio, and so they see you just want to rest and retool and then they let you into the general population where guys who don't have pens are trying to memorize one another’s phone number as they try and sell their story to the magistrate and are led out into to the light.
“I'm looking for things to write about, pitching out ideas, trying to get ideas out there,” I type back to my wife, who has a job that keeps her all day away from our three-year-old son, from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., because of the drive, but the job she has which is corporate academic test-building that I could never do and can barely describe, pays enough so that she doesn't have to one bit depend on me for anything, money-wise, and it’s getting to be, otherwise.
But really today I am waiting for a ride—a taxi might pull up, or a friend of a friend with a gas card and an address, my mother who I talk to almost every day or my sister who I don’t speak to at all anymore: Rachel, two years younger, could be like my Wonder Twin for physically we are so alike, and both with binge bottle behavior, Rachel who will text me out of familial favor because the family is in bad throes and we all get that we all don’t need to get along, and maybe I’ll be waiting on my younger sister the way some people wait on the man, to come by this lodge I rent week by week and pick me up so I can move my everything from one small room in this off season resort to the next small room, almost as small as my growing up room, I have been in as it were some kind of terrible halfway house for months living and screaming and watching TV shows with my folks in a Capital City away from my wife and child; but also away from her terrible sister Barb, chick she has no problem talking to me, this girl that hates my guts anyway that still talks to me, that lives here too, on the bigger side of this not-meant-to-be-a-duplex duplex, with her too-late-to-act-like-a-yuppie now sports-blogging husband, who manages a phone service station where the goal, as I can gather, is to take jobs back from the Indian outsourcing and provide American accents for all the Mexican-Americans who call in for washing machine help ... and their adorable kids next door, basketball and blowing bubbles over chalk circles like a game, God bless them, loving the time they spend with my boy, someone has to be chasing my boy at this age and stage, running to hug, and loving his Kewpie doll face, it should be his cousins.
My dad is out of the hospital now, third brain surgery this year, and out of dialysis today, and even though this is the place for me, this lodge—a Man in the High Castle/Shining-type off season lodge by a lake that I stay in all day until it is time to see my son and walk over to the house to see my wife, and then cook for my wife, do their laundry, and maybe steal a glass of wine, grab whatever books are mine, palm whatever loose change I justify is mine, see if I got any physical mail, give them vitamins, and do my own laundry, and hug them as they go to sleep and then walk back to my place, I need to help dad out for real tonight.
This last surgery he had lent his head the kind of hairstyle I always wanted and paid six bucks for when I was between skateboarding outside the mall and New Waving inside the mall. And I get spinal fluid on my shirt bandaging him up for the wheelchair rides, comes out, or bubbles up at least, with peroxide, that we go through so often it’s like water he is supposed to not drink anymore because of the kidney failure.
We never got along, Dad and I, and now that he is always at the hospital, he will sometimes even try to punch me when we argue when he gets home, we have always argued, the way some Gothic characters have always lived in the castle, but now when we argue—when he never did this to me when I was growing up—he tries to really knock my lights out, like he's making up for missed moments, the way he says now he wishes he had taken me fishing, the way he used to tell me he wished he had taught me to fight. But really it’s just the brain cancer. And I should know better. He's better right when he is out of dialysis—acts quiet and nice, like the sick and the sensibly glad to be alive and he just needs to sleep.
Next day is him growing toward angry as he grows toward health, asking me what happened to me, didn't I use to be so nice, I need to cut my hair that's for sure, I need to cut off from people I thought loved me, I need to go to church and not drink cold things, or walk when it is dark, I need to know when I have been beaten, oh give it up and be a cook somewhere, I've seen you make those omelets: “It's all because you broke up with that Lin, Bob. It's because she was going to be a doctor and you were going to be a teacher, and have kids, that's what happened to you, that is where everything went wrong for you.”
“I've got a kid, Dad.”
“Yeah. Now that I am this old and this sick and maybe will die in six months, every head cut I get only gives me six months; it’s worth it though to see him a bit more, and he won't even remember me, your boy, your boy won’t know who I am,” and now he's crying, he likes to stand and cry, or maybe crying on an air mattress hurts more than crying on your feet when you've been drilled in the head. He's not that old, but he is that sick.
“My boy's got a good memory, Dad. That's why I'm out of the house right now. Don't want him to see me and Gina fight, don't want him to think of us screaming or me punching a hole in the wall or she's got her nails at my neck, or that little kid cousin next door coming over to see if we need help cause her mom sends her over to let us know she can hear all screaming.”
“She kicked you out, son.”
“I know, and for good reason. But this is why I have stayed out.”
I drink coffee, look at the blue and white at the window, and type back to my wife: “It's a pretty day but I've not been outside. I had trouble sleeping but ended up getting enough, just having dreams of being called a dunce hat/witch hat at school, it’s this future high school I've dreamt of before,” I type to her, “in the dream I am always trying to get into class just so I can skip class. I head toward the roof and secret rooms of this Cambridge-looking public high and play hooky, but show up to be there, and hiding in rafters like some whiz kid Quasimodo, like a guy who knows when the bell has to ring but does not have to be anywhere, and this time Bluto from Popeye is outside it all, this part when I am just watching the yard, he's all Blackbeard and into health, good guy tough guy in the dream, introduced in a deep ABC miniseries cartoon voiceover, like: 'Bluto as you've never seen him before' as the sidekick to Captain Marvel, do you recall the World's Mightiest Mortal Man? Here Bluto is a tough guy like he always is a tough guy, but here he loves kale and that's his blue strength; and the guy he protects, Captain Marvel—I had Underoos of this guy before I knew what he was when I was four, I told you that like seven times Gina, do you remember?—that kid that always turns into a man when the lightning bolt gets him, he is a total man in the dream, no kid at all: Captain Marvel: who in this version had a time-line, a moment every day, an appointment with the Gods, that he knew he was going to be hit by that Zeus Deus lightning, no control, just a compass sense of where the bolt might strike, and he had to get there at the moment, that precise moment, or else the lightning might miss him and would hit other objects, wreak havoc and animate still sticks into sentient swords, build teeth along roads, render salt to sweet, stalagmite world in a wreck, leaving evidence of his fate and hurting everyone around, oh the crop circles. So Bluto helps him find the lightning, eating kale for strength and driving around in a cobalt jeep but once that lightning comes Bluto steps back, humble, and once Captain Marvel fields the bolts he could discharge them with the word ‘Shazam’ of course,” I type to my wife, “which in this dream is learned means ‘Schism’—and the bolts would leave through his palms, as, of course, they would have to in real life, in a warm benevolence that hurt no one, that healed no one, but hurt no one.”
“I'm looking for things to write about, pitching out ideas, trying to get ideas out there,” I type back to my wife, who has a job that keeps her all day away from our three-year-old son, from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., because of the drive, but the job she has which is corporate academic test-building that I could never do and can barely describe, pays enough so that she doesn't have to one bit depend on me for anything, money-wise, and it’s getting to be, otherwise.
But really today I am waiting for a ride—a taxi might pull up, or a friend of a friend with a gas card and an address, my mother who I talk to almost every day or my sister who I don’t speak to at all anymore: Rachel, two years younger, could be like my Wonder Twin for physically we are so alike, and both with binge bottle behavior, Rachel who will text me out of familial favor because the family is in bad throes and we all get that we all don’t need to get along, and maybe I’ll be waiting on my younger sister the way some people wait on the man, to come by this lodge I rent week by week and pick me up so I can move my everything from one small room in this off season resort to the next small room, almost as small as my growing up room, I have been in as it were some kind of terrible halfway house for months living and screaming and watching TV shows with my folks in a Capital City away from my wife and child; but also away from her terrible sister Barb, chick she has no problem talking to me, this girl that hates my guts anyway that still talks to me, that lives here too, on the bigger side of this not-meant-to-be-a-duplex duplex, with her too-late-to-act-like-a-yuppie now sports-blogging husband, who manages a phone service station where the goal, as I can gather, is to take jobs back from the Indian outsourcing and provide American accents for all the Mexican-Americans who call in for washing machine help ... and their adorable kids next door, basketball and blowing bubbles over chalk circles like a game, God bless them, loving the time they spend with my boy, someone has to be chasing my boy at this age and stage, running to hug, and loving his Kewpie doll face, it should be his cousins.
My dad is out of the hospital now, third brain surgery this year, and out of dialysis today, and even though this is the place for me, this lodge—a Man in the High Castle/Shining-type off season lodge by a lake that I stay in all day until it is time to see my son and walk over to the house to see my wife, and then cook for my wife, do their laundry, and maybe steal a glass of wine, grab whatever books are mine, palm whatever loose change I justify is mine, see if I got any physical mail, give them vitamins, and do my own laundry, and hug them as they go to sleep and then walk back to my place, I need to help dad out for real tonight.
This last surgery he had lent his head the kind of hairstyle I always wanted and paid six bucks for when I was between skateboarding outside the mall and New Waving inside the mall. And I get spinal fluid on my shirt bandaging him up for the wheelchair rides, comes out, or bubbles up at least, with peroxide, that we go through so often it’s like water he is supposed to not drink anymore because of the kidney failure.
We never got along, Dad and I, and now that he is always at the hospital, he will sometimes even try to punch me when we argue when he gets home, we have always argued, the way some Gothic characters have always lived in the castle, but now when we argue—when he never did this to me when I was growing up—he tries to really knock my lights out, like he's making up for missed moments, the way he says now he wishes he had taken me fishing, the way he used to tell me he wished he had taught me to fight. But really it’s just the brain cancer. And I should know better. He's better right when he is out of dialysis—acts quiet and nice, like the sick and the sensibly glad to be alive and he just needs to sleep.
Next day is him growing toward angry as he grows toward health, asking me what happened to me, didn't I use to be so nice, I need to cut my hair that's for sure, I need to cut off from people I thought loved me, I need to go to church and not drink cold things, or walk when it is dark, I need to know when I have been beaten, oh give it up and be a cook somewhere, I've seen you make those omelets: “It's all because you broke up with that Lin, Bob. It's because she was going to be a doctor and you were going to be a teacher, and have kids, that's what happened to you, that is where everything went wrong for you.”
“I've got a kid, Dad.”
“Yeah. Now that I am this old and this sick and maybe will die in six months, every head cut I get only gives me six months; it’s worth it though to see him a bit more, and he won't even remember me, your boy, your boy won’t know who I am,” and now he's crying, he likes to stand and cry, or maybe crying on an air mattress hurts more than crying on your feet when you've been drilled in the head. He's not that old, but he is that sick.
“My boy's got a good memory, Dad. That's why I'm out of the house right now. Don't want him to see me and Gina fight, don't want him to think of us screaming or me punching a hole in the wall or she's got her nails at my neck, or that little kid cousin next door coming over to see if we need help cause her mom sends her over to let us know she can hear all screaming.”
“She kicked you out, son.”
“I know, and for good reason. But this is why I have stayed out.”
I drink coffee, look at the blue and white at the window, and type back to my wife: “It's a pretty day but I've not been outside. I had trouble sleeping but ended up getting enough, just having dreams of being called a dunce hat/witch hat at school, it’s this future high school I've dreamt of before,” I type to her, “in the dream I am always trying to get into class just so I can skip class. I head toward the roof and secret rooms of this Cambridge-looking public high and play hooky, but show up to be there, and hiding in rafters like some whiz kid Quasimodo, like a guy who knows when the bell has to ring but does not have to be anywhere, and this time Bluto from Popeye is outside it all, this part when I am just watching the yard, he's all Blackbeard and into health, good guy tough guy in the dream, introduced in a deep ABC miniseries cartoon voiceover, like: 'Bluto as you've never seen him before' as the sidekick to Captain Marvel, do you recall the World's Mightiest Mortal Man? Here Bluto is a tough guy like he always is a tough guy, but here he loves kale and that's his blue strength; and the guy he protects, Captain Marvel—I had Underoos of this guy before I knew what he was when I was four, I told you that like seven times Gina, do you remember?—that kid that always turns into a man when the lightning bolt gets him, he is a total man in the dream, no kid at all: Captain Marvel: who in this version had a time-line, a moment every day, an appointment with the Gods, that he knew he was going to be hit by that Zeus Deus lightning, no control, just a compass sense of where the bolt might strike, and he had to get there at the moment, that precise moment, or else the lightning might miss him and would hit other objects, wreak havoc and animate still sticks into sentient swords, build teeth along roads, render salt to sweet, stalagmite world in a wreck, leaving evidence of his fate and hurting everyone around, oh the crop circles. So Bluto helps him find the lightning, eating kale for strength and driving around in a cobalt jeep but once that lightning comes Bluto steps back, humble, and once Captain Marvel fields the bolts he could discharge them with the word ‘Shazam’ of course,” I type to my wife, “which in this dream is learned means ‘Schism’—and the bolts would leave through his palms, as, of course, they would have to in real life, in a warm benevolence that hurt no one, that healed no one, but hurt no one.”
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Roberto Ontiveros is a fiction writer, artist, and journalist. Some of his work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Santa Monica Review, The Baffler, and The Believer. His debut collection, The Fight for Space, was published by Stephen F. Austin State University Press, and his second book, Assisted Living, was published by Corona Samizdat Press.
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