The Music of What Happens, page 20
I sit down next to his bed and he reaches a freakishly frail hand out and touches my leg.
“Hey J-Bird,” he says, his voice encrusted with slurry, it seems like.
“Hey Daddy.”
“You keepin’ everyone in line while I’m down for the count?”
“Yes,” I say, ashamed that, no, I’m totally not. If that’s my job, I’m really failing.
“Remember. You get extra points if you take care of your mom and keep her happy.”
“And the points have no monetary value,” I say, stealing his punch line, and he smiles, and he puts his head back and stares straight ahead. We sit like this for quite a while, and suddenly he’s sleeping, which, oddly enough, makes me feel relieved. Because as much as I want to hear my dad’s voice — gravelly as it is right now — for eternity, this way I don’t have to think about what I should say. I’m so selfish.
His hand remains on my leg, and I allow myself to close my eyes too, and imagine my dad throwing me a Frisbee when I was eight, and his utter bemusement when I totally whiffed trying to catch it, like missed it 100 percent.
“So you’re not an Ultimate Frisbee guy,” he said, and I shook my head and stared at my feet, and he came and put his arm around me. “Everyone needs to find their own game,” he said. “And sometimes … sometimes the game isn’t even a game.”
I don’t know how my eight-year-old mind got this from those words, but in that moment what I heard was that my dad knew I was different, and as much as he was a cowboy sort of guy, with a fuzzy walrus mustache and a cowboy hat and Wrangler jeans, I’d never be any of those things, and it was okay with him.
After about an hour of him napping, he awakens with a start and says, “What time is it?”
I look at my phone. “Four thirty,” I say.
He looks confused. “Morning or night?”
“What?” I say. “Night. Afternoon.”
“What day is it? Tuesday?”
“Um. Saturday,” I say.
He turns his head away and stares straight ahead. “Oh.”
“Just in case there’s a test,” I say. It’s something he says all the time.
My dad takes a deep breath and turns his frail neck to look at me again. “There’s a test?”
I laugh, because this. This is what I miss. Dad joking with me.
But he keeps looking at me, like he’s waiting for an answer.
“Yup,” I say.
He slowly turns his body until his stick legs are over the side. “Well let’s get going,” he says.
I sit straight up and try to push his legs back onto the bed. “No. Dad. No. We’re not going anywhere.”
He looks so confused. His face. Like he has no idea what’s going on. “But there’s a test.”
“I was kidding, Dad,” I say, but now his face is contorted into a mask of pain, and he starts to wail.
I’ve never heard this noise coming from my dad the cowboy. I don’t know what to do.
“Mom! Mom!” I call. She’s been sitting out in the hallway. I hope.
No one comes. “Help!” I scream, above my dad’s wails, and I start to cry too.
A nurse comes in, and then a second, and they help my dad get back into a more comfortable position, lying down with his legs on the bed. And then my mom comes in, and she must have heard, or someone must have told her, because she looks stricken, panicked.
My dad says, “How to give your father a heart attack,” and he won’t look at me. I need him to look at me. He will not. Or cannot. I don’t know.
Mom puts her hand on my back and says, “Let’s get you out of here,” and I stand and she leads me away from the room.
I never see my dad again. “How to give your father a heart attack” are his last words to me.
And I think maybe it’s my fault that he died. That maybe he just needed rest and that his fragile heart and his aching lungs needed stillness, and me riling him up with my stupidity was the last straw, and that’s what did it.
My mom cries for eighteen hours straight. Nothing can stop her during the service, or after, and I can hear the sobs from my room even with her down the hall and my door closed. And I think that I am broken, because I have no tears. I try to push them out. I feel sad. I feel nothing too. I don’t know how to feel anything and I take out a pen and paper and write a poem that I think my dad may have liked.
I know now that it’s a terrible poem, but it was real at the moment, and I put it away and just having it in my pocket made me feel like Dad and I had a secret.
And at home, things got bad. And when Mom falls onto the bathroom floor and starts screaming and writhing, I pick her up, and when she tells me that no one will ever love her again, I tell her that someone will. That I do. That I’ll take care of her, and she’s like a little girl and her hands are bigger than mine but somehow look tiny as I take her to her bed and tuck her in.
And when she closes her eyes I go to my room and I close the door and I go to my bookcase, and I tip it over and it shatters into two pieces, the top clattering into the far wall. She never comes in to check about the commotion. She never mentions it. I leave it there for three days but Mom acts like it isn’t there, so finally I just pick up the busted bookshelf and carry its two pieces out to the shed in the backyard, where they still sit, untouched, as it was Dad’s shed, and when something goes wrong we don’t look for tools; we go to the phone and call the handyman.
And I am always sorry I tipped over the bookshelf.
And I’ll never do anything like that again.
With the truck still out of commission, we assemble the posse of six for a little Third Friday fun. We start the night out by eating as a group at one of the communal tables at Short Leash, which makes awesome gourmet hot dogs and puts them in naan bread.
I get the devil dog, which has red pepper, green chilies, sriracha, onion, cheddar, and jalapeños. It’s the perfect mix of spicy and savory. Betts of course gets the most disgusting thing on the menu. It has smoked Gouda, bacon, peanut butter, BBQ sauce, and Cracker Jacks. He eats like a caveman, and Kayla makes a big show of getting up and moving as far away from Betts as possible. Betts reacts by chewing with his mouth open.
“They have a food truck,” I say.
Jordan says, “I saw that. You ever think about doing something with hot dogs?”
“Totally. We should re-paint and re-name the truck,” I say, and Jordan cracks up. It’s day six of us being without a food truck, and we just found out yesterday that the license will be ready on Monday. The truck, though, needs some love, according to the guys at the shop my mom helped me find. It’s gonna cost about two grand, and it’s gonna take another full week before it’s ready.
“I think we can expand off chicken, though,” Jordan says.
I nod and sip my soda. “Sure. As long as we have the chicken options front and center. Yeah.”
Pam rolls her eyes and says, “Our friends have gotten weird and boring,” to Zay-Rod, and he nods.
“I know, right? You know they have a food truck? Haven’t heard that five trillion times.”
Pam laughs. Jordan curls his lip down like his feelings are hurt.
He says, “You are.”
Pam kisses him on the cheek. For effect, Zay-Rod kisses me on the cheek too, only he does it after rubbing mustard on his lips, leaving a mustard stain.
“What is wrong with you?” I say, wiping it off. “Did your momma not love you as a child?”
Zay-Rod takes his fingers and rubs mustard on my forehead. Betts slams his fist into the table, because he’s enjoying this, and because he’s an idiot.
We finish up, pay, and wander down Roosevelt. Third Friday is this thing Phoenix does on the third Friday of every month, where they open art galleries downtown, food trucks show up, and it’s like a mini-festival atmosphere. A lot of kids from school do it. It’s an opportunity to drink beers out of paper bags and the police don’t bug anyone unless you get out of hand.
“Are we really outside? Purposefully?” Kayla asks as we saunter past the church where people go in and listen to this famous choir as they practice.
“Wimp,” Betts says. “You stay inside all summer?”
“Basically,” she says. “Do you not do that? That’s like Darwin Award–level idiocy.”
“Oh good, I get to be called an idiot again by a chick.”
She swats him in the shoulder. He grabs his shoulder in mock agony. She swats him in the other shoulder, and I can actually see the slight grin she’s trying to hold in. Maybe they won’t be a couple, but I’m kinda glad they’re starting to dig each other.
Meanwhile, Pam and Zay-Rod are going the other direction. They’re quiet, just sort of walking together. Both looking at their phones. Both with serene expressions, as if they’re just minding their own business. It does not take a genius to know they are texting each other.
I nudge Jordan and watch the picture of our friends doing their collective things. He nudges me back.
“This makes me happy,” he says.
“This makes me feel sorry for your friends.”
He laughs. “This makes me feel sorrier for your friends.”
We pass a woman who is drawing a mural on the sidewalk in turquoise chalk. I turn to Jordan.
“Hooligan do-gooder?” I ask.
His face lights up. “Yes!” he says. Betts and Kayla and Zay and Pam have kept walking, and we’re fine with that. We can find them later.
“You got a poem?”
He looks so happy. That makes me smile. Jordan has changed quite a bit from the emo dude I met a month ago. He radiates now, and that makes me feel good. I’m Super Max. I have the power to transform people.
He flips through his phone. “I sent myself one yesterday,” he says. “I think it doesn’t totally suck.”
“People love poems that don’t suck,” I say, and I tap the woman on the shoulder and ask if I can borrow some chalk. She smiles and hands me a variety of colors and points to the ground next to her, inviting me to join her in making the street beautiful. I thank her, kneel down, and touch the sidewalk. Even though it’s nighttime and the sun has been down for a couple hours already, the concrete is hot hot hot. I can touch it for like five seconds and then I have to pull my hand off. That’s how powerful the sun is.
Jordan kneels down and says, “Did I tell you about that poem my dad liked?”
I remember something about that while we painted the truck. I nod.
“So basically I looked it up. It’s by Seamus Heaney, this famous Irish poet. Can I read it to you?”
I nod, and I sit on the hot concrete, savoring the heat emanating from the ground through my shorts.
He reads:
“A rowan like a lipsticked girl.
Between the by-road and the main road
Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance
Stand off among the rushes.
There are the mud-flowers of dialect
And the immortelles of perfect pitch
And that moment when the bird sings very close
To the music of what happens.”
I look up at him. He’s staring intently at me.
“I like that,” I say. “I don’t get it, but I dig it. I wanna draw the trees.”
Jordan shakes his head. “I haven’t read you my poem yet. That one influenced mine.”
“Oh,” I say, and for just a tiny sliver of a second, I’m uncomfortable. Because people are gathered around now. I am sitting on the ground, ready to draw, and they listened to the poem Jordan read, and it was good. What if Jordan’s poem isn’t? Will I have to lie to him and tell him that it is?
Jordan’s eyes read fear, and I realize he’s reacting to me saying, “Oh.” So I smile wide, swallowing down my own stuff.
“Go for it!” I say. “I wanna hear.”
He smiles tentatively, and I give him an encouraging nod. My boyfriend the poet. It’s cool, really. I dig it.
“I call it, ‘The Music of What Happens.’ After the last line of the Heaney poem.”
He reads.
“Down the street from me
Ms. Carter douses her head
The shower pulses
And spits her sins down the drain
Next house over, with the red plastic Adirondack chairs
Mr. Simmons cries while eating waffles
His sink bone dry
Dishes with dried-up barbeque pork and oatmeal pile high
Mowing the front lawn next door
Jimmy Fowler dreams of Jenny Carmichael
And her fantastic tits
Mr. Torres in his two-story mini-palace
Sits on his bathroom throne
His waste meeting Ms. Carter’s sins somewhere
Under Carriage Lane
Here and there
We
Eat blueberries out of a ramekin
Chat with strangers about the sex we won’t be having
Read fake news about the end of the world
Peer over our shoulder at the pimple on our back
Check our breath for rampant bacterial stench
Straighten the family portrait, the one where Kim grimaces for some unknown reason
Dream of a better street
Ignore the sewage below our feet —
Which shows that we are human, and that’s the worst —
And soon there is a knock on Ms. Carter’s door
She answers, her hair in its final bun, her smile pasted on
Like a child playing with Elmer’s
And the man asks
Can I climb your palm tree
And knock off the dead fronds
And she nods, because he is saving her life
And she says, as if it’s nothing, ‘Sure.’ ”
People clap. Jordan blushes. I tear up.
He’s beautiful. My boyfriend is beautiful. I don’t understand the whole poem, but there were so many images, and I think I get it in general. The way we’re all connected, like he said when we were painting the truck. It tingles up my midsection, that I am truly connected to this guy. To my friends, even though they’re, you know.
Even though, yes, this bad thing happened to me. And Kevin is a bad person. A user and abuser, as my mom would say. But not everyone is bad. Jordan would never hurt me like that, and in that moment I realize we don’t have to go slow anymore. He’s not Kevin.
I stand and go over to the woman with the chalk. She’s stopped and listened, and she is beaming up at Jordan too.
“Can I borrow a navy blue?” I ask, and she searches for one and puts it proudly in my hand.
“Your boyfriend is a real poet,” she says, and I nod.
“Thanks,” I say. “He is.”
I go back and start drawing a white ramekin. I close my eyes and picture how the ones we have in our kitchen have these ridges on the side. Then I start adding navy blueberries inside. I shade them with just a touch of black, like a shadow.
Jordan sits down next to me and watches. I look up and there are Betts, Zay-Rod, Pam, and Kayla, watching me. I look in Betts’s eyes. I wonder if he thinks this is hilarious and he’s gonna mock me one day, like he mocks Zay-Rod’s poetry.
But his eyes aren’t mocking. It’s more like he’s seeing me for the first time. And in that moment, it’s like I see the dude for the first time too. He’s more than the guy I trash-talk with. He’s my buddy. I think maybe I trusted Zay-Rod could be, but I wondered about Betts.
I smile at him. He smiles at me. I draw blueberries.
Max: U up
Me: Yup. My mom didn’t come home again
Max: Shit. She didn’t leave a note?
Me: Nope. it’s like three nights this week
Max: U wanna do something
Me:
Max: Get yer mind outta the gutter
Me: It’s 1:06 a.m.
Max: Thank you captain obvious. Wear gym shorts
My heart flutters at the thought of a late night with Max. This summer. First time in my life I’ve been alive, really. I love it. Even with my mom’s … whatever. Even with me needing to make money to keep our house. I always thought I couldn’t do stuff. But I can.
Mom is who knows where. I’m pretty sure she’s been staying out all night, because she came home this morning at around 7:30, looking like a total mess, her hair pasted to her forehead and unwashed, her normal sweet smell replaced with a bitter funk that made me wince.
I have no fucking idea what’s up. There’s nothing I can do about it, and I’ve given up on trying.
As I step outside I have to laugh.
There’s something about the feeling of being in an outdoor sauna at midnight in late June that just takes my breath away. Like I can’t imagine how the sun can generate so much heat while it’s not even up. How my body can shiver from the shock of the temperature while just stepping out into the darkness is a mystery to me. And Max loves this shit. I will never get that.
“You ready?” he asks as I get into the passenger seat. He doesn’t have the AC going — of course he doesn’t. He’s Max.
“Ready as a person can be when he doesn’t know what he should be ready for,” I say, and he revs up the truck and pulls onto Carriage Lane and heads north. He grins.
We pull up to 24 Hour Fitness, which is literally less than a mile from where I live and in a strip mall on the way to school, yet I’ve never even seen it as it’s tucked away on the side. He puts this purple fob up against this red light and the front door automatically opens, and we are hit with cool air. Thank the Humble Baby Jesus. If it was another AC-less Max Special in here, I was going to turn on my heels and walk home.
My last workout was never. I have never really thought it would be great to have big muscles, or more like, even if I did once or twice think, What would it be like to be all pumped? my curiosity wasn’t strong enough to overrule my general disdain for lifting things for no apparent reason. That’s the thing about bodybuilding, I guess. You have to really want it.
The gym is totally empty. No workers, no exercisers. Purple walls and rugs, the antiseptic smell of cleaning product. The lights are bright for this time of night, and a Korn song I can’t stand is playing lightly on the sound system — not loud enough to be annoying but loud enough that I wish it were almost anything else.
