All right, this is dedicated to lulusgardenfli, who is possibly the only person on earth who wanted a Michael Shepard story ;) Thinking it'll end up a threeshot?
They fuck you up, your mum and dad
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
— This Be The Verse, Philip Larkin
September 1985
"Shit." Scott tries to nudge me in the ribcage and hits my solar plexus instead. "The lights are on."
I've been dozing off, but that sentence is enough to make me snap back upright, unfasten my seatbelt with a metallic clang; I have to focus my gaze, downright squint to see it, but that is my fucking house. And if my mama catches me rolling in at three in the morning, piss drunk, driven by my even more drunk friend, I'll be lucky if I'm paroled from it before I finish high school. "Gag me with a spoon."
"You want to crash at my place?" he offers, but I shake my head instead of taking him up on it— his daddy's unemployed, so he's always watching TV on the couch even late into the night, it's not worth the risk. Besides, if my mama's actually waiting up for me and I never come home, she can catch a lie better than the drug-sniffing dogs we have at the front door of Will Rogers.
"Thanks for the ride," I say, my tone too sardonic to sound genuine; he slams on the brakes with another overly sympathetic look, long enough to let me hop out of the car, and I bend in half as he applies his lead foot and speeds off. I've had too much, nausea sitting at the base of my esophagus as I head up the drive; I push my key into the lock, square my shoulders, prepare to face my fate.
— oh, thank God. It's just Curly.
(It pisses my mama off, that I call him that and not Dad, and she makes sure to get her two cents in at least every week— 'you know how many of your friends' parents think he's your stepdaddy?' I don't even remember when it started, probably when he was in the slammer— no, if I'm being honest, long before that. It was always Curly, even if I dig far enough that I hit my earliest memory, me scaling a bookshelf like a lemur while he sucked on the end of a joint and watched the entire thing— I must've been two or three. He'd told me to knock it off; I never listened to him, even back then. "I said quit it, before I tell Uncle Tim you ain't mindin' me," he repeated, his voice sharpening the smallest bit as he took his mouth off of it. That's about our relationship in a nutshell.)
He's sitting in the armchair with a half-smoked cigarette, the tip burning cherry-red as he inhales. Doesn't turn around when I come inside and literally trip over my own feet in the foyer, so I take the opportunity to get the upper hand in this interaction. "Thought you was workin' Thursday nights," I start conversationally, as I stride over to the kitchen and stick a glass under the tap, my voice low so I don't wake my mama or Dani up. I like keeping things with him conversational. We make better friends than we ever did father and son.
"I was, it's past closing time." He looks at me, exposes the left side of his face, the one with the teardrop tattoo. "You been drinking, mijo?"
There's no real scolding in his voice, it's the inherent affection in mijo that makes me stiffen. He used to pass me around like a puppy you get as an unwanted gift at Christmas, trying to find a better owner for it— I have more memories of my great-uncle Luis before he died, from when I was a little kid. "Yeah," I say with some attitude, and have the balls to open the icebox and pop the tab on a Modelo, let the cold beer slide down my throat without breaking eye contact. "You want one?"
Curly's slow to anger like a cow slapping at flies with its tail; he finishes working the cigarette down to the filter, stubs it out on the overflowing ash tray before he holds his hand out. "Sure."
I sit down on our leather couch after I give it to him, pick at one of the torn holes in the seat, exposing more of the white cotton underneath. "I know boys your age run around, Mike," he says. Sounds like he's choosing his words carefully, then he snorts. "Shit, I'd been to the slammer three times by '65, me and Tim, we was the wildest kids in Tulsa." There's a sliver of a smile on his face, a mix between sheepishness and pride, before he tries to fix his expression back into his best guess at paternal scolding. "But this is a lil' late to be comin' home from a party."
I'm not worried he'll punish me, he never has— the only time he ever threatened to beat my ass was if I started selling crack, and as I've got zero interest in those kicks, I didn't sweat it. But I don't like this, a dangerous divergence from his usual MO. I know why I was born, to keep him out of Nam. He doesn't have to play at anything.
"Figured you'd be proud," I say, try to play it cool, but instead it comes out as half a plea, a high note of vulnerability in my voice. "Followin' in your footsteps, ain't I, lil' bit?"
"You got a long way to go 'fore you do that," he says, smiles, but it's not sincere— Curly only smiles when he's shaking someone down. "I don't want to be on your neck, okay? But it worries your mama somethin' fierce, she don't know where you are at night lately."
And I should be happy, with this admission, I should give him a wink and we can bond like men over this, pacifying the little woman worrying her pretty little head off. Curly gave me my first beer when I was thirteen, my first joint a year later, lets me hang around his bar whenever I want and shoot the shit with his friends. I shouldn't be surprised, most of all— everyone likes Curly, except for me, I've always been able to tell that he's all style and no substance. But my sudden urge to stick my head over a toilet says different.
"I get where you're comin' from, but I like my social life just the way it is, actually." The alcohol in my blood makes me brave; I always did have my mama's mouth, even without the added excuse. I want him to hit me, right then, I want him to smack me a good one. I want to see if anything can possibly force him to give a damn. "Don't really see that changing any time soon. What are you gonna do about it?"
"Huh?" He drains the last few drops from the bottle, wipes his mouth off with the back of his hand, studies me; he's not a tenth as dumb as he likes to pretend, his eyes are as shrewd as ever. He can feel the first sparks on dead grass before the fire, between us, and he wants to give me an out. "Whatchu sayin'?"
"You heard me." He's a murderer, he's got it inked into his skin; even though he's long since out of the game, he's as well-built as ever, he could snap me in half if he wanted. "Not Mom, not Uncle Tim, not some do-gooder teacher. What the fuck are you gonna do about it, Curly?"
"I've never made you do a damn thing in your life," he says, a hint of bite entering his tone for the first time, but it's dangerously close to begging and the contempt seeps right back into me. As if that isn't the entire problem. "I'm not haulin' Tim over here, I'm not threatening you, I'm askin' you to make your mama's sleep a little easier—"
"So you ain't got no answer, then, what I get up to ain't your problem." I pick at a scab on my hand until it bleeds, then I laugh. "You're a goddamn coward, you know that? You always make other people do your dirty work—"
His eyes flash with cold, powerful rage, and for the first time in my life, I'm afraid of my father. "You watch your fucking mouth," he says slowly, and it's the most condemnation he's had for me in fifteen years. Doesn't finish whatever else he wants to add to that, though, bites down on the inside of his lip like he's swallowing it back down.
"Make me." I don't have the good sense to know when to quit, stand up in front of him, propelled by the sheer force of my own recklessness; angry like we're two boxers in the ring, my fear sublimating into it. I have about enough brains not to raise my fists at him and not much more. "Go ahead, knock some sense into me—"
But he doesn't land the KO, just looks me up and down, and I shrink. "Go to bed, Mike," he says, his disgust obvious, though I don't know for which one of us. I feel all of five years old again, want my daddy to tell me everything's going to be okay, but of course he can't. When I was five, he pawned me off on whatever relative was in arm's reach to get high. "Before I do somethin' I regret."
A nervous smile presses at both sides of my cheeks, one that could easily turn into a grimace; all of mine are more genuine than I want to admit. My stomach's murky and lurching like a polluted pond, I'm going to be sick in a second. I walk into the bathroom and shove two fingers down my throat, vomit up the contents into the toilet bowl, as though that'll help anything.
Everybody likes Curly. Except for me.