More Tales from the Gashouse

Somehow I had a room to myself. It lacked insulation, so it was cold and damp. It had blue walls and a window that didn’t close—the screen was gone. My parents slept in the livingroom/bedroom with my sister and my brother on the foot of the bed. Because of the cold, I used to sleep with my clothes on. This saved time in the mornings—I didn’t have to get dressed to go to school, and I was warm. I spent the evenings in my room, thinking about how cool I wasn’t, thinking about the girls I crushed on at school, thinking about the money I didn’t have—regretting everything I had said that day to everyone. I lived in the immediate past.

Since we lived in a ranch in the middle of nowhere, I had to go into town to hang out with my friends. This involved buying beer and drinking under a bridge by the town’s golf course. We drank and talked about what we didn’t have and how we would get it; we drank and plotted strong armed robberies that never took place; we drank and designed our future custom cars; we drank and predicted the best ways to die—we paid no mind to the reality of death, only to its possibility…we were children. After our drinking and our planning and plotting, I would go home and wait for the event. My father, it seems, was tired of his marginal existence and the only way he could express his marginality was through violent rejections of his present condition. He was a black-hole of rage and desperation, sucking everything into his center, luring everything and everyone into his event-horizon where we stood mesmerized, afraid, with no choice but to fall head-first into the clamorous darkness of his soul breaking. I would wait for these events—which happened often. I anticipated them and held my breath. But I had to be there, or else they wouldn’t happen. I had to be there, you see, because they had to happen. The happenings unraveled always in the kitchen, next to the stove, by the flimsy kitchen table, and the chocolate-brown refrigerator.