Amp'd (7 page)

I also find myself staring like a cat fascinated by its own reflection in the mirror, struck by heady insights like
I only have one arm but technically two armpits,
and that if I have a heart attack I will not feel the symptoms in my left arm, like Pa Kent did in
Superman: The Movie
.

It seems absurd to think I might be capable of holding some kind of job in this perpetually buzzy state. Even were I capable of some kind of menial, one-handed work, the probability of falling into some kind of grinding factory machinery seems inordinately high; as for returning to my former teaching job, with my train of thought so easily derailed, making it all the way through a lesson seems improbable. As if to prove this deficiency of focus Dad honks impatiently from outside, reminding me that he's waiting while I came up here to get … who the hell knows? Something lost to memory that must go ungotten.

I stagger out to the car and we drive in a silence that makes the ringing in my ears even more pronounced, so I turn on the radio and wait to hear the voice of Sunny Lee tell me something I never knew or even thought of, about the physics of soup or the anatomy of trees or the secret life of a camel. Or, in this case, cat guts:

Every teenage boy wants to be a guitar god … but do you have the guts for it? This is Sunny Lee, with
The Sunny Side
.

Stringed instruments are famously made from something called “catgut”—that actually has nothing to do with cats! But before you get too comfortable, animal lovers, catgut traditionally comes from … other animal guts—usually sheep or goat intestines, but also cattle, hogs, horses, or mules. The intestines are cleaned of fat and steeped in water, and then again in lye, before being drawn out and twisted into strings, dried, and polished to a specific diameter. Talk about “plucky”! Who knew intestines could be so resilient? Maybe that's how the phrase “He's got guts” came to be a euphemism for toughness.

Anyway, most modern musical instruments produced today use strings made from synthetic materials, like steel or polymer, although gut strings remain the preferred choice for many classical and baroque players. Somehow, knowing that is going to make my next classical concert a little … harder to stomach.

I imagine being the young “guitar god” of whom Sunny spoke, thrashing steel strings with my right hand and deftly skimming frets with my left in an act of seduction no woman could resist, willing to abandon a life of groupies in favor of fidelity with Sunny Lee, whom I love more deeply every time I hear her voice.

Completely lost in amorous, two-handed fantasy, I'm unaware of whatever it was Dad just said, now punctuated with a familiar sigh and then more silence—the customary expression of disappointment by dads everywhere. It's seventy-five miles to Decatur Airport, and the malleability of time as experienced under a combination of drugs has me feeling every long minute of the scheduled three-hour round trip.

Against Dad's wishes I've continued to experiment with Vicodin, noticing that taking an odd number seems to have a negative effect: two is perfect, and I can handle four, but three or even one make me nauseous. In keeping to an even-numbered dosage, I observe that taking four Vicodin gives me the ability to concentrate on one thing at the center of my field of vision to the exclusion of all others, like looking through a pinhole, everything but the center rendered a fuzzy blur I like to think of as “bluzzy.” I find this useful when I want to focus on a single thing only, like a beautiful woman walking down the street, or when I wish things around me to disappear, like now.

Jackie has arrived, all the way from California, bursting into tears at the sight of me and drawing everyone's attention as if I had just slapped her with my good arm.

I pull Jackie close to me with my arm and whisper, “There, there.”

“Wh-where, where?” she sniffs back, and we both start to laugh, and that only makes her cry harder.

Behind her I watch a barista pull coffee and a skycap tug bags off his dolly while a TSA agent pats down a traveler with both hands, realizing those are three more jobs I can't do. Dad stands far away from us, so distant from the emotional fray that I don't need four Vicodin to reduce him to a pinpoint.

“Daddy!” Jackie runs to take hold of him with both arms and starts to cry all over again.

“What are you crying for?” I shout over to them. “He has two arms.”

“I must be jet-lagged,” Jackie sighs as we drift outside to the car.

“Hey, bro.” Her husband Steve's abbreviated greeting carries no camaraderie. “Lend a hand with the bags?”

I turn to face him. “What?”

“Kidding!” He spews foamy laughter. “Hey, you want us to ignore it? Wouldn't it be worse if we pretended it didn't happen?”

“All I can say is aim for somewhere in the middle.”

Back when Jackie had emigrated from Paris to Los Angeles, I worried that she was going to wind up married to some rich entertainment industry asshole. Instead, she picked a completely different kind of asshole, one without the redeeming quality of monetary success. Steve is long, lean, and dumb, as if some godlike being took an average-size man and stretched him, only in doing so pinched the head too hard resulting in minor brain damage. Measured against Jackie's type-A personality, he falls deeper in the alphabet, perhaps not as far as Z but no higher than U-V—as a frequency, beyond notice. It's impossible to know what drew these two together—the magnetism of opposites, the complementary gaps that fit into each other with jigsaw puzzle perfection, lingering childhood issues that continue to hammer the self-esteem of one while blinding the other to his true dumb self. If love is a mystery, these two are like digging up Stonehenge to find the Sphinx on Easter Island.

Steve sits behind Dad in the car and refuses to slide over so that Jackie could sit there and she and I might make diagonal eye contact as we pepper the long drive home with uneasy, intermittent conversation. As Jackie trudges around the car to climb in the other side, I get the impression that Steve's usual position on cooperation is to withhold it. We stop to pay the parking attendant, who I can't help but notice faces traffic while we face opposite, his left side against Dad's as he accepts the money, left-handed.

Toll is paid and barrier lifted and Dad slams the car into drive and leaps for the street at a speed that thrusts all of us back into our seats. This is no Lincoln Mark IV, but Dad seems determined that the four of us should spend as little time as possible trapped together for the journey back home.

Twenty minutes later my buzz is wearing off, making it harder to disappear into bluzzy oblivion, so I break the previous nineteen minutes of silence.

“So, how are things in sunny California?” God, I sound like someone's uncle.

“Busy!” Jackie practically shrieks, startled back to her usual heightened state of anxious urgency. “It never stops. I don't have a second for myself.”

Jackie is a marketing director at a Jenga-like vertically integrated international conglomerate that sells toothpaste, soap, deodorant, shampoo, diapers, detergent, razor blades—products the civilized world has come to consider indispensable, although in the carnage of a postapocalyptic dystopia we'd manage without any of them (although you might be willing to trade all of them for a good roll of toilet paper). I imagine in the course of her day she multitasks like a cartoon octopus running a day care center for fish babies.

“I have my hand full too,” I reply, and Dad applies greater pressure to the accelerator.

Steve stops poking at his cell phone long enough to ask, “Can we stop?”

“I'd like to keep moving,” Dad says, fearing the inertia of a body at rest.

“Gotta drain the monster,” Steve insists, so Dad pulls into the next rest stop we see and remains behind the wheel with the patience of an INDYCAR driver waiting for his pit crew to finish.

Tucked under my good arm, Jackie leans with me against the car while Dad occasionally revs the engine.

“Really? ‘Drain the monster'?”

“Don't start,” she warns me. “I've heard it ten thousand times, and each one is like nails on a blackboard.”

“You know we don't use blackboards anymore, right? Although I admit ‘Nails on a dry-erase board' doesn't have the same lilt to it.”

“Do you think you'll go back to your school?”

“Hard to say,” I say without difficulty, knowing I will not. Not that I'm ready to bravely face an uncertain future; just self-aware enough to know that, thus halved, any attempt at who I used to be is doomed to the humiliation of a baseball player on Old-Timers' Day swinging for the fences.

“Have you thought about what else you might do?”

“Just in the past half hour I've ruled out barista, skycap, TSA agent, toll-booth attendant, and personal chauffeur.”

Steve exits with a satisfied look and a twelve-pack of beer, and before he can get back in the car Jackie jumps into his place in the seat behind Dad, a little too pleased by this minor victory. We're back on the road at rocket speed to make up for the lost time of the pit stop, and Steve pops the top off a beer bottle with the bottle opener he carries on his key ring like a badge of stupid.

“Hey! An open bottle in a car is illegal,” Dad announces.

“So's driving eighty in a sixty-five,” Steve counters, and as if to remedy the problem Dad pushes the needle to eighty-five, and three beers later, we're home.

Except for the occasional holidays we both tried to avoid when we could, Jackie and I have never lived at home together even temporarily as adults. When I was fifteen she left for college; by the time she'd graduated and returned home, I was already gone, and on my return from college Jackie had already moved to California. Two thousand miles and twenty-five years is a lot of distance. Our relationship as people remains arrested as teenagers, trapped like a bug in amber.

Which is another reason why Steve is such a disappointment. In high school, Jackie ran through a series of cool boyfriends who feigned tolerance of me, thinking it would appeal to the primitive nurturing instinct they'd been led by hygiene class to expect in the inscrutable female of the species. A senior she dated would even high-five me if we passed in the hallways, and not even the greeting “Little Man” could diminish that skin-slapping transference of cool.

“Is my room just the way I left it?” Jackie asks as we enter the unlocked front door.

“Only if you left it looking like a storage shed,” I warn her. “You're both staying in Dad's room. He moved to the den.”

Jackie drifts through the hallway, absently scanning the photos on the wall like an amnesia patient trying to remember what any of this might have to do with her.

“Gotta drain the monster,” Steve says again as if for the first time. “Bathroom?”

“Right at the top of the stairs,” I smile.

Steve clomps upstairs just behind Dad dutifully playing bellhop. I can count to five before …

“
Jesus fucking Christ on a stick!
”

Jackie rushes back from the hallway. “Did you tell him about Ali?”

“Forgot,” I grin.

“One arm or two, you're still a jerk.” She races upstairs as Steve tumbles out backward, pants around his ankles.

“
Kway-UR
to have you home.”

Jackie and Steve are “exhausted” from their journey and need to lie down, despite the fact that it's technically only two in the afternoon to their West Coast–set internal clocks. Minutes later as Dad and I settle in front of the television, the unmistakable sounds of clumsy lovemaking rain upon us from overhead and I can't help but think: this is not a man who can't keep his hands off his wife; this is a man who takes pleasure from the discomfort he knows he's generating with each plunge into the daughter of the man in whose bed he's doing the plunging.

“We're out of Fleischmann's,” Dad announces, grabs his coat and is gone.

*   *   *

When they emerge hours later, Steve catches my eye in the upstairs bathroom, a proud smirk, raised eyebrow, and knowing nod wrestling for control of his face, as if banging my sister in my father's bed is the bond-forging event our relationship has been missing until now. His expression changes suddenly when he realizes what I'm doing—feeding leftover chicken drumettes to Dad's alligator—and he continues down the stairs.

Jackie enters and crouches next to me, gently stroking Ali and avoiding my eyes as strenuously as Steve sought to offend them.

“Hot wings?” she scoffs.

“Drumettes,” I correct her. “Washed off the hot sauce. They should just taste like chicken … so should Ali, come to think of it.”

“God, it stinks in here!”

“Shh! He can hear you…”

“I can't believe how big he got!”

“That is four feet of placid alligator,” I marvel. “But you don't have to tell Steve about the ‘placid' part. His healthy fear of the alligator is the only thing that makes me think he's not so dumb.”

“You don't have to like Steve—”

“Okay, then, the pressure's off.”

“But you don't have to hate him, either.”

Even with her eyes averted I can see them welling with tears, and I feel worse for someone other than myself for the first time since the accident. “I'll aim for somewhere in the middle.”

She turns her face toward me and smiles, “That would be great. We're in a little bit of a rough patch. He's having a hard time at work.”

Steve is a meter reader for PG&E, a job that, here in the twenty-first century, seems as unnecessary as milkman, lamplighter, or sextant operator. Respecting their “rough patch,” I should be kind enough not to point that out, but I do.

“He drives around counting energy usage. Imagine your cell phone provider sending someone to your house to look at your phone every month to see how many minutes you used before they could bill you. As a job, that's pretty useless.” Whatever tears might have welled seconds ago freeze in her now-icy glare. Wisely, I soften my stance. “I'm just saying I know how it feels to be useless.”