Amp'd (8 page)

Her glare wilts, no match for my status as object of pity, an awesome power I should probably use for good, not evil, but know I'm going to milk like a dairy farmer.

“Steve wants to stay in and nap,” she cheers me up. “I thought it would be fun for you, me, and Dad to eat out.”

“It'll be fun for two of us. Hey, do you want to get stoned and stare at your black-light poster before dinner?”

*   *   *

Half a joint of Grandmaster Stash later, Dad has to pull us away from the poster in the attic, and we titter all the way to Dim Sum & Then Some, where Jackie and I order too much food and somehow manage to finish all of it. Dad pays the check and pockets the pen and we head out into the night, Jackie once again slipping under my good arm and clinging tightly to me, and she doesn't let go until we're home.

 

LAGGED

With Jackie passed out, I make my way to the kitchen. Dad is also asleep in the glow of the television, awash in unwatched sports highlights. I pull open the freezer door and spy Caramel Swirl Crunch, instantly certain in the excellence of any flavor that both swirls and crunches. I plunk it on the counter and fish around the drawer for the proper tool to excavate the swirly crunchy goodness from within, settling on the spork half of a set of giant salad tongs. I sit the container inside a drawer and then close it, wedging the ice cream tight enough to attempt pulling the lid off when Steve totters in.

“Can't sleep. All kinds of fucked up from the time diff. Here, give me that.”

He gently takes the carton of ice cream from me, places it in the microwave, and sets the timer for twenty-two seconds, which I assume is another labor saver (his finger can punch the number “two” twice without having to make its way all the way down to the “zero” twenty seconds would require). As the already swirled dessert spins some more Steve watches quietly, his energy claimed by jet lag, and it occurs to me that he'd be a better person to be around if only he could fly every day. The microwave beeps and we soon face each other across the kitchen counter with mugs of ice cream between us.

“If you wanna sell some of that med mar, let me know.”

(Ah, there he is.)

“You want to try some?” I offer with all the sincerity of a five-year-old who's been told to share his toys with the dim boy next door.

“I don't smoke that shit. Makes me stupid.”

As luck would have it, my tongue is too frozen under a swirly gob to reply.

“Might help you sleep,” I finally offer. “They engineer it now so precisely—the place I go to has twenty-two different strains. I have stuff that makes you calm and other blends that keep you alert. They even make one that has no psychoactive effect—it doesn't get you stoned. I don't have that one.”

“Like nonalcoholic beer. What a waste of fucking time.”

“Decaf.”

“Women who don't fuck.”

“All right, all done here,” I take my half-empty mug to the sink.

“Anything still open?”

“Like what?”

“Bar?”

“Hard to know. Last time I pulled an all-nighter here, I was twenty-two.”

“Well, let's go see what's what.”

“I don't even know what that means.”

“Yeah, you do. You just have to stop being such a smart-ass.”

“My ass is no smarter than yours.”

“Then let's go ass up into the world, and see what's what.”

*   *   *

Our unassuming midwestern village offers exactly one option for late-night drinking, the Loading Zone, where said drinking is done with remarkable efficiency. It smells of beer and sawdust and the booths are almost dark enough to disguise the seats clotted with tiny buds of burst upholstery. This isn't a place for the sophistication of a martini or the frivolity of blender drinks; it's a beer-and-a-shot kind of place, and the shots are nameless, neither Jack nor Jägermeister. Even ordering a Sam Adams instead of a Bud earns me a look of disdain from the bartender; I consider asking him,
Then why the hell do you serve it?
but the answer might be as simple as
To weed out the ass wipes
while he beats me with a cue stick, so I don't.

This is a practiced lot of late-night drinkers, hunched over glasses like guard dogs and pasty faced from a preferred avoidance of daylight: out-of-work townies drinking their emergency funds, blue-collar guys who'll be piloting forklifts in a few hours, criminals meeting after a heist to divvy up the loot while planning how to bump each other off. And Fred Weber.

“Can't sleep worth a damn,” Mr. Weber confides when we slide into the booth on either side of him.

“I thought you were taking medical marijuana.”

“Does the goddamn pot barista tell everyone my business?”

“Sorry! My dad. You're right; he shouldn't have told me, and I shouldn't have brought it up.”

“Forget it,” he waves me off. “I've been your father's lawyer for thirty-seven years; if we have any secrets, it's only because we've forgotten what the hell they are.”

The guy at the next table coughs up a thumb-sized wad of phlegm and spews it into his empty beer glass. Now that he has our attention and we have his, he stares for a very long time at the place where my arm used to be, as if trying to process the information—is it gone, or merely tucked behind me, or some other optical illusion, or yet another alcoholic hallucination? It's why I don't like leaving the house, aside from breakfast at the Four Corners and the occasional trip to Dim Sum, both places where they've grown accustomed to me. But I'm especially uncomfortable here, where even two arms might provide inadequate defense against the unpredictable, and the mere act of causing someone to question his own eyes could be enough to incite confrontation. Or in this case, cause the man to rise from his table and wobble to sit at the bar.

“Anyway,” Mr. Weber continues, “I had to stop. It helped me sleep, but it also made me stupid.”

“What did I say?” Steve beams at this affirmation as if he were a quantum physicist who just had his theory of infinite universes confirmed by multiple versions of himself.

“Have you tried Sleepapalooza?” I produce a pair of marijuana cakes packaged like Ring Dings from my drug purse, something I don't need to carry but for the fact that I enjoy the company of its tacit illicitness made legal by prescription.

“Ate so many I put on eight pounds.” Mr. Weber fishes in his own small leather bag, and Dreamboat, Happy Nap, and Sandmancipation spill out on the table, peaceful marijuana-induced sleep packaged with the shorthand of hoary clichés: cartoon character in a nightcap, sawing wood in a thought balloon, sheep jumping a fence, and lots of Zs. “Two of these make me dizzy. I can't remember which two. Last thing I need is to fall and break a hip. They should put you down right then, right there, like a racehorse. It'd have more dignity than what inevitably follows.”

It all proves too much for Steve, who escapes to the bar.

“In the Merchant Marine, if you gave me a single star in the sky and a horizon, I could navigate ten thousand miles of empty ocean. Now I can't even get to the bathroom before I piss myself.”

Mr. Weber stares at my non-arm, perhaps aware that if his diminishment happened over time—an accumulation of small disappointments that built up like hair in a drain—mine did not. He pats me on the shoulder, and it feels good—he's the first person to touch it in a completely normal act, as if it didn't matter.

“I sometimes wonder what it would be like to lose my left leg. I'd be like two-thirds of a person vertically,” I note, mentally conjuring the image.

I can see I've made Mr. Weber uncomfortable and am actually grateful for the distraction of Steve's return as he shoves his way back to the table with three shots of something brown.

“This is what grandmothers do, get together and compare meds. Put that shit away, do a shot, and watch the titties on TV.”

The titties on TV
belong to the competitors in a decades-old wet T-shirt contest on a grainy VHS tape playing over the bar. If anyone gave it any thought at all, they'd realize the current state of those breasts are as worn and stretched as the plastic polyethylene tape on which they've been immortalized for future generations. But the Loading Zone is not a thoughtful place, and no one seems to mind.

“Words to live by,” Mr. Weber swallows his shot, and before long, we're all drunk as pirates.

*   *   *

I wake up in the morning on someone's couch, and since Mr. Weber is staring down at me, I assume it's his.

“Well, that was pretty dumb,” he says, and by the look of the bloody gauze on my nub, I'm forced to agree.

It's hard to tell what time it is by the diffuse light coming through the frosted windows of Fred Weber's bathroom, but I can hear Sunny Lee on his radio telling how to make a battery out of a watermelon—

And you think a car battery is tough to lug around…!

—
so I know it's just before nine in the morning. Steve is asleep in Mr. Weber's bathtub, and I can't help but think that if we were home I'd be looking over his gator-chewed remains without remorse. Mr. Weber gently removes the gauze pad from my arm and I'm face-to-face with a scabby, cartoonish sea serpent. Even by the low standards of tattoos, this one is exceedingly moronic. And it writhes like a dying monster when Mr. Weber pours peroxide on it, although the shrieks are mine.

“Jackie's gonna kill me,” Steve stirs and moans behind me. “She said if I got another tattoo, she'd cut it off.”

“I guess I did mine the other way around.”

Steve peels back the gauze pad on his calf and is immediately pleased, somehow impressed by the cartoon cherub-devil holding a pitchfork and urinating on his calf muscle. “Hey, pretty cool!”

“What made you think this was a good idea?”

“Whoa, don't blame me. Weber passed out in the backseat and you wouldn't let me wake him up. I couldn't just drive around—I was hammered!”

“So you found the only all-night tattoo parlor in town.”

“You were up for it.”

“I probably would have been ‘up for' running with the bulls at Pamplona or being fired from a catapult.”

“Yeah, well, we didn't do any of that,” he says as he stands and urinates, loud and long, into the toilet. “Aahhhh … a good piss is better than sex. All that work and you shoot your load in, what, seconds?” He explains. “This right here is a minute of ecstasy.”

Mr. Weber leans over and pours peroxide on Steve's penis, and he shrieks louder than I did.

“Ow! What the fuck?”

“That's for the prostitute.”

“I wasn't with a prostitute!”

“Well, you could have been. I was asleep in the car.” Mr. Weber puts away the peroxide and grins at me. “Thanks for letting me sleep. Feel pretty good today! I'll call your dad and let him know his boys are okay.”

Trumping the tattoo, risk of infection, possible alcohol poisoning, venereal disease we might have contracted from the prostitute we weren't with, or the narrowly averted death in a fiery car wreck we managed to avoid, the idea that Dad might think of Steve and me as “his boys” is by far the worst prospect of my morning. And then the tinnitus kicks in, blessedly reducing Steve's further protests to the background.

 

CAROMS

If there had been any concern over our “missing” status overnight—fear for our well-being, bargaining for our safe return—it's gone, vanished like a magician's assistant in an empty box. In its place are split levels of fury (shrieks from upstairs as Jackie shreds Steve behind a closed door inadequate to its task) and Zen (Mom's thunderclap break indicates she's working out her feelings in the basement). In between, Dad sulks in silent fatherly disappointment in front of
SportsCenter
.

I head downstairs to find the more familiar Mom of my youth, leaning over the table, still all skinny limbs and angles, fingers dusty with chalk but absent the yellow traces of those long-ago cigarettes. She slams the one ball into the nine ball and it caroms into the corner pocket nearest her and just like that, it's game over. I gather all the solid balls in the triangle in an easy one-handed sweep, pluck the nine ball from the pocket and add it; forcing them into a diamond is harder—even the two tiny hands of a small boy are preferable to one adult hand—but Mom waits patiently, quietly chalking her stick. I lift the rack and Mom leans in and with barely a look scatters the balls, sending the nine ball into the side pocket. Game over.

“One of us is just as good as ever,” I poke, struggling with the triangle to gather all the balls again.

“Don't do that,” she says. “It's bullshit, and I won't have it.”

“I'm sorry to be such a disappointment.”

“You don't mean that. What you're sorry about is the discomfort you think we're all feeling, but then you go ahead and point out you're not as good as you used to be. It's bullshit, and you should stop. But that's up to you. It's not going to become my problem.”

“So this”—I wave my bandaged nub—“isn't disappointing?”

“Only to someone who's foolish enough to allow themselves to be disappointed by others. Yes, like your father. And your sister, who hasn't figured out that it's impossible to change another person's behavior. We can't … but I can control how it affects me, so I make sure it doesn't. Now, are you going to rack those or not?”

No one calls bullshit like Mom. It's completely without judgment, like an attorney summarizing inarguable statements of fact in her closing argument and leaving the opposing counsel to squirm, knowing he has nothing to counter with but transparent glibness.

“Look what you just did,” I grin, scooping the balls into a perfect diamond. “You turned me from a guy just standing here to one who racked your balls. That makes you wrong about not being able to change someone's behavior.”