Futureproof (3 page)

March

We're moving again.

I heave my 13" black-and-white television through the glass. It clatters on the driveway beneath my window. The sound of the freeway pours through now, crystal clear, into the realm of my fourth new bedroom in half as many years.

My parents have this absurd inability to find or maintain employment, so I've come to expect another relocation every six months. But I'm still resentful. You never think about money when you're a kid until there isn't enough for the basics. My parents don't seem at all bothered by the fact that my brothers and I are tormented daily by other kids at school because our clothing never matches. Paying my own way isn't a viable option, either, because Victor inevitably needs to “borrow” my twenty-hour, grocery-bagger-wage pay
checks. Ever since I was old enough to stand outside strip malls and supermarkets collecting money for Jerry's Kids and their muscular dystrophy, my folks have been “borrowing” my money. And scamming unwary consumers for the balance needed “just to get by” for one more week.

A Short History of Scams

• Videotape rodeos and car shows; offer two-for-one deals (paid up front) on tapes that will eventually be mailed but never are.
  
• Register for college courses; receive loan money; never show up to attend classes.
  
• Place bid on residential house painting, using $20 investment for fake business cards; ask for up-front advance to pay for materials; never show up to paint house.
  
• Acquire cheap Halloween knockoff Alf costume (just like the popular TV character!); ask churches for small “love offering” to give kids “insightful message” using a beloved television personality that will give them the word of God from a source they can relate to.
  

According to my alcoholic uncle, I am powerless to conduct my life in accordance with my own goals and desires. I am powerless, and ironically enough, Uncle Sonny says, there is a certain amount of power in that recognition alone. He says that's the first step in overcoming all of one's troubles.

But I've got ideas.

I start screaming. I can't stop—what did Walt Whitman call it?—yawping.

I had to do it, you know. The window was painted shut. There was no other way to get through.

“What the fuck did you do, you little asshole?”

Victor was standing in the driveway when my TV landed on the concrete behind the half-emptied moving truck. Now he looms in my bedroom doorway, large and angry.

“Go fuck yourself,” I say, trying to sound nonchalant and ballsy. The old man has taught me well. I have learned my insolence from the best.

He is cold, efficient, machine-like. He grabs me by the hair with one hand, smacks me in the face with the other. Blood flows, from my nose and possibly the corner of one eye.

“You think you're big and bad?” He's yelling in his best drill-sergeant bark with his mouth so close to my face I can smell his lunch.

I spit blood in his face.

He hits me again.

I'm pretty sure he slugs me as hard as he can this time, because I can't tell how long I've been down, and when I get up again my
mother is in the room with my three brothers, she's standing in the doorway looking at me, and then he hits me again and she remains standing there and I get up and go back down and she begs him to stop and he waits for me to stand up again, so I do, and he hits me again and I fall again and then my two youngest brothers—Victor's children with my mother—start screaming and pulling out their hair. That's what they do in stressful situations. Jonas and I bite our nails down to nubs. Aaron and Adam pull their hair out until it's patchy.

I stand up one last time, just as Victor leaves the room cursing me. I can't see out of the one eye because it won't open. The taste of copper saturates my mouth.

“What happened, Luke?
What happened!
”

“Fuck you, Mom.”

I'm stumbling, holding on to furniture and walls as I go, willing my feet to move the rest of me.

“Why do you do this to me? Why can't you just get along with him? He's the father of your little brothers! Do you want me to be alone? Again? Raising
four
boys by myself instead of two?”

I make it into the kitchen and slide her keys off the table. She follows me to the front door.

“Do you want me to be alone again like I was with you and Jonas? Is that what you want?”

I start the car and tear out of the driveway.

The mirror in the gas station bathroom is unkind, but at this point it looks worse than it feels, as the nerve endings have shut themselves down for maintenance. My face just feels inflated.

 

Dave works with me at Kroger. We're friends despite the fact that he's a skinhead of the Nazi persuasion. He always wears the same clothes: black jeans rolled up to the tops of his shins, a pair of oxblood Doc Martens boots with white laces (he says white laces indicate that
white people are the best), some kind of rock-band t-shirt, and half-inch-thick red suspenders, which all the skinheads call “braces,” presumably because that sounds cooler than “suspenders.” He's been kicked out of school because one day he showed up wearing a t-shirt with a giant red swastika painted on it. He refuses to believe that I'm half Jewish.

“What the fuck ran into you?” Dave says. He has this great chipped front tooth that makes him look even cooler and more menacing than he seemed to me before we'd actually met, when the store manager had him train me in the art of grocery bagging.

“Stepdad,” I say.

“Let's kill the fucker.”

It hurts to smile.

“Can I stay at your place for a night or two?”

We go to his mom's house. He gives me a beer and then another and my face starts to feel less puffy.

We smoke a joint. It's my first time.

“I don't feel anything,” I say, coughing.

“What? This is good goddam weed, man.”

“What's it supposed to feel like? I just feel drunk and I felt like that before we smoked any grass.”

He laughs in the middle of his toke and the smoke leaves his nostrils in spurts.

“Don't call it ‘grass,' man. Only narcs, mothers, and old hippies refer to weed as ‘grass.' Same with ‘mari
juana
.'”

“Grass
is
what my mother calls it. And she used to be a hippie. That's what my uncle Sonny says, anyway. Mom always denies it, though. But still, whatever you want to call this…
weed
, I'm not getting anything off it.”

“Some people don't get high their first time. Here,” he says, pulling a pack of Marlboro Reds out of his bomber jacket, “try a
cigarette. Sometimes that pushes you right to where you need to be.” Skinheads always wear Air Force bomber jackets, even when it's hot as hell.

I cough on the cigarette.

“Look,” Dave says as we sit on his back deck under the darkening sky, “my mom's outta town for three or four days. She's really cool so don't worry about being here or nothin'. But I don't want trouble from the cops 'cause you got that stolen car in my driveway. We gotta dump it somewhere.”

“That's cool, man.” I'm suddenly numb. It feels
good
not to feel.

“Where do you want to take it?”

“Take what, dude?”

“Your mom's car, man.”

“Whatever. Wherever you want.”

He starts to say something else but I interrupt him because I'm drunk.

“Why are you friends with me, dude?”

“Whaddaya mean? Aww, c'mon. Don't get all drunk on me, Luke.”

“Seriously, Dave. I'm
Jewish
, man—well, half Jewish, anyway—and you come to school with a swastika on your shirt so I'm avoiding you like the plague, and then I start working at Kroger and you act all cool to me and we become friends and I finally say, ‘Dave, man, I'm Jewish,' because I want to see if you'll stop hanging with me or even kick my ass—even though we like the same bands and have the same contempt for our fathers and shit.”

“What's your point?”

“What's my point?” I can hear myself slurring but can't seem to make my tongue keep up with my brain. “You're a contradiction.”

“So what do you want? You want me to kick your ass or something? Would that make you feel better?”

I think he's probably joking but can't tell through the haze of my inebriation.

“It'd make me feel better if you'd quit with all this Nazi bullshit, that's all.”

“There are things that you can't understand about what it means to be a Nazi. Being a Nazi isn't just hating Jews and niggers, man. It's a brotherhood of white people trying to make sure their race is preserved and that all these bloodsuckers don't ruin this country for the people who founded it.”

“But I don't count as a bloodsucker? That's real reassuring, dude. I'm glad the Nazi party makes exceptions for all us poor, run-down Jews.”

“Well”—Dave grins, his chipped tooth gleaming—“that's more like
me
making the exception. Before I met Ralph and Bill, the guys who started this chapter of the Brotherhood, I had nothing to live for. But they showed me some incredible shit. Now I have goals and aspirations, something to
fight
for.”

“Yeah, well, I don't get why one person's goals have to mean shitting on some other guy's.”

“It's not as serious as you think, man. It's not like we're out doing drive-bys on the niggers or nothin'. Shit, they do that themselves.”

I can barely keep my good eye open any longer.

“Hey, I want you to hear this new Four-Skins record I just got,” Dave says. Even though we like a lot of the same bands, he always wants me to listen to his racist shit. The Four-Skins and the less cleverly named White Power are his latest discoveries.

Before the needle drops into the groove, I'm passed out on the leather couch next to the turntable.

 

The next morning we ditch my mom's car at the Pizza Hut next to Kroger. I call information and get my parents' new number. We've lived in Atlanta for two years and this is the fifth phone number we've had. Every time the phone company shuts it off my mother uses another of her kids' social security numbers to trick them into giving us a new account. Aaron's had a phone, electric, and gas bill all in his name. And he's only like six or seven.

“Hello?” There is a hint of hope in her voice when she answers. I know she's been worried about me. This makes me happy in a vengeful sort of way.

“You can find your car at the Pizza Hut by Kroger, where I
used
to work until your shitty husband made me quit my job.” Victor forced me to leave with him in the middle of my shift so I could help them move to the new house. My mother managed, at least, to find another house in the same school district so I could continue at Peckerbrook with her beloved Performing Arts.

“Please come home, Luke. Dad is sorry for what he did. He was angry. You
did
throw the TV out the window. We can't afford to waste a good TV or to fix a window. You know that. You know how tight the money is.”

“Fuck him. And stop calling him ‘Dad.' He's no relation to me.”

 

The week after my mother married Victor, he asked me what I wanted to call him. “You can call me Victor, or Dad if you want,” he said. I didn't want to call him anything. A month earlier we hadn't even known him. Then, overnight, he lived with us, and was married to my mother, and we were moving to a new town. He drove my mother's car while she sat in the passenger seat.

“I'll call you Victor,” I said.

His face stiffened. “That's fine. But you'd better make sure you know who's the boss around here.” He stood up.

“I could call you Dad, too, if that's what you want.”

“Whatever you want to do is up to you.”

“OK. Dad.”

I was looking at the floor when he clip-clopped down the hall in his loafers. He always wore holes into the center of the soles. He said they taught him to walk like that in the Marine Corps.

 

“You said yourself that you wanted to call him Dad.”

“I changed my mind. And he's not the only one who's ruined my life. In fact, it's
you
more than him. Standing around and watching is just as bad as committing brutality yourself. Isn't that what you always said about the Germans, Mom? That the people that lived over there, the civilians, were just as guilty as the fucking SS?”

Hearing that, Dave runs into the room from the kitchen, making evil faces, pretending to kick my Jewish ass in slow-mo while I attempt to maintain my pissed-off composure on the phone.

“You're right, Luke. I should have stopped him,” she mutters. “But I couldn't bear for him to leave us alone like Richard—like your
father
did.”