Read The Last Exit to Normal Online
Authors: Michael Harmon
The Last Exit to Normal
The Last Exit to
NORMAL
CONTENTS
For
Sydney and Dylan
The Last Exit to
NORMAL
CHAPTER 1
T
he decoder card to the universe wasn’t included in the box of cereal
God gave humanity. At the ripe old age of seventeen, I’d at least figured out that no matter how hard you try to
guess what happens next, you can’t. Life wasn’t set up that way and we don’t like it, so we
spend most of our time running around like a bunch of dimwits.
I got out of the minivan and a charcoal-gray cat wound its way between my calves, slinking and purring
in the late-afternoon sun of Eastern Montana. The big changes blindside you. Rough Butte, Montana, was a big change,
but I’d been blindsided before. The mother of all blindsides was my dad coming home one day and telling my
mom and me that he was gay. That’s right. He likes guys now.
That was three years or so ago. I’m not into keeping track of misery, so don’t mark my
words on that. Let’s just say it was in my murky past. A past that included things I’d never thought
would come into my skinny little punk-skater life. And believe me, having a gay dad doesn’t really register in a
kid’s mind until you see him locking lips with another dude. I hated it, him, Edward (his boyfriend), my mother
for walking out, and the world in general.
When my mom and I first found out, my parents didn’t “separate” or any of
those nice things that fifty percent of America’s children get to go through. My parents blew apart. Short and
quick and violent, the conversation in the living room ended with my mom slapping his face so hard I felt it. Probably
some genetic connectivity thing. Fifteen minutes later, she was out the door with a suitcase and I was left sitting alone
in the room with my new gay dad.
There was no aftermath. No quibbling parents saying how much they wanted custody, no bitter battles
because they supposedly loved me so much. Hell, they didn’t even use me to get at one another like most kids
get to deal with.
Sometimes I hated my mom more than him. At least
he
kept me. After my mom stomped out the
door and left, I looked at him for a moment. It was like I was staring at a stranger. I asked him why he decided to be gay.
He told me he didn’t decide to be gay. He’d known ever since he was young, he said, so I asked him
why he decided to be a selfish asshole. He didn’t have an answer for that. Six months after my mom decided to
forget the fact that I slid from her uterus, my dad got divorce papers in the mail, postmarked from Phoenix. I never knew
she liked warm climates.
I used to smoke pot and skip school and hang out with what my dad considered bad influences.
Porkchop Jones and Nick Spigetti and Peach Logan, probably the best street skaters in the city of Spokane, Washington.
I did it all for my dad. I took my first hit from a bong two weeks after my mom left. I got plastered at a kegger a week
later, dropped a tab of acid the next month, and got busted for defacing public property three days after that. I was on a
roll, and I was just getting going.
I’m a fast learner, and my downward spiral into making the world pay for its injustices settled
nice and warm into my newly dysfunctional fourteen-year-old life. Not to say that I hid it. I’m not secretive in
the first place, and besides that, how was I supposed to hurt my dad if he didn’t know what I was doing? I told
him everything right when I did it, and the sparks flew from there. Just like I wanted it.
He put us in therapy. He put me in therapy. I became a master at one-liners and dealing with shrinks who
didn’t seem to understand that I wasn’t the one with the problem, my dad was. He talked until he was
blue in the face, and four months later, Edward moved in. So much for gently easing your kid into the boiling vat of
acid called life. The hardest part of everything was that Edward was, and still is, a totally cool person.
By the time I was fifteen I’d become a heavy pot smoker, having found my favorite drug of
escapism. Acid freaked me out, booze made me sick, and pot was cheap if you knew the right people. Every time my dad
asked me if I was high, I told him yes. Even if I wasn’t.
Sometimes I think he hated me, which is good because I wanted him to hate me as much as I hated him. I
wanted him to be as ashamed and embarrassed of me as I was of him. Then, one morning at two-thirty, I found myself
standing on the concrete ledge of the Monroe Street Bridge. The water looked inviting. I wondered if I’d drown,
or die from the impact first.
As I stood there hating the world and everything in it, headlights came along. Four guys in a pickup drove
by and yelled at me to jump. Ben’s life in a nutshell. I got down and walked home. I’m not good at
doing what people tell me to do.
That’s all in the past, though. That murky past I don’t like thinking about too much.
Now, a couple of years later, I’ve got a cat slinking between my legs in Rough Butte, Montana. This world
makes no sense.
It doesn’t make any sense, because I cleaned myself up. Dad and I went through almost three
years of rough times, but I’ve got to give it to him. He stuck with me even when I didn’t want him to,
and things settled down a little bit. Maybe we came to terms with each other. Maybe we just got tired of it all. Maybe it
was both, but we learned some things about each other, and even if we don’t like some of those things, at least
we know.
My dad wasn’t the most selfish person in the world and I wasn’t truly dedicated to
self-destruction. The bridge proved that. I also learned that no matter how much you disagree with something, most
times you can’t change a dang thing about it, so it’s no use trying. The whole business with my dad still
hurts, though, and I can’t help but feel that bitterness bubble up every so often.
My dad and I made a deal when I turned sixteen: I clean myself up, I get my driver’s license. I did.
Almost a solid year of behavioral conformity. No trouble at school, no trouble at home, no trouble anywhere. I stopped
smoking dope, quit partying, became somewhat civil, got my grades up, and didn’t get busted for seven
months.
Then I got my license. Then I lost my license two weeks later for eluding the police. That’s the
nice way to say I freaked out and got myself into a high-speed chase with the cops that ended up with my dad’s
minivan in some guy’s yard and me in handcuffs.
The deal went down like this: I went to the store to get toilet paper. A simple task, even in the Ben
Campbell Book Of Simple Tasks That Don’t Get You In Trouble. Ten blocks of driving. Five blocks into it, I
saw Peach, Nick, and Porkchop sitting on the sidewalk. I gave them a lift to the store, and if I ever needed a decoder
card to the universe, it was then.
A sign that bad things are going to happen is when three skate punks come running out of a store carrying
cases of beer, with a security guard chasing them. Another bad sign is when they pile in your dad’s minivan and
scream at you to punch it. A sane Ben Campbell wouldn’t go. He’d calmly tell them that he
wasn’t having anything to do with crime, and that they were welcome to exit the arena.
In moments of crisis, my job has always been to make the wrong decision. I gunned it out of the parking
lot. I don’t even drink beer. I didn’t even really hang out with them anymore, due to me becoming an
angel. Four blocks later, my senses came back and I pulled over to kick them out. That’s when the police car
rounded the corner behind us and turned its lights on, and that’s when moment-of-crisis number two happened.
Five blocks later, I’d made my dad’s minivan into a crumpled lawn ornament in some guy’s
yard.
One week, one court appearance, and thirteen hundred dollars in car repairs later, Dad and Edward sat me
down in the living room and told me we were moving to Rough Butte, Montana, to live with Edward’s mother.
Dad cited the “pervasive atmosphere of negative influence” that I was surrounded by as a reason, stating
further that “we just don’t want to see you backslide after all the gains you’ve made in the last
year.”
Let’s get one thing straight. I’m a city kid, not a small-town-in-the-middle-of-nowhere
kid, and Eastern Montana is about as nowhere as you can get. To top things off, small towns mean one thing: gay dudes
and their boyfriends don’t go over well there. Especially when the place happens to be Edward’s
hometown.
So we battled. I fought and cussed and told them I’d run away, but nothing worked. I pulled out
every trick in the book, with no result. They’d made up their minds, and we were going. Two weeks later, we
piled in the minivan and drove away.
CHAPTER 2
T
he image I’d always had about small towns in the middle of nowhere was stereotypical: sheep running away from guys in pickups, turkey shoots, hoedowns, fat church ladies in gingham dresses, and lots of inbred kids running around bumping into things. I was wrong. They also shoot road signs for fun and have tobacco-spitting contests. When we turned off the highway and onto the blacktop leading to town, I gazed at a
DEER X-ING
sign with five holes in it. “You said she doesn’t live on a farm?” I asked.
Edward, sitting in the passenger seat, shook his head. “A neighborhood. There’s only around four hundred people in Rough Butte, though, so ‘neighborhood’ is more like a few streets with three hundred square miles of nothing surrounding them.”
After a mostly silent ten-hour trip to Eastern Montana, we drove into Rough Butte as the early September sun lowered over my new home. An old lady sitting on the front porch gave us the evil eye. Bonnie Mae Ingerson. Edward’s mother. She rocked back and forth in a wooden rocking chair just like in
The Beverly Hillbillies,
and as I looked at the stumpy varicose-veined legs showing under the hem of her dress, the charcoal-colored stray cat picked its way across the yard and rubbed against me.
Old people make me nervous because you can never tell what they’re thinking and it looks like their skin is going to slide right off their bones. Edward had told me stories about Bonnie Mae. Funny and endearing things about country life that sent cold chills up my spine. I half expected her to morph into some sort of countrified demon and spit lemonade-flavored battery acid in our eyes. Dad got out and smiled, giving a small wave and nod to her. She didn’t move a muscle, just sat there rocking. Her face looked like chicken-fried steak. Gnarled knuckles wrapped around the ends of the rocker arms. She wore a flowered summer dress. Liver spots covered her skin. She had a rooster-clucker thing under her chin, and nothing looked nice about her.
Dad looked to Edward, raising his eyebrows. Edward shut the door, walking around to meet us. He smiled at me and in a low voice said, “Just don’t make any sudden moves and you’ll be fine.”
Thanking God for my father’s decision to bring me to this paradise, I walked slowly across the lawn, whispering, “She’s not going to shoot us, is she?”
Edward chuckled, but under his breath. “She comes on strong at the start. Give her a few years and she’ll lighten up.” He smiled, then hit the first step. “Hello, Mother.”
That sunbaked face cracked, the clucker thing waggling when she spoke. She didn’t talk, though. More like a bark. “You track dirt in my house and I’ll strap you raw, Eddie.”
Dad and I looked at each other. I mouthed
“Eddie?”
and smiled. Her voice wasn’t soft and grandmotherly at all. Sharp and high, and quick like a whip. Edward sighed. “Nice to see you, too, Mother. It’s been twenty years, you know.”
“You still funny?”
He laughed, but it was more a sigh. “Gay as the day I was born, Mother.”
She snorted. “Figures. Ain’t no way to get your head straight, livin’ in the city.”
He smiled, a lifelong conflict erupting in the first two minutes we were there. “You sent me there, remember?”
Her mouth cracked and her voice whipped. “Don’t sass me, boy.”
Edward rolled his eyes, then gestured to us. “This is Paul and his son, Ben, and obviously we’re here.”
She swung those beady, deep-set eyes my way. “So you’re the one can’t keep his nose outta trouble.” She looked me up and down, taking in everything from the spikes on my head to the tattoo peeking from my sleeve to the piercings in my ears. “Figures. You look like a bad taste of something got ahold of you.”
Dad, the master of ignoring everything, smiled and held his hand out. “Hello, Bonnie Mae. It’s nice to meet you.”
She looked at his hand like it was some kind of foreign object. “Well, Mr. Paul, I don’t know how city folk do things, but you call me Bonnie Mae again and I’ll have a piece of your hide, too. Don’t care how old you are. It’s Miss Mae if it’s anything at all.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “You one of those funny guys like Eddie?”
My father smiled, taking his hand back before she bit it off. “We are together, ma’am.”
She sniffed. “Funny people all over the place now. Look normal enough, though.” She looked at me. “You funny?”
“You mean funny like a homosexshul or funny like a comedian?”
She studied me. “Got a mouth on you, too, I see. That’s gonna change.”
I shrugged, and Edward came to my rescue. “We’ll just get our things unpacked. Why don’t you go lie down for a while until we’re settled?”
“Suppose if I wanted to lie down, I’d be doing it. Fine right here, and I don’t need my boy telling me what to do.” Then she got up. “Go about your business. I’m lying down for a while.”
We walked back to the car. I watched her go in the house. “No wonder you’re so screwed up, Eddie,” I said.
He rubbed his stomach. “She does have a way about her. And if you call me Eddie again, I’ll make you eat quiche.”
“Is she ever nice?”
He opened the back of the minivan, grumbling, “We’ll want to search the house for weapons. She has a tendency to shoot things she doesn’t like.”
I looked at Dad. “Great idea, Dad, great idea.”
He grabbed a bag and threw it at me. “Ben, I want you to change your shirt before she gets up.”
For once in my life, I didn’t argue. I’d dealt with nasty people and been put in the hospital by five jocks at school for having a gay dad. I’d learned to deal with street people and cops and security guards and bums, but Miss Mae and her chicken-fried-steak face scared me. I kept reminding myself that people around here owned arsenals of guns and they had to take target practice at something.
Edward had us pile our bags on the porch, then we took our shoes off and lugged my bags inside. The porch ran the entire front of the house, just like all the others on the street, and the house was a two-story with a steep roof. Edward said his grandfather built it in 1913.
An hour later, I’d been shown my new room upstairs and unpacked the last of my stuff. A desk in the corner was a perfect fit for my computer, and I set my stereo on the dresser. The wallpaper was a nice flowered pattern from the sixties that made me dizzy, the closet smelled like dusty farts, and the heat was stifling.
I changed my “
NOT A REDNECK
” T-shirt and put on a plain black one. I also put on a pair of long camo shorts to try and get in the groove of living in a state where militia people ate pigs’ feet, drank beer, and played tag with AR-15s. Then I lay on the bed for a while, soaking in the misery of my new life. No air-conditioning, and the heat was already bringing on a rash.
I opened the window to catch any breeze coming through, but it was almost as stifling outside as inside. I looked out. Ten yards across a dry strip of grass, the neighbor’s house opened up onto a back porch. A freshly gutted deer hung by its hind legs from the rafters of the porch awning. Flies swarmed around it, and a kid, about eleven, stood staring at it. I called down to him: “Dinner?”
He turned around, his shaved blond hair glinting in the dying sun. He looked at me for a second, then turned around and walked in his back door, the screen banging shut. I caught a whiff and closed the window, wondering whether I’d be transported back home if I tapped my heels together three times. I tried it. Nothing. Dorothy. What a bitch.
I searched the house for Momdad and Dad and found them sitting on the front porch, drinking imported beers picked up on the way through town. I slumped in the porch swing next to the rockers, took out a smoke, and lit up. Dad and I made a deal that I could smoke in front of him if I gave up weed. I hadn’t had a toke in nine months, and honestly, I didn’t miss it. It was all part of the “clean up your life and make something of it” deal. I exhaled, watching the breeze run through the maple trees by the curb. Edward, as usual, coughed for emphasis and waved his hand in front of his face, even though the smoke blew in the opposite direction. I nodded toward the neighbor’s house: “There’s a dead deer hanging from their porch awning in the back.”
Edward smiled. “Blooding.”
“Blooding?”
He took a swig of his beer. “When you shoot a deer, you gut it, then hang it up and drain the blood. Makes skinning easier, too.”
I rolled my eyes. “They eat that crap?”
“Venison, Benjamin. And yes, they do. It can be quite good if it’s cooked properly.”
I shook my head. “I thought it was decoration. You know, hanging dead animals around the place to spruce it up.”
Ever optimistic, my dad smiled. “See, Ben? You’ll learn a ton of stuff around here. Different way of life than the city.”
My dad, the teacher of wisdom, couldn’t help but direct me in the ways of life and show me how to be positive about things that couldn’t possibly benefit anyone. “Well, as long as they don’t hang me up by the feet to drain, I’m fine with it. I like the wide-eyed dead look, anyway. What’s for dinner?”
Edward shrugged. “Mom has something going in the kitchen. Why don’t you go ask if you can help with anything.”
“I’d rather walk through a pit of fire, thank you very much. She’ll rip my head off and crap down my neck.”
Dad gave me the stare that meant
Go.
“I am seventeen now, Dad.”
He looked at me. “And we’re guests in her home.”
I stood up, rolling my eyes. “If you hear screaming, save me.” Then I walked inside, slowing as I neared the kitchen. I called around the corner, “Don’t shoot!” No answer. I could hear her moving, though, and didn’t hear the cock of a gun. Just pots and pans banging against each other. I looked around the corner.
Miss Mae looked at me, but she didn’t really “look.” Not with a normal-person look. Those eyes ripped through you like she could see to the darkest part of your soul. “Get in here and grab that,” she said, pointing to a basket above the refrigerator. I reached up and took it down for her. She scooted me away with her hands, motioning to the table. I set it down as she opened the fridge. She took a pitcher out, snapped at me to get a glass down from the cupboard, then filled it halfway. “Get that ice out of the freezer.” I did. She plunked ice in the glass, then turned around and handed it to me.
I took it, surprised. “Thank you, ma’am.”
She nodded. “That’s more like it. Sit down.”
I sat. “My dad asked if I could help you with dinner . . . ma’am.”
“It’s called supper around here, and I told you to sit. If I wanted you to help me, I wouldn’t tell you to sit. Now get me that bowl near the window.”
I did, then sat in my spot. I sipped from my glass—raspberry lemonade, sweet on my tongue. No battery acid in it. She busied herself with a mixing bowl full of yellow batter, her back to me as she whipped it. I took another sip. “Is that corn bread?”
“I thought you people lived on that fast-food garbage all the time. Yes, it is.”
“Edward makes it from scratch, too.”
She stopped mixing for a moment, her back still to me, then started again. “You don’t have a mother.”
I shifted in my seat, trying to be a polite young man. “I do, but she’s just not with me now.”
“I don’t hold account of a woman abandoning her baby.”
“I don’t know if you would call it abandoning, but . . .”
“You ain’t with her, now are you?”
“Well, no, but . . .”
“Call it what you like. Boy needs a mother.”
“My momdad does a better job, really. He’s a good cook, and he doesn’t mix colors in the wash.”
She turned around, her eyes blazing. This is where laser beams shoot out and incinerate me—I knew it! She studied me, and I wasn’t burned to a crisp. A half smile barely slid across her face before it disappeared like a lost puppy stuck in quicksand. She turned back to her bowl. “Get the milk.”
I did.
“Eddie’s always been funny that way. Like a girl with boy parts. He’d get razzed by the boys for it.”
I smiled. She called it “razzed”; he called it getting the shit kicked out of him on a regular basis as a kid. “He’s all right.”
“No boy should be raised by two men. Puts weird ideas in your head, and from the looks of it, you already got some.” She peered at my piercings, but didn’t say anything more.
I shrugged. Being a good boy only lasted so long. “Better than being some inbred redneck with two teeth in his head and a corncob pipe stuck up his ass.”
She glanced at me sideways, still mixing. The old-people skin under her arm waggled. “You got something against country people?”
“As long as they don’t drag me behind a pickup truck, I don’t.”
She sniffed. “Come closer.” I took a step closer. She sniffed again. “I smell tobacco smoke on you.”
I shrugged.
She narrowed her eyes. “You been smoking cigarettes?” She raised her spoon to me, pointing it at my face.
“Are you going to whack me with that?”
“You answer me.”
“Yes.”
Her eyes sharpened; then she brought the spoon down on my knuckles. Hard. “You find yourself some manners around me, boy. It’s ‘Yes, ma’am’ to you.”
I rubbed my knuckles. They throbbed. “Ouch.”
She threatened me with the spoon again, waving the thing in my face.
“Ouch, ma’am.”
She nodded, then held one hand out. “Give ’em over.”
I didn’t move.
“Come on, right now. Give ’em.”
I contemplated running; she couldn’t be that fast. I dug in my pocket instead, handing my smokes to her.
“And the lighter, boy. Don’t be smart on me, now.”
I gave it to her. She opened them up, took one out, lit it, and inhaled, leaning against the counter.
I gaped at her. “You’re smoking my cigarettes.”
She frowned. “ ’Course I am. Don’t be a rube. Haven’t had one in ages because the doctor won’t let me, and that old bastard Frank at the drugstore won’t sell ’em to me on account of everybody in this town having their noses in my business.” Then she whacked me on the head with the batter spoon hard enough for the sound to echo off the kitchen walls. “And there’ll be no cussing in this house or I’ll put the strap to you.”
