The Laws of Average (17 page)

You can paint every room every color. All at the same time. And you'll be able to see every color distinct from every other color. You can do this. And you will love what you make of it. But you need to know that no one else will be able to see this but you, not even your dead children. Only you. If this makes any difference in your choice of palate or pattern, perhaps you don't understand what painting really is.

The only true and permanent and legal form of revenge is to conceive a child with Sig.Other. But only proceed with extreme caution on this after long and emotionally crippling conversations about it that spiral for hour upon hour, night after night, month after month, year after year. If you are still able to engage in sexual activity after this, consider it a Sign From Above that you are blessed and special. Because that is, without any hesitation of doubt, exactly what it is.

My children are usually messy eaters, but last night was an exception. They sat properly at the table, waved their forks and spoons through their food in correct, symmetrical patterns, sipped their beverages from their cups without a sound, and dabbed their mouths thoughtfully with their napkins. We were so proud of them when they thanked us for the meal, excused themselves from the table, cleared their plates, glasses and silverware, and retired in single file up the stairs, as if we were Roy Scheider's angelic little family in
Jaws
.

That's the movie based on a novel where a Great White shark bigger than Vermont tries to eat everyone on Martha's Vineyard over a single Memorial Day weekend. I spent my entire childhood terrified of that shark. When I was 6 years old, my family went on vacation to southern California, which is quite a long way away from Martha's Vineyard. I grew up in Twin Falls, Idaho, in the most working working class neighborhood imaginable, despite the fact that all the streets were named after famous presidents.

In southern California, there are real Great White sharks, but there are also fake ones. Metallic robotic fake ones. Families on vacation pay real money really on purpose to have them (the fake sharks) terrorize them (the families on vacation). My family was always equally interested in commerce and terrorism. But this doesn't make them special. Any family on vacation is geared this way. For this particular trip we drove from Twin Falls to Anaheim and did so in my parents' burgundy Volkswagen bus with a pop-top camper and 8-track player. My parents were the farthest things from hippies: their Volkswagen bus was only an occasional weekend driver; their Volkswagen bus wasn't originally burgundy but gunmetal gray, and it wasn't originally shot with a clear coat of metal flake; their Volkswagen bus, on the occasional weekend it was driven, was most often parked on a gypsum-crusted driveway perpendicular to a three-bedroom, air-conditioned cabin complete with full kitchen and microwave oven and curved glass television and linoleum and 20-foot picture windows that stretched all the way up to heaven. My parents were the farthest things from hippies: the rotation of 8-track cassettes was tight and small, and they were all greatest hits compilations: The Bee Gees, Waylon Jennings, Barbra Streisand. My father looked nothing like Waylon or Barry Gibb, but my mother did strike a close enough resemblance to Barbra in both face and figure (Robin Gibb in face only), and especially close enough for a southern Idaho ditchweed town like Twin Falls so as to earn herself a catcall or two.

The drive down was 78 hours of early August swelter. My father's sole sibling, an older sister, caravanned with us in a royal blue Chevy pickup whose ass end shook with the weight of a much-too-large camper shell. (This, I discovered over and over again in my adolescence, was a physical trait my aunt shared with the vehicle; she never did lose her high-school moniker “Mudflaps,” nor her well-earned reputation which amplified it.) The camper had one of those peeling manufacturer's stickers on its plexiglas window, the kind depicting a cartoon Indian or a cave man or a turtle or a penguin or a whatever in full-wink mode, its big fat thumb pointed up in the air as permanent affirmation to the camper's owner-operator that he had made the right purchase.

My older cousin—named after Captain Kirk because (a) he was born the same year
Star Trek
premiered and (b) his mother had a raging girl hard-on for William Shatner—rode with me and my parents. He, too, was an only child to parents of non-hippies, evidenced by the fact that the family pickup remained static with its stock Delco push-button radio, and even moreso that its big bouncy bench seat was eternally (and deliberately) tucked and swaddled into a horse blanket. For the simple majority of hours we spent not sleeping, Captain and I smashed miniature metal cars against one another in the back-back of the Bus, over and over again, head-on and t-bone and rear-end collisions, for pretends. When we were each only a couple of years older, we would practice these collisions with our own bodies, for reals.

When our caravan pulled onto the enormous lake of sun-warmed asphalt which was the Universal Studios theme park's parking lot, we had largely trekked the distance to see a fake shark. After spilling out of the Bus, our non-hippie parents paid Captain and I's entrance, and the entire family cluster made right for
Jaws: The Ride
, when we rode a fake tour bus around a fake lake. The fake tour bus had a fake stall as it traversed a fake bridge which, of course, bent us down to the lip of the water when there was a fake collapse of the fake bridge to heighten the very real anxiety we felt.

I immediately scrambled to the high side of the bench seat, but my aunt pulled me back with a large jerk of her football-wide forearm. She grinned and gnarled her eyebrow at me. Then she shoved me flush against the opening on the low side of the bench seat, right where the water line met the itchy, flaky fiberglass of the fake tour bus's window.

My aunt crushed her forearm into my back, splaying my little flab and even littler muscle with her big fat football arm, forming a perfect perpendicular line right up against my spinal column that I could feel all the way up in the tops of my teeth. Captain giggled and pointed from the high end of the tour bus, where he was pinned against the opposing window frame by my aunt's enormous ass and thus kept clear of the fray at the water's edge. The fake shark fin broke the skin of the fake lakewater not even 10 feet away from my window, slicing its way not only into my direct line of sight, but quite directly right towards
me
.

Which, of course, is something entirely different; separating a human being from what they can
see
and what they
are
is—as far as I'm concerned and have conducted rudimentary research into—a fundamental distinction that we make all the time and helps us sleep at night, for if we were to fully experience (and I mean this in the most visceral ways:
in our bones
) everything that we saw, we wouldn't last too long, and most likely wouldn't want to.

Being witness to something
is
experiential, sure, but only in and of itself. To witness something isn't to actually experience the thing being witnessed, like how seeing a fake shark fin make a bee-line for you in the real water of a fake lake tricks all your senses and even sizable chunks of your cerebral cortex into triggering your instinctual mechanisms to take flight of the situation; however, the reality of the deal is that you are only witnessing your own fear, feeling it surge against your aunt's big meaty forearm that certainly feels like it's all the way up inside you but it isn't, feeling it dart up through your blood and throat and lips like tiny knives stabbing at the air around you that would whistle and scream—in that eye-popping way that only 6 year old boys can scream—if you, of course, had the full capability and capacity of your lungs at your disposal, which naturally you don't, because of the truly over-the-line amounts of pressure your aunt is exerting to keep you locked in the magnificently monstrous moment when the fake fin juts suddenly and terribly up with a great shudder of its hydraulicky-robotty parts down from somewhere way underneath the water line, exposing the big shiny nose and eyes and mouth and carrot-length teeth all flapping together in the most ghastly, rickety chomp-chomp-chomp of your worst nightmares up and over and—wait—yes yes yes—past you.

Because you were, after all, merely a witness, and when you hear third and fourth-hand accounts of how eyewitnesses totally fuck up the details of what really happened of the things they've really and truly seen, you nod your head accordingly and without uttering a chirp.

Firecracker rolled his thick head counter-clockwise until it was directly parallel to the ceiling. A thin green haze floated over him.

02:43 a.m.

The cold crept over his toes, buried underneath a metric ton of cotton, acrylic fleece and honest-to-god, real duck-feathered down, zig-zagged by a mile of thermal wire heating the lumpy electric blanket below him. He knew at this moment what it felt like to be a slice of bread left in the tray too long after it had finished toasting, the scarlet wires beneath him cooling to a dirty grey as the heat left him there, suspended in a half-still of his former self. He wiggled an ankle to feel the blood slosh into his heel, the warmth spilling up his calf like the floorboard heater in the car. Jangling the other ankle, he felt nothing but the graze of the fleece against the top of his foot.

Nothing.

His wife Flame lay sleeping in half-wake in the guest room across the hall, as she had been doing off and on for the past thirty years. Well before Firecracker took sick, she siphoned her clothes and rose-colored cans of Aqua-Net hairspray into the little room as a meek protest against all the cooking, cleaning and obligatory sex duties she superimposed upon herself while he was away (ten out of every fourteen days on average) driving long-haul to Portland (via Bend), Missoula (via Idaho Falls), and Los Angeles (via Wells). After Flame and Firecracker's second divorce, they married a third (and final) time with the stipulation that she would learn to run the rig herself and accompany him. Their living, sleeping, driving and working together lasted all of a month, just long enough for Flame to quit her waitressing job and pick it right back up again with no questions asked. She took her rightful share of Firecracker's check and decorated her new bedroom with everything her heart desired (under $19.98, natch) from the Harriet Carter catalog. The last thing to arrive in the deluge was a digital alarm clock whose undeniable selling feature was its ability to project military time onto the ceiling in glorious 3 X 5 foot lime green numbers. When the clock failed to distinguish between sixes and eights, she transplanted it into Firecracker's room. Served him right, the sunnovabitch.

His eyes veered towards the small bathroom strategically planted directly at the foot of his mammoth California King. It took six weeks in a miniature hospital bed for Firecracker to completely forget the cool sensation of a plastic toilet seat below him. In the terminal two months he had spent at home he was only able to muster one brutal bowel movement. His time in the bathroom here at home was largely out of routine, not necessity. He reminded himself of this: his dentures left soaking in their sterile cup on the counter for over a year now; his bland reflection in the mirror above them. [Re]Cognition failing.

02:44 a.m.

When the cold in his feet boiled into his stomach, his initial urge was to squeeze the remote control for his blanket that had planted itself into his left hand. In his right lay the controller for the TV/VCR combo; for weeks he had been devising mnemonic devices to differentiate between blanket and cable TV, but ultimately none of them stuck. Upon gripping and squeezing what he thought to be the plastic box in his left hand, televisual light and sound pummeled the room in both the image and sardonic volume of Fox News' Bill O'Reilly. Firecracker prodded his left hand to respond again and the volume grew louder. Again and the image changed to Chris Matthews. Again and the volume grew louder. Again and the volume grew louder. Again and the volume grew louder.

Again and the image changed to Flame. She blinked a thin blink and felt the weight of his stare, felt it full at the back of her head and down into her neck, the slow creeping cascade over her shoulders. Firecracker ceased his prodding but the volume grew louder, his thumb slack and growing heavier than his stare.

Flame blinked another blink, 02:45 am, and another, still 02:45 am, and another. When the image first changed to Chris Matthews and the volume was lower, she hadn't flinched. She never had, never in their entire relationship, and with his blood cooling in his veins, finally after all these years, after all the uncertainty and contempt, she sure as hell wasn't about to return his gaze. Not now. No fucking way. Her moment. Arrived.

James's grandfather always said that Frey was a dead ringer for the boys' grandmother. He usually said this when Frey got himself into trouble, which he did every time he got near his grandfather. James, on the other hand, never gets caught.

Their grandfather would say, “Frey, you little fucker, you look just like your fucking grandmother when she's fucking another man.”

And together, they'd pout their twin pout.

James's grandfather just could not control himself when he saw them.

It was never clear to James or Frey as children why their grandparents lived in the same house. They fought violently over anything: what was cooked for dinner, the way it tasted in their old mouths, the matching silverware. They talked openly of their disgust for one another at Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter dinners. They viciously plotted against each other by intentionally overdrawing their bank accounts and bouncing mortgage checks. It wasn't that they didn't have the money. They simply enjoyed watching the humiliation of the “declined” look some waiter or whoever would give. They would be even more proud, depending on how many other witnesses were present.