don’t know who’s saying what. I try to concentrate. The more I relax and let it take over, the worse I feel. The room is rubbery, waxy, everything in it contracting and melting at the same time. I find a fixed spot—the wall clock—and stare at it.
Ten seconds… Twenty seconds… Thirty seconds… One minute…
Two minutes…
I talk myself off the ledge by the time Mom and Dad enter the room. An ugly nurse follows behind them carrying a metal tray. On the tray are two white plastic bottles and a large paper cup.
Mom approaches me, but Dad doesn’t. She runs her hand through my hair. “How you feeling, honey?”
“Fine, Mom.” I’m more sluggish than intoxicated by this point. “Really, all of this isn’t necessary.”
I catch the nurse out of the corner of my eye pouring one of the plastic bottles into the paper cup. A black, tar-like substance rolls out of the bottle. Dad walks over to the nurse and takes the cup. He turns, handing the cup to me.
I grab the cup. “What am I drinking here?”
She picks up the empty bottle and looks at the label as if she forgot why she was here. “It’s activated charcoal in liquid form.”
Dad bites his lip, nods his head, and exhales like he’s been holding in a breath the whole time he’s been in the room. “Bottom’s up, son.”
The nurse sets the bottle down. “It’s not that bad, Hank. More or less tasteless, really.”
I hold the rim of the cup to my lips and tilt it. The black ooze starts to roll down my tongue.
Yeah, nurse, if this shit is tasteless, you’re attractive. The twelve ounces of cough syrup was impressive enough, but that’s nothing compared to a nice room temperature cup of liquid charcoal. The concoction is slightly sweet and very gritty. It tastes as if someone mixed sand and melted black licorice. My teeth are soon charred black. I can’t swallow.
Mom starts toward the door. Dad has already left.
Chapter eleven
After the hospital discharged me, and after my fifth pure black shit in as many hours—which henceforth I shall refer to as The Great Black Butt Incident of 1988—I find myself walking down the hallway toward my bedroom. My body is covered in beads of sweat.
“How you feeling?” Mom asks, ascending the stairs with a cup of decaf in hand. She’s wearing Dad’s old blue robe, his initials “JHF” on the left lapel.
“I’m okay.” I shrug. “One more stupid-ass stunt for you to tell the world about, I guess.”
“Hank!” Mom says. She switches her cup of coffee to her opposite hand as her right hand grabs me by the elbow. “Is that what you call yesterday? A stunt?”
“Come on, Mom.”
“You could have killed yourself!”
“Jesus Christ.”
“I’m being very serious here.”
“Glad to see someone cares.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“You tell me.”
Dad hasn’t spoken a word to me since he left my hospital room. He volunteered his trumpet at a Tuesday evening mass at St. Benjamins and then snuck out of the house early this morning for the dealership. And I noticed.
“What’d you expect, Hank?”
“Anything,” I say. “Being pissed off as hell is better than no reaction at all.”
“Oh, he reacted,” Mom says. “You just didn’t see it.”
I roll my eyes. Mom squeezes my elbow harder. “Don’t you for a second question your father’s love,” she says.
“Take it easy, Mom.” I shake her hand loose.
She’s crying now, her tears more angry than sad. “Do you have any idea what he said to the doctor yesterday?”
“What do you mean?”
“They were going to pump your stomach!” Mom shouts. “I think they wanted to teach you a lesson.”
I’m quiet.
“And you know what your dad said?”
Still quiet.
“He looked that doctor straight in the eyes…”
My throat hurts a little.
“And he said, ‘You stick to being a doctor, and I’ll stick to being a father.’”
I look down at the floor’s dark oak hardwood planks. You can see hundreds of footprint watermarks if you catch the floor in the right light. A casualty of living on a pond. Mom keeps saying she’s going to carpet over everything. I wipe the sweat off my brow. The room is cooling down, the hangover passing.
“Dad really said that?” I say.
Mom sips her coffee, nodding. “Yep.”
I don’t know what to say next. My martyr complex is subtle, nuanced. It usually works for me. The eldest son, trying to live up to his father’s expectations, woe is me—I can do the damn thing in my sleep. But Mom’s bullshit meter is pretty sensitive today.
“Can I stay home one more day?”
Mom scowls, walks by me and into her room. She starts to shut the door behind her and then stops herself at the last second. She peeks through the crack. “Not a chance, mister.” She shuts the door.
Chapter twelve
I’m the son of a car dealer, and I don’t know a dipstick from a chopstick. I have a surprising disregard for automobiles in general.
I got my driver’s license the Monday after my sixteenth birthday. By that Thursday, I had totaled my first car. It was the family car even—a brand-new ’87 Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser station wagon with simulated wood grain paneling. I took a turn at about thirty-five miles-per-hour in a rainstorm, hit the sidewalk on my right, the median, and a Bradford pear tree on my left. I busted three of the four axles. I worked half the summer at the dealership pro bono to pay it off. And yet Dad still saw fit to give me Grandpa’s restored ’68 Oldsmobile 442 Coupe.
“The Beast” isn’t your average Oldsmobile. A couple years back, Grandpa Fred traded it in for a newer Cutlass Supreme. Dad sent the old car over to the community college so the students could experiment on it. They had plenty to work with, most notably the 455 CID engine backed by a modified W-45 rated at 390 horsepower. In order to generate more rpms, they retrofitted her with cylinder heads from the W-30 and the camshaft from the W-31. They also installed new bucket seats and a Hurst Dual-Gate shifter in her walnut mini-console. Granted, I have
