Hit him, scream at him? Hold his hand until he wakes up? I’ve wiped enough fermented spit from his chin over the years to nurse a cataleptic body, and I don’t see a reason to treat this any differently. He’ll be too embarrassed to try it again, I think. My father’s a lot of things, but persistent isn’t one of them. Then again, I never would have pegged him for suicidal, either, so in a half-hour I’ve emptied every knife, blade, fork, scissors, letter opener, saw, and sharp edge I can find into a slick black trash bag. I throw the alcohol from the kitchen and the pills from the bathroom in as well, a perfect Seattle cocktail, and drag the clinking, jingling, bulging black mass of plastic, glass, and metal to the SUV. How many twenty-one-year-olds have to do this, I wonder, take out their parents’ trash? Is it selfish to ask? I lock up the front door and start to put the house back together, closing drawers and wiping down counters, Romeo’s nervous habits. He’ll be OK, but he needs something. A hobby, a date, a new job, a new start—anything, really. Anything to wake up for, anything to throw a wrench in the workings of his steady, systematic implosion.
I flip the kitchen light off and head for my room, pausing to pick up one last scrap of paper from the tile floor. My father’s epitaph. His memoir, his last words scratched across notebook paper like claw marks. I’m sorry. And that would have been it, I’m sorry, a gurgled apology as he drowned himself in vodka and medication between the toilet and the bathtub. With a quick tug, I tear the paper from end to end, then fold the scraps over and tear them again, shredding the letter into a palmful of striped, greyish confetti that explodes next to the oven like a dud and drifts gently down into the trash. Maybe he’ll be lucky. Maybe he’ll wake up and forget the whole thing.
“A prince never lacks legitimate reasons to break his promise.”
—Niccolo Machiavelli
“There’s my boy!” Tony reaches out and slaps hands with me on the front porch, his voice brimming with excitement. I’m using the front door this time, and there are no blood-coated cars in the garage that I know of. I walk through the cramped entrance, and the screen door bangs hard against the thin metal frame behind me, Tony chirping about Cesar on his way to the living room in front. “Twenty-five a kilo? That’s not bad man. I don’t know how you got that motherfucker to go twenty-five for a fucking kilo. And then you walk up the stairs on him? Shit…my boy!” Tony’s mansion is draped in a stucco blanket, hidden behind the bars on the windows and all the touches of normalcy, perfectly camouflaged in an ocean of affordable living. The luxury, the excess, it’s all on the inside, hanging neatly on the walls in black metal frames or installed in the kitchen in shiny metal appliances. It’s probably the only inconspicuous thing about Tony, but it’s perfectly impermanent, too. At any time he can pack up and take his mansion with him, and Tony never struck me as the type to stay in one spot for too long. Dad would hate him.
And Dad—my practical, stone-faced father. His world’s hidden, too, but it’s a much darker place, much more private. A shadowy living room where he can sit and watch a lifetime of safe decisions fall out from under him. They won’t support him anymore, so now what? Part of me wants to give him a gun and a beanie and drop him off at Sarah’s Baby Barn, but all of me knows he’d never go for it. He’s Moses falling down Mount Sinai with a death grip on two stone anchors, and he won’t let them go, not for anything, no matter how far down the mountain he rolls.
I take a seat at Tony’s bar, two jet-black stools squatting next to a smooth grey marble counter bordering the kitchen. Tony slides a stout green Heineken down the counter and breaks the top off of his own, pausing for a single short sip. All of a sudden the beer looks like a vile of
I flip the kitchen light off and head for my room, pausing to pick up one last scrap of paper from the tile floor. My father’s epitaph. His memoir, his last words scratched across notebook paper like claw marks. I’m sorry. And that would have been it, I’m sorry, a gurgled apology as he drowned himself in vodka and medication between the toilet and the bathtub. With a quick tug, I tear the paper from end to end, then fold the scraps over and tear them again, shredding the letter into a palmful of striped, greyish confetti that explodes next to the oven like a dud and drifts gently down into the trash. Maybe he’ll be lucky. Maybe he’ll wake up and forget the whole thing.
“A prince never lacks legitimate reasons to break his promise.”
—Niccolo Machiavelli
“There’s my boy!” Tony reaches out and slaps hands with me on the front porch, his voice brimming with excitement. I’m using the front door this time, and there are no blood-coated cars in the garage that I know of. I walk through the cramped entrance, and the screen door bangs hard against the thin metal frame behind me, Tony chirping about Cesar on his way to the living room in front. “Twenty-five a kilo? That’s not bad man. I don’t know how you got that motherfucker to go twenty-five for a fucking kilo. And then you walk up the stairs on him? Shit…my boy!” Tony’s mansion is draped in a stucco blanket, hidden behind the bars on the windows and all the touches of normalcy, perfectly camouflaged in an ocean of affordable living. The luxury, the excess, it’s all on the inside, hanging neatly on the walls in black metal frames or installed in the kitchen in shiny metal appliances. It’s probably the only inconspicuous thing about Tony, but it’s perfectly impermanent, too. At any time he can pack up and take his mansion with him, and Tony never struck me as the type to stay in one spot for too long. Dad would hate him.
And Dad—my practical, stone-faced father. His world’s hidden, too, but it’s a much darker place, much more private. A shadowy living room where he can sit and watch a lifetime of safe decisions fall out from under him. They won’t support him anymore, so now what? Part of me wants to give him a gun and a beanie and drop him off at Sarah’s Baby Barn, but all of me knows he’d never go for it. He’s Moses falling down Mount Sinai with a death grip on two stone anchors, and he won’t let them go, not for anything, no matter how far down the mountain he rolls.
I take a seat at Tony’s bar, two jet-black stools squatting next to a smooth grey marble counter bordering the kitchen. Tony slides a stout green Heineken down the counter and breaks the top off of his own, pausing for a single short sip. All of a sudden the beer looks like a vile of
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