Knockemstiff

I START OVER

EVERYBODY’S SEEN IT, THE COMMERCIAL WHERE THE OLD man is running along the moonlit beach with the beautiful pink-haired starlet clad in the silver thong; the one that says it’s never too late to start over. This guy’s bounding along like a fucking gazelle, his feet barely touching the sand, a bulge the size of a sledgehammer knocking around inside his plaid swimsuit; and then this young girl, she can barely keep up he’s moving so fast. It’s bullshit, another lie they tease you with, hoping you’ll fall for the special effects, dial the toll-free number with a credit card clenched between your false teeth. And it’s like all those other artsy commercials nowadays, where they don’t actually tell you what they’re selling. I mean, they might have a little drama going on about an elephant and a sunflower, but then someone figures out it’s just an ad for sanitary napkins, that sort of thing.

But still, they suck you in, this new way they tell a story. The bastards prey on your regrets, divine all your little sorrows. Take me for example, Big Bernie Givens. I’m fifty-six years old and sloppy fat and stuck in southern Ohio like the smile on a dead clown’s ass. My wife shudders every time I mention the sex act. My grown son eats the dead stuff that collects on windowsills. I must watch that damn commercial twenty times a day. I dream about it at night, about starting over. I wake up with that background music knocking holes in my heart. Like I said, it’s bullshit.

…..

“WHAT’S THOSE THINGS WHERE THEY BURN YOUR DEAD body?” I ask my wife. We’re inching forward in the drive-through line at Fedder’s Dairy Queen, sucking car fumes and listening to Jerry thrash around in the backseat like an ape caught in a net. It’s been the worst summer on record, just one massive heatstroke. My new white shirt is already stained the color of pus; my shades are fogged over with greasy vapors. Fumes from the paper-mill stack across town make the whole county smell like a giant fart. The sun is everywhere.

“Crematorium?” she yawns. She rubs her eyes, runs a freckled hand through her thin brown hair, dead as straw now from too many dye jobs.

“No, not that, like over in Asia,” I say, wiping the sweat from my forehead. I should have gone ahead and driven the air-conditioned Mercury today, left the Chevy covered up in the garage. Glancing in the rearview mirror, I watch Jerry struggle against the plastic webbing we use to hold him down and keep him from jumping out into traffic. Blue veins thick as fingers bulge in his scarlet neck. The poor bastard never lets up.

“Shit, how should I know?” Jill groans. She begins fanning herself with a wrinkled map of Ohio she’s dug out of the glove box.

“That’s it,” I say. “That’s what it feels like.”

…..

LATELY, I’VE BEEN FUCKING UP LEFT AND RIGHT. THE other night on my way home, I even tried to pick up some young girl. She was walking along Third Street and I drove past first, checking her out. I could see that she was junior high, but I whipped around the block anyway, then pulled over to the curb. “Hey, you need a ride?” I asked. As soon as the words spilled out of my mouth, my teeth started chattering, even though the sign on the bank said it was ninety-two degrees.

The girl looked up and down the street, then edged closer to the car. “Where you going?” she asked. Her voice sounded like tinfoil. Pictures of butterflies covered her pink shirt. She had the body of a woman, but the face of a little kid. Cow hormones have the young people all fucked up.

It was still daylight, and I was nervous about being seen. “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just ridin’ around.” I could smell my sweat, taste the bologna sandwiches I’d had for lunch.

She leaned in the window, looking the car over inside. She wore one of those necklaces strung with candy hearts, and they were melting against her throat. I tried to suck in my gut, but it still rubbed the steering wheel. “I got to be home in two hours,” she said.

“Sure,” I said. “No problem.” For one brief moment, it was like that commercial come true, I swear to God. I was already picturing the stuff we’d do. But then, just as she opened the door to slide in beside me, someone began yelling from across the street. I looked over and saw a tall stocky woman with curlers in her hair standing on the porch of a big red-brick. “Oh, shit,” the girl said. “That’s my volleyball coach.” She stepped away from the car just as the woman leaped off the porch and began running toward us. I blew through two red lights, and then made a fast right out of town. That’s the reason I didn’t drive the Merc today. I figure every cop in Ross County has a description of Jill’s car stuck in his sun visor.

…..

THIS AFTERNOON WE’VE BEEN OUT TO THE MOTHER-IN-LAW’S for another one of her Sunday dinners — a raw pink chicken stuffed with bits of blue grass that I swear the old bag foraged from an Easter basket — and now my ulcers are screaming for long dogs with sauce and limp, greasy fries. Jill’s always on me about my clogged pipes, but I’m a big guy — they don’t call me Big Bernie for nothing — and I crave junk food like a baby craves the tit. Besides, I’m beginning to believe that anything I do to extend my life is just going to be outweighed by the agony of living it.

As the row of cars creeps forward, I drift back to one of the daydreams I’ve been having lately, the farewell one where I douse myself with gasoline, then hand Jill the gold-plated lighter the guys at work gave me when the company forced me into early retirement. “Fire when ready,” I say, standing at attention, flipping her a little salute. Fantasizing myself as a brave orange fireball is damn near the only thing that makes me hard anymore; but today, for some reason, I crank it up a notch, and the flames in my mind leap across to Jill’s hair, then onto the house, and finally to Jerry. Whoosh! In less time than it takes Larry Fedder to burn a burger, the only thing left of the fucked-up family that lived at 124 Belmont is ashes.

Not that I really would, but I can’t help feeling the way I feel, even with the new combo Doc Webb prescribed the other day. I even told him about the commercial, but he dismissed it as postretirement depression. “Just quit watching it,” he said.

“How’s that?” I asked.

He was standing by the window in his office, staring at the car dealership across the street. “It’s like that anthrax scare,” he muttered to himself.

“Well, what about the Zippo?” I said. I hauled it out of my pocket and held it up, a final attempt to convince him that I’m a troubled man.

He glanced over his glasses at the shiny lighter, then checked his watch. “Bernard, you shouldn’t smoke,” he said. Then he handed me a little grab bag of samples and showed me out the door.

I didn’t understand what he was trying to say, but I do know my problem has nothing to do with powdered germs or free pills. The poor fuck didn’t know what to do, so he was just trying to fluff it up and make the whole ordeal seem like it was happening to somebody else. Everything is too complicated when you’re alive, even for the experts.

…..

I PULL UP TO THE SPEAKER AND GO HOG WILD WHILE GRABBING for the sun-bleached antacids I keep on the dash. I order enough junk to tear me up for the rest of the afternoon. The Chevy is missing a little, and my plan is to take it out on the highway and blow the carbon out of it after we put Jerry to bed this evening. “There is a difference,” Jill says out of the blue. Though I know better, I ask her what the hell she’s talking about. “Between big and fat,” she says.

“Big and fat,” I repeat slowly, waiting for the goddamn punch line to smack me upside the head.

“Yeah,” she says, “I mean, the way I see it, big is like that Arnold guy in the movies, but fat is like your aunt Gloria. So I’ve always wondered why they call you Big Bernie and not Fat Bernie.”

I tear off three of the crumbly Rolaids and chomp them while staring at the little amplified speaker protruding between the giant photos of the Chocolate Rock and the Dilly Bars. Even if I ate everything on the menu, I’d still be hungry. White foam begins to bubble from my mouth. I look like the rabid dog in the horror movie that Jerry made us play over and over last winter until Jill finally rigged it to look like it broke in the VCR. “Maybe you better sleep in the other room tonight,” Jill says, scooting over next to the door.

A station wagon loaded with kids in bathing suits is ahead of us in the line. One little guy in the back keeps messing with us, making gestures with his tongue that kids his age shouldn’t know anything about. “Maybe we oughta take him home with us,” I joke, making a feeble attempt to turn the lousy day around. I’m kicking myself in the ass now because I bitched so much about the mother-in-law’s half-dead chicken. “Many kids as that woman’s got, she wouldn’t even miss him.”

“I think he’s eating his own shit,” Jill says, and then sticks her big sunglasses on so nobody can see her.

“Oh, Christ, Jill,” I say, “what makes you say stuff like that? The kid’s just playing around.” I make a goofy face at the boy just as he turns around to grab his ice-cream cone. I think back to when Jerry was that age. It makes me feel like shit, thinking it, but there are days when I’d give anything just to be able to prop him out on the curb like a broken appliance for the junk man to haul away. And almost like he can read my mind, Jerry starts making that hacking sound way down in his throat that he’s been making all summer. It’s the type of noise that makes you grit your teeth.

“Not the kid, you idiot,” she says. “Jerry.”

Whenever I figure it can’t get any worse, it always gets worse. Because I try to follow the rule that we don’t talk about Jerry in his presence, I decide not to say anything. Besides, I can’t stand the thought of another argument. We’ve been at it for months. Her latest bitch has been over this old car I’m driving, a souped-up 1959 Chevrolet with big fins that I traded my pickup for so I’d have something to drive to the cruise-ins they put on around here in the fast-food parking lots. It’s just an excuse to get out of the house, but Jill’s always ragging me, pretending to be jealous of the skanky whores who hang out in the custom vans.

As I pull up to the window, she starts in again about the car shows. “There’s no reason you can’t take Jerry with you,” she says.

I get so sick of explaining it. “Hell,” I stutter, “what good’s that gonna do you? I mean, even if I was screwing around, Jerry wouldn’t know the difference between a piece of ass and your mom’s false teeth.” I immediately hate myself for saying it, for breaking the rule, for even reacting to the crazy bitch at all. Still, there’s no way I’m hauling Jerry to a car show, not even in handcuffs.

I pull the car up and there’s the girl that works the window, the one with the twisted chains of baby blond hair and the perfectly calibrated gap between her white teeth. She’s like that song about the angel that gives head, and I almost blurt out, Look, Jill, an angel at the Dairy Queen, but I catch myself. This girl can have any man who buys a milk shake. She’s the type of girl that ends up in one of those damn commercials, tormenting the shit out of every old geezer with cable.

The girl grabs my money in a huff before I can even ask her to sack up the Blizzards. This afternoon she’s chewing purple gum, and the way she blows bubbles reminds me of Jill back when we were young and horny, before we lost the map that takes you to places like that. “Hey,” I say, turning to Jill, “that girl is the spittin’ image of you back when you carhopped at the Sumburger. Remember that?” But it’s one of those memories that makes the present only that much more unbearable, and Jill just shakes her head, sinks lower into the seat.

While we wait for the order, I listen to my son try to swallow his tongue and go over the whole fucking mess for the thousandth time. Two years ago, on the night before Jerry was supposed to board the bus for boot camp, he went to a party out in the sticks and never came home. Three days later someone threw him out of a car in front of a hospital in Portsmouth, fifty miles away. We were sitting in the dayroom of the wing where Jerry was transferred after he came out of the coma. The young doctor on duty walked in and stuck a video in the TV. It was that old commercial with an egg frying in a skillet while a voice-over explained that this was your brain on drugs or whatever. I’d seen it a hundred times. They used to play it on the tube back when Jerry was a kid as a warning to stay off the shit. I couldn’t believe they still used it. “What about the marines?” I asked. “Shit, he’s already AWOL, and he don’t even have his uniform yet.”

The doctor was crouched down trying to shine a light into Jerry’s eyes. He finally shook his head and turned the flashlight off. On the TV, the egg began to pop and sputter in the little pan. The doctor stood up and handed me a card from his coat pocket. “Sorry,” he said. “Tell them to call me if they have any questions, but I’m pretty sure they won’t want him now.” Then he turned and hurried away.

“Look, they’ve got the same microwave we’ve got,” Jill said that day at the hospital, her voice skipping like one of her old Wayne Newton records. She was trying to pick pork and beans out of Jerry’s hair while he made another attempt to walk through the wall. We’d already planned our golden years — a new camper on Rocky Fork Lake, a hot tub in Jerry’s old bedroom. Then three weeks later, poor little Delbert Anderson came to work blowing off about his perfect son, the one that built the telescope for the senior citizens, and I broke his jaw with my lunch bucket. The company had me up front signing my papers before the blood was even dry on the break-room floor.

The blonde hands me the Coneys, the fries, the melting Blizzards, but she doesn’t see me no matter how big and stupid I smile. While I’m still checking the sacks, a jacked-up Camaro full of boys pulls up behind us. They all look like the same model: matching earrings, shaved heads, little goatees sprouted around their mouths like hair around a poodle’s ass. They begin honking the horn, and the blonde tells me to move on, that I’m holding up the line. “Sorry,” I say, and pull forward without any ketchup.

In the rearview, I see one of the boys say something that makes the girl laugh; then I watch in disbelief as she raises her shirt to show her tits. “Holy shit,” I say, stopping the car. “Jerry, damn boy, turn around and check that out.” For a moment, the girl’s breasts are framed in the window like some advertisement for a new double-scoop sundae. They glow in the blazing sunlight, and I think of soft, precious metal. But even though they’re beautiful, it’s really her smile that takes my breath away. I’d give anything just to feel the way she feels right now. It’s the kind of feeling that people never realize they’ve had until years later, when it’s no longer possible to feel it. “Jerry,” I say again, turning around to look at him; but all he does is curl up his lips and make that damn duck sound again.

“Jesus Christ, Bernie, what are you doing?” Jill says.

I don’t answer. The boys in the Camaro have noticed me staring at the girl, and one of them starts imitating Jerry, squishing his face up and hanging his head on his chest. The girl is still laughing, but she’s pulling her top back down. And though I know that two years ago Jerry would have been right there with them, making fun of the retard, I set the emergency brake and haul my fat ass out of the car. I stand there for a second, pulling my shirt down over my white belly, wondering what I’m supposed to do now; but just before I lose my nerve, one of the boys calls out “Porky,” then another squeals, “Oink, oink.” Taking a deep breath, I walk back to their car and start kicking the shit out of the side panel. Believe me, I’m just a big tub of lard, but when the driver jumps out, a tall boy with big teeth and barbed wire tattooed around his skinny arms, I knock him down with one punch. I’ve never hit anyone that hard in my life, not even Delbert Anderson.

Suddenly, the world lights up, as if someone peeled the skin off my eyeballs. I look up at the sky, startled by the giant bloom of blue. But fuck, it’s only my sunglasses. I’m so pumped that it takes me a second to realize they’ve fallen off my face, and when I stoop over to pick them up, the boy tries to bite me. I reach down and grab the front of his shirt. My sweat splatters his shiny head like greasy rain. I pull him up off the pavement and smack him again, busting his lip open. By this time, the others are out of the car yelling shit, but keeping their distance. I realize then that they’re afraid of me, and I run at them. I grab the one that was making the stupid faces and bang his head against the hood of the car. A wave of dizziness rushes over me, and I let go of his skinny neck. Teeth marks burn my knuckles. A few drops of blood stain my shirt. I wobble for a second in the heat, then head back to the Chevy and flop down behind the wheel.

Jill’s squished up in the corner like she’s afraid I’m going to hammer her next, but I just sit there sucking the steamy air through my mouth. Jerry is still making the duck sound, and I finally turn around to look at him. Even after all this time, he’s got that angel dust glaze in his eyes, as if torching his brain is the only thing he’ll ever remember. His face and neck are broken out in a bumpy red rash from where Jill tried to shave him this morning. His white T-shirt is soaked with slobber, stained with his grandmother’s watery gravy. Every time Jerry attempts the duck, his tongue pops out and spit runs off his chin. I fumble around, then pull a napkin from one of the sacks of food and wipe his face. When my hand brushes against his jaw, his eyes close like a puppy’s.

The other boys are helping the driver back up. They’re talking big now, strutting around like they’ve got shit in their pants. I stick my head out the window and growl like a dog. Then I give them the finger. The girl in the window yells, “Fat motherfucker!” I turn back around and blast my horn, hold it down for a long minute. “My God,” Jill says. “Oh, my God.” She’s holding her hands over her ears.

“Hey, Jerry,” I say, “you wanta drive?” I drop the Chevy into low, and rev the engine until the Dairy Queen’s windows are rattling. The customers inside are staring at us and I wave at them. In my side mirror, I see the manager approaching cautiously from behind and talking on a cell phone. Suddenly, gunk breaks loose in the carburetor and a huge puff of black smoke shoots out of the tailpipe.

“You’re going to jail,” Jill says.

I laugh and pull out fast onto High Street, burning rubber, honking the horn. “Slow down!” Jill screams. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

I slide the Zippo from my pocket and squeeze the small metal case, rub it between my fat, sweaty fingers. It has two dates engraved on it, like a tombstone. I toss the lighter out the window and shift the Chevy into second gear, then stomp the gas pedal and squeal down the street. People hanging out on their porches point at us as we rocket past in third. An old lady grabs a little girl up off the sidewalk. A siren begins to whine in the distance.

Suddenly, happiness rips through me like a sword. Reaching over, I grab Jill’s knobby knee, but she shoves my hand away. “Kak, kak!” Jerry squawks, as he bounces forward against his restraints. I dig a hot dog out of the sack and tear the wrapper off, cram it in my mouth. In the rearview, I see a police car coming up fast behind us, all of its lights throbbing. The trees, the signs, the entire world, start to bend backward as we race up the highway. “Kak, kak!” Jerry goes again, and I almost grit my teeth. But then, ramming the gearshift into fourth, I start over.