Charlie Huston - The Shotgun Rule

He gets up, takes a long drink, sets his coffee cup on top of the dresser and starts to search the room, just as he does every day.

An empty half pint of Fleischmann’s vodka and the same old stash of Playboy back issues with Bob Whelan’s address label on the cover.

Booze and dirty magazines. Kyle Cheney knows there’s worse somewhere.

When Paul first started changing, when his mother took off and left them alone six years ago and he started talking back, that’s when he’d had to start this. She’d driven a wedge between him and his son. That’s what he couldn’t forgive her for. Not the stupid way she left them, but the things she’d said to the boy, the things she’d said about him. Things she’d screamed that scared Paul. Things Paul was just too young to understand.

Things that confused him about their relationship.

What it was.

What it meant to him.

When he started finding the boy’s door blocked, a dresser shoved in front of it, that’s when he knew the extent of the damage she’d done. The damage she’d done to their trust.

Paul stopped talking to him. And he’d had no choice but to take things into his own hands, to find out what his son was up to.

And he found things. A few joints. Pills. A boom box and someone’s class ring, both obviously stolen. Girls sneaking in the window in the middle of the night. Girls he’d seen, and heard. Stood in the hall outside the boy’s room and heard them.

But it wasn’t enough. None of it was enough to make him feel like he was still inside his son’s life.

He just had to keep looking. Keep looking until he found the secret that would open his son back up to him.

Hector wakes up, reaches for his turntable and hits play.

The tone arm jerks and drops heavily onto the album that’s cued up and waiting to start his day. The speakers hiss and crack and then explode into “Memories of Tomorrow.”

The sound yanks him from bed and he pogos around the room, flailing his arms and bouncing off the walls.

Suicidal Tendencies got it right.

The Pistols were a great start. Dead Kennedys and Black Flag carried him for awhile. He thought it might be the Bad Brains that did it for him. But it was Suicidal Tendencies that took it all the way. He heard about them after taking the bus to Hayward and riding the BART train into San Francisco for a Kennedys gig at Mabuhay Garden. He had to wait another month for the album to come out. It was worth it. It’s perfect and he’s been listening to nothing else ever since.

He jumps on his bed, jumps from it to the twin his little brothers sleep on, bounces back and forth between them. The little fuckers must be up already. Up and outside, fighting with each other and talking back to their mom. Little pieces of shit.

Alexandra opens the door.

– Turn it down!

He bounces high off the bed and lands in front of her, smiling and jumping up and down.

– What?

– Turn it down, Hector, it’s awful! Turn it down.

He pogos higher, arms plastered to his sides, leaping.

– Turn it up?

– Down! Down!

– Louder?

– Heeeectoooor! Stooooop iiiiiiit! It’s awwwwwfuuuuuul!

He grabs her hands and drags her into his room, pulls her up on the bed and bounces.

– Dance, mija, dance to the music!

She tries to jerk free.

– Noooo, it’s not dancing! It’s not music! It’s awful!

He wraps his arms around her, bouncing, laughing.

– Dance with me, little sister.

– Moooooom! Muuuuuhhoooooom!

But she’s jumping with him now, her perfectly blownout hair mussed, her sharply creased khakis wrinkled, heavy eye liner smeared by tears as she laughs at her crazy big brother.

He lets her go and they jump up and down on the bed.

Their mom comes in.

– Mijo!

He flies off the bed and crashes off the wall, the record skips once, plays on.

He dances.

His mom puts her hands on his shoulders and tries to push him down, to stop the bouncing.

– Mijo! So loud! So loud!

But she can’t stop him. She’s laughing.

– Mijo, no, it’s too early. Come eat breakfast. Turn it off! Come eat.

He bounces to the turntable, lands, thrashes his head back and forth at the end of the song and takes the needle off the record, becoming still.

Alexandra climbs off the bed, running a fingertip under her eye.

– Hectooor, you ruin my makeup. Mooom, look at my face.

She runs out the door and into the bathroom, where she’ll spend the next hour redoing her hair and makeup.

Their mom is still laughing.

– You look like a dancing fish, mijo. A fish.

He smiles.

– C’mon, Ma.

He puts the needle back down on the beginning of the song, bounces back to her and grabs her hands, pulling.

She jumps up and down a few times with him, then frees her hands and covers her ears.

– Enough, mijo, enough! Too loud. Come eat.

She reaches out and grabs a fold of his belly skin between her thumb and index finger and gives it a twist.

– Eat!

He bounces free and moshes around the tiny room.

She waves her hands in the air and walks away, still laughing, the song thundering and ripping new cracks in the taped up speakers.

Through the open door he watches her walk back to the kitchen, where she spends her life minding pots of rice and beans and stewed pork and chicken.

His dad is in the livingroom, asleep on the couch already, his ruined leg propped on a kitchen chair, a bottle of his painkillers sticking out of his bathrobe pocket, a half empty gallon jug of Gallo on the floor.

Hector pushes the door closed and dances, slashing his hand up and down over the strings of an invisible guitar. The guitar he’ll have one day when high school is over and he takes BART into The City for the last time.

He’ll crash in a squat full of punks and put together a band and play that guitar when they gig at Mabuhay and he’ll take it on the road and he’ll see shit that he’s never gonna see if he takes a job at the quarry and marries one of the pachuco chicks from the neighborhood and has three kids by the time he’s old enough to go in a bar. Fuck that. He’s gonna buy a guitar and be a fucking punk.

He is a fucking punk.

And he sings.

Mass starvation

Contaminated water

Destroyed cities

Mutilated bodies

I’ll kill myself

I’d rather die

If you could see the future

You’d know why.

It’s hot in George’s attic room. All summer long he wakes up sweating. Today he wakes up sweating and screaming, having dreamed the El Camino running him over.

He sits on the edge of the bed, sweat coating his scalp under his long hair and running from his pits and down his sides, soaking the seat of his Fruit of the Looms. He gets up and goes to the mirror over his desk and looks at the scrapes running from his jaw down the left side of his neck.

When he and Andy came home yesterday he told their folks he pulled an endo on a jump at the firebreak. His dad asked if his bike was in one piece while his mom cleaned the cuts with hydrogen peroxide. Andy had gone straight to his room.

You don’t want Andy around when you’re lying to mom and dad. Little spaz gets restless and starts talking too much and fucks it up.

But it wasn’t a big deal. Mom was relieved it was nothing that required a trip to the emergency room. Dad was satisfied that the bike wasn’t messed up. But he gave one of his speeches: Got to value the things money buys, the hard work that goes into making that money. You’ll need that. You’re not gonna be getting a scholarship anywhere like your little brother, you’re gonna be working for a living. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with you. That’s the way it is. Life’s not fair. Sooner you learn the truth that work sucks and working for someone else sucks even worse, the better. Got to put value on what you earn when you hate doing what you have to do to get it.