Z. Packer - Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

My father just got a DUI — again — though that didn’t stop him from asking for the keys. When I didn’t give them up, he sighed and shook his head as though I withheld keys from him daily. “C’mon, Spurge,” he’d said. “The pigs aren’t even looking.”

He’s the only person I know who still calls cops “pigs,” a holdover from what he refers to as his Black Panther days, when “the brothers” raked their globes of hair with black-fisted Afro picks, then left them stuck there like javelins. When, as he tells it, he and Huey P. Newton would meet in basements and wear leather jackets and stick it to whitey. Having given me investment advice, he now watches the world outside the Honda a little too jubilantly. I take the curve around the city, past the backsides of chain restaurants and malls, office parks and the shitty Louisville zoo.

“That’s your future,” he says winding down from his rant. “Sound investments.”

“Maybe you should ask the pigs for your bail money back,” I say. “We could invest that.”

He doesn’t respond; by now he’s too busy checking out my mom’s new car. Ray Bivens Jr. doesn’t own a car. The one he just got his DUI in was borrowed, he’d told me, from a friend.

Now he takes out the Honda’s cigarette lighter from its round home, looking into the unlit burner as though staring into the future. He puts the lighter back as if he’d thought about pocketing it but has decided against it. He drums a little syncopation on the dash, then, bored, starts adjusting his seat as though he’s on the Concorde. He wants to say something about the car, wants to ask how much it costs and how the hell Mama could afford it, but he doesn’t. Instead, out of the blue, voice almost pure, he says, “Is that my old dress jacket? I loved that thing.”

“It’s not yours. Mama bought it. I needed a blazer for debate.” The words come out chilly, but I don’t say anything else to warm them up. And I feel a twinge of childishness mentioning my mother, like she’s beside me, worrying the jacket hem, smoothing down the sleeves. I make myself feel better by recalling that when I went to post bail, the woman behind the bulletproof glass asked if I was a reporter.

“You keep getting money from debate, we could invest.”

When most people talk about investing, they mean stocks or bonds or mutual funds. What my father means is his friend Splo’s cockfighting arena, or some dude who goes door to door selling exercise equipment that does all the exercise for you. He’d invested in a woman who tried selling African cichlids to pet shops, but all she’d done was dye ordinary goldfish so that they looked tropical. “Didn’t you just win some cash?” he asks. “From debate?”

“Bail,” I say. “I used it to pay your bail.”

He’s quiet for a while. I wait for him to stumble out a thanks. I wait for him to promise to pay me back with money he knows he’ll never have. Finally he sighs and says, “Most investors buy low and sell high. Know why they do that?” With my father there are not only trick questions, but trick answers. Before I can respond, I hear his voice, loud and naked. “I axed you, ‘Do you know why they do that?’” He’s shaking my arm as if trying to wake me. “You answer me when I ask you something.”

I twist my arm from his grasp to show I’m not afraid. We swerve out of our lane. Cars behind us swerve as well, then zoom around us and pull ahead as if we are a rock in a stream.

“Do you know who this is ?” he says. “Do you know who you’re talking to ?”

I haven’t been talking to anyone, but I keep this to myself.

“I’ll tell you who you’re talking to — Ray Bivens Junior!”

He used to be this way with Mama. Never hitting, but always grabbing, groping, his halitosis forever in her face. After the divorce he insisted on partial custody. At first all I had to do was take the bus across town. Then, when he couldn’t afford an apartment in the city, I had to take the Greyhound into backwoods Indiana. I’d spend Saturday and Sunday so bored I’d work ahead in textbooks, assign myself homework, whatever there was to do while waiting for Ray Bivens Jr. to fart himself awake and take me back to the bus station.

That was how debate started. Every year there was a different topic, and when they made the announcement last year, it was like an Army recruitment campaign, warning students that they’d be expected to dedicate even their weekends to the cause. I rejoiced, thinking that I would never have to visit Ray Bivens Jr. again. And I was good at debate. My brain naturally frowned at illogic. But I don’t think for a minute that my teachers liked me because of my logical mind; they liked me because I was quiet and small, and not rowdy like they expected black guys to be. Sometimes, though, the teachers slipped. Once, my history teacher, Mrs. Ampersand, said, “You stay away from those drugs, Spurgeon, and you’ll go far.” That was the kind of thing that could stick in my stomach for days, weeks. I could always think of things to say about a debate topic like U.S. — China diplomatic relations, or deliver a damning rebuttal on prison overcrowding, but it was different with someone like Mrs. Ampersand — all debate logic fell away, and in my head I’d call her a bitch, tell her that the strongest stuff in my mother’s house was a bottle of Nyquil.

WE’VE CROSSED the bridge into Indiana but my father is still going. “THAT’S RIGHT! YOU’RE TALKING TO RAY BIVENS JUNIOR! AND DON’T YOU FORGET IT!”

Outside, autumn is over, and yet it’s not quite winter. Indiana farmlands speed past in black and white. Beautiful. Until you remember that the world is supposed to be in color.

LATER, calm again, he says, “Imagine a stock. Let’s say the stock is the one I was telling you about, Scudder MidCap. The stock is at fifty bucks. If it’s a winner, it doesn’t stay at fifty bucks for long. It goes to a hundred let’s say, or two hundred. But first it’s gotta get to fifty-one, fifty-two, and so on. So a stock increasing in price is a good sign. That’s when you buy.”

I make sure to tell him thanks for telling me this.

“Doesn’t matter what you invest in, either,” Ray Bivens Jr. says. “That’s the beauty. Don’t gotta even think about it. That’s something you won’t hear from an accountant.”

“You mean stockbroker. A stockbroker advises about stocks. Not an accountant.”

His face turns bitter, as though he’s about to slap me, but then he thinks the better of it and says, “So you know who to go to when you get some extra cash.”

“Look. I just told you I don’t have any money.” I try to concentrate on looking for gas station signs in the dark.

“You will, Spurgeon,” he says. He puts an arm around me like a prom date, and I can smell his odor from the jail. I don’t have to see his face to know exactly how it looks right now. Urgently earnest, a little too sincere. Like a man explaining to his wife why he’s late coming home. “I’ll pay back every penny. I mean that.”

“I believe you,” I say, prying his arm from where it rests on my neck.

“You believe me,” he says, “but do you believe in me?” He puts his arm back where it was, like he’s some suburban dad, a Little League coach congratulating his charge.

“I believe in you.”

His arm falls away of its own accord as he settles deeper into his car seat with this knowledge, the leather sighing and complaining under him. I take the exit that promises a Citgo, park at a gas pump. You don’t usually see insects in this weather, but the garbage can between the diesel and unleaded swarms with flies. The fluorescent lights stutter off and on as I begin pumping gas. I can hear what my mother would say, that my father is a cross I have to bear, that the Good Book says, “A child shall lead them,” and all that crap, which basically boils down to “He’s your father. Your blood, not mine.” Ray Bivens Jr. leans against the car and stretches. Then he cleans the windshield with a squeegee. After that he sniffs and looks around as though he’s checking out the scenery. When I’m finished filling the tank he says, “Hey, Spurgeon. How about breaking off a few bills? You know they frisked me clean in lockdown.”