Kyle Minor - Praying Drunk

For a while my brother stops calling so often, and I worry he’s sinking into some dark hole he can’t get out of, all those long hours of guitar practice upstairs in his bedroom all through junior high and high school, and all those hours, days, weeks, months, years, by now almost a decade cramped in shitty band vans, logging miles, losing sleep, playing shows for thirteen or thirteen thousand, all of it wasted now, and him locked into some blue-collar management slave life not unlike what we watched our dad do all those years among air-conditioning men and sheet-metal men before he went back to college and clawed and scratched his way up to the corporate life, the desk and the dictaphone. My brother calls and says that’s the kind of thing that sounds good to him now, the desk and the secretary and the screaming boss and the health insurance plan, HMO or PPO, I care not which. I want to go home, he says, and watch TV and chop vegetables like Emeril Lagasse and melt butter and sprinkle garlic on top. I want to mow the lawn and take my dog outside to walk and lift his leg by the neighbor’s mailbox. I want to paint the walls whatever color I want and go to the Baptist church and find some saved bad girl who wants to be monogamous and watch Scooby Doo and laugh at my corny jokes and get married and cook me dinner and take vacations to the Magic Kingdom or Epcot Center and ride the monorail from the Contemporary Hotel to the Polynesian Village. To me it all sounds terrible, and I tell him so. I tell him he was the reason I became a fiction writer and stopped being a preacher and stopped believing in God. I tell him he was the reason I was able to quit home and quit life and make a new life for myself based upon an idea of myself as a new kind of person I could invent and become, and I was able to do it because he did it first. “When you quit school,” I say, “and moved to Nashville and dyed your hair blue and started wearing eye makeup, I looked around me and said, What’s keeping me here? and the answer was nothing was. The only thing keeping me from becoming me was me. Me listening to what everybody else said life had to be, and me trying to believe what everybody else said I was supposed to believe, and me being somebody that other people could get behind. Just me. And that would still be me if it wasn’t for you doing what you did.”

It sounds ridiculous coming out of my mouth, and even if I could find a way to believe it wasn’t so, he tells me. “What you’re saying is childish,” he says. “It’s ridiculous. There’s no life in music or stories or art or whatever. Everything takes money. Everybody needs health insurance. I’m tired of not having money. I’m tired of being poor. If people are going to treat me like dogshit, I want to get money for it. I want to get paid. I don’t want to be afraid I’m going to lose my house. I don’t want people’s parents to act like I’m some kind of lazy person when I work harder than anybody I know. I want to wear khaki pants. I want to sit at a desk. I want to go to meetings.” This uprightness lasts another week or so. Then somebody calls from California. They need a bass player who can sing background vocals, road manage, and look good under the stage lights. Three hundred bucks a night and they leave for Ontario tomorrow. “Sign me up,” my brother says, and gives a few hours’ notice.

My father calls me, sick with the news. “That trucking company was a good thing,” he says. “Your brother could make a good life with a company like that. You learn those skills, not many people have those skills. The trucking industry is what keeps this whole country afloat. The whole economy. All of it is dependent on those trucks. He’s pissing it all away.” Uh-huh, I say, and mean it. He is right, my father, and he is almost always right, and soon indeed this new thing will end badly the way all the other things end badly. But I want to say that everything ends badly. Don’t we all of us live under the shadow of death, that end of all ends, and isn’t life too short to give fourteen hours a day to a trucking company when you could be standing under stage lights making somebody you never met before feel something? What’s khaki pants and health insurance compared to that? All night I stay up thinking about it. My child stirs in his sleep in the next room, and I hear some ghostly echo of my brother’s voice calling me childish. Sometime the next morning an airplane flies over our house in the direction of Canada, and I wish my brother Godspeed to Ontario.

4.

Another death, and another and another. A college mate from Indiana, a girl, gets on the back of a motorcycle at a party. The driver is a seminarian. When they left the party together, they were laughing. At some residential intersection, a newly licensed sixteen-year-old runs a stop sign and hits them broadside. She flies through the air. He impales his lower body on the bike handle. Her heart stops as she hits the ground forty feet away. His legs are broken and his scrotum ripped open. She dies. He walks with a cane.

Another. In Florida, a meter reader, my friend when I was a preacher. He marries a woman, develops leukemia, she leaves him, he dies. In Indiana, a vagrant crawls into the dumpster where I used to throw my trash as an undergraduate. The garbage truck picks up the dumpster in the morning with its mechanical arms and empties its contents into the back of the truck. The sanitation worker pulls the compactor lever, and the man is crushed to death. The lone African-American professor at the seminary holds a memorial service for the vagrant, and hundreds gather to validate the significance of his life.

In Florida, my uncle Jerry visits my parents’ house with his new girlfriend. They make noises like they might get married. She doesn’t seem to mind that he is twenty years brain-damaged from his own accident with a city garbage truck. She doesn’t seem to mind that he still complains every few hours about losing the love of his ex-wife and his children. She seems to love him. She flashes a ring. He’s bought a house. She has a jewelry business. They’ve bought a commercial building. Everyone hugs goodbye. My uncle and his girlfriend drive home, four hours north. My father says everything’s going to be all right now. They’re going to be all right.

The next evening my uncle locks himself in his bedroom. He puts his head on his pillow. He puts a pistol in his mouth and pulls the trigger. She knocks on the front door the next morning. She knocks but no one answers. She knocks and bangs and yells. She kicks at the door. She breaks down the door. She finds him weirdly white, a hole in his head, a pool of blood beneath the bed, whatever wasn’t soaked up by the mattress as it drained from the hole in his head. My parents drive up. Some people from my uncle’s rural church arrive to help clean the bedroom. They carry the blood-soaked mattress outside. My father goes into the bedroom to clean the blood and brains from the wall and the floor, but he cannot. Other men go inside to do the job, but they cannot. In the end a tiny middle-aged woman from the church takes a mop and some rags and a bucket full of water and bleach, and in the end, she scrubs most of it by hand.

I’m there with my parents and the woman who would have been the widow but who was not the widow, through the initial grieving, through the funeral, another funeral, and my father says surely this is as bad as life could possibly be, surely this is the last of the funerals for a while, it better be, we have to take care of each other.

He calls my brother on the phone so many times that my brother stops answering when he calls, and then he worries what it means that my brother won’t answer the phone when he calls. I call, and my brother answers, and he says he’s off the gig from California, he’s not getting paid, keep it to yourself for now. The rich bandleader won’t return my brother’s phone calls. He emails to say my brother has to deal with his business manager. My father runs down the business manager on the phone in California and quotes the labor statutes and threatens all means of legal and public relations related remedies, and the business manager says she’s not going to deal with somebody’s father, and my father says the rich bandleader gets a business manager, doesn’t he? well then my son has a business manager, too, and you’re talking to him, and then he gets a corporate real-estate attorney writing letters just to be more threatening, and the bandleader’s business manager quits, and my brother gets paid, and this rich bandleader who hired him with such urgency and dismissed him so casually tells my brother he has intimidated the business manager unnecessarily, and that he is taking food from the mouths of the bandleader’s children, and my father feels better at all this news. See? my father says, it’s getting better. This season of death and despair is over, and we can get back to the business of taking care of each other, and that’s what we have to do in this world, take care of each other.