Noah Cicero: Best Behavior

I walked in the house. Amanda was sitting there pissed that I took so long. She was dressed in tight fitting clothes ready to get drunk and look sexy while dancing. Her make-up was on perfectly, hair modeled into a messy yet organized formation on her head.

She said, “Where you been, we gotta go.”

I thought, “What the fuck is the hurry,” but instead said, “Okay, I'll hurry.”

The response made her happy.

I didn't feel like making her mad. Making her mad could make her cry. And making her cry was something I didn't want to deal with. It was better to choose to play along most of the time with people and their insanity. I had grown tired of arguing and crying and all the misery that goes along with conflict, so I threw my dirty work clothes off in silence and took a shower.

When my father would come home from work it was the same every day. He would come in the house in silence. He wouldn't say hi or speak to anyone. He would shit. Every day he would shit when he got off of work, perfectly timed; it was amazing the accuracy of the time he would shit. Afterwards, he would leave the bathroom and go to the kitchen to pick up a newspaper and carry it to his La-Z-Boy chair. He’d hit the handle on the chair and lay back reading the paper. There was still no talking — no hello… no how are you… no how was school — he would read the paper for a little over 20 minutes and then fall asleep with the paper in his lap. He would wake up a half an hour later and do something. He would go outside and feed the rabbits and the chickens; he would collect some brown eggs and bring them back to the house. He would mow the grass or weed whack.

It was the same thing every day.

My mother would come home around midnight and slam her car keys down on the kitchen table. She would talk endlessly to my father about her day at work. How it was a tragedy, how everyone was conspiring against her. How her back was killing her. How she had a sinus headache that wouldn't go away. My father never even spoke back. He would play along and say nothing. She didn't require any responses.

When I got home from work, it was a shower and then I would check my email. Amanda and I might say some things to each other, but not much. It was a moderate amount of talking. Neither of us were silent nor babbling morons. We just said things when they needed to be said as opposed to my mother who talked endlessly about nothing, and my father who needed to say things but refused to even say hello to his children.

Amanda and I arrived at the bar we go to every Sunday. It was down in Niles near where we work. It used to be an Italian restaurant but it closed and became a bar. It was the new hip bar on 422. All the restaurant workers on 422 were going to it. 422 was where the mall and all the restaurants were. There was Red Lobster, Outback, Olive Garden, Max and Erma's, Road House, and one called something like Fattie's in the mall. People who work at restaurants are notorious drunks. All the bars were full of us drinking ourselves stupid every night.

The bar was newly remodeled. It was shaped like a box with a low ceiling. There were tables, booths, and chairs on both sides with a nice horseshoe bar in the middle. Three flat screen high-definition televisions hung above the bar that played the highlights of the Steelers game. Young attractive bartenders that attended the local colleges who had bright futures and didn't consider bartending their destiny served the drinks.

The bar was new and shiny. It was unlike the other bars in the area. Youngstown had a lot of bars with cheap drinks but those bars were old looking; they haven’t been remodeled since the seventies. They had high ceilings built back in the 30s. There was too much history in those bars. Nobody was into history there that night. Everyone had cell phones, newer cars they were making payments on, new clothes from the mall, new hairstyles; everyone was singing new music. Everyone was really into ‘the new.’

Over half the people there were wearing Steelers jerseys and hats. The Steelers had won. People expected the Steelers to be good that year, but no one expected them to be that good. Everyone was getting drunk celebrating the victory of the Steelers. Libations were poured, sacrifices were made; everyone believing that through the purchasing and mass consumption of alcohol the Steeler Nation would appease the football gods and be granted more victories.

Everyone yelled when Amanda and I came in. She had her Red Lobster group and I had my Steak House group, both of our groups knew each other because we drank there every Sunday.

I looked around the bar to see who I knew and wanted to talk to first.

There was The Big Smooth.

He was wearing a Steelers jersey and completely drunk. He was a big man. He was six four and 260 pounds. His hands were huge monsters at the end of his arms. He was daunting in size. But when you got to know him he was polite and sensitive. He read war books all the time, The Naked and the Dead and Flags of our Fathers . We would often trade books back and forth. We would sit on our smoke breaks from work or at a bar and discuss the books and the wars they were about.

The Big Smooth was kind of homeless then and living with friends. He was in his early 30s and his dad wouldn't stop yelling at him about drinking every night and not getting a good manly job that paid 40,000 a year and had benefits. His parents were hard working people that lived in a nice neighborhood, paid their bills and had enough money left over to buy things they didn't need. The Big Smooth only bought things he needed and lived simply. There are some people that don't need much, which contradicted many people's version of how people should behave. The Big Smooth held an old philosophy of living by what one needed, being friendly because courtesy made the best outcomes and created the quietest, and simplicity because an excess of desire for objects and prestige led to an excess of responsibilities that people could actually live without. Of course it wasn't that simple. He had spent several nights in jail for fighting and had several DUIs. He could get out of hand. I had never seen him out of hand. He had always been peaceful in my company.

I went over to him. He gave me a big bear hug. Wrapped his large arms around me and said, “The Steelers won,” then he hit the bar with his fist and yelled, “Go Steelers!”

He was drunk, slurring his words. He could barely move. He was clumsy.

Then he pointed at a random guy with nicely combed hair and said, “I threw a dart at that guy last time I was here.”

“That guy over there.”

“Yeah, that guy.”

“What he do?” I said.

“He was pissing me off.”

“What he do though?”

“His hair was pissing me off, it was so nicely combed.”

“He puts gel in it,” I said.

“What kind of man puts gel in his hair?”

“He looks like he shaves every day.”

“I can't drink whiskey. It makes me want to hurt people.”

“Men want to fight when they're drunk and women want to fuck, that's what happens.”

“Women become sluts when they're drunk.”

“That's true.”

Then Linda came over. She was a server from the steak house. She was a short, slightly pudgy girl with dark brown hair. I didn't really know her. She was a new hire and we had never really spoken. The only thing I knew about her was that she was very open. One day she talked about how she had a boyfriend and he would ask her to fuck him in the ass with a strap on all the time. She said they broke up eventually and she told people about it. The guy then got mad. She told him that if you want to do things like that, you better be prepared to have no shame. She didn't seem to have any hobbies or love anything but drinking and sex. She wasn't interested in life at all.