Tim Sandlin - Social Blunders

As I drove home through the deepening dusk, the only thing I knew for certain was this had been the longest day in history. Between Gilia, Atalanta Williams, and Ryan’s fists, my body and brain were pulp on a stick. I swore never to look up my ancestors again. Shannon could deal with them from now on. She was young.

I parked the Dodge in front of the garage and, remembering threats, locked the doors. Shannon’s Mustang was nowhere in sight, which meant she was probably out being loose with the psych major. One more nail in my already hammered back. On the edge of the lawn, I bent forward with my hands on my knees, trying to ease the kidney pain, when a figure in black charged.

Moonlight glinted off the blade of a knife—just like in a book—and I yelled.

“Clark. Stop!”

He stopped. Consider it a miracle.

“What the hell are you doing?”

Clark’s face was dead pale and wrinkled.

“Never hold a knife up high like that. Didn’t your father teach you anything.” I raised my left forearm to his right wrist. “Look how easily you can be stopped.” The boy seemed to be in a trance.

“Give me the knife.” Gently, I pried it from his frozen fingers. It was a serrated kitchen deal, the kind used to cut tomatoes. “Hold the knife at elbow level with the blade up. See, the victim can’t block without getting cut.”

“I’m going to kill you.”

“Not until you learn how to handle a knife. Here, you try.” I stuck the knife back into Clark’s hand, where it dangled uselessly.

“You have dishonored my father.”

“Actually, your father dishonored my mother.”

“My father has never committed an un-Christian act in his life. That’s what I hate about him.”

The kid had an incomprehensible viewpoint toward parents. I could relate to that.

“Billy can’t help who he is,” I said.

Clark passed the back of his hand over his face, then his eyes seemed to focus and he saw my condition. “Did I cut you?”

“The blood’s from another father’s son. Listen, you want to come inside? We could talk about this love-’em, hate-’em problem people get with moms and dads.”

I started limping toward the door, but Clark stayed put. He said, “She must have been a total sleaze.”

I stopped. “Lydia is not a sleaze. Not total, anyway.”

“Only a sleazy woman would seduce five boys at once.”

“She was fourteen and they raped her.”

At the word rape Clark began to shake. “Saint Billy would never.”

“You were hiding behind the door, did you hear him deny it?”

“I’ll kill myself.” He held the knife across his wrist.

“You’ve been looking for an excuse all day.”

His eyes jerked toward me. “I’m not kidding. I am going to kill myself.”

“At least do it right. Don’t you read books?”

“I know more about suicide than anyone in my class.”

“Cut yourself that way and you’ll be two days bleeding to death.” I grabbed his wrist and twisted the knife ninety degrees. “Slice up the vein from the bottom to top. Lay it open and you’ll squirt like a stuck pig.”

I felt Clark’s wrist tighten, then he touched blade to blue vein. Nothing happened. I didn’t stop him and he didn’t go on.

His breath smelled of horehound drops. “You’re not taking me seriously, Mr. Callahan.”

“No, I’m not.” I released his wrist. “I’m sorry, Clark. I know I should but I’m too beat to humor a sad teenager. Come by in the morning and I’ll sincerely tell you why life is better than death. It is, you know. Took years, but I finally figured the thing out. Right now, I need sleep.”

“For my father’s honor, one of us has to die.”

“Can’t we forget the whole thing?”

He pointed the knife at me. “One of us has to die.”

My body was fast running out of gas. Even riding the bike a hundred miles had never worn me out this thoroughly. Bike fatigue was merely physical torture, and physical torture sometimes clears the mind. It sure helps you forget your other troubles. But the walk from Clark to my front door was a hike through the La Brea tar pits. Deathbed flu. The boy was beat.

How many people had I brought to tears today? How many threatened me with violence, compared to how many turned violent? And don’t forget Gilia Saunders. I didn’t even know the questions to ask on that one.

I dealt with the doorknob and thought, guess we’ll have to start locking soon, then I stumbled into the shelter of the family foyer and fell over a pumpkin. Landed on my hip on another pumpkin, which started a pumpkin avalanche. When the slide finally stopped, I lay on my back surrounded by mountains of pumpkins, oceans of pumpkins. The entry hallway was belly deep in orange.

I did not care. I did not give a hoot. I was not affected. Nothing and no one mattered except crawling up the staircase and into bed.

I dreamt of clitorides. Squadrons of clitorides marching in formation like mushrooms in Fantasia. High clitorides, flat clitorides, hard clitorides, squishy clitorides. Amber waves of clitorides.

My dreams used to center on the entire vertical ravine, from furry outgrowth to the hillock atop the twin cliffs—major and minor—leading into the black swamp from which all life arises but no man returns. Of late, my dreams had forsaken the chasm in general to focus on the pleasure button perched on high. Women try to keep pleasure caused by the pleasure button secret from men, because men are limited to the pressure cooker squirt, and the male gender would probably quit having sex if they found out women are having more fun than men are. Yet—the big yet—modern women demand that we know exactly where the button is and how it is operated.

The days when Henry Miller could write in Tropic of Cancer “A cunt came into the room,” “She was a cute cunt,” “Only a rich cunt can save me now” are long dead. And good riddance. Today, clitorides walk into rooms.

When I awoke, the weight of gravity had tripled overnight. A psychic anvil balanced on my forehead and my internal organs felt calcified. We’re talking symptoms of oncoming depression. Depression is paralyzed spirit. If they ever invent a pill that cures depression, I’ll take it. Even if the price is impotency, I’ll pop that pill in a heartbeat.

The only hope is to go through the motions. Shower, shave, brush the teeth—wonder how many years till they fall out. Maurey Pierce told me if you act normal long enough someday you’ll become normal. This was when I was fifteen and dressing like Scott Fitzgerald and wondering why girls wouldn’t go out with me. Maurey said if I brushed my teeth twice a day and read TV Guide cover to cover every issue pretty soon I would stop being strange and girls would begin to make eye contact.

Downstairs, I found Gus, Shannon, and the male Eugene sprawled around the kitchen table, drinking coffee over the local morning paper. To my complete disgust, Shannon and Eugene both wore bathrobes.

“Have you no shame!”

“C’mon, Dad. You and Mom were living together at thirteen.”

“That’s because your mother was pregnant.”

Eugene grinned. The chump sat there in my bathrobe—a blue terry-cloth number that safety-pinned together because a woman named Linda used the belt to tie me up and somehow it’d gotten lost.

The import of my last words made me nauseous. “You’re not?”

Shannon broke into laughter, joined by Eugene and Gus. They laughed at me for trying to be a traditional father.

“Of course not,” Shannon said.

Since no one jumped to pour my coffee, I poured it myself. One thing Gus can do is make good coffee. “That’s not something to say ‘of course’ about,” I said. “Pregnancy is an accident.”