John Jodzio - Knockout

Unfortunately around this time, my fiancée, Susie, broke off our engagement. We’d already sent out save-the-date cards and booked the reception hall. We had the cake tasting, I’d rented my tux. Then one night, after a company happy hour, she fucked her boss, Rodney Pargo, in my car.

“You were practical,” she told me, “but I won’t be happy with practical. I need some excitement. I need someone who gets my nipples hard, someone like Rodney, who drives around with a ladder in the back of his Chevy Tahoe in case he wants to break into the zoo and make the tigers or bears watch him make love.” I’d already planned out my life with Susie, was shocked at her sudden betrayal. I turned to the pipe to stop thinking about how much I missed her round ass and her raunchy sense of humor, how much I missed that great lasagna she made. I turned to the pipe to forget how my car smelled like cherry lube whenever I turned on the heater. I turned to the pipe because no matter how much fucking Windex I sprayed Rodney Pargo’s greasy footprints would not come off my windshield.

This morning I call the memory loss helpline and tell them I’m scared of my father wandering off.

“Tape a black carpet square in front of your door,” the counselor on the phone advises. “He’ll think it’s a hole. He’ll think it’s the abyss and he won’t want to fall inside. It works great.”

“That sounds cruel,” I say.

“A lot of people say that,” the guy says, “but you need to realize that at this point in your father’s life safety and cruelty sometimes walk hand in hand.”

I duct tape the carpet square to the floor, watch as my dad bends down to peer into its inky void.

“How did that get here?” he asks. He’s leaning away from the carpet square like it has a gravitational pull, like he’s going to be sucked in.

“It’s a floor mat,” I tell him.

“I hate that I can’t see the bottom of it,” he says. “I hate that I can’t see where it ends, you know?”

Our regulars are in between pipes. Jake sets down his tattoo magazine and walks over to stand next to me. Last week he brought in a six-pack and we sat in the alley and had a heart-to-heart. He told me how his father died at Costco lugging a shitload of Greek yogurt to his truck, how my dad reminds me of his dad.

“You need a break?” he asks. “I can watch the shop if you wanna get out of here for an hour.”

I look over at my dad. He’s sitting at the counter now, picking at a roast beef sandwich, studying the carpet square from across the room. Soon his upper body starts to do this rocking thing, back and forth, over and over. I put my hand on his shoulder so he stops. “That would be great,” I tell Jake.

Everything still reminds me of Susie and Opium Depot is no different. It’s tastefully lit, just like her condo was. There’s a greeter at the front door whose dark hair is sort of close to the color of Susie’s dark hair. The greeter is wearing a blue polo that looks kind of similar to a blue polo I remember Susie maybe wearing once or twice.

“I’m Samantha,” she says. “Would you like a bed?”

I scan the floor. I’ve got to hand it to them, they’ve got this all figured out. Rows and rows of beds with individual separation screens. Identically dressed pipe tenders walking around in T-shirts and khakis. A central dispensary behind bulletproof glass. Security cameras mounted to the ceiling every twenty feet. The air conditioning is cranking like we’re in a casino.

I remind myself that I’m not here to enjoy myself, I’m here to spy. As I lie down Samantha gives me a choice of recently released movies to watch on the flat-screen TV mounted to my bed.

“Or,” she tells me, “I can queue up something from our extensive music library.”

Before I walked in here I conned myself into thinking that the service wouldn’t be as personal, that they’d treat their customers like cattle, but Samantha gives me a scalp rub and asks me how my day is going and she actually seems genuine about it.

Maybe the product will be watered down, I think. Maybe that’ll be the thing we can hang our hat on. But then Samantha lights my pipe and I inhale and the smoke fills my lungs and every piece of sadness and stress I hold between my shoulder blades floats away and all the chatter in between the hemispheres of my brain finally shuts the hell up. My jaw unclenches and a thin stream of drool slides out of my mouth and falls to the newly carpeted floor. A delicious fatigue comes over my body and suddenly I don’t give one shit about competing with Opium Depot, I just want this feeling forever.

“Where have you been?” Jennie Frontiere asks when I walk in the door later that evening. “Jake called and called.”

Every day Jennie Frontiere brings a can of soup for lunch, heats it up in the microwave. Two months ago, she organized a potluck. While no one else brought anything and I was the only one who ate the macaroni hot dish Jennie brought, my father and I certainly appreciate her efforts at making our place feel a little bit more like home.

“There was a fire,” Allan says. “Not 911 worthy, but pretty decent size.”

I run into the office, see that the left side of the desk is charred. My dad is standing there running his fingers over the burnt wood. Jake’s standing next to him. Sometimes I see a switch light up in his brain, some old synapse grab hold, and he’ll snap at me in a way he would have snapped at me twenty years ago, and even though he’s yelling at me for being a dumbass, it’s just wonderful to see my old judgmental father alive and in fine form once again.

“He walked in here to grab a pen and then a minute later the smoke alarm went off,” Jake says. “I should’ve stuck closer to him.”

My dad is eyeing the desk cautiously now, like it’s going to suddenly catch fire again, like the wood has disappointed him in some way by being flammable, like the desk can’t be trusted to be a desk anymore. Lately whenever his words leave him, he grabs items he knows he should remember — alarm clock, table lamp, pen — and holds them out to me, desperately shaking them in my face until I reveal their name.

“Let’s just go lie down,” I say, putting my hand on my dad’s shoulder.

My dad slaps my hand away. I can tell he’s wondering who I am, who gave me the right to touch him. At first, his eyes are filled with confusion and outrage, but then they shift to scared.

“It’s me,” I say, holding out my palms to show him I mean no harm.

He stands there for a minute, looking me up and down.

“Just you,” he says. “Okay.”

I pull his arm over my shoulder and we walk over to his cot, his bad knee clicking like a metronome with each step.

Later that night, after my dad is in bed, I light up and dream about Susie. I dream about when we went on that riverboat architecture tour in Chicago. It was one hundred degrees that day and I remember my shins sweating and the sweat pooling up in my tennis shoes and the smooshing sound my shoes made when I walked back up the gangplank.

I wake up to two burly men in tracksuits standing over my bed. One grabs me under my armpits and one grabs my ankles and they lug me out the door.

“Hello?” I yell out. “Help?”

Everyone else is zonked out. The men carry me out into the parking lot and shove me into the backseat of a Lincoln Town Car.

“Are you gonna kill me?” I ask them. “Because you should know that I am already doing a good job of doing that myself.”

The men don’t answer me. We drive downtown and pull up in front of a building with a sign “The Uplands Group, LLC” on the side. The men yank me out of the car and shove me up some loading dock stairs. They push me into an office and I see Steve Windom sitting across the desk from me.