The following is an excerpt from my first novel, a true story about highschool. This passage is about my buddy Milo, an insecure boy who finds a father figure in his best friend Anthony after his parent’s difficult divorce.
The novel is long gone, having gathered dust in a drawer since the day I finished it, at the ripe old age of 14, and then vanishing the mysterious way trash does. This excerpt is crappy and full of senseless adjectives, but I kept this one chapter because it made Milo’s mother–the real person– cry when she read it. It was the first time I ever had touched someone with my work, and it has sentimental value. In hindsight, she probably cried because it was a bitter and prying narrative on actual painful events, but I digress.
THE MAN IN THE ROCKS
CHAPTER ? MILO.
The drive to Flagstaff was executed in my mother’s typical silence. I had my overnight bag, which carried two pairs of socks, jeans, my toothbrush… and other than a pack of Marlboros in my jacket pocket I hadn’t thought of a single thing else I’d needed. Except maybe a gun.
“Where am I meeting him?” By he we both knew whom I was talking about.
“Uh, Denny’s,” my mother said, clearing her throat. I was somewhat irritated by the humor that tainted her voice.
“It’s not funny,” I murmured.
“No, of course not,” said Joanne, in the same tone, but her mouth briefly tightened up to show that she felt sorry for me.
I turned to look out the window, unthinkingly folding my arms more securely against my chest, so that the elbows poked out like chicken wings. “God, he’s so pathetic. And I’m his son.”
“Hmm,” said Joanne. She glanced at me in the overhead mirror.
And you, madam, were the woman who married him, I thought. Though God knows why. He was a dog turd long to you long before his string of affairs.
I carefully tilted my head back and looked full at my mother. Her darkened blue eyes, so hollow and tired they were almost gray. Her German skin, tanned by time spent breaking her back over the weeds in the her garden, and her short brown hair, which covered her high forehead and its lines of our family legacy. The hands, the most beautiful part of my mother, was also losing elegance; her long, slender fingers had been paled by years of daily dishwater, and the once-smooth palms were currently gripping the steering wheel like it was about to transform into Jeff’s neck. I realized I had run out of questions. I wasn’t ready for the answers.
The car pulled into a deliberate stop, and my mother yanked on the parking brake and turned to meet my stare. Embarrassed to have been caught looking, I turned my head and saw with a sinking heart that we had arrived.
“It might be cold,” Joanne said carelessly behind me. “It’s supposed to rain tonight up here in Egypt, or wherever the hell we are.” When I didn’t respond, she added, “It’ll be a nice change from the Valley… And Milo, your father said he’d call in a few days to tell me to pick you up, so please don’t call me and beg for a ride home before that.”
I slammed the passenger side door in response, and she released the brake and stamped her foot on the gas. The poor car squealed backwards in reverse, tires burning, and I watched as she peeled out of the parking lot and back down the street, obviously more enthusiastic to escape than I thought was appropriate.
Bitterly, I stared up at the looming Denny’s sign with its flickering yellow and red neon letters, the shining beacon attracting, like moths, all the scum in butt-fucking Egypt looking for a convenient and friendly meal 24 hours a day. Friendly meal, I thought. You might as well go to Mickey D’s.
I wanted so badly to walk away from those glowing letters and hitch a ride back home from some God-fearing truck driver, but somehow, I understood with profound Zen wisdom that this was not the right decision to make. There wasn’t any decision to make. I shivered a little in the noonday sunlight, but then turned my toes so that they pointed to the finger-spotted glass doors and allowed them to slowly carry me forwards. The whole time, I prayed to God I was too late.
American Pie was playing softly over the intercom when I walked inconspicuously into the restaurant foyer. I hid behind the barrier and scanned the crowd. He was wearing a green sweater of ugly material with a white undershirt folded over the neck, and was sitting alone in a booth in the smoking section, which was probably out of habit, since no cigarettes were in sight and my mother had said he quit. He was reading a paper with his back to me. If I’d reached out, he was so close that I could have electrified the hairs on the back of his neck with my fingertips. I stood there for a second and breathed, staring across the small stretch of torn carpet that was the only thing now separating me from the mop of curly brown hair that I’d inherited.
“Party of one?” The waitress asked.
“I’m over here,” I said without looking at her, and moved towards the booth. Every half step I took I could taste my heartbeat. I have to be strong, I told myself. Don’t let him see any weakness. No real emotion. Be fucking strong, Milo. You’re right on time, and God hates you.
I sat, but my eyes did not rise. Instead, I listened to the rustle of his newspaper dropping to the table. “Milo?” my father said, and it was his rough and brokenly accented voice, not my name, that made me look at his face.
The first thing I noticed was that he hadn’t shaved in a while. A good growth of beard stubble had sprouted thick all along the usual places, and it was the same flat brown color of his eyes, with a little gray. I rubbed my own smooth chin, and marveled at how our brown eyes squinted the same way as we studied each other.
“Milo,” my dad repeated, and managed to inject some lukewarm enthusiasm into it. His smile was all gleaming teeth and great effortlessness. It was an attractive trait of the Italians I had not adopted. “How are you? God, it’s been a while.”
“A year,” I said.
“Do you want something?” he asked. “Some coffee, maybe? It’s the crystal flake shit, I think, but it’s free if you don’t complain…”
“I’d like some vodka,” I said loudly, and my dad’s smile wavered.
“I’ll get you some coffee,” he said quietly.
“No.”
“Some soda, then. You used to love root beer when you were little.”
“I hate root beer. It tastes like Listerine.”
With steely control my dad reached over and deliberately handed me a menu. “Then order what you want,” he said in a cooler tone, and abruptly his face grew cheerful again and he forced out a chuckle. “It’s been awhile, I can’t remember what you like.”
He watched me scan the menu and I tried to hide my hateful expression. He’d only been gone a year, and already he’d forgotten the details of the fifteen other years of his only son’s life prior to his leave-taking. I let the silence stretch. “I don’t want anything,” was all I finally said, and took out my cigarettes.
The Marlboro Man himself bit his lip and looked guilty. “So… you smoke now, huh?”
Was I seriously going to spend the next two days of my life in this idiot’s custody? “You’re the one who sat in the smoking section,” I replied.
The man across from me opened his mouth to respond, but before he could speak a blonde woman appeared out of nowhere and slid in to share his booth cushion. I heard his perfect teeth softly click together as he closed his mouth and moved over to make more room.
“Hello,” she said, her blonde hair blinding me, and reached over the table to fumble for my hand. Her gigantic breasts heaved in their flimsy pink tank top casing, threatening to roll free and scare me away. “I’m sorry, I disappeared for just a second to use the toilet. Jeff has told me so much about you!”
“Have you?” I remarked politely, nodding at my progenitor, and added, “Jeff.” I scrubbed my palm hard on my jeans to get rid of bathroom bacteria. Her hand had been dry and warm.
Jeff gazed at me and picked up his paper again.
How I loathe people who say they’re sorry out of context. “You must be Rosalie,” I said to the irritating blonde woman, and as I stared into her moon-shaped, fleshy face, I felt the old rage stir. This woman, one year ago, had been just as much at fault as my father for ruining my childhood memories. But the boobs bounced again behind their pink sheath as she turned to look at my father. “Rosalie?” she asked, her cow eyes bemused. “Who is Rosalie? My name is Laura.”
“My mistake,” I offered quickly, but inside I felt even more angry. The woman my father had left his marriage to run away with wasn’t even in the picture anymore! Either he had moved on, or he was up to his old tricks, and “Laura” didn’t know she was getting sloppy seconds. “I see there is a lot that Jeff doesn’t share with his new girlfriends.”
A little taken back, Laura glanced again at Jeff for support but received none, since he was deeply involved in the median crease in the newspaper and could not be bothered. She blindly tried another direction. “Jeff said you’re going to a boarding school down in the Valley! That sounds so exciting! I went to public school because, uh, my parents were poor…” Her mouth suddenly went slack and her face reddened. “You’re fourteen, right?” she added.
“Sixteen,” I said disgustedly. I realized how young she really was. Probably barely out of graduate school. She looked like the kind of person who left lipstick on the filter when she smoked. I’d found cigarettes like that all over my mother’s garden growing up. Rosalie had stuck around long after I was old enough to not need a babysitter anymore, but she’d always worn the same pink lipstick.
“Sixteen. Sorry,” Laura said, and I winced. “Do you like your school?”
The party tonight. The party I was missing to hang out with this false father and his blonde bimbo in a smoking section of a Denny’s. “Yes,” I said, and exhaled smoke into her face on purpose.
“That’s great,” she said, and it appeared that she’d run out of things to say because she repeated, “that’s great,” and fell silent, unobtrusively turning her head so the smoke wouldn’t sting her eyes.
Jeff folded his newspaper and finally looked at his girlfriend. “Pie?”
“Sounds great!” she said in relief, and smiled lovingly at him as she stood up to let him out.
Jeff turned to me. His shirt had come untucked. “Milo? Pie okay with you? We get lemon meringue every night we come here, it’s sort of a tradition.” He waited a second, and then frowned. Maybe he’d finally realized I wasn’t going to talk to him. Without saying anything else he shuffled away to the front counter where they kept the pies and cakes on display, and as I watched him go, Laura slid back and smiled at me for the nth time. I wanted to rip that stupid grin right off her fat head and step on it. “Milo,” she whispered, twisting around in her seat in her seat to make sure Jeff was out of hearing range. A handle of flab appeared briefly under her bra line, but then disappeared as she twisted back. “Do you think I could have a drag?”
Laura didn’t wash her hands when she used the bathroom. God knew where her mouth had been. I brought out my Marbs and tossed her one, and she produced her own lighter. “Oh, that’s so good,” she groaned in a throaty, sexual way, and turned around again to check on Jeff. “If he asks, you made me.”
“Why,” I frowned.
“Oh, he’s pretty worried about what it does to your health. Jeff quit when he had a kid… that is, when he had you. He’s pretty anal about it now.”
“He is, is he,” I said, and we smoked for a little while. Abruptly, without thinking, I said, “So you have no idea who Rosalie is.”
“No. Should I?”
“Yes.” I said, and this made her smoking hand pause on the way to her mouth. I could see I had her attention, and this gave me an idea. “Do you think that maybe Jeff is cheating on you, the way he cheated on my mother?”
Laura’s laugh was loud and unexpected, and it was hard to tell if she was forcing it or if it just matched her fake persona. She violently fanned smoke away from her eyes. “That’s ridiculous! Jeff would never cheat on me!”
I lowered my voice and leaned close to the tabletop. “Does he ever leave the house for long periods of time where you don’t hear from him?”
Laura smoked fiercely. “Oh, sure, because he works. He goes of business trips all the time…”
“Or does he?” I said with a raise of my eyebrows. When he’d been my father, Jeff had worked as a UPS truck driver, and though there were never any business trips, sometimes he would disappear for a few days if he had to switch routes with someone else. If he still was a UPS man, absences would be explainable… but Jeff being Jeff, he would have probably avoided mentioning his mediocre occupation altogether, in hopes to seem more “suave”. My mother had known, but waited years for him to admit what he did for a living. Laura would have no idea what his specific profession was.
Laura looked like she was going to burst her seams with questions, but right then Jeff arrived with the pie, so she ground out her cigarette without remarking further.
“I got three plates,” he said with counterfeit gaiety, and sat next to his girlfriend, not noticing that she was looking even more pasty than usual, and was warily avoiding his eyes. Ha, I thought, the cheap little smile is gone. Ignoring him as well, I took a tiny creamer cup from the serving tray and placed it in front of me. With one finger I pressed on the end of it, and the creamer leaped into the air and landed right-side up. One. I flipped it again. Two. I read a dirty German limerick once, about a dick that was so big it had ribs. It was unfortunate how easy the image was to visualize. But how did it go? I couldn’t remember.
Jeff and Laura watched as I flipped the creamer a third time, but this time it landed on it’s side. “Damn,” I muttered. Just two. Creamers normally offered endless hours of tacky restaurant enjoyment, but I just wasn’t feeling it this time. I wasn’t on my game.
“Well,” said Jeff. “Pie, anyone?”
Oh, fuck no. I tried to jump to my feet, but I banged my knees and the booth seat forced me to hunch over the table and scoot. As I scooted, I said, “I have to go now.”
They blinked at me. My banging knee had upset a glass of ice water, but neither of them noticed the spreading puddle as it devoured the napkins and charged for the edge of the table. “What?” Jeff said incredulously, “but you just got here. Sit back down.” The water reached the edge and gathered mass.
“No, sorry, there’s been a change of plans. I’m out.” I picked up my bag.
“Sit down,” snapped Jeff, his fork poised over the pie. Laura had an ugly look on her face, but she looked zoned out and distant. She unconsciously moved her foot away away from the increasing counter drip.
“No,” I snarled back. If I stayed in this restaurant one single second longer, I was going to maim, kill, and disembowel every individual in the place, starting with the fucking Laura woman and her lipsticked cigarette butts.
“Sit down!” Jeff shouted, and the fork clattered noisily to the table. The people sitting in booths around us and the front waitress all turned to stare at us in our little corner. Normally, I would have been embarrassed, but it felt like all my life I’d lost my father’s battles. My upbringing, his smoking, the abandonment… It was time for me to win.
“No!” I shouted right back, and stayed in place. Be strong, Milo, be strong. “I don’t want your pie, I don’t want your comments on the weather, and I especially don’t want your company! I am walking out of this restaurant with or without your consent, and if I never see you again don’t think I’ll lose sleep at night.”
I stood there, the tallest person in the smoking section, and maybe it was because of all the people staring, but I think my father saw something in my eyes and that’s why he changed his mind. “Look, son, let me drive you home, if that’s what you really want.”
“No. Leave me alone. I’ll take a bus.”
Jeff’s eyebrows furrowed, but his forehead didn’t crease. “I don’t think…”
“I’ll need money,” I interrupted him. “And may I remind you, Jeff, that I don’t give a shit what you think. I’m going home. Without my father.”
Laura had some color slipping back into her cheeks, and she looked up at me like she’d had a realization. I steeled myself for the feminine side of Jeff’s bullshit but instead, she said, “Shouldn’t you call your mom, sweetie? Let her know you’re coming home?”
“Uh… yeah,” I replied, blankly. “Probably.”
At the mention of Joanne, Jeff began to look a little frantic. “Milo, I’ve decided you’re not going anywhere. Sit down, please! People are staring…”
“No,” I snapped, and lit a cigarette. I willingly stretched my hand out to the girlfriend. “Nice to meet you, Rose– I mean, Laura.”
“You too, Honey. You want some change for the payphone?”
“Laura,” my dad spluttered, exasperation covering his outrage, “Don’t give him…”
She slid coins across the table to me and glared. “Jeff, he only wants to go home. It’s not like he’s taking this 75 cents to go to a crack dealer. Stop being so controlling.”
“That’s not the point!”
By the time I had taken her money and was halfway out the door, I was satisfied to hear a familiar name come into the argument.
“Jesus, Laura,” Jeff was saying.
“Don’t ‘Laura’ me,” Laura exploded with enthusiasm. The pie sat untouched between them. “It’s pretty clear that Milo and you have some issues.”
“Every son has issues with his dad.”
“…And after watching the way you treat him, I’m starting to believe it’s not his mother’s fault, like you said.”
“Laura…”
“Jeff, who is Rosalie?”
It was a shorter trip driving back to the Valley. I felt little satisfaction from ruining the afternoon for me and my father, but I hadn’t expected it to turn out well. Actually, now that I’d had time to cool off, I realized what happened in the Denny’s had made me unbelievably sad. My mother glanced at me in the overhead mirror for the third time since I’d gotten in the car, like she was trying to make up her mind about something. The highway opened up in front of us, and she shifted into high gear. The car lurched ahead, and I watched the white lines on the pavement chasing us, never ending and forever, a competitor who matched our pace regardless of how fast we went.
“Well,” my mother said slowly, and I continued watching the pavement. I knew the lines in her forehead were deepening as she sought the right words. “Are you all right?”
My nose was running. I sniffed and wiped my face on my jacket sleeve. “Yes.”
There was silence. I knew my mother wasn’t about to pry. It wasn’t the way she was. It was the polar opposite of my father and his stream of pointless questions and annoying small talk.
“But you know what I really hate?” I blurted out, twisting around in my seat.
“Hmm,” said Joanne.
“I hate him! I feel like my entire life I was just another piece of dog shit in his path. Just another mistake he wanted to forget about. It was like he wanted to be a father on whim… he didn’t give a fuck about me. Or you,” I added furiously. “He used us, mom. He made us feel like dog shit and then he shoveled us out of his life. Like we were nothing!”
My mom sighed. “I suppose to wish you hadn’t seen him today.”
“Fuck,” I said in disgust, and shook my head no.
“I see,” said Joanne.
I sat still for a moment and composed myself, feeling the balding tires bounce under my feet, and with reluctance I remembered for the upteenth time his cooking. The roughhousing on the lawn. The way he made me feel, as a kid, that I meant more to him than anyone else. Be strong Milo, I told myself.
The day you were born was the happiest day of my life, he’d said.
Unable to help it, I buried my face in my hands, gritted my teeth, and shook in pain. I wouldn’t cry, I thought fiercely. I wouldn’t!
“Does it hurt to think about him?” my mother asked softly.
Breathing wetly through my fingers, a strangled “Yes” escaped me. Madness is the feeling of intensely hopeless frustration on repeat, and I was close. Anthony had said, Milo, you bring it on yourself. Well, fuck you, Anthony.
Joanne’s voice had become very stern. “Milo, when your father left us I went through the same shit you are. It took me months to even leave the fucking house.” Carefully, she released the stick and took my hand in hers. I wiped my nose on my sleeve again and stopped sniffling. It was a very tender gesture for my mother. That, and she’d said fucking. “You’ll move on,” she murmured. “People change. People come and go. People are nothing but pictures in a scrapbook, twenty years from now. Someday, Milo, you’ll look back on Jeff and what’s he’s done and you’ll only feel pity for him.” She looked back at the highway. “I know it’s a difficult concept to fathom now, but believe me, it will happen. I’ve learned that people like your father aren’t worth missing, because wherever he is, he wont be missing us.”
“I’m hanging in there, mom,” I whispered, and I made her smile.
“Good Milo,” she replied. “I’m proud of you.” She let go of my fingers and put both hands on the wheel, and I felt my face crinkle up like a baby’s, but still, I refused to cry. My mom was proud of me, and I knew she was right. I had to let go if I wanted to heal.
I went back to staring out the window, watching the pavement stretch out before us until it pinpricked into the distance, and I was comforted. Although I couldn’t see my future yet, I knew that on the other end of the highway home was waiting, and for now that was enough. People change, my mother had said. People come and go.
I smiled at Joanne, and she smiled back at me, and it was only then I understood that by letting go of my father would I begin to understand my mother.
