Tracy was already up when I went down to the kitchen. She was drinking a cup of coffee and flipping through the newspaper. She was not hung over since she had not had anything to drink the night before. Nothing like having a death sentence from fate hanging over you to keep you from driving a car while intoxicated. Too bad there wasn't some way we could do that to those that were arrested for drunk driving. It would probably drastically cut down on the repeat offender rate.
She asked how my night had gone and I told her about my conversation with Nina. She listened with concern.
"A classic case of denial." She told me when I'd finished. "But understandable. Remember Bill, she's still, for all of her maturity and sophistication, a seventeen-year-old. Seventeen year olds are always right."
"I know." I said. "I'm sure that deep down she knows that I'm right. She just doesn't want to face it, doesn't want to confront it because she'll then be forced into a confrontation with her parents. She's very untypical of a seventeen-year-old in that regard. She worships her parents and she still thinks they're smarter than she is."
"In all except for this." Tracy agreed. "If I was you I'd brace myself. I think this thing might be about to explode."
"I think you're probably right." I agreed.
Tracy then turned the conversation around to her REAL goal of the morning. She wanted to borrow my car again to go to a football party. I had nowhere to go so I told her she knew where the keys were. Less than twenty minutes later she was out the door.
Nina called a few minutes later and told me happily that her parents had raised no objections to her going out today. She almost gloated as she told me this. When I hung up from her my mood was improved greatly. I would get to see her today. That always made me happy. And maybe I was the one who was wrong about her parents. Maybe they really HAD been concerned about her being out on New Year's Eve. After all, Nina knew her parents better than I did, didn't she?
I was about to head upstairs to shower when Dad came staggering into the kitchen. He was wearing his robe tied loosely around him. His hair was a tangled mess and his face was unshaven with eyes that looked downright painful.
"Ohhh God." He moaned, heading for the cabinet. As he passed I could smell the odor of stale booze around him; a smell my paramedicine career had made me intimately familiar with. "Never again."
"Little too much to drink last night?" I asked him as he fumbled a large tumbler out of the cabinet and almost dropped it.
"Uhhh!" He groaned, turning on the sink and filling the glass. "Don't ever drink Bill." He advised me. "Ever."
"I'll take that under consideration." I told him, watching as he downed the glass of water in three gulps. He refilled it and then went to another cabinet for some aspirin.
When I finished my shower and came back downstairs he was lying on the couch, a blanket wrapped around him, watching the first of many football games. He seemed semi-catatonic and I could not imagine that he was actually seeing anything on the screen. I smiled in amusement, reflecting that if I'd been a normal teenager I would have been struck with the screaming horrors at the idea of my girlfriend coming over while my Dad was in his bathrobe on the couch.
"Nina's coming over in a little bit." I told him, just to give him fair warning.
"Uh." He grunted, his head never turning.
When Nina arrived we went up to my room. This was not out of desire to make out or out of embarrassment at the state of my father but simply to keep the noise level downstairs, where both my parents were, to a minimum. They probably weren't in the mood for excessive chatter.
We sat on my bed talking while a Simon and Garfunkle album played on the turntable at low volume. Since my return I'd re-discovered the fact that most music from the eighties really sucked. This was probably due to the advent of MTV, which had made it necessary for a band to LOOK good on camera instead of to produce good music. Since I could not hear music from the nineties, when this fad had balanced out a bit, I had turned, in desperation, to listening to music from the seventies and sixties. To my surprise and delight much of it was actually pretty good and even deep. I'd even managed to get Nina interested in some of it.
We were discussing the track called "The Boxer" when the sound of the doorbell ringing from downstairs registered on my consciousness.
"So you see," I explained. "He's a musician that tried to make it in New York and failed the first time. That's what the lyrics basically say. It's the last verse that really sums it up, tells you that he was defeated but that he remains a fighter from the experience."
"It's actually like poetry." Nina, an aficionado of poetry told me.
"Yes." I nodded. "That's what any really good song lyric is like. That's what they should strive for. That's what a lot of the crap they're putting out these days is lacking in. They simply try to repeat the same phrase over and over while they dance and come up with a bitchin beat from their synthesized drums. That's not music, that just…"
I stopped suddenly, hearing the sound of raised voices drifting up from below. My Dad's was one of them. He was trying to patiently explain something to someone but the someone in question kept overriding his words. When the words 'where is she' drifted up from the owner of the other voice, Nina's ears perked up.
"Dad!" She said suddenly. "That's Dad!"
"Oh shit." I mumbled, hearing MY dad start to raise his own voice.
"What do we do?" Nina asked me. "What is my dad doing here?"
"I guess we'd better go find out." I said, already knowing. "Before our dads start exchanging punches with each other."
"Bill?" She asked, looking really scared now.
"C'mon." I said, standing up. "My dad is younger but your dad was in the war. I don't want MY dad to get hurt."
"Bill!" Came Dad's voice from downstairs. "Would you and Nina come down here for a minute?"
"C'mon." I told her. "The jig is apparently up."
"Oh God Bill." She said, shaking her head.
When we got downstairs we found my dad, still dressed in his robe, still unshaven and looking like shit, facing off against Nina's Dad, who was clean shaven and dressed in slacks and a sweater, over the threshold of the front door. When he saw Nina he took an angry step forward.
"Get your butt down here girl!" He yelled. "How dare you tell me you were going to visit a friend and then take our car over here to this slimy scumbag's house!"
"Dad!" Nina yelled back, not moving forward.
"Now just a minute!" Dad put in angrily. I could tell he was reaching the end of his fuse. "Where do you get off coming to my house and calling my son…"
"Your son is the scum of the earth!" Mr. Blackmore put in. "And you Sir, are the man who raised him with the values of a rutting pig. That makes you a rutting pig in my book and I have no further words to pass with the likes of you. I have come for my daughter before your son violates her in some god-forsaken way. I only hope and pray it hasn't happened yet. Nina, get over here now!"
"Dad!" Nina cried, tears on her cheeks now. "What are you doing? I love Bill!"
"Love?!" He screamed, turning to me. "You are the lowest form of life on this earth young man. Nina, NOW!" He commanded.