So Alex leaves his traditional perch and saunters upstairs, forsaking Marilyn Manson on the tube for the real live dynamics of home. The kitchen is bright with tile and gleaming with chrome, and he doesn’t feel comfortable in here because he’s never very hungry these days, and anyway, he clashes with the decor since he’s wearing a ripped black T-shirt and black jeans with the knees wearing through and his hair is kind of spiky and once they said he looks like he came to vandalize the place instead.
Dad is pointing toward one corner, wearing that face again, and he’s saying, “You do remember that the trash is your responsibility, don’t you?”
Alex nods meekly, mutely, looking at the can, and it’s not really that full, is it, but you’d think the thing was overflowing with used plutonium.
“Can’t you show a little more responsibility, Alex, you’re fifteen years old, for crissake,” Dad continues, so he nods some more and tunes Dad out because it’s the same speech he’s heard a trillion times before. Must be the first one they teach you in Dad School. The only thing about it that changes is his age, and it always seems to take about a century for that number to click up one higher.
Dad goes through it all note by note, and Alex figures he could probably recite it along with him, like the parishioners with the priest in Mass when they tried Catholicism a couple years ago. Mom backs him up, silently nodding, the oft-present cocktail glass in one hand and her Valium prescription in the other, and she wears her bleary eyes like a pair of false ones from a novelty shop.
Dad finishes and Alex promises to keep a more vigilant watch on the can in the future. Dad, his patriarchal duty exercised, smartly turns on one heel and exits the kitchen, probably back to his very own corner in the rec room. Alex cinches the trash bag and notices that Mom lingers behind.
“Are you feeling all right?” she asks, and she hardly slurs her words at all anymore, because now she’s a professional at this. “You look kind of pale.”
“I’m okay,” he says, and hauls the bag out of the can. He knows what’s coming next, and then it’s there, Mom’s clammy hand squelched across his forehead to see if he’s running a fever or coming down with chills. She shrugs. She can’t feel much, he’s figured that out by now.
“You’re always too pale,” she says, and nods to herself as if the act of nodding transforms it into gospel truth. “Maybe you should go to the doctor after school tomorrow.”
He tells her maybe he will, so she’s happy, and he totes the bag through the garage and drops it by the cans already awaiting pickup. Dusk has fallen, and Alex decides to hang outside in the yard for a while. He fishes into his sock for a joint and smokes it behind a tree in suburban peace and quiet. He watches a BMW that looks like Dad’s cruise past, and when it gets to the end of the block he pretends to press a button and vaporizes car and driver. Foom.
No doctors, he knows he told a lie. The only way he’ll go to a doctor these days is if he’s carried there unconscious and has no say in the matter. Doctors ask boring questions and make you take off your shirt and he doesn’t want that, and he’s not sick anyway.
Mom’s always finding some reason to suggest a trip to the doctor, and he always says he’ll go but never does, and she never questions why no office visits in Alex’s name show up on the bills. He doesn’t think she remembers most of the time. Sometimes he tells her he went and needs money to get a prescription at some pharmacy where they don’t have a charge account and she shells out the cash and he spends it on more important things. It’s a good arrangement.
He finishes the J and waits for most of the smoke smell to clear from his clothes and heads back inside. He watches MTV some more and vacates when they announce they’re going to play a pair of Michael Jackson videos, so he hunts for and finds the Very Important Paper he needs. He takes it upstairs to the rec room.
He was right, this is where Dad went. In his corner in the back, hunched over his flat worktop while working with plastic pieces and Testor’s glue and tiny bottles of paint. The fruits of Dad’s labors hang suspended by fine wires from the ceiling, models of Fokker tri-planes and Sopwith Camels from the time of the Red Baron, and B-17 Flying Fortresses and Stukas from World War II, all the way up to modern F-16 Falcon and Harrier jets. The ceiling back here is nearly full, and the models just keep coming. Now Dad is working on a kit proudly acquired last week, a scaled down version of a Stealth Bomber.
Dad is employed as a comptroller for some big corporation with a lot of interlocking squares in the logo, but Alex knows his secret. Dad really wants to be Tom Cruise. They have a DVD player hooked up to the TV but still only one disc, a copy of Top Gun. Dad has watched it at least twice a month for years, and Alex knows that whenever Dad watches he pretends he’s Tom Cruise shooting down MiGs and nailing Kelly McGillis.
“Dad?” he says, and waits and watches his old man pour himself into the model and close off all else. The model looks silly, like a chunkier version of Batman’s boomerang. “Dad?”
“Mmmmm?” comes an eventual reply.
“Got a minute to sign a paper for me?”
“Mmmmm.” Alex doesn’t know what this means, so he waits, and finally Dad joins two pieces together and says, “What is it?”
“It’s a permission release for my driver’s training class this final quarter.”
Dad still hasn’t looked up. Alex could be on fire and roast all the way down to charcoal before Dad would notice, and he finds this funny, the thought of a charred lump standing there between his father and the pool table begging for an autograph.
“Just put it on the edge of the table, I’ll sign it a little later.”
“But I need it tomorrow, and it’ll only take a second.”
“I never sign anything without reading it twice,” says Dad, words to live by, he’s using that particular tone of voice. “You’ll have it by tomorrow. Now … please?”
Alex bows out. He’s had his eyes crossed the whole time to see if the old man would notice, and it’s a bet he would’ve won. Tom Cruise would have noticed. Have to be alert to be a fighter pilot.
He checks on Mom and finds her zonked in the living room and so he lifts the half-smoked cigarette from her fingers so she won’t set the couch on fire. As she sleeps, gravity plays mischief with her face, but that’s for somebody else to lift.
When he returns to MTV, Michael Jackson is history, so he watches some more and calls a couple friends to see what’s new in their lives since school was out, and pretty soon he’s tired and it’s time to go to bed.
He digs into his sock drawer in the very back and pulls out a small plastic box full of shiny metal. He takes off his shirt and leans back on his bed. A moment later he selects a safety pin from the box and opens it and skewers it through a pinched fold of skin over a left-side rib. He licks the trickles of blood from his fingers and latches the pin closed again and watches MTV to wait until it quits bleeding. Just like after the ninety-odd pins he’s already put there.
Sometimes they get infected and he’ll wash the area down with alcohol or hydrogen peroxide. It burns, but he doesn’t mind, likes it sometimes even, because it means he can still feel something, and it scares him to think of what it might mean if the pain were to stop.
Just like the blood. His scar tissue has gotten gnarly thick in places, and sometimes he’ll sink in a new pin and it won’t bleed, and this never fails to freak him out. No blood, like he’s dead inside. Somehow this signifies failure. Or maybe he’s like an atrocity-hardened veteran who can’t cry, because no matter what he sees it’s just not awful enough anymore. The body won’t turn loose of the liquids.