In the passenger seat, I saw his hands on the wheel, his fingers chipped, cracked, blood-blistered on the palms and black beneath the nails, battle calluses on the inside edge of his thumbs and knuckles. He’d been working, staying straight. He wore wraparound mirrored sunglasses like a cop, didn’t say hello or you doin’ okay? or anything when I got in. Dad put the Ranchero into gear, jutting his chin at my Personal Effects envelope.
“Take your stuff out of there and toss that. Those things are bad luck.”
I dumped out the keys, wallet and gum, pointed through the windshield at a refurbished oil drum near the visitor’s entrance.
DISPOSE OF ALL CONTRABAND BEFORE ENTERING.
ALL VISITORS ARE SUBJECT TO SEARCH UPON ENTRY.
“Swing over. There’s a garbage can,” I said.
“Roll down your window and throw it the fuck out.” He turned sharply toward the lot exit, never took his eyes from the windshield. That was my reunion with Dad, like an after-school, football-practice pickup that intruded on dinner, something we did every day. An hour and a half of silence into the ride and I realized that Dad had never covered his eyes before.
With each passing minute of that silence, Is Mom okay? grew heavier in my head, but those space insect/trooper shades killed my nerve to ask. We arrived home and I saw for myself.
Our old place, the two-bedroom house Mom and Dad rented, was gone. Dad pulled into an apartment complex and parked the car in a covered space (#49), walked me to an apartment, a red door (also #49) in a row of other red doors in a low, white stucco barrack. With three other barrack structures, they surrounded a dirt courtyard where a tricycle sat, fused halfway underground, having sunk into the soft mud during the rain, surrounded by deflated soccer balls, headless Barbies, empty 10W-40 cans and patches of grass the color of old fingernails. Later, I found the pool, the gate padlocked and the pool drained except for a foot of black water at the bottom, in which lay three tumbleweeds the size of bulldozer tires.
Bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, living room, too cramped to subdivide for Shelly and me. Mom and Shelly took the bedroom, Dad and I slept in the living room. Everything but Mom was different. I’d expected her to wear a kerchief knotted over her bald head, her face the plastic sheen that cancer patients get when their eyebrows fall out, but she looked the same. Just tired, and she seemed to forget things more and more. She kissed my cheek and left for work.
Shelly was out of school, working full-time. I didn’t know where, but she limped out every morning in a simple skirt and blouse, came back at night. Mom waited tables, went to the clinic every two weeks. Dad welded in a machine shop, made decent money for the first time in a while, but his insurance wouldn’t pay for Mom. They said she had a pre-existing condition.
I think it was easier for Dad while I was in jail. He had enough to worry about, and as long as I was locked up he wasn’t getting wakeup calls from the school or the cops, and he had one less mouth to feed.
Maybe he would rather I’d dropped out and started working too, except I had a PO who all but held a gun to my head. Officer Durrel came to the apartment every Saturday, had me piss into a cup, and rummaged through my book bag. I spent extra time to show my work on my math papers. Dad was always working on the car or gone when he came by. Durrel needed a signature each week from Mom or Dad, so he went for lunch where Mom worked, got a signature from her.
“I can read your mind, John Vincent.” My first interview with him, he folded his hands in his lap, looked me straight in the eyes. “You think ‘Equivalency Test’ and I will know it, and I will violate you back. You stay in school as long as you’re under my watch with nothing less than a two-point-eight. You stay outta trouble, you and I won’t have any trouble.”
He never said Got it? or Understand? or Do I make myself clear? And I didn’t want to go back, so I stayed in school, kept my head low, even kept away from Louis.
———
You’re alone, the house is quiet. The refrigerator stops humming and the ambient static you mistook for silence is gone and you can almost hear your own heart beat. That’s what it’s like right before a godsplitter hits. Like when you know something in a dream because that’s the dream script and for no other reason.
I was heading home from school and by the time I’d arrived at our front door, I had one eye closed because the patchy sunlight hurt, barely held my balance, teetered on the edge of vomiting, and went straight for the couch to cover my eyes with a pillow.
I took aspirin all afternoon, chewing the bitter tablets until the bottle was empty except for the dust and cotton, started coughing them back up but tried not to, as each pulse of my lungs pushed on my eardrums like a knitting needle. Gobs of snot and spit and blood pouring out with a bile chaser to sandpaper my throat and burn my eyes. Half-dissolved chalky-paste chunks of aspirin following behind.
Mom and Dad came home after Shelly called Mom at work to tell her there was blood all over my pillow. That fixed my stomach for a couple of years. I couldn’t have spicy food and my own shit burned me for a while. Twenty-four months of grits, waffles, meatloaf, and mashed potatoes in the Hall put a stop to that.
On the living room sofa for days, I wanted the curtains shut and the lights off. Mom kept trying to feed me soup and crackers. She didn’t want to give me aspirin, but had other pills from Dad. Plastic bags or unmarked bottles that he turned up with after going out for cigarettes. Give him these. They’ll shut it down quick.
Mom had come home early to check on me. She tried to put a damp cloth on my head but I didn’t want it. The cold made it worse.
“Sweetie, keep it there. It’ll help the pain.”
“No. It hurts.”
“Honey—”
“Stop it.” The air vibrating with sound hurt. I wanted her to leave me alone, stop talking, just die altogether, but I couldn’t speak. She went away.
We were already being tapped hard for medical expenses with Mom, but I knew what Dad was thinking. Some cancer is hereditary. Mom had breast cancer, it turned out, and they’d caught it too late. I wondered if there was something growing in my head, and I know that’s what Dad thought. He took me to the hospital. The pain had subsided after three days, and he was able to get off work for an afternoon. I had to squeeze my eyes shut to and from the car, holding his arm.
Dark never bothered me. Dad taught me how to change fuses when I was six. I could crawl under the house with a flashlight blasting Id-fear shadows across the dirt without a second thought, swap out a twenty- or thirty-amp fuse from the cigar box, then go back inside and watch TV. But light scared me after a while. Hospitals and doctors’ offices and police stations were bright, and I got to hate bright light after years of it, beginning with those first tests, when they put me through a CAT scan. I was in the hospital wearing a papery gown tied at the back and being shoved into this tunnel of light. The nurses kept telling me to sit still.
The doctor’s office smelled like new leather and lemon oil. The dark wood on the desk and chairs was smooth and bright as glass, one wall covered floor-to-ceiling with books in austere leather bindings, gold stamps on their spines. Gray’s Anatomy. New England Journal of Medicine Index. Pediatric Consultation Reference. The godsplitter had fully subsided and all I could think about was food.
Dad and I waited. An unfiltered Lucky stump wedged between his fingers, the first three knuckles of his right hand the size of walnuts, the last quarter-inch of tip missing from his thumb, sheared off with a chop saw. Dawg ate it, he’d told me.
“We see no signs of a fracture or tumor.” The doctor spoke with a measured cadence, no emphasis or accent, like the voice-over for a safety film. “And no ruptured blood vessels, fluid buildup or sinus infection. Here’s the number for an eye doctor you might want to try.”
Dad mumbled, “It’s all in your head.”
“Yes, there’s that,” said the doctor.
“Pardon?”
“Attention,” he continued. “With his mother being ill, the shop
lifting and drunk driving not getting him any, the headaches are a mechanism for attention.”
I was in trouble and had headaches before Mom was sick and tried to say so. He held his hand to quiet me, talking about me in the third person like I was a plant that needed watering.
“But that’s not really my field. I do know some people that might help,” he handed a card to Dad. “They charge on a sliding scale.”
In the car, Dad gripped his last cigarette in his mouth, crushed the empty package with a squeeze of his fist and tossed it out the window.
“Doctor thinks you’re a fucking nut.” He pushed the dashboard lighter and waited, pulled up to a doughnut stand. “More shit I do not need.”
I looked out the window. Clouds the color of sheet metal hung low, scraping the tops of billboards and telephone poles. My view through the window grew hot and blurry and I kept my face turned and my mouth shut.
By now I’d had counseling from two probation officers, another in juvenile hall, one in high school when my grades were on the downside of their roller coaster and the other two that had me shoehorned into Special Ed when I was seven. Mouth off at a cop, maybe you get snapped with a baton. Maybe you get arrested for something that’s got a time lock on it no matter how bad. Misdemeanor. Thirty days in County. Six months of community service. But a Psych Evaluator has a different set of rules and they can make them up as they go.
Training for therapy, learning how to diagnose or identify dysfunctions, syndromes or depression doesn’t teach someone how to be patient, how to listen. Colleges don’t teach empathy. Psych students don’t learn how to manage budgets and paper trails or linen shortages and staff turnover at an institution.
Instead, overcrowding means you’re assigned to a solitary, cushioned room whether you’re a threat or not, and last resorts for therapy become first resorts for discipline.
I once read something about an orderly at a hospital. He’d been a convicted sex offender but they hadn’t checked him out thoroughly. For months on end, he was masturbating over the faces of tranquilized patients in restraints. Dish towel in their mouths, the last thing a patient saw if still half-awake was the nano-second of overhead light before the orderly blew his load, wiped the sperm from their eyes and out of their nostrils and hair.
A patient complained but, as there was no evidence and as he was heavily medicated, a severe auto-erotic delusionary psychosis was added to that patient’s file. He gave up complaining and the hospital figured the delusion had passed. In fact, he had just learned how to time the orderly’s visits, learned how to numb himself to them. People can numb themselves, get used to anything.
The orderly did this with seven patients over fourteen months until someone walked in on him.
My first day at the clinic where the doctor sent me, I saw a kid who lived down the street from me. His name was Brett. He was a couple of years older than me. I’d seen him in the school lunch area by himself, eating alone and reading a copy of Circus. He lived down the block from our apartment complex in a big house. It must have been every weekend I saw him in his front yard, pushing a rotary lawnmower in precision rows across the massive lawn in front of his house. Covered with sweat, batting bugs out of his eyes and dumping the wet green clippings from the canvas grass catcher into a garbage can. Every week, without fail.
Sometimes a woman was there, his mother—baseball glove tan, shorts, rubber thongs, a blouse knotted at her waist, a tall drink in her hand. Her voice carried, dog-pitch high, and I could hear intermittent weeds, dammit, lazy from a distance.
I recognized Brett’s mother in the lobby of the hospital where Dr. Gaines worked my first time there. She paid Dad and me no mind, her nose buried in a gardening magazine. Dad smoked, rested his face on his fists, elbows on his knees, hand bandaged from his latest cut, piece of sheet metal went right through my goddamned gloves, his eyes burning a hole at some invisible midpoint in the air in front of him.
The door to the lobby opened, a nurse was showing Brett out to his mother. He wore dark wraparound glasses and carried a paper cup of water.
“He’ll be very thirsty for a while,” the nurse said to his mother. “Give him as much water as he needs and keep him in the shade for the rest of the day. The grogginess will wear off in a few hours.”
I saw him on two other visits after that. He always wore sunglasses coming out of the office, though never when he mowed the lawn. He moved a little more slowly each time. I don’t know why he was there, never spoke to him at school, and he never indicated that he recognized me.
Dr. Gaines asked me about my headaches, about school, my family and friends. How did I feel about Mom being sick? Were Mom and I close? Were Dad and I close? Did I want to be like Dad? Is that why I got sent to jail?
I remembered the questions my first probation officer asked me, after my shoplifting arrest. After all of these people, the pattern shone plain as staring into the sun:
Parents.
Siblings.
Friends.
Girlfriends.
School.
Strong subjects.
Weak subjects.
Medical history.
Drugs.
Discipline.
The list was the same, rubber-stamped for every county intern, probation officer and school guidance counselor. The light came on so bright that when Dr. Gaines showed me the Rorschach blots, it didn’t occur to me to ask what he saw in them, I was so preoccupied with putting numbers to the questions, piecing together the equation I thought he was looking for.
“John,” he held up a card with a black forensic splatter. “Can you tell me what this might be?”
I shook my head.
“Try and imagine what else this might look like. Take your time.”
“It’s a black splatter.”
They call this marginalizing, I came to learn, when you’re faking a response in order to skew an evaluation. I could write a book on it now. With Dr. Gaines, though, I was telling the truth. And I said the same thing for the next four cards because I couldn’t see anything other than black splatters.
“John.” He slapped down the stack of inkblots and yanked off his glasses, closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I can’t help you if you don’t cooperate.” He spoke in the short, clipped tones of adult condescension and threats that I’d tuned out long before. But the words Special Program tuned me back in fast, like a sledgehammer through my daydream.
“…you’re failing school, you’ve been in Special Ed before, and now you’re butting heads with the law. You’re claiming these terrible headaches that your doctor says don’t exist. You see where that leaves me?”
Questions had eluded me before, at school or with Mom and Dad. But I was truly stumped with this one, and I felt stupid for not seeing anything besides a white card with a black ink stain. I was back in grade school again.
“Can I draw it for you?” I asked. I didn’t know what else to do.
“You want to draw me a picture of what you see? That would be fine.” He spread his hands, waiting for more.
The cards lay in a face-down stack on his desk, the last one as clear in my head as my hand in front of my face. A symmetrical black splotch that fanned out like an angry butterfly after a collision with a light-speed windshield. I look back, that’s what I think. At the time, saying It looks like a butterfly never crossed my mind.
I reached for a sheet of paper and a black marker. Dr. Gaines dealt with lots of kids, kept buckets of crayons and markers and paper right on his desk. Starting with the outside contours, I traced a single, continuous line, closed it, started filling in the shape from the edges to the center of the butterfly’s exploded thorax. It took me sixty-five seconds, then I turned the last ink splatter over for comparison.
“May I have a look?” he asked.
I showed him my flawless, photomemory replica.
“That’s what I see.”
Sometimes I can be so smart, and sometimes I can be so
stupid. The extremes of both are indecipherable to most people, and I’ve learned that the smartest thing that a smart person can do is keep those smarts hidden in plain sight. Otherwise, someone will slot you where you pose the least threat to their private scope on the world. Retard. Nigger. Spic. Cripple. Mess with their custom-fitted, rose-colored welder’s goggles and you will pay for it.
Dr. Gaines brought me back for weekly follow-ups, a different battery of tests each time. More Rorschach splatters with different student interns and doctors for second opinions. The male doctors and students always called me John the first time, then Sport, Champ, Slugger or something after that. The females always called me Johnny.
Johnny, I want you to really use your imagination. Look at the picture, close your eyes and imagine what else it might look like? What else do you see?
I see:
A tumor.
A bloody nose and broken teeth from a kid who got beat up for saying fuck you to a group of other kids who called him a retard.
A six-fingered handprint.
A middle-aged woman with one tit.
A drunk man, old before his time.
A human heart full of staples, stitches and sutures.
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale. Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory. Beck Depression Inventory. Weschler Intelligence Scale for Children. Weschler Individual Achievement Test. Woodcock-Johnson Psycho-Educational Battery-Revised. Millon Adolescent Clinical Inventory. Thematic Apperception Test. Axis I. Axis II. Axis III. Verbal. Non-verbal. True or false. Matching. Memory. Figure-eights with one eye closed, then the other. Question: You dig a hole two feet deep by two feet wide by two feet across, what is the volume of dirt in the hole? You’re being a real sport, Ace. You want a soda? Serial Sevens: Please count backwards from 100 in increments of seven. Ninety-three. Eighty-six. Seventy-nine. Seventy-two. Sixty-five. Fifty-eight. Fifty-one. Forty-four. Pretty good, Kiddo. Can you do it from, say, 322? Three hundred fifteen. Three hundred eight. Three-hundred one. Two hundred ninety-four. You’re a regular Einstein, Champ. Show me your hand. People tease you about it? What do they say? Colored puzzles and matching shapes to holes under a stopwatch. Complete the sentence: Dog is to cat as cockroach is to blank.