Authors: Xavier Neal
A sigh comes out of me. This reassuring shit is getting old. But she needs it. I always want to give her what she needs. “I'm sure.”
“But-”
“Pres, if I wanted to be fucking, I would let you know.” Her perfect lips close. “I respect you. I love you enough to wait until you're completely ready. I've already waited a year. I'll wait another. Or four. Or seven. Fuck it, ten. I'll wait ten years if I have to.”
She gives me a sweet look laced with sarcasm. “Ten years? You'd wait ten years to sleep with me?”
“Make love to you,” I correct sounding like a pussy. “There's a difference or so my brother's girlfriend's Cosmo says.” The moment her laughter starts again, I add, “I'll wait forever for you Presley Morrison.”
“But you didn't.” Doc's dead expression mixes with my guilt, which causes me to shut my eyes. “Because you're sitting here. Refusing to finish your time. Refusing to complete these sessions.” There's a very brief pause. “Why?”
On a quiet mumble I ask, “Why what?”
“Why didn't you wait for her?”
“I tried...”
“Obviously not hard enough.”
Unsure I heard him correctly, I lift my head and my eyes. “Excuse me?”
“You're sitting here, on the floor of a rehab center. Had you done everything the way you're implying you were going to, you wouldn't fucking be here.” I blink baffled by his bluntness. “You started at that moment in time. Maybe you did it to try to shock me, but not likely. You started there for a reason. What happened after you took her home? After the blow job.”
There's a familiar aching in my bones. The pain of realization I've dealt with year after year in between highs has long moved past settling in just my chest. No. It's made a fucking home in my entire body. It's damn near hollowed me out. The weight of what happened after that fractured even the simplest structures in my spirit. He's fucking right. I picked that moment because it was the last blissful, honest one we had together. It was the last time I believed in miracles, the last time I believed in anything greater than the power of my next fix.
“My life began to fall apart.”
“Come here son,” my obviously intoxicated father calls me to the end of the neighbor's driveway.
All I want is to go upstairs and go to bed. I hate when I can't curl up next to Presley after we fool around. Sleeping next to her is almost as fucking amazing as getting off with her.
He sternly repeats, “Come here.”
I don't wanna 'come here'. I don't wanna hear the shit he has to say. It's always about how just the right of money can make miracles happen. How money is the foundation of life. All conversations center around that with me. Why? Because I'm the accident child. I'm not the one who was meant to hold his legacy. I'm not the youthful version of him like my older brother, or the thinned perfection that was once my mother that is now my sister. No. I'm the surprise that stopped a divorce. The surprise that melded a broken marriage back together. At least until I walk off the stage with my diploma.
Bracing myself for the latest load of crap he's about to spew, I slowly approach. “Dad, I really should get to bed…” My eyes glance back at the house. It would be so easy to just turn around and go inside. “I've got school in the morning.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he brushes off. “Get over here. We wanna talk to you.”
I growl under my breath, shove my hands in my jeans and arrive where I was summoned. “What's up, Dad?
“Don't be a dick,” he grunts, beer coated on each word like he's been marinating them for hours. Wouldn't be surprised if he had. For a man who likes the finer things, he loves his beer more than liquor. “Say hi to Mikey.”
“Mike.” I greet my dad's best friend with a nod.
He tips his beer at me and then has another swig.
My father continues, “Where were you tonight?”
With a heavy sigh I clench my fists tighter in my pockets. I don't want to play this game. I don't want to do this again. Sometimes I think he pushes me to see if I'll push back, to see if I'll go down swinging, or even contemplate not letting his abuse land on my face. But he's my father. What else am I supposed to do?
Hopeful he asks, “Strip club?”
“You know I was with Presley.”
“Ah.” He points at me with the beer bottle. “Of course you were. Always are. You two are inseparable…”
“Inseparable,” Mike echoes.
“Okay…” my voice trails off. “I love her. What’s the big deal?”
In a mocking tone he says, “You don't know what the big deal is?” He elbows Mike in the side. “He doesn't know what the big deal is?” Mike chuckles and shakes his head. Dad looks back at me and obnoxiously repeats, “You don't know what the big deal is?” I blink. I don't give them the satisfaction of seeing how his words rattle the ground beneath me. “Son, the big deal is there are millions of fish in the pool.”
This isn't going to end well. “Okay…”
“You need to start dipping your fishing pole in other scuba tanks.” His misspoken metaphor makes me roll my eyes. “Hey! Don't roll your eyes at me!”
I surrender my hands. While he doesn't typically put his hands on me, the beer in his system messes with his restraint. Sober or inebriated, verbal assaults are always in season, but his hands only come out for assistance after beers nine and ten.
“What I’m saying is your 16 years old-”
“18 years old-”
“18 goddamn years old! You know what I was doing at 18?”
Of course I knew the frat tales he's passed down to my older brother who followed in his steps, but managed not to lose his heart to the devil. Pretty sure my father sold his before he was old enough to legally drink.
“Fucking girls in the back of limos. Fucking girls in bar bathrooms. Fucking sorority girls for sport two at a time. Are you fucking your girlfriend?” Definitely the influential speech I need after telling my girlfriend I'm willing to wait. Oh wait. No, it's not. My silence seems to upset him. “You're not, are you? Fucking pathetic.”
A hard exhale comes from me, but I stay frozen. I don't feel pathetic. I don't feel I'm doing anything wrong waiting for Pres. It's not like I'm a virgin. I started boning girls when I was thirteen. Sex with my sister's best friend while she slept in the room beside us. I've had my fair share of pussy before Presley, so it isn't a giant mystery what the big deal about sex is. I just so happen to like what she has to offer more.
“You're too young to be this fucking attached to one girl. Making plans like running away to college together. Moving in together.”
Unsure of how he knows all this, I press my lips together admitting nothing. “Marriage...you really think you're gonna marry this chick? Ha!”
“Marriage?” Mike sarcastically laughs. “That's what you want kid? I got my old lady griping at me in and out every day about the trash. How I don't make enough for what she wants to spend. How I'm not 'as romantic as I used to be' or some horse shit.”
My dad mumbles, “Marcy says that bullshit to me all the time.”
“All that bitching and moaning and I ain’t even got kids.”
Dad stares down at the ground, regret flushing his cheeks. Or maybe that's the alcohol. “It's so much fucking worse with kids.”
Mike shakes his head at me. “This ain’t life. It's a prison. An expensive ass prison.”
“Very,” my father concurs looking back at me. “Do you have any idea how much you three cost? How much your mother costs? School. College. Graduations. Vacations. That shit just never ends.”
In an even tone, I ask, “If it’s so terrible then why’d you do it?”
“Trapped!” he loudly protests. Suddenly he slips his voice down to a whisper and drapes an arm around me. “See what they do is they get you while you’re young…young and dumb-”
“And full of cum,” Mike adds.
Dad laughs and nods in agreement. “They get you young enough to think life is all about love and roses. Sunshine and sex, but really they’re laying down the ground work for the day they tell you they’re knocked up and all you can do is marry them because you’re an 'honorable man'…We’re honorable men in this family.”
Obviously. However, I feel maybe this conversation should be steered towards what honorable means? And who exactly is he honoring? Mom by staying in a miserable, loveless marriage? His children by forcing us to choke down bullshit rants like this?
What sucks is now, now I feel like there's an invisible noose around my neck, tightening by the breath. He's not wrong. I pictured marriage with Pres some day being filled with morning blow jobs and bagels. Movie marathons and making love in the middle of the day or after a hard day at the office or whatever it is I end up doing. I wasn't thinking dollar signs and diapers. Bills and bill collectors.
Nervous, I question, “Is that how you really feel?”
“Look…don’t make the same mistakes we did.” Dad says in a stern voice. “Presley’s a nice girl. Smart. Loyal.”
My face unconsciously twitches a smirk.
“Dump her. She’ll come back. You two can get back together way in the future. Cut her loose now and live a little.”
“Fuck that,” Mike laughs. “Live a lot.”
My eyes stare deep into my father’s reading a pain I never have before. He's a grade A asshole. I've seen disgust in his eyes for me since I was old enough to crawl. I've seen the disappointment and shame that comes at social functions or family gatherings. Disgrace for me being the derelict he just knew I would be when I came out of the womb. All of that and I've never once saw an honest, heartfelt pain like the one I'm seeing now. I fold my arms and search for light in the darkness of the alcohol that has consumed him. That has broken the dam of emotions. I can't become him. I don't want to become this.
“That was the dumbest fucking advice he’s ever given me.” I let the candy cigarette shake between my lips as I tug at my brown hair. My eyes are still planted on the ground. “What kind of father says that to his son? What kind of father tells his son to give up the only thing that makes him happy in his life? What kind of father dumps his own emotional bitterness for his sheer existence on his very impressionable teenage son? The one you never tried to connect with before that moment? The one who took that sliver in time as your way of trying to build a bond he swore would never be born. What kind of father destroys his son's life in less than ten minutes?”
“You gave her up.” Doc states.
I ash the cigarette on the floor and mumble, “Obviously.”
“Had you taken advice before?”
For a brief moment I shut my eyes, cigarette rolling around my fingertips. Honesty bubbles in the back of my throat, burning my lymph nodes on the way up. Quietly I admit, “Not really.”
“Why start?”
“Because I was afraid he was right,” I whisper bringing the candy back to my lips. Letting it sit on them for a second I tug tighter on my hair determined to rip the anxiety of admission of guilt out of me. To tug away the pain from the constant 'what if' hell I live in. That I've created. To tug away the terror that comes from living here in this desolate dungeon of my mind where all other thoughts outside of the well woven 'what ifs' have deserted me. “Because for just a brief moment in time, I wanted to feel like he gave a fuck about me....”
Doc stays silent. The surprise lifts my head. He's staring down at me with his coal eyes, not judging, but almost understanding. I guess we all have daddy issues. “It is a father's responsibility to guide his son towards greatness.”
“Mine didn't.”
“You blame him.”
Yanking the cigarette off my lips, I snap, “Of course I fucking blame him.” A small jeer comes out of me. “Had he not sold me the bull-”