Knockout (18 page)

I remind myself that I'm not here to enjoy myself, I'm here to spy. As I lie down Samantha gives me a choice of recently released movies to watch on the flat-screen TV mounted to my bed.

“Or,” she tells me, “I can queue up something from our extensive music library.”

Before I walked in here I conned myself into thinking that the service wouldn't be as personal, that they'd treat their customers like cattle, but Samantha gives me a scalp rub and asks me how my day is going and she actually seems genuine about it.

Maybe the product will be watered down, I think. Maybe that'll be the thing we can hang our hat on. But then Samantha lights my pipe and I inhale and the smoke fills my lungs and every piece of sadness and stress I hold between my shoulder blades floats away and all the chatter in between the hemispheres of my brain finally shuts the hell up. My jaw unclenches and a thin stream of drool slides out of my mouth and falls to the newly carpeted floor. A delicious fatigue comes over my body and suddenly I don't give one shit about competing with Opium Depot, I just want this feeling forever.

“W
here have you been?” Jennie Frontiere asks when I walk in the door later that evening. “Jake called and called.”

Every day Jennie Frontiere brings a can of soup for lunch, heats it up in the microwave. Two months ago, she organized a potluck. While no one else brought anything and I was the only one who ate the macaroni hot dish Jennie brought, my father and I certainly appreciate her efforts at making our place feel a little bit more like home.

“There was a fire,” Allan says. “Not 911 worthy, but pretty decent size.”

I run into the office, see that the left side of the desk is charred. My dad is standing there running his fingers over the burnt wood. Jake's standing next to him. Sometimes I see a switch light up in his brain, some old synapse grab hold, and he'll snap at me in a way he would have snapped at me twenty years ago, and even though he's yelling at me for being a dumbass, it's just wonderful to see my old judgmental father alive and in fine form once again.

“He walked in here to grab a pen and then a minute later the smoke alarm went off,” Jake says. “I should've stuck closer to him.”

My dad is eyeing the desk cautiously now, like it's going to suddenly catch fire again, like the wood has disappointed him in some way by being flammable, like the desk can't be trusted to be a desk anymore. Lately whenever his words leave him, he grabs items he knows he should remember—alarm clock, table lamp, pen—and holds them out to me, desperately shaking them in my face until I reveal their name.

“Let's just go lie down,” I say, putting my hand on my dad's shoulder.

My dad slaps my hand away. I can tell he's wondering who I am, who gave me the right to touch him. At first, his eyes are filled with confusion and outrage, but then they shift to scared.

“It's me,” I say, holding out my palms to show him I mean no harm.

He stands there for a minute, looking me up and down.

“Just you,” he says. “Okay.”

I pull his arm over my shoulder and we walk over to his cot, his bad knee clicking like a metronome with each step.

L
ater that night, after my dad is in bed, I light up and dream about Susie. I dream about when we went on that riverboat architecture tour in Chicago. It was one hundred degrees that day and I remember my shins sweating and the sweat pooling up in my tennis shoes and the smooshing sound my shoes made when I walked back up the gangplank.

I wake up to two burly men in tracksuits standing over my bed. One grabs me under my armpits and one grabs my ankles and they lug me out the door.

“Hello?” I yell out. “Help?”

Everyone else is zonked out. The men carry me out into the parking lot and shove me into the backseat of a Lincoln Town Car.

“Are you gonna kill me?” I ask them. “Because you should know that I am already doing a good job of doing that myself.”

The men don't answer me. We drive downtown and pull up in front of a building with a sign “The Uplands Group, LLC” on the side. The men yank me out of the car and shove me up some loading dock stairs. They push me into an office and I see Steve Windom sitting across the desk from me.

I recognize Windom from the covers of all the opium trade journals. He's clean-shaven, wearing a navy-blue suit. There's a neutral paint color in his office, low-pile carpet, no shitty tassels anywhere. His autobiography
How to Kill the Dragon
was required reading in one of my business classes in grad school and so I know a lot about him—how his father used to beat him with an electrical cord, how he dropped out of high school at age fourteen, how he ended up on the street turning tricks to pay for his habit. I know how he found Jesus and got clean and how he started cleaning toilets in a den and clawed and scratched his way up the corporate ladder to ruthlessly conquer the opium business. While I'm excited to be in the same room as him, I know from the chapter on negotiation in his book that I should not show any excitement at all.

“I apologize we had to bring you over here like that,” he says. “But I always like to discuss business face-to-face.”

Windom doesn't waste time with chitchat. He reaches into a drawer and pulls out a brick of opium and slides it across his desk. The brick looks like black clay. It has red veins snaking up inside it like little rivers.

“You've had an incredible run with your shithole, but that's over now,” he tells me. “This is your going-away present. And after
you take it you're immediately going to go back and shutter your place up forever.”

I look at the brick and my mouth begins to water. I force myself to stop staring at the brick, at its luscious color. I stop thinking about how wonderfully bitter it probably tastes. Instead of looking at the brick, I stare at the wall behind Windom. There are a bunch of photos of him hung there, one of him windsurfing on bright blue water and another of him snowboarding on chalk-white snow. While I look at these pictures of Windom I wonder why he's arrived where he has and I have not. Maybe it's because I've always had trouble telling the difference between luck and fate, maybe because they've always seemed like the same thing to me. I wonder if there is something more than hard work and smarts that makes a difference? How come some people always have the wind at their back and others don't? How come some people are programmed to see every setback as a challenge and others see it as proof they're doomed?

“My shithole's worth more than one brick,” I tell Windom, even though it probably isn't. “There's so much history there.”

Windom takes out another brick out and slides it across the desk.

“Here's to history,” he says.

There's enough dope here to keep me high for a year or to kill me really good in a month. There's enough dope here to say fuck all to my regulars and my dad, to quit worrying about them altogether, to hole up in a hotel room with a prostitute who will let me pay to call her Susie even though her real name is Marilyn or Monica.

I pick up the bricks, one in each hand, feel their heft. I think about how I don't owe anything to anyone, about how I never promised anyone a place of refuge, about how my dad would forget about my betrayal in two minutes.

While I mull over this decision, I notice a picture of Windom's wife in a frame on his desk and goddamn it if she doesn't look like a dead ringer for Susie. I start to think about how much I loved Susie and how I thought we were going to be together forever. Instead of betraying my father and our regulars, I call bullshit. Bullshit that Windom gets all of this and I get nothing. Bullshit that he wants to crush my family business and bullshit that I'd make it any easier for him. Even though my hands are shaking like hell, I push the bricks back across Windom's desk. I see a glint of surprise cross his face, but it's quickly replaced by anger.

“Bad call,” he says.

W
hen I get back to the den, Jennie and Allen are playing cribbage. Jake is standing over the top of them, looking at them as they clack their pegs around the board. My dad is asleep on the counter, his cheeks flushed. It's windy outside and I watch as two Opium Depot employees climb up on the roof to batten down their inflatable gorilla.

Soon I light everyone up. It's hard not to think that each time I do this it will be my last, that soon the cops will show up and slap an eviction notice on our door. In the last few days, I've started to slow down my movements, savoring every second we have left here. Each time I light up one of our regulars, I say a quick good-bye to them under my breath.

I sit down in a recliner and close my eyes and drift off. I wake up to the sound of breaking glass. While I was sleeping someone chucked a large rock through our front window. The rock is sitting on the black floor mat. I walk over to get a closer look. Windom has written the words “Only the beginning!” on the rock and signed his name.

“Dad?” I call out.

There are a ton of fortune cookies broken open on the counter.
Most of them are spitballed, except one that's been flattened out that reads: “Higher ground is higher ground.”

While I'm standing there, I hear sirens. I look out the window and see fire trucks, ambulances, police cars surrounding Opium Depot. There's a crowd gathered in their parking lot. People keep pointing to the roof. What they are pointing at is my dad, dressed in his pajamas, his legs dangling down near the neon “U” in Opium Depot's sign. I race across the street, fight my way through the crowd.

“I'm his son,” I explain to one of the police officers. “Let me go up there and talk him down.”

The cops lead me to a service ladder mounted to the side of the building and I climb up, walk slowly across the roof toward my father.

“It took you long enough,” he calls out. He pats down a spot next to him and I sit, dangle my feet over the edge, just like he's doing.

“The air up here reminds me of the lake cabin,” he says. “It's crisp.”

I know exactly what he's talking about, he's totally right, the air up here has a little bite to it, smells lightly of lavender when the wind freshens, just like the lake cabin we used to rent when I was young.

“And there we are over there,” he says, pointing to our building.

I see all chipped paint on the south wall, notice all the beer cans and potato chip bags on our roof. I look down at all the people standing in the parking lot below us, their hands on their hips, waiting for something bad to happen. The security guards on the roof are inching closer to us, talking into their walkie-talkies.

“Maybe we should go down now?” I ask.

“One more minute,” he says.

He closes his eyes and takes in a lungful of air. I do the same. While I've got my eyes closed my father stands up and runs. At first I think he's going to jump off the side of the building, but then I see he's running toward the gorilla. I watch as he pulls a knife from his pocket and stabs the gorilla in the calf. Next he takes his knife and shivs the gorilla in the foot. There's a massive rush of air past my face, a wind that drives me back. The gorilla's arms fall to its side then its hips start to shimmy. It happens so quickly, the air trapped inside there that's now free. The gorilla's head bows toward my father and he slices open its forehead then jabs the knife into the gorilla's chest as it folds. The security guards are running at him now, a bunch of them, all of them screaming at my father to stop. It's too late. The last of the gorilla's air slides out of its body and its black skin floats down and covers up my dad. At first he stands tall, but soon he melts under its weight, kneels down, disappears into its darkness.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First off, thank you to Kate and Theo for their unflinching love of a person with a serious burrito addiction. Next up, to all the Jodzios, Diethelms, Condons, McDermotts, for years of showing up to every damn reading I've ever done even if they had to drive through apocalyptic winds and thigh-high snow. To the wonderful Emily Condon, who is owed way too many favors to count. Gracias to Eric Vrooman, whose charitable early readings brought many of these stories back from the abyss. A lengthy hat tip to the octopus queens of
Paper Darts
, Meghan Murphy and Jamie Millard, for always using their eight arms for the greater good. To the early readers of these stories: Lara Avery, Dennis Cass, Tony D'Aloia, Marcus Anthony Downs, Thorwald Esbensen, Luke Finsaas, Alex Helmke, Baker Lawley, Ross Nervig, Maggie Ryan Sandford, and Robert Voedisch; thanks for the late-night gin and wisdom about words. Thank you to Adam Johnro and Neil Vacchatani for twenty years of inside jokes. Thank you to my editor, Dan Smetanka, whose judicious eye made these stories shitloads better than they started. Thanks to my agent, Ethan Bassoff, whose skill in talking me down from ledges, both high and low, is unparalleled. To all the incredible people at Soft Skull and Counterpoint, especially Megan Fishmann, Sharon Wu, and Kelly Winton, for their enthusiasm and diligence in getting
this book out into the world. A final thank you to the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Loft Literary Center, the Jerome Foundation, and Pen Parentis—I am humbled and grateful for your financial support and your confidence in me.

PUBLICATIONS

“Knockout,”
Mixer
; “The Indoor Baby,”
Indiana Review
; “The Wedding Party,”
Tampa Review
; “Inside Work,”
The Tangential
; “Lily and Annabelle,”
Austin Review
; “Ackerman Is Selling His Sex Chair for Ten Bucks,”
MnArtists
; “Alliances,”
Paper Darts
; “
S
omeday All of This Will Probably Be Yours,”
Twin Cities Noir
; “The Piss Test Place,”
Whiskey River
; “Great Alcoholic-Owned Bed and Breakfasts of the Eastern Seaboard,”
Brooklyn, Vol 1.
; “Cannonball,”
Matrix Magazine
, winner of the Lit Pop Award; “Winnipeg,”
The Atlas Review
; “Our Mom-and-Pop Opium Den,”
Normal School
, winner of the Normal School Prize; “Athens, Athens,”
Salt Hill
; “Duplex,”
The Adirondack Review
, winner of the Fulton Prize.