(eleven) “They’re not mine, I swear”

Jake awoke groggy the next morning, his teeth covered in a thick pasty film, breath reeking of yeast and cigarettes. Struggling to get his pudgy frame off the sagging bed, he stood unsteadily and waddled over to the cracked full-length mirror leaning up against the chimney in his bedroom. He was wearing only grungy grey briefs that were too small for him. Turning his hips to his left, he saw the large purple bruise that covered a softball size circle of flesh over his kidney. He winced softly as he ran his hand over its plum surface. Bending down slowly, being careful not to pinch or bind the sore spot, he began the process of picking out his school clothes from the crumpled clothes piled on the floor of his room, alternately picking an item up off the floor, smelling it and either returning it to the floor or putting it on.

Jake came down the stairs fully dressed in jeans and one of his dad’s old work shirts. He pulled his torn hightop Traxx sneakers on as he sat at the foot of the stairs. Realizing he was running a bit late, his dad had already left, he dreaded the fact that he would have to take his bike to school. Grabbing his worn jean jacket off the knob of the door leading upstairs, he headed for the kitchen. As he turned the corner, he was startled by the sight of his Mother seated at the table in a pink flannelette housedress, drinking a mug of instant coffee.

The east window caught the sun popping over the Nickerson’s colonial. Light filtered through the dirty kitchen windows in a thick film of dust particles settling down onto the surfaces of the countertops. The kitchen was bathed in a murky golden glow. The sink was piled with glasses half-filled with sour watered-down milk, plates with spaghetti sauce crusted around the rim and bowls of stagnant water immersed in the process of incubating bacteria. The floors were crumby with months worth of salt, sugar and other seasonings and toppings that had missed the plate during application. Long deserted cobwebs hung in the corners of the room, caked with dust. The table, at which Jake’s family only ate Thanksgiving dinner, was piled high with newspapers. Stacks spilled over onto the chairs, which, of the four, only two were actually free from clutter. Jake knew that the kitchen was a tinderbox from the Fire Safety filmstrip he saw in class. He had jokingly thought of suggesting a field trip to his house to experience Bad Fire Safety at first hand. Perhaps the embarassment would thrust his mother out of her depression-enduced slothfulness enough to toss the trash out. Jake did his share but with an example like that, his efforts soon dwindled to just taking the garbage out, cutting the lawn and shoveling snow. Nothing else.

His mother completed the picture in her rumpled gown and tousled dyed-red hair, its white roots showing. Her pinched yet plump face, splattered with a spray of freckles, was alive in some kind of agitated condition. Behind her, the dowager’s hump slumped into her large upperarms, then tapered off into graceful forearms and wrists and finally into thin bony hands clutched around the mug bearing the slogan “World’s Best Mom” that Jake had made for her in 4 grade.

“Looking for these?”, she said, turning and proffering a hardbox of Marlboro Lights.

As Jake glimpsed the white and gold box, his head began to buzz, his heart rate quicken.

“Well”, she insisted. “Are you?”

Jake stood there in a wretched silence that entombed like a bubble he dared not break.

“Take one.”

He stood stock still, aching to be outside and on his way to school.

“I said: Take One”, she repeated and thrust the pack toward him.

What the hell are you going to do? If you take one, she’s gonna go gonzo on you. If you don’t she’s gonna yell at you until you do and then go gonzo on you. You are so fucked.

She took one of the cigarettes out and handed it to him. He took it timidly.

“Light it.”

Fine. He decided he’d do what she wanted. Jake knew that in an effort to torture him by going through this, she was torturing herself. She was forcing her son to engage in a behavior that she tried to raise him not to do. The whole situation seemed masochistic to Jake.

He grabbed the Zippo off the table and popped the lid, pausing slightly for any reaction before he went further. When none came, he continued. He snapped the wheel and the flame kicked into life. He brought his hand up and cupped the lighter as he brought it to his face. He even tilted his head slightly to avoid the flame. He clicked the lid shut and took a long, calm first drag.

He felt the sting of nails scrape the tender flesh between his cheek and his mouth. Hot coals rained onto his neck as the cigarette flew from his mouth. Catching it out of the corner of his eye, Jake watched as it somersaulted and bounced, ash first on the linoleum, before coming to rest, extinguished on a pile of last week’s Detroit Free Press.

“I can explain”, he said brushing his neck where the coals landed.

“You fucking better.”

He had never heard his mother cuss before. It was beyond odd. It was surreally freightening; as if he’d just seen Mother Teresa knock back a shot of Jack Daniels and light up a stogie.

“They’re not mine, I swear”, Jake whined.

The words sounded shallow and brittle as they fell from his mouth. Now completely beyond his control, his lower lip began to tremble. The sound of the repetitious pop of his pulse thrummed in his ears. The heat in his face grew with each beat. He felt the trust he had built with not only his Mother but his Father, crumble as he spoke. He vainly tried to shore it up with words that flaked off and disintegrated with every syllable.

“Whose are they?”

“Eddie Stephens gave them to me to hold.”

It was then that Jake realized how utterly unbelievable his absolutely true story was coming out. He had turned into a very poorly scripted after-school special on the dangers of smoking; changed into the trope of the Bad Child who did things behind his parents’ back. He struggled to reconcile to himself that this was not him.

“I knew that kid was trouble the day he moved into the Polks’ Old House”, she took another sip of her burnt- smelling coffee without taking her eyes off her child. This statement assuaged Jake’s guilt a bit. She was willing to believe, at least she intimated so, that her son was under the control of darker force, one he was powerless to resist.

“He gave them to me at Chuck E. Cheese”, Jake said building on the story to make in more believable. He hated having to sell the truth.

“When were you at Chuck E. Cheese?”, she asked.

“Yesterday”, Jake replied quickly. He closed his eyes as he realized his mistake too late.

“You came home right after school yesterday. It couldn’t’ve been yesterday.”

Jake scrambled for an answer. He spun his mental Rolodex to come up with a plausible explanation to cover the truth.

“Maybe it wasn’t yesterday”, Jake said averting his eyes.

He was caught now. He felt it. Sweat started to bead on his upper lip. What came so easy in front of that stranger named Pam at Harmony House, was now sticking in his throat, choking off his air supply.

“Are you lying to me, young man?”, she said, leaning into his face and grabbing his hand in her bony lobster-claw grasp.

“No?”, Jake asked.

He wished he could replay this entire episode. He saw Eddie knocking on the door, his Mother answering it. Eddie would ask if Jake were home.

“Why?”, she would ask as she let him in.

“He’s got my pack of cigarettes”, he would say. “I asked him to hold them for me while I beat the shit out of a some kid in a Chuck E. Cheese suit.”

“Jake, Eddie’s here, he wants his cigarettes back”, she would then turn to Eddie and ask him to stay for breakfast, which he would refuse politely.

“Is that a question or an answer? Don’t try my patience”, she barked, her burnt coffee breath pulsing out in acrid clouds toward Jake’s face.

He looked at her. Really looked at her.

For the first time he saw the careworn wrinkles at her brow, the way they cut into the space between her eyes, making her seemed hard-edged and permanently pissed. Her eyes were rimmed with tears, pink and rheumy. With just one glance, Jake saw his dead uncle Dodge, her only brother, staring back at him.

* * *

Uncle Dodge was a beerbarrel of a man, with scarcely a straight line on him. He was meaty and tough like a cheap flank steak. Dodge was bald with a monk’s tonsure and a few strands of combover sticking to his sweaty pate. He wore painter’s pants ages before anyone thought they were cool. Painters pants and an off-white t-shirt with a yellowing half-moon pitstain splaying out from underneath his each of his chubby arms. The left sleeve was where he always kept his cigarettes. “Squares” he called them. Unfiltered Phillip Morris cigarettes. Like Pall Malls, only stronger. He smoked them heavily, he would constantly stress “only two packs a day”, but in reality the third pack he opened late in the afternoon would only have five or six cigarettes in it come morning. Along with that were his evening cigars; stench blowing Phillies Blunts he had chewed into a mushy blackness, one after supper and one while on the toilet after watching Johnny Carson, his “night crap” he called it.

And, he was a professional mason on top of it. So, when the doctor told Jake’s mother, his only living relative, that he had lung cancer, his mother took it as a given, shaking her head up and down slowly and assuredly, with no sobbing or tears, only a somber grace, as if she’d just given the doctor the bad news.

Later, on a frigid day in February, he had a heart attack, a severe one, and fell from the scaffolding in the Shrine of the Little Flower, to the marble floor below and straight into a coma from which he’d never wake.

She’d signed the “Do Not Resuscitate” order and gathered up his shredded clothes, while Jake sat quietly in the aqua vinyl chair under the TV in his uncle’s hospital room, just eight years old and already he’d seen his first dead, or dying, body. As she placed his things into the bag, a pack of Phillip Morris cigarettes rolled out of an unseen pocket and smacked to the floor.

She stood there, shocked for the moment, staring at the red rectangle on the gleaming white tile. She stood there, in this catatonia for several seconds, just staring, as if willing the pack up from the ground and back to its proper place with solely the power of her thought.

A howling sob burst forth as she tilted her head to the ceiling. Her body began to shake. Tears poured out of her swollen eyes and down her round freckled cheeks.

And, then it stopped. She breathed, no sucked, a large breath in, as if this brief moment’s passion had nearly suffocated her. She sighed out long and slow, brought her head level, stooped and picked up the pack, swivelled on her thick-heeled shoes and dropped it in the wastebasket next to the bed. She turned and exited, leaving Jake alone in the room with nothing but the rhythm of the heart monitor for company.

* * *

In the mustiness of the kitchen, his mother looked at him the way she looked at that small red pack of cigarettes, with fear, anger, regret and sadness.

Jake took a deep breath and the truth came flowing out of him like vomit.

* * *

She had dragged him into the bathroom by her patented underarm pinch and told him to open his mouth. She reached in the back of the medicine cabinet and drew out a grey-green bar of soap. It was Fels-Naptha. Craig was the only person who used that bar because it removed grease better than any other soap. Its grease-cutting power was attributed to the active ingredient of Naptha or “White Gas”. Jake’s eyes widened when he realized what was in store for him. She turned the tap on and ran the bar under the warm water. Jake’s jaw reflexively clamped tightly shut.

“Open”, she said. “I said:‘Open’”.

She grabbed his jaw and he opened it, forcing the bar into his mouth where it hit his tongue in all its chemical bitterness. His tongue drew back and triggered his gag reflex. His teeth clamped into the bar involuntarily. She placed her hand on his forehead to steady herself and yanked the bar out of his mouth. Jake shuddered violently as he felt the waxy shavings of soap dredged up by his teeth curl into the roof of his mouth. He tried to open his mouth to spit, but his Mother shoved his chin up, causing him to bite the tip of his tongue. This made his mouth water. He retched a bit, the foam shooting up the back of his throat into his nose. Now he could smell as well as taste the petroleum rankness. A few seconds later, his mouth slick with foamy lather, she released her hand and allowed him to spit.

“Maybe next time you’ll think twice before you lie to your Mother”.

She exited the bathroom. Jake stood retching soapy slightly gas-scented foam into the vanity bowl. He stuck his tongue under the running water, hurriedly cupping water into his mouth in an attempt to rinse out the inside. When the taste had subsided, he looked up at his reflection. The whites of his eyes were a bright pink, his nose was running and he was drooling. For a boy who’s Mother had nearly poisoned him he didn’t look half-bad.

He dried his tongue and the rest of his face on a sour hand towel and went into the kitchen, fully expecting to see his Mother breaking up the cigarettes into the garbage disposal. Instead the kitchen was empty. He reached in to the cupboard and took three Dolly Madison Zingers from the box his Mother had “hidden”. He opened the fridge and grabbed a can of Faygo Rock ‘n’ Rye --their version of Dr. Pepper-- and made his way to school.