Dan Mender, Prison sous chef?

Gettin Weird Chapter 4.

But Bay Camp was then.

This is still now . . . Wally’s a cheap, easy drunk. His speech is always slurred from about his first half drink on, but his coordination is okay, and he’s never done any of the crazy-ass stuff that I’ve seen lots of kids do when they’re wasted.

“I gotta go home,” Wally says.

“I better drive ya.”

“Nah, I’m good.”

Actually, I’m more affected than Wally is, having started drinkin’ way before him, and he’s driven home lots of times after more drinks than this without ever having a problem. Knowing he had to drive so soon, Wally hasn’t had anything but straight Coca-Cola for the last half an hour. He had a slurry buzz on for a while, but he’s not drunk now.

“All right Wal-mart, you stay outta trouble, young man!”

“Oh yeah!” Wally answers and laughs

“You sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah, absolutely,” he says, not slurring at all.

“Okay bad dawg, drive careful!”

“Yep.”

As soon as Wally splits, I jump up and ditch the Bacardi in my bedroom closet.

I stare at my desk drawer. I must have looked at it ten thousand times while Wally was here. I open it, pull it way out, and grab Dad’s letter. Dan Mender. Damn. What’s in this stinkin’ thing? You were dead. Why didn’t you just stay dead? And why no word? Are you limited to one letter a month as a sous chef in prison? I turn the envelope over and over in my hands, lift it to my nose and sniff it. What the hell is that about? Did I think it would have perfume on it? I’m losin’ it big time.

I almost tear it open, but I stop. My hands aren’t shaking anymore, but my gut growls, and I feel beads of sweat trickling down from my armpits. Dad’s letter can wait a bit longer. Of course, I want to know what happened to make him just disappear. And yeah, I’m more than just curious, but I’m not curious enough to risk whatever bad stuff he might say or to listen to whatever lame-ass excuses he might try to offer. He’s been dead to me for five years, and I’d learned to accept that. But I hate his guts for letting me believe he was dead. I jam the letter back into the drawer, intentionally wrinkling it like I’m punishing the paper.

I can’t read it yet. I won’t. Besides, I’m busy. I’ve got to get dinner ready.

I head down to the kitchen.

Our kitchen is small, with an old noisy fridge and an equally beat-up old stove. I pull out a thing called Southwestern Meatloaf from the freezer and toss it into the oven with three baked potatoes. I open a can of green beans and mix it with a can of chopped tomatoes in a beat-up silver saucepan, all carefully prepared with secret spices (if Johnny’s Seasoning and garlic powder can be described as ‘secret’). The whole time I’m cooking, I’m trying not to worry about the letter. Being busy makes this easier to do.

I’ve become a pretty decent cook since quitting school. Oh yeah, in case I forgot to mention it, I’m a high school dropout. So, most days I make dinner for Joey and Mom and me—hey, even a dropout needs to develop a few skills, maybe I’ll be a fry cook in prison someday.

As for quitting school, I wasn’t gonna graduate anyway, not the way things were going. And is there any place in the world more horrible and boring and useless than high school? I got a job but got laid off after only three weeks, which totally bummed me out. Even though putting words up, one letter at a time, on a big overhead sign.

Milk and Beer on Sale

Get Your Lottery Tickets Here!

…ain’t exactly a dream career, but at least it was something to do every day, something to kill some time. Still, even after only those three weeks, when I got laid off school was already a distant memory to me. I’ve had a couple of other jobs since then and I use the money for booze and my cell phone. Mom doesn’t make me pay rent because I’m supposedly studying for my G-E-D, which, in truth, I may or may not ever take. I only look at the G-E-D study guide when I can’t think of anything better to do. This is usually when I’m too hungover to do anything else.

When mom gets home from work, she walks in and yells, “Hi guys.”

I answer, “Hey Mom.”

Joey doesn’t say anything, but he usually doesn’t hear her, studying in his room with his iPod jammed into his ears.

In a few minutes, we’re all ready for dinner. I’ve set the table too: Slightly stained brown placemats, paper napkins, cheap but matching plates, and sort of foggy old drinking glasses, faded forks, knives, and spoons. I put the tomato-and-green beans mix and baked potatoes in separate serving bowls and the meatloaf on a big white platter. We all sit down.

“Did you study today, Honey?” Mom asks me.

“A little,” I answer.

 “Good,” Mom says to me, smiling, “keep it up.”

Joey kind of snorts and asks, “We got any ketchup?”

I answer, “Yeah, sorry, I forgot to put it out.” I walk to the fridge, glad to avoid eye contact with Mom for the moment. Technically, I noticed the G-E-D book sitting on my desk next to the half-gallon of Bacardi earlier, so I might have almost thought about studying. I know, I know, pretty lame.

We’re all seated together, a nice little family scene, minus a chair for Dad, but it’s been that way for over five years.

The whole education thing is really important to Mom and God knows I’ve put her through enough grief already. When Joey and I got in all the trouble last year, Mom was battling cancer. She had to do chemo and radiation treatment and we had to go on welfare and all other kinds of embarrassing stuff. After a while of feeling like a loser, it makes you crazy. Why crazy? Well, take the time that a grocery store check-out guy gave me this sneering, killer stare for handing him our Welfare food card. I was buying a bunch of noodles and vegetables and hamburger and chicken legs and other inexpensive cuts of meat, milk, and bread, all of it healthy, good-for-you stuff. And at the very end, he comes to one small, cheapest-available half quart of vanilla ice cream and he asks, still sneering, “You want to buy this on your welfare card too?” He said it loud enough so that the other customers could hear him. I almost punched him right there.

Dad was this way too. When he’d see those free turkey giveaways they always have before every Thanksgiving, and people standing in a long line waiting for the handout, he hated it. He loathed The Tree of Sharing, where rich people donate so that poor kids can get some kind of lame-ass Christmas present because their own folks can’t afford to buy them anything. Dad once said he’d do anything, anything rather than look at himself in the mirror and say, “You can’t afford to buy your own kid even a damned coloring book and some crayons? You don’t have the guts to walk into Toys-R-us and swipe a damned two-dollar action figure?” That was Dad then, Mr. Cool's Family Values. I always liked the way he talked about that stuff and agreed with him. Of course, if you got busted shoplifting and they sent you to jail, that wouldn’t be a real holly-jolly Yuletide either. And obviously, whatever ‘values’ Dad claimed when he was talkin’ that way didn’t slow him down much when it came time to disappear from our lives. I know that I will never find out what it would be like to abandon a wife and kids because I’d never do something like that.

As we’re finishing dinner, Mom asks “How was your day Joey?”

“Good Mom.” He answers.

I wonder if Joey ever notices that Mom always calls me, ‘Honey’ or ‘Sweetie’ and always calls him ‘Joey’? It’s not that Mom loves me more—it’s just that . . . well . . . I know she loves me differently than she loves Joey and even if it isn’t ‘more’ I think she and I are a lot closer. Joey is a strange guy: he doesn’t like to be hugged; he always sees everything in life as completely black and white, right or wrong; there are never two ways to look at anything in Joey’s worldview. That’s just how he is. Ever since we were little kids, Joey has just seemed, I don’t know what you’d call it, seemed to have some part of himself . . . missing. He’s never cared when he gets in trouble, at least not in the way of feeling bad about anyone other than himself. He has never flinched at seeing something like a dog run over by a car. Never showed any emotion at all at seeing animals or people hurt or even got a tear in his eye watching a sad movie. Joey fakes like he gets it, but he doesn’t. Mom loves him but I don’t think she feels close to him; nobody can get very close to Joey. I wonder if Joey would be different if Dad hadn’t walked out.

Dinner done, Joey and I clear the dishes. I think I’ll go ahead and read Dad’s letter once we’re through here. The thought of doing this makes my stomach flip over but I must do it sometime. I get the chills thinking about it.

But now the phone rings. I’m closest to it, so I grab it.

“Hello”

“Alan, it’s Wally.”

“Hey Wal, what’s happening? You home?”

“Nope”

“Where are you?”

Wally takes a quick deep breath, “I’m in jail.”