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Things that confused him about their relationship.
What it was.
What it meant to him.
When he started finding the boy’s door blocked, a dresser shoved in front of it, that’s when he knew the extent of the damage she’d done. The damage she’d done to their trust.
Paul stopped talking to him. And he’d had no choice but to take things into his own hands, to find out what his son was up to.
And he found things. A few joints. Pills. A boom box and someone’s class ring, both obviously stolen. Girls sneaking in the window in the middle of the night. Girls he’d seen, and heard. Stood in the hall outside the boy’s room and heard them.
But it wasn’t enough. None of it was enough to make him feel like he was still inside his son’s life.
He just had to keep looking. Keep looking until he found the secret that would open his son back up to him.
Hector wakes up, reaches for his turntable and hits play.
The tone arm jerks and drops heavily onto the album that’s cued up and waiting to start his day. The speakers hiss and crack and then explode into “Memories of Tomorrow.”
The sound yanks him from bed and he pogos around the room, flailing his arms and bouncing off the walls.
Suicidal Tendencies got it right.
The Pistols were a great start. Dead Ke
He jumps on his bed, jumps from it to the twin his little brothers sleep on, bounces back and forth between them. The little fuckers must be up already. Up and outside, fighting with each other and talking back to their mom. Little pieces of shit.
Alexandra opens the door.
– Turn it down!
He bounces high off the bed and lands in front of her, smiling and jumping up and down.
– What?
– Turn it down, Hector, it’s awful! Turn it down.
He pogos higher, arms plastered to his sides, leaping.
– Turn it up?
– Down! Down!
– Louder?
– Heeeectoooor! Stooooop iiiiiiit! It’s awwwwwfuuuuuul!
He grabs her hands and drags her into his room, pulls her up on the bed and bounces.
– Dance, mija, dance to the music!
She tries to jerk free.
– Noooo, it’s not dancing! It’s not music! It’s awful!
He wraps his arms around her, bouncing, laughing.
– Dance with me, little sister.
– Moooooom! Muuuuuhhoooooom!
But she’s jumping with him now, her perfectly blownout hair mussed, her sharply creased khakis wrinkled, heavy eye liner smeared by tears as she laughs at her crazy big brother.
He lets her go and they jump up and down on the bed.
Their mom comes in.
– Mijo!
He flies off the bed and crashes off the wall, the record skips once, plays on.
He dances.
His mom puts her hands on his shoulders and tries to push him down, to stop the bouncing.
– Mijo! So loud! So loud!
But she can’t stop him. She’s laughing.
– Mijo, no, it’s too early. Come eat breakfast. Turn it off! Come eat.
He bounces to the turntable, lands, thrashes his head back and forth at the end of the song and takes the needle off the record, becoming still.
Alexandra climbs off the bed, ru
– Hectooor, you ruin my makeup. Mooom, look at my face.
She runs out the door and into the bathroom, where she’ll spend the next hour redoing her hair and makeup.
Their mom is still laughing.
– You look like a dancing fish, mijo. A fish.
He smiles.
– C’mon, Ma.
He puts the needle back down on the begi
She jumps up and down a few times with him, then frees her hands and covers her ears.
– Enough, mijo, enough! Too loud. Come eat.
She reaches out and grabs a fold of his belly skin between her thumb and index finger and gives it a twist.
– Eat!
He bounces free and moshes around the tiny room.
She waves her hands in the air and walks away, still laughing, the song thundering and ripping new cracks in the taped up speakers.
Through the open door he watches her walk back to the kitchen, where she spends her life minding pots of rice and beans and stewed pork and chicken.
His dad is in the livingroom, asleep on the couch already, his ruined leg propped on a kitchen chair, a bottle of his painkillers sticking out of his bathrobe pocket, a half empty gallon jug of Gallo on the floor.
Hector pushes the door closed and dances, slashing his hand up and down over the strings of an invisible guitar. The guitar he’ll have one day when high school is over and he takes BART into The City for the last time.
He’ll crash in a squat full of punks and put together a band and play that guitar when they gig at Mabuhay and he’ll take it on the road and he’ll see shit that he’s never go
He is a fucking punk.
And he sings.
Mass starvation
Contaminated water
Destroyed cities
Mutilated bodies
I’ll kill myself
I’d rather die
If you could see the future
You’d know why.
It’s hot in George’s attic room. All summer long he wakes up sweating. Today he wakes up sweating and screaming, having dreamed the El Camino ru
He sits on the edge of the bed, sweat coating his scalp under his long hair and ru
When he and Andy came home yesterday he told their folks he pulled an endo on a jump at the firebreak. His dad asked if his bike was in one piece while his mom cleaned the cuts with hydrogen peroxide. Andy had gone straight to his room.
You don’t want Andy around when you’re lying to mom and dad. Little spaz gets restless and starts talking too much and fucks it up.
But it wasn’t a big deal. Mom was relieved it was nothing that required a trip to the emergency room. Dad was satisfied that the bike wasn’t messed up. But he gave one of his speeches: Got to value the things money buys, the hard work that goes into making that money. You’ll need that. You’re not go
Big Bob Whelan, saying it like it is. Again. Telling him that everything has a cost. There’s no free rides and life’s not fair and there’s always assholes wherever you go. Work, work, work and get by and take a break on weekends and crack a beer and watch a game and show your kids how to mow a lawn and drywall a house and shovel rocks and play hard and there’s no such thing as second place wi