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It was somewhere near the end of sixth grade, the final six week period. My grades were falling and I was afraid of finals. They weren't close yet, weeks away, but that's forever to a twelve year old. The teachers were pushing us to devote our free time to studying but I didn't know how.
Weeks was an eternity to do nothing but study for something I didn't care about. For something meaningless in my mind. For something that could change nothing and only lead to a series of six more somethings that were the exact same thing I had already been doing for the last six years, which was half my life. They were yet another eternity each, the coming grades, and they all lead to what I was working for, but graduation was something I had never chosen for myself. Something I never understood, only knew I had to do.
Every morning, wake up, go to school, come home, work on school work, go to sleep, wake up, go to school. Over and over and over. So redundant. My motivation was draining before but now it was dead. Literally. My mother, who had encouraged me, who even inspired me with road trips to museums in other cities, complete with planetariums and King Tut's traveling tomb tour, was dead.
I guess I loved her. I think I did. It's hard to recall really, but all my relatives told me they knew how much I loved her and that they all loved her too and that they knew exactly what I was going through because they were going though it too. It looked to me like they were going through something else entirely as they choked back the sobs that mangled and distorted their words, making them sound like half trained walrus rejects from Sea World.
"I oved har oww ark!" Their faces were equally twisted by blubbery giggles of flesh as they made strange, suffocating expressions that were enhanced by too much makeup and running mascara stains from the tears that streamed down their faces.
The men just looked tired. My Father was dead now, too. Not really, he was alive, but it was different. He was a zombie, there was no spark, no animation, no more smiles and playful teasing. He made no effort to pretend anything going on around him was of interest. He just stared off into space mostly, often ignoring even direct attempts to speak with him.
Three months later, just a couple weeks after my uncelebrated birthday, it happened.
He woke me up early in the morning. Real early. Sometime after midnight but hours before sunlight would reanimate the world in a way the two of us would never feel animated again. He shook me awake and said, “Come on.”
“Huh?”
“Get dressed, we gotta go.”
“Where...”
“Put your clothes on son, it's time you learned how to be a man.”
I had no idea what he meant. I'm not sure he even knew what he meant but I could tell there was no arguing. He was somber but forceful and I had reached a point in living where I often felt like I was watching a movie pass by, so I didn't argue.
My movie had characters made just for me, that only interacted with my camera according to what I did, but was still somehow an illusion, something that didn't really matter. I had gotten bored with my movie but kept watching anyway because I had nothing better to do and didn't care about anything anymore, so I just followed directions and let events take their course.
He lead me through the house, out the kitchen lined with dozens of empty beer and liquor bottles that were never drank when Mom was alive, but would never be cleaned up now that she was dead, and into the garage.
“Get in,” He said. I did.
He drove us out of the suburbs, through midtown and into downtown, where the street people and drunken bums where around every corner, asking for change or shuffling from one spot of nowhere-to-go to the next. They mumbled incoherently about things only they new about, if that.
On the way my father told me life is tough. Life isn't fair. Life is hard. I already knew the first two, as if my mother dying hadn't convinced me, but I had never found living hard. It wasn't much of a challenge for me, until now. But life is hard, I was about to learn.
“There,” he said. “that one,” Pointing to a smallish, late middle-aged man in an old coat and ragged shoes that was turning a corner into an alley. The man tilted his paper covered bottle up to his lips and tilted his head back all the way, trying to get the last few drops of what must have been his second or third quart of the night. Empty, he tossed it away as my father pulled up in the empty street.
“Kick his ass.”
“What?”
“Kick his FUCKING ASS!”
“I'm not touching him!” I protested.
“GodDamnItSon!” he screamed as he wrenched open his door, threw himself out and started marching around the back, the car idling in the empty road. “Life is fucking hard!” He yelled as he worked his way around to my door. “Life is fucking tough as a mother fucker, and by God, you will be too -GOD DAMNIT!”
He threw open my door and yanked me out by my arm, knocking my head on the roof as I went. The bum, no longer in his own little world, just turned and watched, silent.
“Kick his ass.” my Father stated again, nudging me towards the bum. I held my hand to the back of my head and looked at the small, drunken, pathetic man with grooves stretching out from the corners of his eyes, and the gray, patchy beard on his grimy face.
“But...”
“NOW!”
I timidly walked up to the bum, who just stood there, silent, watching his movie, and lightly punched him in the chest.
“Hey!” he garbled in an unfamiliar accent, “Gerroff...” and lightly pushed me away.
“MOTHERFUCKERRRRRR!” my father screamed.
Now the bums expression changed. From nothing, his face slowly contorted into fear, to understanding, to resignation. Or maybe it wasn't slow, maybe I was slow. Or maybe my comprehension was working at the same pace as this homeless mans was. I don't know.
What happened next was strange and frightening, like sneaking your first horror movie as a kid in the basement, while your parents slept upstairs. Tense... gripping. Something you dearly do not want to see but cannot help but watch anyway, helplessly as it all unfolds before your eyes.
My Father came from behind me and slammed his fist into the bums face, temporarily trapping me in-between the two men. I smelled the dank, stark, burning order of a man who hasn't cleaned himself in months. I felt the grit of his filth stick to my face before he fell away and to the ground.
“What the fuck is wrong with you!” my father asked urgently, pulling me to his face as he bent down to look at me. “Never let a man push you around like that!”
The irony was lost on him.
He walked a few feet into the alley and grabbed a cheap, aluminum trash can as he continued to lecture me.
“When someone lays a hand on you, you defend yourself. If he insists on starting something physical, you finish it.” He raised the can over his head. “You do...” he paused and strained as he brought the large, metal can down on the bums head, emphasizing the next word, “Whatever! ...You have to do to end him.”
The bum had been attempting to lift himself off the concrete but fell flat as the force of my fathers blow bent the container around his head.
“Now,” my Father continued, picking up the bottle the bum had discarded and handing it to me. “Finish him.”
There was blood on the concrete. Nothing huge like what you see in the movies, no giant puddle, just a little splatter from my fathers initial punch and a few drops dripping from the mans nose now, as he tried to rise again.
I stared at him, lifting the bottle half way up. He turned his head to look at me looking at him. Our two unrelated movies of emotional detachment, now linked by the rage and force of my fathers violence, just took note of the others film in progress and kept on shooting. Them shooting us shooting them shooting us and on and on into eternity.
He had blank, empty eyes. The bum had seen this scene dozens of times before and was bored by it. Now he was just waiting for it to end. I saw this. I saw into his mind, into anyones mind, for the first time. I knew what he felt without him telling me, and I knew now, that I wasn't alone in the world.
I burst into tears, sobbing uncontrolably. The empty bottle, held like a club, dropped to my side as I stood there balling at the thought of this mans tragic, empty existence.
“Gimmie that!” my father hissed, snatching the bottle from my hand. He hefted it over his head and shattered the glass over the other mans cranium, spraying sparkly bits across the sidewalk. A few stuck in the growing puddle of blood, catching the light, before the bum collapsed back into his own fluids.
A siren screamed to life in the distance. “C'on,” my father sighed, obviously disappointed in me.
On the ride back home I stared out the window, looking at other homeless drunks hover past my window, my viewing screen. I wondered how many of them were also my soul mates, like the bleeding man we just left on the sidewalk.
Fuck school I thought, there's no one for me there.
A few years later, after breaking the nose of a kid two grades behind me in the school yard, I walked off campus and never returned. Life's hard, I thought, but so am I.
