“Bonnie?”
“Who else calls you Suuuuuun, silly?”
“But. What?” I can’t find the words. It’s been years and yet her voice is so familiar, like the sound of birds in a tree. She sings a silly little song, “Mouse-kateer, Mouse-kateer, we can’t wait ’til you get here.” There’s something ancient, a memory, like everything from Synanon before the move, before the bad men with their clubs in Berkeley who made us come here to hide in the rain.
“But what are you doing there with my dad?”
She says he just showed up one day. She opened the door and he was standing on her doorstep in his socks with his boots in his hand. “That was three months ago. He won’t leave. I can’t get rid of him so we shacked up.”
“Shacked up?”
“Yep. That dad of yours is one crazy guy. He can’t wait to see you next week. Every night he wakes me up and says, ‘Are they here yet? Are they here yet?’”
The warmth in her voice seems out of place in Salem, Oregon. She says, “Okay, Suuuuuun, I love you.”
“I love you too.”
It’s different from how those words are spoken in the house on Breys Avenue, which is like a question I’m supposed to know the answer to. These words are more like when your feet are cold from cleaning the rabbit barn in the rain so you come inside and put them next to the woodstove to watch the water steam off your shoes. I thought maybe I dreamed her up but there she is on the other end of that phone, “shacked up” with my dad somewhere near the ocean on the other side of the mountains a million miles away.
* * *
I PROMISED MYSELF I would memorize the details of Dad better this time. How he looks, how he talks, the way he walks. I go through the checklist in my head. Curly black hair like an Afro. Mustache. Tan neck. The boots. The jeans. The lines on his face around his eyes when he smiles. That cackle. The slight dip and the swing of the arms as he turns on the heel of his boot. When we land at the airport in Los Angeles, I see him standing next to Bonnie at the end of the hallway. He’s got a goofy smile and she’s decked out in a long purple dress, hanging on his arm with her curly dark brown hair. I can’t even walk the last twenty feet so I run and throw my arms around his neck as he lifts me up and says, “Hey, dude. You’re here. You’re actually here.”
Bonnie squeezes me. “Suuuuuun! Did they let you fly the plane?! I heard they let you do that sometimes.”
Their apartment in Playa del Rey is only blocks from the ocean. On the way home from the airport, Bonnie takes us down a highway where you can see the waves and the sand, the big oil tankers parked offshore and the people playing in the surf. The apartment is on a sunny street at the back of a courtyard with a redbrick wall under a huge purple tree called a jacaranda that Dad says sounds like a kind of snake.
There’s ice cream in the fridge and big bottles of soda pop, string cheese and crackers, potato chips, frozen dinners, Popsicles, burritos and fruit. We can’t believe our luck. We’ve never seen so much food. Tony asks Dad if we can really have string cheese anytime we want. He gives him a strange look. “Sure. Of course. If you’re hungry, eat.” We fill our bellies with Fruit Roll-Ups and bags of Fritos, microwave taquitos and celery with peanut butter and raisins.
At night we sit with Dad while he watches the Dodgers, smoking his Marlboro Lights and drinking a six-pack of white Budweiser cans. Nobody seems to care that he drinks in the house, or that he drinks at all. He doesn’t seem any different after the sixth beer than he did after the first. He just talks louder, yelling at the TV, “Dodger blue, my ass. These bozos play like a junior high rec team.”
“Dodger blue, my ass!” we yell in unison.
I know Mom would say that once an addict always an addict and therefore Dad shouldn’t be drinking and she may be right but it just doesn’t feel bad. Maybe because he’s in the house. Maybe because it’s just beer, not heroin. Maybe it’s as simple as he doesn’t leave.
He likes to talk about sports, about people I know nothing about. “Kareem was un-guardable last year. Un-guard-able. The release on that skyhook is like nine feet in the air. Watchu gonna do, climb a fuckin’ ladder?” I make a mental note of phrases so I can repeat them later to the kids back in Salem. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Un-guardable. Fuckin’ ladder.
We hang all over him, grabbing on to his neck and pulling on his arms. “You got to do some push-ups, kid.” He picks us up, tying us into pretzels as we try to wrestle him to the ground.
He sends us for cigarettes at the Dales Jr. Market down the street. “Here, tell the guy they’re for your dad. Marlboro Lights, in the hard box.” He gives Tony five bucks. He never asks for change so we spend it on Starburst and Hershey bars, asking for quarters for the Donkey Kong Jr. next to the door where we play doubles.
We sleep in the living room on the fold-out couch. It’s never completely dark because of the huge window bringing the moonlight and electric lights from the courtyard.
He takes us to his shop where he’s the manager, overseeing the mechanics like he did in Synanon, the team of Goodyear Tire salesmen. The place is called Foogerts, in the center of the city on a busy intersection. There’s a showroom with walls stacked floor to ceiling with tires. Next to it is a hydraulic lift where they put the cars when they change the tires with noisy air guns pulling off the lug nuts with one squeeze of a trigger. One of his mechanics says, “Hey, Jimmy! You see that shit on lift two?”
Dad says, “Yeah, fucking Fiats, man. Too many hoses and wires. How do you drive a thing like that? Those I-talian engineers.” He looks at us with a wink. “The Italians take too many lunch breaks. They made shitty tanks too. The old lady used to say if it wasn’t for Fiat, Mussolini would’ve stayed in power and Italy wouldn’t have switched sides. Bad Italian engineers are the reason we don’t speak German.”
At night I drift into the bedroom where Bonnie is reading Stephen King or Danielle Steel. I sit by her side or sometimes I curl into the bend of her knee as she lies sideways. We call this my “favorite spot.” She says, “So, Suuuuuun, you bored with baseball? You got a girlfriend in that school of yours yet or what?”
We lie on our backs looking up at the ceiling, discussing school or how mean Tony is or her family or Dad or our mom. She’s horrified by the rabbits. “So you have to cut their heads off? That’s terrible.” I tell her it’s not so bad and you got to eat anyway.
She tells me about her job where she does phone sales and what it was like in Synanon when they made her get divorced from her husband, Eddie, who she loved. She seems so confused by it. She wanted to stay married but Eddie believed in the “Synanon system.” “We got to trust it,” he said. “We came this far.”
The Old Man said that the marriages had to end and that was that. Either people got divorced or they left.
“I didn’t know what to say. This was my husband telling me he was going off to be with another woman.” All the couples were paired with other people by the Old Man and Eddie liked the woman he was paired with, Emily Durst. “She was pretty, I guess,” Bonnie says, wiping her nose with her hand. She was paired with Lenny Dickenson who was short with bad breath. She wanted to leave but stay married. But Eddie wanted to stay which meant divorce. “So we got divorced and here I am.” She lets out a bitter laugh.