* * *
TONY FIGHTS WITH Dad at night. He sneaks out of his room and doesn’t care if he gets caught. He comes home in the middle of the night drunk or high or both, sneaking in through the bathroom window. He screams at Dad, “You can’t tell me what to do!”
Dad says, “Oh yes I can! This is my house, mothafucker!” Tony leaves and Dad tells Bonnie he’s calling the cops because he doesn’t know what else to do. He picks up the phone, calls the police station and screams, “My son is out of control!” then hangs up before saying his name or address.
Dad says he’s just trying to keep him alive, just trying to get him to his next birthday before he kills himself. He says this like he’s been there before. He kicked heroin himself. He dealt with endless Dope Fiends in Synanon. “There’s no easy fix here,” he says. “Maybe he will die. I don’t know. It’s his choice.”
He says this like he doesn’t care, with a shrug of his shoulders, snarling his lips into a scowl, but afterward, as the words settle over the room, as they fill up a corner and grow monstrous in size, his face changes and he only looks scared. Tony will apologize and Dad will forgive him immediately. Bonnie wants to ground him but Dad says he doesn’t want to be “too hard on him. That he needs to stay connected.”
Bonnie calls him an enabler and Dad says, “What do you want me to do? Let him die?” She shakes her head and goes into the bedroom, and when he walks out in the morning to go to the track, she tells me that he just sees too much of himself in Tony.
One night there’s a call at the house saying Tony’s been arrested for possession of marijuana. He’s in jail somewhere in the valley. “What did you say?” Bonnie asks Dad when he hangs up the phone.
“I said, ‘Good.’”
“So we’re not going to pick him up?”
“No. Let him figure out his own way home. He needs some tough love.” At the Al-Anon meetings in Salem everyone said alcoholics need “tough love,” which means you don’t just “enable their addiction by bailing them out of all their bullshit.” Dad is an expert on this. Until he isn’t.
Tony arrives at the house five hours later. He walks in the door and screams, “You were just going to let me stay there?” Bonnie won’t even look at him. She says she’s glad he made it home and it was his father’s decision and if he’d like to talk about it that’s fine but she will not be yelled at.
Dad walks into the room and screams, “You need to change your tone, my friend!”
Tony gets up in his face and says, “Or else what? I had to beg people for money and take four buses to get here, so don’t you fucking tell me sh——”
Dad yells, “You need a fucking attitude adjustment! You hear me?! A fucking attitude adjustment! You think you can just do anything you want! You’re gonna fucking kill yourself!” Dad walks up to him.
Tony screams at the top of his lungs, “What, are you gonna fuckin’ hit me?! You can’t do anything to me, you burnout piece of shit! I don’t need to be here if you don’t want me here!”
Dad is standing right in front of him, face-to-face. His face looks sad, scared. Tony is breathing hard, tears falling down his cheeks. Just as I think maybe Dad is going to let loose or sock him one in the jaw, he puts his arms around Tony and hugs him. I see Tony resist for a second, his black karate shoes shuffling on the carpet. But then he gives in and lays his head on Dad’s shoulder and starts sobbing.
Bonnie raises an eyebrow and looks at me. Soon they’re talking in the bedroom, all three of them. I can hear Tony pleading something over and over again. “But they’re my friends. They’re my friends…” Eventually, he walks out of the room and straight out the front door.
He doesn’t call or come back home that night.
The next night I leave the Bowl with some of the older kids and walk to the Bluffs. I’ve been hanging out with Tony’s friends after school since the day Ryan Church’s mom saw me smoking on a corner with my skateboard. Word got around to the other PTA moms and now none of the kids from my classes are allowed to hang out with me after school because I’m officially a bad “influence.” So even though I hang out with Ryan and Drew at school every day, after school I’m always with Tony’s friends.
I’m wearing my green basketball jersey because I have a game in the morning at the park league I joined with some of the kids from my classes. When we get to the top of the hill, we see a group of boys standing in a circle holding drinks in brown paper bags. I see Tony in the circle with them.
“Heeeeey, little bro,” he says and punches me in the shoulder. “You want a sip?” He hands me his forty of Olde English. I take a drink. It tastes like kerosene mixed with beer. After a few minutes, I feel lighter, that warm embrace, that relief, like maybe all this fighting is just a joke and Tony doesn’t need a home and neither do I. We are pirates at sea and besides we’re on the same team, so I’m just glad I’m not the one he’s mad at.
“Are they pissed?”
“I think so. Where have you been?”
“Just crashing with Duck and Flesh on their floor.” Duck and Flesh are Donald and David Fleishman, two brothers who live in an apartment down by the gas company in Playa del Rey. Duck is thin with the face of a forty-year-old man, even though he’s Tony’s age. Flesh is his younger brother who is only a year older than I am. At fourteen, he’s the only one close to my age. Because their mother is gone so much, their place is the go-to crash pad for Tony and his friends. They both have motorcycles, so some days they ride with us, with their full body gear, their matching shoulder pads and shin guards and kidney belts.
“Oh, cool.”
“I never thought Dad would get in my face like that.” Tony stares at the ground, kicking the dirt with his karate shoes. “Like maybe Paul or Doug or something but not Dad.” He lights a Marlboro Menthol and takes a drag. I can’t keep up with his brands anymore.
“Yeah, he was really pissed. I think he’s worried about you, though. He keeps saying how he’s just trying to keep you alive.” Tony nods his head and spits with his eyes closed as if to say, Well, yeah.
To be a drunk is to be a hero in a sad story.
Someone gives me a can of beer. We drink a few and a neighborhood security car arrives. The lights go off and a young man with a goatee in a thick brown jacket gets out, opening a door that says “Security Patrol.” They all yell, “Rent a cop!” as he walks down to the circle and bumps fists. Someone hands him a pipe packed with weed. The security patrolman takes a hit. Everyone laughs.
After a few beers, someone suggests maybe it’s time for a little destruction. They throw their arms around each other’s shoulders and form a circle around the pile of empty beer cans. Someone grabs me, pulling me into the circle as we sing:
This is a world destruction. Your life ain’t nothing!
The human race is becoming a disgrace!
We hop into Duck’s VW beast and head to the apartment by the gas company where we finish a case of beer then run out into the alley. “We’re just gonna do a little minor damage,” Duck says to me as we run out the door. I don’t know what to expect. I’ve seen them write graffiti on walls with big industrial pens or cans of spray paint. But this is different. It’s wild bodies fanning out into the street like those old zombie movies, mindless and aimless.