wishbook

From under the living room sofa I pulled out the Wishbook catalog and took it out to the porch swing with my root beer float. For Christmas that year, Billie complained that there hadn’t been enough presents under the tree and so Dad promised us that he would turn our basement into a game room. He had described a room to us where we’d soon be shooting pool in, playing a quarter-free pinball machine, drinking soda and eating chips from a wet bar. “We’ll move the stereo down there, too,” he had said, “So you kids can have some parties . . .” But all he had done for the game room was coat the cinder-block walls with sheets of plywood and tacked up some posters of Lamborgini, Ferrari, Porsche – that sort of thing. This is how I got into the routine of the Wishbook catalog. I had every corner of what of my dream game room should consist of circled with a red pen: air hockey, Atari, bubble gum machine, beanbag chairs, etc. Plus there was one girl I really liked in the lingerie section. She had a round shell of black hair and was dressed in pair of white panties with a large baby-blue robe pouring over her shoulders. Not that I thought she belonged in our game room. I didn’t know where she belonged.

dad’s look

With a mix of resentment and respect, Dad explained, “There’s this guy at Taco Night. He’s not exactly a good looking guy. But he’s this ear and eye doctor in town so the women love him, right? I don’t see it though. I mean, okay, he drives a Saab. So what?” Dad’s eyes closed and his face filled with pleasure. “But you should see his ponytail though. Just perfect. His hair’s all one length and he does it so a couple of strands fall down the side of his face. Can you see what I’m saying here?” His eyes opened again and he studied his own profile. “That’s what I want . . .”

edisto

When my sister Billie graduated from high school she asked for a set of luggage to take with her to a new life in this place called Edisto. I’m not sure if Edisto ever existed but some trucker passing through Fast Jack’s had told her it was one of the best little vacation spots on the shores of South Carolina. The idea was that Billie and a friend of hers were to move down there, share an apartment, waitress at one of the hotels and then spend their free time on the beach. Graduation night came and went and the next day Billie started packing everything she could into the luggage Dad had given her. But then the friend she was to leave with called and told her that she was going to community college instead. Billie’s the kind of person that when she wants something then she doesn’t want anything else. Once she threw the phone down, she went right back to packing.

I helped her take the luggage out to her car – a Dodge Dynasty with a saggy felt ceiling filled with cigarette burns, a floor of Little King bottle caps and the weathered remains of scratch-off lottery tickets. The beach towels draped over the front seats, having absorbed Billie’s suntan oil over the years, gave the Dynasty its permanent smell of coconut and banana. When Dad asked her what her plan was now, she gave us each a half-hug goodbye and said she’d call us when she found out.

As the Dynasty turned out of the driveway, it wasn’t as if Dad and I turned away and had one of those moments where we wondered if we were ever going to see her again or not. It wasn’t one of those kind of goodbyes. Neither of us would admit it, but we were sort of relieved to finally see her go.  You don’t realize how much you care about a place until someone starts shitting on it.  All Billie had talked about for the last couple of months was how she couldn’t wait to get out of Bicknell.  The last thing Dad told her before she cranked up the radio before backing out of the driveway was, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do . . .”

Billie returned home four days later, the luggage gone, her clothes piled in the backseat of the Dynasty, and wearing a t-shirt that read Southern Chicks with little yellow chicks poking their heads out of eggs painted in the Confederate flag. Dad asked her what happened to the luggage and Billie explained that the closest she had come to finding someone else to go with were a couple of girls who were only willing to go as south as Gatlinburg so they could get a job at Dollywood. But Billie didn’t want Dollywood. She wanted Edisto – even if she had never been there.

international male

I was just a kid, but I could tell those early days of Taco Night were tough on Dad. He’d come home with the bouncer’s stamp smeared across his hand and Billie would ask how it went. Dad could only reach for his box of Cheese Nips at the top of the fridge and sigh, “All I want is somebody to do stuff with on the weekends. All I want is somebody to love.”

A quiet tension would settle over the house and for the next several days Dad would isolate himself by taking marathon showers and going to bed before nine o’clock until he’d find the nerve to crack open the new International Male catalog and invite us back into his world again. Getting ready for another Taco Night, he’d hit us with questions like: “Think these pleats are too wide? Can you tell I had the cuffs of my jeans redone or do they look natural? Do these loafers look better with or without socks? Which mousse is best for my hair? I heard tanning booths cause cancer. Is that true, guys?”

love is a battlefield

Once the boys are fed and entertained and put to bed, Billie and I will head out to the front porch. If anything can make me feel halfway human again after spending two days in the Peterbilt and then spending time with the boys it’s one of Billie’s Crown and Cokes. She squeezes like a whole lime into each one and there’s always plenty of ice.

We’ll sit there on in our separate lawn-chairs on the porch and she’ll go on about her bartending job at the Corral Club.  “I’m a one woman show,” Billie tells me. “If it weren’t for me that place would go up in smoke. I’m the waitress, the bartender, the dishwasher. I bus the tables. The men love me there because they know I’m not going to take their shit. They know they’ll be pulling back a stump if they get it in their head to pinch my ass. You know what they did today though? I was telling them how I haven’t been to the dentist in years and they got together and collected enough money to pay to get my teeth cleaned. You believe that shit? That’s really cool, you know? To have a little insurance like that?”

My sister was born with a leaky pupil in her left eye. Dad always said the leak made her look like a cat. Stone says it makes her look French. But to me, her leaky pupil always reminded me of a lock to something simple like a little girl’s jewelry box or a pair of plastic handcuffs.
“You’re lucky,” I told her, knowing she needed to hear it. “To have a little insurance like that is really good, Billie . . . Yeah, that’s good, Billie . . .”

The week before that she told me how Dan Quayle’s cousin came into the bar and gave her a fifty-dollar tip because she did such a good job of programming songs into the jukebox for him. And the week before that, it was some guy that said he knew one of the talent scouts for Rod Stewart and that Rod was looking for some back-up singers.

“So, I got the karaoke machine up and running and sang Love is a Battlefield for him and you know what he said, Sean? He said I was way above average. He said that I had a lot of heart. Can you imagine that? Just imagine . . . your sister singing for Rod Stewart. Imagine that.”

These are the good times.  Out on the porch with a Crown and Coke, sitting under the stars of Pearl City, with Billie dreaming of a bigger and brighter future, while the boys are sound asleep in their beds. 

i was like fuck no

Six weeks ago, my sister’s boyfriend, Stone, was picked up for a number of things – speeding, open-container, driving with a suspended license, not showing up for jury duty. A couple of joints and seven ounces of Crank were found in his pack of cigarettes, too. I was sitting there in the courtroom when the judge offered Stone a choice. He could either pay an eighteen hundred-dollar fine or spend a hundred and eighty days in jail. Stone said to the judge, “Choice my ass.  You think I got eighteen-hundred bucks to blow on this horseshit?” The judge brought down his gavel and gave him an extra sixty days for contempt. It took three cops to haul Stone out of the courtroom.

All of this came down to who was going to feed Stone’s two boys Robin and Adrian and who was going to make the payments on his trailer in Pearl City. Pearl City isn’t really a city but a part of town where all the bad things supposedly happen. But then you grow up and you realize Pearl City is just a trailer park where the poor people live.

Walking up to the courthouse that day, Stone told me, not asked me but told me, “Listen Sean, you’re gonna have to take my rig over if I end up serving any real time in jail.” Stone’s rig is an old Peterbilt, a top-over, with about a million miles on it that he’s been driving it up to a potato factory in Wisconsin and back for years. He made the trip two sometimes three times a week. I made the ride up there with him seven or eight times myself. A two-day ride up there and back, it had given us plenty of time to get to know one another. And I got to like Stone. Really like him. I got to see that he wasn’t just another guy that was servicing my sister. That’s what the woman who took my virginity called making love. She’d tell me, I need servicing, Sean.

I told Stone I wasn’t the man for the job. Sure, he had taught me the basics of handling the Peterbilt. And on our last trip, I had even driven the entire length of Indiana without a hitch. “But you can’t expect me to go up there all on my own,” I told him. “What if something happened? What if I get pulled over? Hell, I don’t even have a CDL license!”

“Horseshit,” Stone said. “You know how I got into this game? I was sitting at a tavern one night and this guy that I didn’t know from Adam ends up asking me if I’d ever been to California and I was like fuck no and then he asked me if I knew how to drive a truck and I was like fuck yes so he threw me the keys and told me, well, do her then and so I did her. I was out there two weeks before I got home. So don’t tell me you don’t know enough because I know how much you know and I’m telling you, you’re qualified. So help me feed my fucking kids, man. You know I can’t count on your sister to do it.”

the bookmobile driver

A week after moving into Little Bill’s house, Mom ran off with the Bookmobile driver. I was at the YMCA taking my first swimming lesson and Dad was at work. Billie was at home. She had even helped Mom pack. Not that my sister wanted Mom to leave, but she had been told that the two of them were going on a trip together – a mother and daughter vacation. Looks like Billie was the one that got fooled this time. When she went outside to put her things into the Le Mans, there at the end of our driveway was the Bookmobile, with Mom in it, pulling away.
No one ever saw Mom again.
And our library hasn’t had a Bookmobile since.
Dad traded in the Le Mans for a Le Sabre.
It took me two years to eventually go back into the water.
I never did learn to really float right.