SellingMannysGrill.com

“Yes?”

“Are we actually going to do something, today?”

“Probably, yeah. What do you want to do?”

He leaned back in the sofa and breathed like a colt, his lips flapping as the air trickled out, disappointed. Jake hoped Dad actually planned something for once. Every Saturday afternoon I showed the kid that disappointment doesn’t necessarily have to correlate with expectations. Just because you know you’re about to be let down doesn’t make the hit any less painful, or in his case, any less surprising.

“Well I don’t know. What do you want to do?” he asked.

For his 8th birthday a few months back, we went to Great Adventure. We rode the ferris wheel, and I vomited on a retarded Asian boy in the cart in front of us. He thought it was hilarious – the retarded boy that is. Jake thought it might lead to another one of my fights. I struggled to think of something without a negative precedent in place.

“Dad?” he asked again after I hadn’t suggested a thing.

“Yeah?”

“Did you try to kill yourself?”

I had tried to kill myself.

“What? Of course not. That’s insane. Where’d you hear that?”

“Mom told me.”

“Mom told you? Wait hold on. Was she on the phone talking to someone and you overheard, or did she actually say to you specifically that I tried… that?”

“No, she told me. I asked if you and her were happy, and she said she was, but that she didn’t think you were because you tried to kill yourself. She said that you tried to take a bunch of pills but that you didn’t do it because you drank too much, and then when you–”

“Ok, ok, she told you!… Jesus, Jake.”

I leaned back in the sofa, parallel to the boy. We both pretended to be alone, each serving the roll of the 800 pound gorilla to the other, respectively. The living room felt like some weird sauna-prison cell hybrid, only with lots of glass. I had a few vases on coffee tables and dining tables. They were empty. Real flowers required effort. Fake flowers are stupid. It smelled like Jake, or any 8 year old boy, like a junkyard dog that ran through a car-wash. We were working on a puzzle that his mother bought thinking it’d be something we could connect over. The pilgrims and the Indians eating squash and corn and turkey without gravy. Thanksgiving was a week ago. The puzzle felt dated. Fabricated.

“So did you?” he asked. I hadn’t realized he had been looking right at me the whole time. What the hell was I supposed to say?

“I was going to,” I said, sighing, still staring at the puzzle, mimicking giving a shit. “But I didn’t.”

“Why?”

Eyes roll.

“I — listen I don’t know, Jake. What Mom said. I drank a lot of beers and I fell asleep before I got the chance.”

“How did she know then?”

“I called your house in the middle of the night and told her I was going to do it, I think. I’m not sure. It was weeks ago and I barely remember it.”

“Weren’t you afraid it was going to hurt?” he asked.

“Nah, not really, I said. “They were sleeping pills. The idea was that I would be drunk from all of the beer, and then I’d go take the entire bottle of pills, and hopefully it would have been enough to sleep forever. It doesn’t hurt when you’re asleep, right?”

“I guess not,” he said. He still looked confused. I really didn’t understand what he wasn’t getting.

“But why would you want to kill yourself?”

“Why? I don’t know, really. Sometimes life can do that to you. Remember in your first year at Laurelton when — didn’t something happen with you?”

“Huh?”

“Like, some kid was really giving you a hard time. Locked you in a dumpster or something?”

“Oh… no. He–”

“He what?” I insisted.

“He pulled down my pants in front of the whole school at lunch,” he said, his head dipping towards the puzzle. I, subsequently, was now looking at him.

“Right, ok! That’s it. Perfect example. So this guy pulled down your pants, and your — what do you guys call it — a weiner? Your weiner was out there and everyone had to be laughing, right? Girls probably turned away and didn’t want to look because that’s really traumatizing for kids that age.”

“Yes,” he said, eyes closed.

“Now that was horrible, wasn’t it? Didn’t it make you want to just… die? No, let me rephrase that, didn’t you want to kill the guy?”

“Ye- Yes, I did,” he said, welling up now.

“But you couldn’t right? Because you knew you’d get in trouble.”

“Uh-huh.”

“See Jake, after a long time, that’s what makes you want to do it. Over and over again people will do things to you in life. Some of them will be good, most bad, but no matter what, you’ll never be allowed to do anything about it because it’s against the law, or whatever. And you know what? It gets really frustrating and you need to take it out on someone, even if that “someone” is yourself. And I mean listen Jake, don’t get me wrong here — I’m not saying you should do this, but do you understand why I did it, now? Or why I wanted to do it? Like I said, I drank too much beer and fell asleep before I got a chance, but do you get why I wanted to?”

“Na- no, not really, Dad. Don’t you love me and Mommy?”

“Well, I love you, but not Mommy, really. But of course I love you!”

I put my arm around him and rubbed his shoulders and kissed the top of his head. This was the best father-son moment we had in a long time and I wasn’t going to let it slip.

“You’re the most important person in the world to me. You know that, don’t you? Have you ever heard the expression, the sum of the parts doesn’t equal the whole?” I asked.

“I don’t think so? What’s that mean?”

“It’s what happens when someone has a lot of good things, but for some reason, it isn’t enough to make that person happy or successful. Like a baseball team with a lot of star players but doesn’t win games because they don’t have chemistry. That’s sort of how I felt. I have you, I make good money, I have a nice home, me and Mommy are still sort of friends I guess, I have great metabolism, and I never have to leave the house, ever. Based on all of that, I should be the happiest guy alive, but the sum of the parts just didn’t equal the whole.”

“But why not? Why didn’t it equal the whole?”

“Well, I really don’t know, Jake. That’s a good question.”

It was a good question, and I really didn’t know. The night I planned on going through with it was one of the more screwed up evenings I’d endure. I have this housekeeper. Marina. Very typical of the housekeeper cliché. Early 40s. Sort of speaks English. Sort of inefficient. The only thing that separated her from the rest of the housekeepers was that she sort of had a little bit of a coke problem, and by that I mean she’d do lines off the ironing board.

Anyway, she’d come by once or twice a week. Usually she’d vie for two sessions — it helped support the coke situation I assume. Nine times out of ten I’d tell her I didn’t really care and if she wanted to clean the house twice, I’d pay her twice, but that particular week I had planned the suicide. Even in that unenviable mental state, the prospect of the coked-out Marina trying to articulate my demise — in broken English — to the 911 operator was just too dreadful to allow. I swear to Christ I thought I told her not to come in that afternoon, but sure enough, there she was, a mop gyrating like a vibrator in her trembling hands, ready to give the place a good once-over.

“I ready to clean, Mr. Wyndam!” she said, calling me Mr., followed by my first name just like the slaves did — only instead of plantation cotton picking, the poor woman was stuck picking raisins off the floor of her drunken, suicidal Master’s kitchen. I had already finished off a bottle of Jack, although I told my Son it was beer. I didn’t want to set a bad example. The last inebriated moments before blacking out can be some of the more dreadful “memories” a man will ever have. For whatever God forsaken reason, I figured I was just drunk enough to solicit her.

Before I continue on, it’s important to stress that I never had thoughts of raping the woman, or at least that was never my intention. I’ll let you be the judge.

“You can — can you start upstairs, in the bedroom?” I winked, sprawled out on the very same sofa where I spoke with my son. If Satan were human, he would’ve been my identical twin at that moment. I tossed the vial of pills up and down in my hand, gleaming with the same confidence of a pitcher with a baseball. I wore one flip flop, the other having gone missing at an undetermined point in that evening’s timeline. A soft core pornographic film manned the television, a hunk-of-junk big screen from the mid-90s.

“Ahh — Ok Mr. Wyndam, do I start with –”

“-you have any coke?” I interrupted?”

“Pardon, Senior?”

“Coke… like cocaine,” I said, making sniffling sounds.

She stood in the door way, somehow her heart racing even faster, unable to speak, unable to stand completely still.

“Listen. Marina. Sweetheart. I could care less – or – I mean, I couldn’t – that’s the expression. It’s great, honey. I’ve seen you do it. I’ve seen you do it right here. In my house. In my laundry room. Next to my good tie.”

“Oh Mr. Wyndam, I so sorry, I –”

“Babe, you’re not listening,” I said, staggering to my feet. “I dig that you dig that, you know? It’s all good. I-want-to-party.”

It was strange. It may have been the way the light gleamed off her smooth, extra skin. The way she struggled with the concept of an abstract noun. I wanted to help her. I wanted to make her my little French (Hispanic) maid. My foreign Goddess. Not just my slave — my sex slave as well. You’ve got to understand — I had given up on a lot of things. My ex-wife was my best friend. I wouldn’t marry anyone else, but couldn’t stand the concept of living with her, either. I was a regular embarrassment to Jake, the only living thing on the planet naive enough to look up to me (I never had a dog. The cat ran away years ago). She just seemed so controllable.

“Mr. Wyndam, I…”

“Yes, Marina?”

“I think I go now. You-you no have to pay me. I go now. I see you next week.”

“Woah, woah, listen. Listen to me for a second here. You’re here, I’m here. Let’s have some fun with it, ok? I mean after all, I told you not to come in today, and you — you just showed up. You showed up knowing I wouldn’t turn you away because you need the money to buy more coke, right?”

“Sorry Mr. Wyndam, I go now,” she repeated.

I inched in closer, each step loud and resentful In my mind I was redefining charming. She backed up against the wall, dropped the mop and I moved in even more. She was still trembling, but we’ll say it’s still from the drugs.

“Relax. It’s ok. Really.”

“I — I go now, Senior?” she whimpered.

“Relax,” I whispered, our lips nearly connecting. The pheromones from the Windex were driving me wild, and I went in for it, only I think there was some sort of communication gap because my tongue didn’t wind up on hers, but rather on the sides of her lips as her mouth never opened. That was when Marina let out of a scream so loud I was finally entertaining the idea that I might have misread the signals. Never underestimate the strength of a frightened, coked-out Mexican’s knees and how they could impact the state of a man’s testicles. The pain reverberated through every ounce of my existence despite being nearly blacked out.

She ran out of the screen door that led to the backyard, raced down the porch stairs, over the fence and into the park behind my house. I lied their, alone. Shaking. Totally ready to check out. The thing was, I didn’t want to go out in that state, so I continued the barrage on my liver after opening a second bottle of Jack Daniels. Alcohol ends a lot of lives. It saved mine. I continued to drink until I couldn’t feel anything down south, and eventually, I couldn’t feel anything at all. Everything after that second bottle wasn’t just hazy. It’s not like there were short, fleeting memories that gave me the gist of what could have occurred. There was nothing. A complete and total gap in time. There wasn’t even the illusion of a memory — no dream that replaced the real thing. Nothing to speak of, what so ever. The only evidence of consciousness was the phone call I made to my ex-wife — a phone call she has refused to completely divulge the details of.

The nature of what I think of her becomes more distant with every minute I spend dwelling on it. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t still curious about what I could have said. Maybe I had a change of heart. Some sort of revelation — a newfound commitment to my future. It’s also very likely that I really did just fall asleep — too drunk to kill myself. I could have told her I loved her and then, of course, pussied out. All I know is that she is a deliberate woman and an intelligent one. She kept the conversation from me for a reason, and no matter how much we’ve soured, I’ll always have that trust.