War Zones in the Modern World
Mike Lee
My old man was an unstoppable series of calamities from birth.
I pulled into the parking space in front of the hotel and saw him leaning against the wall beside the double-plated glass doors, acting for the whole world as if he was expecting me, even pretending as much when I greeted him.
His bushy eyebrows, sunburned skin, and gray-blue eyes once invoked a handsome manliness, but the boozing transformed his countenance into a caricature of Irish indolence.
Ironically, Dad identified with the family who rejected him. Made sense--he dumped us, too.
Dad’s blue and red checkered shirt reminded me of a wadded-up newspaper stuffed in a battered oil-stained box. He used to not look so bad, but that was long ago. Now, he is awful to behold.
Dad worked in the sun too often. The peeling skin on his sunburned neck looked reptilian.
In contrast, his oiled, ruddy hair was flawless. The smell of Pinaud hair tonic may have preceded him, but every follicle was in place. This seemed the only cared-for part of his appearance. A couple of years ago, when Mom saw him last, she told me afterward his slick hairstyle was all that remained of the person she once loved. For my sake, I was relieved he wasn’t going bald.
“My God in heaven, boy,” Dad yelled when he heard the shit, the sound of the engine.
“What the hell is wrong with this car?”
“It does that sometimes,” I said.
“You should let me take a look at it.”
I paused, taken aback by his offer. Despite his many faults, Dad did know how to fix cars. It was also a reasonable solution to the problem of spending any time with him.
“Maybe I should.” I didn’t want to push it; Dad was sensitive to being used. He was a more brilliant man than others took him to be since he was the one who went to college before getting drafted.
Then I remembered that he had read to me before I slept. I once found comfort in his voice. Now I’m old enough to know that Dad was utterly ineffective. Numerous never-sent or bounced child support checks proved that.
With this, I was at cross purposes. A part of me wanted him to help. The other wanted Dad to go away. I hated making these choices; I never seemed to get them right.
Mentally flipped a coin. Then asked--
“Want to go for a ride?”
He lurched awkwardly into the front seat, then settled. I told him about the abandoned gas station in Manchaca that my friends sometimes used as a garage.
“Let’s go,” he said, almost cheerfully.
The garage belonged to Bill Siler, whose Dad ran it until he died in a mysterious fire at their home last year. There was a rumor that Daddy Siler had been dealing on the side with a biker gang. The case was under investigation.
Bill didn’t have a problem with us using the facility.
The garage was deserted. I pulled up to the service island, grabbed a wrench from the floor in the back, and jumped out. Dad followed me with a Falstaff in his hand, belching. He took a peek inside the garage and gasped, “Damn, you boys got a genuine Daytona pit stop.”
Oh sure, I thought. For months, we rummaged around the area for tools and car parts. Most of the stuff was antiquated and broken, useless to anyone who didn’t have the time to figure out how to use unworkable equipment and rusted gear. The effort to rig this shit together took more time than applying it to the cars we worked on, but that’s how we did things around here.
I forced open the sliding gate to the repair bay, threw the wrench back in the car, hopped in, and drove it inside.
“We have a lot of friends who work in the auto yards,” I said, slamming the door and remembering PVC. “We’ve even rigged extension cables from the construction site behind us so we can have electricity whenever needed.”
“Man, that’s amazing.” Dad was impressed. I was slightly happy.
He stared at the half-risen jack in the center of the bay.
“I guess you guys couldn’t get away with what we do nowadays.”
“My ass,” he said, spitting on the ground. “We could do everything and more.”
I grabbed a heavy toolbox and dragged it next to the grill. Then I opened the hood. Gunk crusted on the battery. I leaned in and checked the oil. My hand slipped, and I stained my shirt.
“You suppose it’s time to check the battery cables?” I said.
Dad looked at the chaotic mess that passed for my engine and pointed a stubbed finger at the left clamp. “Shit. You’ve got that gunk eatin’ through the metal.”
He bumped me aside and grabbed the rag hanging off the aerial. “Jesus Christ,” he groaned as he tried to pull off the clamp. “You really don’t know squat about cars.”
I pulled a flat-head screwdriver from the toolbox and handed it to Dad, who began chipping away at the encrusted mass. After several tries, he finally pulled the clamp loose and wiped his sunburned brow.
“The other clamp better be easier.”
He was right about the cables; the rubber was eaten in places, exposing the interior strands.
“Lord.” Dad wiped his brow again, taking a break from scraping off the ossified crud. He looked at me and sighed, shaking his head.
Leaned away from him and crossed my arms. I felt stupid, not guilty. Honestly, I didn’t care what he thought of me.
After carefully cleaning the insides of each clamp, Dad replaced the cables, tightening them as best he could. He wiped his hands on the rag and dropped it on the radiator. With a belch, he picked up the Falstaff from the ground and took another sip.
He glanced at the engine and cracked, “Lord knows what you got lyin’ under there.” Dad liked to talk out of the side of his mouth, which seemed arrogant to everyone else.
I reached over to spin the flywheel to open the cover. When I lifted it and pulled out the filter, Dad smiled, his grin frightfully skull-like. Held out the filter so he could see that it was clean.
“At least you have the sense to change the goddamn oil filter once in a while.”
He reached in and lightly touched the inside of the casing with his fingertips, then held a blackened finger.
“Like putting lipstick on a pig.”
I was getting annoyed. “It’s not that big a deal.”
Dad rolled his eyes. “I guess not.” He sighed again.
I ignored him and replaced the filter, defeated.
~ ~ ~
We drove west down William Cannon. I pointed out various construction sites--a strip mall and sprawling apartment complexes. Dad grunted replies, his gaze elsewhere. I told him that when Mom and I moved here, there was nothing but mesquite, crabgrass, and a Ballard’s package store down the highway.
I stole a glance at my father. He disgusted me. I really wished him death. An awful, slow, painful one.
“Shit,” Dad drawled. “When I lived here, there wasn’t a thing south of Manchaca and Lamar Boulevard.”
He didn’t bother to look at me as he lit up. I was surprised that he pronounced Manchaca correctly. “When did you live down here?”
Dad stretched and stared out the window again. “After I got out of the Air Force. It was a smaller shit town than it is now,” he said into the wind.
“A few redneck beer joints on South Lamar and the damn Texas Tower. Not much to piss on if you want to get into a contest. Your mother and I drove half an hour just to see civilization.”
Took the turnoff at Lightsey, where the road ended in a maze of sawhorses and mounds of upturned earth. We passed the apartment complex under construction on the corner and wound up on the two-lane blacktop that led back to the highway.
The strip malls hadn’t come this far. In fact, it was hard to believe that we were still within the city limits. But it wouldn’t be long before the developers turned this mass of scrub and abandoned shacks into a sprawling suburban monotony. In other words, the area was about to look even more like shit than it did now.
I don’t know if I should be sad; I’ve only lived here for a few years. Even so, I felt a sentimental twinge of regret as I witnessed a city reinvent itself into a cookie-cutter town.
“From nothing, you’ll get nothing,” Dad whispered to no one.
He shifted his weight in the seat and asked if we could stop at the Big Wheel.
“I wanna get me a beer. I feel like somethin’ on tap,” Dad snorted, waving his hand out the window to shake off the phlegm.
The road curved downward and around a bend. I could see the few squat buildings and mobile homes that comprised virtually all of Oak Hill. I left at the one traffic light and pulled into a gravel parking lot. The car shook with the effort, bouncing over the slashes made by last week’s rain.
Dad held tight to the dashboard. “I don’t suppose you need shocks on this heap,” he cracked.
“Shut up,” I said under my breath and gripped the wheel, ready to tear it from the column.
Parked the car behind a wooden frame garage and got out, coughing through a cloud of dust. The restaurant was a sprawling cinderblock building with peeling whitewash.
Dad held the door open for me. “You know, I cut somebody here once.” I tried not to react.
We found a booth in the back corner. The waitress came over.
Dad leaned against the ripped vinyl. “Give us two Staffs, honey. And two packs of Camels, too, while you’re at it.” The waitress snatched the wadded singles he threw on the table and padded to the bar. I watched his eyes follow her while I pretended to stare at my knuckles.
He leaned over and repeated, “I cut somebody here once. You wanna hear the story?”
“Not particularly.” I continued to stare at my knuckles.
“Well, fuck you, then.” He put a hand on his chin and waited for the beer.
The waitress came back with the beer and cigarettes. Dad smiled at her, showing his missing teeth.
I sipped slowly from my glass. I opened one of the packs lying on the table, tearing the foil on one edge of the label, just the way Dad did it. I flipped a Camel into my mouth and gazed into the parking lot.
“Looks like rain.” There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
“It always looks like rain,” Dad replied, staring into his glass.
He paused for another puff from his Camel, tapped the cigarette in the ashtray, and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “You know, when we lived on St. Elmo, about a year before you were born. . .”
Then, suddenly, he was silent, his face frozen in an open-mouthed stare. He lifted his glass, took a big gulp, and slid the empty glass to the edge. The arrogance had disappeared.
Took him a while to find the right words. “Bet you really hate me.”
“Not anymore,” I replied calmly. “I gave it up for Lent.”
“I’ll admit I never tried.”
“You never did, and you never will. Just be happy you have beer money and a warm place to be yourself, right?”
Dad nodded. “Yeah.”
He looked more worn out than I’d ever seen him.
~ ~ ~
Dad was quiet during the drive back to the hotel. I dropped him off, and he waved as I pulled away from the curb.
I wondered when I’d see Dad again. I didn’t want to be reminded of how easy it would be for me to repeat his mistakes.
I did not want to follow him into the life of living in a weekly rate dive hotel.
The rain began to fall as I drove across the First Street Bridge.
Mike Lee
My old man was an unstoppable series of calamities from birth.
I pulled into the parking space in front of the hotel and saw him leaning against the wall beside the double-plated glass doors, acting for the whole world as if he was expecting me, even pretending as much when I greeted him.
His bushy eyebrows, sunburned skin, and gray-blue eyes once invoked a handsome manliness, but the boozing transformed his countenance into a caricature of Irish indolence.
Ironically, Dad identified with the family who rejected him. Made sense--he dumped us, too.
Dad’s blue and red checkered shirt reminded me of a wadded-up newspaper stuffed in a battered oil-stained box. He used to not look so bad, but that was long ago. Now, he is awful to behold.
Dad worked in the sun too often. The peeling skin on his sunburned neck looked reptilian.
In contrast, his oiled, ruddy hair was flawless. The smell of Pinaud hair tonic may have preceded him, but every follicle was in place. This seemed the only cared-for part of his appearance. A couple of years ago, when Mom saw him last, she told me afterward his slick hairstyle was all that remained of the person she once loved. For my sake, I was relieved he wasn’t going bald.
“My God in heaven, boy,” Dad yelled when he heard the shit, the sound of the engine.
“What the hell is wrong with this car?”
“It does that sometimes,” I said.
“You should let me take a look at it.”
I paused, taken aback by his offer. Despite his many faults, Dad did know how to fix cars. It was also a reasonable solution to the problem of spending any time with him.
“Maybe I should.” I didn’t want to push it; Dad was sensitive to being used. He was a more brilliant man than others took him to be since he was the one who went to college before getting drafted.
Then I remembered that he had read to me before I slept. I once found comfort in his voice. Now I’m old enough to know that Dad was utterly ineffective. Numerous never-sent or bounced child support checks proved that.
With this, I was at cross purposes. A part of me wanted him to help. The other wanted Dad to go away. I hated making these choices; I never seemed to get them right.
Mentally flipped a coin. Then asked--
“Want to go for a ride?”
He lurched awkwardly into the front seat, then settled. I told him about the abandoned gas station in Manchaca that my friends sometimes used as a garage.
“Let’s go,” he said, almost cheerfully.
The garage belonged to Bill Siler, whose Dad ran it until he died in a mysterious fire at their home last year. There was a rumor that Daddy Siler had been dealing on the side with a biker gang. The case was under investigation.
Bill didn’t have a problem with us using the facility.
The garage was deserted. I pulled up to the service island, grabbed a wrench from the floor in the back, and jumped out. Dad followed me with a Falstaff in his hand, belching. He took a peek inside the garage and gasped, “Damn, you boys got a genuine Daytona pit stop.”
Oh sure, I thought. For months, we rummaged around the area for tools and car parts. Most of the stuff was antiquated and broken, useless to anyone who didn’t have the time to figure out how to use unworkable equipment and rusted gear. The effort to rig this shit together took more time than applying it to the cars we worked on, but that’s how we did things around here.
I forced open the sliding gate to the repair bay, threw the wrench back in the car, hopped in, and drove it inside.
“We have a lot of friends who work in the auto yards,” I said, slamming the door and remembering PVC. “We’ve even rigged extension cables from the construction site behind us so we can have electricity whenever needed.”
“Man, that’s amazing.” Dad was impressed. I was slightly happy.
He stared at the half-risen jack in the center of the bay.
“I guess you guys couldn’t get away with what we do nowadays.”
“My ass,” he said, spitting on the ground. “We could do everything and more.”
I grabbed a heavy toolbox and dragged it next to the grill. Then I opened the hood. Gunk crusted on the battery. I leaned in and checked the oil. My hand slipped, and I stained my shirt.
“You suppose it’s time to check the battery cables?” I said.
Dad looked at the chaotic mess that passed for my engine and pointed a stubbed finger at the left clamp. “Shit. You’ve got that gunk eatin’ through the metal.”
He bumped me aside and grabbed the rag hanging off the aerial. “Jesus Christ,” he groaned as he tried to pull off the clamp. “You really don’t know squat about cars.”
I pulled a flat-head screwdriver from the toolbox and handed it to Dad, who began chipping away at the encrusted mass. After several tries, he finally pulled the clamp loose and wiped his sunburned brow.
“The other clamp better be easier.”
He was right about the cables; the rubber was eaten in places, exposing the interior strands.
“Lord.” Dad wiped his brow again, taking a break from scraping off the ossified crud. He looked at me and sighed, shaking his head.
Leaned away from him and crossed my arms. I felt stupid, not guilty. Honestly, I didn’t care what he thought of me.
After carefully cleaning the insides of each clamp, Dad replaced the cables, tightening them as best he could. He wiped his hands on the rag and dropped it on the radiator. With a belch, he picked up the Falstaff from the ground and took another sip.
He glanced at the engine and cracked, “Lord knows what you got lyin’ under there.” Dad liked to talk out of the side of his mouth, which seemed arrogant to everyone else.
I reached over to spin the flywheel to open the cover. When I lifted it and pulled out the filter, Dad smiled, his grin frightfully skull-like. Held out the filter so he could see that it was clean.
“At least you have the sense to change the goddamn oil filter once in a while.”
He reached in and lightly touched the inside of the casing with his fingertips, then held a blackened finger.
“Like putting lipstick on a pig.”
I was getting annoyed. “It’s not that big a deal.”
Dad rolled his eyes. “I guess not.” He sighed again.
I ignored him and replaced the filter, defeated.
~ ~ ~
We drove west down William Cannon. I pointed out various construction sites--a strip mall and sprawling apartment complexes. Dad grunted replies, his gaze elsewhere. I told him that when Mom and I moved here, there was nothing but mesquite, crabgrass, and a Ballard’s package store down the highway.
I stole a glance at my father. He disgusted me. I really wished him death. An awful, slow, painful one.
“Shit,” Dad drawled. “When I lived here, there wasn’t a thing south of Manchaca and Lamar Boulevard.”
He didn’t bother to look at me as he lit up. I was surprised that he pronounced Manchaca correctly. “When did you live down here?”
Dad stretched and stared out the window again. “After I got out of the Air Force. It was a smaller shit town than it is now,” he said into the wind.
“A few redneck beer joints on South Lamar and the damn Texas Tower. Not much to piss on if you want to get into a contest. Your mother and I drove half an hour just to see civilization.”
Took the turnoff at Lightsey, where the road ended in a maze of sawhorses and mounds of upturned earth. We passed the apartment complex under construction on the corner and wound up on the two-lane blacktop that led back to the highway.
The strip malls hadn’t come this far. In fact, it was hard to believe that we were still within the city limits. But it wouldn’t be long before the developers turned this mass of scrub and abandoned shacks into a sprawling suburban monotony. In other words, the area was about to look even more like shit than it did now.
I don’t know if I should be sad; I’ve only lived here for a few years. Even so, I felt a sentimental twinge of regret as I witnessed a city reinvent itself into a cookie-cutter town.
“From nothing, you’ll get nothing,” Dad whispered to no one.
He shifted his weight in the seat and asked if we could stop at the Big Wheel.
“I wanna get me a beer. I feel like somethin’ on tap,” Dad snorted, waving his hand out the window to shake off the phlegm.
The road curved downward and around a bend. I could see the few squat buildings and mobile homes that comprised virtually all of Oak Hill. I left at the one traffic light and pulled into a gravel parking lot. The car shook with the effort, bouncing over the slashes made by last week’s rain.
Dad held tight to the dashboard. “I don’t suppose you need shocks on this heap,” he cracked.
“Shut up,” I said under my breath and gripped the wheel, ready to tear it from the column.
Parked the car behind a wooden frame garage and got out, coughing through a cloud of dust. The restaurant was a sprawling cinderblock building with peeling whitewash.
Dad held the door open for me. “You know, I cut somebody here once.” I tried not to react.
We found a booth in the back corner. The waitress came over.
Dad leaned against the ripped vinyl. “Give us two Staffs, honey. And two packs of Camels, too, while you’re at it.” The waitress snatched the wadded singles he threw on the table and padded to the bar. I watched his eyes follow her while I pretended to stare at my knuckles.
He leaned over and repeated, “I cut somebody here once. You wanna hear the story?”
“Not particularly.” I continued to stare at my knuckles.
“Well, fuck you, then.” He put a hand on his chin and waited for the beer.
The waitress came back with the beer and cigarettes. Dad smiled at her, showing his missing teeth.
I sipped slowly from my glass. I opened one of the packs lying on the table, tearing the foil on one edge of the label, just the way Dad did it. I flipped a Camel into my mouth and gazed into the parking lot.
“Looks like rain.” There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
“It always looks like rain,” Dad replied, staring into his glass.
He paused for another puff from his Camel, tapped the cigarette in the ashtray, and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “You know, when we lived on St. Elmo, about a year before you were born. . .”
Then, suddenly, he was silent, his face frozen in an open-mouthed stare. He lifted his glass, took a big gulp, and slid the empty glass to the edge. The arrogance had disappeared.
Took him a while to find the right words. “Bet you really hate me.”
“Not anymore,” I replied calmly. “I gave it up for Lent.”
“I’ll admit I never tried.”
“You never did, and you never will. Just be happy you have beer money and a warm place to be yourself, right?”
Dad nodded. “Yeah.”
He looked more worn out than I’d ever seen him.
~ ~ ~
Dad was quiet during the drive back to the hotel. I dropped him off, and he waved as I pulled away from the curb.
I wondered when I’d see Dad again. I didn’t want to be reminded of how easy it would be for me to repeat his mistakes.
I did not want to follow him into the life of living in a weekly rate dive hotel.
The rain began to fall as I drove across the First Street Bridge.
