It was the usual thing, an estate sale, and the three of us, my mom and my step-father John and me were standing there, conspiring in the hallway of somebody else’s home about how best to rip them off. It wasn’t going so well.
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Only this morning my mom had asked me “What do you want to do today?”
I was on my bed, in my t-shirt and boxers, reading Spider-Man.
“Let’s go to Santa Monica beach.” Lately I had been remembering all the good times when I was younger and it was just me and her and she used to drive us up through the canyon and down to the beach in her yellow VW bug, steering the wheel with her knees while she smoothed sunscreen over her brown legs.
I realized why she wanted us out of the house. Yesterday she had told the landlord he could come by today for the overdue rent and almost four weeks ago she had negotiated to pay double this month. All she needed was a little extra time. By the way she had been desperately tearing through the mail for the last week, I figured some money she was counting on still hadn’t arrived. I hated seeing her upset that way.
She liked my beach idea, which made me happy, and when she asked my step-father Johnny also I was surprised that he agreed to Santa Monica, said “Sure, Christine, let’s go to the beach. The three of us.”
We left the house at 9 a.m. and hopped into Johnny’s blue T-Bird that he had spent eight years restoring. He went through the usual routine of lighting his camel, cupping one hand around the other. Johnny couldn’t drive if he didn’t have a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. I could barely see over his head from the back. Johnny was tall, with slicked back hair and a handle-bar moustache. His left arm dangled from the open window, pounding out in rhythm to Foghat or whatever hard rock classics were playing on KLOS-FM. He had tattoos of dragons with peacock feathers and weird shit like that up both of his big arms. Johnny had a way of scaring off other cars around him. I knew the feeling.
He looked up, squinting at the sky. “Too cloudy for the beach today. Maybe next week.” My mom just shrugged, but I don’t think she really agreed with him either.
So Johnny decided to take us to IHOP even though I had already eaten breakfast. We sat down at the royal blue formica table and Johnny ordered a couple of cups of burnt-smelling coffee while my mom bought a paper. She spent the next half hour circling ads. Not ‘Help Wanted’ ads, which would have made sense since she had been laid off almost sixth months ago from UPS. That would have taken too much time and been too disappointing. Instead, my mom had taken her four-in-one Bic pen and was marking off the addresses of garage and estate sales in red.
She could tell by the way I was shooting the paper covers off of all the straws that I was less than enthused.
“Come on, Matt. It’s something fun we can do. All of us together. As a family.”
She stuck her lower lip out and smiled at me in that goofy way she always did when she didn’t want me to be mad at her.
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Her being a single parent and all, my mom and I had been pretty close most of the time growing up. We looked out for each other. Even when I was in elementary school, if anyone ever picked on me there she was. “Nobody pushes my kid around or they answer to me.” I knew about her temper: Grandma said that she was a scrapper, that she had given aunt Marty lots of black eyes and bloody noses growing up.
Like about 5 years ago, when I was in fourth or fifth grade. There was this bully named Harry Amos, who I called Hairy Anus. I thought it was real funny, but Harry didn’t. He said he was going to beat me up after school on Friday. I didn’t tell anybody about it except my grandma, but she told me I was going to have to learn to fight my own battles at some point.
On Friday afternoon, I hesitated leaving school and looked around for a few friends that might be able to walk home with me, but there weren’t any around. When I finally dragged myself out the school gates, sure enough Harry was there, waiting. But so was my mom.
It was a half hour before she normally got off work, and she was leaning against her VW door with her arms crossed and talking to Harry this real intense way. His eyes were wide as I approached them and he looked like he was scared as he hitched his backpack over his shoulder. He walked away, fast.
I opened the car door, dropped myself down into the passenger seat and crossed my arms, not bothering with the seat belt. “I’m not a pussy, I can fight my own fights, Mom.”
“I know. I just told the Anus how crazy you are when you get angry.”
She leaned over and pulled a pack of cigarettes out of the glove compartment. She lit a Tiparillo and continued with her story, acting totally serious, “I said that you sent some seventh grader from the Catholic school to the emergency room last month with a ruptured spleen and a gash all the way down his face. The kid is still in a coma over at County, from what I hear. Oh, and I told the Anus to be careful because you carry a knife.”
I had to laugh. My Swiss army knife that she bought me those three months I had been in Cub Scouts. I felt pretty good right then about what my mom had done for me. I knew that there was someone around who would always have my back.
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So today was going to be like every other Saturday. All the weekends lately were the same, with Mom and Johnny and me cruising around the west San Fernando Valley and up into Ventura county, going to flea markets and garage sales, looking for that lucky break. Something to get rich quick.
When we got to this place it was just a big suburban house, and we could see that it obviously wasn’t an estate sale – not like things were catalogued and that there was someone running the show or even like they knew what they had. We figured that some old woman had died, since she was nowhere in sight, and her husband (who was in a wheelchair) was pretty much an invalid. My mom said the kids were probably trying to sell whatever they could to clear out the house before sending him off to a nursing home.
There was a picture of the dead woman and the husband on the wall, overseeing the proceedings. It was one of those portraits you have done at the mall and it didn’t seem very old. The husband, heavy and grey, looked exactly the same in the picture as he did today, except that now he was in a wheelchair. The wife had kind of Indian features, with black eyes and a silky braid of hair falling over a red and gold blouse. She had dark and oily circles around her eyes and I guessed that she had been sick for a while and that they wanted to have the photo done as one last way of remembering their life together.
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When I first met John Fooshee, I was eleven years old and pretty hesitant. My mom had gone out with a lot of losers: Rabbit, who my mom told me later was a coke dealer and liked wearing her bras; Arthur, who had left her one night at the Sagebrush Cantina and stolen her car; and my dad, who was in jail back in Florida. None of them stayed.
Now I was fourteen and Johnny had been around for three years and been married to my mom over two. It was kind of cool, with Johnny around it was sort of like I had a real dad. My mom’s family felt relieved to see her settled down, finally.
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“She was an ugly broad,” Johnny whispered to my mom and motioned up to that family portrait of the old couple. He made an imaginary dot on his forehead. When I didn’t laugh, Johnny shrugged his shoulders and motioned for us to follow him. My mom and I looked at each other and laughed at Johnny, how stupid he could sometimes be. I knew that I wasn’t always very nice to Johnny. Of the three of us, he was pretty clearly the outsider. My mom and I told a lot of inside jokes, a lot of the time at his expense.
I didn’t like encouraging him when he was acting like this, making fun of the people who owned the house we were in. I mean, at least they had family photos. Now that there were three of us, we would get pictures taken with the extended family at Christmas and other get-togethers, but I never saw a single one of them framed or on a wall or nightstand in our apartment. Despite what my mom had hoped for, that just wasn’t the type of family we would ever be.
Absolutely LOVE this.
Kaitlin: This is about the first one-forth of Mike’s story. If you’d like to read more, leave a comment for the author on this site and I’ll make sure he gets it. — Bryan
Whoops!! Kaitlin: I think this is from further into the story, but it is still about 25% of the total piece. — Bryan