The landfill manager and his son at home with a bowl of Fruit Loops – Mama and Paul – The Junk Yard – The Gold
The Kid, he's me and he's not. He's sitting there adjusting the rabbit’s ears covered in tin foil, wriggling and wiggling just right to find a good signal. Waiting for dad to come home from work, to hear gravel crunch of his boots and the grunts as the key turns in the door, but he’s late again. He had said something on the phone yesterday about overseeing the new pipes going in and Mama hasn’t been there for a long time she moved out to Palm Springs with new dad, new dad’s name was Paul but he liked to make jokes about being New Dad and being old and clap his over-tanned hand on my shoulder and smile with really long yellow teeth, not yellow like the fish bones but enough I knew he liked to smoke his cigars. and bright blue eyes and white grey hair. Little tan lines on his hands from the gap in his golfing gloves and he had a putting grass put into his basement in plastic. And Mama sits out by the pool and drinks screwdrivers and thumbs through the old copies of Cosmopolitan that she could steal from the dealership, which means orange juice and vodka. While Paul smokes his thin cigars and golfs.
And there is a white leather armchair on the fake grass in the basement and a giant clamshell he tells me he dove out of the ocean from a boat he used to have. He wears a gold chain too like dad does and has a little tuft of white chest hair poking out of his polo shirts. For breakfast with Paul and Mama is egg whites and toast.
And dad has a vein that throbs in his temple and fake grass too. But he doesn’t golf. He’s in charge of making sure “all this shit goes somewhere”. I like going to work with him and seeing all the trucks come in with their loads of stuff and junk from different cities. And he lets me go out with the guys and pick through all the broken furniture and bags of clothes and other thrash. It climbed and we crawled around Geraldo, Luis and Alejandro were working today and I learned a little Spanish from them, words that make dad laugh over his beer and mom frown and whisper to Paul, and he. Might sit down on the edge of my Coleman cot in the basement blue light and say ya know your mother doesn’t like when you talk that way see I know it’s not in English, but it still isn’t good to say words like that. Now, no, you aren’t going to be in trouble. But I liked those guys. So, I stopped saying those words.
Dexatrim Diet pills and the sleeping pills in a candy bowl
The junkyards. Dad Like a used car shipping magnate coordinating where all the trash would go.
Conversations with dad over breakfast on Saturdays and in the car as he would leave me at the bus stop on the edge of town, I could walk really. It’s only a half-mile or so to wait for the yellow school bus to rattle through the dust and heat lines.
That’s where I learned to salvage the good stuff or to at least have an eye for the good stuff.
The broken white painted wood of a lawn chair arm. No.
A briefcase with the leather ripping of the seams. No.
A trumpet bent to shit and dented. Good for a laugh and making a fart noise to scare Luis, but no.
Old Polaroids of some dark-haired woman topless on a couch. Definitely
An old bullet with a dent in the back from where the pin struck but didn’t fire. Right in the pocket the little one that doesn’t hold a lot on my right-hand side, it won’t fall out there.
Hand over fist and splinters everywhere, they kinda stop hurting so much after a while and Dad says it’ll toughen up the skin, you’ll need tough skin in life everyone is out to get you out to take what’s yours or get it before, well before something I think, I don’t remember too well what he rambles about.
Alejandro has tattoos on his arms like a tough guy, naked ladies and skeletons on fire. I like tattoos I think they’re cool. Gonna have my own when I get older, can’t now against the law or against dad and mom and Paul, which is basically the same thing.
When the boy dragged himself out of bed pulling on the jeans and T-shirt he had stepped out of the night before a little stiff with sweat but passable, he wasn’t going to school anyways today, dad was already sitting at the white and brushed aluminium flip-down table the light from the open blinds cutting in shafts across him and his photoprint coffee mug with some old image of us at Christmas a few years ago, faded and almost scoured completely off from the washing and a dark brown scale built inside from the years of muddy coffee. Just between the small green couch and the and the Early American-stained plasti-pine panelling of the kitchenette, we ate breakfast and he scooped me out a bowl of red bagged fruit rings the same as Froot Loop’sä from the me-sized super-buy-bargain-bag in the lower left-hand cupboard, with a spoon with a little nick in it so that if you pulled it out of your mouth at the wrong angle or too fast then it would catch and hurt a little bit, not enough to cut, but just enough to be annoying, a lot of stuff in this trailer is like that. The clock sometimes stops between ticks a little long and then hurriedly clicks forward to catch up the minutes it missed in apology. The couch has a spring that sticks in your back if you flop back too fast. And a whole lot of other stuff, but you get the hang of it and learn to step over the panel that creaks or drink around the chip in the cup and then everything continues as normal and after a while of getting used to the little cracks and bits you don’t even notice they are there anymore. If it still does the job why put in the money to fix it when there ain’t none.
You’re coming to work with me today.
What about mom?
Can’t come, so you’re with me and the guys. Could use a hand with the guys. Teach you how to keep them in line. Run a team, be the boss.
Okay.
Okay?
I mean Yes Sir.
Dad looked over his coffee while taking on long swill the corners of his greying moustache catching the drips that would have otherwise run down his chin aside from the few drops escaping back down the sides of the mug. It was always sir, but no, he didn’t serve, just liked the idea.
I finished eating and made my milk moustache and left it there pretending I had one too and he laughed, I was a good clown at school too most of the other kids liked my jokes. But we finished and I cleaned my bowl and spoon after sucking down the last of the greying sugar milk, thickened and room temperature after sitting out with us for breakfast. Well don’t fucking waste it, he said a few times or more. Out the swing door with the screen and across the sun-bleached gravel and the AstroTurf lawn and the plastic peonies sticking screaming and open-mouthed from the terracotta. Immaculate and plastic. That’s how mom always liked things and dad liked that he could just hose it down to keep everything clean. He designed the drainage so that any water just flowed over to the neighbour who kept a trough there by the side for his old white pit bull and a female goat that he loved to kiss on the mouth and pet fondly, Jack was his name, or I called him Uncle Jack, but no blood between us, and he like to joke that the goat was his wife. But Jack wasn’t out this morning, and neither was the goat or the old white pit bull. Through the chain-link and out of the plastic lawn we got into our Red F-150 with the lifts and tan leather seats. Dad loved that truck, called it baby.
Clambering up hand over foot to reach the seat and avoid touching the metal clasp of the seat buckle already white-hot in the few hours of sun that already passed in the morning. Clicking it in with careful fingers the engine began to rumble and spit to lurching rolls back out onto the brown clay-dust road. Bumps and potholes and ruts make the tracks the few cars in town would roll along to get to the highway stretching out from dunes towards Palm Springs and Southeast to Slab City and the Mexican Border.
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