Unintentional Retaliation

A short story

This is the first short story I’m putting out as part of my ‘Texas Trash’ (working title) collection of stories inspired by my teenage years in Dallas. This one is about a kid who learns to appreciate something that not everyone gets the privilege to experience, but should: a good ass-whooping. Make sure to subscribe to get them all.

When my dad slapped me, my first reaction was to laugh. His slap came out of nowhere and it just seemed absurd. But then he slapped me again - harder this time - and, I’m a little ashamed to admit this, but I wanted to cry. 

It’s not that it hurt, which it did. It’s that getting slapped by another man when you’re a 14-year-old who thinks you’re a man crushes your soul a little bit.

And I have to say this now because it’s relevant: there was also a shock factor because I wasn’t an abused kid. The last time my dad laid hands on me, I was maybe 8 or 9. A few whips of a belt for something I don’t remember but probably deserved a whipping for. Slapping my face was not a thing he did. My mom was the parent more likely to show her love through brutality. She wouldn’t hesitate to throw a shoe at me if I hesitated to do something she told me to do. But she never really made contact. Matter of fact, she got the worst of it since she got so frustrated from me dodging her footwear. One time, I had to let the shoe hit me because I could tell she was about to cry.

A few misunderstandings aside, I was a pretty good kid, and so my parents had no reason to kick my ass. But then I turned 13 and discovered the pleasure of inhaling and exhaling smoke. 

It started with a Marlboro Red. Most people cough up a lung upon their first tobacco hit. Not me. I was a natural. I inhaled and exhaled like I had been smoking for my whole prepubescent life. Of course, this encouraged me to keep doing it because people like to do what they’re good at, even if it’s bad for them. Soon enough, somebody passed me a joint, which I did cough up a lung upon first hit. But coughing is acceptable in the marijuana community. I also felt wonderful once I stopped coughing, so I kept doing that, too, eventually not needing to cough. 

A few months later, me and my little freshman crew were spending every weekend in a cloud of smoke, laughing and philosophizing with rap and metal in the background. We weren’t the types to go out and cause trouble. We were teenage stoner homebodies who had a good weed connect, and we’d pool our meager finances together to accomplish our mutual goal of attaining new heights of highdom via blunts and water bongs. There was one problem: One of us liked to take pictures.

Andy was the social butterfly of the crew. He usually made the connects and found the ride to secure the goods before we all holed up in Jamie’s house to smoke, which I’ll explain to you in a bit. But first, let me tell you about Andy. He loved taking photos of his friends and then giving those photos to them at unexpected times. It was just a thing he did. He took photos at school, at parties, and, unfortunately, of me at one of our weekend bong sessions at Jamie’s house. He gave me a few photos of me hitting a massive water bong, a cool one of me exhaling a gigantic cloud of smoke, and another with the silliest grin stretched all across my face. I loved those pictures. They were images of me and my friends having good times, and, though I didn’t know it at the time, were one of the happiest moments of my youth - young, carefree, and high as hell. Most people don’t have a lot of time to feel this way. I would be no exception to that rule. 

That’s in part due to what happened next: My dad found the photos. He never said how he found them. I suspect he suspected I had been up to something with all the late nights out and the “sleeping over” at so-and-so’s on the weekends and, this one especially, my decision to redecorate my bedroom in the latest blacklight-friendly decor (in hindsight, a dead and dumb giveaway). While his motivation might be unknown to me, his reaction was not. 

A Tuesday in1998. He came home after a long day at work as a mechanic, busting his back changing carburetors and timing rings. I was in my room, listening to Prodigy, imagining myself at a rave in some warehouse in Manchester. He kicked my door open, threw the photos in my face, and slapped me so hard I felt my teeth switch sides. 

“This is what you’re getting your ass into, Craig?” he shouted, and slapped me again, on my other cheek with the back of his hand. I had a Super Fly poster on the wall - a movie I had never seen, but liked the poster and knew it was about a pimp, and pimps slap hoes with the back of their hand so as not to get their palms dirty - so I heard during one of my stoner discussions. 

“You want to act stupid, I’ll treat you stupid!” he said, followed by another slap, this one harder and near the top of my head. The first two slaps stunned me, but this one turned on my survival instincts. I put my hands up to cover my head.

“You little sonofabitch - I work all day for you to fuck around with that shit!?” he said, and brought down another slap, which I blocked and grabbed a hold of his wrist.

“Don’t you put your goddamn hands on me!” he said, and yanked his arm away before coming back with more hands, left and right, open hands. I tried to block, but couldn’t while sitting, so I got up. I was taller than my dad at this point. We looked into each other’s eyes. Mine were holding back tears that I was intent on not letting out in front of him. His were full of the anger and frustration of life that got him to a life full of unfulfilled dreams, a shitty marriage, and now a kid who, despite all his efforts to clothe, feed, and turn into somebody who isn’t a worthless bum, was doing exactly that and proudly documenting the process. 

But neither of us saw what was inside the other’s eyes, and so the hands spoke for us. Him with the slaps, me with the blocks. Him with a push, and me with a push back -and once I saw that he stumbled from my push, I closed my right first and threw it as hard as I could at his jaw. He fell down hard on his ass. He tried to get up, but couldn’t. I couldn’t believe this was happening. I couldn’t have hit my own father. He looked at me like he felt the same way. No way his son could have knocked him on his ass. 

My mother stood in the doorway. She just got there and was just as flummoxed as the rest of us. She grabbed my forearm tight and said: “You have to go now, Craig. Please just stay at your friend’s house tonight. Now.”

I did as told and went to Jaime’s house.

________________________________________________________________________

My teeth chattered the whole way there. Adrenaline from the taboo action of punching my own father in the face. I knocked him down. He looked hurt. I hurt him. How could I have done that? This was the man who took care of me my whole life. I felt a tiny shard of pride that I stood up for myself, but mostly I felt angry - at my father, at myself, at Andy’s dumbass for taking those photos, at my dumbass for keeping them, and at everyone and everything because that’s the only thing that made sense. I had heard of kids getting kicked out of their house, but my family always seemed a little too stable for that. Now I realized maybe we weren’t. On some level. I knew things would eventually calm down and get figured out. But at that moment, I felt orphaned. The only place I knew I’d be welcome was Jamie’s house because at Jamie’s house, everyone was allowed.

Jamie was a kid who kept to himself, smoked weed, and played video games, just like the rest of the crew. The only difference between him and us was that his father, Lee, allowed him to smoke all day in his bedroom, which was really a converted den in the back of the house and essentially a separate entity from the main house, complete with its own bathroom. Every teenager’s dream. Lee allowed Jamie to have all of us over to smoke weed all day and night in that den, exhaling more smoke than a coal factory. The only thing he might say something about was if we played hip hop music too loud. He didn’t have a problem with the metal, just the rap. Him being a white Texas man with a deep drawl, I at first thought that attitude might have been a little racially-motivated, but I changed my mind once I moved into Jamie’s house and realized that Lee was too beaten down by life to have much prejudice in him. 

When I got there, Jamie told me there was no problem with me staying there for however long I needed. I asked if he had to ask his dad, or if I should formally ask him, just to be a gentleman about it. Jamie said there was no need. It’s not like his dad would say no. He nodded for me to come in and we walked through the living room to get to his room. I saw Lee sitting on the couch, staring at the TV in a daze. Sportscenter was on and they were talking about the U.S. Open. Lee never mentioned tennis before, but he was entirely transfixed by the screen. 

“Hi, Lee!” I said. “You a tennis fan?”

Lee looked at me but didn’t answer. He was drooling and the turn of his head caused a thin whip of saliva to stretch off his lip and splash on the ground. He turned back to the screen. 

A girl’s voice from the other room: “He’s a fucking vegetable when he watches ESPN.” 

It was Becky, Jamie’s 13-year-old sister. She never said much to us because she was always in her room on her computer. But when she did say something, it sounded like that.  

That night, the crew arrived. Let me formally introduce you. There’s Andy, whom you’ve already met. There’s also Bradley, who would classify himself as the deep thinking tastemaker of the bunch, the one who always knew what groups to listen to and what 70s movies to watch. And then there was Big George, who was 21, a little older than the rest of us, but hung out because he lived next door to Jamie, hated his baby mama whose house he lived in with her parents. Big George genuinely liked having us as drinking buddies since he never hesitated to make a beer run, which he did that night, at the behest of Andy, who wanted to celebrate me for punching out my father.

Andy was six Mickey’s Grenades in when he started to reenact, completely via his own imagination, how the bout between my father and I went down.

“But the blows Craig took from his dad didn’t hurt him. Oh, no. They only made him stronger! Craig got up, dusted himself off like this, looked his punk ass dad in the eye and said: You made me, but I will destroy you. And then he punched that fool so hard, the time-space continuum got all fucked up!”

As I watched Andy over act his one-man show, thoughts I didn’t want in my head blended together into an uncomfortable collage made even more disconcerting by the cheap weed and alcohol clouding my brain. I thought Andy was mocking me, I felt embarrassed everyone knew I got beat by my father, I was scared because I didn’t know if I could go home, and I felt like a traitor for allowing everyone to laugh at my dad, who I could still see sitting on the floor, shocked by what just happened. I told myself he deserved it, and he did, I did think that. But I just wished none of it happened. We all deserve something sometimes and wouldn’t it be nice if we could just get it, and then have it all erased from memory with only the lesson we learned left behind?

“The time-space continuum can only be altered by the speed of light or some sort of black hole force,” Brad said, his voice scrunched up as he exhaled a long drag from a Newport. 

Andy rolled his eyes and groaned.

“That’s the joke, dumbass!” he said.

“It’s not funny if the exaggeration isn’t relatively close to the truth, or at least something that can be visualized,” Brad said. 

Jamie and Big George weren’t paying attention. They were both gearheads and their entire focus was on the machinations of a faulty bong that was letting too much smoke escape from the base of the pipe. It was just Andy and Brad debating how best to tell a story of a son punching his dad.

“Exaggeration softens the situation,” Andy said. “That makes it easier to swallow a difficult tale.”

“But that’s not funny,” Brad said. “You gotta dial down the force of that punch. Space-time continuum? Come on, dawg. You don’t even know what that is.”

I wanted to go home and go to sleep. But for the time being, this was my home and sleep wasn’t allowed until everyone agreed that such an affront on lived inebriation was a temporarily acceptable surrender until the next hedonistic battle.

Instead, I went out for a cigarette.

Outside, the air was surprisingly brisk for Dallas in October and gave a promise of the solitude I craved. I took a deep breath, letting the ice particles gently dagger my lungs, and took in the view of this somewhat suburban street, a block away from a boulevard teeming with souped-up sports cars chaperoned by oversized pickup trucks driven by men with oversized bellies, their aggressive agita causing them to be the most dangerous drivers in our dangerous driver culture.

I took a deep drag of my Marlboro and exhaled, watching the cold breeze tear apart the cloud of chemical smoke like a fragile piece of cotton.

I heard a cough. I look over my shoulder and see Lee sitting on a plastic folding chair that looks like it was about to snap under his weight. He’s shirtless and his massive gut splayed across his thighs. He rests his chin on his chest, as if his neck had been hollowed out from the front. He looks right at me. His eyes are watery and red. He had been crying. 

“Hey, Lee,” I say. “Everything alright?”

He spit out a thick stream of tobacco juice, said nothing. But I try again: “By the way, thanks for letting me stay here. Things are a little crazy at home right now. I appreciate it.”

Lee lifted his head and leaned it back. The only sound he makes is from sucking the tobacco in his mouth. He spits again, a loud smack as it hits the wooden panels of the patio.

“Goddamn bitch left me just like that, like I ain’t nothing,” he said. 

Tears fled his eyes, but his face was stoic and still except for the slight movement from his jaws holding the tobacco. 

He shouted: “Like I ain’t nothing!”

I tried talking to him, trying to be the friend who was there to listen, offer a shoulder to cry on, but Lee went on like I wasn’t there. He wasn’t talking to me. He was talking to himself.

“Maybe she’s right. Maybe I ain’t nothing,” he said, tears in his eyes and snot in his nose, struggling to breathe, maybe not wanting to breathe. 

“Maybe she should be with another man since I for sure ain’t none,” he said. 

I never heard somebody speak like this in real life. It was more than just sad, it was grotesque, pathetically so, and I felt disgusted by his naked self-pity. I tapped his shoulder and said, “Sorry, man.” 

He didn’t react. It was like I wasn’t there. Just as I was about to go back inside, a loud and dusty Camaro, once-souped up but now just struggling, rolled up in front of the house. Becky was in the passenger seat and she killed the driver. I couldn’t see him very well, but I could see that he was very big - tall and fat. Becky got out and went inside the house without saying a word to either me or her dad as the Camaro and its dying engine hobbled away. 

_____________________________________________________________

The next morning, I called my mom. I knew it was too early, but a part of me was hoping my dad realized the error of both of our ways and wanted to reconcile. I was wrong. She was curt.

“It’s best if you don’t come around here for a few days,” she said. “He’s really angry at you. And to be honest, I am a little, too. I know he overreacted, but he’s your father, Craig. You shouldn’t have done that.”

I tried to explain to her that what I did was the only way he would stop. But she grew up in a house where beatings were as common as hugs, and had the same intent: to show love. A son never hits his father, and that’s that. I agreed to stay away for as long as necessary, maybe longer. 

It was a Saturday afternoon, and me and Jamie were waiting for the rest of the crew to show up so we could begin another evening of intoxication. We were playing Tekken 2, which neither of us liked very much, and as we disinterestedly tapped the buttons on the controller, I was getting up the nerve to ask him about his mother leaving his father. We were friends, we trusted each other, but we didn’t talk much about our personal issues. It was cool to not care about bullshit. Stoner stoicism was a philosophy we didn’t have a name for at the time, but nonetheless abided by with conviction. Nonetheless, fathers and sons was a topic on my mind, and I wanted to know what he thought about his father’s situation. And just when I got the nerve to say something, Becky walked into the room with a very large, heavyset man with long hair and thick eyebrows that seemed to sit on, not above, sunken, sullen eyes.

“This is Jared, my new boyfriend,” Becky said, holding the man’s hand. “He’s going to live with us and stay in my room.”

Becky led the man away. He waddled more than he walked, his back hunched and knees bent, like he had some kind of injury. 

I looked at Jamie.

“How old do you think that guy is?” I said. “Gotta be at least 30-something.”

Jamie shrugged and lit up a cigarette.

“Who the fuck cares? Becky’s just a little hoe, anyways,” he said.

“Yeah, but he’s kinda too old, no? Your dad’s cool with that?”

Jamie spoke with an assertiveness that hardly ever entered his normally laid back voice. 

“My dad’s fucked in the head, man, alright? You think he gives a shit about anything? He doesn’t know what the hell’s going on. He’s too gone to give a shit.”

I guess I more or less had my answer. I didn’t realize until then Jamie didn’t like the way his dad was. Since the first day he let us smoke up in Jamie’s room, we had all thought that Lee was a cool, laidback Texan, who knew that us kids were just having a good time and not anybody. And who wouldn’t want a dad like that? But I didn’t realize that the way I had seen Lee the past couple days was how Jamie saw his dad all the time. Jamie had given up on his father, and it takes a lot to do that. But what do you expect when your father gives up on himself?

I thought about my dad sitting on the floor, stunned, maybe more spiritually than physically. My mother was right. He overreacted, but maybe I did, too. We both did. None of it was necessary. A nice talk would have sufficed, maybe a grounding. But I knew none of that would have made a difference, and he did, too. So he tried to do something different - the wrong thing to be sure. But he did it because he hadn’t given up. Maybe this was some battered child syndrome logic, but it was the truth, ugly and strange as can be. 

Suddenly enlightened by my new sense of compassion, I was about to tell Jamie that he should be easy on his father, who was obviously taking his wife leaving him hard. But the sounds of bedsprings and moans in the next room filled Jamie’s room with eerie disgust. Becky and the large man were having sex.

“I don’t fucking believe this,” Jamie said, throwing down the controller. “She’s 13, man! And my dad is just sitting there watching TV. What the fuck?”

He reached under his bed, grabbed a handgun I didn’t know he had, and stormed out of the room. I followed him. I had never wanted to be at home more than this moment. I tried telling him to chill. Pointless. I’d never seen Jamie angry before. And when you see someone who’s never angry get angry, something in your brain tells you it’s for a good reason and you better not disturb.

In the living room, Lee was again hypnotized by the TV screen. I didn’t notice what was on, I just knew Lee wasn’t really watching. He was transfixed by the glow and the sound of a place that wasn’t here. His peace was fake, but it was all he had.

“What the fuck, dad? She’s thirteen! You’re just gonna sit there? You’re gonna allow that shit? Wake the fuck up!”

Lee snapped out of his daze and looked at Jamie. I don’t think he saw the gun. Jamie held it low and close to his thigh. The gun wouldn’t have been seen from where Lee was sitting. But Jamie didn’t want to hurt his dad. He wanted to heal his dead. This is the most difficult feeling a son could have. 

Jamie kicked open his sister’s door. The large man was on top of Becky, but turned around quick. His eyes knew exactly where to look, like they’ve done it before: right down to Jamie’s pistol. 

 The large man rushed at Jamie. Jamie raised the gun, but he didn’t shoot. The large man, who must have weighed at least 100 pounds more than Jamie, tackled him to the ground and got his hands around Jamie’s throat.. 

“He just got out of prison!” Becky shouted at her brother. “He’s gonna kick your ass, dumbass!” She was naked and jumping up and down and screaming taunts like a redneck cheerleader on meth. 

Lee didn’t move from the couch. He looked on with a blank face as the large, naked, 30-something man who was statutory raping his teenage daughter was now strangling his teenage son. Lee was a man who had been completely hollowed. Maybe by heartbreak. Maybe by some mental illness. Maybe a combination of both. Whatever it was, he was watching a man assault his entire family and doing nothing about it. 

I joined in the fracas with a kick to the large man’s head. He hardly budged, but looked up at me with a cold look that said I was next. Becky lost it. She screamed at everyone and threw anything she could put her hands on. I ducked from a coffee mug that still had some coffee in it. Jamie got hit by a ceramic plate that was on a display shelf, and the large man got beamed in the temple by a picture frame with Lee and his ex-wife from their wedding 15 years ago. The large man let go of Jamie’s neck to console his own head, and Jamie got out from under him. He looked around for the gun.

“Where is it?” he said. 

I looked around, too. And that’s when the large man decked me. My face hit the ground before I realized I’d been hit and he squeezed  my neck with one hand and used the other to launch repeated blows to my face. I was limp and beginning to lose consciousness, but could see Jamie trying to get the large man off of me, and Becky trying to get Jamie off the large man. I wondered what she had against me. I was always nice to her. 

I heard the front door open and I smelled weed and Newports. The crew was here. Big George, who was almost as big as the large man, grabbed him and pulled him off of me. Brad jumped in with some karate-style kicks, looking weird and uncoordinated, but probably hurting the large man. Jamie was exhausted, but he was getting some good hits in. And Andy took pictures mostly, with the occasional half hearted punch here and there. For the first time, I realized none of us could fight very well, so we better not get in this situation again. 

But Becky - she screamed like a hillbilly banshee and, having run out of things to throw at us in the living room, brought stuff from her bedroom to throw at us. Objects were flying everywhere. The large man was regaining control and fighting back. And I was still trying to get on my feet when I saw Lee. He was standing behind a few feet away from the mayhem with the gun to his temple. He shouted: “Stop it!” His voice was harsh, guttural, nothing like his voice. And then he pulled the trigger. 

When they say somebody blew their brains out, they mean this. Lee’s brains shot out the side of his head and rained bloody chunks onto the floor, the couch, Becky, everywhere. His body fell forward and landed next to me. Lee’s eyes were open. I stared at his vacant eyes. A man who had enough and gave up.

I was ready to go back home.

By the time the police were finished questioning us, it was almost dark. Staying at Jamie’s house was obviously out of the question, but it didn’t matter. I wanted to go home. I didn’t care about any potential fallout. And besides, I looked pretty beat-up, so I was sure I’d at least get a few compassion points from my parents, especially if I told them what happened. All I wanted was to be in my room, lay my head on my pillow, and just be.

The shortcut to our apartment required me to pass by the auto repair shop my dad worked at. When I passed by, I kept to the opposite side of the street. My dad was there, standing in front of the popped hood of a white minivan, explaining something to the owner. He looked confident and assured, a man who knew what he was talking about, and doing what he had to do, even if he didn’t love it, even if it didn’t give him everything he wanted. 

I knew things wouldn’t be the same between us again for a long time. But sometimes that’s how it has to be.