The Story Garden 5.0
Fiction
Pop-Tarts
Dog-boy, who lives in the apartment next door, is always getting stabbed. I mean, he’s been stabbed way more times than you’d think a person could survive. It’s understandable now, because he’s a junkie, and junkies tend to, you know, get stabbed. But he even got stabbed before he ever messed around with anything stronger than beer and his prom date.
He told me the first time he got stabbed, it was his mother that did him, and she tried to make it out to be an accident, but he knew it wasn’t. I kind of got the feeling it was a sore subject and possibly even had to do with him being a junkie now. At least as far as a low-self-esteem connection goes. Because I think if your mother stabs you, you can’t help but feel rather shitty about yourself and your life and what have you.
He told me the story last Tuesday, which is the last time I saw him; he came over with a box of Pop-Tarts and asked to use my toaster. It seems he’d forgotten he’d pawned his toaster a while back, along with a few other kitchen appliances and some cufflinks he stole off a guy he knew from rehab. Which I told him, hey Dog-boy, stealing from your sponsor, that’s extremely bad karma. Dog-boy was on his way down at that time, in that sort of reasonable but mellow place that’s the only place he’s fit at all for human contact, and all he said was, “When has my karma been anything but?” Which, I had to admit, he had a point.
So Dog-boy cooked his Pop-Tarts, and started to ask me again to put in a good word with my manager. Which always makes me uncomfortable, because as I’ve already explained the guy is a junkie, and as such would not the most reliable employee on earth, and I would hate to screw over my own reputation by vouching for him. Plus the fact is there have already been layoffs and my own job is none too secure. Well I of course didn’t want to get into all of that, so I cut him off with my voice too loud, “How come you don’t eat those things raw?” Which I knew is not the correct word, it’s a Pop-Tart not sushi, but I kind of panicked or something.
Anyway, it did the trick. Dog-boy’s smile got goofy. He settled into the big green beanbag which I really hate, due to the leaking place and the duct tape patch, but which I can’t get rid of because it is, in point of fact, the only furniture that I have except for a card table, a rusty folding chair, a busted-up one of those lawn-furniture recliners, and a futon mattress. I’m just grateful he didn’t flop down in my bed. He had these two Pop-Tarts cooling, one balanced on each thigh, his jeans so filthy they shine, but what the hell, I suppose they’re all his own germs, anyway. He slung his hands behind his head and stretched, staring up at the ceiling, and started riffing on Pop-Tarts and Tang and what have you, the great Brady Bunch breakfasts that his mom used to make.
“She was like that, a total Kool-Aid mom. My house was where all the other kids used to want to play.”
But then I guess his old man got into some sort of trouble with the law, something white collar or what have you, but still, it made problems. His Pop went to jail. His mom had to find work, only she couldn’t, or maybe it was that there wasn’t anything she could do. So then she started bringing home these men, “in lieu of gainful employment”, Dog-boy said. He has that way of saying things that I find really funny and at the same time sad, and I didn’t know what to say so I asked wasn’t he going to EAT the damn Pop-Tarts. “When they cool,” he said, but he picked one up and bit it right away.
So apparently, one of “the endless parade of ersatz uncles” was a real shitheel named Marshall, a guy with drinking demons and a nasty temper. His mother was likewise drinking her fair share by that time, and so, as Dog-boy said, “the breakfast scene had deteriorated sharply by that point.” Dog-boy came home from school one day and Marshall was really tuning up, screaming at his mom and throwing shoes and dishes and knick-knacks and what have you. Apparently the thing is, it was Marshall’s birthday. “Or at least”, Dog-boy was careful to explain, “Marshall was under the impression that it was his birthday,” and so Dog-boy’s mom had decided to try to do it up right, go into her whole Betty Crocker routine for him. “Only Betty was crocked,” Dog-boy said. Man, that Dog-boy, he cracks me up. He broke off another piece of Pop-Tart and blew on the jam a minute, but that was just for show.
So she made this lemon cake and it came out okay, “listing a bit to one side, but then so were they,” according to Dog-boy. But then his mom was trying to make this frosting, this fancy meringue frosting, and that’s where the trouble started. First of all, there was the egg situation, which according to Dog-boy was a disaster right from the start, because apparently the thing is you have to separate the eggs, but Dog-boy’s mom had a lot of yolk mixed in with the egg whites. “Not to mention,” he added, “shells, cigarette ash, and a goodly quantity of her own vodka-laced spittle.”
Plus the recipe had called for sugar and vanilla, but apparently unbeknownst to Mrs. Dog-boy, Marshall had drunk the vanilla one night when they didn’t have any other alcohol in the house and he had been feeling the thirst. And so Dog-boy’s mom had some sort of half-pickled notion that turnabout in this situation would be fair play, and had substituted in about a pretty hefty shot of Marshall’s Old Grandad.
Well egg white won’t get stiff if there’s any yolk in there at all, not to mention all the other contaminants and what have you. And so she had apparently become pretty upset and frustrated and probably even went on a crying jag of a kind when she couldn’t get the meringue to gel right. Marshall, who as Dog-boy had already explained, was a complete asshole, decided to sort of berate her about it, supposedly in a teasing way, but the jokes weren’t meant to really be jokes, they were meant to make her feel bad. Dog-boy said Marshall was always that way, and of course his mother just lapped it up because she apparently figured she was worthless, with her husband locked up and her rocky financial situation, and Marshall was around to sort of confirm the suspicion.
But this time Dog-boy’s mom was pretty far into the bag herself, so she apparently – Dog-boy says this is the point at which he walked in the door from school – she apparently made some off-color remark about the “several things in that household that didn’t tend to get stiff,” and so this rather substantial brouhaha ensued.
Dog-boy said it was usually pretty half-assed between them, that they never really hit each other or did any serious damage, just got loud and broke things. Dog-boy just happened to unfortunately get in the way of an ashtray that Marshall had just chucked, and it sort of ricocheted off of his shoulder as Dog-boy threw up his arm to protect himself. But at the same time Dog-boy’s fist had connected with Marshall’s nose, which Dog-boy insisted when he told me the story was an absolute fluke. But I have to wonder, because Dog-boy was fourteen at that point and probably pretty fed up with Marshall the Asshole, probably itching to see if he was any match for him.
He started in on the second Pop-Tart while he thought through the rest of the story, and I could see his face change. He was still smiling, but it wasn’t goofy any more. It looked like the smile you smile at a cop when he stops you somewhere that you shouldn’t be. Apparently the thing is Marshall’s nose broke, everyone could hear the crunch, and there was maybe a second or two when everyone just kind of… gaped. "Hiatus." But then Marshall lunged for Dog-boy, and Dog-boy’s mom pulled a boning knife out of the block next to the stove, and everyone sort of converged on the spot where Dog-boy just stood there, rubbing his shoulder with one hand while he stuck the knuckles of the other one in his mouth.
“You bastard! Don’t you hurt him,” Dog-boy’s mother had shouted, and charged over, waving the knife. She knocked into the counter on the way over and sort of lunged in an off-footed way, and the knife came down across the back of the hand that Dog-boy stood nursing.
He put the last of the poptart in his mouth and held the hand out to me, palm down. “See? There’s the scar. I still got it.”
I looked at it and allowed as how yeah, I could still see the scar. He stood up, but it took him two tries to get loose of that damn beanbag chair. He brushed imaginary crumbs off his “Satan Rules” teeshirt and ran a finger under his runny nose. “Yeah, well, she said it was an accident.”
“It sounds like it was,” I said. “I mean, she was pretty messed up, and things were pretty out of hand…”
“Thing is,” Dog-boy said from the door, “When she said that about not hurting him? She was addressing me.” Addressing, I love that. Dog-boy really has a way of saying things sometimes.
He left then. I heard he got into some trouble last night, got stabbed outside the hockey game. Trina from downstairs -- she used to fuck Dog-boy, but now she doesn’t -- Trina says they think maybe he’ll die, but they just aren’t sure, on account of the guy nicked Dog-boy’s liver or spleen or what have you.
Me, I don’t know how Dog-boy could have known what his mom was saying, or who she was trying to stab, or anything like that. He thinks he knows, and I guess it’s got him pretty messed up. But it sounds to me like things were pretty out of hand.
--Mary Corinne Powers
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