A white Cadillac pulled up, tinted windows and brand new with gold ensignias and gold-plated lug nuts on the rims. The door opened and a dude in a shiny silk suit stepped out. His gray hair reflected the sun and he was tall and skinny even though he was old, skinny like he’d never eaten a bag of Fritos or chugged a twelver in his life. He stared at us for what seemed like a flick of time but we all knew that for this dude it must have seemed an hour, his eyes going pale and shaky as he took us in, the truck drivers and jackhammer operators and cops and the titty twins dangling and no one in the crowd who didn’t have perma-filth scored three layers of skin deep, no one of us without biceps bigger than his pinhead. He walked around the Caddy and opened the passenger door and a woman took his hand and he brought her to a stand. He took a pair of sunglasses from his coat pocket and slipped them on.
She wore a white dress, low cut, slit up the side to show some leg. Her titties nearly dropped out when she stood, and she had to rearrange the dress to hold them in. The diamond on her finger was big as a hubcap.
It was my mother.
I looked at Pop. He acted like he didn’t give a shit, stood there in his suit with a beer in each hand and his tie crooked and his Florsheims spotted with foam.
He acted like he didn’t care, put on the face, but we all knew he did. Mom—she was the reason Pop ended up living in a trailer next to a gas station. He’d married her when I was already born of another man, and he’d raised me, the bastard son, along with two sons she’d popped out for him, one of which was no doubt his own, and while he’d been working four jobs trying to give her everything she wanted—a new Chevy Impala, a new house, new clothes, her own washer and dryer and a fancy television/stereo console—while Pop was driving a tow truck, pumping gas, working as nightwatchman at a junkyard, and spot-gigging in the Oakland Symphony on his trumpet, Mom was boning the Oakland chapter of the Hell’s Angels, whose headquarters was over the fence from our house on 62ndAvenue, jumping the fence like a bitch cat in heat whenever Pop was at work, which was all the time.
The night he beat her up, she hopped the fence and told the bikers, and when they came round the block on their choppers, Mom sitting bitch behind one of Sonny Barger’s boys, Pop was ready for them. He’d unfolded a lawn chair on the driveway and he’d cracked a beer and sat down. He was tipping the beer back when the first chain cut the air and cracked his chest into splinters. Me and my younger brothers, Kent and Clyde, watched from the living room window as the Angels tore into Pop, and each time they’d knock him over he’d set the lawn chair back upright and crawl back into it and take another swig from his beer. When they finished with him, he was sitting upright in that chair, blooded. And that’s where he was when the cops showed up and took him off to jail for beating Mom.
When he got out of jail, she’d given away or sold off all the things he still owed money on, divorced him, and stuck him with alimony and child support. No one would give him a job since he was an ex-con. Joe Fernandez, owner of Joe’s Tire Service, owed Pop a favor for something Pop had done for him that no one ever talked about and Joe gave Pop a job. Pop lived in the office of the Texaco station until he’d saved up enough money to buy a 19 foot Airstream trailer, and Joe let him park it next to the gas station, behind the stacks of truck tire casings.
I hadn’t seen my mother in a few years, not since she brought her last husband to town to flash him around. The last one was younger than me, and he worked for the railroad riding around in a caboose, easy money union job. We got drunk together, him and me and Mom, and the last glimpse I had of him was Mom smacking him around because he’d forgotten to bring her some booze.
And here she was, Mom, slutted up and stepping out of a Cadillac with some swanky dude that wasn’t pimp and had bucks anyway, that looked like his loot was earned easy and long, that stood and carried himself like a man from a world none of us had ever known or ever would. He seemed nice, and there was a dignity about him that was disarming, that made it so even though your first instinct was to bitch-slap him and take his lunch money you knew you shouldn’t because he was not deserving of a bitch-slap at all. Instead, what he deserved was to be commended, to be stepped aside for. He made you feel ashamed of hating rich people, made you suspect that not all of them were assholes that would fire you and starve you out just for shits and grins. We wanted to hate him, we knew we should hate him, but we couldn’t. And that made us hate him more. Otherwise, we’d have to hate ourselves.
“Everyone has better tits than me,” Rhonda said.
“Fake,” I said.
“How do you know?”
I said, “My mother.”
“Right.”
“No shit,” I said.
“Well shit,” Rhonda said. She spat on the lawn. It was substantial. She wiped her mouth with her forearm. I loved her.
The congregation was so quiet you could hear the chain banging against the flagpole, the soot filth flag wagging like a greasy shop-towel.
My buddy Carl drove up, his Rambler backfiring like gunshot. My mother and her man ducked, but none of us did.
“Fine party you got going here,” Carl said.
He took his flask from his pocket and slammed one. He passed it to me. I took a pull. Everclear with lime juice. Rhonda took it from me. “Bottoms up,” she said, and she smiled a nasty smile that would have killed any man on earth and sent him home jacking off like a chimp for days and days.
Pop’s face stretched into a grin. I could tell it hurt his face. It was the kind of grin you don’t like to see on a man, a creepy show of teeth that made your own smile sink down into your throat, the kind that means some bad shit is about to happen, and if not soon than sometime before long, and when it happened the grin would still be there hurting his face because it was the kind of grin that wasn’t face deep but went clean down to the bone.
“We aren’t too late, are we?” my mother said.
Pop just stood there grinning.
“T-Bird?” my mother said. “Is that you? Is that really you? You’re such a hunk! Hunk hunk hunk! I hardly recognized you. Do you like my new dress? What do you think of your ol’ ma now?” And she walked right on up to me, her man trailing along behind in his sunglasses like a politician’s hired goon.
People started talking again, and Lura and Tura packed their titties away in their halter tops. The guys in the band flipped the power and tested their mikes, warmed up their horns with quiet scales and whole tones. One of the Markstein guys cracked a couple more kegs.
“Well, I just couldn’t miss your father’s wedding. I heard about it from one of the old gang and since I just got married again and found the love of my life, I thought, to myself I thought well, if Bud’s getting married he certainly wants me there to witness his bliss and joy because I am, after all, the mother of his children! My children would want me there!”
“Kent’s dead,” I said. “And so is Clyde.”
“If Bud’s getting married, he must be as happy as I am! And I know he’d be just so happy for me too.”
“They’re dead and I’m not his son.”
“Gail is the perfect man,” my mother said. “He’s kind, and he’s handsome—as anyone can see—and he has the means to provide a proper home for a lady. Where are Kent and Clyde, my other two darling little boys?”
“They’re dead,” I said.
I put my arm around Rhonda’s waist and turned toward the kegs and then I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t move. My mother stood behind me saying, “What? What?” and her voice got more and more quiet and the sound of the party rose and Rich Kuam pulled his 4-wheeler onto the lawn and cranked up his car stereo and opened the doors and the ground shook with Creedence Clearwater Revival and I’d never before felt anything like what it felt like to have my arm around Rhonda’s waist. Her waist was slim and soft and beautiful and I could nearly wrap my arm all the way around and touch my own ribs. My forearm touched the undersides of her breasts, and I couldn’t see anything at all even though my eyes were open. I could only feel her breasts, her waist, her hair over my shoulder, the heat of her body shimmering and the bass guitar and drums of Kuam’s stereo, the rimshots of the bandman’s snare drum as he tuned it, the rumble of a train and jell-o shake of the landfill beneath my feet. Rhonda leaned her head on my shoulder, and her mother, my soon to be new step-mother, looked at Rhonda and winked. A flock of seagulls swooped toward the linguisca vats, and broken-haunched dogs sat drooling in the street.
