House of Prayer No. 2 (18 page)

He's angry when he can't find it all. Then he says something you don't understand. He tells you he's hauling your trash. You just shrug and say,
Get your stuff and go
. When the moving crew
he has hired, big thug-looking guys who seem to specialize in this type of thing, get impatient toward the end waiting for your father to find the things you've hidden, your father finally comes around to the porch where you're waiting for him to leave. He puts out his hand to shake, and you look at it as if it were a poisonous snake and go in the house.

IT WASN'T EASY BEING YOUR FATHER
. A perfectionist with an imperfect child, a son who avoided you, a son who would have preferred to live across the street at the Baptist parsonage. A son who was a stick-figure kid mostly on crutches scared of ice and wet tile.

The good thing about your father being a perfectionist was that he was paralyzed by his perfectionism. Here is a Father Illustration: your father would do all the research on how to do some home repair or home improvement, he would research all the best places to buy the materials he would need, he would buy all the special tools he would need to accomplish the task, and then, afraid of not being able to make the repair, the addition, the improvement perfectly, he would not do any of it at all, so that when he leaves your mother's house, he leaves the garage full of the materials and tools needed to do all the things that have always needed to be done around the house but have never been done by him.

In the months to come, you scrape and caulk, prime and paint while your mother refurnishes the house with things she buys at yard sales and things given to her by friends. She gets a job working
midnight shifts as a switchboard operator at the hospital. Your sister needs to look at colleges, so you and friends of the family take her, even though there is no money for tuition. Your mother is not worried, she says God will provide.

THE FURNITURE IN YOUR BEACHFRONT PENTHOUSE
is an old broken table, a desk in the living room, a bookcase your grandfather made, and an old four-poster you scavenged from the ex-girlfriend's barn when you lived on the Chesapeake Bay. When your mother and sister come to visit, you have to wheel over a couple of cots you borrow from housekeeping at the Thunderbird.

At the T-bird Lounge, they play the States Game between Memorial Day and Labor Day. There's a large Rand McNally map pinned behind the bulletin board on the back of the swinging door behind the bar. If you get a girl from a state, you get to put one of those little stars like you are awarded in Sunday school for attendance; everybody chooses his own color. At the end of the summer, whoever had the most states wins a prize. Because of Virginia's physical proximity, by midsummer everybody has already gotten Pennsylvania and Ohio. You sit next to a girl and say,
So, where are you from?
and she says, Ohio, and you turn to your buddy next to you and say,
Damn it, I already got Ohio
, and you pick up your drink and move along. On your way home one night you see a friend desperate for Nevada in the front seat of his car, and the buttock flesh and arms pressed against the windshield look like a fat man changing clothes in a phone booth.

In spring, there are amphibious assaults on weddings at the country clubs on the back waterways of your beach town, and Witcher has a nice boat, and you all wait until the reception is in full swing before you dock quietly at the end of a private yacht slip. Before the mother of the bride can buttonhole you as to who you are, you've had a drink and dance and have made off with a bridesmaid in Witcher's boat to tie her to your bedposts with the pretty ribbons she's pulled from her hair.

In summer, a girl from New York comes down on weekends, and you're not really sure what she does, she works for a fashion designer, she says, and she packs light, mainly a handful of bathing suits. For you, that summer becomes a big blue star over the state of New York.

Fall is the Whiskey Rodeo. The Navy and the local police want to demonstrate the effects of drinking and driving, so they set up a large municipal parking lot with a twisting course marked by orange cones. They invite the local media to come down and participate. About a half dozen reporters will drink whiskey, wine, or beer over a certain time and then drive their own cars through the obstacle course, all the while the news groups will tape it for a segment. You see the woman who always gets green just riding the helicopters out to the aircraft carriers when the media would go meet a returning battle group. There's the photographer who has volunteered from the daily paper who always had a joint to share before you got on the helicopter. You decide to take your drinks in shots of bourbon. The art department has painted a landing strip on the hood of your car as if it were an aircraft carrier and stenciled the number 69 on the door like the aircraft
carrier
Eisenhower
. You said sure they could do it, not thinking they would.

People at the Whiskey Rodeo are crunching orange cones even after one drink. But not you. You have downed five shots and run the course perfectly.
That's the end of the demonstration
, they say. You say one more, so you pour yourself a big shot and down it and announce that you're going to do the course backward. The police make a move to stop you from getting in your car, but you get in, laughing. Of course, you flatten all the orange cones, and a couple of people have to jump out of the way.
Okay, fun's over
, somebody says, and instead, you do a really big doughnut in the parking lot, honking the horn and waving for the one news camera still rolling, and then you leave the parking lot heading south on General Booth Boulevard.

Down the road you realize you're the only one laughing. You look in your rearview, there are no blue lights yet, but probably there will be soon. It's getting dark, so you decide to floor it out to a subdivision that is still being built by a crooked developer who once boasted that he had never read a book in his life. You get out there, and there's a house lit up, and it's a Model Open House somebody has forgotten about and the garage door is open, so you pull in and hit the garage door down. You go in the living room and the kitchen with the fake fruit in the bowl and the stack of flyers and wait, and nothing happens. You go into a bathroom off the laundry room to piss, and there's a water snake in the toilet, or else somebody didn't flush a long, perfectly coiled turd with a head and eyes. It spooks you, and to this day you don't know what it was. When the timers shut down the lights
in the Model Home, you creep back to your penthouse, go to the T-bird, and watch the eleven o'clock news with Brian, the marine biologist bartender, and are grateful to see the Whiskey Rodeo didn't make the news.

THE PROBLEM WITH ASKING GOD
for signs is that He sends them. You drive along a country road late at night and see a little cross atop a little church lit with a spotlight and you say, Okay, if You are real, make that light go out,
and the light goes out
. Shooting stars are too easy, especially on the water. Even that one time you are pissing off a dock in Marathon and you say, I
really
need a sign, and something falls out of the sky so bright you can read a newspaper, and you know you didn't imagine it because your wheelhouse radio bursts alive with chatter:
What the hell was THAT?

After the Whiskey Rodeo, you are strongly encouraged by the police to make amends. You know what that means. You don't want to be stopped down in the dark part of the county in April by a beach cop with an August attitude and when you roll down the window he says,
I'm thinking of a number between one and ten
, and he's studying his thumbnail, working the little banged-up places on the end of his unsheathed billy club, while his partner watches for any headlights that might come along before they pull you out of the car and adjust your attitude.

So for your sins you are assigned to Crash and Burn. You'll ride with rescue squads who pick up the pieces of the young sailors when the fleet comes in and they take their six months of
paychecks and buy overpowered cars and motorcycles. They call the head-trauma wing of the Norfolk hospital the House That Honda Built. You'll ride and report what you see.

At the first accident scene, you can smell the beer in all the blood. It's hard to tell how many guys are in the accordion of car that missed the dogleg turn off Oceana Boulevard and plowed right into the bull's-eye of the hazard sign. They're all dead. You can't look but you do and see a bloody arm coming out of a T-shirt that seems to be coming out of the glove compartment. There are some skin magazines on the folded-up backseat floor, and they look as though they might be gay magazines, but you can't tell and you don't care, it doesn't matter, they're all dead.

The next is in broad daylight. You go to one of those faceless Navy housing ghettos, and there's the young girl hysterical at the front door:
The snake is eating my baby! The snake is eating my baby!
It's the home of one of those asshole guys with the ninja crap on the walls and a boa constrictor or some large snake in a tank, and he leaves on deployment and gives his wife careful instructions on how to feed the goddamned snake, she's supposed to take live mice and dip them in vitamin powder and feed them to the goddamned snake, and she can't do it, who can blame her, and the snake gets hungry and pops itself out of its tank and makes its way over to the crib. The snake gets in there and unhinges its jaw and starts to try to swallow the baby headfirst when the mother comes in from the neighbor's laundry and the baby is screaming with a snake on its head like a skullcap with a length of yellow and brown tail. Nobody knows what to do. One of the EMTs is a woman who tries to calm the woman and almost
faints herself, the other EMT holds the snake's neck as if he can squeeze the top of the baby's head out of the snake's mouth. Suddenly you're a Boy Scout, and you take down one of the asshole's ceremonial swords, and you tell the EMT to get out of the way and he does, and you chop off the goddamned snake's head, and the baby is going to be fine except for some small punctures in its scalp after they cut the snake's head off of it, but the worst part is when the snake's body goes off twisting and banging headless into the furniture and knocks over the baby changing table and twists all around it, dying.

What do you want?
your boss asks you one night in a strip club. You don't know what you want; you seem to have everything you need—job, girlfriend, car, bar, beach. Historically, as with the realtor, when your employer asks you this question, it's always like a sign from God that you're about to move on.

When your employer springs this question on you, historically you've not been smart enough to ask for a raise, you take the question literally, and you think you might want to live in New York and be a writer, even though you've not really thought this out and you're a little surprised to think it to yourself at that moment.