American Outlaw Page 11

  “Let’s leave it to the boy to make the decision,” Coach Meyer said. “He knows what his body can do.” He turned to look at me. “How does that knee feel for you?”

  “Nice,” I said, flexing it. “It feels pretty strong.”

  “You see?” Coach Meyer said. “He’s ready. I tell you what, Jesse, those four sacks you got against Long Beach were un-fucking-real. We could use some more of that in the playoffs, I’ll tell you that much.”

  I said nothing, just sitting there, looking at the ground.

  “Well?” Coach Meyer prodded me. “Everybody says you’re ready to play. Do you want to play?”

  It was a beautiful fall day. The sun shone down on our faces, and you could smell the cut grass on the field. I was an athlete. This was what I had been born to do.

  I looked up at my coaches and told them, “No, I’m done.”

  Both of them looked shocked.

  “Excuse me?” Coach Meyer asked quietly.

  I shook my head firmly, feeling more sure of my decision. I had never liked to side with my father, but in this case, I couldn’t help it. He was right. I was a commodity to these people. I’d been broken, but now I was fixed. They’d changed my flat. Now they wanted me to head out, full throttle.

  “You know,” I said, “someday I might have some kids.”

  Meyer stared uncomprehendingly, as if he was listening to a foreign language. “And?”

  “Well, I was just thinking,” I continued. “Someday, I might want to pick them up and run with them.”

  I picked up my bag, nodded respectfully, and left them sitting there.

  6

  As soon as they found out that I’d quit the team, the school stripped me of my scholarship. That was that—I was gone. As relatively cheap as RCC was, I couldn’t afford to be there if I had to pay for it myself.

  I set out to scrub my dorm room of my existence. Pants, socks, undershirts, cassettes, toothbrush: I stuffed them all into two green army duffels. The job took me about ten minutes to complete. I had nothing, really.

  “I’ll see you again,” Josh said.

  “Nah,” I said.

  “Sure, I will. You’ll be that guy out there on the freeway, begging for cash,” Josh said. “I’d always give you a nickel, Jesse James.”

  “Cool, I’ll remember that.” I stripped the cheap, dirty linens from my bed and, after looking at them cheerlessly for a moment, crumpled them into my duffel.

  “You’ll have a bitchin’ homeless tan,” Josh continued. “All brown and healthy-looking.”

  “Hey, look. Thanks for helping me out with my rehab and everything. I appreciate it.”

  “Can’t have you out begging with a broken knee,” Josh said. “Good luck, Jesse.”

  I headed back home to my dad’s place, dreading the homecoming. I knew he’d make me eat some crow for coming back. Sure enough, the knowing grin that spread over his face when he saw me just about made me sick.

  “Well, what now?” he said, hardly even trying to hide his smile.

  “I’ll figure something out,” I muttered.

  “Stay here as long as you need,” he said magnanimously.

  Right off the bat, we started butting heads. About a week after coming back home, we got into a fight concerning some car parts that I’d sold out of the garage.

  “Where’s my cut?”

  “What are you talking about?” I said, outraged. “What does this have to do with you?”

  “You stored ’em in my garage, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, but . . .”

  “Are you paying rent around here?”

  “No, but . . .”

  “Yeah, I didn’t think so!” His eyes blazed. My dad’s temper had been ignited by the subject of money. All his attention focused on me now. “You come here whenever you want, and you use this house as your own personal storage bin . . .”

  “I won’t anymore,” I said. “I’m gone.”

  “. . . you’re making deals on my damn front steps and paying no rent? No, no way. Not in my house.”

  “I told you I’m leaving.” I pushed past him. “So stop fucking talking.”

  He laughed rudely. “Oh, I’m sorry! I didn’t realize you had so many places to go. Tell me, Jess, where are you headed? Back to school? Oh, no, they didn’t want you there.”

  “Get away from me.”

  “How about to your little friend Bobby? No, wait a second, he sold you down the river once already. Better not go there.”

  My temper was rising, and so was my frustration. “I’m telling you to shut up, man.”

  “You think you can get away from all this shit, don’t you? But the truth is right here. You can’t run. This is your goddamn life.” He stood for a second, his hands on his hips, a smug expression on his face. “Sooner you figure that out, the better.”

  I looked at him—at the pitiful specimen that was my father. His bald head sprouting stray hairs. The beard he had always been so proud of was more gray than black, now. His 1970s big-collar print shirt looked faded and out of date, and a potbelly bulged out from beneath the lower half of it. The sags of age had added rings beneath his eyes, and crow’s-feet poked from the corners of them. He looked tired. When he smiled, his teeth looked worn down. It was a grim sight.

  “I’ll clean out the garage this afternoon,” I told him. “You won’t see me after that.”

  He scoffed. “Son, that’s what you said last time. That’s what you say every time.”

  I looked at him. “This time, it’s real.”

  He laughed, then walked back into the house, slamming the door after him.

  I stood there for a second, listening to the silence.

  “Dick,” I muttered. Then I packed up the garage. Then I left.

  ——

  My mom hadn’t been in my life for several years. But there weren’t any options left. So I came begging.

  “You want to stay here . . . with me?” she said doubtfully.

  “Just for a while, Mom,” I assured her. “Just till I get my shit together.”

  My mother lived alone in a house in Long Beach. Aside from the drunk boyfriend she’d had when I was just a little kid, right after my dad and her split, she’d never gotten another partner. You could tell she was really used to living the solo life, because every time she opened a cabinet, she slammed the crap out of it. Same with every door.

  An earsplitting rattling of plates awoke me the first morning I was there.

  “Mom,” I grumbled. “What’s the commotion?”

  “Oh, hello, son,” she said, still a bit surprised to see me in her house. “You’re up early.”

  “Didn’t really have much of a choice,” I mumbled. Rubbing my eyes, I came into the kitchen to make myself a cup of coffee.

  My mother gave no indication that she’d heard me. A bowl smashed down powerfully on the countertop: “Oatmeal?”

  “No.” I winced, putting a hand to my head. “Mom, do you get the paper delivered here?”

  “No, sweetie. Not much call for me to read the paper these days.”

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll go out and get one.”

  “What’s the hurry?”

  “I need a job, Mom,” I said. “Don’t know if you’ve figured this out yet, but I’m kind of penniless, right now.”

  She looked at me, unsure of how to take my comment. “Do you need some money for lunch, sweetie?”

  “It’s all right.” I kissed her on the cheek. “I’ll see you later, okay?”

  I headed to the closest diner and bought a paper and a cup of coffee with change. Perusing the want ads, I saw nothing but a whole bunch of low-paying crap: carpet cleaners, fast-food cashiers, busboys, and hotel clerks. I sighed, depressed. Maybe my dad was right. Maybe I was fucked in the water.

  Then I saw an advertisement that said, “Skilled Welders/Fabricators Only.”

  I looked closer, and was greatly encouraged by the next line: “Earn $1,000 a week! Immediate openings. Ex
p. required.”

  Now, that looked interesting. I’d learned to weld in freshman shop class, and I’d always been pretty good at it. Consistent practice had eluded me to this point—I’d always been too busy with sports—but I’d kept up on my skills here and there. And I’d certainly cut up enough cars to know my way around a blowtorch.

  Nevertheless, there had to be a catch—and there was. The job wasn’t local: it’d be in Seattle, up at a shipyard, near Puget Sound. Still, I took down the number and called up a manager, who described the job responsibilities to me. It was aluminum TIG welding, which I’d never done before. But there didn’t seem to be many other jobs out there, so I lied to him and told him no problem. “TIG welding? My favorite!” He replied that he liked my initiative, and that I should report to work the following Monday.

  “I’m thinking about going up north,” I told my mom. “I found a job, and it pays really good money.”

  She slammed the refrigerator door. Pickles shook. “Really? You just got here.”

  “I know, Mom.” I gave her a hug. “I think I need to make some kind of new start.”

  She nodded.

  “Be good,” my mom said. For a second, I imagined asking her if she wanted to come up there with me. We could start some kind of new life together, have the lovable, kooky mom-son relationship that we should have had all along, but didn’t. But she was already looking at her hands blankly, forgetting I was even there.

  I wasn’t angry at my mom. I didn’t disdain her, like I did my dad. She wasn’t a bad woman. But she had never tried very hard to be part of my life. It was sad, but by now, we’d sort of missed our window. Neither of us really had the inner resources or the drive to fully connect.

  I had never been out of California in my entire life. I had nowhere to live, and no money. The prospect shook me a little. How the fuck was I going to survive? Fortunately, my mom wouldn’t let me go before she’d stuffed a couple hundred bucks in my pocket. I tried to refuse, but she could probably tell that my heart wasn’t in it. She wouldn’t let me say no.

  “Thanks, Mom,” I said, embarrassed.

  “Write me when you get there,” she said.

  I found a Greyhound going north and bought myself a ticket. As soon as I boarded, an ancient wino plopped down next to me, reeking of whiskey. Immediately, he passed out on my shoulder. I looked out the window, watching the highway pass by blackly.

  When we finally pulled in to Seattle, it was early evening, and very cold. I still wore my Southern California uniform: a pair of cut-off Dickies and T-shirt. Shivering, my heavy bags on my back, I bounced from motel to motel, unable to find a place that fit my budget.

  Exhaustion threatened to undo me. In desperation, I found a phone book and called a Red Lion Inn in Kirkland, Washington. They had a single small room that was going for fifteen bucks a night.

  “Where’s Kirkland?” I asked.

  “Oh, just about fifteen minutes from downtown.”

  “How am I supposed to get there?”

  “Bus?” the night manager suggested, perversely.

  One interminable city bus ride later, and I arrived at the Lion, sweating and clammy in the cold night air.

  “I’m the guy you spoke to on the phone,” I announced. “You said fifteen, right?”

  “Sure, fifteen bucks. But you gotta stay a week.” The dumpy woman gave me a quick once-over. “You got a week’s rent?”

  I gave her the money, and lugged my two duffels up to my room, where I sat down heavily on my bed. The bedsprings creaked beneath me. A feeble lamp cast a putrid yellow light around the room, displaying a small, grayish dorm-style refrigerator, two rolls of toilet paper, and a plastic bath mat that lay coiled on its side in the grim tub.

  It would have to do. I rolled over, listening to the creak of the bedsprings. My clothes were filthy. Sadly, I realized that I didn’t want to go to my first day at work smelling like a bum. Though I was dead tired, I forced myself to go down to the front desk and ask the night manager if by any chance there was a Laundromat nearby.

  “Down the road, half a mile on the right,” she grumbled. “Bring your own soap. Their machine’s busted.”

  I didn’t have any laundry soap of my own, but I set off anyway, hoping she was wrong. Soon, I realized that the night manager had underestimated the distance greatly. A good mile and a half had passed before a strip mall appeared on my horizon.

  It was winter, Seattle, 1988—grunge was being born, but I barely noticed. Sweating and tired, not to mention mildly freaked out to be in a new place, I struggled under the weight of my tramp bag. Vaguely, I fantasized about heaving it into traffic and letting the oncoming cars maul my overripe clothes into oblivion. But then I’d have to buy new ones, and I couldn’t afford luxuries like that at the moment.

  Finally, I saw the strip mall. As I walked toward the Laundromat, a guy came out the door and passed me, nodding in a pleasant, friendly manner.

  “Hey, man, how ya doing?” he said.

  “Fuck off,” I barked instinctively.

  A confused, fearful look passed over the guy’s face, and he quickly scurried off.

  I muttered “sorry” under my breath, but the dude was long gone. Dammit! I thought. He’d taken me by surprise. Where I came from, you didn’t talk to people you didn’t know on the street. This Seattle shit was going to take some getting used to.

  The next day, I rented a car for work. “What’s the cheapest thing you’ve got?” I asked the guy working the counter.

  “Try this on for size.” He tossed me the keys to a Chevy, a no-frills piece of crap. It had almost no suspension at all. I felt like I was riding on a set of Tonka wheels. But the price was right. It was going for about ten bucks a day.

  Now I would just need food. I lurched to the grocery store, where hungrily I seized a towering stack of lunch meat, three loaves of white bread, and a bottle of ketchup. I moved toward the checkout, but then, reconsidering, I turned to my right and added a stack of pink wafer cookies to the pile: a fourth food group.

  ——

  “So, you definitely know how to TIG weld. Is that right?” my boss asked me on my first day at work at the shipyard. It was seven o’clock in the morning in December off of Puget Sound. The wind coming off the water was absolutely freezing.

  “Definitely,” I agreed, shaking from the cold.

  “Where’d you learn?” he asked dubiously. “Tungsten inert gas welders are pretty rare in this day and age. And, well, no offense, but you’re just a kid.”

  “My dad.” It was the first thing that came to mind. “Welder.”

  “Well, all right, then.” He seemed satisfied. “Go over to the office, get your torch and your helmet. Tell ’em to give you a work jacket, too. You don’t want any of those fucking sparks gettin’ on you, am I right? Burn the goddamn skin right off your face!” He cackled alarmingly.

  It didn’t take me long to realize the job I’d taken was slow, repetitive, and dangerous. Even more, it was difficult. I’d considered myself a good worker with a torch, but in this shipyard, I found it surprisingly challenging to execute my tasks. In the most basic terms, we attached and repaired the metal appendages of giant crafts: one of my first jobs was to construct the munitions racks for the USS Camden, a guided missile frigate. The scale and importance of the work inspired me, but the job required me to regularly worm my way into tiny spaces. Often, I was caught in between bulkheads so tight that I literally couldn’t wear my welding mask.

  “I can’t fit it on my head!” I complained to my boss. “There’s no room!”

  “Well, wear this!” he yelled to me. He tossed me a little leather hood with goggles on it. I looked at him.

  “This is . . . a gimp hood.”

  “Okay, go in there with nothin’ on your fucking head, I don’t care!” He stomped off to troubleshoot the next battery of problems.

  Despite the challenges that came with the work, I caught on pretty quickly. I labored completely alone, every day, and i
mmediately I loved that. I welded: that’s what I did. The simple realization that I could come to work, get out my torch, and start blazing away for hours and hours, and then receive good money for it, well, it felt great. I took chaos and made order of it. That was my job.

  With bright bursts of electricity, I jointed aluminum and steel. Soon, a vague realization came over me that I might actually be good enough at this to do it as a career. Maybe it wasn’t curing cancer, but I was contributing to the world. One way of life, football, had disappeared for me. But just as quickly, another had arisen to take its place. I felt grateful for the turn my life had taken.

  The jury was still out on Seattle as a city, though: it was absolutely freezing there. After years of the mildest Southern California winters, I’d been dropped face-first into a never-ending drizzle that went from cold to gray, and back to cold. My Chevy bombed its way through flooded highways at seventy miles per hour, its shoddy tires spraying up huge arcs of water. I remember the windshield wipers of that car vividly, because I never actually turned them off. They batted back and forth so continually that I’d wear them out by the month, and had to fork over eight bucks for new ones.

  “You want the regular model, or the double-arm blade?” the lady behind the counter asked me.

  “Give me the doubles,” I said. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life.”

  The people mystified me, too. Seattle was in the dawn of its Plaid Shirt Era. This wasn’t the preppy California plaid I had grown up with, either. Dudes wore goatees, sideburns, and beanie caps pulled down over their eyebrows. Meanwhile, chicks went for chokers, ripped jeans, laced-up Docs, and pale makeup. Apparently, a mutant gang of ex-hippies with seasonal affective disorder had taken control of the city’s fashion scene. No matter where you went, you could never really get away from the plaid.

  It wasn’t that I hated grunge; in fact, quite the contrary. I just liked to laugh at the people who thought it was so hard-core. These folks had never been to a Circle Jerks show, I can tell you that. When it came down to the music, I actually liked a bunch of the bands and their sound. In Pike Place Market, there was a Sub Pop record store, where they sold singles and EPs and limited edition stuff by cool new bands like Tad, Mudhoney, and Soundgarden. I happily threw my money down for those records.