Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn Read Free Book Online Page A

the bakery at the supermarket, where she made donuts. This was the only real supermarket in town, having drawn the lifeblood ( bigfisheatlittlefish ) from the smaller markets. I remember it being built on the muddy field that the tenements once occupied. A friend had lived in one of those decrepit buildings—the yellow trucks came one day and knocked them all down. Each evening after the workers left I’d creep around the machines and mud. A small outbuilding was left standing and inside were boxes filled with skeleton keys (a key to a skeleton? or was the key itself a bone?). I took some home and the next evening this building too was gone, bulldozed under.
     
    The bank gave her a loan to buy a two-thousand-dollar ruin, a complete wreck of a house. Nightly the raccoons came to our ramshackle porch and raided the garbage, which was submerged in the yard beneath a lid that flipped open when you stepped on it. We’d watch them from the kitchen with the lights out, amazed at how organized they were, a team—one holding open the lid, another reaching into the pail and passing out the bones and scraps to a line of hungry bandits. The lookout would raise a paw and hiss if we came to the door.
     
    Unless a boyfriend was sleeping over she would bring my brother and me to the supermarket rather than leave us in that drafty house to wake up alone. We’d wander the empty aisles while she opened the bakery. It was unspoken, but we could eat anything we wanted, as long as we hid the evidence. At least that’s how I understood our agreement. An entire supermarket. Like a television game show. Aisle of cracker, aisle of chocolate. A few years later I would walk in with the silver coins I stole from the coffee can in her bedroom, coins she’d hoarded from the bank, from tips, and use them to buy candy bars, until one day a cashier asked if I really wanted to use a rare Flying Liberty silver dollar to pay for a Heath bar. Soon after I began shoplifting, deciding it was wrong to take money from my mother. I hit all the stores she had worked—the convenience store, the newsstand, I even had my eye on the bank. I found a loose grate that led into a crawlspace and to the bank’s basement. I was skinny, I had a plan. In the supermarket I mirrored what I had done just a few years earlier as my mother was busy making donuts in the still-dark morning, only now I did it in daylight. I was maybe all of eight. I’d wander in, put plums in my pockets, Twinkies, walk out. We got no allowance, and this was where the food was. The good food. I had been feeding myself there as long as I knew. Soon I didn’t even bother to see if I was being watched. I ate the plums as I wandered, left the pits on the shelves beside boxes of cereal, beside the faces of smiling athletes. I’d go to the bakery, look past the glass cabinet at the donut machine, I’d remember standing on a chair watching the yellowy dough extrude into the hot oil, watching the donuts form, roiling in the agony of becoming. My mother would set us up at the formica lunch counter on the spinning stools and give us juice, milk, hot donuts. I would take the little packages of jelly and fill my pockets, the vast parking lot slowly coming out of the darkness through the plate-glass windows behind us. Occasionally a carpenter would come and rap on the window, hoping to be let in, to be allowed an early donut. Occasionally my mother would unlock the door, let him in.
     
    Within a few months the house caught fire—the raccoons toppled a smoldering grill left on the back porch. My brother and I were asleep upstairs when our mother came in with Vernon, her boyfriend at the time, and lifted us, still wrapped in blankets, to carry us through the smoky house. The fire station sat directly across the street, I remember running up the stairs, busting in on the firemen’s card game. The firemen barely looked up from their hands, gestured to the alarm box on the wall, told us to pull it. Only then