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

did they throw their cards down, jump into their boots and slide down the pole to the waiting truck. They drove past the house first, then returned, dragged the hoses into the backyard, put out the blaze.
    It turned out not to be such a bad thing, as my mother got some insurance money and had the whole house renovated. Vernon was a carpenter, did all the work. He was also married, so this was a way for him to spend more time with her without arousing suspicion.
     
    I got stopped one day as I was leaving the supermarket, a half-eaten candy bar in my hand. The manager brought me into a little room elevated above the registers that had two-way mirrors on four sides, just like on television. I realized he sat up there on the lookout for people like me. I felt sick. He asked what I was doing and I said I didn’t know. He asked where my mother was and I said at work. He asked me for the number and I said he couldn’t call her there, that there was no phone. I might have even started to cry. He asked if I knew that what I was doing was wrong. Yes yes, I said. After an hour he let me go. He told me he’d have his eye on me, that he wouldn’t forget my face. I never told my mother, even when, years later, she was pressuring me to get a job there, bagging groceries, stacking shelves, anything.

funeral, unattended
    (1970) Weekend mornings, after or before my paper route, my mother, still in her bathrobe, drives me to the Harbor, sends me in to get her coffee while she waits in the car. Cream-no-sugar, I tell the woman behind the counter, the code my mother taught me, and she nods comprehension. This is the same coffee shop my mother worked in as a girl, where she met my father, though she never tells me this. As she pulls away I tear a little “v” in the lid for her. We drive past St. Mary’s—the lot filling up early, a funeral, high mass. Offhandedly she says, That’s your grandfather’s funeral . At first I’m confused, sickened— Dead? But I quickly figure out it’s not the grandfather I know, not the one I see all the time, the one on First Cliff, though I’d never considered I had another grandfather until that moment. Of course , my father’s father, he’d also be my grandfather, though I never met him. We must have walked past each other on Front Street countless times, I suddenly realized, stood in line together at the one supermarket in town. My mother must have known what he looked like, but she never pointed him out, never mentioned him at all. It was complicated enough for me to keep track of her own parents, the grandparents I knew, divorced and living in the same town. My brother and I were warned to never mention one to the other, even as we drove from breakfast at Grandma’s to lunch at Grandpa’s, never to say where we were headed or where we’d just been. And now this other grandfather pops up, dead. He must have lived in the house on Second Cliff, I reckoned, we would pass it on our way to the real grandfather, my mother’s father. I knew it was the house my father grew up in, it must have been pointed out to me at one time, but I never went inside. I’d merely glance toward it as we passed, imagine someone at a window, watching me. It was near the water but not on the water, nicer than our house on Third Cliff but not as nice as my grandfather’s house on First Cliff.
    First second third. Three two one. Elevator, going down.
     
    My father wouldn’t have been at his father’s funeral that day any more than I would have—he wouldn’t have dared the Breen boys and more jail time. I don’t know if this second unattended funeral occurs after my father’s second marriage breaks up, or even how he got married again with a warrant hanging over him. This was when computers were the size of rooms, not something to hold in your hand. Easier to get lost in a room. Maybe you could just drift north into another state, maybe the courts weren’t as aggressive as they’ve become in tracking down