The Tooth (ROUND 12)
scent of the day: Nose Rest Day
*Let's workshop this poem about how a son would prank his inebriated father, tormenting the man on physical and mental and emotional levels as a way to feel in control (in an out-of-control milieu).
*Worked on ending and some bits in the beginning.
The Tooth
1
The snap-sizz of a match, the rasp-click of a lighter—amens like these were peanut shells next to the crack-fizz of a can. Five-five and balding since twenty, my dad would torch up a Newport 100 from the embered stump of the last—blazing through them like my thumb along the black beads he held in his casket. “Daddy’s got what they call an ‘oral fixation,’" so he would grin at my coughs: a confession made contract. But the beer, that bothered me most. “Daddy’s got a thirst.”
My nagging tears futile, his swear-on-me promises to quit
the guzzle broken too many times—a self-distracting thirst
to fuck with my father, a fierce thirst all my own, flowered
widest under moonlight (just like that older thirst for Pepsi
to wash down the Doritos, the Slim Jims, the Ring Dings)
in my transfixion before junk cable. Eyeing him for years
at our kitchen-living-bedroom table, every waking hour
smashed by his go-to Busch Light, could you blame me?
Frisbeeing bologna, liverwurst, on his head as he snored
adenoidal arpeggios in infantile oblivion on the hardwood
(fist-pump bullseyes landing in minuscule splats); stacking
board games, NYNEX phone books, on his chest, his face
(cans, lit candles, Aqua Velva undulant in Jenga precarity);
pinching his nose, his mouth, to silence the apneic rattles,
the flappy snorts and gasps that eclipsed (as if for theater)
my shouts: “Yo Dad! What the fuck! Go to the damn couch!”
I was hooked on such sweet-caffeinated sips of prankery before tolerance set in. And I snared others into the web. My friend and I once sharpied a clown face on him—black angles sharp, menacing like Gacy, around mouth and eyes, which in the noon sun (nickels still stuck to his bare gut after a long piss) I said he had drawn himself to amuse us but later (this to explain burns turned sores) had us scrub with the green part of the sponge (the only part there was).
2
Films on Lifetime, binkies after Ricki Lake at five—my dad liked their drama while he calibrated himself for the floor. All their “Mommy loved me too little, Daddy too much” only honing the mental slant of my mischief, in ambush I would wait for that soft spot just before gravity won out. And when it arose my intonation would twist histrionic, shaking like after-school-special lines: “Reefer?! Who, Son— who taught you this?” “You, alright!? I learned it from you!"
Anthropologist of dysfunction, weaponizer of emotion— I would take on a posture of too-sad-to-snack dejection and, at an ad break, go something like: “Hey Dad, can I—? Never mind. It’s fine.” Eyes up at the nicotined stalactites as if fighting back tears, this would suffice to draw him in. “S’matter, Boy? Tell Daddy.” “I’m havin,” voice cracking, “well, problems—problems back home, at Mommy’s.— I, I don’t know. It’s fine, Dad. You wouldn’t understand.”
“Huh?” He would have me mute the TV, brows furrowed (matching my drama); mouth slack, beady eyes befuddled, concentration quivery versus inebriation’s tug: “The fuck— you talkin, Boy? Fuckin headcase!” Hands over my face, both to hide chuckles and to hint how deep this goes, the scene would unfold like a liturgy: “Well, he—.” “He!? He who!?” “Can we just watch the movie?” “Tell Daddy the fuck now!” “After—I don’t know. After, he says—never to tell or—.”
“After!? After the fuck what!? This fuckin for real, Boy? Don’t tell me no lies.” “I’m not allowed to tell.—Okay!? He says if I tell anyone, it’ll break—break, our little secret.” “Our little fuckin secret!? The fuck!?—You bullshittin me!?” “Dad, he says it’s—it’s just for us. I can’t even tell Mommy.” “Mahfucka. Say what the fuck’s going on, Son.—Mikey!” “I’m tellin lies. Forget it!” I would yell, wiping Lifetime tears (aikidoing chuckles into sniffles). “Just drop it, Dad. Please.”
I would clam up at this point. He would go from sobbing to smashing his beer-can barricade (“Touch my son! Watch! I’ll kill that motherfucker!”), back to sobbing, then too soon to dream-mutters raging through the stink of the Newport cooking his insensate pointer (forever hooked rigid by steel after a tendon tear). “It’s just—well,” I would say, prodding his gut to pull him back from snore land, “it doesn’t feel good. Dad, I don’t want to play any more ‘love games.’”
3
One Friday night, my father sat groaning about his tooth. “Gonna yank this bitch!” His repetitions finally breaking my concentration on my own consumptions, I funneled my frustration into instigating tones of PSA hyperbole. “Stop jokin, Dad. You can’t do that.” “Wanna fuckin bet?” “How can you do that without a dentist? It’s too painful.” “Sheeit!” He cocked a grin of someone who lost the battle with every bottle he met. “Daddy don’t need no dentist.”
“Pull your own tooth, without medicine?” “Pop’s medicine”: he held his beer high. “Got ya fuckin medicine right here.” I shook my head, giggling, as if I thought he was just joking. But he rapped his twist on Domino’s “Sweet Potato Pie,” his response to people (me, mainly) making him feel bad for drinking: “♪ I’m all fucked up and I don’t know why! Feeling kinda freaky, that’s no lie. ♪” “No way,” I cut in. “Daddy don’t lie to his son, Boy. Sheeit, you know that!”
A junky at ten, toying with prey like cats came naturally given the weakening highs. So rather than jump right to “Prove it,” I fell into the silence of someone holding back skepticism. But at the cusp of uvular flapping, my voice surged to outdoor decibel. “I know it all!” I said. His face squinched into wobbly perplexity. “Mom told me, okay?” I said as his head buckled into sleep. “Mom talkin what?” “It doesn’t matter.” “You make no goddamn sense, Boy.”
“It doesn’t change things. It really doesn’t.” “You idiot.” “I know, okay!? You’re not my dad!” His cheeks and brows squeezed his eyes shut—his top teeth bared in agitation. “Huh? Tired of these mind games.” But having soaked up tales he would never have remembered he had told me— banging wives of impotent men for cash or, crucial here, fresh from the Marines and rescuing my would-be mother from Chris, her biker boyfriend at the time—I had angles.
“She told me everything. She took me to see my real dad. He’s okay, I guess. It’s more fun with you, th—.” “Who!? Who the fuck we talkin bout? You got some fuckin issues!” “He said I don’t have to call him ‘Dad’ yet if I don’t want. I can—I can just call him ‘Chris’ for now, or ‘Mr. Condon.’ He even took me on his motorcycle!” “Watch what you say— cuz I’ll kill the bitch.” “Dad, I’m telling you I don’t care. I still love you.” “Sheeit. Look at you, Boy. You Istvan clan!”
“I just don’t want you hurtin yourself if you’re not my dad,” I said (wincing at my ham-fisted pivot). His face contorted. “Fuck you talkin!?” I pressed on, banking on his fog to blur the stitches. “If you’re not my dad, you don’t have to prove anything by pullin your tooth,” I said as if (for all he knew) we had been talking about this. “I am your dad!—If I love ya.” He raised his hook, a gesture forever fused to that phrase. “Ain’t got shit to prove! Bitch’ll get yanked reeeal quick!”
“You sure you’re my dad—enough to pull your own tooth!?” “You don’t know shit. Get them fuckers.” His chin flicked to the linesmans on the TV. Handles greased (the channels turned by me), he held the pliers high as if to toast the pain that proved him. Then came the wrenching. “’Mon bitch!” I failed to tell the story at his wake: how then came the molar, berserk roots barnacled. Chest runneled red—“If I love ya!” he said, and spat into the heat grate at his feet. “If I love ya!”
“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right)
