Tales From The Abused Bouche
I heard 2 Neil Young songs on the radio, then flipped the station and heard another and thought Damn, Neil Young must’ve died.
Turns out it was just his birthday.
But that’s the way news has been breaking lately, terrible things dropping from the sky or else a quick shift in light, a thrown shadow, and everyone can finally see something that’s been so evil forever: Fanged monsters behind college football fields or first amendment massacres.
My mom got attacked outside of the casino. It was one of those stories that had been around the local news recently, not her story—but women like her: alone at the casino—were followed from the cashier’s booths out to the parking lot and robbed of their winnings. My brother Jackie called from DC to tell me and a seething brewed in my blood; he was down there for business and was ready to kill someone too.
“So can you go up to the house to check on her?”
“Yeah,” I said. ”Of course. Do you know how it happened?”
“I don’t know. I just spent an hour talking Pop out of going to the casino himself and stabbing every gutless loser hanging around there. He was crazy when he called me, and drunk—Mom had to give him Valiums to knock him out.”
“Jesus.”
“Look Jess, just check on her for me, will ya? This didn’t even happen today, it was yesterday—broad daylight! She spent the whole day in bed scared to talk to anyone and Pop finally got the story out of her tonight when he got home from work.”
At that point my phone fell into the kitchen sink full of soapy water and the clothes I was washing. I fished it out and fired it against the wall as hard as I could. If it wasn’t dead already it certainly was now.
Getting up to my mom’s house wasn’t easy: I didn’t have a car, couldn’t afford an Amtrak roundtrip, and wasn’t wearing pants. I grabbed my sopping jeans from the sink and wrung them dry best I could. It was almost 8 O’clock. If I took the subway as far as I could up into the Bronx I would still have to walk ten miles north after that. I’d done it before, but it was crisp into Fall now and my clothes were damp…I’d do it again, I decided.
It bothered me in a way that was beyond rational that my mom was hurt by someone, that she was alone at all. It bothered my whole family that she’d go to the casino by herself but she never took well to people telling her what to do, which is something I always admired her for.
On the long walk I let my anger over my inability to protect her and a dark, rush of revenge fantasy mix into some kind of adrenaline that was warming and trance-like, kind of like clawing your way home from a bar when you’re too drunk to stand still. I ducked my head into the wind and burrowed my fists into my jeans, both for warmth and to keep my pants up. I’d lost my belt in a dominos game last weekend, along with my watch.
I held my breath walking past graveyards.
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Rich Baiocco
