Men Left Alone

He could remember when he was young, his father dressed him on Mondays and Wednesdays. He dressed himself Tuesdays and Thursdays, and on Fridays, they compromised. He hated Wednesdays the most because he would be sent to school in a baggy T-shirt or a sweatshirt with the name of a sports team he didn’t care about and he had football practice in the evenings. His father had encouraged him to join the peewee football team so he could make friends with the boys his age. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to make friends, he just didn’t like talking to the boys on his football team because they never seemed to like talking about things that he wanted to talk about. Eventually, he stopped speaking during practices and games. Although they were young boys, the games were long and the practices were too. It was a very long time for a person to be silent for. He knew this but, eventually, he stopped noticing.

Thursdays were his favorite days. Not only was it the day before Friday, and the promise of the weekend could be felt in the air of the elementary school hallways, he was also able to wear his favorite collared shirt and purple light up shoes that his mother gave him for his seventh birthday. Thursday nights, while his father worked late, he watched his favorite television program or, his mother drove him to the McDonald’s drive through. On the way there, they would sing a long with the songs on the radio and his mother let him sit in the front seat so he could be next to her. She told him not to listen to the mean kids at school and that one day people would hear him. His mother made him feel like he could break the silence he sustained out in the world.

For his eighth birthday, he asked his mother for a karaoke machine, the one that you can plug into the TV and read the words right off the big screen. He had felt too guilty to ask his father where the present was hidden after she died. The boy was almost certain she had already bought the gift and thought it a shame for a perfectly good karaoke machine to go to waste but he feared his father. He feared him more than he feared death itself and the way it lay pale and cold in the coffin the day of his mother’s funeral. Besides, his father probably had no idea where she had hidden it. The boy had overheard him discouraging his mother from buying the karaoke machine one night, shortly before his birthday and even closer to his mother’s dying day. Words like “queer” and “pansy” flying from his father’s lips and into the boy’s ears for the first time. On those suddenly lonely Thursday nights, the boy skittishly looked for the karaoke machine in all the suspected hiding places. But, his mind tricked him into hearing his father’s heavy footsteps coming down the hall and each time he looked for the gift, he quickly gave up.

Each year following, his father celebrated the boy’s birthday with a glass of whiskey and his gift to the boy was to offer him a sip. The boy would touch the drink to his lips. He clamped them tight. He never gulped. Each year, when the boy took the whiskey glass in a bigger hand and a firmer grip than the year prior, his father was silent and, looked away. The silence became all consuming in the boy’s life and there were no more words to be said or songs to be sung.

Some days, the silence got too loud for the boy to bear. His father recognized the anger in his son but wasn’t able to understand its origin. He told the boy to direct his anger at his opponents in football. Surprisingly, the boy found relief in the crashing shoulder pads and ground

hitting bodies of peewee football. He broke the silence with every tackle, every time his cleated foot dug into the turf. He was making the world hear him.

One day, when he was eleven, he stood outside with the neighbor boy, who always wanted to be outside even when it was too hot or too cold. This day was too hot and school was going to be starting any day. He told the neighbor boy he would continue playing football because it was the bravest sport someone could play and girls weren’t allowed. The neighbor boy told him that he was going to go out for the track team because he liked to run and thought that if he could win medals for doing something he liked, he wouldn’t mind that so much.

The first kiss he had with the neighbor boy had tasted like ocean water, because the neighbor boy had been running and sweat beaded on the brim of his upper lip, like a water fall about to spill over a rocky edge.

This same year, on his birthday, the year of the kiss, he gulped. The whiskey from his father burned all the way down, he tried hard to keep his eyes from watering but they stung with a redness he’d never felt before. The year of the kiss, his father watched him as he coughed. He looked at his son for the first time since he was young. He remembered laying out the outfits that normal boys should want to wear on his son’s bed and how he could see a sadness on the boy’s face, a sadness he, himself, would never understand. He saw his boy now, almost a man, in a different, unfailingly pink shirt and took in everything about him. He felt the sting that comes from releasing the reins on a running horse, it digs deep into the palms and leaves a mark from a burn that never had a flame. The boy stifled several choking whiskey coughs before, meeting his father’s gaze and downing the remaining contents in the glass. This gulp burned his throat less, along with the imaginary sting, fading on his father’s palms.

The two sat in silence for several moments before the father stood and left the room. The boy sat slumped in the living room arm chair. When his father returned, he carried a tall rectangle box with pink and purple wrapping paper. The boy wondered, with drunken amusement, how long his father had known the whereabouts of the karaoke machine. It didn’t matter, for the son now saw the father with a view no longer fogged by fear. He saw him as the man who let him pick his own outfits on Tuesdays and Thursdays.