B*****d Son

A Story by DaftWriter

B*****d Son

Most people spend their lives trying to fit into places they don't belong. That's jusy my opinion anyway. I'm not saying something that hasn't been said before. I'm no genius. I barely listen to myself. I don't see why other people would listen to me. When I really think about it, I'm speaking for my own benefit. I've spent my entire life trying to fit into places I don't belong. It took me alot longer than your average person to realize it. Like I said before, I'm no genius.

"You're like a crazy nomad," my ginger friend Rory told me one night. He was one friend in a long list of friends I had scattered across the country. A casualty of my misadventures.

As we walked down the palm lined streets of Coconut Grove, on our way to a bar, I thought about what he'd just said. For the longest I'd had this feeling brewing inside of me that I couldn't quite figure out. It was as if Rory had been able to put his finger on it and give it a name.

"Crazy nomad," I said to myself. It felt like a shot of vodka as it went down, the taste not so great at first, then warming my insides and making my brain tingle. I imagined myself in a desert struggling against a mighty sandstorm. With an ancient looking walking stick, I braced myself against the force of the wind fighting to push me back, my head down in furious resolution, dirty gray beard whipping behind me like a trail of smoke.

"Yeah, I guess that's right," I said with a smile on my face.

"Right," Rory said.

It was his way of agreeing with me without agreeing with me. His comment had probably been more of a criticism of what I was doing with my life, than an objective observation.

I rambled throughout the entire walk to the bar. Rory would listen patiently. The only time I'd stop talking and he'd stop listening, was when we'd see a woman worthy of a pause. Nine times out of ten, it'd be a mocha skinned Latina, with so much to offer, it felt like looking at her was the equivalent of running my hands up and down an ordinary woman. That's really the best why I can describe it. I've been with plenty of ordinary women. I should know.

When we go to the bar, there was a long, snaking line to get in. The doors were guarded by two huge guys with dreadlocks, dressed in all black. The entire strip around us swarmed with people ready to look death in the face, if only for one night, and smile triumphantly the next morning as they pulled their heads out of the toilet.

We inched closer to the door. It dawned on me that I wasn't old enough to drink legally at a bar. Neither was Rory. The fact that I hadn't thought of this before we'd left his cousin's house, or on the way to the bar, was probably the thing that tied us together. It was the foundation of our flimsy friendship.

I looked over at Rory. He didn't seem too worried about the whole thing. I realized he already had a solution to the problem. Well, his end of it anyway. To think he had the whole thing figured out, a way for both of us to get in, would've been like trying to paint a picture with the wrong brush for the job.

I didn't get angry. I didn't overreact. I was the crazy nomad after all. Flexibility is the key to success as a penniless vagabond. A little tip if you ever decide to stretch out your own road legs. I opened my wallet to see what my options were. I had my Florida ID. It had NOT OVER 21 in a screaming shade of red written on it. That was no good.

I flipped through the rest of the pockets in my wallet. A voters registration card. I kept a mental tab of it and moved on. Then, there it was. My old military school ID. A bald, deathly serious version of myself stared back at me. I cringed a little inwardly. The birthdate had been altered with a razor blade by yours truly, a couple years back. When I did it, I was sure I had a glorious career in counterfeiting ahead of me. Now looking at it, I realized why I had forgotten it was hidden away in an obscure pocket of my wallet. I was sure there was no way I was getting in. That didn't mean I wasn't going to try.

The line inched forward. I saw Rory looking at what I was up to out of the corner of his eye. He looked at the ID and his eyes grew wide. "Oh, s**t," he said. He snatched the ID from my hands and studied it with his trademark s**t eating grin. Handing my ID back, he reached into his back pocket, pulled out his wallet, and handed me something. There Rory was, with the same stone faced stare and freshly shaved head. I laughed at the picture.

"Crazy.Huh?" he said.

"Yeah," I replied.

We had first became friends at military school.

But, that was years ago. We were different people now. Our personalities no longer kept in check under the weight of institutionalized discipline. They say that you get to know what a person is truly made of when you watch them under pressure. Back then, all I saw was a person gritting their teeth, counting the days. It was like looking into a mirror.

A combined six hundred pounds stood between me and a night I expected to vaguely remember. "ID's" the bouncer on my right said, sounding bored. He didn't even look at us. Rob handed an ID to the bouncer on his left. Acting like if everything was going the way it was supposed to, I opened my wallet and handed my ID. The bouncer scanned it up and down. Then he looked at me sceptically.

"Do you have anything else with your name on it?"

I pulled out my voters registration card. He eyed the front, then flipped it over to read the back. I could tell he was weighing the options in his head. Should I let this guy in? Is it really that big of a deal if I do? He's just a kid trying to have some fun.

The bouncer handed me back my things and waved me in. I must have seemed overly excited as I darted past. Out of the corner of my eye I could see him give me a little look. It said, " Make sure you have a good time." Or maybe that's just the way I read it. To me, everything is an invitation to have a good time. No one faults you for it if you play dumb.

I elbowed my way to the bar through the throng of people. Rory followed behind in a cool guy walk he had recently acquired. It looked akward, like he was wearing a suit not tailored to his frame. It'd been a few years since we'd hung out. My memory of him had been one of a laid back stoner with the body of a runner, tall and lanky.

In the time we'd last met up, I had moved to Florida to try my hand at becoming a professional poker player. I saw guys not much older than me on ESPN and the Travel Channel winning millions of dollars, toasting to the good life with bottles of overflowing champagne held up high. I'd pleased myself to the image of one of the hosts of the World Poker Tour, an ex-Hawaiian tropic model, on many occasions. Stacks of hundred dollars bills piled high?Hot models? No boss? I was in. It all looked so easy. A few months in, reality quickly set in. It was hard. The hours were long. And worst of all, boring.

That dream dashed from the list, I applied for a job as a ski instructor in Colorado. To everyone's surprise, most of all my own, I got it. Now I was going to be a great explorer. Paving my way through the West like Paul Bunyan and his big blue ox. I quickly realized skiing was alot more fun than teaching it. After the supervisor took attendance, I'd slip away to make sure I didn't get any groups assigned to me. Not that I had to worry much about that. Just for showing up each day I got eight bucks. My money ran out just as quickly as my enthusiasm had. I like to think that for a time in my life, I got paid to ski.

Call it destiny, call it what you will, but right around that time, my friend in New Jersey, Nick, who's just under 5'5, had his teeth punched in by an angry meathead (someone that does alot of steroids). I'm sure he deserved it. Nick's street fighting record was something like 0-4. That's including a girl he once fought. He was smart though. He sued the meathead and won. The judge awarded him something like eighteen thousand dollars. He started his own construction company. I worked for him as a laborer.

We'd spend mornings working, nursing our hangovers. At night I'd spend everything I'd suffered all day long to get, in a little less than two hours. Nick or one of the guys in our group would usually help me keep the good times rolling. I did that six days a week for six months. I could feel my insides prematurely aging with each week that passed. I'm not really built for manual labor. The drinking I have down to an art form. There were plenty of mornings I'd slam my alarm clock off in disgust and fall back asleep. I was fire and re-hired four times. Eventually I had enough. I moved back to Florida to live with my parents until I could figure things out.

On the way to the bar, I had filled Rory in on all of this. That's what had led him to make the "Crazy Nomad" comment earlier in the night. Now, sitting at the bar, waiting for Rory to catch up, I realized how out of place I felt. I had no idea who this jacked up, "protien" shake chugging person walking towards me was. Of all people I should be the last to judge someone, especially based on outward appearances. But it was more than that. It was his body language, the way he was dressed, the things he'd said. Actually it was more like the things he wasn't saying that bothered me. But, as a guy, you can't just burst out and say those types of things.

He sat down next to me. A bartender walked over and asked us what we were drinking.

"What are you having?" Rory said.

"Let me get a rum and coke," I said.

Rory ordered a Jack and coke. It was an unwritten rule, which must be written down in one of the many places I've been, that I wasn't going to have money to pay. We didn't say much to each other until we were a good five rounds in.

The extent of my kowledge of what Irish people are like in real life comes entirely from Rory. When he isn't drunk, he doesn't say much, just holds it all in. The good and the bad. When he is drunk, everything he says, he says it like its shrouded in some kind of mystery, like he's saying something without just coming out and saying it. I'm not sure if that's an Irish thing or a Rory thing. I think I'd be doing alot more drinking if I always had to talk like that.

We started talking about our days in Military School.

"You remember that one time we went to that party by your Mom's house?" I said.

"Yeah," he said.

"You f*****g ran into the woods drunk as hell in the middle of the night. Me and Ralph start chasing after you. Here I am this kid who grew up in the ghetto, chasing you through the woods in Pennsylvania. I've seen all the Jason movies. I knew how it was going to end. I'd find you hacked up in chunks just in time to see a huge butcher knife coming towards my face."

"Hahahaha," his baritone laugh rising above the noise of the crowd.

I had to poke a little fun at myself. In a way I guess I was paying for my drinks. The truth was, I'd been a boy scout in high school (there's boy scouts even in the ghetto). I could survive in the woods for two weeks with just the clothes off my back if I had to. I don't know why I never brought up things like that.

We bullshitted for a little bit. Something's about the past. Something's about the present. I could tell he was building up to something. I just didn't know what. I guess he was waiting for the proper level of intoxication to let it all out. Then it came.

"So listen to this......" he said, the tail end of his seventh jack and coke causing him to slur as he spoke. He rarely spoke directly. The bar seemed to disappear, I was ready to hang onto every word.

"About a year ago, I meet this chick. Everything was cool at first. We fucked for like a week straight. All day. Every day. Then, she goes all psycho...."

"Ok?" I say.

He goes on, " It turns out she was in rehab down in some place in Fort Lauderdale. She lived in Chicago and was married. She told me all of this afterwards. Well, one night, it's like one in the morning, she comes knocking on my door. I hear her calling my name and I think, "F**k!" . So I just let her keep knocking and knocking, hoping she'll just leave. The neighbors start yelling at her so I let her in. She starts giving me this sob story about how she has no place to stay, blah,blah,blah...."

"What'd you do?" I said, trying to fill in the silence as he pounded another drink.

"She tells me she's pregnant. That it's mine. She says she's going to have to live with me now. I tell her to get the f**k out of my house. She won't leave. So I call the cops. She's crying. Begging me to let her stay. At this point I just want the b***h out of my house. It's like three in the morning."

Rory has this big smile on his face. I try to fake one back, but inside I start feeling a little uneasy.

"The cops eventually came and took her away."

"Damn, that's crazy," I say, because, well, I don't know what else to say.

"Get this. A year later, I get this call from a number I don't know. It's from Dallas. I pick it up and it's her. She starts crying and says, "he looks just like you." I call her a crazy b***h and tell her to never call me again. I haven't heard from her since."

I don't say anything. I wanted to ask a million questions, but I don't say a word. I'd just recently found out I was a b*****d son. My mom was wasted one night and ended up getting pregnant with someone else's kid. I was the result of that. The man that raised me had been a coke addict at the time. I guess they'd decided to forgive each other and keep me in the dark. I'd found out by accident a few months back and my whole world came crashing down. It felt like someone had stuck a powerline into my brain, causing it to overload.

"So what about if he's really your kid? Don't you give a s**t? I said. At this point I was drunk and didn't care about how I phrased my questions. I guess maybe I took the issue personally.

Rory looked me in the eyes. I see nothing. His eyes are glazed with hate.

"If it wants to find me, it can look for me."

I already know that night will be the last time I ever see Rory again. We brush of the conversation and start talking about other things. I don't remember what. The entire time I'm imagining what might become of his kid. The mother will probably tell her current husband it's his. Maybe he'll believe her. Maybe the kid won't turn out all messed up. I try not to think about it. Rory says he'll be right back and walks off towards the bathroom.

I look around the bar and I see faces I don't know, laughing, packed like sardines in a place in don't want to be. Reaching into my pocket, I leave a twenty on the bar. I take one last look to make sure Rory doesn't see me leaving. I walk first, then gradually pick up the pace until I'm pushing people out of my way.

That night, after leaving Rory at the bar, I drove North throughout the night. Past my house. Past everything. Eventually I headed West.

That was years ago. I never heard from Rory again.