Читать книгу Flushboy - Stephen Graham Jones - Страница 18

The brochures. If my dad spot-checks me and I don’t have at least twenty packets rubber-banded and ready to go—his wet dream is some citywide sewage catastrophe, I think, forcing people to us in droves—then brochures will become the focus of the next Drive-Through U. intensive, and, midway through the demonstration, either my head will implode or the rest of me will become violent. Neither of which I want to have to deal with on my day off.

So, to save my Saturday and maybe my life, I slouch to the rack at the second window and fan all the slick pamphlets and brochures and decals out, start leafing them together in the recommended and, supposedly, market-tested sequence.

As for who that particular market was, I’m guessing it was my mother, reluctant and out of excuses at the kitchen table, my father sitting across from her, his fingers churched together, the toes of his loafers fluttering on the fake wood floor, the telepathy he’s trying to direct across the table at her so thick you can practically see it.

We’re on the ground floor of something big here.

This is the future.

That yellow glow in the pot at the end of the rainbow, it isn’t gold.

These are all things we’ve found carefully printed onto the dry-erase board on the refrigerator.

Another: Diuretics?

They’re what make people pee more.

But how to get them into every condiment tray and salt shaker in town? Or, better yet, how to condition the consumer so that, when he sees our distinctive sign, he has a sudden and wholly undeniable urge to relieve himself?

For the first month we were open, the rubber band that held the packet of brochures together was a delicate, made-to-break elastic string. It connected to the flare of each nostril of a series of Halloween noses we’d spray-painted gold. The noses were in honor of the sixteenth-century astronomer Tycho Brahe, our “proprietor in spirit.” His family crest, altered just enough, is monogrammed onto the collars of our uniform shirts and painted onto the tinted glass of the front door.

He died in 1601 from a burst bladder, because it would have been rude to leave the party he was throwing.

According to the brochures, he’s a lesson for us all.

As for the noses, Brahe had a prosthetic one, so my dad thought all his customers should as well, to properly display their corporate allegiance.

A plastic, golden nose, however, it’s significantly different than a brand name artfully worked into the pocket of a pair of jeans.

There must be nothing about this in my father’s small businessman’s handbook. His dream book, my mother calls it.

Satan’s bible, more like.

We still have boxes and boxes of the noses and are supposed to distribute them with a “fraternal smile” upon request. It’s a smile I’ve seen Roy attempt in a workshop once. He looked like he’d just swallowed a live lizard, and was trying hard to keep it down.

As for the rest of the brochures, there’s:

• that legendary Bantams game and the rash of lung ailments that followed, all delivered in a very solemn, facts-only tone, and never allowing the possibility that most of the coughing people were trying to get in on a class-action suit, or that it was respiratory season already;

• the brief, pictorial history of urinals—a tour nobody wants to take, really;

• the historical uses of urine: tanning hides, flushing out wounds, making paint, hydrating the dehydrated, filtering mustard gas in some world war or another, marking territory, carrying disease, “paving dreams,” etc., and not including “deviant” sex acts (my father’s word);

• the support-group pamphlets: something from a Shy Kidneys Services, a “Paruresis—Do You Have It?” foldout from the American Urological Association, a “Nocturnal Enuresis” wordfind/sleep-aid, and, for some reason, an insert about how Porta-John Enterprises can supply facilities for whatever event you’re having, be it black tie or blue-collar;

• and, finally, the thinly veiled, happy version of my dad’s life as a small businessman, exaggerated in all the necessary places.

It’s that last brochure I find myself studying sometimes, between customers. In it, my dad is idealized, perfect, predestined.

Driven.

The other way of saying that is that he’s got certain fetishes.

As a graduate student in biochemistry—this was before he defected to the land of business administration—his thesis (still “in process”) was an analysis of amphetamine levels in the urine of truckers. The way he collected his samples was by taking assistants and volunteers with him into the unmapped wilds of the interstate ditches, to fish unburst plastic bottles up from the tall grass, a prize each time. The way he tells it, I can see him holding the trucker pee up to the sun, angling it back and forth so the light can glisten through it, bathe his face golden.

Due to a lack of volunteers, however—just one was hardy enough for the whole six weeks—the study had to be shut down, all the samples destroyed, and even then, my dad and his last assistant were there at the incinerator, taking notes about the color and tint of the flames.

To him it was a funeral pyre. The end of one dream, the beginning of ten thousand more.

After that there’s a convenient fast-forward in the brochures, until the months leading up to that Bantams game that began all this.

For me, those were the last good times.

My dad’s business then was a website—the first incarnation of The Bladder Hut, the way he tells it. What he doesn’t say is that the main difference between the two was that the website was consciously entertainment-related. Instead of the forty-nine-cent freak show we have going on now.

Not that there wasn’t a geek even back then, though.

There’s always a geek, I think. Some kind of blockhead for the people to gawk at. At least where my dad’s businesses are concerned.

His website was pnow.com. The only imperative URL out there, maybe. To his credit, it was a hard domain name to forget.

As to what he provided, it was a log of all the movies he subjected himself to daily, for full price, since the managers had locked arms, were refusing to work out any kind of deal with him.

What he was doing was posting the down times in the movie where an audience member could safely slip out to the restroom and not miss anything important.

The money wasn’t meant to come from ad revenue, either; that was what he put down on his small business loan as the genius of his plan. His revenue was supposed to come from the programmed stopwatches he was going to sell that would glow or vibrate thirty-two or forty-one or however many minutes into your selected feature, usually about the time two characters started leaning into each other to kiss.

He wasn’t writing reviews, but my dad’s running critique came down to there being too much sex on the big screen. That nothing important to the story ever happened in bed.

Which is to say he was appealing to the sensibilities of an age bracket that no longer had the hand-eye coordination to manage one of his newfangled “pee-timers.” Either that or people were still just hitting the head whenever they had to, like everybody except Tycho Brahe had been doing for thousands of years already.

But still, if I hold my eyes just right, I can see through this premature story-of-my-success stroke job and make out my dad hunched over his legal pad at the kitchen table, writing it all down the way it should have been. And after a while, it stops being hype, turns into a confession of sorts. A plea for help, which is at least the glimmer of an acknowledgment that something’s wrong, right?

From there, then, it’s just a nudge over to an apology, even the kind where you’re looking away, covering your mouth with your hand.

Which is all I really want from him.

Instead, though, he won’t even call Roy in a half-hour early.

This time when the drive-through bell dings, I finish the cigarette I’ve retreated to before lowering my goggles, dragging myself back up front, my lungs grey with smoke.

At which point the one nightmare I’d forgotten all about leans forward to see if I’m really in here or not.

It’s my mom.

Here they come,

those feelings again.

—Men At Work