Stubble

            by Lucas Buckman

 

             It could have been that I really needed to pee, it could have been the events that transpired while I was asleep, but either way something woke me up that night.

 My eyes opened slowly, like a newborn. I had to tinkle but got distracted by my bunk bed. Looking up at the underside of the top bunk where my brother slept, I realized that bunk beds are rather ugly. I thought about different ways that I could spruce it up so that I didn’t have to stare up at these stupid, mundane horizontal bars every time I lay in bed.

I wasn’t tired, I didn’t know what time it was, and it was dark. I realized there was a flashlight within reach. After blindly shuffling my hand through a collection of boy stuff on the floor, I finally found the little black keychain of a flashlight. Darkness was my antagonist, the flashlight was my sidekick, my mission: to shine light on the previously unlit. I swirled the flashlight around in circles and meaningless patterns, awe-struck by its outstanding capabilities, and was careful not to shine the light into my oldest brother, Travis’, eyes. Travis was in the single bed across the room. But accidents happen, and in experimenting with my newfound flashlight, I inadvertently flashed it at his bed, which, to my surprise, was empty. Terrified of being alone and in the dark, I worked up the courage to stand up to see if my other brother, Henry, was missing from his bed as well. He was.

 There were three of us. Travis was the oldest at fourteen, Henry was the middle child at ten, and I was the baby at a mere six. We all shared a room. Picture a prison cell but instead of cold hard cement, we had piss yellow, dead walls in serious need of life. Instead of prison bars we had an old creaky door that for some ominous reason locked from the outside. The inmates were given one bunk bed and one single bed, which, if you can imagine, takes up all available floor space. All other nooks and crannies of this fine establishment were taken up by assorted toys, broken or burned, stacks of books that grew to the size of Egyptian pyramids, clothes that assembled and seemed to be having an orgy on the floor, an offensive boy stench that lingered from wall to wall, a record player that had lived through more presidents than Bob Hope, and socks. If anyone has ever lived in a confined space with at least one other boy, they know that socks can become the plague. They smell, they sit around, and they don’t do anything productive.

Taken aback by my brothers’ insensitivity in not telling me that they had left our room, I was scared. I found myself utterly alone. This breeze of confusion numbed my fear of thugs, the government, and rapists. Monsters never scared me – people scared me. It was at this time that I realized I still needed to pee, which excited me because it gave me something to do, freed me from my dark and lonesome room, and now I had a carte blanch to go investigate the whereabouts of my brothers.

Equipped with my keychain flashlight and stuffed animal friend, Abbey, I headed out to the shadowed hallway expanse. As I walked through the door, I heard crying coming from the living room. I could tell it wasn’t just one person crying but many, so I headed into the living room to the sight of my mother, brothers, and aunts sitting and crying. Where’s my dad? I thought. I slowly walked towards them when I stepped on a toy army man. The uncomfortable crackle beneath my foot made me grunt. At this, they all noticed me.

“Lucas, come over here,” my mom said softly, through a waterfall of tears.

“Mom, why are you guys crying?” I asked, confused, and still with pee lingering in the back of my mind.

“Honey, I just want you to know that no matter what, we’ll get through this, okay?” she said. Get through what? I thought. I observed my family’s faces and, even at six, I could read grief like a billboard.

“Your father had a heart attack,” my mother choked up.

“Is he okay?” Why wouldn’t he be? I asked myself. I didn’t even know what death was, let alone a heart attack.

“An ambulance took him to the hospital,” she sputtered, “and he died while he was there. There was nothing they could do.”

This news seemed to reverberate throughout the room like a gunshot. After hearing her say these foreign words, I expected to cry. Uncontrollably. Like in the movies, my only insight into what death was. But I didn’t cry. It hadn’t hit me, and that made me feel even worse. I pretended to cry for my mom because I couldn’t just sit there; I wanted her to know that I was sad. I wanted to be sad – I just didn’t know how to be.

Three mornings after my father’s death, we were on our way to see his body before his cremation. I got in my mother’s cream-colored car and sat next to my brother, Henry. As we passed familiar sidewalks in Berkeley, I realized that plants don’t just appear – they grow. I started to pick at my seat, tearing off a small piece of foam, which resulted in a louder sound than I had expected. It was then that I realized that no one was talking. Everyone was quiet that day. Everyone had been quiet everyday since he passed. All of us were lost in our thoughts. I decided to break the silence.

            “Did you guys know that plants need food and water to grow? They aren’t just put there,” I said, hoping to shock them all out of their unhappiness.

No response. My oldest brother, Travis, who was sitting in the front seat, swiveled his head around to glare at me. I didn’t see anything wrong with the question. Seeing as how there was no one talking, I just assumed any topic would do, and I had just happened to be thinking of plants. We hit a stoplight at Hopkins and San Pablo, and my mom rested her head on the steering wheel, and with a combination of crying and laughing, she turned to me and said, “I love you. I love you guys so much.” Taking credit for my mother’s newfound happiness, I grinned at Travis and his glare broke into a smile. It was comforting.

It’s amazing how people so close to you can seem so far away. After the night that I woke up, the dynamic of my family was different for obvious reasons. All around me moods were simple and predictable, and my oldest brother, Travis, got the worst of it. At fourteen everything is unusual. Your voice is changing, your bones hurt, your jimmy gets furry, you begin to smell worse even though you’re getting lazier, you probably listen to shitty music but think it’s the greatest, you’re starting high school and it’s awkward, and girls become far more distracting than they have ever been in the past. Travis was fourteen on the night my dad died, so he had to endure something more intense and real than most kids at that age have to deal with.

As a result of being faced with the heavy reality that our father had died, Travis was left with an empty void. He later found that nothing filled that void better than drugs. It would start with depression, lead to cocaine, which would lead to meth, and inevitably isolation from all the potentially beautiful aspects of his life. He would go on to spend the majority of his teen years living in and out of our house, stealing from my family, and essentially terrorizing my childhood. His current state of paralyzed shock would diminish, and in its place would be someone I didn’t know at all. I have since begun to forget these painful memories along with the good ones.

I struggled to remember more about my father. Do you remember when you were

young and everything was new and fresh? Do you remember when your hand would touch some texture and nothing else felt better? And to touch that thing later would send you on a euphoric journey back to your childhood? For some people this could be a stuffed animal, a shiny thing, a special hat, an awesome blanket or maybe even just peanut butter. For me, there was nothing like the stubble on my dad’s cheek when he read to me.

As I started to grow cheek stubble of my own, I grew an obsession for rubbing it. I had no clue why though. I knew it felt good, but it was too good. As I grew my own stubble, I began to have flashbacks of rubbing his cheek in the same way I rub mine. It made me sad, but also happy at the fact that I had remembered something about him. Because of this, I began to remember more about him all the time.

I remember one day, my mother dropped me off at UC Berkeley, where he worked as an art professor. I went into his classroom where he had just finished up a screen-printing workshop. He was excited to see me. He picked me up and put me on his worktable, pulled a stencil of a cat out of his desk drawer, and showed me the steps of how to use the screen-printing machine. Together we made a print of a red cat.

He left me at the table to continue making more, and when he got back I had just finished making another one. It was a lot worse than the one we had done together. I cried at my failure but my dad wiped my tears away with his apron, took the failed cat out of my hand, grabbed a thumbtack and stuck it on the wall.

“It's too ugly,” I protested.

“No, Lucas, it’s beautiful.”

 

I walked inside the crematorium building holding onto my mom’s hand. I knew that this experience would be an intense one. A man with thick facial hair met us at the front desk and after he and my mother talked logistics, the man ushered us into a box of a room with peach walls, mellow lighting, four chairs, and an elegant table. Lying on the table was my father’s lifeless body. He looked good, but that was only because my father was a good-looking man. He was wearing a suit, which didn’t seem fitting. My dad was a casual guy, always sporting a t-shirt and jeans.

At first my mom, brothers, and I hovered around his body with looks of disbelief. We then all took turns having our alone time with him. I sat in a chair and watched as Travis and Henry took their turns being with him. Travis stared at his face and whispered something in his ear, then kissed him on the forehead and walked over to one of the four chairs. It was Henry’s turn; he walked up and down seeing his father at all angles before he said his goodbye, giving him a kiss on the cheek.

By the time it was my turn I was feeling an immense amount of pressure. Just imagine the last five minutes with your father. As I approached him, I felt a relaxing sensation flow through my body. I stood near his head and played with his curly hair, and knew that I needed some definitive closure, something personal between me and him, so I did something that I have always enjoyed. I put my hand on his cheek and rubbed his stubble slowly.