Styrofoam Throne (2 page)

I went to pick up the change in my hat, but Janice hooked my elbow and jerked me away.

“My money!”

Then Janice yelled something at me that was so angry I couldn’t even decipher it. This was the most pissed off I had ever seen her. My mom always had a loose grip on her anger at the world but this was way more intense than usual. Janice buttholed her lips, squinted her eyes shut, and dug her nails into my arm as we crossed the busy street. As she sputtered in fiery tongues unknown, I melted into compliance. Cars honked all around us as Janice garbled more nonsense. Her face took the shape of someone who’d eaten a bitter lemon with a fart in it. She held this expression until we pulled in our driveway, where Janice proceeded to unleash hell—phase two.

“Do you have any idea of what you are advertising to the world? What this says about our family?” She sounded like an evil cartoon character.

“I just wanted—”

“I don’t know what I did to deserve this. I don’t know what to do with you. Do you want to go live with another family? Because I will gladly support that decision. That’s what you want, don’t you? I don’t think they’ll take this shit any better. But then you can burn them out and move on to your next failure.”

“No, but—”

“That’s what this tells me. Well, I’ll look into it and see if anyone will take you. I’m not sure.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Get out.”

I got out of the car and went inside. Janice stayed in the car crying for so long that I began to fear what would happen when she got out. When she finally did, Janice parented the only way she knew how—by belt.

I leaned over the sink and closed my eyes.
Crack! Crack! Crack!
Janice would stop for a second to catch her breath and then . . .
Crack! Crack! Crack!
She had issues but I didn’t really know what they were or why I had to pay for them. Sure I was out begging, but the punishment didn’t fit the crime. And I was way too old for this to still be going on. The one person who was supposed to protect me was the one beating the shit out of me more than any bully at school. Janice didn’t whip the hell out of me. She whipped hell into me.

So then I thought I would destroy the one thing I knew she loved. I went into the living room where she sipped on white wine and watched the TV. I walked up to the TV and kicked it in. Broken glass, a puff of smoke and an electronic fizzle. I couldn’t open my mouth to talk because I would have erupted in tears, so I left without a word. The next day she brought home a stack of horror magazines and comic books from the grocery store. I would have rather had a ticket to the Castle but I would take any sign of remorse. It took a while for us to get a new TV, but she never hit me again.

Those marks from years of the belt are still on my ass. You can’t see them, but they’re there. I stopped calling her “Mom” after too many beltings. “Janice” offered more distance from the nauseating reality that the person who gave birth to me was the person who made me black and blue. She hated it. “It’s goddamned creepy that you call me ‘Janice’. Especially in front of people who know I’m your mom.” All the better then.

But today, a new type of horror was unfolding in the living room. Janice and I stared at each other, each looking for a sign of weakness. I broke the silence.

“So . . . I’ll get paid though, right?”

“Yes, you will get a paycheck.”

My eyes lit up.

“But I will be taking it and using it for our family’s expenses.”

“What?!”

“That’s right.”

“Family expenses like white wine?”

My only weapon at home was quick wit delivered by a sharp tongue. It was defensive instinct more than a desire to artfully belittle someone. But if I wasn’t at least a little defiant, I’d probably be hanging from a rope somewhere. I’d rather have some real friends but since that wasn’t happening, I turned my middle finger into a switchblade. Janice had done the same.

“No, family expenses like the hour-long, hot-water masturbation marathon you call a bath.”

I was silent.

“We’re working tonight. It’s Sandy and Julio’s anniversary and I said we’d cover it.”

“I don’t even get an afternoon off?”

“You always say you want to be treated like an adult until that means actually being one.”

The Roost was located in a part of town that would sooner be forgotten than turned over. The diner hadn’t changed anything but the toilet paper since the sixties. It had a long counter bar and a few booths against the front windows. One good thing was that no one from school would ever see me. Lonely old men were the dominant patrons of The Roost. It was like they all came to ride out the end of the storm together. If they woke up the next morning, they’d show up again and wait for the inevitable at the bar.

I walked into The Roost behind my mom.

“Hey, everybody, meet the new dishwasher, my son,” Janice said as she tossed her purse by the coffeepot. Before anyone could respond, she continued, “Alright, enough celebration, get to work. Viktor!”

The short-order cook, Viktor, poked his head through the service window, holding a butcher knife. The heat lamps made his sweaty face sparkle an evil glow. He was a Russian something-something who sought political refuge behind a grill.

“Ya?”

“Get Donovan in the back and working.”

“You heard,” Viktor said, lowering his brow my way.

I passed through the swinging doors and into the kitchen. Total disaster. Dirty plates, trays, glasses, bowls, utensils—everything piled up in or vaguely around an industrial sink filled with dark-gray water. The floor and walls looked like they’d been hit by a decade-long food fight. In all the years that I had been coming to The Roost, I had only seen Viktor’s head through the service window. Always a few orders behind, his husky voice and intense focus projected the image of a towering man with expert knife skills. I didn’t expect to find him standing on a footstool with two phone books stacked on top of it so he could reach the grill. His rotund gut was in constant peril of being cooked medium rare whenever he leaned toward the back of the grill.

“Hey,” I said, as bummed as possible.

“Hahahaha, look at you.”

“What?”

“This,” he said, motioning around at the mess. “This is yours now.”

“Who normally does the dishes?” I said, looking at the overflowing sink.

Janice yelled from the front for a chicken sandwich with popcorn shrimp.

“No time for chit-chat,” Viktor said in his thick accent while throwing a chicken breast on the grill.

“Shit shat?”

“Chit-chat!”

“Shit? Shat?”

“Chit! Chat!”

“It sounds like you’re saying shit shat.”

“How many languages you speak, Donovan?”

“All of them,” I said.

“You want trouble already?”

“It gets worse than this?”

“You see.”

Viktor took the hair net off his head and threw it at me. He grabbed a fresh one for himself from a nearby cupboard.

“You wear hair net so you don’t get it on food,” he said.

“But I’m washing dishes, not cooking.”

“I tell you how we work. Work hard, no problem. Work lazy, big problem.”

“Okay, but why do I have to wear a hair net if I’m washing dishes? If I get a hair on anything, it’ll wash off.”

“You have to wear hair net because you have to wear hair net.”

“But the only food I’m touching is going in the trash.”

“No hairs! If I see black hair, I know it’s you.”

“Okay, I promise to not go bald while flying over your grill.”

“Don’t expect breaks because of mamulya,” he said nodding to the front.

“If anything, my hair is the cleanest thing back here. At least it’s been washed today.”

Viktor ignored me. He turned up the classical station on the radio and focused on the chicken breast.

I started whittling away at the dishes. I got bored and picked back up with Victor. “What kind of breaks could there even be? The Roost is like a town gathering of people who haven’t gotten a break. That’s why they work here or eat this shit.”

Viktor smacked the spatula on the grill with a loud clap.

“The break is you don’t break.” Viktor motioned to the dishes. “That will take one hour if you work hard. Two hours if you act like spoiled honky.”

I had never been called a honky before and bit my lip to keep from laughing. I started washing dishes and, almost immediately, let a water glass slip through my fingers. It smashed into more pieces than I thought possible.

Janice burst through the swinging doors.

“Acting out already? Viktor, you have my full permission to keep this boy on track no matter what, okay?”

Viktor flashed a gold tooth at me.

Fuck.

I concentrated on the task at hand. The work was so boring, I strained to think of something to entertain myself with. The only option was listening to people on the other side of the heat lamps. It took some effort to hear over the running faucet and sizzling grill, but most of them wanted to address the whole place anyway.

“I just can’t even remember the last time I could have a milkshake. It’s been so long.”

“Why’s that, Ernie?”

“Milkshake in, milkshake out. Know what I mean?”

I shivered and looked over my shoulder to try to spot the lactose intolerance through the service window. It was an old guy sitting between two other old guys. They all looked the same. I had no experience with old people growing up. Janice had cut off communication with relatives since before I was born and never told me why.

Their skin appeared translucent. You could see the veins at different depths and sizes. Wrinkles and Super Bowl–style rings covered their fingers. I imagined they were for stuff like “1972’s Western Regional Vacuum Sales Leader.” The thought of being a champion salesman made me shiver again. I shouldn’t have turned around. It was better to be hypnotized by the circling drain I hovered over.

Afterward, Janice and I went home and performed our nightly ritual of watching TV in silence. The program was about a talking car and a rogue detective. In the middle of a scene showing the car hydroplaning on the ocean, she changed the channel.

“Wait!” I said.

“That show has gone downhill. It’s like a cartoon now.”

“I think it’s even better.”

Janice flipped through channels and landed on the tail end of the news. It broke into commercial but not just any.

“Nee ner neeeee!”
An organ rang out Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.” It was seriously my favorite song.

Its thick atmosphere filled the living room as a foreboding voice said, “Castle Dunes is alive again! A living, breathing nightmare of more than thirty incredible rooms, each with its own very special surprise. Wander through the myriad of secret passageways and winding labyrinths. Discover the Throne of the Living Dead and its unimaginable terror. There’s Dracula, the Prince of Darkness, and many more. Castle Dunes is waiting for you!”

Images of witches, zombies, and evil druids went along with the foreboding voice and featured Dracula most of all. At the end, he spread his red-lined cape over a hot chick in a nightie and went for her neck.

“That’s what I wanna be,” I said to an already frowning Janice.

“You can’t be Dracula when you grow up. That doesn’t even make sense.”

“No, like him,” I said motioning to the TV.

“No one goes, ‘Oh, my son? Well, he’s a Dracula. Got a big house on the beach with a big, happy family. Bills? He pays them by scaring people and they just go away. We’re all real proud of him.’”

The Dracula stuff had been a sore subject at home for a while. Years ago, I kept wearing a vampire cape after a Halloween that came and never went. Eventually, Janice threw it away instead of washing it. I rushed into the kitchen when I couldn’t find it.
 

“Where’s my cape?”

“Cut this shit out. I swear you're just trying to torture me.” The cape was embarrassing for any parent but it was compounded with a reminder of Janice’s magic past.

That Christmas, Janice asked what I wanted.

“A new cape.”

She got me a sweater.

It’s not like I wasn’t into the other famous monsters, but Dracula was the boss. The Castle was his and the rest were capable only of being guests. Frankenstein was too dumb, Wolfman couldn’t control himself, the Mummy took forever, and the Invisible Man wasn’t anything to look at. It was Drac who ran shop. With a hypnotizing eye, flight capabilities, and immortality, he had them all beat.

The career conversation went back on mute and I retreated to my room. I fell on the bed and stared at my two Castle Dunes brochures taped to the wall. The full color pamphlets were the same one but folded out to show each side’s four panels. The front side was taken up by a giant photo of the Castle with a crowd below. A hand-drawn Dracula loomed over the scene, and a dialogue bubble by his head said, “Castle Dunes! Follow the bats to the pier of fear!”

The other side featured three shots of the pier showing carnival games of skill and chance, the arcade, and food stands like Castle Pizza and I Scream. There was also a coupon for a discount if you bought twelve tickets.

Based on commercials, brochures, and word of mouth, I could only vaguely piece together what the Castle was like inside. But even better than the Castle propaganda were the local legends. It was said that half of the people going through would never come out, and those that did had lost their minds. They said the Castle people would follow you home at night. And that the building had been transported brick by brick from Carpathia. None of which I knew to be true, but the stories were still rad. The Castle was only about a mile down the road but Janice made it seem a world away.

I opened the window to cool off and listened to the neighborhood’s silence. Dunes sucked. It was totally fucking boring. We had one movie theater and it only showed one movie at a time. The town’s adults were bored enough to actually give a shit about our high school sports. I’d see grown men stop dudes in letterman jackets on the street and talk to them like war heroes. We just had one big grocery store and its produce section constantly sat on the brink of rot. Our main industry seemed based around the liquor stores.