Late from school

The kid came home at 3:10.  School gets out at 2:20 and it takes half an hour to get home on the bus, which means he usually gets home at 2:50.  So what the hell made him twenty minutes late?  These are the questions that seem simple, and yet answers elude me.

Where have you been, I asked him.  School, he said.  True enough.  What about after school?  He didn't answer, just grabbed a snack cake from the tall cabinet and stomped up to his room.

And look, I know how it sounds.  I'm not such a hardass that I'll ream the kid for getting home a little late from school.  I try to give him his independence or whatever.  It's just -- to get from school to home takes a known number of minutes.  Five or even ten minutes late suggests traffic, or forgetting a book in class, or chatting with a neighbor -- a brief, unexpected delay.  An hour or more late, ok, sure, he's got something else going on, another activity of some kind, a little heads up would have been nice but I suppose I don't have to know everything.  But twenty minutes late is too long for a delay and too short for an activity -- it's only enough time to do something wrong.

He drinks now -- I know that.  His mother says it's not big deal, and it's not, obviously, but it annoys me.  He knows a server at Chili's, some girl in college, so he and his friends go there every Friday and Saturday and get a table and get a bunch of appetizers and their server friend brings them preposterously colored drinks all night.  I don't know how this has been going on for weeks and the girl hasn't been fired yet.  He comes home with his breath stinking of weak booze and fruit mixes; his teeth are stained blue or red or purple.  I'm always right about to lay into him but his mother cuts me off and says she's just glad he got home safe and asks, did you have fun? like he's coming home from flying a kite.  He says they take turns being designated driver but I've never seen him come home sober.  That's not what he was doing today, obviously, it's just to say -- I know him, and he's rotten.

I went up to his room and knocked on his door.  He was blasting something on his television way too loud.  He called out WHAT, already annoyed.  I told him I didn't want to shout through the door and that he should open up or I was coming in.  He shuffled some papers and shoved them into his desk, it sounded like, and then came to the door.

"Turn off that damn TV," I said.  "We never should have let you bring it up here."  He stomped over and made a big show of turning it off.  I was actually glad he had the TV; it was my idea; it keeps him out of our hair, and it's useful leverage.  "I'm going to cut the cable cord outside, see how you like that."  He sat on the bed and looked out the window, away from me.

"Return to the door," I said.  I wanted him to face me.  He sighed and dragged himself over like his shoulders weighed a thousand pounds.

You never think your son is going to grow up to hate you.  Well, that's not true, I had an inkling.

"What were those papers I heard?"

"What papers?"  He avoided eye contact, which, I knew from television crime shows, was a sign of deception.

"I heard you shuffling some papers before I came in.  You threw them in your desk.  What were they?"

"They were just some magazines."

Preposterous, that he thought I couldn't tell the difference between the ruffling of papers and a glossy magazine, even behind a closed door.  But why lie and say they were magazines?  Even if he thought he could fool me (fat chance), did he not realize that magazines opened himself up to all kinds of uncomfortable questions?  That in many ways, magazines were more suspicious than papers?  I was a bit thrown off, so I decided to respond with that old standby, explosive rage.  "I know the difference between loose papers and magazines, who do you think I am?"

"It was just homework."

I had him changing his story; it was difficult not to grin.  "So first they were magazines, and now they were homework sheets.  Why, if we're here for much longer, soon they'll have been elephants!"

"You're not making sense, Dad."  He always did that; skirt my traps by pretending not to understand their logic.  Well, he's dim, but he's not that dim.

I wanted to press further, but ultimately decided to move on for now and circle back to the papers later if he squirmed free on the main issue.  "Where were you today after school?"

"I don't know," he said, "on the bus?"  Every answer was another question with him.

"So why were you twenty minutes late?"

"I wasn't that late."

"You want to explain to my watch that you weren't late?"  I tapped on my watch for emphasis.

"I didn't say I wasn't late, I said I wasn't twenty minutes late," he insisted.  "I was like five minutes late."

"Well let's start there," I said.  "Now we have an admission from you that you were late, and I appreciate that you're being honest with me."  This was a ploy -- let him feel comfortable with his story, and soon enough he would contradict himself, and then it would just be a matter of pointing out the inconsistencies and he'd have no choice but to acknowledge that I'd been right.  "So the question is, why were you late at all?"

"I don't know, I was just walking slower?"

"Well, that's another lie," I said calmly, "shall we begin to tally them up?"

He scoffed.  "Can I close this door now?"

I burst into the room.  I seemed to pass through his body like it was a mist, odd.  I marched over to his desk and yanked open his drawer.  There was a single sheet of paper inside, with "Fuck Dad" written neatly in pencil on the top line.  "Ah ha!" I cried.

"I told you, it's homework!"

"Homework, indeed!  For your 'fuck dad' class?"

"Give it back!" he screamed, but he stayed where he was, as if his feet were rooted to the spot.  In fact, his feet were still facing out the door, where they were before I'd stormed in; he'd had to spin at the hips to face me.

"So this is what you think of your father!"  I waved the paper under his nose.

"I guess."

"You guess?  You guess 'fuck Dad?'"  We were going nowhere.  The conversation, the situation, the relationship, it was all going nowhere.  "Is this why you were late?  Were you writing this filth?"

"Yes."  He had no spirit left -- I was losing hold of him.

"Don't evade me!"

He put on a pair of sunglasses and pulled a skateboard out from behind the door.  "Surf's up, dude," he said.

"You don't make sense, you don't hold together," I screamed at him, "you lack depth, you have no reason to be, and you're not interesting or amusing!  Why are you even here?"  His posters and his pictures all fell off the walls.

He shrugged and blew a big cocky bubble with his bubble gum.  He mouthed words but all that came out was a low, even whimper.

"Louder!"  The air conditioner and the furnace both started blasting at the same time, the TV turned back on and the vacuum howled from where the downstairs used to be.  My son was saying something to me but I couldn't hear it, and everything was wrong.

I searched for something to say -- something witty and droll, maybe, or something cutting and brutal -- something coherent and true that would bring things to a close, but I reached down deep and there was nothing there.  The fact is he was never there, my son, he was never real to me, it was you.  It was you I was trying to reach, to shout at and beg for clarity or meaning or forgiveness, but the fact is, I don't have anything to say to you anymore.  And I'm not angry, it's just how it is.  You were a light in my head but it got switched off and now all that's up there is the parts that tell me to eat and sleep and go to the bathroom.

"You all right over there, Pops?"  My son punctuated his sentence by rapping on a pair of small bongos and flashing a peace sign.  I ripped the world apart and was absorbed into a blackness that was very bright, and what does that even mean?