Don’t Want a Little Piece of Your Heart

TROUBLE FINDS ME. Always has. I don’t go looking for it. It just finds me.

So, it was no shock when my daughter told me she saw two men in a van parked across the street. Watching her. She said they had big fat ugly faces on them. She’s five at the time. Those are the words of a panting five-year-old. Tongue hanging out of her face. Out of breath because she’s just escaped her Boogeyman.

Trouble just finds me. A fact that I should be used to.

Still, I don’t take the message well. Maybe it was the perpetually guilty conscience. Maybe it was the ghosts parading along the edges of my mind. Could’ve been any number of things that sent me from zero to sixty in a heartbeat. I wanted to lay in the fetal position on the floor. Try wishing the day away.

I’m at the dining room table when she tells me. Suddenly I was in the Arctic. We were citizens of Long Beach California at the time. Hovering near 90 degrees all day long, 75-80 at night. Yet I fell into a deep freeze. The cold ran along my skeleton. Took me over, core and periphery.

What do you mean, I ask her.

She repeats herself. My daughter has never liked to repeat herself. Her words are spoken in a halting manner. Her words are tinged with an unstated fury.

• Two men. They’re ugly. They’re big. See that white van? They’re inside it. Ok?
• Got it.

I stared at her only for a second or two. I could not bear the weight of her gaze for very long. I closed my eyes. Hoped she would go away. I opened them again. She was gone. Maybe into her bedroom down the hall. I glanced around me. Just to make sure she had not glided into my personal space. Ready for the kill. My daughter was more lethal elf than human at the time. The girl was born absolutely feral.

In the silence, I landed on an explanation. The two ugly men had to be the brothers of my ex. It had to be them. Trouble had found me. Bad, bad times. More on the way. I wasn’t thinking it was the end. They weren’t going to kill me. I just wasn’t envisioning no picnic in my future.

They’d come to take our daughter.

Deliver her from me.

My ex-wife and I had moved to California to escape the small city swagger of Pittsburgh. Men and women proud of what I still don’t know. We felt we deserved more. We were drunk the entire time we drove across the country. As a matter of fact, I recall nothing about the drive except the exquisite, all-consuming drunkenness. It was like having a bubble around us. Barreling through the Heartland of America in an absolute stupor. Our relationship was a fucking catastrophe. From the start, we fought with sheer rage and skill.

Then we had our daughter.

Absolutely nothing changed.

I once told my ex that I felt like Gulliver. Pinned to the earth by my reality. She said she felt as immense and throbbing as a planet gone white dwarf. She would explode if she stayed with us.

Our little family.

Maybe that’s the problem with people. Not just myself but all of us. Families are the problem. Or the lack thereof. Personally speaking, I was never given the proper tools. Don’t know how to perform the act of family. Don’t know how to wear that particular type of overcoat. I’ve considered this. Pondered the void within. From day one, an incredible absence has dwelled at the center of me.

For a moment I considered speaking to my daughter. I took a few steps down the hallway toward her bedroom. I don’t have the words. Then, out of the ether, a thought of my own father. How he might have handled a situation like this. My father was a country boy. Never should’ve been let loose in a city. From the time he set foot outside the borders of the family farm, he didn’t know which end was up. He was in touch with spectral oddities. Odd transmissions. Voices. He was wired completely and utterly wrong.

My father wouldn’t have confronted a child like my daughter so much as he would’ve floated over her. Floated along the borders of the trouble until he could escape through an open window.

This is what I had to work with.

I sat back down at the table and dug mightily at my eyes. Trying to rub away the moment. Trying to rub away my own existence within the moment. I picked up a pen. Grabbed a piece of paper.

I kept a journal in those days. Kept might be the wrong word for that sentence. What I did was fill one sheet of paper per day with a barely legible script. A day’s worth of thought and action and planning. A page filled with rambling malarkey if I’m being honest. After I filled a page with scribble, I’d tear it out and pitch it in the trash. Move on with my life. Never revisited what I wrote. Never gave it a second thought. The content wasn’t as important as the act. Just one of those things I did to appear normal.

Nothing was coming on that particular day. I didn’t really try very hard.

I laid on the floor and stared at the ceiling fan. This was years ago. I suppose if this tragedy was being staged now, I would’ve been staring at my phone. Staring at tattooed women doing squats on Instagram. But this happened then. Twenty-two years ago. The fucking Stone Age. So, I stared at the ceiling fan. Grains of rice from the previous tenant were still embedded in the carpeting beneath me.

Our one-bedroom apartment on Del Amo Boulevard had all the familial warmth of an interrogation room. But after all an apartment is an empty space. The acute and lingering sense of pain that was palpable within our empty space had grown from its occupants. There had been an intense intolerance of lasting affection. Love was always brittle and fleeting. Short-lived mercy. The word itself, the word love, was never used.

For the most part, our stay was a fucking tragedy staged in Apartment 208. It was like we stained it with our presence. Not so much a haunting as a corruption.

And the rooms were beyond hot. We’re talking the infants-dying-in-hot-cars kind of heat. My daughter had taken to walking around in her underwear. Occasionally I considered this. Her tiny form. What a sick individual might see if they had laid eyes on her in such a state. Something at the core of this world is irreparably wrong if there are men like that running around in it. Men like that stalking around all quarters of society. Men who were afflicted with that kind of fever.

The fact of the white van really began to dial itself into my brain.

I was drunk enough that confronting the men in the van seemed like a grand idea. Didn’t even really have to work myself up for it. The urge to prove my courage and whatnot. I got off the carpet. Grains of rice like petrified lice in my hair. One of those occasions when a small, utterly powerless part of you hopes there is someone around who will make a case for sensible thinking. Someone who will take a stand for intelligence and self-preservation. But there’s no one around. Just you and your colossal idiocy moving swiftly toward doom.

There was the white van parked directly across the courtyard. Idling in a space in the parking lot. No advertisements painted on the sides. Just whiteness and the sun gleaming off it. Every parent’s worst wicked nightmare. The plain white van. The stalking pedophile with the duct tape and the bottle of chloroform and the hammer at the ready for the bludgeoning and the unending terror that is the kidnapping of a loved one. You’d never see them again. You’d never know what happened or, worse, what was happening, right at that moment when their memory breaches your subconscious and burns at your soul. That loved one could be enduring an unending cycle of suffering and there was no way to rescue them.

The white van represents stark fucking terror for a parent.

I walked across the courtyard and slammed my fist on the white, gleaming hood of the white, gleaming van. Inside were not my ex’s two brothers. Staring at the two strangers inside the van, it finally dawned on me that my ex’s brothers still lived in Pittsburgh. And they were perpetually broke. The cost of airfare was out of the question. The cost of bus fare was even out of the question.

I said what I came to say anyway.

• You stalking my kid?

The men looked at one another.

• Fuck off. We’re not here for your kid. Like we’re some fuckin’ pedophiles.
• Then why the fuck are you just sitting here?
• None of your fuckin’ business.
• You’re sitting in a white van next to a courtyard where a bunch of kids are playing. That’s fucked up.
• Fuck it man…the dude in 108 owes somebody some money.

108 was the apartment directly beneath mine. There was only one male in that apartment.

• You mean Benny? He’s fuckin’ eleven years old.
• I don’t care if he’s still pissing in his Pampers. These dudes gotta pay what they owe. No matter what. That’s the way shit works.

The man in the passenger seat leaned across the great expanse between the two front seats.

• Your daughter was out here a few minutes ago playing by herself? With the little Steelers jersey on? The Jerome Bettis jersey?
• Dude your woman does a fly job with her hair. That braid was tight.
• I did that. Her mom left us a few days ago.
• ..like left left? Like she got pissed and left the two of you?
• Kudos dawg. It’s tough braiding a black girl’s hair. But a white dude doing it? Shit’s unheard of.
• That braided stitch bun was on point. Shit bro…guess you got the touch.
• You might have missed your calling.

The driver spoke.

• Seriously bro. We ain’t here for your kid. You can go crawl back inside your whiskey bottle.
• Dude’s girl just left him and their kid. Cut him some slack.
• That obvious I’ve been drinking?
• We’re parked ten feet from a dumpster in this goddamn California oven and I could still smell you coming at us from across that courtyard.

The lawn of the courtyard was brown and weather-stripped. Eaten away by the punishing summer sun. Large patches were nothing but dirt and rocks. The kids that played there, the little kids that rolled around in a bed of cigarette butts and gravel and cinder, were surely tougher than me. I dodged jagged boulders in my bare feet. Winced when I misstepped.

Back inside the apartment, I walked down the hall and stood outside my daughter’s room. There was a gravity to the moment. An importance so heavy that it laid across my shoulders like a piece of iron.

I felt like I had nothing to give. All I had to offer was my heart, bound up and knotted like a piece of dried wood.

My ex and I were like devils when we fought. Christ…the things our daughter had seen. The past was unrelenting. It was a liquid presence at my feet.

I knocked then went into her room. She was sitting cross-legged in the center of her bed, looking as silent and stoned as a fucking sloth.

• Are you high?
• What?
• Never mind.

The night my ex left, we in our daughter’s room. Both of us were stuck eyebrow-deep in that level of drunkenness when nothing but grievous harm was possible. Mutual annihilation was assured. Our little girl watched us. Eyes back and forth like she was watching a tennis match. Her eyes chasing acidic volley after terroristic ace. She’d seen it all by that point. There was a great sense of calm about her. The expression on her face was gray and ancient like it had been sent to her from another, more spiritually advanced world. Her mom and I argued like we were feeding an addiction. Like if we stopped, we would implode. The reasons for the argument escape me now.

• Those men in the white van weren’t here to get you. They were here for Benny. That kid downstairs.
• Benny?
• Do yourself a favor and stay away from Benny.
• He wears the same clothes every day.
• I know. Sometimes things work out that way.
• He smells like pee.
• Sucks to be Benny I guess.
• Get me a popsicle.
• Please?

I left the room. Came back with two grape popsicles. One for her, one for me. She finished hers way too quickly and tossed the popsicle stick across the room. I did the same. Ate it too quickly. Always in a rush. I waited for the inevitable cold shock headache to set in. She moaned and rocked back and forth until the pain between her temples subsided. There was a bright sadness to her now. Eyes wide. Edges of her mouth downturned.

She stuck out her tongue so I could see that it was purple. I looked at it. Made a face as if it were the grossest thing I’d ever seen.

She leaned backward and laughed. Supported herself with her bony arms.

She spoke while staring at the ceiling.

• Mom’s been gone for a long time.
• Eight sleeps.
• Where is she?
• I don’t know.
• All her stuff is here.
• She’ll come back for her stuff. She’ll come back to get me. She will, right?

At that point, there was no way to tell. I didn’t know how to respond. Admittedly I was leaning hard toward the negative. But that was just a theory. A yes would’ve sent her hopes sky high. Not a day would go by when she wouldn’t expect to wake up and see her mother’s face first thing. A no would paint me in a bad light if my ex did return. Daddy said you wouldn’t come back. It would be my epitaph.

Since I didn’t know what to say, I sat on her bed and dragged her onto my lap. I held onto her like I was leeching the strength right out of her tiny body. This is what parents who feel powerless do. They hold onto their kids during those low moments when they feel their lives are heading in strange directions. It seemed a bit twisted to me. But I held her for a couple minutes anyway. The world was quiet. There was a look of vague astonishment on her face.

It’s just what parents do sometimes. They hold their kids.

Something inside told me that this separation would hold forever. It was a creeping, ominous feeling somewhere off in the weeds of my mind. But it was there. Just starting to make its presence known. Creeping out of the darkness toward the light. A low growl and a rustling in the bushes. Ready to play a larger role.

My daughter’s eyes are a pool of deep, dark green. There are flecks of brown and gold. The colors of a forest in spring.

I had a feeling that the separation would hold.

Even now there are days when I still don’t know what to do.