SBWC 2009 National Writing Contest
Fiction Winner
Tracy DeBrincat of Los Angeles, CA
“Buckaroo Proper”
There’s a Death Clock on the Internet that determines your expiration date. I enter my birthday (March 19), sex (M), height (5’9” in shoes), weight (178 on the right day), and consider the pre-determined personality “mode” options. Let’s say I’m feeling pessimistic. In that case, I’ll officially kick the bucket Friday, July 16, 2016, with 249,869,065 seconds left to live and counting. If I pretend my mode is optimistic, my last day on planet Earth reconfigures to Saturday, June 7, 2059, with some 1,619,220,588 seconds before I croak. That’s a whole 43 additional years — over a trillion seconds. With just one little lie, I could live longer than I’ve lived already, and then some. If I click the normal mode, I’ll die April 14, 2034. All these dates are bogus, of course, as my current mode is neither pessimistic, optimistic nor normal. What I am is — with the help of another website — numb, stunned, stupefied, paralyzed. I sit here checking boxes, calculating and recalculating my death, waiting for the taxi that will take me to my father’s funeral, which began fifteen minutes (a measly 900 seconds) ago.
--
Beneath an ultraviolet explosion of jacaranda trees in full fall bloom, the entrance and exit lanes to and from the cemetery are fraught with cars, hearses, limousines and one Checker Cab —mine. From gridlock’s unmoving mass, I have ample time to find the poetry in this: Los Angelenos die the same way they live: in traffic. Ample time to wonder whether Mom gave in to my younger sister Ellie’s constant ragging about upscaling and designering Dad’s funeral, or whether Mom stuck to her guns to honor Dad’s wishes for a plain memorial. Ample time to re-read the cemetery’s promotional brochure, which describes Forest Lawn as the “Eternal Resting Place Born of a Dream of Dr. Hubert Eaton, Who Believed, Above All, in a Christ Who Smiled.” Ample time to ponder this bewildering description before a traffic cop finally arrives to decongest the mess.
When it’s finally our turn to move, the taxi passes a sleek Chrysler Towne Car. With uncanny timing, the back window slips down, and Ellie sticks her head out for some air, something she’s done for as long as anyone can remember, often causing Dad to remark she might be part dog. I duck down in the back seat, but too late. The last thing I see before the Towne car exits the gates of Forest Lawn is Ellie slitting her finger across her throat, and glaring at me. Fucking shit. No Christ smiling here.
--
The marble halls of the Sanctuary of Memory are shadowy and cool. Brackish marigolds and cheap carnations decorate cabinets behind which burned flesh and bone are locked and filed away. At the end of the east wing of the Columbarium of the Sanctuaries (Columbarium Enema, Ghost-Dad whispers into my ear), Robert Edward Sanderson lies in a simple pine casket—no brass, no carving—on a cloth-covered riser. Two Filipina workers in grey uniforms collapse folding chairs that have been arranged in front of the casket on a square of red carpet. Smoke rises from two tapers, recently extinguished, in tall candlesticks. The women see me approach and back away, beckoning, “Come, come,” ostentatiously bowing themselves against a far wall. The younger of them silently speed-walks to Dad’s casket and holds a lighter to the tapers, then rejoins her colleague. They both stare at the ground.
“I didn’t mean to miss the funeral.” My voice cracks as I stand there in my outdated, ill-fitting all-purpose suit, unable to move any closer to the casket. “My car broke down. I couldn’t find my jumper cables.” The red carpet swirls at my feet. I am loathe to step onto it. Somehow, the red carpet means what has happened is true. Dad is dead. Life is not, as I have oftentimes wished, reversible.
“Psssht, psssht.” One of the ladies frowns, waving impatiently. A family of four down the hall gathers in front of another drawer. The mother weeps into a handkerchief, the children are wide-eyed, holding hands. The father is somber, consoling wife and kids with constant touches and encouragement. He murmurs something, I imagine a prayer, and the others join in, their invocation echoing in the chamber. On the strength of their spiritual white noise, I move toward the Shaker-style casket. Dad hated the idea of spending dough on a fancy viewing box when he was ultimately going to be cremated, and would have been happy with a paper bag if it were legal. I’ll bet he’s thrilled that a receptacle resembling an entertainment console from Ikea is launching him into the afterlife, though when I finally look inside, my gut curls in on itself. Dad’s stocky chest sinks in the middle, like a shelf that’s been piled with too many books. His olive complexion, ruddy from years of outdoor work, seems like old deli meat, jaundiced around the eyes. His lips are stitched vinyl. Some animal instinct inside me hankers for a sniff. I dare myself to breathe. If he still smells like Dad, like Old Spice and Pine-Sol and the scented hair pomade he wore to diffuse his workaday aromas, then maybe I’ll believe this is him. I hold my breath, and stumble to a chair. Close my eyes. Concentrate on the words from the family down the corridor, whatever, whoever they are.
--
The Saturday Dad died was one of those rare Los Angeles days when the sun sparkled in a pollution-free sky, puffy white clouds hopped around like bunnies, and the breeze made everyone’s hair look like they just got laid. A gorgeous fucking day. The afternoon sounds of birds, weed whackers and turbo-charged vacuums ricocheted through a bucolic canyon in the Hollywood Hills. Bougainvillea vines cloaked the lush garden walls around a faux Tuscan villa while Dad and I labored to liberate its occupants’ crap from a clogged sewer line. The only reason I was there because of the flowers. Dad’s other employee, Fabrizio, had an allergy attack that prevented him from working outside. This was the first outcall I’d made since I’d been banished from client contact six weeks ago. Six weeks since I’d worn the blue El-San Pipe & Drain coveralls, identical to Dad’s except for “Sander” stitched above my breast pocket and “Bobby” in red above his. I noticed Dad rubbing his chest a couple times, taking shallow breaths and yawning, but every time he caught me watching, he’d turn away.
The problem at hand: a clay sewer line, riddled with roots from a nearby ficus hedge. Dad and I’d worked all morning digging a five-foot trench on either side of the short stretch of old clay line that needed to be replaced with PVC. His catcher’s-mitt hands had always surprised me with their grace, but his usual efficient moves were clumsy today. When I was ready to make the cut, I pulled on my protective mask and motioned for Dad to do the same. He ignored me. Typical. He rubbed his chest again. “You all right Dad?”
He nodded his big, balding head once, sharply, so I waved for him to stand clear; a standard safety precaution. He ignored me—also standard procedure—and nodded again.
I snapped on my ear mufflers, pulled the chain on the saw, and set blade to pipe. After easily shearing through the clay, I turned off the saw and noticed Dad’s hands were clutched at his chest. Was he having trouble with heartburn? Wiping his dirty hands on his shirt? As I tried to make sense of what I was seeing, a familiar sound traveled through the cast-iron sewer pipe from the direction of the house. Before my brain recognized the sound of the untimely flush from inside, my body snapped into action. I dropped the saw and flipped myself up and out of the trench like a gymnast, escaping being sprayed with sewage by a mere tenth of a second. Dad didn’t react quite so fast. A geyser of waste burst from the pipe, exploding at his chest with amazing force. Adrenaline pumping, I lunged at Dad, wiping shit from his face, putting my lips to his, thinking Not yet not yet not yet. Trying to remember the steps I hadn’t thought about since Duck and Cover days in grade school. Pinch. Breathe. Press.
When the lady of the house ran out on the deck to apologize for forgetting not to flush, she saw what was going on and quickly called 911. For being up in the hills, the paramedics got there in really good time. Ultimately, it made no difference. Dad’s heart had already quit.
--
Across from the Sanctuary of Memory, artificial flowers and metallic balloons decorate headstones and statuary in rows on a grassy slope. When did people start putting party decorations on headstones? Yellow hillsides behind them accentuate the artificial golf-green of the cemetery lawn. Beyond those, downtown’s skyscrapers huddle behind a dirty blanket of October haze. There’s no sidewalk here, as befits its home town; this cemetery is made for driving. I slip my flask from my pocket and take a swig of whatever’s in there since the last time I filled it. Stale, smoky whiskey singes my throat as I stroll down the middle of the road.
Below me, at the cemetery’s ornate entrance gates, are two large, white film trucks, along with a trailer, a cluster of lights and scrims, and a crew, laying cables and yapping into walkie-talkies. For the first time since Dad died, I am reminded of the brand-new laptop and titanium VMX3000 camcorder that recently maxed out my VISA and my half-cooked plan of quitting El-San to write a screenplay and film it. That stupid screenplay. Bane of my life.
“Mr. Sanderson?” The polished voice is at once reassuring, familiar, and kind of fake.
I turn to look into a bespoke lapel, its perfect, tiny stitches marching along a contoured seam. Above that, a chiseled, tan jaw below laser-beam blue eyes. “Paul Street.” The man offers his legendary hand, a hand that has caressed a legion of starlet asses, pointed countless silver-gray prop guns, placed and pulled cigarette after cigarette on his snarled leading-man lips. “I’m a tremendous fan of your father.”
This guy was on Celebrity Profiles a few weeks ago. He was one of those actors who appeared in over a hundred B-movies. Science fiction, Westerns, action adventures, dramas. Noirs, comedies, war epics. Back in the forties, if there were ten movies in production in one week, Paul Street was in at least three of them. Some were okay, but most were bad—rip-
roaringly, cult-worthy bad. He’d since retired from acting to become a celebrity spokesperson for beauty and exercise products, but his silver screen aura right here in Forest Lawn cemetery is undeniable and larger than life. He’s got to be close to seventy, about a decade older than my old man, but he looks years younger, his skin healthy and unlined. A tidbit from Celebrity Profiles I’ll never forget: at thirteen, the pony he was riding bolted straight into freshly-laundered sheets breezing on a clothesline. His mother looked on as the line caught Paul around the neck and sliced his throat open from earlobe to earlobe. After his recovery, Paul transformed himself from gawky teen to high-school heartthrob, dedicating his life to his acting career.
“He loved his work, his life and his family.” Street delivers the line like a priest.
He can’t be talking about my father. “You’re talking about Bobby Sanderson?”
“Oh, yes,” Paul Street says, eyes closing, going private. When he opens his eyes, they’re brimming with tears. “Bobby was my good-luck plumber.”
God, he’s good. I offer my flask.
He takes a tiny slug and makes a face. “I’m more of a champagne man myself.” He mops his eyes with a silk pocket square.
“How did you meet Dad?” I still can’t believe this guy is our client. I know all the names on our roster and each of their plumbing quirks. There is no file on Paul Street.
He takes another slug. “It was 1971. A movie I was in was up for an award. Academy thing.”
“No One Ever Dies,” I say, managing to keep a straight face in light of the circumstances and our location. “It was a great film.” It was drivel. “I’ll never forget your performance.” It was unforgettable in its way. A few years later, I watched it from the top of a pickup on the other side of the fence behind the old Olympic Drive-In where I got my first handful of Marti Jo Johnson’s right boob.
Paul’s used to compliments and waves mine away. “I was a beefcake. Lucky, yes. Hard-working, absolutely. But only and ever a beefcake.” He nods. “Anyway, this nomination was the closest I’d ever get to an Oscar, unless I accidentally shoved one up my ass. Pardon the French.”
“Ouch. Not good for the plumbing.”
He smiles, a momentary strobe of bright denturnalia. “I was throwing a big to-do at the ranch. Night before the party, the entire septic system ups and regurgitates years of contents from all orifi. I was a wreck. Your father worked through the night, cleaned it all up. Saved the day.”
“That was your party my parents went to!” I was eleven years old, Ellie was six, and we were left in the care of our dope-smoking baby-sitter, who worshipped Jimi Hendrix and whose cookies we worshipped. Mom and Dad stood looking at themselves in the hall mirror, splendid and surprising in their finery. I remember waking up from a chocolate-chip coma on the sofa much later, when they came home tipsy and quarreling. “Dad would have been just about my age now. Thirty-three.”
Street flicks his eyes over me, searches my face for something, then takes another sip before returning my flask. “From then on, if my septic was acting up, your father was my man. If they gave Academy Awards for plumbers, Bobby would have received a Lifetime Achievement.”
“Thanks for saying so,” I say, aware of the irony of Dad’s dubious feat as I contemplate an oversize replica of a statue of Michelangelo’s David—“the largest in the world!” proclaims a plaque on its pedestal.
Paul Street throws open his arms, like he’s about to burst into song. “So who are you, Sander? What turns you on? What wakes you up and makes you glad you’re alive?”
Is he joking? Acting? Snippets of annoying advice, in Ashe’s voice, echo through my head. The next person you talk to might change your career. Have a snappy personal bio at the tip of your tongue. You never know where your next gig can come from. I never listened to her when we were together; why start now? “Not married. No kids. Had a steady girl, but she dumped me. Been working with Dad at El-San. Who names a plumbing company after their kids anyway?” It feels good to talk, if that’s what you call my little rant, to a stranger. The cab driver honks. My fifteen minutes are up. “My family’s waiting at Mom’s. Will you be there?”
“At your mother’s house?” The color of Paul Street’s eyes changes ever so slightly. “I’m sorry, I can’t.” He grasps both my hands in his—they are smooth, warm and hairless—and maintains the grip for what seems like a full minute, though it’s probably only a mature second or two. “But I’d love to talk some more. Why don’t we get together?”
I hesitate. Is he coming on to me? I wonder, then hope I’m not so transparent that thought was evident.
“I’m throwing a little soiree,” he clarifies, eyes twinkling. “With lots of other people. You’ll be safe.”
Yes, I’m completely see-through. I laugh. Not the good laugh, but the donkey-sounding one. “Okay. Sure. I guess so. Why not? Absolutely.” Have I left out any other possible response?
Smelling of high-end herbal shampoo, Paul Street leans in and palms me his card. “Next Saturday then. Eight-ish.” He turns on his heel and jogs up the grey concrete stairs of the Sanctuary of Memory.