(Originally published in Monsters and Critics, July 2007)
Sunday:
I've never enjoyed sharing bathrooms. My father--he's always shared. Can piss a stream like Secretariat cutting loose. No care on looks from neighboring stalls; no words while urinal cakes jump porcelain. When he went to prison, maybe this is what separated him from weaker men. Made murderers, rapists and thugs leave him be while they turned quick on others.
My father gets telephone privileges every Sunday at noon, so I wait for his call at a payphone outside my boarding house. Above me, the sun beats warm. Out over the nearby Gulf of Mexico, clouds build into big-stack cumulous monsters. When the breeze blows from the Gulf like this, I'm always glad I moved to Mobile. It's only when the breeze turns and sucks the mosquitoes and humidity in from the swamps that I question ever coming to south Alabama.
The phone rings. "Yes," I tell the recorded message when it asks if I'll accept the charges. Six months of collect calls coming to a public payphone and the phone company still hasn't caught us. Without paying a dime, my father and I talk of my job in a shoe-store stockroom. Of the college I might attend. Of the girl I'm kind of serious on.
These are the same subjects we talk about every week. We never talk about his life, or prison. We never talk about how I still hate him, or how I don't want him back in my life.
"Anything else on your mind?" my father asks.
Never.
That evening, I'm watching TV in the den of the boarding house when the manager introduces me to a short, thin old man standing in the doorway. Evidently the man will be living across the hall from me.
"Jeremiah, this is One Side," the manager says, his mini-jowls juggling to his words. "Like the direction," he adds.
One Side and I shake hands. The man looks like he might be Asian, or Hispanic, or Caucasian, or any of a dozen ethnic groups, all depending on which way I look at him. I start to ask where he's from, but don't. After all, who wants someone you've just met to pry into your life?
After One Side carries his bag upstairs, the manager comes back to me and whispers, "He's foreign, you know."
"Like the direction?" I ask.
Monday:
One Side enters the bathroom as I'm shaving. This isn't unusual since the boarding house only has one bathroom and the door's lock is missing. Still, most residents at least knock or wait until the room is empty. Not One Side. He gives a cheerful "Good morning" and squeezes between me and the tub and squats over the toilet.
I can't stand watching people shit, so I try ignoring him--but there he is, reflected in the mirror, his eyes looking right at me. I glance down to avoid his gaze. When I look back my razor has sliced me and I'm bleeding all over the place.
One Side flushes the toilet, then passes me the toilet paper as he leans over the blood-spackled sink to shave his own face.
"Nine months growth," he says, holding one of his few chin hairs between thumb and finger.
"Really?" I ask, being polite. I holding the bloody toilet paper against my neck and I'm not really interested in One Side's beard--or lack of it. I mean, he only has a few long hairs on his thin face. They don't even look like hairs. More like the squiggles preschoolers draw, or the cryptic alphabets from spy movies.
"A pretty woman convinced me to grow the beard," One Side explains. "Said it would make me look like the old men in her home village. I should have known better. She was only forty-five. Much too young for me."
"Is she from around here?"
"Indonesia. She's from Indonesia."
It turns out--as One Side proceeds to tell me--that she's the reason he moved from Jakarta to Los Angeles and then onward to the real L.A. of lower Alabama. "She told me I'd love America,'" he mimics in what I suppose to be her high-tone voice. "Told me I can't have traveled all over the world and not go to America. Naturally enough, she broke up with me right after I arrived." One Side holds an old straight-edge razor above his face as if debating shaving his "beard" away.
As a joke, I suggest he try Rogain."It'll grow hair on anything," I say.
One Side shakes his head so the two sides of his shrunken jaw go in different directions before returning for a smile. "That is so American," he says. "Don't know a word about me, but still feel inclined to give advice."
One Side swipe swipes his beard off with the straight-edge. There's no blood on his face.
Tuesday:
The next day, One Side and I are in the bathroom again. He picks up our conversation as if we hadn't just spent a day apart--or, perhaps, as if I really wanted to know everything he's telling me. He says that after his girlfriend dragged him to Mobile, she kicked him out. "Not two days here," he says. "Not even two days and I'm out." One Side then talks about discovering our boarding house. He says he likes how the rooms are cheap and how the only rules are to keep quiet at night and share the bathroom.
"Speaking of sharing, mind if I shower?" One Side asks, undoing his bathrobe.
"No problem," I say, lying.
There is no shower curtain. I tried putting one up once, but a drunk tore it down. The water from One Side's shower splashes onto the floor tiles and against my legs.
"You're a good kid," One Side says above the shower splatter.
According to my father, I'm also a good kid. When I was eight, my father taught me to shoot my new shotgun. He took me out in the woods and I remember bang-bang-banging into these old bowling pins he'd found somewhere. We were supposed to be gone all day, but after only two hours he suddenly decided to drive us home.
Funny how things work out, because we walked into our house to find my mom making love with my father's cousin.
I was so shocked I couldn't move. My father, though, didn't have that problem. He calmly picked the shotgun off my shoulder and fired. Since then, I've always thought about how I should have resisted; how should have fought like hell over that shotgun. I know if I'd done something--anything--my mom would still be alive and my father wouldn't be in prison.
I try not to look at One Side showering--try to focus on my shaving--but a quick glance shows he is covered in tattoos. Faint green tattoos cover his chest in swirling lines and unknown cursive-letter words, while straight lined tattoos reach green crossjoints across his right leg before they turn into circles and arches around his thighs. On One Side's chest, an eye tattoo is thin-etched in the hollow of his breastbone.
"That's a tiger eye," One Side says, catching me looking. He steps from shower and dries off with his bathrobe. "It gives me strength. Protects me."
"Where'd you get it?"
One Side says he was born Dutch in colonial Indonesia.
"I was five, sailing home to a Europe I've never seen, my father with me, my mother dead, when the war started."
I pause in mid shave, wondering which part of that is his answer.
"The Japanese captured our ship. 'One side' a Japanese officer said in English, shoving me aside. He mistook my father and I for Americans. He then shot my father point blank. That night a submarine, who knows whose, torpedoed us and I swam all day. But they caught me again and put me in an isolated prison until the war ended."
I rinse my razor clean. "That when you got the tattoos?"
"No."
One Side puts on his now-damp bathrobe, reaches around me and wets his toothbrush. He quick brushes his teeth, then flings toothpaste suds about the white ceramic tub. He exits the bathroom with a nod of his chin.
I don't know what to make of his story, so I forget about it and simply get dressed for work.
Wednesday:
Today One Side barely waits until I'm finished showering before entering the bathroom. "One side," he says, laughing to himself as he reaches for his toothpaste.
After brushing his teeth, One Side continues his history. I stand to the side, trying to dry off in the crowded bathroom.
"They were going to kill me," he says. "Someone told the Japanese prison commander I was biracial, Dutch and Indonesian. I think that insulted the commander, me being mixed. So he tells me in English--him not knowing Dutch and me knowing just a little English--he said, 'You'll die tomorrow.' That I understood. It sweetens the fear, the knowing. But the next day we hear of the bomb on Hiroshima and that is the end of my upcoming death."
I tap my disposable razor against the sink and send cut stubble tumbling the drain. To me, One Side is an old man, skin and bones sinkholed to a collapsing chest with a tan face unremarkably beyond nationality. "You don't look Dutch or Indonesian," I say.
"Some people never do."
Before I leave, One Side asks if I want to tour Mobile with him later today. I really don't want to, but he knows I don't work on Wednesday afternoons and I can't think up a good excuse not to go.
I end up driving us to Church Street East, a historic district near downtown. We do a walking tour, going from Victorian homes to Italianates, from stately Neoclassical mansions to lively little shotguns shacks. At one point in the tour, One Side says that these houses aren't as old as the Indonesian house he was born in. Still, he adds, it's amusing how these younger houses already have age striations in their heat-shrunk sideboards, and how their falling angles and curved roofs remind him of hands folded in prayer.
I mention that one shack looks like the one my father was born in.
"He took me there once," I say, "to this little dogtrot house in the woods. It was all falling down and full of old farm hay."
"Did it mean anything to you?"
"No."
"Don't tell your father that."
Thursday:
As he stands in the shower with water dripping off his sagging skin, One Side tells me how his mother's family on the island of Java adopted him after he got out of prison. For some reason they laughed as he explained in broken Javanese the prison and his father's death. Poor translation, he thinks. They then discarded his Dutch name and called him One Side for the Japanese man's words at killing his father. "Since English isn't my first tongue, the name doesn't sound strange to me, eh?"
In the silence after his story, I mention that my father is in prison. I'm not sure why I tell him this.
"Then we have much in common," he says, "although my dad didn't live to go to prison. Did your father ever say why he killed your mother?"
I self-consciously tug my towel tight about the waist. "He never said," I say, before pausing. "Wait. I never told you what he did."
"Correct"
Suddenly I feel the need to be alone. "Mind if I use the bathroom?" I ask, even though I really don't need to go.
"Please, go ahead," he says, but doesn't leave.
Not wanting to stand over the toilet while he watches me, I mutter never mind. One Side asks if there's a problem.
"No."
An hour later, I'm leaving the boarding house when One Side stops me. He wants us to go to the beach on Dauphin Island when I get off work.
"I'll think about it," I say, when I really mean I don't want to go anything with him. However, when I return from a long day of stocking shoes, One Side is in my room waiting for me. "You forgot to lock your door," he says. He is looking at the stack of Playboys on my nightstand--each one full of holes where I carefully cut out the pictures of all the naked women.
"They're for my father." I don't explain that to torture my father's cellmate--who is a perverted little rapist--my father has me cut out all of the pics. This allows my father to say, in a sad, forlorn way, that his son only gives him the magazines for the articles. In truth my father snickers as his cellmate flips from page to page, moaning over the shapely-cut holes in the slick paper.
Even though I'm irritated at One Side, I drive us to Dauphin Island. We end up standing on the beach as the waves surge around us and suck our feet deeper and deeper into the oscillating grains.
"I've tasted this moment before," One Side says. "As a baby, my mother held me among specks of wind-whipped salt on some beach."
My own mom got shot when I was eight. Still, I've got tons good memories with her, especially compared to my total lack of good memories of a father who's still around.
"I don't remember much of my mom," I say, lying.
Friday:
Today One Side enters the bathroom before I even finish my shower. He talks as I hide my crotch behind one hand and try scrubbing my back, legs, and stomach with the other. After two minutes of this I stumble and slide across the tub's rust stains.
"Careful," One Side says. "Anyway, my mother's family, they'd never approved of her marrying a white man. They cared for me perfectly well, but no one really tried too hard. For example, my grandfather gave me these tattoos but never finished them. I remember his long, white beard hanging over me while he pricked me with a knife and ink. 'This will being you good luck,' he kept saying. But he never finished."
As I step from the shower, One Side pulls his bathrobe aside for a big flash of his bony butt. "See. The tattoos stop at my waistline and only go down one leg."
Saturday:
I shift my shower time to four in the morning. Despite this, One Side still wanders in and sits on the toilet as I'm lathering up with the soap.
"Not that it mattered, you see. The unfinished tattoos did protect me. A tsunami hit our village when I was fifteen. Me, the others in the village, we had seconds to climb trees to live. I made it, but no one else did. Funny thing about tsunamis--you think they're so tall but sometimes they're not so big. I climbed three meters up a tree. The water swirled my body but didn't pull too hard and I kept climbing."
"Ain't that just the key to life," I say, using my towel to dry off the soap suds still clinging to my back and butt.
I avoid One Side for the rest of the day. That evening I ask the house manager if a lock could be put on the bathroom door. "Nope," the manager says. "You always know someone'd lock themselves in and do that overdose thing. Then where'd we be?"
"Prison?" I ask, and the manager looks at me like I'm crazy, so I let the subject drop.
The funny thing is that once, while visiting my father in prison, he said almost the same thing. Sitting behind that plexiglas divider in the visitor's room, he said that in prison everyone always knew what everyone is doing. "You take a shit, and fifteen guys see you doing it," he said.
I told him I couldn't be like that. I hated it when people pried into everything I did and didn't give me any privacy.
"Then don't go to prison," he suggested.
Sunday:
This morning I skip bathing and sleep in until eleven. At noon I walk out to the payphone and wait for my father's call. The house manager and One Side sit in lawn chairs on the front yard, a portable TV in front of them tuned to the Alabama basketball game.
I ask who's winning but the manager shushes me silent. One Side points absently to an unfinished tattoo on his left leg. "A charm for clarity, understanding," he mutters. "That's the tattoo my grandfather never finished."
During a commercial, the house manager asks if I have any problems sharing the bathroom with people.
"He doesn't have a problem," One Side protests. "He just isn't comfortable sharing those private moments, that's all."
"Excuse me?" I say, still standing by the phone.
The manager sucks in his fat cheeks and gnaws them between words, as if not needing me to be there as he speaks. "Jeremiah probably thinks you're being too weird," he says, "like it's some sexual thing. The two of you being in the bathroom together, I mean."
"Oh please," One Side says, and turns to me. "Do you really think you're my type?"
I shake my head.
"Just talk," One Side says. "That's all we do."
"Problem solved," the house manager states.
Before I can say anything to all of this nonsense, the phone rings. I pick up and accept the charges. The house manager laughs at this because he knows what I've been doing. He doesn't care because it can't cost him anything.
After waiting through the loud recorded message--"The caller on the phone is a convicted felon in the Alabama state prison system"--my father and I talk about my job, getting into college, and the same old stupid stuff we always talk about. I'm just about to say goodbye when One Side yells that he wants to say something.
"What?" I ask, but he's already standing there. My father says to put the man on.
"You have an excellent son," One Side says. He waits, listens, then answers whatever my father said. "Yes, he must know that is true. Good talking with you."
One Side hands the phone back. I try to ask my father what he said to One Side, but he has already hung up.
Monday:
To avoid One Side, I shave and brush my teeth out of a McDonald's cup in my room. By doing this, I cut my bathroom visits to under two minutes--which is just enough time to shower, dry, lather, rinse, and run back to my room.
However, in those two minutes One Side still tells me about an Indonesian restaurant, two Thai restaurants, and a candy shop he's discovered near our boarding house. It seems each place produces a particular food smell that reminds him of pleasant kitchens and meals long gone by.
He then talks about the ships.
"At sixteen I began working merchant ships. I was a seaman, boson, radio operator, even shipmaster on this rusty Japanese freighter. I learned perfect English, of course."
I bolt from the shower, only to lose my towel halfway to my room. When I leave the boarding house after getting dressed, One Side is waiting for me at the front door. He follows me into the morning air as a hazy rain shower dances down the opposite side of the street. A few drops blow our way, but we stay dry the entire walk to my pickup truck.
"How unlike the monsoons of my childhood," he states before I can drive away.
Tuesday:
"I made friends all over the world. This American saved my life from a cable accident. It was he who said I ought to come and see the states. When my girlfriend invited me here, I decided to do just that."
I run from the shower before the water even warms up. Through my bedroom door, One Side says he's going to tour Battleship Memorial Park today. "I have to see the U.S.S. Alabama," he says. "Can you envision the battles it endured while I was in prison? And that little submarine beside the battleship--it might have sunk the ship my father was executed on."
I turn my radio up loud to drown him out. I end up getting dressed to the sounds of drive-time DJs debating which supermodel bimbo can chug the most beer.
Wednesday:
I don't bathe, don't shave. In the morning I run out the front door. That night, I plan to run from the front door to my room.
Unfortunately, while I'm stocking tennis shoes at work, my boss walks by and, after taking a deep breathe in my vicinity, points out that the employee manual has a section on personal hygiene. She sends me home in the middle of the day to clean up.
I walk straight to the bathroom. A minute later One Side swings open the bathroom door and comes in.
"Think they need a lock on the door?" One Side asks.
"The house manager doesn't like the idea," I say, resting my elbows on the sink. "Look, you're a nice guy. If I do ten minutes a day of listening to you, will you leave me alone?"
One Side notches his head sideways. "Listening? Nothing personal, but I don't know you well enough to need any listening from you."
With that One Side gathers his toothpaste and brush and shuts the door as he leaves.
Thursday:
I don't see One Side all day. But that evening, as I'm eating a pizza downstairs, the house manager can't stop talking about him.
"Did you know that before coming to America, One Side bathed at four each morning in ice cold water." The manager says this as if cold water is the very epitome of foreign behavior. I tell him that my father also preferred cold showers; that he believed they made for a long life.
"That's what One Side said," the manager says, smiling. "Evidently the cold water makes each bath stretch into eternity. This way, even if you don't live longer, it'll seem like you did." The manager shakes his head when I don't laugh at the joke.
"It was funnier when One Side said it," he states.
Friday:
My father calls me before I leave for work. I'm sitting in a chair on the front lawn, reading a book, when the payphone rings. I walk over, pick it up, and accept the call when I hear it's from my father.
"I've been calling all morning," he says. "Where have you been?"
"What do you mean, where have I been? It's a pay phone. I don't usually hang out near it."
My father is quiet for a moment, then tells me he's in the hospital.
"I got shanked in the shower," he says. "Some new kid was trying to make a name for himself. I'll be in the prison hospital for a week or two."
There's not much I can say to that, so I keep quiet while my father tells me he'll be okay. He then starts talking about the wound--how the shank sliced his belly hard, but missed the important organs--and I'm just thinking about how this is the most he's ever talked about his own life when the BellSouth operator cuts us off.
"This is not a legal call," she says. "The receiving phone is not allowed to accept collect calls."
My father demands she let him finish, but she says she's gonna cut the call and that there will be possible legal action for stealing phone service. "I'm in a fucking prison," my father shouts. "What can you do to me?"
The phone line goes dead.
Saturday:
I wake to the hazy dark of the streetlights. My alarm clock says it is four A.M. While I'm lying there, trying to get back to sleep, I hear someone pad down the hall to the bathroom. I roll over and listen. It's One Side.
I try to forget about him but, as the minutes go by and I don't hear him leave the bathroom, I start thinking of my father and how he always said to be polite to people. I realize I need to apologize to One Side, so I wrap a towel around my underwear and walk to the bathroom. The unlockable door swings open with a tight gag.
One Side is standing there naked, leaning over the sink. His bone face is bent over into his hands, which makes his arms look like thin twigs on a bark-stripped tree. His tattooed leg is green with lines and foreign words, while his untattooed leg is bloody where new lines and stabs and pricks have cut the skin in wavy scripted patterns.
I can't move into words, so I just stare at the blood smears on the white floor tiles.
"Do you need to use the sink?" One Side asks. I nod. One Side limps to the toilet and sits down. I step around the congealing blood drips and the thin smears that are already brown and turn the cold tap on. I flick the water stream around to rinse the blood down the drain.
"Seemed like you were enjoying yourself last week," I say.
"Seemed so indeed."
I stand there a moment, waiting. "Well come on. What happened?"
One Side drips his hands down his stomach. "I went to see my ex-girlfriend. Don't know why, just everything had gone so well lately."
One Side describes how his ex-girlfriend opened the door, with her long black hair hanging loose and her smile seeming so genuine. One Side asked if they could try again. Maybe we just went too fast, he said.
Before he could say more, she shook her head. "I'm seeing someone," she said.
"I don't believe you."
"That doesn't matter."
One Side describes how he rubbed his chin and only then remembered that he had cut off the long hairs that she had convinced him to grow. "Why did you ask me to come here with you?" he asked.
She didn't answer and just stood in the doorway, looking far younger than her 45 years. One Side says that at that moment he felt older than he was--old enough to be one of her distant ancestors, old enough to be a skeleton decaying away yet still having enough dry leather and skin left to hold itself together.
Old enough to be whatever she thought of as home.
Instead of asking any more questions, he walked away.
As One Side tells me all of this, I keep staring at the blood still oozing from his new self-done tattoos. What did he say the tattoos on his other leg were for? A charm for understanding?
"Standing there, in her doorway," One Side says, talking so low that I have to turn off the faucet to hear him, "I suddenly realized that the only reason she had brought me with her, the only reason she'd liked me at all, is because I reminded her of the old men in her home village. I mean, she'd said this once, not like that, but still she said it."
I don't know what to say, so I start to tell One Side that we have to clean up the blood before the manager sees it. "He'll evict you for this," I say. Suddenly One Side kicks against the tub, leaving behind a blood imprint of his leg.
"I need a curse word," he says. "One that I can say and have it mean something to me, and to you. The words I know mean nothing to you, and yours hold little to me. I mean, I speak many languages. But Holland I never knew and Indonesia was never there." He stops, and waits in silence. "Home. I need a good word to curse not having a home."
"Nothing wrong with not having a home. You can always find somewhere else."
"Really?" he asks. "And the homes in my head?" He runs his hand down his bloody leg, pushing the blood and scabs in a slow-drip rain to the floor. For a moment, I see the newly cut tattoos. They are lines and joints and squiggly words, but different--rougher cut--than those on the other leg.
One Side limps into the bathtub and begins to shower in the cold water. I sit on the toilet and watch him.
"He did it when I was eight," I say. "Killed her, I mean. We were coming back from learning to shoot, and my father simply picked the shotgun off my shoulder, clicked the shells, and..."
Sunday:
My father doesn't call today. I don't expect him to, after the trouble a few days ago with the phone company. Still, I wait by the payphone and waste an hour looking at the clouds and airplanes pass in the sky.
One Side is sitting inside when I finally leave the phone.
"Want to drive to the prison and see him?" he asks. I know he really means I'll drive us to the prison. We'll go see him.
"Yeah."
It's a five hour drive to the prison, and as we pull onto the interstate cars are backed up everywhere. Total slowness. Nobody even dreaming of going anywhere.
A mile down the road an electric traffic sign warns of an accident ahead and traffic slows to a stop. One Side hold his hands before the windshield and waves like Moses parting the sea of traffic. "One Side," he says.
It's a bad joke, but we still laugh.
