By Jason Sanford Jul 23, 2007, 22:21 GMT
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, the sun beats warm. Out over the 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 and a recorded message asks if I’ll accept the charges. Six months of collect calls to a public payphone and the phone company still hasn’t caught on. 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 boarding house den when the manager introduces me to a short, thin old man. Evidently the man will be living across the hall from me.
“Jeremiah, this is One Side,” the manager says, his jowls juggling to his words. “Like the direction,” he adds.
One Side and I shake hands. The man looks Asian, or Hispanic, or Caucasian, or any of a dozen ethnic groups, all depending on which way I glance at him. I start to ask where he’s from, but don’t. After all, who wants someone you’ve just met prying 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 up I’ve sliced myself with the razor 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’m holding bloody toilet paper against my neck and not really interested in One Side’s beard—or lack of one. 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 some cryptic alphabet.
“A pretty woman convinced me to grow the beard,” One Side explains. “Said it would make me dashing. I should have known better. She was only forty-five. Much too young for me.”
“Is she from here?”
“Indonesia. She’s from Indonesia.”
It turns out—as One Side proceeds to tell me—that this woman is 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 says. “Told me I can’t have traveled all over the world and not go to America.” One Side holds an old straight-edge razor above his face as if debating whether to shave 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 move 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 the conversation as if a day hadn’t intruded between the last telling—or as if I really cared to listen to him babble. Evidently, his girlfriend dumped him right after she dragged him to Mobile. “Not two days here,” he mutters. “Not even two days and I’m out.” One Side then talks about discovering our boarding house. Says he likes how the rooms are cheap and 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’s no shower curtain. I hung 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. I remember bang-bang-banging these old bowling pins we set up out in the woods. 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 I 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. Straight lined tattoos reach green crossjoints across his right leg before turning 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 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 simply forget about it and dress 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. “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 beyond nationality and ethnicity. “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 to stately Neoclassical mansions to lively little shotguns shacks. At one point in the tour, One Side tells me these houses aren’t as old as the simple Indonesian home he was born in. Still, he adds, it’s amusing how the heat-shrunken sideboards of these houses already look ancient, and how their falling angles and curved roofs remind him of hands folded in prayer.
As we pass a tiny dogtrot house near the end of the tour, I mention that the house reminds me of the one my father was born in. “He took me there once,” I say, “to this little shack in the woods. It was all falling down and full of old farm hay.”
“Did the trip mean anything to you?”
“Don’t tell your father that.”
Thursday:
As One Side stands in the shower with water dripping off his pruned skin, he tells me how his mother’s family on the island of Java adopted him after his release from 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 One Side this.
“Then we have much in common,” he says, “although my dad didn’t live to go to prison. Did your father ever apologize for killing your mother?”
I self-consciously tug my towel tight about the waist. “Not really,” I say. “Wait. I never said he killed her.”
“Correct”
My skin crawls, and I wonder how One Side knows this secret of mine. One Side asks if there’s a problem, but I don’t answer as I storm out of the bathroom.
Thirty minutes later I’m dressed and leaving the boarding house when One Side stops me. He wants me to join him on a trip to Dauphin Island when I get off work.
“I’ll think about it,” I say, knowing I won’t do any such thing. However, when I return from a long day of stocking shoes, One Side sits in my room waiting for me. “You forgot to lock your door,” he says. He’s 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-out holes in the slick paper.
Even though I’m irritated at One Side, I drive us to Dauphin Island. We stand 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 the 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 a minute of this I stumble and slide across the tub’s rusted 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 knife and ink. ‘These 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 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 I simply kept held on for dear life.”
“Ain’t that just the key to everything,” I say.
I avoid One Side for the rest of the day. That evening I ask the house manager if he can put a lock 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 knows what everyone is doing. “You take a shit, and fifteen guys see you doing it,” he said.
I told him I couldn’t live 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.
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 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’m having problems sharing the bathroom with people.
“He doesn’t have a problem,” One Side protests. “He’s just embarrassed when people get too close to him.”
“That’s ridiculous?” I shout, still standing by the phone.
The manager gnaws on his fat cheeks and acts like he didn’t hear me. “Jeremiah probably thinks you’re being too weird,” he says, “like it’s some sexual thing. I mean, the two of you always being in the bathroom together.”
“Oh please,” One Side says, and turns to me. “Do you really think you’re my type?”
I shake my head, although I’m not sure if I’m disagreeing with this entire conversation or merely my supposed attraction to One Side.
“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 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 start to ask what was said to One Side, but my father’s already hung up.
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, shave, 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 twenty 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,” One Side states before I can drive away.
“I made friends all over the world. This American saved my life from a cable accident. It was he who first 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—maybe it sunk the ship my father was executed on.”
I turn my radio up loud to drown him out and dress to the sounds of drive-time DJs debating which supermodel can chug the most beer.
I don’t bathe, don’t shave. I simply dress and run out the front door, ready for work in five seconds flat.
Unfortunately, while I’m stocking tennis shoes at work, my boss walks by and, taking a deep breathe in my vicinity, points out that the employee manual has a section on personal hygiene. She sends me home 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 with a sigh. “Look, you’re a nice guy. If I listen to you for a few minutes each day, will you leave me alone?”
One Side notches his head sideways. “Listen? Nothing personal, but I don’t know you well enough to need any listening from you.”
With that One Side leaves, shutting the bathroom door behind him.
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 prefers cold showers; that he believes they make for a long life.
“That’s what One Side said,” the manager says, smiling. “Evidently the cold water stretches each bath 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 mutters in disgust.
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’s quiet for a moment, then tells me he’s in the hospital.
“I got shanked in the shower,” he says. “Some new kid 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 talks about the wound—how the shank sliced his belly hard, but missed the important organs—and I’m just thinking how this is the most he’s ever told me about his life in prison 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 there will be possible legal action for stealing phone services. “I’m in a fucking prison,” my father shouts. “What can you do to me?”
Unable to debate such a point, the operator simply cuts the connection.
I wake to the hazy dark of streetlights and my alarm clock saying it’s 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. I wrap a towel around my underwear and walk to the bathroom. The unlockable door swings open.
One Side stands naked before the sink. He holds his bone face in his hands, his arms looking like thin twigs on a bark-stripped tree. His tattooed leg is green with lines and foreign words. His untattooed leg is bloody where new lines and stabs and pricks have cut the skin into wavy scripted patterns.
Unable to speak, I simply stare at the blood smeared across 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 and turn the cold tap on. I flick the water around the sink 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 shrugs. “I went to see my ex-girlfriend. Stupid thing to do, I guess.”
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,” he said
“That doesn’t matter,” she replied.
One Side describes how he rubbed his chin and only then remembered cutting off the long hairs she’d convinced him to grow. “Why did you get me to come here with you?” he finally asked.
She didn’t answer and just stood in the doorway, looking far younger than her 45 years. One Side says at that moment he felt older than ever—old enough to be one of her distant ancestors; old enough to be a skeleton decaying away; old enough to be the dry leather skin of some ancient forgotten mummy.
Instead of asking any more questions, One Side walked away.
As One Side tells me all of this, I stare at the blood oozing from his self-created tattoos. What did he say the missing tattoos were for? A charm for understanding?
“Standing there, in her doorway,” One Side says, talking so low I turn off the faucet to hear him, “I suddenly realized it didn’t matter why she brought me here. It didn’t matter that she’d treated me like excrement. All that mattered was why I’d come back begging to her door—and the only answer was that I didn’t want to be alone.”
I don’t know what to say, so I tell One Side that we have to clean up the blood before the manager sees it. “He’ll evict you for this,” I say. But One Side merely kicks 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. 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. 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. The same as his other leg, just different. Rougher cut than all his other charms.
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. We were coming back from learning to shoot, and my father simply picked the shotgun off my shoulder, clicked the shells, and. . .”
My father doesn’t call today. I don’t expect him to, after the trouble the other day with the phone company. Still, I wait by the payphone and waste an hour looking at the clouds pass in the sky.
One Side waits for me when I finally walk back to the boarding house.
“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. 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 holds his hands before the windshield and waves like Moses parting a sea of traffic. “One Side,” he says.
It’s a bad joke, but we still laugh.
******
This is the second story from a 3 part installment from Jason Sanford. The first story as well as Jason's full bio can be read here.
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