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On HOLD

Charlie Brice

Bathed in watermelon sugar, blessed by ambiguous
angels, I read Brautigan and Rilke, listened to Judy
Blue Eyes, Tchaikovsky’s First Piano concerto,
counted pie tins, mop heads, and ashtrays at my
mother’s restaurant supply store, read Nietzsche
and Plato, sprayed Aerodete, an industrial cleanser
that removed oil from concrete, the alveoli from
my lungs, and years of grease caked on the used
restaurant range that I scrubbed and scrubbed amid
Aerodet’s mists of Lethe so we could resell that gooey
mess. My examined life and search for truth couldn’t
save this overworked Übermensch from selling
glassware, delivering barrels of dishwasher detergent
to hotels, or filling Kotex dispensers in gas station restrooms.

I took to drink that summer of ’69 unable to stand mother’s
7am shrill, Charles, get up!, her adhesive anhedonia and
constant criticism. Her siren-voice often caught me passed-
out fully clothed after a night of cheap wine and withered
roses. Eventually I’d stagger into her store, hours late,
hungover, and ready for brutal boredom. I once appeared
at 10AM, sunglassed and shaky, to find Mother on the phone
with Harry Smith, her most important customer. Would you
hold for a moment, Harry? Mother asked in her most angelic
voice. She punched the HOLD button as if sending a ladybug
to hell. You little shitass, she hissed through gritted teeth like
a demonic ventriloquist, Take that drill and put holes in those
table tops so you can screw on the bases. My world swirled
as her witch-wand finger pointed to drill, table top, and base.

She smote another ladybug and said in her best sing-song voice,
How can I help you, Harry? I’d never used a drill. I shoved a bit
into the funny opening, turned a table top over, eyeballed where
the base should go, and quickly fell asleep. I awoke to the drill’s
cruel bucking. I’d drilled through the Formica table top, through
the tile floor, and into the concrete sub-floor. I picked up the table
top and looked through the hole I’d drilled. I could see my mother
on the phone with Harry. She could see me as well. Using her most
sonorous tone, she once again asked Harry to hold for a moment
Cheeks puffed in fury, a bull pendant, her “bovine dick,” rutted
up and down between her breasts with each enraged breath.
She hit the HOLD button with such vicious aplomb that she
could have destroyed every ladybug colony in Wyoming.

We have Freud to thank for describing the mercies of repression,
a defense I must have used instantly. Did my sweet mother try
to strangle me with a telephone cord that day? Or did I
go home, sleep it off, and start the entire miasma
of misery all over the next morning?

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