Meeting Your Makers: King of Clubs

I see Anne-Marie hesitate for the first time.

“Got any tips for the old man?” she asks, her black boots pausing just before the threshold of the doorway.

“It's really not that deep. He's just one of those likely-neurodivergent gen-x shop dads.”

“I’m being for real, Goggles.”

I scratch my neck. “Hmm… Try not to remind him of his ex-wife, I guess?”
Anne-Marie guffaws. “That’s gonna be a tough sell.”

“And whose fault is that?”

“Yours, I’d think,” she replies, accusing me with a finger. “I’m not the one who asked out the one girl that would vibe with your insane mother.”

“Fair enough. I guess it’s not your fault your family made you crazy.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?” She asks, jabbing said finger into the still-healing bruises under my shirt.

I gasp. “It means your job is just to sit there and look cute.”

“Easy enough. If looking cute was a job, it’d be free passive income.”

I squat down to fish the house key from under the Grover of our moldy Sesame Street doormat, and fire back:

“What, did you finally apply for the local strip club?”

“Ew. I have enough awkward run-ins with my dad at home, thank you.”

I snort, and shove the key into the door- only for it to open on its own. Greeting us at eye level is the entire newly-minted stone’s weight of my father’s gut.

“Hey, kids,” he announces, scratching his chest hair as if he isn’t wearing nothing but tighty-whities and reeking of whiskey at 4 in the afternoon.

“Daaad!” I hiss, shoving him back into the doorway.

He wobbles with me as I walk him clear of street-view. Glancing around, I breathe in relief at the absence of Ms. Wilkinson’s eyes prying at us from between her blinds across the street. It’s almost like old people have nothing better to do but sit around and complain. God knows we get enough complaints to the neighborhood association about the constant metal-working and hammering—And yet, despite dear old dad’s nasty habit of passing out with the garage door open, we have somehow yet to be filed for public indecency.

Anne-Marie nudges the door closed behind her with her boot, and says:

“Nice to meet you-”

But my dad’s already stumbling his way towards the first door on the right, intending for the garage.

“Just make sure to use protection,” he says, as he’s turning the knob.

“Hold on,” I say. “Where do you think you’re going, bud?”

“To get hammered while I nail. What’dyou think?”

My grimace says it all.

But Anne-Marie elaborates. “We’re here to ask for a little favor, mister.”

Dad grunts like a walrus, “Oh, well when you say it like that,” and promptly walks through the door.

Anne-Marie throws her eyebrows up in a cry for help, but I just follow him in without saying anything. In the literal five seconds since the last time we’d seen him, my dad had gotten dressed. Or rather, his definition of dressed—Spread-eagle on the garage floor with a lead apron draped between his thighs and a mortifyingly charred-and-scarred welding mask, he does several test clicks with the blowtorch in his hands. And, upon failing to catch a light, he says:

“Fetch me a cold one, will ya? Betsy’s being a bitch again.”

Anne-Marie glances to me, and I glance over to the generator in the corner of the room. She walks over to secure the loose, fist-thick wall plug, whose black-and-yellow anaconda of a wire winds perilously between the gauges, spare parts, and materials littering the floor. I walk over to Betsy and give her a good kick in the side when she’s been replugged, and the garage whirs to life. Dad somehow falls even flatter onto his ass as the blowtorch spits out a searing blue saber with a satisfying tsk-hum.

He lets out a wolf-whistle. “You must know your way around a workroom, newblood.”

“Uhh,” Anne-Marie says, giving me a quick look. “I guess I musta just picked it up from my sister.”

“Hah,” Dad shoots back, “Where’d you really learn?”

“I met your boy at a shop class, I guess.”

“I thought they cut the funding for those back in ‘04.”

She shrugs. “Either way, you might want to tack-weld that hinge.”

“I’ll be damned,” Dad replies, “You’re right. A spot-weld won’t be precise enough to hold the sheathing for the LED wiring.”

Concerned, I look to Anne-Marie for an explanation. But she merely sticks her tongue out at me.

“What?” she asks, playing up the amusement in her voice. “We went over this like last week, Goggles.”

“Right,” I reply, before kicking a wrench over to Dad’s outstretched arm. “I’m not getting you another beer, though.”

Dad groans from under the tangle of metal hanging in the center of the room. “Who raised you to be such a buzzkill?”

“Someone had to be the adult in the house,” I say. “And speaking of, are you even going to make your deadline?”

“Get off my back. I’ve been on mine all day workin’ on it.”

“Bull and shit, pops. You were halfway through your M.A.S.H. marathon when I left to see mom today.”

“You know I can’t miss out on Hawk and Trapper, kid.”

“Just. Pirate. It,” I say, groaning with every word.

“My iPod still broke from the time you tried loading music onto it.”

“Because who the hell even listens to obscure indies grunge from the 90’s these days?”

Anne-Marie raises a finger to speak, only for Dad to fire back:

“Don’t you go dissing Whoicide. My buddy Richard put his heart and soul into that band.”

“Doubt you guys could hold a conversation about a time in your life in which you were somehow even more drunk than now.”

“Could too,” Dad replies, reaching out another arm.

I toss him a bolt cutter. “Please, you guys haven’t even spoken since high school.”

“Well,” Dad replies, his tone dopey as always, “Sometimes life just happens to ya, y’know. One day you’re rocking in your 20’s, and the next you have some acne’d gremlin lecturing you in your own house to look cool in front of his side piece.”

“Side piece.” Anne-Marie throws me a chilling smile.

Seeing her fists clenching, I hurriedly yelp, “It’s a joke! Or at least, his idea of one.”

“What’s a joke is being sober when you’re working from home,” Dad replies. “You’re almost as much of a fascist as Barbs, kid.”

“She’s rather nice,” Anne-Marie says, “Once you get past all the crazy, that is.”

“She’s nice alright- in the same way a bucket of piranhas makes for a good sack shave.” Dad mounts one of his old skateboards and rolls out from under his project. “But hold on a tad- you’re telling me you’ve actually met Barbs?”

Impressive, she actually got him to make eye-contact.

“More or less,” Anne-Marie replies, “It’s hard to tell how present she really is at any given moment, but I can say I was definitely around her.”

“Yep,” Dad chuckles, before rolling back under. “You’ve definitely met Barbs. And now you know that the kid doesn’t get his looks from her side of the family.”

Anne-Marie looks like a teapot set to boil until she lets out a single, sharp laugh.

“You’ve got balls to laugh at me like that,” Dad says.

For a moment, the only sound in the chamber is the snakelike hiss of the blowtorch.

“Then again,” Dad adds, with a snort, “The kid told me he don’t mind it if a girl comes with a little extra.”

I feel my nads invert with a sickening crunch, and my voice comes out as if they really just did:
“I told you that under oath.”

Anne-Marie bursts out laughing. “You Bodgan boys are something else, you know that?”

“Don’t go quoting my divorce attorney, girlie.”

She keeps going until she’s wheezing, and I can’t help but feel she’s playing it up just to make my skin crawl so hard that I’ll molt.

“Speaking of divorce attorneys,” I say, “What’s this shit Mom mentioned that’s going down on Tuesday?”

“Oh, that?”

I wait for an elaboration, only for Dad to keep wrenching away with labored breaths beneath his metallic muse.

“Yes,” I add, “That.”

“Oh,” Dad repeats. “Nothing much. Just Barbs being Barbs, y’know.”

“No. I don’t know.”

Dad wheels out from under the sculpture. His round face bears a distinctly nonplussed kind of canned contempt. “Look, kid. Are you going to tell me why you came down here already or what?”

Sometimes, impatience can be a blessing.

“I need to ask for a favor.”

“Ah, so there it is,” he replies, before taking the time to turn up the old Britney Spears song clanging away on some radio laying around the floor. “Spill the beans, kid. You know I’m not one for small talk.”

I step up and rattle off, “We’re going to need little red riding hood starting Monday for about a week. Say, until next Saturday or Sunday. I’m covering gas, she’s covering food, and Barbs has us for accommodations.”

“No can do, squirt. You know damn well I’ve gotta be up in Madison on Tuesday.”

My rage comes out as scratchy, pubescent indignation. “But you promised me that I could have the truck if I helped out this week!”

Dad shrugs. “That was before I got a call from Sal last night.”

“Last night-” I cut myself off before I start dropping f-bombs like it’s February of ‘45 over Dresden.

“Don’t go too hard on Sal,” Dad replies. “He’s the reason why we got to keep the house despite the prenup.”

I sigh in agreement. “Not like anyone else can translate Barb-arian.”

“Right. Now is there anything else? I like to weld in peace.”

I bite my lip as the world comes crashing down around me. Maybe it was stupid to get my hopes up all over some crazy idea. The adrenaline was riding high last night, to be fair. And what’s that saying about not making any life decisions past 9pm? Doesn’t matter—what does, though, is the fact that my little dream vacation is falling apart in my fingers like one-ply in a max-setting bidet stream. But as long as Anne-Marie’s in my corner, hope isn’t lost:

“So theoretically,” she says, neatly tossing him a bolt cutter, “If you had someone to take you up to Madison, we’d get the car, right?”

“No shit. You won’t catch me dead day-drinking on the Megabus.”

Anne-Marie nods to herself. “We’ll be back in a couple hours.”

“We will?” I ask.

But she’s already dragging me out of the garage by the arm, making sure to trip me up on as many wires and doodads as possible.

“Where are you taking me?”

She holds in what sounds like a pained moan.

“To my house.”