Metal Deep: Infinite - Damsels in Distress: Episode 1 (2 page)

The night was mine. I was off from work, and I was in the mood to do something. I had finished the modest cleaning and put everything away. Dad and I had two polar opposite schedules, so when I worked he slept and the other way around. While Dad and I didn’t hang like we used to, we still loved and cared for each other, but his fantastic version of every single event made anything but the most surface of conversations possible. I liked to do the cleaning since that’s what he did all day at his job, and he respected the fact that I was around food all night, so he handled most of the cooking. For breakfast I shoveled down the last of some lasagna that had reached a pre-fuzz state, and then started in on a monster BBQ meatloaf that made you want to fornicate it tasted so good.

Gorged on food I spent most of the afternoon sitting in defeat and listening to the rain. I was depressed for yet again not following through with my nightly vow to hop in my shite colored hatchback and take off to see the world. I took solace in the comfort of my steaming black cup of coffee. I usually stop counting the cups somewhere around the second pot. I was a machine. Caffeine had long quit working on me. It was nothing to drown myself in a couple cans of kidney destroying Sugar Bomb energy soda before bed. I think I actually slept better when I did. The chagrining question I asked and the crux of why I had to stay: How could I leave my coffee pot? I couldn’t. Besides a single photograph of my mom and dad which had been taken some years before I was born, the coffee pot was my favorite possession. I could never leave Flip. Don’t ask me why we call it that, it’s just the random name we gave the coffee pot because of the little flip water door. For all our differences my Dad and I still take an odd pleasure in naming everything.

Dad came home as I finished getting dressed. Tonight was the normal, jeans and a black button down with the sleeves rolled up. By normal I mean I had one pair of “going out jeans” and two shirts: the black button down, and a navy polo. My hair was a shaggy brown, a little more dull and plain than I would have liked, but when Bubba from Slap Out was your target audience at work, you didn’t want to scare him away with piercings, gelled spikes, and hair bleach. I thought I looked a little too ordinary. Dad said I looked “Snazzy” when I gave him a love tap on the back as I passed him while he sat at the kitchen table with the newspaper for his ritual post work reading and coffee. To this day I don’t know what , and I air quote, “Snazzy,” means; but hearing him use it so much put in my head, and I’ve been known to absently let it slip out on occasion, worse, I did so in front of a girl. Never tell a date her dress looks snazzy. Well, not if you want a second date.

Tired. I think that’s how I would best describe Dad slurping a grateful satisfied burble from his coffee mug. In a lot ways we were mostly identical save the years difference that showed via the wrinkles in the corners of his steel blue eyes, and along the deepening hallows of his cheeks. When I was a kid, friends of Dad’s would affectionately call me, “The Clone.” We’ve always favored in appearance. The older I get the more I see it. Which is fine, because even with the little extra salt and pepper in his darkening hair and beard, and despite the age lines creeping across his face, my Dad does looks pretty “Snazzy” himself. There are worse people to become.

He worked hard and stayed tired, but I could tell as he dropped all the pages of the paper except the one he was reading that he had found yet another article to spin some crazy exhaustive faux fact about. Maybe the old man should have become a writer? He’s not that old, he still could. Then maybe something constructive could come from our dysfunction.

It hurt that we did not hang out like we once had. I know boys grow to men, and fathers and sons tend to go their own ways, but we used to be best friends. He has done a lot for me, and I don’t want to be ungrateful for all that he’s sacrificed so he could raise me. But I just can’t keep listening to the stories. They’re not good for me. The problem was, somewhere deep in my soul I want to believe him even though he’s always saying they’re just jokes and dumb facts to keep the tedium of our uninteresting lives more interesting. Life is all about pain and boredom. There are no heroic lands of myth and fable. There is only our sparse, two-bedroom apartment, my crappy job, and my broke little skid-mark of a hatchback.

“I’m headed out.” I told him. I was trying to avert his attention from the article. Sometimes the “distraction tactic” worked on him just as well as it did me. “Shiny” things captured our attention as it would with small woodland animals, and we would forget all about what we had been obsessed with only seconds before.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work as Dad’s eyes stayed uncharacteristically glued to the single front page article. “Probably not a good idea,” he tried to fake a smile, but it was still aimed down at the paper while he scrutinized every word and every inch of a small blurry photo. I knew him will enough to tell the difference between a genuine smile and a fake one. That was one of the first things I learned back when I was old enough to start asking questions about Mom. Whenever he talked about her, that fake grin would crop up, and I knew only one true thing regarding her: whatever had happened, things did not end well between them, and my father lived his life trying to hide the pain he really felt.

“We should spend some quality time hanging out. We haven’t played cards in forever.” He looked up from the paper, but his face was pale, and the smile was the worst mask of deception I had seen in years. The blue eyes we genetically shared were pleading, “Come on. We’ll order pizza, grab a movie from the vending machine. The works!”

I don’t claim to be totally in control of my emotions. Okay, so my emotions swing from one extreme to the next like wrecking balls crashing through green houses, but his reaction, and I think it may have been the blatant paranoia, ignited something inside me that I could only describe as volcanic. The thing with volcanoes, they don’t blow right away. Intense pressure starts building over a period of time, and only when the pressure reaches a critical state does the volcano blow
. Vesuvius
was my middle name as I felt molten rock begin to churn in my gut, from years of built pressure that came from his over active imagination. Steam rose from my fiery innards and lofted heavily toward my reddening ears.

My response was calm and demure on the outside. On the inside I was frothing, and my froth was threatening to get out, “And why the sudden interest in my evening?” I asked, “I believe you have to be up early for work in the morning. Besides I have plans.”

“You never have plans.” Dad shot back with acute and painful accuracy. It was bad enough my social life sucked, but worse to be called out on it by my Dad.

I leaned over and gripped the chair back across the table from him. My fingers curled into the wood, my knuckles turned a lovely shade of death. Over the years, Dad has taken an unofficial rule upon him to say as little as possible about his flights of fancy. I was daring him to break the unspoken vow, “And you have something you want to tell me?”

“You won’t like it.”

“I’m already there.”

He got a little defensive, “Just because I want to hang out?”

“Because I know you really have no interest in spending time with me, you’re trying to keep me from something.”

The intensity flamed between us, and we both physically felt the sting over the truth of that last statement. We really didn’t spend quality time together anymore, and it was something both of us regretted. Each knew it, yet, we never did anything about it. That was true sadness.

There is something to be said about the “dramatic pause.” Dad and I shared one such moment across a scratched kitchen table that hadn’t seen a placemat or actual place-setting in twenty years. It gives you time to consider your next verbal movement. It also becomes something of a stare down as each combatant waits for an opening salvo in an effort to be that final man standing with the infamous “last word.” Usually the first to speak loses, not always, but it was a good rule of thumb. I waited. He budged by breaking his rule to keep the quirky stories to himself, only this time, there was no joking or pretense. He seemed serious. Deadly serious.

“There’s what I believe to be a mob-like underworld Purie conglomerate using a traveling expo at the fairgrounds as a front to forcibly enlist new slates into the dwindling Amalgam population. There is almost always unexplained tragedy to kids your age whenever they visit a new city. They choose people like you because you are at the peak physical and emotional state to handle the changes such Amalgamation would construe. These guys don’t ask to take your young. Like heartless Pied Pipers, they just take.”

Now if I wrote that particular statement on a piece of paper and posted it for the world to see, there would be nobody who could understand what that spewed jargon actually meant.

When I was young and I thought Dad’s stories were cool, I realized that if I ever wanted to tell other people what he told me, and get them to like it, I would have to simplify and explain. Dad did not spare the techno speak. So I used to stand in front of a mirror and talk to myself and imagine translating what he would say to those who would be conversationally lost. I had hoped that it might bring some friends to our lonely life. It never did. I learned quickly that nobody shared my Dad’s appreciation for fantasy. Apparently when all was said and done, neither did I.

The three words you have to understand the translations to are: Purie, Slate, and Amalgam.

Let’s look at everyone’s favorite creature of the night, the Vampire. Purie is slang for Pure Blood. So it would be a Vampire born of two full blooded Vampires through the good old fashioned “bumping-uglies.” Easy enough.

Slates are just plain old humans. They’re called Slates because there is a genome in the human DNA that makes a person an imprintable “clean slate” host, which in turn allows other genetically dominant creatures to turn that human into something that resembles their race. That’s why in stories humans are always being turned into creatures like Vampires, Werewolves, Zombies, etc; and that’s why he calls them, or should I say us… Slates. Again, that’s according to my Dad.

That brings us to the Amalgam. So Pure Bloods are almost all but gone, and so to keep the species going they do their thing to the Slate turning it into a creature that shares their racial DNA, but that person is not “pure” because there are residual human elements that coexist within the genetic amalgamation, thusly they are “Amalgams” a combination of human and non-human DNA. It should also be noted that many Amalgams can’t handle their new abilities, and so they go insane. Why do you think these creatures are always cast as bad guys in movies, TV shows, and books? Those stories are based on a real lore involving good people who simply couldn’t handle their new existences as Amalgams.

And so, what my lunatic father had just seriously conjectured, is that there were a number of people visiting my town who work for an unknown Pure Blood, and they are taking teenagers and young twenty-somethings by force and turning them into whatever species that Pure Blood happens to be. He says this is happening at the fairgrounds where there is a much-anticipated one-night-only racing demonstration. I had been thinking about going to see it, but I had decided not to drop the dollars on it. That was until the aforementioned emotional volcano bubbled to life.

My boss at work often tells me to shut-up. I talk more than any guy I know. Not that I have an array of friends who I just jabber on the phone with, but if I did, I would possess the capacity to spend a great many hours in single conversation on just about anything. However, staring at my Dad in that dank kitchen, watching sweat form into beads along his temple while palpable fear held his eyes wide, I fell somewhere between irate -at what we had become, and frightened -that he might actually be insane and in need of some real psychological intervention. I could not form words for what felt like an eternity. All I could do was allow my emotions to simmer over.

There are different levels to my angry mode. Sometimes I explode loud and obnoxiously. I get it out, and within minutes we’re all laughing. There are other instances when I walk away, hit something, and swear using such poetic profanity the wallpaper literally begins peeling itself from the wall. That’s always expensive and time consuming because after I calm, I have to replace a closet door, or mend the Swiss-cheesed sheetrock motif in which my fist redecorated my bedroom. This, however, was something else.

All the years of frustration, pain, and embarrassment boiled over into what felt like a tangible liquid that oozed from a deep growling voice that seethed from me, though I still am not quite sure it was mine. A demon’s, maybe? But certainly I was not capable of making such smooth guttural words of hatred, especially toward Dad, whom I really did love. “You paranoid and insane mother…” I was able to stop myself before continuing, “I don’t know what your problem is, but I’ve had it. My entire life has suffered because of your delusions. I used to think your stories were some latent creative desire to entertain that never quite made it to fruition, or maybe even a coping mechanism to help you deal with what happened to Mom. Whatever, however, you have officially gone too far. I’m not dealing with this anymore. I’m moving out as soon as possible. I will be better off without you and your delusions. I finally understand why Mom left. I won’t stay here to become like you… a poor, crazy, nobody who couldn’t keep his wife, and who has now lost his son. I’m going to create a new, successful, and
grounded
life. I won’t be the failure you’ve become. Never.”