this story is written in memory of mike:   where ever you are or what ever happened in the end, i still think of you daily and i pray you are alright.  i love you.
TOUGH LOVE
"...me and a gun and a man on my back..."
Tori Amos
       The teenager smelled the stench even before he exited the filthy stairwell. He and his father lived in a small two-room apartment on the eighth floor in the "bad" part of the city. The teenager hated all of this: this apartment, this smell, even this life. He hated all of these things with a passion unfathomable to even God, if there was a God. The boy was beginning to doubt even this. He opened the unlocked, slightly ajar door. He smelled the alcohol before the door was even a quarter of the way open. His first step inside the musty apartment brought a clink as his right foot made contact with Jack Daniel's. This only confirmed his suspicion: his father was sloppy drunk...again.
       "Damnit, son! Where you been?" the father slurred.
       "I-I-'ve been at work," stammered the boy. He knew what was next.
       "You get off at ten o'clock this morning. It';s 3:25," the father slurred accusingly and pointing a quivering finger that betrayed its strength at a broken clock that had stopped what seemed like an eternity ago.
       "The clock is wrong," whispered the youth in a barely audible voice. He knew his father knew this. It was just an excuse. Every morning he got off work, they went through this ritual. This scene bore a well-worn script.
       "Don"t sass me, boy!" With that the drunken father arose to his full 6'3" height from his worn and beat up old recliner, the only real furniture in their trash littered apartment. Actually the greasy haired father thought it was his apartment even though his son paid the rent, utilities, and food bills, when he could afford it. It didn't matter how much of an effort the boy put in to maintain their small ramshackle pit. The father would always believe it was his. He believed everything was his.
       The father stumbled to the corner of the room where a bat stood like a shrine to all things dark and perverted. The Louisville slugger was autographed by some baseball great. The boy didn't care for baseball now.
       With the slugger in hand he took to the boy like a mother bird to a toddler who had picked up one of her babies and carried it away, except this vulture had no maternal instinct. The boy thanked all that was holy and sacred to him that his father was so drunk he couldn't swing the bat as fiercely as when he was sober. Sadly, the boy had plenty of research to prove this point. Still it wasn't the beating that hurt so much, it was the yelling.
       "You no good son of... I'll teach you to...You're a whore just like your  mother." The father attempted to undo the button on his pants with one hand, just another page in the script. "If it wasn't for you...You're mother wouldn't be DEAD!"
       The Son couldn't take it anymore. He gathered all his strength and shoved his father against the wall. He looked into his father's watery bronze eyes. The only thing separating them was a piece of Louisville wood the sweaty, fat man still clutched. "You bastard! You killed her," he whispered with such hate and animosity in his voice Lucifer would have been jealous. And as tears silently rolled down his gaunt cheeks he gave his father one final shove and ran to the bedroom they shared. He slammed the door with such a velocity that the junkies in 2C became unbelievably paranoid.
        The father was still against the wall, more out of shock than pain. In hopes to get in the last word, he yelled, "Be a man and fight, you queer," at the door.
         The boy ran to the far wall in the bedroom. The room's furnishings consisted of a mattress on the bare floor, for his father. The boy's bed was composed of a quilt his mother made for him and a grocery bag full of rags he used as a pillow. Besides scattered newspapers, bottles, and filthy clothes, the cracked linoleum was bare. The boy stared out the window at the view of the crimson bricks of the next building that always seemed to look like dried blood at this time of day. He then crossed to his pillow/bag of rags and emptied it with an eerie calmness. A shiny nickel-plated pistol clunked to the floor. It had been his grandfather's retirement present from the Army. After his death the boy saved it from all the other priceless relics his father pawned for drug money. The very idea that his beloved Poppa's memory was reduced to the contents of a miniscule plastic bag maddened the boy. The boy always felt safer with the weapon, even though he had never used it, and his grandfather's memory underneath his head while he slipped into uneasy slumber.
        But now as he caressed the cold trigger he wondered what it would be like to see his grandfather again, to see his mother again. He hadn't been hugged in so long. He struggled to remember the sensation of when his mother would squeeze him tight and tell him she would always be there no matter what. She wasn't here now as he rocked back in forth wrapped in his mother's quilt, mechanically fingering the trigger.
         The son all of a sudden vaulted up in a moment of sanity, and ran in to the adjoining rusty bathroom. He turned on the cold water, the only one that worked, and splashed freezing, dirty water on to his face. He looked into the medicine cabinet's tarnished mirror. He looked at his reflection. His brown skin made some of the scars he had received look like tiny tributaries from his soul, but his blue eyes were cold with hate. He looked down with the shame of what he had become. He caught sight of his willowy frame under his stained clothes. His taunt muscles and lean build had always made money easy to obtain when he was desperate. The son snapped his head back to the looking glass and stared into the strangeness of his own steely eyes. He was a long way from where he wanted to be and too close to pain.
          The medicine cabinet itself diverted his attention, however. His father had always forbidden him to look inside. Out of fear, he obeyed, but now he didn't care. What was there left to fear? That his father would kill his only son. That didn't scare him one bit. He knew the incident would happen in a matter of time. Besides he had always figured that that was where he kept his stash of needles, cookers, and powders. He never really wanted to look inside before, but now he did. Now he was curious why these powders were more important than money, self-respect, and his father's only son. He opened the chipped, white medicine cabinet.
Knock, knock.
KNOCK, KNOCK!
"SON!"
        The father had sobered up a bit, and now he felt it was time for his customary apology. He felt that if he apologized to the boy and said it would never happened again, God would pardon him. It didn't matter though. The father never lived up to his part of the bargain. His son's bruises, cuts, and bones would heal and he wouldn't go to Hell. He casually let himself through the dilapidated door with all the guilt he could manage on his face. He would say he was sorry and then hurry off to the liquor store to get himself a pint of vodka. He might get a little something on the corner, if he was lucky.
         Instead of seeing the usual tearful son he saw a shiny pistol that had belonged to his wife's father. Funny, he thought he had sold it. The man had never liked the idea of having guns in the house. He picked it up. The trigger was slightly warm. He then noticed the alien peacefulness in the apartment. He walked silently to the bathroom where he saw his son on the gritty floor. There was pink foam coming out of his mouth, with his worn leather belt around his upper arm, and a hypodermic needle sticking out of the inside of his elbow. The plunger was empty. His son wasn't breathing. The man mechanically cocked the gun and put its cold barrel into his mouth. As tears silently streamed down the man's face he prayed to a God he hadn't spoken too since the night  he had beaten his wife to death. He prayed for his son. He smoothly pulled the trigger.
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