Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn

prisoner like the rest, the tellers and the customers face-down on the floor, hands behind their heads. Lines tracing the possible connections between the players, possible paths of possible bullets, Patty’s face the center of the world. Christmas is the season of tips, of real tips, of stuffed envelopes. An occasional twenty. I keep track, know how much I take in. “The Take,” I call it.
     
    My mother arrives one day to the bank she has worked at for the past ten years to find a photograph of my father on an FBI wanted poster. It warns her and all bank tellers to call the police immediately if you see him, or have seen him, or have any information as to his whereabouts. My mother brings this poster home to show my brother what kind of man our father is, but she doesn’t show it to me. I’ve become a fuckup, high every day. It says he’s stolen thousands of dollars. She hasn’t seen a penny.
    Later we’ll see a shoot-out, a house in Watts where Patty may or may not be. The police bomb it anyway and it burns to the ground on national tv and only the next day do they search the rubble and say she wasn’t there. They find teeth and none of the teeth are hers. Months of silence follow, then it ends quietly. Patty has been hiding out with her two remaining comrades, who, seemingly out of character, jog every morning. Running dogs. The FBI stops them at the end of their workout, when they are the most winded, unable to run any farther. When they batter in the door Patty is in the kitchen, watching television. Walter Cronkite. He hasn’t uttered her name in weeks but he will tonight.

red sox
    (1975) A helicopter lifts out of the embassy, people cling to the landing struts, we see some fall. This is how the undeclared war ends. Travis moves out as we watch the helicopters on the evening news. Shortly thereafter my mother, brother and I begin a summer of watching baseball on television. That we hadn’t given a damn about the Red Sox until then, not really, doesn’t matter. We need to toughen up.
    All in all it’s good Travis is leaving. After building the master bedroom his second act had been the cultivation of marijuana in our very public backyard. The marijuana plants towered ridiculous and gangly above the lesser tomatoes in our tiny garden, and I was sure the neighbors would turn us in. One afternoon I pulled up all the plants, shaved off their roots with an x-acto knife, stuck them back into the ground. Years later my brother admitted to having poured poison on each one, perhaps on the same afternoon, a hundredth-monkey kind of afternoon. Either way, they withered and were gone. Within a year, though, I was rummaging through Travis’s roach stash, cleaning his pipe with a straightened paper clip, searching out anything to smoke. By the time Saigon falls I’m drinking whatever liquor I can get my hands on, believing, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, that it will get me laid. I cling to this sodden belief as my mother’s marriage to Travis collapses in on itself, grinding to its necessary halt.
    That summer she cuts off all her hair, becomes a vegetarian, and drops way too much weight, to hover in the ghostly realm, the realm of vapor and shade. Hollow-eyed, spooked. My brother sits down to dinner with her, shovels in the offered vegetables and grains, but I’m annoyed I have to buy my own meat. By now she’s taking pills for her migraines, pills to wake up. Thirty-five and her second marriage has ended as badly as the first. To me Travis had been a reckless older buddy, scary-fun. As a husband he’d been a nightmare. After two years in Vietnam he’d barely fit into our mickey mouse cottage, our badly converted summer shack. They were together from the time I was eleven until I was fifteen, and each year he lived with us our house felt smaller and smaller, in spite of the additions. They slept together for the first couple years in the room he’d built, then he began sleeping on a cot set up in