Zero Ave 1998: Chapter Forty One- Brothers
(This chapter is part of a series. Click here to read chapter forty.)
A mother with 2 small children walks past the hood of Steve’s burgundy Honda, parked half a block away from Jada’s apartment where he has been waiting for Richie to leave. He watches while the children skip across the grass, gleefully playing with one another on their way to school. He remembers a distant era when he and Zeus would do the same; a time before he was lost in the dreary fog of criminality. A bizarre sorrow fills his mind when he realizes the memories of broken bodies and moral corruption are more vivid than anything before it; recollections that seem to have occurred a lifetime ago.
Then suddenly Steve spots Richie’s Tercel sluggishly rolling out of the parking lot. He waits until the car turns onto the main road before stepping out of his Honda and speedily walking to Jada’s front door.
He takes a deep breath and stares at the envelope full of cash, the words ‘For Jada’ scribbled on the front. It’s a hefty sum of money to be giving away, but he can think of nobody else more deserving.
The envelope glides when he pushes it under the door and he’s overcome by a sense of relief as he turns to leave. The nefarious anchor that had been sinking him deeper beneath the surface of human squalor has been passed along to somebody whose own buoyancy is impervious to its weight.
The heat has turned up a few degrees and Kevin squints into the sunlight reflecting off the school windows when he steps toward the doors to the foyer. It’s the last week of classes before summer break and excitement hangs in the air like static electricity. In the past Karina was one of his two main reasons for being at school, but the uncomfortable morning after their sexual rendezvous has made him uneasy about seeing her again- despite his determination to eventually charm his way into an exclusive relationship with her. Their first fully clothed encounter since Saturday morning will undoubtedly be an awkward one.
“Yo!” Richie shouts, jogging to catch up with Kevin. “Wait up!”
“Hey,” Kevin says when Richie approaches. “Didn’t think I’d see you today.”
“I had to get out of the house,” Richie explains. “I was going crazy just sitting in my room.”
Kevin pulls the door open and the boys walk into the crowded foyer. Various students observe quietly while they walk into the hallway toward their lockers.
“You doing alright though?” Kevin asks.
“I’ll be ok,” Richie answers. “It’s just gonna take some time before-”
Suddenly as Richie’s locker comes into view he spots a piece of paper taped to the top of the door that reads, ‘Your mom is a whore’ in letters cutout from magazines as if it were a ransom note for a kidnapped child.
“What the fuck is this?” Richie mutters when he sees the note.
As he gets closer he notices photos taped beneath the letter; his mother in various stages of sex and confusion, her nude body brightly exposed by the flash of the camera. In the most prominent photo Chad stands behind her bent over body, sadistically smiling for the soul crushing capture.
“Oh my fucking god,” Richie whispers, pulling the photos from his locker while his mind scrambles to unsee the images.
Kevin frantically helps Richie rip the snapshots from his locker door while trying to offer words of compassion to his shattered friend.
“We’re gonna get these guys, bro,” he promises. “Just don’t do anything crazy.”
Richie turns and the crowd of students has come to a standstill, watching his entire world come crashing down around him. This black sheep that lived firmly at the bottom of the social totem pole has somehow managed to be ground to a fine dust, left to mingle with the bacterial lifeforms that inhabit the bottom crust of existence.
Whatever rage could be induced by such an act of absolute cruelty is overrun by shame as Richie examines the expressions of ridicule staring back at him. He wants to yell in their faces, to scream his life story at them so maybe they could understand the years of utter despair he’s lived through. He wants to take his pain and heave it onto them so they could empathize for him, even just for a millisecond.
But the tears welling up in his eyes won’t allow him to do any of that. Instead, he sprints down the hallway to the doors in the foyer, his embarrassment unwilling to let him face his peers.
Richie slams through the doors and crosses paths with Derek who is just arriving at school with Michelle.
“Hey,” Derek says to Richie, who ignores his greeting and continues his sprint across the parking lot.
“Richie!” Kevin shouts as he sprints through the doors after his friend. “Come back!”
Derek intercepts Kevin before he can chase Richie down.
“What’s going on?”
“Fucking Chad,” Kevin begins, his voice screeching with tension. “He fucked Richie’s mom. They took pictures and taped them to his locker.”
Derek releases Michelle’s hand and storms into the school like a murderous robot, his face blank as if he had been programmed specifically for violence and nothing else. Kevin trails closely behind, eager to witness the scene that’s about to unfold while Michelle follows, unsure of how to intervene. The students immediately recognize the steam engine rumbling through the hallway and clear a path directly to Chad’s locker.
“What’s up?” Chad says with a smirk on his face when Derek rounds the corner. He’s surrounded by Matt and other members of the wrestling team prepared for a tussle with their leader.
Derek’s fist collides with Chad’s face like a sledgehammer into Jell-O. Immediately his brain concusses and his body stiffens, tipping over onto the ground and frozen in position. His head bounces off the concrete floor and his open eyes flicker, staring into the depths of oblivion.
Derek leaps onto Chad’s chest and continues his assault, his fists slamming into the flesh of his face. With every thunderous punch he can feel the bones breaking beneath the thin layer of muscle as the impact ripples through Chad’s skin. Blood splatters from his mouth onto Derek’s t-shirt and paints his face with red speckles. Derek’s mind is a blank space, his consciousness switched off and turned over to a primal savagery; the sort of brutality one would witness between warring colonies of chimpanzees. Matt and members of the wrestling team struggle to lift Derek from his unconscious victim but he’s an unmovable boulder of barbarity, a hurricane that cannot be stopped until it’s eye has run its course.
With one final blow Chad’s orbital bone snaps under the force of Derek’s knuckles and he stands to his feet, the surrounding crowd terrified at the sight of the convulsing body beneath him. He turns and faces the hallway, his mind still empty.
Coach Fassbender runs to the scene and desperately pushes his way through the crowd to find one of his beloved athletes seizing while the other marches like a death machine toward the exit.
“Derek! Stop!” Fassbender shouts, wrapping his hand around Derek’s bicep.
Derek pushes him into the lockers effortlessly, a furious gorilla roaring behind his eyes.
“Don’t fucking touch me,” he warns the coach.
As he turns from the chaos to leave, Derek spots Michelle watching with her hands over her mouth in a petrified state. For a moment the nuclear fallout burning inside of him quells and he realizes what he’s done. He looks down at his blood covered shirt and hands, his own body feeling like a foreign vessel for the raging fire driving him.
“I’m sorry,” he says to his tearful girlfriend before stomping out of the school.
Kevin sprints after his friend, suspended in shock as well. He always knew there was a violent demon inside of Derek, but he never imagined the level of savagery that lived just below his skin waiting to get out.
The sounds of birds singing in the morning sun fills Jada’s apartment. As she slowly walks from her bedroom to the kitchen she spots a thick brown envelope in the doorway and changes course to inspect the mysterious package.
‘For Jada,’ it says on the front, scribbled in barely legible handwriting. She tears open the top and peers inside, examining the two $5000 stacks before turning the envelope over and dropping the cash into her open hand.
Strangely, the gift angers her. There’s no doubt who it came from and she doesn’t want to owe Steve anything. Her entire life she has felt indebted in some way, be it to her clients or Richie or James, and what she has given up in exchange for her survival far surpasses any dollar value. She has paid her dues in spades and will no longer allow any man to dangle a carrot over her while she sacrifices what little respectability she has left. She’s been beaten, raped and utterly destroyed over and over again, and now finally she has had enough. She refuses to be a sponge for another person’s insecurities and bodily fluids. She cannot be purchased anymore.
Jada marches to her bedroom and begins changing into a tank top and shorts when suddenly the front door slams. She can hear the faint sobs of her son standing in the living room, an uneasy stillness accompanying his whimpers.
“Richie? Honey?” Jada calls out as she pulls her tank top down and walks into the living room. Perhaps it’s another flare up of emotion for his recently deceased friend, she think to herself.
Richie wipes the tears from his eyes when his mother enters the room, a confusing cocktail of anger, sadness and embarrassment broiling inside of him.
“Fuck you,” he growls at her quietly.
“Excuse me?” she rebuts, confused by his vitriol.
“You know those two dudes you fucked?!” Richie yells at her. “They go to my school! They took pictures of you and put them on my locker!”
Jada stands silent, unable to speak as tears fill her eyes. It’s now occurred to her that crawling naked in a hotel hallway was but merely a pit stop on the way to rock bottom, and this is the cataclysmic final collapse to the floor of the abyss. Anguish has gripped her so tightly she has forgotten about the $10,000 in her hands as she holds them over her mouth.
Richie notices the cash but doesn’t address it, instead letting it serve as a silent reminder to both him and his mother about who she really is and where her priorities lie.
“Why can’t you just be a normal fucking person?!” he shrieks as tears roll down his cheeks. “Why do you have to be like this?! Why do you have to be a fucking whore?!”
“Honey,” Jada says through the hardening lump in her throat. “Please-”
Richie interrupts, “My life is fucking over thanks to you.”
Jada is paralyzed, her mind scrambling to explain her betrayal while Richie steams past her into his bedroom.
He slams the door and leaps onto his bed, burying his face in the pillow to muffle his hysterical cries. He doesn’t even know what he’s crying about anymore. Is it Vanessa’s death? His mom’s promiscuity? Or is it just the state of his existence in general? Richie’s entire lifetime has been one marred by pain and maybe these 2 consecutive events were the catalysts to the unearthing of 16 years worth of despair. His muted wails erupt from deep in the bottom of his belly, as if reaching down into the darkest regions of his being and cleansing him of the old rotting misery that had collected and compounded since he was a child. All of his insecurity, his shame, his self-hatred; everything colliding together and being released at once like a grand bulimic purge. He will never be the same person after this moment, nor will he recognize this scared little boy when he reflects on it.
Derek’s Honda Accord screeches into his driveway and rumbles when it comes to a panicked stop.
“Wait here,” he says to Kevin, who has stayed mostly silent since the vicious beating at school.
Derek quickly darts inside and up the stairs to his bedroom. He can hear his mom’s slurred voice downstairs as she calls his name in a pharmaceutical haze. There’s no doubt the school has contacted his parents and he has a very small window of time before his father arrives. He has to get his things together now- enough to last him at least a week before his dad cools off and he can return home to a mild beating, one far less intense than the one he’ll receive when the news is fresh.
Derek yanks a gym bag from under his bed and begins emptying his drawers into it while loose t-shirts, socks and underwear fall onto the carpet. His bedroom is absurdly clean; the type of tidiness provided by a lonely housewife who spends her mornings obsessively scrubbing after her first round of pills. There’s no time to pick up the scattered clothing from the floor. He has to collect his personal effects from the bathroom and make it out of the house as quickly as possible.
A white Mercedes screams up the driveway and Kevin watches helplessly as Derek’s father, Bill, parks next to the Accord and furiously stomps into the house. Anxiety twists in the pit of Kevin’s stomach when he disappears behind the door, knowing what Derek will be facing in a matter of seconds.
Boom.
“Fuck,” Derek curses himself at the sound of the front door slamming. He tosses his toothbrush into his bag and zips it shut, debating in his mind whether he should jump out of the second story bathroom window and risk a broken ankle or walk downstairs and deal with his father.
“Derek! Where the fuck are you?!” Bill screams. He’s a stocky man with a barrel chest and a head of thinning black and grey hair. His face is hard with pronounced creases from decades of constant anger as if petulance had replaced the blood in his veins.
Derek takes a deep breath and swings the bag over his shoulders while beginning the long walk downstairs. His footsteps catch Bill’s ear and he storms back into the entranceway where he finds his son cautiously descending into his crosshairs.
“Dad. You don’t understand,” Derek pleads in an attempt to pacify his father.
“You had one week left,” Bill snarls, eying his son’s blood splattered t-shirt. “You had one week but like always, somehow you managed to fuck it up. Do you know the fucking cops are looking for you?”
Derek reaches the bottom step and extends his hands as he speaks- an instinct he developed after years of absorbing blows from his angry father.
“Dad, let me expl-”
The blinding flash travels through Derek’s skull and zaps his brain before he can finish his sentence. The sudden collision of Bill’s fist on the bridge of his nose causes his knees to collapse and his body crumbles onto the stairs behind him. His eyes rattle and struggle to focus as his consciousness restarts, frantically pulling the timeline of events together in order to determine the catalyst for the hard reboot.
“Get up,” Bill says, his voice like a bubbling volcano.
Derek staggers to his feet, blood flowing from his nose and collecting with the dry stains on his t-shirt. Once again, the blackness envelops him and a sleeping giant awakens.
His hand wraps around Bill’s throat and presses him against the wall before he can react, his father’s body jerking like a rock thrown violently by a rushing river. Bill fearfully stares into the hollow eyes of his son, startled by the force he’s suddenly powerless against.
“That was the last time,” Derek growls, blood spattering onto his father’s face with every word. Adrenaline surges through his limbs, tempting him to smash them through Bill’s skull.
Derek resists the urge and instead walks through the door onto the front lawn. Bill follows cautiously, afraid Derek may turn around and finish the retribution he so rightfully deserves.
“Don’t even think about taking that car!” Bill yells out as a final attempt to maintain authority over his son. “That car belongs to me!”
“Get out,” Derek says to Kevin, who is anxiously standing half out of the car with the door open. “We’re walking.”
Kevin jogs across the grass to catch up with his quietly furious friend and Derek tosses his keys into the shrubbery. The last remaining threads connecting him to his father have been severed and he will never return to this house of horrors. After years of abuse he has been liberated; delivered through an ocean of blood and granted reprieve from a brutal dictator. Although he has permanently altered his life in more ways than he can count, and his future is uncertain, his freedom from the dark cloud of fear that followed him his entire life is more than worth the sacrifice.
