Flushboy. Stephen Graham Jones

in the brochures, until the months leading up to that Bantams game that began all this.

      For me, those were the last good times.

      My dad’s business then was a website—the first incarnation of The Bladder Hut, the way he tells it. What he doesn’t say is that the main difference between the two was that the website was consciously entertainment-related. Instead of the forty-nine-cent freak show we have going on now.

      Not that there wasn’t a geek even back then, though.

      There’s always a geek, I think. Some kind of blockhead for the people to gawk at. At least where my dad’s businesses are concerned.

      His website was pnow.com. The only imperative URL out there, maybe. To his credit, it was a hard domain name to forget.

      As to what he provided, it was a log of all the movies he subjected himself to daily, for full price, since the managers had locked arms, were refusing to work out any kind of deal with him.

      What he was doing was posting the down times in the movie where an audience member could safely slip out to the restroom and not miss anything important.

      The money wasn’t meant to come from ad revenue, either; that was what he put down on his small business loan as the genius of his plan. His revenue was supposed to come from the programmed stopwatches he was going to sell that would glow or vibrate thirty-two or forty-one or however many minutes into your selected feature, usually about the time two characters started leaning into each other to kiss.

      He wasn’t writing reviews, but my dad’s running critique came down to there being too much sex on the big screen. That nothing important to the story ever happened in bed.

      Which is to say he was appealing to the sensibilities of an age bracket that no longer had the hand-eye coordination to manage one of his newfangled “pee-timers.” Either that or people were still just hitting the head whenever they had to, like everybody except Tycho Brahe had been doing for thousands of years already.

      But still, if I hold my eyes just right, I can see through this premature story-of-my-success stroke job and make out my dad hunched over his legal pad at the kitchen table, writing it all down the way it should have been. And after a while, it stops being hype, turns into a confession of sorts. A plea for help, which is at least the glimmer of an acknowledgment that something’s wrong, right?

      From there, then, it’s just a nudge over to an apology, even the kind where you’re looking away, covering your mouth with your hand.

      Which is all I really want from him.

      Instead, though, he won’t even call Roy in a half-hour early.

      This time when the drive-through bell dings, I finish the cigarette I’ve retreated to before lowering my goggles, dragging myself back up front, my lungs grey with smoke.

      At which point the one nightmare I’d forgotten all about leans forward to see if I’m really in here or not.

      It’s my mom.

      Here they come,

      those feelings again.

      —Men At Work

PART TWO

      12.

      Because we’re a facility that serves the public, the rule is that we have to have a public restroom. In single-toilet cases like ours, there has to be a unisex sign, a lockable door, a sink with eventually hot water and soap, and a last-serviced sheet at eye level with room for employees to initial.

      Never mind that access to a public restroom takes money from our register.

      My dad’s solution is to arrange an obstacle course of OUT-OF-SERVICE and PISO-MOJADO signs and cones and tape all along the narrow hall, so that it’s just bad luck that whatever wily customer’s made it back this far chose now to try to use our restroom, instead of later, when it would surely have been available, or earlier, when nobody was even using it.

      Just for appearances, though, we have to let every twentieth or thirtieth customer through. “At our discretion,” of course, with eye contact all around, meaning it had better not be our friends’ names that keep showing up in the guestbook, understand?

      And if the freeloading customer’s name happens to be I.P. Freely or Ivana Tinkle or P. Rivers or Peter Pantz or any fake-o Indian name with ‘Yellow Snow’ in it, then it’s our asses.

      My mother’s name is Gwendolyn.

      It’s not what she writes in the book.

      Because she hasn’t said anything yet, I don’t know what to do.

      “It’s not really….out of order,” I tell her, about the restroom.

      She shakes her head no, not that, and looks out to the drive-through. A tumbleweed could blow across it at any time. “Has your father called?” she asks, watching me too close.

      “A bit ago, yeah.”

      “And?”

      “And nothing. Just being his stupid self.”

      This makes her laugh. It’s not a good laugh.

      Partway through it, a tear slips down her face.