Another Bullshit Night in Suck City Read Free Page A

asked them, they both asked me so I jumped on it . We are alone in his apartment when he tells me this, years after the divorces, the jail time, the homelessness. I’ve known a lot of poor women, and they were very nice, but not marriage material . He glances at a photograph of my brother as an infant in my mother’s arms, propped beside a photo of his second wife helping their daughter to walk. I was thinking of the children we would have together—it was important what their background was, that they came from culture. He looks me in the eye. It was all for the children , my father insists.

trader jon
    Renault is the only spot open for them in the foreign car market, and they don’t sell especially well. Who the hell wants a Renault? My father is set up as president, though my grandfather maintains ownership himself. They dub this doomed enterprise European Engineering, its world headquarters in Belmont, Massachusetts, one in a row of other dealerships. My father gets to wear a suit to work each morning and drives a new car and his pretty young wife is at home with their newborn and a few people work under him and it all seems to be unfolding nicely. Except my father has no talent for selling cars. And his father-in-law, his backer, his silent partner, is a businessman, and expects a return on his investment. The new son-in-law is expected to show his worth. But soon there is a cash-flow problem. My father has hired several of his old drinking buddies to work alongside, including Ray, and none of them know the first thing about selling cars. Nothing much moves for the first few months, until my father hires an acquaintance named Duffy. Duffy, my grandfather will claim to this day, could sell sand to a beach. The cars start moving, and things look bright, until the folks that bought the cars began returning, to redeem the new radios, or the custom paint jobs, or the whitewall tires Duffy had promised them.
     
    (1960) After two years of diminishing returns, after they had sold perhaps the only Renaults they would ever sell, my grandfather cans Jonathan as president of European Engineering, cuts his losses, folds up shop. My mother, though wary of her ne’er-do-well husband, is relieved to be no longer beholden to her father. My father decides to take in used foreign cars and sell them on commission, full-time, after having done it on the side, piecemeal, for a while. He leases another garage next door and christens himself “Trader Jon.” His clients are rich, away in Europe for the summer, and these cars—BMWs and Mercedes, Fiats and MGs—sell themselves. But come fall there’s another cash-flow problem. My father takes his time notifying his clients that their cars have sold, waiting instead for them to contact him. And when they do, often the money isn’t there, already spent, and my father can’t say on what. He assumed they were so rich that they wouldn’t miss the money, not right away, but he was wrong. In another version he claims not to have kept track of the books, that he was born to be a president, not a treasurer, and it was the treasurer who set him up. But in the next breath he will claim, gleefully, that the entire “caper” made front-page news. A search through microfilm records of newspapers from that time reveals not a word.
    In January I am born. Again Ray drives my mother to the hospital, just as he did when my brother was born. That June my mother, twenty years old, packs us up and leaves my father. She will never receive any child-support from him, nor will she ever take any money from her father. Or perhaps none will be offered, at least not in a way that she will feel comfortable accepting. Perhaps she wanted to make it on her own. Perhaps she saw that money hadn’t really ever made anything right. Perhaps her father did not want to confuse money with love, not again, and so he withheld the money, confusing them even more. I lost a lot in that car business, is all my grandfather will