I'm in the hospital visiting my friend Max, who is hooked up to hoses and sleeping, thank God. So rather than think about the pain he is suffering I'm mulling over my bathroom sink, which is covered in cigarette burns. This means there is work ahead for me, because that cigarette-burnt sink and its surrounding vanity need to be torn out, but before I ever get started on stuff like this, before I get out my overalls and tool belt and thick leather mules, my brain wants an image in my head of who to blame for this, and if there is no one to blame I'll blame someone anyway.
It can't be the home's original owner, because this sink is made from some cheap-ass amalgam that can't possibly have been around in the forties when this tiny house was built, and it's not the last owner, because he didn't look like a smoker, so it had to be the owner in between. Her name was Rose and I hear she died of cancer.
Bitch, heard of an ashtray? I grumble to her inwardly. Even I -- me -- as a chain-smoking 12-year-old, even I could fashion an ashtray out of damn near anything. Get a goddam grapefruit rind, for chrissakes.
I only stole from my father's supply of super-tar tumor sticks when the supply he kept on top of our refrigerator wasn't running low enough to where he might notice a pack missing, and you didn't want to be around my dad when he was low on cigarettes. I remember he once had me walk to the liquor store in my pajamas to replenish his carton because the half pack he had left wouldn't get him through the eleven o'clock news.
Still, though, I would rather face the creepy child-molesting masturbator who ran the cash register at the liquor store than brave my father when his cig supply was dwindling. Lord Jesus God, but that man could rampage on a nicotine withdrawal. We were still scraping the ketchup out of the cupboards from the last time. Evidently what happened is my dad shook the ketchup bottle when the cap was loose, so a drop got on his favorite Bermuda shorts -- the ones made from light denim printed with pretzels and beer cans -- and I guess my dad, in his tar-starved head, figured why stop at a drop? Then he splattered the entire kitchen with ketchup while raving about his absolute inability to understand how his daughters could be so stupid as to leave the cap loose on the ketchup bottle.
"I mean, just look what can happen!" he was hollering, but by then the three of us had run out of the house to hide in the empty motel cabin we'd figured out how to break into at the motor-court across the street. We didn't come home until after our mother returned from work, at which point we were dispatched straight to the liquor store to procure a carton of Marlboros.
When we moved out of that house six months later, there were still ketchup splatters at the back of the spice cabinet, as well as about a million cigarette burns on the kitchen counter, because my father had the same habit as Rose, the former owner of this house, which was to just lay his damn cigarette on the edge of the sink and leave it there until the end burned into the crappy composite that made up the counter. The owners of that house knew exactly who to blame for those burns, as a court summons followed us to our next address, demanding payment for replacing the counter. After that my father didn't change his habit of marking up the counters of our rented houses with cigarette burns, but he did try to cover the damage with spray paint -- that is until his last address, where he died, like Rose, a victim of his own habits.
But just because Rose is dead doesn't mean she escapes blame. I blame her, I do, just like I blame my dad -- the damn-ass cigarette burning fool. I was 13 when I kicked the habit, why the hell can't a grown man with kids who need him put down the pack long enough not to die like a lab rat in a jar? And here I am in the hospital next to my friend Max, a father himself, with an illness for which he cannot possibly be blamed, fighting for every minute he has, and I'm trying not to be angry, I really am, but when you're useless in the face of suffering, your brain wants an image in your head of who to blame for this, and if there is no one to blame you blame someone anyway. Max is so sick, with a legacy of his own that doesn't include burns, while the burns made by my father will soon be older than he was when he died, and I'm sitting here angry and powerless and empty of any useful knowledge except this one thing I keep thinking about, this one thing I know for certain, and that is this; wouldn't Max just love some of the days that my dad threw away?
Hollis Gillespie authored two top-selling memoirs and founded the Shocking Real-Life Writing Academy (www.hollisgillespie.com).
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