New Fathers

New Fathers

By

Xavier Kind

Smashwords Edition

*****

Published By:

Xavier Kind on Smashwords

New Fathers

Copyright © 2013 Xavier Kind

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the

hard work of this author.

*****

New Fathers

BOOK I: Asleep

1.

In late September 1989, Jacob Donal disappeared. His blue Ford Bronco was found in a campsite in Manning Park. The four doors of the Ford Bronco left wide open. A mixed tape on repeat. The music crackling, because the volume had been turned up to full and the shitty Bronco speakers had blown out. It was a disappearance as strange as the music on Jacob Donal's mixed tape (Rick Astley and George Michael and other girly shit like that).

By all appearances, it looked like Jacob Donal just got tired of living in the city... tired of living... and walked into the woods never to be seen again. No sign of foul play. The only prints in or around the car, his. The only footprints leading into the woods, his.

Jacob Donal was 25 years old. The assistant manager of the meat department at a Safeway in North Vancouver. He had a girlfriend named Sally. He played beer-league baseball and loved hockey. Generic. Normal. All's well that... His friends said he was the happiest motherfucker in the world. Loved telling jokes about Americans and drinking shitty beer. Got a little obnoxious when he had one too many shitty beers in him.

If Jacob was wearing a mask, he was the only one that knew it.

When he disappeared, his story appeared on BCTV for almost three weeks. His parents were filmed on a couch weeping. At the campsite weeping. In front of the refrigerators in the Safeway weeping. Always pleading for Jacob to return. To call them. To send them a sign. For God to send them a sign he was alright. They said they'd search night and day till they found him. They offered a ten-thousand dollar reward for information about his whereabouts. For any information. Posters went up all over the Lower Mainland. Flyers were left at rest stops along the Crowsnest Highway. In Manning Park.

Jacob Donal was never found. Just a young man who wanted to disappear. And disappear he did.

So why am I telling you about Jacob Donal?

Why should you care about this guy?

Because Jacob Donal's disappearance was strange. Not only for the fact that a seemingly normal dude just walked off the face of the Earth, but because I now know it was the first of a string of disappearances in British Columbia by men between the ages of twenty five and thirty five that has been kept very hush hush by the media and the police for more than a decade now. I know this, because I was one of these missing men. Because I met Jacob Donal nine years after he was declared dead. I met him and laughed at a joke he told me about an American hooker and a man from Winnipeg.

And then I became his friend for a short time.

But look, Jacob would say and toss the shotgun on the ground. I'm jumping the gun here. And then he'd jump the gun and laugh his ass off. And Jacob would be right. I am jumping the gun a bit.

So let's go back to oblivion.

Yes, oblivion.

Sometime in the mid nineties a big corporate coffee company moved into town. My town. Our town. Abbotsford, British Columbia. A little hell hole of religious excess an hour, give or take ten minutes, east of Vancouver. This coffeeshop had a deep-rooted belief that they could be my Third Place. They were in Abbotsford for God's Sake. Belief was an easy thing to sell. And they wanted me to believe that my time away from home (my first place) and my time away from work (my second place) could be spent with them, sipping their coffees, sitting at their tables, listening to their baristas shouting words we all know, but words many of us who aren't coffee baristas have trouble speaking.

Our coffeeshop was not the spawn of a big corporation, but it was our Third Place. And as our teeth stained brown and our hearts began to pump coffee over blood, our little coffeeshop also became our Second and our First Place. My parents may as well have been the owner and the employees of The Meanest Bean. Karl and his people fed me. They put a roof over my head. They instilled rules that guided me through my everyday life. My happiness derived from them... from the tasty, brown liquid in the mug that was always in front of me. When I pushed open the door of The Meanest Bean and I heard that bell ring above me, I knew I was home.

We did not work. We watched life pass by as we sat in the worn plastic chairs that littered the patio outside The Meanest Bean. Sometimes we sat for hours. Sometimes for whole days. We said things like, We'd like to get involved but somehow it was easier just to sit at the fringe of life and observe it. And critique it. There were three of us there, slowly committing suicide. Our guts rotting away from our excessive ingestion of caffeine, cigarette smoke and blueberry scones.

Me thinks me needs another mug of java so I may quench my thirst. I shall return.

Another mug of coffee and another half hour to talk about our greatest achievements in life, all of which happened during our five years in high school. Five years ago. Another half hour to talk about our future plans. Those ones we never got any closer to starting. And another half hour to talk about all the girls (from our past, in our present, and in the future) we'd like to fuck.

I looked behind their bloodshot eyeballs and I saw emptiness similar to the emptiness in the coffee mugs in front of us. It was emptiness stained with the dirty colours of regret, remorse and lack of effort. As I sat there watching them, on a day no different than any day in the past six months, I suddenly realized my greatest fear. I had become what I said I never would. I had become one of them.

Another cup, eh? What says you dig through that thick, greedy-assed skin of yours and find it in your heart to bring me back another cup as well?

Hey man, UI isn't paying me to support your addictions. It's paying me to support my own. And to get a wicked tan at that. So why don't you get off of your lazy ass, pull out that twenty your mom gives you every day and buy your own damn coffee."

Every day the stories changed. Every day the memory of the moment was different from the memory of the moment from the day before: the name of the girl, the year it happened, the amount of time it took. It was funny that the three pathetic boy-men huddled around a stinking ashtray, sipping on cold coffee, were the three things that never changed.

The two of them stood up. One of them opened the coffeeshop door, but I don't know which one, because I wasn't looking. I was trying too hard not to gag. The stagnant ocean of cologne on their clothes and in the pores of their skin mixed with the smell of roasting coffee beans inside The Meanest Bean had thrown my stomach into a series of loop de loops.

Only when the door was closed and I was left with the smell of smoked cigarettes and the cow manure that hung in the Abbotsford air twenty-four seven, did I look at them. Through The Meanest Bean stencil on the window, my view framed by the top circle of the B in Bean, I watched them flirt with Amy. The poor girl had only worked four or five shifts at The Meanest Bean. I wondered if she knew their intentions. I wondered what she would say if she knew they went home most nights after The Meanest Bean closed and they spanked it to porn on the Internet. What would she say?

I ran my index finger around a coffee halo stained onto the table. I circled it eighty times and they were still in there chatting up Amy.

White chairs and white tables. I wondered how someone running a coffeeshop could think white was a good idea for us dirty, outside people. Outside and inside. There were two types of people who inhabited the Earth.

Inside People and Outside People.

Inside People drove BMWs and new Honda Accords. They played racquetball and smoked cigars on special occasions. They had three kids or talked about having three kids. And they all knew somebody who knew somebody who had the right connections to land them that cushy job that gave them the gall to sanction off part of their paycheck for a daily five-dollar decaffeinated, skinny, hazelnut café latte.

Outside People -- my adopted people -- drove pick-up trucks and rebuilt Volkswagons. They drank coffee, and coffee only, and one of their big goals in life was to weasel free refills from whatever coffeeshop they happened to be at. Whenever possible. They smoked more than a dry forest struck by lightening in the middle of a summer heat wave, and they rambled on and on about schemes they were concocting to make themselves rich. And no outside person would ever tell another that these crazy schemes were impossible to do if all they ever did was talk about them. Outside people drifted from one laborious, minimum-wage job to the next, or if they were lucky, they succeeded somehow in getting Unemployment Insurance. The definition of romance for an outside person was pizza, a Jackie Chan movie and a blowjob.

So there I sat, at a coffeeshop, buying coffee with money my mother had lent me, stereotyping people I didn't know into categories I had made up. You have such a creative mind, my mother would say. Put it to use. Write a book or something. I guess what it really came down to was those who embraced the warmth inside were doers, while those of us who huddled around our warm mugs and lighters on the outside were dreamers. What made me such a judge of the people carrying on their happy lives around me? What made me so goddamned bitter?

Everybody has a back story. I was never really a fan of the back story. All those mundane events and facts from a character's past laid out so you can more readily accept their actions and reactions. Nope. Not for me. The fact that the gunman came from a broken family and was shunned by the only woman he ever loved didn't interest me one bit. All I cared about was how much blood splattered against the wall when he filled his targets full of bullets. But I will share my back story with you so you can understand in some small way why I ended up at that coffeeshop cursing my life and why I allegedly did what I did in the weeks following. I will share my back story so you can judge me.

It is only fair.

My life had become routine at that point. But what lead me to routine was a past filled with deception, rejection, irresponsibility and frivolous sex.

I was famous once for falling off of a British Columbia ferry. I was Canada's baby Jessica. The well I happened to fall into was the Juan de Fuca Strait. I didn't know this until my grade-one teacher Miss Moxley said to me on my very first day of elementary school, Aren't you that little boy that was thrown off the ferry? So 'fell' and 'thrown' are totally different words, but the fact remains, one minute I was on the upper deck of the Queen of Saanich, gurgling away like babies do, and the next minute I was bobbing up and down in the Pacific Ocean. I don't remember the coldness of the water. I don't remember the passengers crowding the two passenger decks after they heard my mother screaming. I don't remember anything from that day or from the months that followed. My childhood and teen-years memories of the 'incident' and the fallout were formed from quarter stories and half truths told by uncomfortable parents.

Most of the story, however, was there to be found if I looked for it hard enough. And I wasn't looking in the direction of my mother and father. When I went to college to be a journalist, I used my newly acquired skills to investigate the ferry 'incident.' And what I found on microfiche deep in the bowels of the Vancouver Public Library was what I had expected. An unsettling mess. My mother was charged with attempted murder. They said she threw me over. Threw. Me. Over. She even spent a week in jail. The charges were only dropped when a lawyer named Amos Strain (for real) proved that she had slipped on some ice and lost her grip on me.

An accident. That's all it was.

I tried bringing up the 'accident' with her. I tried to get some sort of explanation from her mouth, but I would get nothing. It was a time of great darkness, she would say. To relive it would be too devastating. So I let it go.

I graduated from college... from three years of intense study, devotion and college sex, and I returned home with a little piece of paper that said I was a Journalist. And I did it all while my father's health deteriorated. When I left for school, he was a tower of a man, strong in physique and in opinion. When I returned home he barely spoke a word. He was fifty pounds lighter and he was on a diet of pills and liquids for ailments I was too afraid to ask him about. I was all set to find the job of my dreams and move myself to wherever that dream was taking place. Start small, they always told me. Start small and finish big. I wanted to replace Stone Phillips. I wanted to report on wars abroad and end my pieces with, Ryan Paul, NBC News or what have you. But the rejections came quick. And there were plenty of them. Hell, I was even given the big Fuck You by a newspaper in the Yukon. After three months of job hunting and thirty-three rejection letters spanning all the Canadian provinces and seven U.S. states, I gave up. I turned to cleaning my parents house every other day. I vacuumed. I disinfected the toilets my thirteen-year-old brother still insisted on pissing all over. I washed floors and I washed cars and I mowed lawns for that feeling of contribution... so I wouldn't fall into a deep depression I knew was sitting peacefully on my shoulder waiting for that split second I started to believe my life was worthless.

While I was at college my brother learned to be sarcastic and cynical. He gained an ability to degrade me worse than I could ever degrade myself. I drank so much coffee that I got headaches when I went without it for even a couple of hours. I hadn't had sex in more than a year. And I was suffering, without really knowing it, from the culture shock of being back among certain people I once thought I had seen the last of.

The door to The Meanest Bean swung open.

Man, would I like to bend her over a table and fuck her five ways from Friday, Fraser Janzen said and reclaimed his seat across the table from me.

What the fuck does that even mean? I asked.

Don't really know. Some dude in a porno I once saw said it. Thought it had a bit of a nice ring to it. Five ways from Friday. Hey college boy, isn't that alliteration?

Fraser and I became friends while sleeping through grade ten. To be more accurate, I befriended a group of slackers that revolved around Fraser. We weren't the popular group and we weren't the group of misfits in the chess club or banging their heads to Pantera in the smoke pit. We were somewhere in the middle of all these groups. Inbetweeners. There were eight guys and four girls in the group and our mission in life was to be as cruel as we possibly could be to our bodies and to have the best possible time while doing it. On weekends. On school nights. It didn't matter. We filled our bodies full of beer and vodka and tequila and whatever else we could get our hands on. If one of us got lucky and scored some weed or some acid, our night got that much better. We called this period The Time of Experimentation. At that age consequences were nothing more than urban legends. Living in such a small city, cocaine and heroine only existed in movies and the bowling alley could stave off boredom for only so long. We knew how it worked. We'd run around terrorizing the city and ourselves and the adults would pass it off as that teenage phase. But Fraser never grew out of that phase. Five years after graduating high school he had yet to live on his own. He had one job in his entire life cutting down trees, or something like that, up north, which allowed him to live comfortable off of unemployment insurance ever since. And like me, every night Fraser could be found up at The Meanest Bean sipping on a cup of coffee, smoking an unfiltered cigarette.

What's Todd still doing in there? I asked, not really caring if an answer was given.

He's still loading that shit up, man. You know how that bitch is with his coffee.

Todd Phillips, another player from The Time of Experimentation and Fraser Jansen's right-hand man, stood at the condiment stand pouring sugar into his coffee. As the seconds passed and the white, rocky avalanche of sweetness continued to flow from the jar, my teeth began to hurt.

He must count to five, eh? I said. You know, he must time the amount of sugar he puts into his coffee.

I don't know. But I'm sure that's part of the reason his teeth look like a bunch of rotten corn on an old-assed cob.

Hey, two highs in one go. Guess we can't complain about that, can we?

Amen, sister. Amen.

Coffee was my addiction. The drugs were long gone (mostly because I was too lazy to hunt them down) and I barely touched alcohol, because I couldn't afford it. Caffeine was my heroine. A poor man's heroine. It was the shit that kept me from jamming a gun down my throat and pulling the trigger. Yes, it was coffee pumping through my veins. If you pricked me and emptied me into a mug, the dark brown liquid that had come out of me would smell roasted and earthy. It would steam mist-like over the rim of that mug. There was something comforting and safe about sitting outdoors sipping on a mug of coffee. When it flowed down my throat and spread itself through my body, I always had an overwhelming sense of peace. Life without coffee would not be life.

When Todd opened the door to The Meanest Bean, the bell above it rang. I thought of angels. I thought of Heaven. I wondered if they drank coffee up there. I wondered if all the angels gathered at a local coffeeshop, ordered up vanilla lattes (decaffeinated, of course) and talked about the appearances they had made that day. Talked about all the lives they had touched down here on Earth. Todd returned to the seat that had been his throne for the three hours prior.

Fraser removed the cigarette from his lips and said to Todd, She's so sweet, eh? He let out a Hooey and snubbed out the cherry on his smoke with his thumb and index finger. The feat never got old with me. I need to keep the rest of this for later when my thoughts finish running their course. You know what I mean, boys? You know what I mean?

Todd took a sip of his sugar and nodded his head like his thoughts were running the same course.

That girl couldn't be older than seventeen, I said in a fatherly manner. Seriously, that 'two legs, two tits, it will be fucked' philosophy of yours is going to get the two of you in a lot of shit one day.

Todd pulled out his pack of smokes, tapped one into his palm, spun it around his fingers like a drummer spins his drumstick, and lit it up with the Zippo his ex-girlfriend had given him on their one-month anniversary. He burned up a quarter of the smoke with his first drag, then exhaled a machinegun blast of smoke pellets into my face.

Once, I had sex with this chick that was like fifteen, he professed quite boldly.

I wanted to spit out the coffee that was in my mouth, but the waste was unjustified for one of Todd's untruths.

Was this before you turned nineteen, Toddy? I asked.

Actually, dude, it was just a few months ago. But hey, don't get me wrong. I didn't know she was fifteen. I swear. Bitch told me she was eighteen and I swear, man, she looked like she could've easily been twenty.

But you're twenty-four, I said, playing with him. Let's think about that for a second.

Fraser had obviously heard the story before because he pulled his cellphone out of one of the inner pockets of his black leather jacket and he placed a call to somewhere else. Somewhere I wish I could've been.

I was at this house party, Todd said. Don't remember at all how I got there. And you know, I couldn't find anyone I knew. I had already had like fifteen beers before getting there and I was spinning like a yo-yo, so I decided the best thing for me to do was to plant myself and sober up a bit so I could get the hell out of there. Anyway, I'm sitting on this big-assed couch and this girl collapses next to me. I tell you, Ryan, it was like she just fell from the ceiling. Like she was one of those sticky hands that had lost its stick at that precise moment. So I look over at her and she's giggling. And you know, she's not wearing a bra and with her shirt as loose as it was I could see major cleavage and the upper edge of her right nipple. Being the gentleman I am, I introduced myself. I'm waiting for her to tell me her name, but instead she lunges at me and throws her arms around my neck. She starts kissing me. Her breath, it smells like vodka and mint toothpaste and I'm eating it up, man. After like a minute of her tongue down my throat she says, 'You know, this is my house and I think you and me should go upstairs to my bedroom.' Never one to pass up such a golden opportunity, I defeat gravity and the whirlies and I stand up and I pull her up with me. On the way up to her room I asked her how old she was and I swear to motherfucking God, man, she said she was eighteen. Now, this chick obviously wasn't new to sex, because it was only like the most mind-blowing fuck I've ever had.

He raised his mug then took a sip of his sugar. He kept his eyes locked on mine. He was waiting for a congratulation, like a high five or a kiss on the cheek. Like he had climbed Everest and not the body of a minor. But I wasn't going to give it to him. So, how'd you find out she was fifteen?

Oh. Well, the next morning her sister, who was the one throwing the party, came into the room to wake her for swimming or something gay like that. She freaked out on me. She was all like, 'You fucking pig! She's only fifteen! My dad's going to kill you! Blah blah blah.' I threw on my shit and bolted.

He raised his mug to his lips. Before he sipped his sugar he whispered into his mug, Fucking sister, like what he did wasn't so wrong and what was her fucking problem anyway?

You know it's illegal to have sex with a girl that's fifteen years old, right? You could go to jail.

Hey, man, I haven't seen any cops at my door and I sure as hell know you guys aren't cops. and Hell, it's not like I'm going to pass up getting laid. Life goes on, man. Live it to its fullest. Fuck.

Toast to that, Fraser said, breaking away from his phone conversation.

We sat there for a few more minutes listening to Fraser's end of his phone conversation, but his repetitive use of the phrase, Fuck yeah soon bored me.

I closed my eyes and watched the film playing on the back of my eyelids. It was a slow motion clip of me kicking my chair out and smashing my coffee mug on Todd's forehead.

When I opened my eyes, Amy was cleaning things up on the inside, preparing for her close. We had been sitting on the patio of The Meanest Bean for four hours. Day had left its post and night had taken over watch and I hadn't even noticed the change. Warmth put up a fight, but in those late April days the cold still had a bite that was hard to pry off the skin.

I'm just going to take a piss before she kicks us out for the night, I said. Then I think I'm going home to bed. I'm shot, boys.

Hold up, Fraser said from behind his cell phone. We're heading over to The Barge for some beers after this. Do you want to maybe join us tonight?

I don't know. You know my stance on nightclubs. (I fucking hated them).

Fraser grunted something that sounded like pussy but the bell ringing above me as I pushed open the door to The Meanest Bean drowned out his voice. I thanked the angels. When I dropped my mug off at the front counter I took a closer look at Amy. The boys were right. She was cute. My morals kicked in right after the thought and reminded me how much older I was than her.

So I guess I'll see you back here tomorrow, then, she said, topping off her sentence with one of those always-be-nice-to-the-customer smiles.

I nodded and chuckled uncomfortably. I dropped my head and made my way to the bathroom, searching the whole way for my ego that was now somewhere down there mingling with the dust and shreds of dead leaves. I had become predictable. My metamorphosis from interesting, always on the go, always willing to try new things guy, to daily coffee whore with nothing much else to be proud of in life but his past memories, was almost complete. All I needed was the Harley t-shirt, the cheap cologne and the poorly shaved goatee, because to deny what nature, or God, or whoever was running things had planned for me would have been to deny my whole existence.

I quickly slammed the bathroom door shut to hide the redness my embarrassment had painted me in. Whether Amy had still been looking at me, I did not know. A fog crept under the crack between the bottom of the door and the floor. And it filled up the bathroom and my head. I grabbed the sink and I held tight as the floor rumbled under my feet. Then the walls closed in on me. My flare for being overdramatic wasn't the culprit this time.

Then it all stopped.

There was a brief moment of clarity and in that moment I saw myself in the bathroom mirror. Spiders crawled behind my eyes. Spun webs in the emptiness. There has to be more than this, I whispered. My reflection answered me with a grin, then like a flash flood, it allowed a pain to rush into my head and slam into my brain. There was so much pressure in my head I thought it would pop. I thought, Amy is going to be hella pissed about having to clean this mess up. The pain then rushed down my neck and into my body. It rattled off my bones and bear-hugged my organs. And when that flood of pain rushed out of the pores in the soles of my feet, it took everything with it. My head grew light and my body went limp. So much emptiness. I saw porcelain and I smelled piss. And then all the bulbs in the washroom blew out leaving me in the dark.

Black.

Are you alright in there? It was Amy. Her voice hit me like a fist. It jostled me out of my daze. I shook the remaining fog out of my head and I stood up drunkenly.

Yeah... I'm okay.

Good, she said. I wouldn't want to have to break this door down and save your sorry ass.

Ouch, I said, disorientation still holding me tight.

I took my piss, focussing extra hard not to get any on the bowl, floor or wall, then I returned to the great outdoors. Amy was now stacking chairs and dragging tables indoors. Fraser and Todd were off in the distance walking toward Fraser's Camaro.

Wait up! I yelled

I ran to the car and said something I thought I'd never say. All right, I'm in. Let's go to your stupid night club.

2.

A small line of people was waiting at the entrance doors to The Barge. Girls wearing cowboy hats, and guys with cell phones glued to their ears. The line was of no concern to Fraser. He had connections, or so he had said on the drive over. Fraser gave the bouncer a nod and we walked right past the line and into the club. Was there more to Fraser than he lead me to believe?

I got the first round, boys! he declared. His chest puffed out like he was the king of the peacocks in this twisted petting zoo.

Todd and I ducked into a booth a few steps from the dance floor. An odd place to sit. Thick bass rumbled out of ten mammoth speakers tiled along the ceiling, making it almost impossible to have a conversation. But I guess that was the point.

The bass jiggled my brain. Jiggled my organs. It reminded me of why I hated places like The Barge. Why I hadn't been to a night club since my first year of college. I looked out across the dance floor and spotted Fraser chatting up one of the waitresses. I looked across the table and Todd quickly turned away. He had been staring at me. I looked down at the floor and spotted a quarter. And then another quarter about an inch away from the first one. And another quarter an inch away from that one. I reached down to pick them up, but they were glued to the floor. There were hundreds of quarters, like a trail of bread crumbs, leading to each of the bathrooms. When I sat back up, Fraser was in the booth sitting next to Todd.

Here we are, boys! I think he yelled.

What? I yelled, my hand cupped to my ear.

Beer! I caught that and nodded.

Fraser slammed down a mug in front of each of us and doled out beer from the pitcher he had bought. We sat through ten songs, watching people, drinking flat, watered-down beer that tasted more like piss. Every so often Fraser would put his mouth to Todd's ear and point something out somewhere in the club and the two of them would laugh. And I would notice how demonic people looked when they laughed and you couldn't hear the laughter coming out of their mouths. Every so often they would snap their fingers in front of my eyes to make sure I was still with them. I would smile and nod and continue to sit, quietly observing the madness going on around me. Todd bought the next round and then the round after that. As the beer saturated my insides, my unease disappeared. I dropped down the fifteen dollars I had in my wallet -- all the money I had in the world -- and a waitress magically appeared. She put her ear down to Fraser's mouth. His lips moved and she smiled. Then she took my money. A few minutes later she was back with a pitcher of beer and three shots of tequila. The music waved