Jim Frazee

“Cheapskate

The day I blurted the word out at my father
I was still an in-the-dark toe-headed excuse
for leaving early from the Sunday ritual -
the after-church bourbon-fumed lunches
of deviled eggs, Vienna sausages, and saltines
at his mother’s airless La Jolla bungalow,
what Purgatory must’ve smelled like in 1962.
I doubt even this “intermediate state after death
for expiatory purification,” according to Webster,
endured as long as our visits that my own mother
artfully dodged and I failed to appreciate,
an annoyance that incited the battle-axe’s contempt
and me to mime her derision, drawing into question
the battery life of her cumbersome hearing aids.
Often my father zipped a finger across his throat,
though amusement danced in the lines of his brow,
unlike when I burst in on them à la Soupy Sales
or lurched into histrionic spasms of boredom,
forcing their conversation into ellipses, usually
over an envelope he set by her lipsticked tumbler.
That called for banishment to the tiny courtyard
where among a few droopy orange trees
I could kill time and escape the weird reversal
of my father no longer himself to her,
but a mother to his own mother, a slow suffocation
that on occasion drove him outside.
During our last visit, the week of a heat wave,
I’d been rolling oranges like depth-charges
into her moribund pond of scabby goldfish.
I had no idea anger could travel in the family
when the door kicked open, and out he came
cracking like ice in a glass of the bourbon
hidden in her unused kitchenette oven.
One of the oranges swiped his wingtips
with its fetid juice, and he picked it up,
a Zeus lost in a thousand-yard gaze of divine wrath,
then hurled it at the pink retaining wall.
Long after he returned inside I stood still,
entranced by the splatter as if its tentacles of anger
reached out to me, though my behavior, the orange,
or even cash in an envelope - what he feared
I’d one day too place beside his own drink -
had less to do with his outburst than imagined.
Nothing was ever so simple about him.
On the drive home, the windows rolled up,
we swept by 31 Flavors without slowing down
while kids on tailgates slurped ice cream,
and riding shotgun, I just snapped,
calling him that terrible thing
you can never take back - a cheapskate.
Suddenly we coasted in the wake of it
worse than any blasphemy or sacrilege,
the tires thumping louder than ever
on seamed concrete until his white knuckles
flew off the wheel at me, and belted-in
I ducked to cushion the blow.
His legacy halted mid-air. By chance
in the rearview mirror he’d caught
his own father’s fist coming on fast, too late
for both of us to get out of the way.”
― Jim Frazee, Thief of Laughter