The Tooth (Round 4)
Let's workshop this poem about how a son would prank his inebriated father, tormenting the man on physical and mental and emotional levels as a way to feel in control (in an out-of-control milieu).
scent of the day: Mousse Illuminee, by Rogue
Mousse Illuminée (2019, Manuel Cross)—a fougere-chypre hybrid whose stern minimalism brings me, despite its lack of lavender, into an old-school spiral-poled barbershop, albeit one perhaps run by elves and nestled in a broadleaf-but-pine-dominant forest next to an Irish-Spring waterfall (sunny like Tuscany Per Uomo, Beach Hut Man, and other green cousins but whose fairylike overgrowth of dewy moss on bark and stone overlays a dimming shade)—
opens with a bracing blue-green explosion of eucalyptus camphor (piney olibanum along with green notes like bitter artemisia, herbal laurel, and crisp cypress) that serves to color and thicken the star of the show (and the main reason, I had too with all the barbershop smells he had tucked away in his bathroom cabinet, I chose to wear this on the day of my father’s passing as well as at his funeral, where I made sure to capture that blue-green algae-meets-emerald vibe):
oakmoss so padded and fluffy, so dense and creamy, that it makes the coumarin lather of Nishane’s B-612 and the patchouli-musky-white-blossom suds of Xerjoff’s Torino23 and perhaps even the dense and bouncy musk-aldehyde-moss soap of ELDO’s Exit the King seem thin and unnatural,
an inky-fungal oakmoss so much like shaving lather and even leather that—coupled with a clear tobacco-ash impression resulting from the musky white florals (tuberose, jasmine, narcissus)—evokes an image of mustachioed barbers whipping up Barbasole foam and sharpening their straight razors along leather strops while they fill the shop with cigarette smoke—
the overall effect being a spicy-green fragrance that, especially in light of its overlap with Polo-Green (artemisia, jasmine, white musk, patchouli, incense, oakmoss), I see as a Zelda-emerald cousin of Yatagan, the two quite similar (down even to the smokey Chinese-apothecary, tiger-balm eucalyptus vibe and all) only Mousse Illuminée goes in a more resinous and soapy and velvety direction (just as we would expect from such a serious love letter to oakmoss).
The Tooth 1 The snap-sizz of a match, the rasp-click of a Bic— these were rare compared to the crack-fizz of a can. Five-six and bald since twenty, he chain-smoked even through his infrequent meals, lighting up the next Newport 100 from the previous butt. “Daddy’s got what they call ‘an oral fixation,’” he would slur back to my coughs. The drinking bothered me most, though. “Daddy’s got a thirst.” My nagging tears futile, his swear-on-me promises to quit the beer broken, too many times—a thirst, a fierce thirst all my own, to fuck with my father moon-flowered (like that older thirst for Pepsi to wash down Doritos, Slim Jims, Ring Dings in my transfixion before junk TV), having eyed him years at the kitchen-living-bedroom table, done in daily by his go-to case of Natural Ice. Frisbeeing bologna on his big head as he snored adenoidal arpeggios in cruel oblivion on the floor (bullseyes landing in minuscule splats); piling board games and phone books on his chest-face (cans, lit candles, stacked in undulant precarity); pinching shut his nose, his mouth, to silence them, those apneic rattles that eclipsed (as if on purpose) my shouts of “Dad, go to the damn couch!”— such sweet-caffeinated sips of prankery came before tolerance to their effects. That went too for the time I had sharpied a clown face on him, black angles sharp around the mouth and eyes, which in the new sun (nickels still stuck to his gut after his morning piss) I said he had drawn to amuse me and then had me try to scrub off with the green part of the sponge). 2 Programs on Lifetime, the network he favored while building up for the floor, only refined— with their “Mommy loved me too little, Daddy too much”—the mental slant of my mischief. Lie in ambush I would, for that sweet spot just before the floor. Then with histrionic sincerity, intonation matched to an after-school-special (“Where’d you learn to smoke this reefer, Son?” “From watching you, Dad!”), I would take on a look of too-sad-to-snack dejection and go, at a commercial break, something like: “Dad, can I—? No. It’s okay. Never mind.” Eyes up at the nicotined stalactites, this would suffice to draw him in. “S’matter, Boy? Tell Daddy.” “I’m havin’—well, problems. Back home. At Mommy’s.—I, I don’t know. It’s fine.” He would have had me mute the TV, brow furrowed to match my drama, mouth slack, beady eyes befuddled, concentration quivery versus the pull of inebriation: “The fuck” (said slowly) “you talkin’, Boy?” Hands over my face, to hide chuckles and to insinuate how deep this likely goes, my go-to move would be: “Well, after—. After, he says, well, never to tell or—. I, I, I don’—.” “This fuckin’ for real, boy? Don’t tell me no lies.” “I’m not allowed to tell. Okay!? He says, if I tell, ‘it’ll break, it’ll break—our, our little secret.” “Our little fuckin’ secret!? The fuck!?” “He says it’s just for us. I can’t even tell Mommy.” “Mahfucka. Say what’s going on, Son. Mikey!” “I’m telling lies,” I would say, wiping fake tears, twisting chuckles into sniffles. “Forget it, Dad.” I would clam up at this point. He would go from sobbing to smashing his beer-can castle (“Touch my son! Kill that bitch”), back to sobbing, soon to dream murmurs despite a Newport burning his insensate pointer (hooked rigid by a steel pin until death). “It’s just—” I would say, prodding his gut to stop the throaty snores, “it doesn’t feel right. Dad, I don’t want any more ‘love games.’” 3 One weekend night, my father sat groaning about his tooth. “Gonna yank this bitch!” he repeated. “You can’t do that,” I insisted, his repetitions finally having broken through my concentration on my own consumptions. Tone roused again to after-school hyperbole, “Dad,” I baited, “you need a dentist for that.” “Shiiit! Daddy don’t need no dentist, Boy.” “Pull your own tooth? Without medicine?” Beer held high, “Pop’s medicine,” he said and sang his version of Domino’s “Sweet Potato Pie”: “I’m all fucked up and I don’t know why. Feeling kinda freaky, that’s no lie.” “No way,” I cut in. “Daddy don’t lie to his son.” A junky at ten, toying with prey (like bored housecats) was a natural response to the weakening highs. So instead of jumping right to “Prove it, then,” I fell into brooding silence, until just before uvular flapping. “I know it all,” I said, decibel for outdoors. “Stop faking. Mom told me.” His grimace again one of wobbly perplexity, “Fakin’? What shit your mom been talkin’?” “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change things.” “You idiot. Make no goddamn sense, Boy.” “I know. Okay!? You’re not my dad.” Cheeks risen, squinting out sight and baring top teeth, “What!?” he said. “Tired of these goddamn mind games.” But having had soaked in tales he would never have thought he had told me— banging wives of impotent men for pay or, key here, fresh from the Corps saving my soon mom from Chris, a biker boyfriend—I had an angle. “She told me everything. She took me to see my real dad. He’s okay, I guess. It’s more fun with you, th—.” “Who the fuck we talkin’ ’bout?” “He told me I don’t have to call him ‘Dad’ yet. I can just call him ‘Chris’ for now, or just ‘Mr., Mr. Condon.’ He took me on his motorcycle!” “Watch what you say, cause I’ll kill the bitch. Shiiit. Look at you, Boy. You Istvan clan!” “I don’t want you hurting yourself if you’re not my dad,” I said to get us back on track. His face scrunched. “What you talkin’?” “If you’re not my dad you don’t have to prove anything by, by pulling your tooth.” “I am your dad! If I love ya.” He raised the hook forever fused to that phrase. “And ain’t got shit to prove. Bitch’ll get yanked real quick, Boy!” “You sure you’re my dad— enough to pull your tooth!?” “You don’t know shiiit. Get those fuckers.” His chin flicked up to the linesman pliers on the TV. Blue-handles grease-stained (since I was the channel turner), he raised them as if at the end of a toast, “If I’m your father,” and went right to wriggling work, wrenching the molar out, long roots barnacled. Linoleum splattered red, “If I love ya!” he said.
