How it all started...
My name is Kyle Tenney. My Dad and I live in Lucky Palms in this tiny, rundown trailer. Off to the right just past the hood of his car is an old rickety park bench he STOLE from town. He never really sits on it, but I'm glad it's there for nights when he's drunk and pissed off and picks fights with me. If I leave the house to get away from him, he locks the door and then usually passes out. There's a second deadbolt, meant to be used only when everyone is INSIDE. But he uses it to lock me out of my own house. I've spent a lot of nights on that bench.
It's all he could afford after he lost his job in construction. The construction season in Minnesota isn't very long, and he likes drinking too much. He showed up to work drunk too many times, so he got fired. It's a good thing we moved here, actually. It hardly ever snows. That's a good thing for the "lockouts".
Where's my mother, you ask? Mom--if you can call her that--took off not long after I was born. Dad says she said she wasn't cut out to be a mom and didn't sign on for the blue-collar life.
To tell the truth, Dad isn't much better. He drinks and gets drunk and gets mean. He usually just tells me what a loser he thinks I am, but sometimes he smacks me around. If he didn't manage to find and steal the money from every job I've tried to do, I'd take my earnings and leave. But he found my latest hiding spot above one of the bathroom ceiling tiles, so now I'm as broke as he is again.
I photoshopped this photo to show my room and how small it is and the living room right outside it. Dad plays the TV however loud he wants...even when I'm trying to sleep. The walls are so thin, I can hear every word the cops say in the crime shows he likes to watch. And when I start to drift off, gunshots or sirens from the show wake me up again.
He took this photo of me one day...just to mock me for reading the paper like "some kind of hoity toity businessman." I don't what I want to be someday yet, but I know I want better than this.
Sometimes, Dad's almost a normal Dad. Cheerful and wants to know what I'm up to, so I'll risk sitting on the crappy "crate futon" he put together as a couch. Yes. We're that hard up. When we rolled into Lucky Palms from Minnesota and he rented this POS trailer, we had literally nothing. He blew the last of his cash on my bed, his bed and the TV, then took me "dumpster diving" and "junkyard picking" for anything passable. Gross.
Look, I'm not trying to be a snob or anything. But we had things so much better in Minnesota. Houses cost a lot less there. Jobs are actually pretty easy to find...if you haven't made a bad rep for yourself with multiple employers. And the "good ol' boy" network of construction there...everyone knew everyone in our town, so Dad got himself blackballed.
Here's the bathroom. I can't scrub it clean enough. I use it because I have to, but I love it when I manage to scrape a few bucks together. I'd rather shower at the freaking PUBLIC pool for a $2 entry fee than spend time in this cruddy bathroom.
The plumbing backs up at least once a month, so I'm constantly bleaching and sanitizing and grossed out.
Here's yet another overflowed toilet.
Dad's actually a passable cook, but he never cleans up the kitchen.
He can look right past all the filth and keep cooking food in there. Ew.
I get mad, sometimes, and I try to fight the vomit down and just wait to see if he'll clean it...but he doesn't. Like...ever. So, I end up doing it just so I can stomach eating a meal out of the kitchen.
The good news is, it's as tiny as the rest of this hovel, so it doesn't actually take that long to clean. It's just the principle of the thing.
And then I get mad at myself for making it so much harder on myself.
And I hate wasting food, especially since Dad sometimes drinks (or gambles) away the weekly grocery money. But I couldn't eat that mac and cheese if you paid me a million bucks. Not when I found it sitting in our grimy kitchen!
The funniest thing is he yells at me and picks fight over his messes. Usually after I've cleaned them up.
"You think you're so much better than me? Think you're Mr. Swank because you cleaned up the kitchen?"
"I just--"
"Don't talk back to me, boy!"
"I wasn't..."
"What'd I just say?!"
"Dad! Stop!"
Maybe I am as stupid as he says. I sure haven't learned that pleading only makes him madder. And makes him hit harder.
The worst thing about him is how he's so unpredictable. If I leave for school without cleaning the kitchen, I spend all day worrying he'll kick me around when I get home. And sometimes he does. But other times, like today, (I had a half day at school) and when I got home, he was all smiles and friendliness and "We haven't gone fishing in a long time. Wanna go fishing? Let's go fishing. I already got the stuff in the trunk!"
So, I let my guard down. We drove for a couple hours to a fishing spot.
Things were going great until he was three beers in, and then it was a fight because HE wasn't catching anything, and I got a nibble. It wasn't even a big deal...or a big fish. But he accused me of messing with his gear so he wouldn't catch anything.
When I had the audacity to tell him he's being ridiculous, he leaned closer with his foul as heck beer breath and slurred, "Fine. You're right. You're the fishing master. So, you stay here and fish, and I'm going home to watch TV."
I followed him. I mean, we were two HOURS from home by car. But he clocked me, and I stayed down until I was sure he was gone, my head dizzy and my eyes blurry. And then I tried to wait him out. He's done stuff like this before, leaving me stranded someplace. But he always comes back.
I pulled my homework out of my backpack, glad he hadn't even let me shrug it off before he herded me into the car to come here. Might as well be productive while I wait, right?
After my homework was done, I goofed off, trying to catch a lost butterfly that flitted around. There were no flowers around or anything. Maybe it was defective and couldn't find the gardens. I suddenly worried maybe it would die if it didn't have flowers or water. I caught him and took him back over to the lake and bent down, releasing him so he was actually ON the surface of the water. He did seem to drink there for a few seconds before fluttering away, out of reach.
It started getting dark, and I started getting worried. Maybe this time he wouldn't come back.
What if he didn't? What would I do with no money or car or anything more than the clothes I was wearing and my backpack?
But just before it got really dark, I heard the familiar rattle of our car's engine. He was all smiles again.
"Look, I just needed to cool off. Get in. You'll never believe what happened!"
So, he gleefully tells me he stopped at a little casino we'd passed on the way and decided to play a few slots.
"I won five hunnerd bucks! Five hunnerd!" he laughed.
"That's great, Dad," I said, yawning. And then my stomach rumbled SUPER loudly, like stomachs do when they haven't been fed since breakfast and your nutty Dad takes you fishing before you can grab any lunch, then leaves you stranded well past dinner.
"Anywhoo, I musta stared at the thing in disbelief for a good several minutes, but then I scooped it all up and went to the cashier."
"I treated myself to a couple drinks."
"Oh, but I was just about to leave when another machine caught my eye and I put a buck in. Then this guy comes along and says he was playing that machine...didn't I see his chair up against it?"
Even I know that when someone tilts their chair against the machine, it means they're coming back.
"The guy didn't leave any money in it or anything, but he was real pissed that I played my buck."
"I told him to cool his jets...I didn't win anything while he was gone."
"He almost took a swing, but the security guard came and split us up, and I figured it was time to come back and get you, anyhow."
I guess the good thing about his win and hearing my stomach was he decided to be generous and spend some of that "five hunnerd" on a good meal. He stopped at a steakhouse chain and fed me the biggest, best dinner I'd had in a very long time.
It didn't even bother me when he snarked at me the next morning that I was "eating cereal too loud".
Even though he goes through guilt trips and will be nice and cook and try to clean up after himself for a few days, it always falls apart within a week.
I like it so much better when he finds someplace to go...like when he (once in a very blue moon) takes on a few days of work (or nights). It never lasts long, but when it happens, I'm soooo happy!
I watch what I want, I eat what I want, and the kitchen and bathroom stay clean!
I can't wait to turn sixteen in a few months. That's the earliest you can work an afterschool job in Lucky Palms. Stupid laws. In Minnesota, I could work fast food at fourteen as long as they didn't schedule me more than three hours on a school day or six on a weekend day.
I need to find a way to hide my money better so I can get the hell out the second I turn eighteen.
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