Earl Will Always Be Too Late
by
Goodwin/GOODW.Y.N.Nicole
“His name was Earl!?”
“Yeah…”
His name, his realname was Earl.Funny how little about a man you know, especially when you think you know everything about him. That is until the man you knew you knew, or thought you knew, never knew, would never really know ends up dead. Then you’re not sure if you ever really knew anything about him at all.
It seems the only actual thing I did know about Earl was his face. Over the years it never really seemed to age; but I suppose it was decaying all the while. I knew his face all of my life, or it might as well have been. I trusted it as my one and onlyfather since I was three years old. That is still embedded in me somehow; affixed in my heart by something strong! Like Super Glue® or Gorilla Glue®, although on everything I love I can’t say why exactly. Truth is, I don’t have a genuine reasoning behind it. It’s just the way I felt; feel—will always feel for him I suppose.
In all honesty, Earl never did anything REALLY to earn my loyalty to him. He wasn’t a kind man, or a smart man—it wasn’t as if he was genuinely stupid, he just was a “blank” piece of work when it came to thinking for himself. He wasn’t industrious, or inventive. Never created something profound. Never developed something incredulous or innovative. Earl never finished school. Or held down a job, whether it was decent or off the books. The only thing that Earl clutched onto were his habits, and the toxic relationship with my mama. Or maybe they both, his booze drinking and love for my mother just had a way of latching on to him. Deeply, clamping on the threads of his soul; like a Pitbull or a Doberman cutting a new tooth on a raggedy, bare bone. Yeah, something like a lacerates against the spirit like that can’t be shook.
His smoke and drinks of choice were that of the cheapest poisons—Earl inhaled at least two packs of Kools 100 (Super Longs, NOT the stumpy ones!) every day and chased that with a bottle of Richard’s Wild Irish Rose. God, I HATED the stench that left on his fucking breath. It would creep inside my nostrils, burning its way into my chest, my lungs, my throat…it felt kin to hot lava, or the rubber wheels after a drag race.
“Heeeeeey, Neeeecooollle…” he’d slither with lushed, twisted lips.
I was so helpless whenever I smelled that stench coming in and out of his mouth. I just wanted to die every Friday night; bury me until Monday would come ‘round again. But I loved that man something awful. Something beyond myself, beyond my body, my mind; any sense of self, of health. I loved Earl so much; it must have been a sin. And I wanted him to love me back, but he never did. There was no way he could love me the way I wanted him to. The way I loved him. I loved him the way someone drowning wants to be saved. It was a desperate kind of need to become someone’s daughter. To be seen as a beautiful to the first man around you, he that raised you. All he had in his heart for me was hate. Hate because I wasn’t hischild, but my father’s daughter. A remnant of a dirty past that I knew nothing about.
Earl’s skin was darker than midnight but was never ashy or blemished. Instead, it flowed calmly like the surface of water during the fullest glow of the last super moon. “Pete was a good-looking man,” momma used to say. This lay in comparison to my mama’s tawny, light-brown skin in which I inherited. Earl was covered in something that I thought was unworldly. I have yet to see it again or a Black man—or any man for that matter ever since. His flawless creamy coating of chocolate…all the members of his family possessed it—that outside onyx porcelain, especially the women! And how I loathed them for that perfection. I’d often find myself in the mirror studying my face. The longer I look the more I found imperfections, the dirt nesting within my pores. The wild hairs violently sprouting out of my eyebrows and lashes. The plumpness of my nose and lips. My features were never as refined as theirs; HIS. There was no way I could be mistaken for his daughter. No matter how much I wanted to.
Over the years he’d drink more often and hate on me even more; his drunkenness mirroring his hatred, both becoming a thirst he could never satiate. I was too young to understand that. And when you’re young, clinging to a life you can never obtain—you scream, and shout, and kick for anything you can find. Anything around that looks like it could save you possibly. Even someone like Earl, who became a log infested with flames when that liquor hit his tongue just right. Loving that man was as good as being loyal to an anvil that’s sinking to the bottom of the sea. Earl was only good enough to keep afloat just long enough to drag someone to the bottom with him. In each of us girls, me and my two sisters a part of us was buried with him out of sheer happenstance, mindless obedience, and toxic devotion to his unbridled parenting.
As I got older, Earl’s wordsbecame harsher, and so did my mother’s. Their loathing of my existence synced up like elegant, Olympic swimmers. If my mother was “putting me down,” well he followed suit like the lackey he was…butEarl was there. He was a consistent man. Always coming back to us, addicted till the end to our dysfunctional fold. And for that much I was, am eternally grateful. Or that’s what I tell myself now since…Pete…Earl died.
One day I was fed up with both of their antics. I had to be 13 years old or so. We still lived in the same Brownstone on Putnam Avenue, but it was long falling apart. I recall the walls, a filth covered and dulled robin’s egg blue. The bathroom toilet was sinking into the floor, about to crash dead into the basement below. Our once glorious crystal-shaped mirror that my Uncle Doc had crafted himself was falling to pieces, chip- by-chip. You might say that those decrepit shards reflected my sanity. I could feel it slipping under the pressure that my mother and Earl manifested, thrusting their lust to demean at each other and me since I was a young, outcasted homebody.
Being the black sheep in a violent household, no matter the number of kids, always ends up mortifying in the end—because it’s the black sheep that gets the most sheering and the least amount of compassion when it comes time for it to be done. “Why you hate me so fuckin’ much huh? I never did nothin’ to you an’ all you do is fuckin’ make my life miserable! Why, Pete? Why?”
The silence. The silence. That silence was hot and furious as dragon’s breath. Pete’s—Earl’s eyes were red as hellfire. When he broke it, the silence, it wasn’t with a yell, it was with a whisper that chilled me to the bone.
“Ask yo’ mutha,” was all he said. But I knew then the hammer had finally fallen.
A few days later my mother broke her silence; it was as painful for me as a rare, fine bird being defeathered for X’mas dinner. And no one prayers go down easy for the heartbroken of the turkey. The case was that while my mother had officially ended it with my biological father, they still fooled around on there mates with each other. My mother’s mate at the time was indeed Earl. This lasted on and off for a least three years unbeknownst to him—or at least I understood it to be. The climax of their relationship was when my father showed his face once more. Only it wasn’t to reclaim my mother as bride, it he had tried to “kidnap” me from her asshe put it. I found that wording ironically funny considering how they both spent a lifetime treating me after that encounter. Both full of regrets, resentments, and remembrances of promises broken, like fragile twigs under heavily booted feet. Neither one of them could repair the damage they had suffered and subjected each other to after that day. So, in the end they unconsciously took it out on the one person who it had nothing to do with causing, and everything to do with tying it together. Not being loved in that household wasn’t my fault; but it became my responsibility. Till this day it’s been my burden ever since. Another notch in the belt of my depression. But I now realize that there are worse things than fighting with your own self-hatred—one is fighting for your life and realizing you’ve completely run out of time.
Tubes. All I remember surrounding his skeleton-like body were a rainbow spectrum of tubes and electric hospital monitors. This was at the height of a depressive state I was in, since I had found out another friend of mines (he was a veteran), had killed himself a few weeks before. And now my stepfather, Pete—Earl, lying on a sanitized bed in a weary slumber, was a patient in Bellevue Hospital dying from ailments arising from his decades of alcoholism. The doctors even had the nurses stick a tube down his throat, for digesting food, his sister told me—so he couldn’t talk, even if he was awake. I found it hard to believe that this frail, sad husk had once been my mama’s “handsome, dark-skinned” partner in crime and passion, while raising me together as my tormentors.
I awaited him to awake, when he finally did his eyes were dark yellowish pools with a speck of clouded, foggy-brown pupils that seemed to barely recognize me at all. His sister stood over him and he began to mouth wantings of speech, but all that came out were pathetic wisps of air and whimpers. He had become a voiceless child, begging for the tube to be removed from his throat; tears slipping from the corners of his thin, leathery eyelids, staining the white hospital pillowcases with salted remorse. Then suddenly his wrapped righthand jerked to his mouth trying to grip the outside of the tube.
“No, no Pete. Don’t do that.” His sister reprieved gently.
More tears fell from his eyes, drifting to their sunken death up the white of the pillowcase. I bit my lip to and turned away, my eyes stinging with tears of their own. I didn’t stay long after that. I drifted into my own “sunken place” for about a year or so. It turns out that was exactly how many more days Earl’s body could give out in the vein of life, before it gave out permanently.
“You went to see Pete in the hospital?” My mother asked vehemently. “I don’t know why; you didn’t come to the damn funeral.” I was somewhat hurt by that remark, and I knew she intended it to be that way. It was because she was jealous that I went to see him but hadn’t seen her in all that time. I understood it; she would never admit that to be true, and I would never admit that she had hurt me. Both of us as stubborn as bulls butting heads.
“So that’s it huh, his name—his real name was Earl. And he was from Alabama.” I said flatly.
“Yeaaah…” My mama said while letting out a loud, long yawn. Earl is dead.
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