Kyle’s Story: Problems with Similes and Smiles
The last few years have been tough on Kyle. Losing the house he’d grown up in. Leaving his neighborhood. Relocating to a new city.
And now he’s moving into a house with a gruesome history. And he is not happy about it…
In today’s information age, with the internet, it’s impossible to hide much. Kyle has been researching his new house. He’s seen horrific photos of the crime. He’s been feeling anxious, wired, and most of all sick, knowing that he’ll be living in a house where an entire family was shot. He’ll be living in a house that was once a funeral home. A house that’s allegedly haunted.
It’s the sort of house he would have expected to read about in a tabloid, in a click-baity, SHOCKING article about the house being recently purchased by an eccentric recluse, or a ghoul like Marilyn Manson…
Kyle sits in the hotel’s dramatic lobby, with its walls made of black marble, and its furniture like something from an impressionist painting.
His parents meet him in the lobby, and as always, his dad stands out in a crowd, towering above everyone. Kyle thinks about how his dad looks like such a freak. Or a sasquatch. His dad looking like a less hairy bigfoot, with his over-scaled features, his big hands, his barrel chest and lurching gait. His dad… with the body of a monster… has the face of a monster, too… with his square jaw, cleft chin, prominent nose and freakishly wide forehead.
Worst, most frightening of all, for sure, is his dad’s abnormally huge head. His dad’s head like a weird, warbly blimp. His dad’s head always unnerved Kyle to a degree, made him think of blimps, hot-air balloons. Kyle has long been tormented by an irrational fear of blimps, perhaps because they remind him of his dad’s head, or it could be from seeing footage of the Hindenburg disaster on TV, as a young child. Sometimes Kyle would lay eyes on his dad’s head and he’d picture the blimp crashing. He’d picture the flames in black and white and that “oh the humanity” soundbite.
At least his dad isn’t wearing a Panama hat. Thank God his dad isn’t wearing one of those Panama hats, Kyle ponders. To Kyle, there’s nothing as embarrassing as how goofy his dad looks in a Panama hat… Kyle might hate Panama hats even more than blimps and hot-air balloons.
Even without a goofy hat, there’s still no way his dad could be wholly inconspicuous. His dad’s limping gait, slow and hobbled, leg dragging, was kind of like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. And just his dad’s colossal mass, how enormous he is, renders him instantly noticeable. People around the lobby, young and old, crane their necks, pop their eyes, and stare at him as if he were a freak.
Not that he blames them. Kyle had always thought of his dad being something of a freak of nature, that maybe his dad is the Missing Link, a result of scientific experiments, genetic manipulation, an escapee from a lab, perhaps. Or maybe he’s an escaped zoo animal, a rare species of gorilla. The way people stared, it was with that same mix of curiosity and fear you’d see on the faces of visitors at zoos…
But the hotel staff are more polite. Forcefully so. Dad insists they stay in 5-star establishments. This one, a JW Marriott, appears to have a policy that every employee smile and maintain that smile. Smile and stretch their lips as far and wide as possible, revealing as many teeth as they can. The receptionists, concierge, cleaners, whenever you’d see them, they’d smile like a kid on Christmas morning, like a Japanese toothpaste ad, that sort of smile.
It makes Kyle sick. He hates these places. He has a love/hate affair with everything to do with money. Part of him is happy to leave the mansion. He felt like a piece of shit growing up in a house like that. He felt guilty. Privileged. As a young boy, he’d thought it was normal, that everyone lives in such a house, but, when he was a little older, around 10 or so, he discovered poverty, through seeing videos online, and he felt so awful that others had to live in slums, wooden shacks, third-world conditions.
“How is that even legal,” he’d think… “How could the governments in those countries let their people live worse than dogs, in those dreadful slums. Places like India, a country with buildings like the Taj Mahal. India has billionaires living in skyscrapers, whole skyscrapers, to themselves, and then below the same private skyscrapers, they have millions of people living in tin shacks, huddled masses, stacked on top of each other… People with no electricity or running water… People openly squatting and shitting on public streets; people pissing, dumping garbage and sewage in the same streams drinking water is collected, clothes are washed… It’s a travesty! It should be a crime!” he’d rage and vent in the comment section of YouTube videos.
His parents step away from the front desk, his dad is sliding his platinum card back inside his alligator skin wallet. The two saunter over toward Kyle. They are grim-faced, conjoined in a tacit silence. His dad, like a walking tree, hovers above him, seemingly casting a shadow over the entire lobby. His dad’s eyes are a bit bloodshot. Perhaps he’d been crying. Or taking the pills again. Kyle knows his dad takes pills, injections sometimes, too.
His dad nods his heavy stone of a head. Kyle nods back in assent and rises, feeling airless, as if his lungs were punctured. Terror seizes him. The hairs on the back of his neck prickle.
It’s time. It’s time to go to the house. He’s been dreading this moment. He’d thought of going to a relative’s. He’d thought of staying with a friend. He’d thought of running away. He’d thought of so many ways to escape this moment. He’d wanted to escape the house, the ghosts, even before he’d stepped foot inside.
But now, they move. They walk. Bodies in motion. Right foot, left foot. Their bodies in lockstep. A bellboy is pushing a golden cart with the family’s bags. The bellboy, a short late-middle-aged man of possible Arab descent, is smiling his own version of the hotel’s plastic, toothy smile. The bellboy looks like he’s hurting his lips, stretching his mouth that wide. The beaming bellboy is making forced, painful small talk about the weather, emphatically proclaiming that it’d cooled down, that fall was here.
They cross through the swivel door, are thrown into the front of the hotel. The bellboy was right. Fall had arrived. The sky was dark, looked like a bruise. The bellboy sniffs the cool air, then confidently asserts that it’ll rain on and off all day.
It had cooled down outside considerably, to 50 something degrees, and the crisp, soft fall air tickled at Kyle’s skin. Jim tips the bellboy a folded 20 as the bellboy readies to load the family’s bags into their car.
The valet drives the car up, parks and jumps out. The valet is all smiles too. The valet is a very young and very large Black man, nearly his dad’s size. The valet recognizes Jim Everett, “OH my GAWD! Jim Everett!”, and the two have a short word. The valet plays high school football and snaps a selfie with Jim. Jim tips him well, slips him a folded $50 bill, and claps him on the shoulder, offers words of encouragement.
Kyle has a brief moment of jealousy, knowing his dad never spoke to him like that. He could see that young man, that valet, being the type of kid his dad wanted. A stud athlete, vivacious, strong and handsome. Not a scrawny computer nerd, a freak like him.
The jealousy abates, however, when Kyle thinks of his dad limping around. When he flashes back to the times he saw his dad, hunched over, recovering from a surgery. His dad’s Frankenstein face contorting in agonizing pain.
Those are the moments the NFL doesn’t show. The surgeries. The injections. The pills. The tears and blood and scars and middle-aged men walking like old geezers. Kyle thinks of the valet, how handsome he is, his electric, high-voltage smile and his young body like that of a Grecian God, the valet so full of life. Kyle’s jealousy morphs to pity.
Then the fear returns. He and his parents sit into the leather seats, buckle up. His dad, ever the aggressive driver, throttles the gas pedal, and their heads whip back as they plow ahead, into traffic, his dad cranking Korn, that annoying nu-metal shit that Kyle can’t stand.
Kyle defensively blasts meditation music in his earbuds, hoping to calm himself, settle his anxiety.
They will arrive at the house in approximately 40 minutes, the white flashing text on the dashboard GPS says. The digits on the GPS begin to slide off the dashboard, falling off the screen, slimy, like the trail of a slug. Kyle’s lower jaw trembles. His teeth chatter. His eyes go glassy and his vision becomes a milky blur. He shuts his eyelids, breathes deeply, tastes the leather smell of his seat.
40 minutes. 40 minutes, he laments.
