My Short Story, "Roll the Dice!"

 

Copyright Glo Lewis 10/19/2023

 

Dear Readers of My Blog, 💚 

I have decided to share my short story, “Roll the Dice!” with you; this is not a memoir! Here is the story below (As usual, God bless, and I'll be in touch soon):

 

 

Roll the Dice!

Copyright Glo Lewis 10/19/2023 

 

 

 

 

 

   “Roll the dice!” my father shouted. He was drinking his usual creamed coffee with lots of sugar that I had just served him, but he was drunk. They all were-- he and his friends-- the union thugs. It was a hot September night in 1966 in the Bay Area. My father had just been on the TV news the night before. Some reporter had stuck a microphone in his face and eagerly asked him what was going on with the Teamsters. “We’re calling a wildcat strike,” my dad said into the camera, and he looked so smart and handsome. Now the men all wore short-sleeved shirts with the little cuffs rolled up. At that time, I don’t remember anyone referring to that look as a “wife-beater” T-shirt, but that was the persona conveyed. They had huge biceps with tattoos. My father’s left arm showed a skull with crossbones and the words, ‘Like you I once was—Like I you will be,’ which always conveyed such an ominous, dark tone, as though you could never escape your roots.

   “I don’t want to,” I said. I was sixteen and a half. My mother had just that afternoon, on her lunch hour, brought me home a half-year birthday cake, something I had come to beg for, just for fun, the last few years at the halfway point to my birthday. My sister, Roxie, and I, had eaten two big pieces of the heavily frosted white cake that said, “Happy Half Birthday, Kathryn.” I loved the red roses on the icing and the little rendering of a girl with long brown hair that was supposed to look like me.

   “Roll the dice! Roll the dice!” the guys shouted in unison, and banged their big, meaty fists on the kitchen table. There was Bobby McDougal, Freddie Alvarez, Glen Schwartz, and his brother Mittie, Ron Farrell, and my dad, Arnold Daniels. They were all teamsters in Local 70, the most powerful union shop on the West Coast. My father was the shop steward and a union organizer for Jimmy Hoffa. All union families back then worshiped Jimmy Hoffa; he had done so much for “working families”-- the forgotten blue collar workers and their wives and children. Hoffa could do no wrong and was untouchable, we imagined. My sister and I met him once at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. The great one.

   I had my pad and pen. “I’m just supposed to take minutes,” I complained. It was 10:00 O’clock at night, and I was tired. I had school the next day, and my mother would be getting home from work at the Safeway store by the beach across the highway soon. I wanted to get ready for bed and kiss her goodnight.

   “You’ll do what you’re fucking told. Roll the dice, damn it!” my father shouted, glaring at my impudence.

   I rolled the damned dice. I knew what it meant. It meant that someone would die, or someone would have his car blown up, or a man would be beaten unmercifully-- all on the poor luck of my throw-- because that was the drunken game. It was sick, and ill contrived, but there you have it. The dice came up seven.

   “Shit!” Freddie lamented. “I wanted to kick that sonofabitch’s ass. Roll them dice, again, girlie.”

   My father just looked at me from across the Formica. We both knew that Freddie was the actual hit. Nothing of this sort ever went into the minutes of the secret late-night union meetings of the inner circle of Local 70’s rank and file leadership of which I was the unfortunate secretary. The group always invited the hit to the game before they took him out and did terrible things to him. Many of those guys just disappeared. Who knows what they had done wrong? Mostly, they just didn’t want to steal enough, or they knew too much and talked too much. Dad said, “Go on, and roll ‘em one more time.”

   “If I do, can I go then?”

   “Make another pot of coffee, and then you can go,” my father said. “We’ve got a long haul tonight.”   

   They would be gone until the next day, and I could not wait until they left. I rolled the dice. “Snake eyes!” my father exclaimed. And they all slapped each other on the back and launched into their raunchy stories—intricate weavings of lie upon lie. I made coffee and left the room.

   My mother came home after I went to my bedroom. Roxie was already asleep. She was, even then, a disciplined person, who later in life would become highly successful in business and run a company. But back then, she was just my cranky older sister, fast asleep, her auburn hair wrapped around big pink curlers. When I heard the men leave, I relaxed into my bed and fantasized about running off, stowing away on a cruise ship.

   When my father returned home the following afternoon, he asked me to come outside. We stood in the long white drive; his yellow 911 Porsche sparkled off to the side. “Stand right there,” he said, and the warm daylight of California’s second summer glinted off his bald head. I waited. He walked back to his green Lincoln Continental and started the big car. He threw it into drive and came hurtling at me. I jumped out of the way. He knocked the car into park and jumped out. He came right up next to me with a tiny, twisted smile on his sanguine face. He pointed an index finger at my temple. “You know too much,” he said, “remember that.”

   It is a sorrowful day when you realize that your father is a total fraud, but a highly intelligent, powerful man, who could easily kill you, and think extraordinarily little about that, yet he is your father, and curiously, you do love him.

   When I was seventeen, my father took me to see the canary-yellow Porsche that he sometimes let me drive to school. “It’s wrecked,” he said, as we sped to the location in the Lincoln.

   “How did it get wrecked?”

   “I had a friend torch it. But that’s between you and me. Don’t repeat that. Insurance fraud-- a way to make a little money.” He smiled-- his curling lips as twisted as twine.

   When we arrived at the scene, the little Porsche, burned beyond recognition, was a hulk of charred metal surrounded by pacing investigators with clipboards. I burst into tears. Dad put his arm around me-- for all who witnessed, a doting father.

   After the Porsche burned, sometimes I walked part of the way to school, and then I would take the bus the rest of the way. One day I was walking, carrying my books, and I saw a towheaded little boy with his mother. The child had a blue balloon; he was holding onto the string of it with one hand, and his mother’s hand with the other, and they drifted along, letting the breeze carry them like a song. He was so merry that I started to cry. I was seventeen, and I wept for my terrible, tortured life that just seemed to go on and on. And I realized that in all my days, I had never felt as happy as that small boy with his balloon and his mother in the clear morning.

   This is about the time that my mother’s admonishment, “When you don’t have it, act as if” started to become a handy piece of learning.   

   My boyfriend, Robbie, was a senior, so even though I was a junior, we went to his senior ball together. “Marry me,” he said to me that night, pressing me against the lighted mirrored wall of the elevator as we moved between floors at a couple of late night parties at the San Francisco Hilton Hotel.

   “You’re crushing my corsage,” I said, and he moved back a little. I looked up into his eyes and his strong, earnest face. “I can’t marry you, Robbie. My parents barely even speak. I don’t plan to get married until I’m about forty, after their example.”

   “I would wait for you-- if you even said you’d marry me someday,” he said.

   “You wouldn’t wait that long.” I picked a tiny daisy petal off his blue tuxedo. He looked like a movie star with his bleached blond hair-- something no other person in high school was doing-- and his green eyes.

   “I could get you to change your mind.” He flashed me an arresting smile.

   “Anyway, I want to go to law school,” I said.    

   “Yeah, I guess that won’t mesh too well with my career ambition of driving a bus.”

   “I thought you were going to sell cars, like your dad.” The elevator doors opened. A band was playing the most beautiful music. So many couples were walking around. I said, “Here’s our floor.”

   “Why don’t we split-- find Luke and Laura (our double-dates at the ball) -- get the car and go someplace where we can be alone.”

   We met up with Luke and Laura and left the hotel. Robbie had a red convertible that he had decked out with fur from thrift stores. He had installed a wired-in bar in the back seat. It was so trippy. We drove through the streets of San Francisco and got lost. Suddenly, we were in the Tenderloin-- a predominately African-American area of the city. A black man threw his upper body onto the hood of Robbie’s car in the middle of the busy nighttime street. “You fucking honkies!” he screamed.   

   We were four white kids from the other side of the bay. “Look straight ahead, and don’t say one word,” Robbie cautioned us. We inched our way through the crowded dark street, and the man pulled away, shouting epithets after us.

   Later, we went to the peaks and kissed until 1:00 O’clock in the morning. I was out past my curfew, but my father was supposed to be in Las Vegas until the following day. To my disappointment, I found him patrolling the front room when I arrived home. I had fur all over my neck and face from Robbie’s car seats, so I was in the bathroom for quite a while, washing up for bed. When I came out, my father asked accusingly, “Are you having sex with Robbie?” My mom was there, but she didn’t say a word.

   “No,” I said. It was the truth, for the most part, but I wasn’t about to say how far we went.

   My father wasn’t having any of it. “Call him up, and break it off right this minute,” he demanded.

   Around this time, Roxie had a screaming argument with my father that ended with her grabbing her purse and running out of the house. “Get the hell out,” my father shouted, “and don’t come back!” I watched her race down the street in her little blue Volkswagen bug. After that, everything changed.

   Suddenly, I realized that I loved Robbie. Yet, it was so impossible. He was out of school now, but sometimes we met on the sprawling front steps at the main entrance to the high school. We’d have the sweetest hurried talks-- always on the lookout for my dad’s union friends, who might be watching to see if I was meeting Robbie. My dad had warned me.

   I had lost my sister and Robbie to the adult world; they were in the wind. In my increasing depression, I missed a lot of school. I stayed up late talking to my friends on the phone, and then I slept until noon or two in the afternoon. The principal called me into her office one day. “If you miss any more school, we’re going to ship you to Encil!” she threatened, nasty as could be. But I was a dead girl walking, so her snide remark bounced off my shield of “don’t give a damn anymore.”

   Encil was the high school on the other side of town, near the Naval Air Station, where the poor and military kids went. I went to Allowood, where all the rich kids attended-- on the west side of town.  We all had lots of good money, even checking accounts, to throw away on suede jackets, fur-lined ski parkas, saddle shoes, and the like. We wore expensive gold jewelry and drove fancy cars. I had so many friends, and we all lived the most desperate lives. No one would have guessed, given our brave and serious faces. None of it meant a thing to me. I would have given every cent to have a loving family. In our crowd, it was common to drive multiple cars. When I wasn’t driving either the red 912 Porsche, or the yellow 911 Porsche (before its demise), I raced around in an MGB sports car; it had been custom upholstered just for me in the stars and stripes. Cheerleaders jumped in wearing their lettered gold and cream outfits, and we sped away for hamburgers and fries with our various cliques-- many of those people seemed too phony for words, but maybe we were all terribly lost. I moved around from group to group. In this world, money really does do a lot of talking, but true popularity is about loving others and respecting them. I was an openhearted California girl even when my heart was breaking in so many places.

   There was no way that I was going to be sent to Encil. After that, in writing, I bumped off virtually every member of my family. I wrote note after note in a forgery of my mother’s handwriting, stating, “Please excuse Kathryn for her absence from school yesterday. Her grandmother died and we attended the funeral.” “Please excuse Kathryn. She was absent yesterday because her Uncle Desmond died in a car accident last week and we had the services….” And surprisingly, no one ever challenged all this or required a memorial card.

   Often, my best friend, Tiarra, and I, would show up for our homeroom classes and then take off in our cars for her house or the beach.

   “My dad’s a sonofabitch,” I’d say, drinking a soda, my feet crossed at the end of her sofa, and my slingbacks dangling by the brown leather tops.

   “Yeah well, at least he doesn’t fall asleep with a cigarette in his hand every night,” she’d drawl in exhaustion. Tiarra’s mother had died when Tiarra was eight years old. Her father, who was very old and quite slight in frame, was slowly drinking himself to death, and falling asleep with a lit cigarette pressed between his frail fingers. Tiarra had sliced through almost every piece of carpeting in the downstairs, cutting out the burn marks. She could never fall asleep at night until she had escorted her dad up to his bedroom, but half the time he would insist on nodding off in his kitchen chair until he’d nearly fall off it. The kitchen linoleum had about a hundred burn marks in it, but there was no point in replacing it.

   Tiarra and I used to give each other the best little friendship books and write things like, “to my best friend ever in the entire world-- forever,” and stuff like that. She had gray-green eyes, a perfect figure, and straight brown hair in a stylish cut angled flush at her jaw line. She drove a white Toyota and once had to attend two weeks of driving school for backing up on the freeway when she’d missed her exit. All our mutual friends were so shocked at her erratic driving. However, even after driving school, she still zipped around town at a high rate of speed, as though on a hunt to cause an accident.

   Claire, a tall blond, big-boned friend, whom I hung out with occasionally, was the daughter of our school’s basketball coach. She met me in the hall one day. “Hey, Kathryn, you’re so thin,” she said.

   “Yeah, well.”

   “No really. You’re wasting away.” I saw you out in the yard at gym from English class the other day, and I could hardly believe it was you. “You’re skin and bones!”

   For almost a year, I had been reaching into my father’s top bureau drawer and grabbing amphetamine capsules that he used to keep awake on long truck runs or when he was traveling for Hoffa. They were doubtless purchased illegally, because he threw them in by the handful; I had seen him do it, so I knew he’d never notice the difference, and he never did. I took them so that I could jerk myself awake when I wanted to go to school, where I was barely hanging on academically now. “Well, summer’s almost here,” I told her. “Got to fit into my bikini.” I lived just across the highway from the beach and the huge amusement park that was in the sand there. You could see the rides lit up at night; the Ferris wheel was particularly beautiful. I used to meet guy friends in the surf and hang out with them for a few hours; it was a lot of fun.

   “Listen, Kathryn,” she said, touching my arm warmly, Robbie has asked me out, and I wondered if you would mind if I went on a date with him.”

   “Why should I mind?” I said, but I did care. “Robbie and I have talked. We know it’s over. There’s nothing we can do about it. I respect you for asking me though. Thank you for that, Claire.”

 

***

     

     Sometime during this period, I wrote in my journal the following:

 

 

   We are rich in some things, poor in others. We are at once young and aloof, and old souls. It is a time of rioting and revolution. We glimpse that there may come a day of reckoning and humiliation, that we will have to fight for our sanity. We are naive and trusting; the world may beat this out of us, as it has so many others-- why should we be any different? It may deliver to us more crushing blows and bring us to the brink of disaster. In truth, it will make us eat our own arrogance. But we are not supposed to suspect any of this now. We’re supposed to be spoiled teenagers with angst, thinking that we’ll burst onto the world stage with something new and profound to offer. After all, if not us, then who?

 

***

 

   Bobby Kennedy died tonight. I watched the whole thing on TV right as it happened. I called Tiarra, awakening her at 1:00 O’clock in the morning. She groaned with despair. It is the end of hope.

 

***

         

   In a far flung place called Vietnam, war was burning, but this was rarely discussed in school, except in whispers about how to avoid the draft-- go to college or disappear into Canada-- or go to jail. The wealthiest boys knew of it-- their fathers had warned them that there was talk of the numbers going in for a draft. They had to go to college; they had to get in.     

   Robbie with his dashing smile enlisted in the Army. He wrote to me through a teacher friend of ours, Miss Lacey. “Dear Kathryn, it’s a jungle out here,” he joked from the belly of Vietnam. I heard that he died within his first two weeks in country over there. For days after I received this news, I wept into my pillow until I was numb and slept for long hours in the darkness of my despair.

   Luke, Robbie’s friend, with whom we had attended the senior ball, showed up at my school one day. He still had his thick pompadour of rich brown hair and wore his old senior jacket with the gold letter “A” for football at Allowood High. He was one of those people who are too good-looking to be attractive and always came off as conceited and vain. He handed me a black leather box. “What’s this?” I asked.

   He looked away momentarily and when he turned back, I discerned in his eyes a tenderness that I had never seen in him before. “Robbie would want you to have this.”

   I opened the box. It was Robbie’s school ring with the yellow topaz stone. He had worn it when we went steady. “How’d you get this?” I asked him.

   “What are friends for?” he said.

   The yellow stone glittered in the afternoon sun.

 

                                                        

                             The End