The 1991 Chevrolet Silverado

• Dads truck. The precarious nature of moving cabinets in it.

• Dads truck. How I saw it spy on us in the middle of the night

Living alone with my Mom as a roommate was alright looking back at it. She tried to make a living as a nail tech and for a while did okay with it. It was the first time I ever experienced cable television. I remember sitting alone in the apartment the summer my parents separated, just leaving the pay-per-view preview channel on repeat as it showed trailers to Dazed and Confused and The Piano. I never called the 1-800 number to watch the movies, I just left it on repeat.

Soon after my brother was released from jaill, he came to stay with us that summer. Mom would be out and my brothers friends would be hanging around getting high on the back porch. I remember one of them with an aggressive skinhead vibe, who would act like he was going to beat me to death, whipping out a spring loaded baton with authority, you know, as a goof. They had a super secret project going on, they were making a four-way bong in the shop and brought it to mom's to hide. I knew it was from the shop because of the materials used, namely the ¾ white melamine particle board exterior cladding.

Those weeks my brother came in late and would be my roommate. He would come in wasted and smoke Marlboro reds in front of the television, clouding the room as I slept. The moments I would confront him about it would escalate quickly. I lost an urge to talk to him at that point and that lasts to this day. When Mom the bong in the closet she kicked him out of her house and he moved on down the road to dad's apartment.

About the time my brother went to jail, I started the 7th grade. One day my dad pulled up in a brand new 1993 Chevrolet Silverado. It was brand new with a gleaming cobalt blue paint job. The interior had this lovely blue carpet that matched the exterior paint exactly, and the bench seat was upholstered in this woven muted teal blue fabric. I hadn't seen dad in months after the incident where they wanted me to move in with him. This time, he was clean shaven. He had lost a few pounds and looked a little leaner.

Agh, son, you smell like shit.

What are you talking about, I took a shower and did my laundry this morning?

You smell like a, ashtray boy. Are you smoking.

No, I live with two that are.

He would make fun of my physical appearance at the time. He would do that in the trailer also. In the trailer he would regularly bust through the paper thin bathroom door on the phone and laugh at me while on the toilet without a shirt on.

Heh Heh Heh, You gotta be looking at what I am.

I had put on weight at that time. I knew nothing of diet. I just ate what was around. Looking back, I imagine that 7th grade is one of those times that body changes do happen. It just doesn't help much that both parents were punching down to mask their own insecurities. They were into their 40s and were service workers for the burgenouining mcmansion class in town. I figure they punched down on me to hide their own fears. These were learning experiences for me to keep my mouth shut and not say what I was thinking. Whenever I did, they overreacted. Enabling selfish behavior seemed like the best course of action during this period of time. I learned how to ask questions in a way that entitled their behavior. The way I looked at it, if I did that, they wouldn't attack me and would leave me alone.

Dad would inch back into my life and pick me up in the new blue truck. Whenever I said that I wanted to go to college, he asked how would I pay for it. I said a student loan, he said, boy, you got your life to live and your own problems to live down. He had piercing moments of clarity in the sea of his impulsive decision making.

I would see the vehicle around town when I was riding my bike and the gleaming man that was driving it. It had a twitchy manner about it as it rode down streets, as if it was driving 10 mph too fast over bumps in the road, and before squealing to an abrupt stop at a redlight. As Dad picked me up in the mornings for school or take me out to get lunch he would regularly criticize others:
Move your fat ass!! To a woman trying to walk into a store from the parking lot.

He was quick to judge, so was my mom. I always kept my mouth shut. Dad talked about the diet he was on, a fat free diet. Boy you're so fat because you are eating fat. His apartment was spartan, he cooked the most terribly bland food -- vegetables and skinless chicken without any oil in the pan. All his snack treats were fat free varieties. Though, by his logic, bread didn't have much fat, nor soda, so those foods were ok to eat. I followed suit. I ate what he ate and nothing happened, so I was afraid to eat anything. One Christmas a half brother came over that I almost never saw. Ass a present he got me a VHS cassette called "Lee Haney's Mr Olympia Workout". It had over 70 minutes of raw power. I started working out at the gym that my dad went to, and which provided a space for me to figure out alone what to do. I got pretty into it. I lost a lot of the weight. I had a setback when my lack of eating had me pass out doing dumbbell incline presses.

I noticed how dad overdid it on the treadmill. Before he seperated from my mom, he was pushing 250 lbs, carrying most of it in his gut, with normal sized arms and legs. He would pound the fuck out of that treadmill for more than an hour at a time in a pair of shitty 15 dollar walmart gym shoes. Not long after that, I found out one day that he tore his right knee badly on the treadmill, halting the persona of my dad as Jack Lalanne, fitness infomercial guy. He lived with the knee the way it was rather than fixing it, probably because he didn't have health insurance or wasn't able to take the time off to deal with the surgery.

I saw the midnight blue Marauder everywhere, even snaking the apartment complex parking lot at night. I could see it slowly circle through the blinds. Sometimes the phone would ring 3 or 4 times, either stopping with the truck leaving or the phone getting picked up by my mom in the other room to the hushed sounds of argument, of pleading to the person on the other end of the line to leave her alone. The truck circled to check in, much in the same way that my dad saw himself in those days, as a mover and a shaker. I witnessed this as he did the "running" -- as he called it -- for his men in the construction business. With a limp, he would run through the jobs and argue and fight as multiple teams would install the interior millwork of 7000 square foot McMansions. The truck would move in a feedback loop around town, and my mom was just another stop on the route, to check in, making sure she wasn't with another man.

My mom tried to date in secret. I didn't ask many questions. The first guy she introduced me to was over dinner at a Black Eyed Pea. He was a slicked back guy with white hair, clean shaven. Polo shirt tucked in and khakis. He ordered for us, I didn't even open my mouth to what I wanted. He asked me what I wanted to be. I said I don't know. You gotta get a spark boy. Shortly after that date, Mom asked me what I thought. I said I didn't like him. I didn't see that guy again.

Another guy I remember I met the first time when I was brought along on a group date at a restaurant bar at a golf club. My mom and her real estate friends, all freshly divorced, on a group date in cocktail dresses. The guy my mom was with had a degree of calmness, quietness, and confidence. The other ladies picked at him and he quietly kept his cool. My mom afterward asked what I thought about him, I said he seemed cool. He never tried to tell me what to do, he just tried to be there for me. Tom was a balancing force for me and luckily stuck around for a while. I would see the marauding blue truck in the parking lot when Tom was over watching rockets games with me. Mom must have also. Holidays were awful. With Mom making up a fake itinerary of where we were going and who we were spending them with. She asked me to repeat back to her our plans. I would. Then she said if Dad asks, this is what we were doing. Dont tell Dad about Tom. I never did.

The blue Marauder became aged, dinged and pockmarked running construction sites.

Over summers, I was going back to work with my dad and assumed the job as a delivery driver and gopher. Sometimes Dad would come along to give instructions, sometimes not. On usual mornings, we would stack assembled melamine cabinet boxes into the 4x8 truck bed like tetris blocks that would tower above the cab like a high rise office tower. This process usually took about an hour.

When completed, a large run of ropes wrapped the melamine tower and were tied together with a jumbled maze of knots. After a clearing to go, I would set off with the tower of cabinets clunking along in the back. It was always customary to stack the cabinets box fronts face to face to limit damage to the front edgebanding. The truck seats by this point were coffee stained, and if you slapped the bench seat, a plume of fine sawdust would eject from the upholstery like a fine khaki colored cloud. It would stick on your body in summertime sweat, forcing you to scrub it off you at the end of the day. Some projects called for different varieties of wood. Some you would be allergic to and some not. It was the color and the smell that struck me. The smell would never leave your nose and reminded you of a specific vibratic numbing to the body. The shop machinery in continuous operation, whirring at over 100 decibels. The near constant yelling over the machinery and each other. The clients who all wanted one thing and then changed their minds and wanted something else on a whim. The smell and the color of sawdust will always bring me back to how the body felt numb. The blue lost its brilliance. It became faded in the plume when it settled, somehow losing its control in the chaos.

The accelerator of the Silverado was absolutely tactless. It was stiff and sticky. Any application of force to the gas pedal would shoot the truck abruptly forward. The brakes were just as unresponsive. You would have to press the pedal a significant distance to the floorboard. When you got the pedal to the floor, it wouldn't gently decelerate. The brakes would lock up and squeal to a stop. The cabinets in the commute out to the job would rock back and forth, sometimes with great ferocity, although nothing ever ejected from the bed into oncoming traffic. An iron and spare edgebanding would be around on the job to fix all the problems that came up in transportation.

I remember about that time that when I rode around with Dad, he talked a few times about Ron Stone's show, "The Eyes of Texas". It had been a mainstay on local programming since the 1960's. Some of the first memories of his media work when I was 4 or 5 in McDonald's happy meals. Ron Stone had this book of wonders of Texas, like the Alamo and Big Bend included as a gift in the happy meals. He'd always speak like a cowboy about those things. Like he knew about them and been there multiple times. As the only times we ever went outside of a small business routine on something like a road trip, it was usually east to Mississippi to see dying or ailing family members. On the way back into Texas, there would be this sign that would say 5 miles to Orange, 867 miles to El Paso. I would say in the back of the car, wow can we drive to El Paso. He'd look at the sign and say, nah son, maybe someday though. That's longer than the trip to Mississippi. About this time in the truck he would bring up Ron Stone's show and how he wanted to go, but his knee hurt and he had too much to do with his work. It was a good time for him as he was taking part in the mid-90s McMansion boom. I'd say, I want to go, to which he just kept saying, I can't go, I have to work.

He was dating a woman about that time and kept himself together. I saw her once or twice but didn't get too involved or hang out with Dad much past work; he would usually be out after work country western dancing and I went home and had my hidden family life with Mom and Tom. One day Dad resigned from his relationship, saying that I didn't approve of it. It was strange because it was a unilateral statement. We never had any conversation about it and I think it was his convenient way of ending it. He was telling himself whatever he needed to tell himself.