At 13

1984


It’s summertime and I’ve taken a minimum-wage job at Cherry Hill High School West, as a maintenance man, or in my case, maintenance boy. I’m still too young to have any kind of real job, but because my family is poor, I qualified for the Summer Youth Program. If you’re at least twelve years old and come from a low-income household, you can sign up and be placed in a job for the summer. I did enjoy my years as a paper boy, but the ten or fifteen dollars a week that I earned didn’t get me much other than some comic books and a few hours at the local arcade. I now make about three dollars an hour, and I’m happy to earn that much. Soon, I’ll be rolling in cash.

The school employs five kids from the program, and the regular maintenance men are thrilled, because we do all of their work for them. Most of the maintenance men are older black men, and during the school year they work their asses off, so when summer rolls around and the kids show up, life is good for them. We paint and sweep and mop and carry and mow; we are worked hard, while the old maintenance men laugh and sip tea while "supervising" us kids. It’s hard work, but I like the job. I like working. I feel grown up. The old guys are nice to me. They say I’m a decent worker and not half bad for a white boy. They call me Skinny White Boy. As in, "Hey, Skinny White Boy, we gonna need you to paint the bathrooms today, and if you see any shit that missed the toilet, well, we figure you should go about cleaning that up, too."

The maintenance men can’t believe that I was born in Camden, that I actually lived there for the first five years of my life. "You must’ve been the last white boy left in all of Camden," they say. "Nah," I say, "my older brothers are white, too, and I think there was one other white kid, or maybe he was Asian. I forget." The maintenance men laugh at my stories, and most of the time I can’t figure out why they’re laughing. I think they see me as their mascot. Doesn’t matter to me. As long as I’m getting paid, all is well.

It’s near the end of summer, and I’ve painted almost the entire school. The job is coming to an end, and that makes me sad. But soon I’ll be old enough to have a real job, not just the seasonal kind they give to poor people because the government feels sorry for them. Some of the kids who work with me have to give most of their money to their moms or dads, because they’re so poor they can barely afford food. Mom lets me keep all of my money, which is nice. I guess we’re only mildly poor.

We’re living in a rented house; well, a rented part of a house. It’s sort of like a garage that’s been turned into a miniature home for very small people or full-size people with very small bank accounts. Our new sliver of a house is infested with cockroaches, of course. We’ve had bugs for so long now that I almost feel like they’re a part of family. Our pets. Our really, really fucking disgusting, diseased pets.

I’m riding my bike home from work, sweating under the hot August sun. I turn the corner and notice that my mother is sitting on the porch with a man. A stranger. They’re both smiling and laughing, but in an uncomfortable sort of way, as if laughing is the only thing they could think to do to break the tension. Mom has that unstable kind of smile that people get when they’re trying not to cry. I hop off of my bicycle and walk it slowly up to the house. My stomach begins to hurt, as if someone stuck a long needle into my bellybutton when I wasn’t looking. The man looks like me. An older, less cute version of me. Blue eyes. Thinning, wavy blonde hair. Pale skin. Even though I haven’t seen him in years, since I was a small child, I know who this man is. He’s my father. Big Erv. The man I was named after. The man who owes my mother thousands of dollars in back child support. I haven’t thought about him in years. No reason to. Nothing about him is worth the time or energy it would take to think.

Mom points to him and says, "Look, Ervin, it’s your father," as if he were a major prize that I had just won.

They’re sipping iced tea and smoking cigarettes, seated around a small white plastic table. Mom smells like hamburgers. Dad smells like grease.

I decide quickly that I’d rather not speak to him, so I carry my bike up the steps and walk into the house without saying anything to my dear old dad. I decide to hide in my room until he’s gone. I turn the stereo’s volume up loud, pop in a cassette tape, push ‘play,’ then spread out on my bed as the sounds of Prince’s Purple Rain fill the room.

A half-hour later, Mom knocks on the door and shouts, "Ervin, that was very rude. Why didn’t you say anything to your father? He wanted to see you. Ah, well, He said he’ll come back soon. If he does come back, please talk to him. He is your father, whether you want him to be or not. He’s not a bad person. He’s just...I don’t know."

I know that he will never come back. I know I’ll never see my father again, and all I can think is Good.

I suppose I could say more about Dad, but why bother?