Brian Mihok

I'm 1994. It's the year mostly responsible for me. Me in the infrastructure sense. Responsible like rebar is responsible for the stability of a concrete porch. The inner part, so that if you took it away I wouldn't be me anymore. It's like my own big bang.

In 1993 we moved from New Jersey to the Tampa area. My two younger brothers and I liked to wrestle my parents on the living room floor of our new house. My uncle's house. My father would play dead or injured and then come to life to attack us and we would laugh. We lived a couple blocks from Taco Bell and one time by brothers and I got twenty dollars and bought as many tacos as twenty dollars could buy. Turns out in the early 90's twenty dollars could buy an awful lot of tacos. It was like a taco lottery on our tray.



 

One night my father became ill. I heard him throwing up in the bathroom, which was adjacent to my bedroom. He ran the faucet the entire time and I thought it was to muffle the sound of his heaves so he didn't wake us.



 

We started getting little paper dollars in the mail. They came in perforated books and my mother said they were only good for food. My father was not feeling well enough to have a job and my mother hadn't worked since I was born, so she got a job at the Elk's Club where banshees screamed at her to bring them more coffee. When she got home her feet were all blistered. Also the $2.83 an hour wasn't enough.

Later that year my uncle wanted his house back because he was retiring. I have to live in my house, I heard him say to my parents after my brothers and I were sent to our rooms. I remember wanting New Jersey back. I wanted the friends and family we hadn't seen all year. The excitement of this new state had worn off like a weak perfume, but instead of New Jersey we moved just north to a town called Hudson.

Up until moving to Florida, to my father getting sick, to scrounging for thirty-five cents in gas money, I had seen the image of my family in all the families on television and in books and magazines. We looked different now though. Or maybe it was the world that was different. Or just me. I stopped thinking in terms of happy endings. I let the difficult feelings wash over me like I was investigating them. In some way I welcomed them because they made me feel like a grown up. Still, I could have done without seeing my father sick or my mother falling apart because of it. There was a chocolate cake for my thirteenth birthday and I wished some things would go away but readied myself for them to stick around.
 

My father pulled us into a complex of three streets: Awl, Ball, and Call Courts. Hudson Hills Manor the sign said. My parents called it the Hud. The complex was made of townhouses, four to a building. We had a two-story on Ball Court.

Next to our place was another family. A kind of bizarro version of us. Their mother was like our mother only something important was different and we couldn't figure out what. Her name was even Susan too. Bizarro Susan had three girls our age and was married to a man named Ron who was kind and bumbling. Ron also had a nice little boy named Ronnie. We always felt bad for Ronnie. He seemed like the runt of a doomed litter.

Next to them, at one end of the building, was Rob, Candy and their two infants. Rob had served in the Gulf War and was some kind of chess master. He liked to beat us at Madden and Castle Risk and flail his arms dancing around as if a man defeating children at children's games was important. Candy went to stay with her mother a lot. On the other end of the building was Luke, who we called Joo Joo Bean, and his mother.

 

Joo Joo Bean was 17 already and Graig was only 12. Little Mihok they called him sometimes because I'm the oldest. Mostly just Mihok. Hey Mihok let's play basketball. Hey Mihok let's play Dungeons and Dragons. Hey Mihok let's go to the Rec. Why do you call him that horrible name Joo Joo Bean's mother asked once.

 

At night it seemed like the entire complex played Manhunt. Manhunt was really just hide and seek in the dark. We ran until the humid night was on top of us like a sandbag. We drank sugar and laughed and captured flags. The Hud Pud, the other kids said. That's what we call this place.

 

Rent was assessed based on your income. Our rent was $30. We ate spaghetti for a month once. I loved it for about two weeks.

 

My father turned on the faucet when he threw up because he had been throwing up for several nights and he grew tired of bending over the toilet, but because it was blood that was mostly coming up he didn't want to stain the sink.

 

Bizarro Susan's husband Ron disappeared one day. We didn't put it together at first that the man sitting in the old pickup out front day after day had anything to do with it. He parked and sat there drinking coffee, not talking to anyone. A couple hours would pass and then he left. Next day the same. Next day too. Then he stopped showing up. Eventually we heard Ron had been picked up by a different bounty hunter altogether.

 

Erin and Javen looked like two ghosts. Their mother kept their house dark, the windows blackened with trash bags. It seemed to suck the pigment right out of their skin because Erin and Javen walked around the Hud Pud in their long dark clothing, speaking mostly of The Monkees, looking like albinos with colored hair. Their voices were like down pillows and they had pleasant giggles. My mother always invited them in because she thought they were sweet.

 

 

Easter of 1994 was probably like Easter of 1993 for the Hud Pud until it was ruined. Missy lived across from us and was having an Easter party, coloring eggs, doing Easter things. We didn't like Missy much but didn't have good reasons other than she was too loud. She had a three-year-old named Drew and a boyfriend who didn't speak much but he had a car that was a hot rod under the hood and a beater
everywhere else. Drew climbed into the boyfriend's car when no one was looking and pulled the gear shift down, which made the car jolt forward, crashing into the house. A woman, one of Missy's friends, got hit and was pinned up against the building. She and the baby in her stomach got crushed. Reporters showed up the next day to interview anyone willing to talk. The news called the little boy Deadly Drew and in the middle of a live report, Missy stormed out of her house and chased a reporter right down the street, shouting and cursing. We pendulumed back and forth between the live feed on the screen and the chase unfolding right outside our door as if in that moment we realized most of what they called news was really just somebody else's heartbreak.

 

 

One time Erin and Javen put their pet bird into a microwave and watched it cook.

 

 

My eighth grade art teacher told us about a summer program at a nearby vocational school. You get to learn something important and they'll pay you, she told us. Getting paid sounded like going to Mars so I applied and felt lucky to be accepted. My brothers and I were in New Jersey for the summer to visit our grandparents, so I had to come back early to attend. Dad's not at home, my mother said as she
drove me home from the airport. Then she said he was in jail. That the judge had ordered him to pay fees for having driven drunk. My father told the judge the fees weren't a problem even though they were. A deadline passed and the judge ordered a 30 day sentence.

It didn't feel like he was in jail. I didn't even know where the jail was. I convinced myself it was not too big a deal. My mother was not eating very much and I figured she was stressed out. One day she asked if I wanted to go with her to the little store, as we called it, which was a convenient mart down the road. The day sweltered and so much light shined through the windows it looked like the glass itself was yellow. I was watching the British version of Who's Line Is It Anyway? My mother was gathering her purse at the table when she yelped. I thought she said ow so I turned expecting to see her consoling a thumb pricked by something sharp. Instead she fell straight back almost hitting her head on the corner of the wall. I ran to her to see she was convulsing. I had never called 911 before but this seemed like the perfect time. The operator took the details and I tried to sound distraught because I figured that's how they wanted me to sound. As though this would make them take me seriously.

An ambulance pulled into the lot and they helped her up. One of the paramedics went through her purse finding a small mirror and asked, what's this for buddy? It's just a mirror. No drugs, I said. He dropped it back in and lost interest. They took her to the hospital and I stayed home. That night Bizarro Susan came over having heard the news. She was kind enough to bring over some lasagna. When she left I ate some but it was disgusting. I threw it out and made a box of macaroni and cheese. Eventually my other grandparents, different ones who lived in Florida, found out and picked me up so I could stay with them until my mother was out of the hospital. They asked why I didn't call them the night it happened. I said I didn't know, but really I didn't call because it was my home. It wasn't their white house with its white walls that we weren't supposed to touch. It wasn't some bizarro house with a bizarro family that ate bad food. It wasn't a hotel and it wasn't strange. It was home and I figured that's where I would miss my family the best, the place they would return.

 

 

Rodney was a big man who lived with his wife Mona. Rodney could throw knuckleballs and screwballs and had a loud jolly laugh. He busted in the back door once and told my mother that she didn't see him. He peaked out the window for a while and then ran out. My mom pulled my youngest brother close and locked the door.

 

My parents were very good at misunderstanding each other and falling into the trap of yelling for hours. Sometimes I sat on the swings out back in the big grass field while they argued, hoping a girl would come sit next to me.

 

Johnny Fix-It, the Hud Pud's handy man, stole my big plastic D.A.R.E. mug that I had been awarded during my mandatory enrollment in D.A.R.E. in 5th grade. One time my parents went over to Johnny's house because he was from New York and they knew all the same places up north. My mother said they had a nice enough time but Johnny and his wife did a lot of cocaine.

 

There were a lot of phone calls my parents took for a couple weeks. A supposed job for my father. A place to live. We crowded our little Escort full of stuff about a hundred times to get it all over to the single-wide at the other end of town. I wanted to be a man so I carried out my brother's television and got it in the hatchback myself. Realizing nothing else would fit I slammed the door down. The glass hit
a corner of the television and exploded. I stared at the glass shards on the ground at my feet, the sound of shattering ringing in my ears. I almost laughed, not because I was happy but because it was like some perfect punctuation for our time in the Hud Pud. My mom came out and looked at the glass and then at me and I must have had some long face because she patted me on the back and said it was all right even though it wasn't because they didn't have the money to fix it.

The new place was smaller and felt like it was made of cardboard but my brothers and I didn't mind. We knew what it meant. What the Hud Pud had meant. For me it was a point of no return. Maybe because it was all happening as I was hitting puberty, or maybe because time can feel like it goes back and forth, getting jumbled up with love and fear and memory. I came out of the Hud Pud with a knowledge of feeling. A way to detect the ax falling. Also to know what to do when it falls because it's going to fall. I learned what scientists mean when they say the universe is moving away from itself at all times. I imagine that if you could survive going through a singularity, you'd be changed too much to be you anymore.

I never wish we didn't move to the Hud Pud because my whole path to college, to California, to grad school in Massachusetts, to Buffalo, to these very words I write to you, feels like a straight line. On a straight line there's no other way to get from beginning to end. There's a creation point and the way it went. This is what brought me here. This is how I will continue to arrive.