As You Were

When he learns his father is dying, David Tromblay ponders what will become of the monster’s legacy and picks up a pen to set the story straight. As You Were (Dzanc Books) is the result.

Off the Reservation

You could begin this with how Grandpa Bullshit was an arm breaker for the Irish mob in Chicago. Or how the spring of ’68 became the boiling point for the Civil Rights Movement after Dr. Martin Luther King Junior’s murder, shortly after Mom turned eleven. Or how she and all her siblings attended elementary school with the Jackson Five in Gary, Indiana, before they went to Hollywood and the Lynns made their way to the woods in the middle-of-nowhere Minnesota. But it would take too long to give all those details and bring the story back on track. It would be a lot simpler to say how Grandpa Bullshit decided to drive his family here in sixty-eight and did so without making a single pit stop. Instead, he crammed one of those little Porta Potties families take on camping trips into the back of his ’59 Cadillac hearse, along with a couple of suitcases and all six kids. 

Six years later, Mom grew tired of babysitting her little brothers and sisters, so she got knocked up and married to get out of the house. Little did she know she’d have to get notes from her husband to excuse her from school once the morning sickness started, despite his being in the same grade. So she dropped out of high school and got her GED because she’ll be Goddamned.

She got divorced from him before she was old enough to register to vote. Three years after she had your big brother Sam, she has you. She takes a taxicab off the Fond du Lac Indian Reservation twenty-odd miles to St. Luke’s Hospital in the east end of downtown Duluth.

You’ll notice there’s no mention of Dad bringing Mom to the hospital, pacing the hallway outside the delivery room while waiting to hear the news, the proclamation of it, you, being a boy. He is elsewhere—with a prostitute. You’ll have to pause here, collect yourself, choke back the laughter. All you can really do is laugh. Not a ha-ha laugh, but a Jesus-jumped-up-Christ-what-could-come-next? kind of laugh—or bite your cheek, or stall, one way or another, before admitting that last bit of information.

Dad doing that might make sense if you were born after midnight on a Saturday, but you were born at about a quarter to four on a Monday afternoon. The real question is: how long should someone go on thinking that’s the worst thing he did that day? Because he made Mom take care of the hooker’s cat while the hooker served a ninety-day jail sentence. He wasn’t charged with a crime. They let him go, according to your mother. According to his mother, he could high dive into a manure pile and come out smelling like roses. He doesn’t go completely unpunished, however; his only begotten son will not bear his last name. 

Perhaps hooker isn’t the right word for the woman who kept his company the afternoon you came into the world. She didn’t walk the streets or work a corner. Though the apartments above the Lake View Store—the world’s first indoor mall—where she calls home, do double as a brothel of sorts. Curiously enough, the National Register of Historic Places isn’t in the habit of adorning dilapidated shitholes with copper plaques. And to play devil’s advocate: should it be so surprising to learn the building erected to fill every need of everyone working at the steel mill in Morgan Park, Duluth, Minnesota, did, in fact, sell everything?

Morgan Park came to be for the same reason as Hershey, Pennsylvania, except there are no chocolatiers. When it first opened to the public, the Lake View Store housed a bank, a barbershop and beauty salon, a dentist’s office, a grocery market, as well as a shoe store. And if it hosts the world’s oldest profession now, it certainly did a century ago.

That aside, you’re not special. You’re not the only child to come out of Mom’s second marriage. She had twins—not identical twins, but twins nevertheless. You were a dizygotic twin, meaning each fetus had a separate placenta and a separate amniotic sac. But you grow up thinking you’re their only child. That’s because your brother is stillborn, as was your uncle’s twin, as was your great-uncle’s twin—all on Mom’s side, of course.

Maybe it’s genetic, or happenstance, or the scientific hypothetical sum and substance of someone hanging around a bar, begging her husband to come home, striking up a conversation with the bartender when her husband refuses to move a muscle, and eventually marrying said bartender. 

The above is an abridged version of how this happens. How you happen. It’s also from whence the butterfly that peeks out from behind her bra strap came. She got her first and only tattoo one night at a bar while pregnant with the two of you. 

There once was an artist who always carried a tackle box filled with tattoo guns and inks and needles, and who was more than willing to tattoo a tit for free on ladies’ night. This, too, explains why your skin is stained with every color of the rainbow—how tattoos got into your blood before birth—like a crack baby, only the addiction is ink. Mom drank and smoked a bit while pregnant, too. It’s easy enough to imagine her Marlboro Reds and the ladies’ night drink specials played into the loss of your brother’s life. At least, they do in the version she told. But in her defence, the doctors didn’t know it was bad for babies back then—or so she said.

This excerpt from As You Were was reprinted with permission from Dzanc Books. To purchase a copy and/or browse other Dzanc Book titles, click here.

To read more excerpt-articles from Project Jupiter, Mercurius’s ever-growing anthology of indie press titles, click here.