“Want to take a ride?” my mother asks. It’s past eleven, and I’m watching David Letterman on the small TV in my bedroom, the one without a remote. I only finished my homework a few minutes ago, during one of the commercial breaks after tonight’s top-ten list.
We don’t have a destination; the ride itself is the point. We do this from time to time, but we’ve been doing it more often as junior year has progressed.
At midnight every weeknight, the Loop, my mother’s favorite radio station, plays an album from start to finish. Side A, uninterrupted. A brief break while the DJ turns over the vinyl and repositions the pin, tossing out some facts about the record at the same time. Then Side B all the way through. Always a rock classic, something my mother would have listened to when she was my age, when the music was new.
Tonight, it’s Jimi Hendrix. Are You Experienced? The first one. The one with “Purple Haze,” “Hey Joe,” and “The Wind Cries Mary.” It’s going to start soon, but it doesn’t take me long to throw on the jeans I was wearing earlier in the day. The boxers and ratty white t-shirt I changed into for bed will be fine.
I showered and changed for the same reason why I was so late finishing my homework. Earlier tonight, my parents’ other son assaulted my sister again. Her screaming alerted me, and I ran downstairs to find her curled in a ball in something like a fetal position on the vinyl-tiled kitchen floor while he repeatedly kicked her.
He was laughing while he did it. He has always enjoyed his own viciousness.
Both my mother and I had to restrain him so my sister could get away. As usual, I received a series of roundhouse punches in exchange for my efforts, until my mother took the white handset from the kitchen wall and threatened to call the police, and he ran down to what used to be our family room. He has since converted that entire space into his lair, where he watches TV all night, spreads his possessions haphazardly throughout the floor, and turns our comfortable rust-colored couch into a disgusting morass of food and garbage.
My sister is only five at this point. Things like this have already happened to her more times than I can number. They blur together after a while.
We’ve already pulled down the driveway and are passing my elementary school, little more than a block away, by the time the host finishes his introduction and the opening notes of Hendrix’s electric guitar blend into the familiar tune and the full band joins.
Neither of us says much while the record plays. At some points I’m nodding my head in rhythm; at others, I’m keeping the beat with the thumb of my right hand. Though I’m right-handed, I’ve always played air guitar with my left, probably because both my parents are lefties and I’m used to my mother miming during a good solo. It’s particularly fitting for the Hendrix album and our pretending to play along as we pull onto the main road heading south out of Lake County.
I don’t know all the album cuts, but the twenty hits included on the Ultimate Experience CD get regular play on my Aiwa countertop system. The one with the three-disc changer, for which I saved months of babysitting money, my parents making up the difference as a birthday gift the summer before. Several of those songs have appeared on the mixtapes I make with the dual cassette deck, a hobby that fills some of my quiet time.
In the months since I got that CD player, I’ve gradually built an impressive collection. Some of the albums come from mall trips with friends, or from the BMG music subscription that I fulfill and close before it can start sending me unwanted monthly selections. Most of them, however, have come from weekend trips to the Best Buy in a strip mall a few suburbs north of where we live. My mother, my sister, and I make that drive often, and for several reasons. That store has the widest selection of older albums on CD, and the prices are good, but it’s also a smart idea to get out of the house on weekends and leave the violence without a target.
Tonight, my sister is safely asleep, and my father is home from work to keep watch. Tonight, we can drive.
We watch our speed carefully as we drive down Route 43, with the landmark church on one side and its expanse of undeveloped land on the other. We laugh at the lone police car, poorly hidden in a side lane surrounded by uncut grass. In our quiet suburban area, its occupants are waiting for speeding cars or kids out past curfew.
Technically, I’m one of them, but it’s okay. I’m with my mother. The rule only applies if you don’t have a parent with you.
“That’s Side A of Are You Experienced? by the late, great Jimi Hendrix, assisted by Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell,” the DJ cuts in, after thankfully letting the last track end rather than talking over it like his drive-time compatriots. One nice thing about the Loop at midnight is there are no commercials; this interrupting banter comes only because the DJ is physically flipping the well-used vinyl.
We turn around early in Side B, so that our driving route forms something of an extended loop. The only lights out here are from the giant Kraft headquarters I joke about being a future home if I ever make it big as a writer. I love my actual home but am never sure when it’s safe to walk in, whether I or someone I love will be attacked that night. My mother promises endlessly that it’s only until he’s eighteen, and I feel a little guilty that I’m a year and change away from leaving for college, making the problem a remote one for me.
Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of nights at school, doing my homework in the office where I work on the monthly newspaper until the activity bus leaves at half-past six. My grades have gone up since I started doing that last year, and I regret it took so long to realize this was an option.
The three-note riff of “Foxy Lady” breaks my thought pattern as we cross the invisible county line between the other suburbs we’ve driven through and our own town. By the time the last track begins, we’ve pulled into the parking lot at the all-hours grocery store and turned off the engine so only the battery is on. All the other stores in the same mall have gone dark, but the cars of a few employees and fewer shoppers dot the parking lot.
“Want to go shopping?” my mother asks when the DJ interrupts the appropriate pause at the end of the album. Of course, she knows the answer, and we take a leisurely trip through the aisles.
We pick a few items we’ve never tried, or that are recommended by the friendly cashier we usually see on these late-night trips. With so few windows during the week, this is often how we get our groceries, spending an hour filling up the cart and talking about the album we just experienced. It’s also how we find time to talk about life and the future, how I’m doing in school and what my friends and I did last weekend. We avoid only one subject, as this is a welcome break from it.
I don’t know it yet, but years from now, my mother won’t talk to me anymore. The monster will learn that attacking my mother or sister carries punishments, but not attacking me. One day, he will nearly kill me, when I interrupt his choking my mother with a phone cord. The police will come and take him, but he’ll be back the next day. My mother can’t protect me any more than she can protect herself.
Worse, she’ll repress the memories of his consistent violence, letting him literally beat her into submission. We’ll talk about it less and less, until we only really talk about music or movies, until one day I find my calls and messages simply go unreturned. Eventually, I’ll stop trying, though I’ll never really know why my mother stopped valuing me. What I know is that right now, at this point in time, I feel truly my mother’s son as we drive back, the windows cracked so we can catch a little night breeze without the music we’re blasting disturbing the neighbors.
Jeff Fleischer is a Chicago-based author, journalist and editor. His fiction has appeared in more than sixty publications including the Chicago Tribune’s Printers Row Journal, Shenandoah, the Saturday Evening Post and So It Goes by the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library. He is also the author of non-fiction books including Votes of Confidence: A Young Person’s Guide to American Elections (Zest Books, 2016 and 2020), Rockin’ the Boat: 50 Iconic Revolutionaries (Zest Books, 2015), The Latest Craze: A Short History of Mass Hysterias (Fall River Press, 2011), and the upcoming A Hot Mess: How the Climate Crisis is Changing Our World (Zest Books, 2021).
Dipti B is an artist (kind of) whose artwork and prose have been appeared on both digital and print magazines, Beyond Words literary magazine, Polemicalzine and Journal of Expressive Writing. She is from Nepal. She likes to try new art styles and medium but she is mainly focused on talking about mental illness and violence against women through her artworks.