Motherfucker – Dustin Cole
December 14, 2022
I haven’t always been a motherfucker. I haven’t always been well-spoken either. Things happen. When they happen you change. It isn’t a change for the better or the worse but only change. We can’t help that. We slide out the pussy kicking and screaming on Day One and that’s when the changing starts.
My dream was to play pro hockey. I didn’t have the speed or the size but that didn’t stop me from dreaming. It was my father’s dream for me and I dreamt right along with him. I was never even close to top five on any of the teams I played for. But I still dreamt about playing in the NHL, making seven figures a year with a hot wife, a fast car and a big house. It was all blood coins on white ice and vague glory, deafening crowds in primetime barns in the mind of a thirteen year old who didn’t know enough to know better, to know what was realistic. I was no Mark Messier. I was no Steve Yzerman. I was never going to make The Show. My dad used to call me Petr Klíma because he said I coasted when I didn’t have the puck. None of it was real.
Real was how certain teammates and junior coaches teased me about my mother. She was and still is attractive and this fact led to comments about what they would like to do to her in bed. I watched porn too. I got horny. I knew what images and desires they called to mind. But none of this made sense with my mother as the subject. That didn’t stop them, and it didn’t stop the others from joining in or awkwardly giggling. Most painful was the look of sympathy on some of their faces, those who were embarrassed not for me but with me. I didn’t say much. I just took it.
I started resenting my mother. She was highstrung but she would do anything for me. If I told her what my teammates said she would have confronted them and she would have informed the coach. I’d be classified a narc. So I kept it to myself and resented my mother. I hated her for being pretty.
*
Dag the Norwegian skate sharpener worked for the Town and conducted his winter side hustle in the stall beside the arena concession, from which he leered at all the hockey moms. His eyes were bile green. His face was all angles and planes like some hatchet job. He did a perfect job on our skates.
My mom was no different. He’d ask her how my skates were doing. He’d say her name, Gale, like it meant something else, something more. My skates were always dull from our Sunday session at the outdoor rink and I begrudged the money she gave me to sharpen them.
We’d watch Dag at his Blademaster, every so often glancing up through the sparks, scoping out my mother’s tits through her ski jacket. My mom would offer me additional cash so I could buy a juice or a chocolate milk at the concession. I’d snatch it out of her hand and leave the two of them alone.
When the skates were done I’d pay Dag with my mother’s money.
At first it was fine in the dressing room, before the real cocksuckers arrived—Justin Hart and Dave Lalonde and our star centerman Tim Pratt, then our junior coach Travis Braun, who always came later because he didn’t need to wear all the equipment. Coach August, or Augy, laced up for practices in the penalty box. We never saw him in the dressing room unless it was right before a game or between periods. He was very hands-off in the dressing room.
One evening stands out in particular.
“I’d eat your mom’s pussy for an hour straight, without a snorkel,” Justin said, pulling on his cup over sullied white boxers as the laughter began to circle.
Then Dave took over. “She’s got the nicest rack, Merrick, your mom is so hot. When does your dad go away for work? I’m gonna come over and take a hot shower with her,” he said, shirtless. He had a tribal tattoo on his bicep that went only two-thirds of the way around.
My nose started to bleed. I stood in my skates on the black rubber floor with my head back and a paper towel screwed up my nostril and everybody asking me why my nose was bleeding.
“My nose bleeds easy,” I said, throat full of blood.
“Your mom bleeds easy,” Tim said, which got fewer laughs. The dressing room chatter tapered, the door piston yawned and Travis swaggered in with a Skoal pouch inflating his bottom lip. Justin, Dave and Tim were already warmed up. By that time they’d been giving it to me for fifteen minutes straight.
“We’re just talking about Merrick’s mom,” Dave informed Travis.
“I’d fuck your mom five ways to Sunday. That shit wouldn’t even be funny,” Travis said, spat and hit the garbage can at a distance. “I’d be giving it to her from behind, playin with her tits with one hand and her clit with the other. She’d lose her mind. She’d divorce your dad after she slept with me.”
The dressing room percolated with more laughter. We knew Travis had a multitude of lines and depraved imaginary scenarios. He winked at me like the sexual predator he was, is, and I don’t know. I had to sneeze. When I did a blood clot the size of a slough leach ejected from my nose, quivered through the air and landed on the side of Travis’s face and my nose started bleeding all over again.
*
After practice I always showered at home because I wasn’t hairy yet and my dick didn’t look that big. With headphones on and the volume up I would lay in clean sheets and stare out my window at the northern lights undulating like phosphorescent silk. I didn’t have a lot of actual heavy music. I didn’t have Mayhem but I had Sepultura’s Beneath the Remains. I imagined lacing up my sharpened skates, standing, taking up my stick, walking across the dressing room to Travis and crosschecking him in the throat. I pictured him writhing on the floor and me stomping his face with one of my CCM Tacks, cleaving the skin and bone, slicing his eyes open, until I shuddered from clenched jaw tension and snapped out of this homicidal revery. The side of the cassette would end, I’d slip off my headphones, hear a show my dad watched bleed through the wall, and remain there, sometimes fondling myself, looking out the window as the last shred of aurora thinned and faded.
*
I graduated high school with a B average in 1998, quit hockey and went straight into hauling mud. At first I didn’t have my Class One so I started off swamping—lifting hundred pound bags of bentonite, barium sulfate, calcium carbonate and hematite onto pallets, then loading the pallets onto a flatbed with a forklift, strapping down the load, chaining up if need be and handbombing the cargo off the flatbed at the drill rig location. That’s when I got strong. In the unheated quonset winter mornings I’d toil in extreme cold. I’d move fast to say warm as carcinogenic dust sparkled in the forklift’s headlamps.
In my nineteenth year I picked up the habit of weekend beer drinking. If I wasn’t working late I’d call up my buddies Greg and Kalum and we’d pre-drink, then get a taxi to The Frontier. When I drank I became mean-spirited both verbally and physically. It was standard for me to scrap at the bar. The night I’m thinking of was no different except Justin and Dave were there with their girlfriends, Karla and Mandy respectively, who I saw dancing to Puff Daddy’s ‘Been Around the World’ when Justin and Dave were at the bar waiting for shots.
Greg and Kalum were over playing pool by the VLTs so I got right in there. Karla will only ever be a stuck up banker’s daughter but Mandy was into it. I looked at their boyfriends in the mirror along the back of the neoclassical bar, Dave’s face framed in faux marble. I’d heard tell of but not seen his new braces. His teeth looked like the squares in the disco ball. Right around Biggie’s part they returned to the dancefloor.
“Take a hike Merrick,” Justin said, cut in.
I turned to Dave. “That’s some serious hardware up in that filthy mouth of yours.”
Mandy laughed.
“Don’t you got Bible study little bitch!” Dave screeched. One of his elastics snapped. He tried unhooking it off some clamp in his mouth.
“I’m exactly where I need to be, dancing with Mandy, you watching.” I motioned for him to sit at one of the low tables around the dancefloor, smiled at Mandy, who wore a lowcut tank top, red. Her cleavage looked impeccable. She had a beauty mark on her left cheek bone, had cut her hair short and dyed it burgundy.
“Get. Lost. Motherfucker.” Dave wasn’t kidding. Either was I.
“Them braces must add ten pounds to your pan face you slush brained pig fucker.” Then I belched in his face.
I’ve been punched in the head many a time and this time was no different. That flash behind the eyes, that clang in the skull like a flesh bell. If it doesn’t knock you down it’s go time.
Me and Dave went shot for shot, Tie Domi-Bob Probert style, until he slipped on our spilt drinks and I kneed him in the mouth. The blood started gushing. Up in the DJ booth the DJ was doing some kind of semaphor at the bartenders, trying to get their attention so they could get the bouncer’s attention. Then I went down. We grappled on the dancefloor in Dave’s blood. I got loose and to my feet and dragged him by the hair towards the door, wasn’t looking up, shouldered that miserable heavyduty mechanic Jovan in the chest and dumped his drink. That’s how it kicked off. Jovan one-punched me. Greg threw the cue ball at Jovan, missed, hit this milf Suzanne Robak in the nose. She was always so pretty. That cue ball got to her face before time could. The DJ cut the music. When my vision stabilized I saw the blizzard of fists, heard the ribald din quiet to a hush. Then it was only the dull thud of bone on bone. That’s when someone chaired me.
*
I woke up in the drunk tank handcuffed to the bed still drunk, a sticky gash above my ear. Across the cell an old wino slept soundly in his vomit and shit.
I passed out again and dreamt I was trying to have sex with my mother. She wasn’t mean telling me no when I tried to suck on her nipples. It’s hard to explain. I wasn’t ashamed or embarrassed in the dream but I was embarrassed as I dreamt it, if that makes sense.
The mountie uncuffed me. I woke with a paper cup of instant in my face, head like a detonated nuke and feeling a great resentment towards my mother. The wino sobbed in his sleep, dreaming something of his own.
*
On a Friday night the following summer my dad took us out for supper at the Four Winds. My mom was wearing a light dress she had to hold down walking by the lobby fan. We made our way through the dining room as a table of truck drivers gawked at her and nodded their collective approval to one another.
“Why don’t you put on some clothes,” I told her.
“Could you be nice to me for once?”
“You’re half naked.”
“That’s enough,” my dad said.
Our server Esther Weissmann was a Holocaust survivor. As a little girl she’d been interned at Buchenwald with her family. She had the number tattooed on her forearm and an eastern European accent. Her pinky toe jutted from a hole in her shoe. When she was getting our drinks my mom started kidding around.
“What’s your soup special, Esther? Toe-mato? Hmm, no thanks.”
We laughed. She does have a good sense of humor.
Esther took our orders. Me and my dad got the steak sandwich that came with garlic toast and a caesar salad. My mom ordered the mushroom cream linguini and my brother Kader ordered a cheese burger and fries, as per usual, his go-to.
Then my parents got to talking about a construction loan, borrowing against the equity on their split-level so they could buy a semi-rural lot and build a much larger house. They talked blueprints, general contractors and sub-trades, building durations, the option to sell first and rent something while they built, to avoid the sky high interest rate on a bridge loan.
I tried to follow along. Kader never paid attention, though. He stared at the neon ad clock flipping through companies—Gertzen Transport, Triple K Well Servicing, Syncro-Tek Downhole Tools—or he’d look out the window at the evening sky changing color. My brother was always in his own mind. He became a painter, not a house painter, a picture painter. Now he lives summers in Berlin and winters in Mexico City. He’s always in New York, New York. I knew he’d do something with it. One time I walked by his bedroom and he had a painting going, a photographic scene of the annual demolition derby. I was honestly impressed by all that chaos frozen in time, in perfect harmony, him looking over his shoulder at me, something different in his eye.
*
Me and Kalum used to get together Sundays in the fall and go hunting. Ivo Bos, an old Dutch farmer our dads knew, would let us shoot on his land, a quarter section forty five minutes south of town, edged by the Peace River on its northfacing side. Apart from the many acres of arable field, there were countless meadows, cutlines, coolies and isolated stands of poplar, spruce and pine in which to try and fill the freezer.
Idling in my pickup or his pickup down rutted backroads hardened by the season’s cooling air, music low, light beer in the cupholders, we’d look into the strobing trees, their boughs empty and the ground layered with yellow and orange fallen leaves.
On the day I’m thinking about I was driving. We came to a clearing that led into a grove of spruce and willow and was easy walking. I put the truck in neutral. The clearing sloped up from where we were parked, cupped like a bone socket and behind, unseen, it descended gently down to the grove we liked going to on foot. It was very quiet but for an arrow of Canada geese honking overhead. The grass in the clearing was gray and dead. I still had my Winchester .308 with the Zeiss scope. Kalum was using his dad’s rifle, a new Remington 30-06 with a Bushnel scope, nice gun. We had them leaning on the center console, loaded, rounds unchambered.
There was still some daylight. We sipped our beers, in no particular rush, chatting. I was talking about work.
“There’s a new guy in the warehouse to pick orders while I’m out driving. Braden.”
“Is he green?” Kalum exhaled the words with cigarette smoke.
“I gotta show him everything. He ran the forks through eight bags of bentonite then drove the pallet from one end of the warehouse to the other, made a big mess. He’s got a new order of hematite stacked three pallets high and teetering like a game of Jenga.”
Kalum laughed real quiet.
“I gotta fix it all tomorrow. He’s nice enough. Don’t know shit.”
“Yet.”
“Yet.”
“You’ll learn’m,” Kalum said, up-nodded towards the clearing rim, red knob of sun arcing behind the trees. At first the rack blended with the willow and then it crested, a large mule deer, its expansive rack all tangled and asymmetrical like something my brother would paint. Then he came slowly into full view, nosing the dead grass.
“You take him,” Kalum whispered, “he’s on your side.”
I slid the bolt in, chambering the round, pointed my rifle out the open window, sighted, squinted, let the crosshairs blur and sharpen, waited for him to turn profile and shot him behind the shoulder blade, the report echoing and echoing across Ivo’s land. His front legs buckled as if from the sound alone and he collapsed, twisted and thrashed, dug those crazed antlers in the hard ground and died.
*
We tagged the deer and went back to town, to the Four Winds Cold Beer and Wine and on to Kalum’s garage with a flat of Bud Light and the carcass. By then we were listening to Cannibal Corpse, Possessed, The Ruins of Beverast. Kalum pressed play on the boombox. Behemoth’s Grom was in the CD player. Kalum laid down some poly sheeting and I slit the deer down the middle, cut through the stomach wall, cut the sternum, diaphragm and windpipe and rolled the entrails out into a popcorn bowl. Kalum’s fiancé Georgia made a stellar pâté with the offal. I called Kader, told him to come over because he liked to draw the insides of things.
Kalum had a gambrel intalled in the rafters. We had it almost totally skinned by the time Kader got there. He sat down with his sketchbook and a Bud Light, began to draw, said it looked like a Francis Bacon painting. Me and Kalum didn’t know what that was. And then the CD ended. Kalum put on Thanatos. I got a hacksaw from the workbench and cut off the head with that bizarre rack I intended to mount and hang in the living room of my doublewide trailer. Kader said he wished he could draw the way it smelled.
*
I drank over half that flat of beer. The alarm clock was a blast from hell next morning. It was still dark when I got to the warehouse. Braden hadn’t shown up yet. There was a load of bentonite and sawdust scheduled at a Husky drill rig mid-afternoon. The location was a couple hours northwest of town. I had time to do a bit of clean up, saw the wheelbarrow and shovel in a space between two rows of teetering hematite. Because of the hangover I wasn’t moving too fast, nor was I very alert. When I took up the handles of the wheelbarrow I heard the bags slide off the top pallet, saw the pallet flip in my peripheral vision and everything go black.
*
I woke up in Edmonton in a Royal Alexander Hospital bed wearing a cervical collar with a catheter up my dickhole. My mom stood there crying while the nurses reassured her that I wasn’t paralyzed.
*
I woke up again on my stomach high on morphine after back surgery. The morphine made everything wrong with me seem okay. My L3 and L4 discs were fractured and putting pressure on the spinal cord but the spinal cord wasn’t severed. I had titanium rods and screws in my discs. My back was stitched up and bandaged. The doctor told me the rods and screws were like a brace, but inside my body, that they’d take pressure of my spinal cord and reduce the likelihood of further injury.
They kept me in the hospital for a while. As the pain lessened and I regained lucidity between doses of OxyContin, I was able to pay enough attention to read. My mother brought me books in French. I aced highschool French. If not for that my average would’ve been a low C. We had a beautiful French teacher, Mrs Blas, who I crushed on and made sure never to disappoint. My pronunciation was laughable but I could read it. Confined to the hospital bed I would read Montaigne, Chateaubriand, Valery, Racine, Baudelaire, Rabelais, Houellebecq, Jarry, Rimbaud, Proust, Modiano and Carrère. I read a lot in English too. That’s when I got my words.
*
After several weeks in hospital I graduated to convalescence in my doublewide trailer. When I got home I was surprised to see those antlers mounted on a plaque and hung in the livingroom with pride of place beside the taxidermied pike I caught when I was ten.
A caregiver came daily to make meals, help me bathe and wipe my ass after I went to the bathroom. This was bad enough. But one time I had to go when the nurse wasn’t there and my parents were visiting. I still couldn’t reach around. I guess my mom heard F-bombs coming from the bathroom.
She came and knocked at the door. I told her no but she insisted. As she wiped and checked the toilet paper, three, four times, making sure I was clean, I smelled the Exclamation! perfume I bought her every year for Christmas right around the time the previous bottle ran out.
From then on, until I could reach around, I stood in the shower and let the water rinse my asshole. It didn’t take long for the drain to clog and I had to call the plumbers. They averted their eyes on the way out. I heard them snickering by their truck, almost out of earshot.
*
When I returned to work it was just as a driver. For a welcome back gift the company owner, Trevor, replaced the flatbed driver seat with a brand new Bostrom that’s got auto-style recline and adjustable dual chamber air lumbar support. I didn’t hump mud no more. I told my swamper how much to hump and where to hump it to and I kept the language clear, coarse and colorful. Braden took over in the warehouse after my injury that he couldn’t live down. He tried extra hard, got real good at his job. Then he caught pneumonia in mid-April and we didn’t get him back for a month and a half.
Trevor hired a temporary laborer to fill in for Braden and guess who it was. Travis Braun walked into the shop gaunt and fragile the day after Braden called in sick. I’d heard he’d been in and out of jail: grand theft auto, sexual assault of a minor, break and enter, fraud over $10,000. At first I thought Trevor gave me another welcome back present. But I had never mentioned the dressing room torment. No, it was just the fickle finger of fate pointing in the opposite direction.
“Are you in shape?” I asked him, on the way over to the warehouse.
“Fuckin A son,” Travis said, started hacking and wheezing like he had emphysema, more than likely did.
“Okay,” I said, reading out the invoice, “we need eighty bags of bentonite, that’s two and half pallets, and we need thirty bags of calcium carbonate, that’s half a pallet.” He stood there looking at me, waiting for additional instructions. “I can tell you in French if you want.”
“Aint you gonna show me what to do?”
“Show you how to read the bags and count how many?”
“Well—”
“Well what? The pallets are there, the bentonite is over there, the calcium carbonate is right next to you—get to work. We gotta hit the road in an hour tops.”
He shook his head and got to it in his own unskilled, pathetic sort of way.
“You’re not helping?” he whined.
“I don’t lift anymore.”
He was sweating after five bags and took off his jacket, had a bengal tiger tattooed on his forearm and a rose on his throat. Both looked like shit, done in a two man cell with Bic pen ink and a guitar string.
*
It was spring break up, rainy. The roads could hardly be referred to as such. I was getting no traction in that mix of slush and Albertan gumbo. It was deep and I stopped right where it looked deepest.
“We gotta chain up. I mean, you gotta chain up.”
“What’s that?” Travis looked confused.
“Tire chains. Get em on, make sure they’re tight.”
They were caked in mud, twice as heavy. I didn’t touch them, I just pointed, pointed at the hooks they hung off, at the tires they went on. I’m not sure if I witnessed anything that funny before or since. I egged him on. The more tired, wet and filthy he got, the more I laughed.
The chains are folded over on themselves. You throw them on the outer dually and unfold one half onto the inside dually. Then you have to get underneath and secure them on spare links of chain. They have to be tight, and getting them tight isn’t easy. When doing that you’re laying in mud or snow or both and it’s dripping on your face from the wheel well. I never heard a grown man whimper and plead for help like that, and I don’t know who he was pleading to because Jesus Christ himself wasn’t gonna ride down on a sunbeam and assist. There aren’t words for the look on his face when I told him that was one, he had to chain up the other side.
He was wet to the skin when we got to the location. Three floorhands filed down the stairs from the drill rig platform—robust farmboys with sadistic smiles. They manhandled those hundred pound bags of bentonite. Travis felt the need to show himself equal. When everything was offloaded he was hyperventilating, then he scrambled up the berm behind the piperacks and puked to a chorus of ridiculing laughter, the derrick hand calling down PUSSY from the top of the mast.
*
A few years ago I was coming out of IGA with some ground beef and saw a woman at the trunk of her car struggling with a heavy water jug. She was attractive, about my age. A little boy sat in the front seat of her Camry. It was minus thirty that day.
When I asked her if she needed help I detected a Quebecois accent, then asked her in French if she spoke French. She told me yes but preferred to practice her English. She told me her name was Claire.
A pall of vehicle exhaust hung at face level but I could smell her. I don’t know how to describe the way she smelled. It was, I don’t know, skin-sweet. We agreed on meeting that weekend for coffee at the Four Winds. Eventually we started dating. After a few months of that Claire and her son Luc moved into the doublewide.
Claire was from Sherbrooke. She left Quebec for Alberta to elude her ex, who abducted Luc and kept him in a crack shack for two weeks while he got high and fucked junky whores. Her ex went to prison for kidnapping. She didn’t wait around for him to get out.
*
We’re happy, if that’s the word. When I get home early I sit on the couch and read and watch Luc play Super Mario 64. I know the game inside-out. Whenever he’s stuck on a level I help him. Or I show him some of the secrets I know—the 1-up mushroom near the warp pipe in Whomp’s Fortress, or where to find all the hidden stars in Peach’s Castle.
Claire and I talk and watch him play. I put my hand on the ball of her stomach. The ultrasound shows it’s a girl. She’s due in the spring. Of course my mother’s ecstatic.
Over the Christmas holidays Kader was in town visiting. He came by to take some reference photos and did some sketches of Claire and I on the couch and Luc on the floor between us. I haven’t seen the painting yet. It’s not quite finished. It could be worth a fortune one day, considering the trajectory of his career. But I’d never sell it.
Last night I fell asleep to Claire’s breath against my chest and saw my mother in a room with no features. It was black, everything except us had been cut out, like in a computer. She wore a silk robe embroidered with oriental flowers and birds, left open and nothing on underneath. She looked beautiful and that was okay. In the dream I didn’t hate her.