The Dawn of My Discontent

Stephanie Bournias was a spicy Greek-American girl who enjoyed doing something none of my previous girlfriends had. It was one of the reasons I loved her and she was kind enough to love me back. I had hooked up with her after starting a fight that almost became a riot at a Greek dance party in L.A. 

The shindig was held at the El Rey, a venue where I had seen Human League, a musical group from Britain, when I was in high school.  With “Don’t You Want Me,” Human League was one of many 80s New Wave one-hit wonders. Thinking back, it’s an ironic coincidence that the night of the fight was also probably the night Stephanie started wanting me. 

That fateful evening, Stephanie and I were on the dance floor. I remember how beautiful she looked in a tight-fitting, short-sleeved red dress that was cut above her knees. She wore thick-heeled pumps, also red, with rounded toes, and we were dancing to some modern Greek music. I say “modern,” but I think a lot of modern and traditional Greek music sound the same, so it also might’ve been a classic Greek song. But that’s neither here nor there, now that it’s been many years since this happened and I don’t much listen to music from the nation fabled for its archaeological sites and ancient myths these days. In fact, I never even got around to listening to the CD by Yanni, a popular composer of modern Greek instrumental standards, that Stephanie’s mom bought me the same Christmas I gave Stephanie a bottle of Marilyn Monroe wine and a plush burgundy bathrobe.

In any case, as Stephanie and I were dancing at the El Rey on Greek night, she translated the lyrics to songs the DJ was playing, staying close to me and speaking her translations intimately into my ears. Right after she translated a line about two lovers kissing each other, she gently joined her lips to mine. For most guys, that kiss would’ve been enough to signal the start of something, but I really wanted this girl, wanted to give here something to remember. 

Not long after I was electrified by Stephanie’s kiss, I saw some stocky, older guy who was not only balding but also had a pony tail, eyeing Stephanie from the dancefloor sidelines which were elevated two full two steps above the area where people were swaying and gyrating to music pumping on the club’s speakers. The guy stood there surveying the scene as if he were some kind of predatory bird, there to swoop down one-by-one on the many attractive women enjoying themselves at the Greek night. For some reason, back then I conflated guys who were naturally losing their hair to more intentionally clean-shaven racist skinheads, so I resented this guy’s presence when I saw him there, apparently lording over the dancers. 

In the little time it took for Stephanie to look away and exchange some small talk with her friends, who were also dancing close to us, I stepped up to the guy, asked him what he was looking at, and when he said, in what I imagine was Greek-accented English, “I can look at anything I want,” I tried to connect my fist with his face. 

Although he wasn’t hurt by the blow, he was definitely surprised, and, with his blue eyes opened wide, he grabbed me by the shirt with both hands and started spinning me around in a half-circle. After taking a few awkward sideways steps, I lost balance, fell to the floor and became a target for his and his buddies’ designer-shoe-clad feet. For some reason, the disturbance became contagious and other fights started in the club. Needless to say, the festive vibe was replaced by one of mayhem. Before anyone got hurt, though, I was escorted out of the club by some black security guards who asked me where I was from and I replied with silly pride, “I’m a brother from another planet.” 

Although I was a little bruised, I also felt a lingering adrenaline rush, but fell off my high horse when police outside asked me whether I wanted to finish what I started. This was after I told them, “Some grease ball inside was trying to get at my girl.” Like the coward I was, I had no intention of facing off with bald ponytailed guy, and I simply said, “no,” to the cop, after which he replied with an aggressive, “okay.”  The cop really emphasized the last syllable of that mysterious American word and made clear that I should beat it.   

On my way to the parking lot after the ruckus, I saw Stephanie on the street. I don’t remember what I said to her, but she had this wistful look on her face. For those of you who don’t know, “wistful” means “feeling vague or regretful longing.” I think that describes what Stephanie was feeling to a T.  

A year later, after many dates and nights of pleasure, I settled down with my suburban Aphrodite up north where she was enrolled in college. Our relationship was blissful. She’d roast a whole chicken and rosemary potatoes for dinner and I’d bring home bottles of wine from a job I had at a retailer that specialized in sales of international alcoholic spirits distilled from grapes.  

About a year into our settled co-existence, I developed a drug habit, but, like Stephanie, Ecstasy was a drug that always made me feel good, unlike pot and some of the other stuff that made me stir crazy paranoid most of the time. 

Chris, one of my co-workers at the fine wine warehouse, was my X supplier. At work we always talked about the relation between drugs and musical talent. Even though I had never taken guitar lessons seriously or knew squat about singing, I was convinced that doing X would allow me to become the singer I had wanted to be since I saw Michael Jackson do his thing on Soul Train when I was five years old. This was well before Michael became the King of Pop and lived on the estate he had built to resemble one of the various “lands” at the Disney theme park. I guess a lot of people thought it was a creep’s Fantasyland after Michael was accused of doing stuff to those underage kids.  

All those years of wanting to sing eventually paid off for me. Well, they didn’t exactly “pay off,” but you’ll catch my drift after I explain a little more. I put an add on a classifieds website and joined a band. The band had a rehearsal space in the city and sometimes, before practice, I would pop a pill. X made the music sound great. X made me love my bandmates. I wouldn’t become seriously spiritual ‘til much later, but X even allowed me to feel loving-kindness and compassion for randoms on the train to and from practice.    

The first time I got in trouble, real trouble, with the cops was a little after I broke up with Stephanie. 

I left my bandmates and my girlfriend without making excuses and moved back south. Back to my parents’ house, but it would be more correct to say “my parents’ houses.” You see, they had separated, and I couldn’t accept the fact that they no longer wanted to share a roof over their heads, or a bathroom, and most certainly not a bed.

I couldn’t accept my parents’ commitment to conjugal separation. I constantly pestered them and blamed my dad, even though by the time I arrived “home” from living with Stephanie, my dad was seeing some buxom American girl, and my mom had a black boyfriend named Max who wanted me to become a cell phone salesman for him. I wasn’t having that, so I spent most nights at my dad’s place, but I constantly blamed and resented him for the fact that he and mom weren’t together anymore.

I was obsessed with patching up mom and dad’s relationship, but I couldn’t convince them, especially dad, to get past their differences. I convinced myself dad was a coward, and it’s about this time that I went all black, meaning, I started regularly listening to Tupac, Biggie and other rap, and became convinced that cops were the enemy and black people, black men in particular, were all heroic targets of social victimization—heroes because they were victims and victimized because they were heroes.

Fueled by the stories in rap lyrics, I developed an attitude that didn’t help things between me and dad. 

Even though I felt he was some kind of spineless enemy, when dad told me he was going to sell his house and that he planned to have the carpets replaced, I decided I’d help him out. I wanted to use the opportunity of his moving out to make him move back in with mom. Little did I know that he wasn’t at all serious about finding a new place to live. But if pulling up the carpets on my own meant that my parents would be living under the same roof again, I wasn’t going to pass up the chance to rush that outcome along. 

So, pull up the carpets is exactly would I started doing one late morning when dad had gone out to brunch. After he left, I started with the crème-colored woolen flooring fabric in my bedroom. I planned to have the entire house done by the time he got back, but dad forgot his wallet and had to return home. After he stepped in the door, he heard me frantically at work upstairs.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he asked more or less, in Spanish, after he had climbed the steps and stood in the doorway to the bedroom I slept in when I stayed at his house.

“What does it look like I’m doing, viejo?” I replied. For those of you who aren’t familiar with my parents’ native tongue, “viejo” means “old man.” I knew that calling him that always got his goat. I don’t know where that term — “getting someone’s goat” — comes from, and it especially doesn’t make much sense these days when G.O.A.T is short for “greatest of all time”—back then I sure didn’t think dad was any kind of G.O.A.T, except, maybe, an old one—but there’s lots of things we say that are strange, take for granted and don’t question, when we should. I might’ve considered dad old, but if he was any kind of goat, he was a strong old goat, one a lot of guys wouldn’t want to mess with, much less wrestle with.

“Stop what you’re doing right now!” dad demanded.

Instead of complying, I began ripping up carpet even more feverishly. 

Dad, repeated his command, which I ignored, causing him to get red in the face, pounce on me like some kind of Andean-mountain lion and put me in a head lock. Thinking back, this was only the second time dad had ever put his hands on me. The first time was when I was fourteen, and we had been on a motorcross outing in the desert. Toward the end of the day, when all the adult off-roading enthusiasts were good and drunk, I was zig-zagging my 80cc dirt bike between lifted four by four trucks and my dad had gone apeshit with worry thinking I was going to get myself killed. When I finally rode back to camp where my dad was waiting for me, he sat me down on an ice cooler and slapped me with a flurry of haymaker open hands that rattled the brain inside my skull and left both sides of my face red and stinging for a while. I never understood why he did it, why he’d hurt me when he had been worried about me, but I guess sometimes love and concern are expressed in ways that baffle the human mind and make mince-meat of the human heart. 

Maybe it was the part of me that still held this incident against him that caused me to start pummeling dad’s head a minute after he put me in the wrestler's hold to stop me from pulling up the carpets. 

Whatever the reason, when my fists started connecting with dad’s head, he cried out again, this time in a high-pitched squeal, for me to cease pummeling him. He said “stop” in English, and the way and manner that he did, made him seem pathetic to me, but his vice grip on my head and neck tightened and we continued to struggle for what seemed like an eternity when, with the grace of God intervening to succor those who have lost their way, mom called up from the bottom floor of the house.

She had dropped by on a casual visit and must’ve heard the commotion when she stepped in the front door. Alarmed, she cried out our names, then wailed in Spanish, “What’s going on up there?”

Dad, now winded, replied, “It’s Mikey, he’s lost his mind. Call the police.”

Dad lived in a beachside predominantly white community where lots of quaint bungalows were being torn down and replaced with multiple level, modern and swanky homes—a gentrifying suburb where police respond in almost no time.

Mom managed to calm me down enough for me to stop hitting dad. Two cops arrived after my parents beat a hasty retreat downstairs, uncertain whether or not my black mood had subsided. 

The cops called up for me to descend from the second floor. They were both whitish, with brown hair and sleight builds. “Are you here to arrest me? To batter me and arrest me?” I asked as I complied with their request to come down to the first floor of the house.

“No, we’re not here to do that. Why would we want to batter you, bud?” said cop number one. “We’re not the bad guys. Are you calm now? Do you want to hurt anybody? Do you want to hurt yourself?” added cop number two.

I had come down to the landing of the staircase. I stopped and said, “Life is war,” then added, “The world is hurt.”

The look on mom’s face when I said this told me she agreed and that she now expected the worst. “Son,” she said, “Just come talk to them.”

Still standing on the landing, I said. “You guys touch me, and I’ll unleash a world of hurt on you.”

The conditional threat didn’t sit well with cop number one. His thin veneer of patience evaporated and he approached the stairs. As he climbed the first steps, I spit at him then tried to kick him. I had the high ground, so he backed off. I spit again.

“Whoa, that’s it,” said cop number two, who took his mace from its holster and said, “You don’t want me to use this, kid.”

“I’m no kid, I’m Rocky Marciano. I’m on a rocket to Mars. You punks are the enforcer of petty putty laws,” I said in a near rap.

As my parents looked on in dismay, cop number two took good aim and a spray of mace hit me in the face.

Too late, I covered my eyes and crumpled onto the landing. The cops quickly rushed up the steps, roughly placed me on my stomach as best as they could and handcuffed me. 

“Please don’t hurt him. He’s sick,” I heard mom say.

“He’ll be alright now,” cop number two said as he and his partner helped me to my feet.

Still irate from my initial disobedience, cop number one said, “You’re not going to give us any more bullshit, are you?”

“Suckers talk, bullshit walks. I’m Marciano, not raging bull,” I replied as they walked me out of the house, onto the street, and into their squad car.

“Alright, Rocky,” I heard cop two, who was in the driver’s seat, say. 

“We’re gonna fifty-one-fifty you, Marciano. You know what that means?” said cop one.

Although I had listened to the Van Halen album by that name in the 80s, I hadn’t known 5150 was the penal code for an involuntary hold at an emergency psychiatric ward until cop one explained its meaning.

I had come home from my sudden and unexpected break up with Stephanie, my Aphrodite, my Helen of Troy to find my mom and dad no longer wanted to be with each other. 

Through my stinging eyes I could see my parents standing side by side on the sidewalk as the police cruiser pulled away. Dad’s arm was draped around mom. I couldn’t hold onto a girlfriend because I had started unravelling due to an Ecstasy habit, but maybe, just maybe, if my parents couldn’t be reasoned into reuniting, my looming madness would provide the means to accomplish the Herculean task.