Stingray

Smart: Consecutive Substack Story 1162

Feb 19, 2025

For three weeks, we could hear metal clanking, farts and new swear words.

Scottie and I got into a slap fight once over one of the words being a dirty cuss or an animal we never heard of.

Billy Chambliss was mom’s new boyfriend.

Mom’s new boyfriends always seemed to move in, except Chad something Polish, who lived above The Sugar Shack Saloon and let us play Galaga for free because he cleaned the place up and had a key for everything.

Scottie and I were used to Mom’s boyfriends moving in, and different brands of cigarette smoke, and howling fuck noises and the ice cream accidentally left out to melt overnight.

But Billy Chambliss moved his car in the garage, backed it in right on top of Scottie’s forest green Stingray, wrecking both tires and a pedal and then taking something off the engine so that he couldn’t move it til it was fixed.

Mom always dated drunks.

Always.

Always, like it was a religion and she’d drop through the gates of hell immediately if she didn’t.

We caught her crying one night and I thought for sure it was because I got an F in Spanish but she wailed “I’m all alone,” and it was only three days after Jason the Drywall Guy moved out.

Billy Chambliss was different than the rest of the boyfriends: He was dumb as fuck on top of being a drunk.

We knew he was dumb as fuck the first five times he opened his mouth, before he backed his shitty car in over Scottie’s rad bike that we might have stolen for him from outside Cloverleaf Lanes.

Scottie had just turned twelve and was starting to say shit out loud when he thought it, shit we used to keep for the pallet tree fort/platform thing we made in a big maple behind the garage.

Billy said something dumb and Scottie asked, super snotty, if Billy ever attended school.

It took him a minute, but Billy answered “You can learn more in life than you can in school.”

I didn’t hate that answer, though Scottie had some comeback to it that couldn’t have been funny because I forgot what it was.

I thought about Billy’s answer when I lay in bed that night.

I put a little respect on that answer.

We knew, Scottie and me, that we were gonna share a bike forever if we didn’t steal him one from the unlocked bikes naive kids left outside Cloverleaf Lanes, even if Scottie’s bike was now under Billy Chambliss’s non-running Cutlass. We didn’t learn that in school, we learned it in life.

When we got up that Saturday morning, there was newspaper spread on the kitchen table Rick the Army guy trash picked for mom, and a bong, and some crazy glue.

Scottie was picking the red Fruity Pebbles out of his cereal because he saw a story on 60 Minutes about food dyes causing cancer.

I liked the red ones.

I was eating my Fruity Pebbles, thinking about how Scottie, at 12, was smarter than all the guys Mom had ever dated, when there was a loud clank and a scream from the garage. The scariest part of the scream was how quick it ended.

***

Mom said one reason she went to rehab was that she slept through Billy Chambliss’s accident, and I had to call 911, like calling 911 was the most responsible, traumatic shit I ever had to do.

I wouldn’t blame her if she went because she couldn’t stand looking at Billy Chambliss’s mangled face, because it was the most gruesome thing I ever saw, and hopefully ever will see.

Mom left Scottie and me alone for thirty days.

I figured I was kind of in charge, because I was the oldest, and because the last thing she said before she got on the bus to go to Sacred Heart was “make sure you go see Billy in the hospital.”

And I did make sure we went, twice, because there was an Arby’s next to Grace Hospital. They wouldn’t let us in the hospital room because we were minors, not family, and Billy was in Intensive Care, but they did let us in to Arby’s.

Scottie didn’t say anything about Billy Chambliss being dumb any more. It stopped being funny to him after he saw Billy’s face with a brake rotor carved into it.

Billy Chambliss, drunk and high, couldn’t find or borrow a second jack for his Cutlass, so he crazy glued our Jenga game together to prop up the car.

Billy Chambliss didn’t learn that in school.

When Mom got out of rehab she handed us three bottles of whiskey from the cabinet, one bottle of whiskey from the bedroom, and a bottle of wine from the basement. She told us to pour the whiskey in the storm drain on the side of the driveway, because she didn’t even want to smell it, and to give the bottle of wine to Mrs.Kolipsis, who tried to teach Mom to sew.

We did what she asked, except Scottie took one of the whiskey bottles and stashed it on the pallet tree fort.

***

I kept learning stuff in life, while Scottie learned so much in school he was class valedictorian.

He was so smart the whiskey for breakfast thing didn’t catch up to him until he was 34 years old, making good money and his wife said she was gonna take the kids and leave if he didn’t get help.

Scottie invited me over for Easter dinner, same as always, he said, but no booze. I put on my best suit and slammed a beer before I walked out the door because I knew I couldn’t drink in Scottie’s house.

We hadn’t celebrated any holidays since Mom had passed, and it was gonna be weird looking at her empty chair.

I wondered the whole way over if Scottie was gonna lean on me to quit drinking, or if he was gonna notice that I wanted to leave early to go have a couple or five.

I figured I could just use the excuse that it was too sad, looking at the empty chair where mom usually sat.

Except her chair wasn’t empty.

A man sat there, and he smiled pretty good when he saw me, especially for a guy missing a piece of jaw with stubbly gray facial hair surrounding a scar about the width of a brake rotor.

Scottie didn’t have to tell me who it was.

And before I could ask how, or why Scottie, his eyes wide and bright like the rush of stealing a bike, said, “This guy is brave …and dumb enough…to be my sponsor.”

***

Jimmy Doom's Roulette Weal

Discussion about this post