Blame it on the Schluties, Gang
I get an app to autotune my voice. It’s a pain in the nards to get going, but I patch onto Liv’s Bluetooth speaker in her room where she’s probably vaping bath salts with her friends–I keep hearing a hissy schlarp-ing sound and coughing.
“Livia clean up the kitchen / yuh / all of your bitchin' about being grown up and you left your retainer on the sink it’s fucking gross / whoa-oh.”
It’s my best trap rapping, which is garbage. But I hear giggles from her friends and Liv scrambling to the door–I know her fury-scrambling well–and so I beat a retreat downstairs to play it aloof in my laundry room.
Later that night I’m still in the laundry room fiddling with the autotuner and my wife Reagan comes in with a load of towels. “Hey, bud. Be sure to use the Febreze sheets.” She blows me a kiss and tries to moonwalk back into our kitchen.
“Wait, baby,” I say, autotuned. “I’ve got an idee-ee-uh.”
“Uh-huh,” she says, hits me with the “is this important?” eyes. She’s frazzled after another 10-hour day of local heroism; her dance team is helping Habitat for Humanity build an orphanage; I can’t really keep up. I’m proud, but she makes me feel less than.
Frazzled or not, Reagan’s still pretty in the dim fluorescent thrum, and, as ever, something tightens in my chest: impress her, you ass.
“I’m going to be a rapper. I think I can do this.” It sounds plaintive, not at all impressive.
She looks me over, notices the chain necklace I’ve rummaged from her jewelry box, the pen and balled-up scraps of paper.
“No. Please, babe. You’re not doing this. Not again. I can’t go through another crazy thing with you. I’m serious. I will leave you, do you hear me? No.” The door squeaks on its hinge as she holds eye contact with me until it pops shut and I say, “Hear me out.”
Two in the morning I find our daughter Liv standing over the kitchen sink scarfing a plate of macaroni. She’s put on weight since her knucklefuck boyfriend Jydyn disappeared sometime last spring. I’ve caught snippets of tearful lamentations and commiserations between Liv and Reagan over his ghosting. But I say, good riddance.
I’ve been putting on weight, too, and scoop myself some macaroni. And I hasten to add–I’m not judging Liv about her weight. I simply worry she’s sad, like me.
Suddenly, I feel something press against my shoulder–for the first time in living memory, my teenage daughter has initiated physical contact. I freeze and macaroni gloops cheesily from the ladle back into the pot. Please last forever, I think. Please.
“That was pretty funny,” she says. “You didn’t sound half bad.” She lifts her head and my hand goes to the warm place her brow left on my t-shirt.
I stare ahead into the dark backyard. “Really? I was thinking about recording an album.” My sphincter tightens at this invitation to mockery, but she just pats twice between my shoulders.
“Follow your dreams, Daddy.”
“Always.” I turn to kiss the crown of her head, but she’s gone.
It’s an ex-student who tattoos my face. It hurts, for sure, but not like the lips. I guess Evan isn’t an “ex.” He sure as shit didn’t graduate, and we didn’t break up. I’d assumed he’d sublimated to the great parking lot beyond, wherever the drop-outs go, but here he is tattooing men’s faces in the daytime, in a Tudor stucco building in our city square, no less.
Good for him.
I imagine introducing this handsome, gainfully employed young man to Liv. Then, I imagine Reagan killing me with a chainsaw.
“So, you’re working on a demo?” Evan’s making small talk like a hair-dresser, shading in my eyelid. The tiny needle perforates my sclera, but I can’t blink, on his strict instruction, or else he’ll surely blind me.
“Yeah. Wanna hear it?” I bring up a track on my phone: “Hit me with that wobble-obble / ooh girl, stick it / I’m gonna give you my golden ticket.” It’s my club track, “Tha Wonka-Donk.”
He pauses, machine whirring, stares long and stoically into some ethereal middle distance, nods once. “Yeah, man. That’s dope.”
As he’s etching my daughter’s name in wobbly cursive across my forehead, I’m telling Terri Gross, “I rap about being a fat white middle-class dad in America.”
“Mmm,” she says.
Back home, Reagan’s surprisingly chill about the facial tattoos. I think she thinks they’re fake, despite all the swelling. I’ve noticed these last few years, she tries not to look much at my face. The pain is incredible. I don’t think Evan should have let me tattoo my entire face and mouth in one afternoon, but he never was one for rules.
I could have sawn my head off and it wouldn't matter; Reagan doesn’t see me anymore. Not after my ventures parcel auctioning, condemned house flipping, the tech start-ups, iconoclastic street art, the inverted pyramid schemes. Now her parents own our house and I’m to be shot on sight at our bank.
She’s beautiful as ever standing in a little halo of summer light at the kitchen window, leaning against the sink in a frilled lavender sundress and brushing absently at an errant curl of philodendron, playing on her goddamn cell phone.
She scrolls and smiles and chuckles. How do I get into that fucking thing? I have to get in there.
I take a Casio, Liv’s blue-tooth speaker, and my phone into the laundry room, record my first album between the whites and darks, which is a terrible name for the album. So, I go with “Fabreezy.”
For my rapper name, I take inspiration from Liv’s posters and split the difference: “Post-Future.” I see it as the magical place where we’ve all outlived the consequences.
The studio software is a pain in the perineum and I must be hiding in the laundry room for a day or more because finally Liv pokes her head in to check on me, sees my swollen, infected face, my woozy stumbling, hears my choked-off pleas for help, and says what she’s mostly only said to me for years: “Oh my God, Dad.” I go down in a shower of iridescent sparkles, crack my forehead on the linoleum, but it’s OK. The doctors say I had to get some of that bacteria out of there before it ate the rest of my brain.
When I wake up in the ICU, I’ve got 17 hits on SoundCloud, but I can’t speak clearly. NGL, the experience seems to have slowed me down a step or two, but I think it will add to my street cred. I can recognize Liv right off but Reagan takes a while, and I think that hurts her feelings. She says it’s fine, keeps playing on her phone, our daughter next to her like a shadow, playing on her own.
Or that might be a nurse, but I’m pretty sure it’s our daughter. Her name is Livia. Probably they don’t pay nurses to play on their phones.
I try to show them my SoundCloud hits.
“What is that?” the older woman asks. “You kept waking up from your coma and checking it and then going back into your coma.”
“My coma,” like it’s another one of my projects.
Back home, my girls take tandem care of me. When they dissipate to wherever it is they go beyond our guest room, I record and post more songs with apps on my phone. When enough time passes that I’m beyond feeling the physical sensation of thirst or hunger, I figure out that they’re not coming back. So, I wrest myself from bed and skulk about the empty house. I eat some leftovers. Then, I throw it all up into the kitchen trash. I have so much sadness in me, there’s nowhere else to put it.
At least I have my schluties, which is what I call the big, oval pain pills that inspired my most popular song as yet on Soundcloud. It goes like, “Give me some of those / schloo- oOooo0Ooo0o0oO0ties for ya boy / yuh.” 149 hits and counting.
One afternoon, I wander through the house toward distant laughter, lifted on schluties, and interrupt on our back deck some kind of formal tea-party occasion, Reagan and Liv and Reagan’s mom and several other well-dressed women with gloves, pastels and pearls, all sitting in a semicircle, the stark light of noon beaming down through the skylight and the bees buzzing in the azaleas woven through the latticed housing of the screens. And I think, “What a lovely way to stage my intervention,” but then Reagan hurries over and shoves me backward into the kitchen and slides shut the glass door. She makes a turning motion with a pearlescent satin finger, and we lock eyes as I turn the blinds shut click by click.
Reagan finds me stuck at the kitchen table; I’m too woozy to stand. “Thanks for inviting me to your tea party,” I say.
She shakes her head, glowers. “Thanks for cleaning up.” She starts slamming dirty dishes into the sink.
I can feel this thing getting away from me. “Look, babe. I’m sorry I get so caught up in projects. But it’s not like I have anything else to do. Grade papers. Video games.”
“You have me. You have your daughter.”
“Well, how can I compete with your Pinterest page?” I raise my voice when I’m mad.
She turns on the sink, shuts it off. On, off, on, off. “Is that what you think?” Her back is
to me, shoulders tense, and I’m scared, but I keep going: “Yeah, gotta keep tabs on the Tiny House market. I get it. Can’t miss a wine-mom meme.”
She gets her phone from her bag on the counter. I give a big, stupid, “see what I’m saying” wave of my arms.
Her face is shadowed but she’s crying, thrusts her phone in my face and little text swims an inch from my nose. “I’m looking for help. For you. I’m trying to find someone who can help you. Medical sites, forums, online counselors.”
“But,” I say. “I’m right here. You can help me, here.” I slap the table too hard and upset the salt and pepper shakers. Maybe it’s the drugs, but I feel bad for the shakers. I tell them, “Sorry.”
“Why can’t you say that to me?”
“It’s all I ever say to you.”
It’s bad choreography–her face screws up again, just as I think I’ve said something to break through the ritual.
With a shuddering sigh, she reaches and cups my cheek. Her hand is pale, bony, thin, incongruously old; I must be doing this to her. She asks, “What have you done to your beautiful face?”
It’s the first time anyone has ever told me that I am beautiful. I say so.
She says I only want to feel sorry for myself, calls for Liv and they leave, still dressed in their pastels. At the door, she yells back, “We’re going to our al-anon meeting, then getting Cheddars. Want anything?”
“Mo-om,” Liv groans. “Don’t be mean. He can’t help it.”
“I’m good,” I say, too quietly to reach them.
So, I sit and sulk. I am the by God worst rapper in America; hours ago, I loved that. Now, it seems rote and sad. My SoundCloud hits have dwindled. I’ve re-branded myself; I’m going by the name “That Lil Big Baby Daddy.” Soundcloud’s algorithm suggested the name.
Eventually, my legs come back online, and I pace, killing time until I can take more pain pills.
Seeking answers, or, perhaps, the missing connection, I slip into Liv’s room and find the posters of Post Malone all down, which stings some faraway me inside the schlutie-fortress. Her room is filled with boxes from Ikea, and it occurs to me that she’s moving away to college soon. I’ve heard nothing about this, but the math works out.
In her bedside table’s drawer, I find a diary and my heart pounds stupidly as I skim a few pages: it’s all about Jydyn, how much she hates him. Each passage is addressed to Maddie, who must be one of her friends, the tall one or the less tall one.
It’s this Jydyn kid’s fault, I realize, that my daughter skulks and my wife follows and consoles. And then I think, Wait, I’m forgetting what it’s like. Reagan and I met young. I start reading more carefully. Their song is “Now or Never” by Halsey, so I play it over and over, and I read, and she’s right, it’s not fair, when you tell someone their going to be your 4ever person, and, like, your always there for them in the good times and the bad times–
“What the fuck?” Liv storms into the room, and she’s like, OMG, Dad, my diary, WTF?
And her face, screwed up angry like her mom’s, she looks so young, and it hits me how inappropriate I’ve been, and I give an apologetic shrug like, IKR? And she throws me out of the room and slams the door.
I grab the family MacBook and drive a weaving 10 mph over to Evan’s tattoo shop. Our lawyers really don’t want us talking, but he says he’s not worried about it.
While he works on my left hand, I’m writing out some new verses about everything going on at home, and telling Evan. I tell them about Jydyn, who, it turns out, sells Evan weed. I ask, “How long till she gets over him?”
Evan’s like, “Breakups are hard. You want me to start on your feet?”
And I’m like, “Hold up, I got to get this out there.” There’s no time to set up my apps and mic, so I open up the laptop and record myself perform a smooth impromptu ballad: “Ooh, yuh, / Jydnyn, don’t you hurr-urr-urr-ur-URRR…”
It’s my masterpiece. On a whim, I post it, far and wide, near and far, high and low, I post it and post it and post it, Instagram and Reddit and YouTube, even Truth Social, where I tend to get good critiques, despite being a “race traitor.”
I close the laptop, shivering and shook; every time I record a new song, it takes something out of me and casts it spiraling into the void. It’s like giving birth, only sweatier. Giving birth to a beautiful, messy autotuned baby into the yawning maw of oblivion. But this time, something tells me–this time will be different.
I’m not wrong. I wake up home, somehow, sprawled on my kitchen floor, weak and confused from a near overdose of schluties. My phone rattles and bangs by my head on the linoleum. I’m getting so many notifications my phone locks up. When it resets, I see that my video has made the front page of Reddit.
It’s happening.
I charge upstairs and stumble into Liv’s room, where she’s sitting on her bed holding a giant teddy bear. Reagan is pacing the narrow space between her bed and the boxes stacked against the newly bare wall.
“Look!” I open her laptop. “Look, guys!”
I bring up Reddit and there it is, my face etched with tattoos.
“Whoa,” Liv says, coming over. “Wow, babe,” says Reagan.
I click play. “This is Liv’s Lil Big Baby Daddy. This is for my baby girl Livvy. ‘Don’t anybody hurr urr URR urr urr…”
The Subreddit is R/sadcringe, but who cares? I’ve made it! My vision swims. I feel their hands on my shoulders. I’m levitating off the carpet.
I’ve got thousands of SoundCloud hits. I keep refreshing and there are more; Reagan and Liv call out the numbers. “You’re really bad at rapping!” Liv shouts, hugging me.
“I know!” I kiss the crown of her head.
They settle behind me on Liv’s bed, stunned. I had no plan for this; I need to talk to my agent. I text Evan, but he responds: “You signed the settlement agreement, man. No take-backs!” And I think I’m blocked.
Doesn’t matter; I’ve done it. I’m fully seen, fully heard, by the world, the derelict people of the internet, both my girls. I play the video again.
“Wait, are you saying, ‘Jydyn?’ Is this about me?” Liv is shrieking in my ear. She’s got her phone and it’s blowing up with her own notifications. “Dad?” she shrieks. “Baby daddy? Whose baby?”
She shows me her phone: “Eww wait is your dad the father? Eww.”
And she’s gone, and Reagan goes chasing after. The big teddy bear has “Maddie” embroidered across its belly. One of the Ikea boxes is open on the bed and a half-assembled bassinet sits propped against the pillows.
“Oh,” it hits me, looking at the laptop screen, the video title: “ ‘Dis That Liv’s Lil Baby Daddy’.”
“Yeah.” I suck my teeth. “Yeah,” I say to no one, no one whatsoever, alone in my daughter’s room. “I get it.”
I pick up a thin plywood piece of the bassinet and an Allen’s wrench. I’m going to be a grandfather, a stand-in for a Dad. Unfolding before me are the halcyon days of me not being an asshole that never were but could now be: a post-future-past. For time is a bridge and I’ve been like a douchebag troll that lives underneath the bridge and hops and curses. Is it wrong, I wonder, to earnestly know I will do things right this time? Is it a sign of growth, or a betrayal? Where the hell is part EG?
I drop the Allen wrench, fling the plywood piece back onto the mattress. Instinctively, my hand finds my phone, slides open the autotuner app, and I decide, inspiration thrumming, I have to fight for my family, now, the only way I know how.
Lucas Flatt's work has appeared in Puerto del Sol, Typehouse Literary Journal, Sundog Lit and Ellipsis...literature and art. He won the 2016 Larry Brown Short Story award at Pithead Chapel. He teaches creative writing at Volunteer State Community College.