I’d just got home after pulling a double shift when Carrie told me her brother Paul would be coming to stay with us for a while. I was working at a chocolate factory south of the city, which sounds like fun if you’ve never done it. The pay was not much more than minimum wage but the extra shifts added up. I’d just walked in the door, still smelling of chocolate, when she hit me with the news.
Paul was 22, still living at home with his mother, and his older brother, Peter. The brothers fought, sometimes physically, and their mom kept threatening to throw them both out. Peter had been recovering from a motorcycle accident, his leg still in a cast, when Paul came home drunk and knocked him down, breaking the leg again. The fight was so loud that their neighbors called the police, but their mom sent them away. Now, instead of going to jail, Paul was coming to live with us.
“And what about me?” I said, taking off my sweet-smelling shirt. “Do I get a vote? Maybe jail wouldn’t be so bad.”
Carrie knew I was kidding, mostly. I liked Paul; he was a fuck-up but I’d been one too, at his age. He was funny when he wasn’t drunk, and sometimes when he was. But I liked him down in LA, where I didn’t have to see him too often. “And where’s he going to sleep?”
We both knew the answer. There was only one extra room in the railroad-style apartment we rented in Chinatown—our first place as a couple. I had been using it as a studio on my days off. I’d gone to art school, which explains why I was now working in a chocolate factory.
“It’ll only be for a little while,” she said, “until he gets himself straightened out.” I thought straightening Paul out might take more than a little while, but I decided to steam about it in the shower while Carrie made us dinner.
Paul was there when I got home the next day. He was drinking a beer in the dining room while Carrie cooked in the adjacent kitchen. She was a social worker for the city, doing psych evals for people on public assistance, and always got home before I did. She liked to cook, or so she said, and I think she was feeling a little guilty about Paul coming to stay with us.
“I’m making fried chicken,” she said unnecessarily. I could smell it when I unlocked the door.
Paul stood up when I walked in, and shook my hand, which surprised me. He was not a shake-your-hand kind of guy.
“I really appreciate you guys letting me crash with you,” he said.
“No problem,” I said. I raised my voice so Carrie could hear me over the crackling oil she was dipping the breaded chicken pieces in. “Need any help in there?”
“I’m good,” she said. “You guys just relax.” She even brought me a can of beer, which made a sharp gasp when she opened it at the table, and for a minute I felt like I was living someone else’s life.
I sat across from Paul. The table was already set, with red fiesta plates sitting on black-and-white checked placemats. The checkered placemats reminded me of a car race but I couldn’t remember if they waved the flag at the beginning or the end. A long day at work would do that to me.
“So, how’s life in the chocolate factory?” Paul said. He’d grown a moustache since I’d seen him last, long enough that it grew into his bushy sideburns. He looked like someone from a Civil War photo.
“Oh, you know. Another day, another dollar.”
“I hear you.” He took a gulp of his beer and said, “You ever see that Lucy episode where she works in a chocolate factory and starts to eat all the chocolates that come by on the conveyor belt?”
“Everyone’s seen that,” I said. “It’s the first thing people mention when I tell them I work in a chocolate factory. A guy told me they showed that episode over at some gay bar where he hung out, like every night.”
He finished his beer and crushed the can with one hand. “Wait, you know a gay guy?”
“I know all kinds of people,” I said. “I went to art school, remember.”
“Or how ‘bout that fat kid that falls into the chocolate in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?”
“Augustus Gloop,” I said. “That’s the second thing people mention when they hear I work in a chocolate factory. After that they usually stop talking to me.”
He held up the crushed can. “Another cold one?”
We stayed up late that night, drinking beer, smoking weed and listening to music. I was mostly into punk then (Dead Boys, Damned) while Paul preferred classic rock, and had even brought some of his favorite albums: Led Zeppelin 4, Blue Oyster Cult’s Agents of Fortune. We found common ground in “Don’t Fear the Reaper.”
The next day was Saturday, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to paint with Paul sleeping in the room that had been my studio, so I had no reason to go to bed. Carrie had to come out a couple times to tell us to keep it down. We’d turn the volume down but it always crept back up.
Carrie made us all breakfast the next morning. I helped her, frying bacon and toasting English muffins while she prepared to scramble eggs.
“Could you go see if my brother’s awake?” she said. She was mad about us keeping her up last night, but I felt like she was partly to blame.
I knocked on the guest room door, and when I got no answer, I opened it and peeked in. Paul was on the day bed, still in his clothes, fast asleep. At least he’d managed to get his boots off. All of my paints and my easel had been pushed into the corner by the window. There was a pyramid-shaped prism on the window sill; the morning sun was hitting it just so, causing a rainbow pattern on one white wall.
“Wakey, wakey,” I said, and Paul’s blue eyes sprung open like a trap.
“I’m awake,” he said, and sat up. I wasn’t sure he knew where he was.
But a minute later he was in the kitchen, standing next to his sister. He had changed his shirt, at least, and assumed the air of someone ready to meet the day. I began laying out strips of bacon on a paper towel and she started cracking eggs into a plastic mixing bowl and asked him how many he could eat.
“I’m starving,” Paul said. “Like, four?”
Carrie cracked the first egg and dropped it into the bowl. “Look!” she said. “It has a double yolk.” There were two yellow blobs floating in the bottom of bowl.
“Twins,” I said.
“Look,” she said, “another one!”
“Whoa!” Paul said and coughed. “That’s so weird.”
“And another,” said Carrie, after cracking open the third. “What’s going on here?”
“That’s unbelievable,” I said. “What are the odds?”
In the end she cracked ten eggs into the bowl, and every one of them had two yolks, but after a while it didn’t seem funny and we stopped commenting.
The rest of the weekend was quiet. We drove out to the zoo on Sunday, along with half the families in the city, but it was cold and a lot of the animals stayed inside. We went grocery shopping afterwards, and bought more of everything because of our guest, though I was keenly aware that Paul didn’t chip in. That didn’t stop him from adding an extra six-pack to the shopping cart.
Over dinner that night he asked me if they needed any help at the chocolate factory.
“Easter is coming,” I said. “So that always means more production. I could ask, but I got to warn you, it’s pretty tedious work. And the pay’s not so great.”
“That’s cool,” he said, “anything’s better than nothing.”
Christopher was the senior operations manager at the chocolate factory. He’d been there over 20 years, “and I started out on the conveyor belt, just like you,” as he told me several times.
My boss seemed to like me, for no reason I could discern. Sure, I showed up on time, and was always willing to work an extra shift. Maybe it was because I was one of only a handful of men there. Most of my coworkers were Asian or Hispanic women, you couldn’t hardly tell when they were covered up with their hair nets and their masks and their aprons and their gloves. I was about a foot taller than most of them and you could often find me on the floor, rescuing chocolates that had gone by too fast and should have been pulled.
We made 30 varieties of Easter egg, and most of them were hand-formed. No one buying our chocolates expected them to be identical but they had to fit into the square allotted to them in each sampler. After passing under a waterfall of chocolate in what was called “the enrobing room,” each lump of nougat, fruit or nuts was met by a worker at the end of the line, who adorned the eggs with candy flowers for shipping.
I’d only been there six months when Christopher made me an operations manager assistant, or assistant operations manager. It was supposed to say on my business card but they still hadn’t come from the printer.
Christopher’s father had worked at the chocolate factory, too. He’d been a veteran of World War II, “the Battle of the Bulge,” as Christopher liked to tell everyone. In his tiny office he had a D-Day wall calendar and a picture of a soldier in a long coat and helmet, standing by a pile of snow that was almost as tall as he was.
Christopher himself had never served. “By the time I was old enough, it was Vietnam, and I didn’t want to come home in a box,” he said to me at a coffee break one day. I wondered what his dad thought, but didn’t ask. The old man was gone by then, and Christopher loved to talk about his father’s time in the infantry. At the Christmas party last year, he shared a few ribald songs the veterans brought home from the battlefield, including one sung to the melody all the prisoners whistled in Bridge on the River Kwai:
Hitler has only got one ball
Goering has two but they’re quite small
Herr Himmler is very similar
And Herr Goebbels has no balls at all
Maybe Christopher had a little too much punch that afternoon. About half of the women didn’t drink and the others were giggling as he repeated the words and tried to get them to sing along when he reprised it.
The following week he got a note from someone in HR. One of the women had complained about the song, and Christopher was told it was inappropriate and to refrain from doing anything that would make anyone uncomfortable in the future. No one knew who’d made the call, and Christopher reacted by staying in his office with the door closed most of the day.
Before punching out for lunch, I stopped to ask him if they needed help for the holidays. We produced four million eggs in Easter season, I’d heard him tell a reporter, 100,000 a day at its peak.
“We could probably use someone this week,” Christopher said. He looked through some papers on desk while talking to me, as if the answer might be written down there. He was a thin man with a bit of a paunch (“My Battle of the Bulge,” he’d say when walking the floor sometimes). He had a photo of a wife and kids on desk, not as big as the one he had of his father. “This is your brother-in-law, you say?”
“Carrie and I aren’t actually married, yet,” I said. “But it looks like it’s heading that way.”
“I know how that goes, brother,” he said, and he made a sliding motion with his hands, as if he was trying to catch something that was slipping right by him. “Ask him to come by tomorrow.”
I pulled another double that day; orders were way behind, and as Christopher said, “Easter doesn’t wait for anybody.” Smart shoppers, or irreligious ones without children, knew to get their chocolates from us the week after Easter when everything was marked down. The chocolate would only keep so long, and the candied flowers got dry and cracked.
On the way home, I pulled over before getting on the freeway to watch the fog roll in over the bay. It looked like dry ice at the beginning of a heavy metal concert, and I wish I had something to sketch with. I’d missed the sun that day; it was foggy when I got to work and dark when I came out. The moon was high in the sky and seemed very remote, like the objective lens at the top of a telescope.
Carrie was already in bed when I got in. “After dinner I just threw up for no reason,” she said.
I sat on the bed and put my hand on her forehead. She didn’t feel feverish. “Too much exposure to your brother might do that,” I said.
She laughed. “Did you ask Christopher about getting him a job?”
“I did,” I said. “He wants to meet him first.”
I found Paul in front of the TV set, watching a late-night comedian. “What’s your story, ugly man?” This was his standard greeting when he was still in high school; it seemed funnier then.
I opened the refrigerator to find a gaping hole where the beers had been. “I think I drank all your beer,” Paul said loudly from the other room. And walked back to find him staring mournfully at the screen where the comedian was interviewing a movie star. “And I think I smoked all your cigarettes, too,” he added.
I was waiting for the punch line and looked at the screen with him, thinking I might find it there. I thought of a bunch of things to say and didn’t say any of them. I looked at Paul again, and his eyes met mine. His expression was solemn, even sober.
“I suck,” he said. “I’m the worst.”
“I asked my boss about getting you on at the factory,” I said. “Could you come in tomorrow to talk to him?”
This stirred Paul out of his stupor and he promised to be there and swore to make the most of the opportunity, though I knew what the opportunity was actually worth. Working on a conveyor belt was the definition of unskilled labor, and Paul’s skills were very well hidden.
Carrie felt nauseous again the next morning, but not enough to call in sick. She usually took the bus to work but this time I wanted to drive her. I woke Paul to tell him how to get to the chocolate factory; you had to take a train, and then a bus, and I could see his eyes shifting back and forth as I explained the commute to him, as if looking for a way out.
Yet he showed up that afternoon, looking fairly presentable. His hair was combed and his shirt tucked in, and after about 20 minutes in Christopher’s office, he seemed to have a job. Someone else was going to train him.
I walked him out to the parking lot where he immediately fired up a cigarette. “This shit rocks,” he said, gesturing at the factory behind us.
“You could wait for me, if you like,” I said. “But I have a feeling it’s going to be another late one.”
“It’s cool,” he said. “And I don’t really need the bus, I can walk to the train station from here.”
This was not the kind of thing people from LA said very often. “Do you need a loan ‘til payday?” I said, reaching for my wallet.
He waved his hands in front of me. “You guys have done too much for me already,” he said. “Besides my mom sent me some money.”
Paul wasn’t there when I got home. Carrie said he’d called and told her not to wait dinner. “He sounded like he was in a bar,” she said, taking a meatloaf out of the oven.
“But he’s supposed to start work tomorrow,” I said, and she didn’t even bother to shrug. Without a job, we couldn’t get rid of him, and he couldn’t get a job if he didn’t show up for work. We ate mostly in silence.
Paul woke us both a little after two in the morning. He was playing the stereo so loudly I thought he’d moved one of the speakers to the hallway. Carrie simply rolled over as I got out of bed.
He was sitting in the one comfortable chair we had in the living room with both of the stereo speakers trained on him. He still had his jacket on and was holding a lit cigarette. A beer was open on the table beside him.
I went to the stereo to turn down the music. He shouted as I did: “The song ‘Bad Company’ by the band Bad Company on an album called Bad Company,” he said. “How bad is that?”
“You have work in the morning,” I said. “So do I.”
“Just a nightcap,” he said, holding up his beer.
A “nightcap” was an expression from our parents’ generation, and it always made me think of some guy from olden times, in a nightgown and holding a candle, a nightcap on his head. What was even the point of them?
I was back in bed and asleep when the music crept up the hall again. “Goddammit,” I said and was about to get up again when Carrie climbed over me. “I got it,” she said, and for a few moments I lay in bed and listened to the noise from the living room. I couldn’t tell who was playing on the stereo but the voices of Carrie and her brother sounded like they were singing counterpoint. I heard Paul’s voice rise as if belting out some anthem, and then a cry from Carrie, and the sound of something falling.
When I got to the living room Carrie was holding her hand over her nose and Paul was beside her, wringing his hands. One of the speakers was on its side on the floor.
“I’m sorry,” Paul said, “I didn’t mean to!”
“Jesus Chris, what the hell is wrong with you?” said Carrie.
They both looked at me. I could see blood on Carrie’s fingers. “I went to turn off the music and he hit me in the face,” she said, holding her nose.
“It was an accident!”
The music had stopped but their voices were so loud that I could see a light go on in the flat across the street. Next someone would be calling the cops.
“Tilt your head back,” I told Carrie, and turned her toward the door. I wanted to say something to Paul but he was looking out the window and cursing himself, or someone.
And the next morning he was gone. I went to knock on his door and his bed was empty, his suitcase vanished. It seemed like a miracle but a poorly timed one. I’d just gotten him hired and I was afraid how Christopher would react when he didn’t show up.
Turned out Paul had called bright and early and told him he found another job.
“Sorry,” I said, “this is the first I heard of it.”
Christopher waved me off. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I didn’t get the impression he really wanted to be here anyway.”
We got a note from Paul a week later. He had been arrested the day after leaving our place, and the judge had given him the choice of rehab or jail, so now he was in a county hospital getting sober. “Maybe Ill see you in here sis,” he wrote in his big, blocky handwriting.
“Not if I see you first,” said Carrie. We were reading the letter out loud to each other.
“And sorry for all the shit I put you threw,” he said in the part he addressed to me. “I will always remember the good times and the eggs with the double yoke.”
“Should I tell him he can’t have his room back?” said Carrie. She had just learned she was pregnant, and we were already talking about getting married and turning what had been my studio into a nursery. Sometimes things happen pretty fast.
The day after Easter we got a note from our landlord saying he needed our apartment for his daughter. There was rent control in the city, and you could only force a tenant out of a property you owned if you needed it for someone in your own family. We were immediately suspicious, and Carrie asked me, “Do you think this was about the noise Paul made?”
I said something to the landlord’s daughter the next time I saw her, and she seemed surprised. “It’s actually my aunt,” she said. “His sister.”
“Yeah, right,” I said to Carrie later. “His daughter, his sister. He just wants us gone. I’d like to come back in a month and see who’s actually living here.”
I said that a couple times, but I never did go back.