THE COMEDIAN

My father worked nights as the desk attendant at a cheap hotel downtown. It was a thankless job behind bulletproof glass, which was all he had to shield him from demented drunks and screeching prostitutes, from seven in the evening until four in the morning, the poor man.

- OTTESSA MOSHFEGH

But he had to do it. The next month's rent was always due. Life cost money. I was in high school and growing so quickly that I needed new shoes all the time. And he had to pay my clarinet teacher and the girl who came to clean once a week. My mother hadn't been able to work for years already. By the time I turned sixteen, she was completely blind, and so, while my father was downtown with the scum of the earth, it was my job to keep my mother company, to feed her and put her to bed, etcetera.

Our ground-floor apartment had no views but was crowded with city noises all the same. My mother insisted that we keep the windows shut at all times because, I think, it pained her to hear life happening outside. From our kitchen windows, all you could see was the gray courtyard, pale walls with marks like blood splatter from rain that had fallen before the cement had fully cured. Outside the bedroom windows, there was a two-foot gap of tinny air, like a laundry chute. Sunlight barely made it all the way down, and pigeons used the cool darkness for their mating rituals. My mother called them garbage birds.

Weekday mornings, my father and I walked together to St. Thomas, where he was a math teacher and I was a junior. Every so often, he’d buy me a pack of Twizzlers and himself a pack of NoDoz from the pharmacy. The NoDoz made it hard for him to keep still, so he was always doing something with his fingers, worrying a paper cut or picking at his cuticles. Anything to keep him occupied and busy, to distract him from his exhaustion.

He spoke constantly for the same reason.

“The people downtown, they are not like us, son.” He called me “son.” It was that dignified between us, or he pretended it was. “It’s a different world down there. You don't see a single normal person. They’re all heathens and whores.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said and crossed myself, and so he did, too.