The Cooler
21st annual tamarack award winner
By John Bresland
(page 4 of 4)
Another fact—implausible but later confirmed—is that my father was a member of the National Socialist Party of America, a.k.a., the American Nazi Party. I hesitate to mention this. It’s hard to make a sympathetic hero out of anybody who writes out a quarterly dues check and mails it off to the south Chicago chapter of American Nazis. For years my mother kept this information secret. Until long after she left him, until long after he had vanished from my life and from hers, she never said a word about it. Perhaps she worried that I would judge her for finding enough content in the man’s character to actually marry him. When she asked him for a divorce, my father slapped her so hard that you could see it on her face for days. For a period of weeks you saw the slaps appear and reappear like bad dreams. So there you go: A Wife Beating Nazi. Plus, he owned guns, one of which he kept in the glove box wrapped in a canvas bank-deposit bag. Tally it up and you get a Paranoid Gun-Loving Wife-Beating American Nazi. On paper, I can’t deny this.
But he didn’t teach me to hate. There were no swastika banners strung from the ceiling of our house. No private rituals during which we basked in the glory of the supreme white race—unless you count the Indy 500. I recall nothing in the way of suppertime Holocaust denials. Dad liked to use the word nigger, but his greatest hero was Muhammad Ali.
“How about Jewbag?” asked my father.
Uncle Billy acknowledged that Jewbag sounded pretty bad. It had a certain something. But since Jewbag didn’t apply to all whites equally—if it applied to any whites at all—he said Jewbag was an invalid entry.
The game stopped while Stuckey took his turn at the Folgers can. There was no reason he couldn’t play the game while he took a piss, but I think Uncle Billy was caught off guard by Stuckey’s handling of the can. I think we were all caught off guard.
Stuckey had lowered his shorts and held the can tightly to his groin, as if he’d trapped a lightning bug in there. To my knowledge then and now, I don’t believe there is a single circumstance under which it’s acceptable to watch another man take a piss, but I couldn’t take my eyes off of Stuckey. The way he pressed that can into himself with both hands, airtight. His whiz drumming up against the metal. Complex acoustics accompanied his progress. Variations in pitch and tone that could not be ignored. Suddenly that cruel nickname popped into my head: Señor Micropenis. And then Stuckey said something that made me wonder if he knew that I knew.
“What they say about black men,” he said. “Is it true?” A silence took hold and deepened as Stuckey let out his last tympanic squirts. He persisted. “You know. About the size of their dicks.”
“That’s a myth,” said my father. He coiled the pull string around the Johnson and fired it up on the second try. There were millions of perch out there.
BY OBSCENE IN ALL THE RIGHT WAYS, I mean we went dangerously fast, and after my mother abandoned these excursions to prepare for her exams, we went fast dangerously. I especially liked to position myself at the bow, coil my arms around the handrails, and lay my head out over the rushing water. I liked to spit into the water and watch it disappear into the rush. This was never allowed under Mom’s watch, and I was grateful for the latitude. Grateful that I could be flipped, at any moment, from the bow into the lake, and get my head chopped off—always the leading adult concern. Don’t fall in. You’ll get your head chopped off by the propeller. Everybody knew somebody who had fallen off a boat and got his head chopped off. Or somebody who dove into the shallows at the quarry and ended up a paraplegic. Or somebody who got a shiny red apple for Halloween with a razor blade hidden inside. Dad understood the debt of recklessness fathers owe their sons. How recklessness inoculates against fear. How recklessness teaches you to tighten your grip when you need it, and to loosen your grip when you don’t. When he pushed that little Starcraft beyond the speedometer, the water turned hard as marble. When we got up into the air, jumping the wake of a passing ore freighter, the water had consequences. The way it slammed into the hull like thunder from hell, like we were landing on broken glass. Obscene in all the right ways. What I mean is that the boat sounded like it could rip in half at any moment. And this made me laugh out loud. Because maybe it was true. Maybe somebody out there really would get his head chopped off. But it wasn’t going to be me. MM
Listen to an audio version of The Cooler, read by the winning author.
TAMARACK 2006
THE PRIZE $10,000THE SPONSOR Tamarack Funds
THE STORY “The Cooler”
THE WINNERJohn Bresland, 36, received an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Iowa last spring. Several of his radio essays have aired on public radio, and his video essay, “Les Cruel Shoes,” is a current feature on Blackbird, an online journal of literature and the arts. His story “The Horns You Get” appeared recently in North American Review, and his commentaries appear regularly on editorial pages throughout the Midwest. He lives in Iowa City, Iowa, with his wife, Eula Biss.
THE INSPIRATION
“This story came from my memories of growing up on Chicago’s south side at a time when U.S. industry was being dismantled and shipped abroad,” says Bresland, whose story is a chapter from a novel-in-progress, How to Be a Man. “The kids I ran with in those days were wild, resourceful, unmedicated, and so were most of the adults. I often wondered while writing ‘The Cooler’ how we salvage good lessons from bad teachers.”
THE 2007 TAMARACK
Minnesota Monthly will begin accepting entries for next year’s Tamarack Award competition on March 1, 2007. Check here for official rules and submission guidelines.
Interested in reading more of the Tamarack submissions?
Check out two stories that tied for fourth place:
"How to Ride Greyhound" by Eric Vrooman
"Beautiful Country" by Amanda Coplin
