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Half-baked, condescending and aggressively white? Showtime must be back in season!
But seriously, it only takes about half the pilot before the weird tone, Britishisms that don't connect, and the entire preposterous unnecessary existence of this show altogether fade into the background and you realize that, pedigree aside, you're not looking at the show's resume but at a good story and some terrific performances. (And one truly gruesome dance scene better never spoken of again.) After that, you just sort of adjust and forget that you're watching the copy of a copy of the ghost of a semiautobiographical stranger... And then you maybe fall in love. Shocked the hell out of me.
That's all due in no small part to Emmy Rossum, who manages to make looking totally jacked-up seem like a valid fashion choice; William H. Macy, who vacillates depending on the demon drink between a man who looks like William H. Macy and something they pulled out of William H. Macy's drain; and old favorite Justin Chatwin, who has grown up real nice and plays the ethically challenged but sympathetic new guy Steve.
So. Steve finally gets to meet his dream girl, Fiona, when a dude steals her purse. He doesn't get the purse back, but he does knock down a mean bouncer whose relatives will be coming for his ass in weeks to come. That night, he and Fiona have some pretty thrilling sex on the floor that is interrupted by her drunk dad Frank; he spends the few days trying to overcome her presumptions about their class differences and whatever. Turns out he's a car thief anyway, which is just romantic enough that she sets aside her low self-esteem -- and occasional glints of a pretty dark, claustrophobic emotional paralysis -- long enough to let him into the family.
And what a family it is. The thing I forgot is how whichever Gallagher is onscreen is always the awesomest one. The oldest of the kids, Lip, is a thuggish, good-hearted kid who finds his younger brother Ian's gay porn and immediately drags him over to this blowjob girl's house to cure him. (That is how Lip works, and it is great.) Then, just when you're thinking the girl Karen is like the sad collateral damage of our oversexed society or whatever, she throws her clown-obsessed dad out of the house in a blazing rage and you realize she's great, too. (Also, her mom is Joan Cusack playing essentially Joan Cusack, a role at which she excels because that is the only thing they ever pay her for. She's the reason I never worry about Michael Cera.) Pray we see much more of Karen and her mom.
door is this neat couple, Kevin and Veronica: Veronica is blindingly competent, Kev is a bartender at Frank's favorite place (when not accidentally flopping his giant wang around like to drive poor Ian 'round the bend). The second-hardest worker and second-youngest after Lip, future paramilitary Ian is currently sleeping with his father-of-two Muslim boss at a deli, a warm young guy whose white wife is played by my very favorite actress. Lip struggles with his brother's sexual identity and experiences for like one minute, then it's just gay jokes all the way down; we have every indication that the deal with Ian and his boss is a lot more complicated and okay than it first appears. (Better than that, we have Ian's word.)
The younger kids, we don't know much about yet. Debbie is both a pickpocket and incurably charitable; Carl either loves animals or tortures them, I can't tell yet; and Baby Liam is, well, black. It doesn't seem we're going to be discussing that, but it sure does make things picturesque.
So. If you like poor people, and who doesn't; if you like big drunk speeches by obsolete old men who once held promise, and how can you resist; if you like seeing Justin Chatwin naked doing dirty things, and trust me you do; if you want to know what having brothers is actually like, or what it would be like to be Dave for an infinity of Chipmunks; if you like blowjobs or little kids drinking beer, and who doesn't love these things, then I must recommend this show. Plus, and I know I mentioned this, but Emmy Rossum looking like hell is like seeing a unicorn. A sad, nasty unicorn with bad breath, but still.
week: Poor parenting, thug behavior, probably more blowjobs, and we get to know more about this incredibly large group of unsavory people. At some point perhaps there will be dignity, but until then, keep it shameless.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Meet Frank Gallagher, a drunken self-important loser and paterfamilias of a fairly gross, fairly awesome family in some poor area of Chicago or something. He's got about a billion kids, who frankly would be better off if he disappeared one day; wife's out of the picture. The oldest, Fiona, is super gorgeous and super messed up in her head. She raises the kids and tries not to be totally disappointed in her circumstances, which is like this Herculean task, because her life is objectively repulsive. She starts out being the most important one, but they're all going to end up pretty important.
The two oldest boys are Lip and Ian, a study in contrasts: Lip is smart in that hood-rat way, ethically challenged; Ian is super responsible and keyed up and honorable, but as we'll see, he also has his share of iffy secrets. Then there's Debbie, who is sort of like in that movie Stigmata where they talk about how the closer you are to being a saint, the closer you are also getting to true evil: She's both at once, and it's fantastic. Carl and Liam are the babies. Carl's an eight-year-old psycho in training, and Liam is mysteriously black: "I'm no biologist, but he looks a little bit like my first sponsor. He and the ex were close."
Anyway, he discusses other people we'll meet in a bit, and then it's morning: Fiona passes around a cereal box for money to pay the electric, and they all toss in. Because they are a family of grifters and thieves, everybody has something to contribute except the babies. There's a lot of whirling camera action as we see just how busy a morning is when you have a million kids, and just how busy a morning can be when you're poor Fiona. She hands Liam over to Debbie in lieu of a real Show & Tell ("Show them the birthmark on his back, it looks like Latvia"), gets their shared cell -- what you call a Ghetto Family Plan -- from Lip (fourteen minutes left), feeds the kids, collects almost enough to keep the lights on, et cetera.
There's a bunch of smash-cuts and slow-mo and speed-up and whatever, the editing better calm down soon because it was annoying in the UK version but straight up dickless here and I don't want to discuss it at all. I mean, at least they had reasons to be all self-satisfied and dorkily overproduced: One, have you ever seen British TV, and two, the pilot here is practically shot-for-shot the original one, which was 2004 I think. Which is like 1998 in UK years. (And I'm not being racist or whatever, it's a continuum: 2011 here is like 1950 in Japan years.)
Fiona has so many jobs it's resulted in at least a 1% reduction in overall national employment numbers. One of them is at a pretzel place, where she is -- chronically -- overworked, today because their coworker's son tagged a cop car with the cop inside. I think they should give awards for something like that. Some hot fratty guys try and flirt with Fiona, which brightens things for a second until they're walking away: "Tap that ass? Once, if I double-bagged it. Project girls don't abort."
Hurts her feelings, why wouldn't it, but like how is it that young women in low-income areas are simultaneously known for their constant abortions and their welfare-queen baby-having? Surely you can't be hated for both, at the same time, by the same brain. It's like how no Republican would ever allow a tax break for artists like they have in Ireland -- that's the only time taxes are a good idea, when they come out of an artist's income. Either that makes sense to you or it does not. Nothing but hoes and tricks.
God, hating poor people is really complicated now. In my day it was as simple as paying them to fight one another for the internet. Then came the Mad Hatter's Tea Party and now poor people are the new rich people, and rich people think they're poor, and everybody's mad at the rich people, who are also them, and the only people upset about gentrification are the rich white kids doing the gentrifying and making silkscreens bitching about it because affluent is the new hipster and nothing means anything and maybe never did. It's actually somewhat soothing.
Lip heads over to Joan Cusack's house for one of his many jobs, tutoring -- he's good at the maths -- and due to her molysmophobic fear of dirt, Joan Cusack makes him put his shoes in a plastic bag specifically for the purpose. A few minutes later, after some bizarrely adorable mnemonic devices of his own devising -- "Midget naked witch is bending over, and she's crying because she lost one ear and she can't find it" -- Karen's blowing him. He reminds her that tutoring is his job (and today's the last brick in the electric bill wall) and they agree that he's getting paid either way.
Everybody continues in a state of rest or uniform motion unless acted upon by an external force, Lip says, on his way to blowing. Better definition for this show than anything I could have said.
Fiona's getting ready to go out, running from room to room, when Lip finds Ian's collection of gay porn. He sort of vibes in the air for awhile as the universe changes shape around him, but he seems to be okay mostly. Fiona's best friend Veronica shows up and snips off the tag of Fiona's dress -- she's got a gun to stick it on later, from when she worked at TJ Maxx. This is, as we'll see, characteristic of Veronica. Like everybody else, she's equally awesome and vile, which means she's like everybody else, which is what this show is about. Also, this episode specifically, it's about the washing machine. Any time anybody's in the kitchen, especially Fiona, something draws attention to the jacked-up washing machine: She has to prop a chair against the door to keep it shut, that kind of thing. Poor people ingenuity or salient plotpoint? We will see.
At the club, a boy named Steve watches Fiona from the balcony and seems bedazzled by her dancing. He'll do a skin-crawlingly overworked speech about it later, but it will still be confusing because she still looks pretty much like shit even when she's all prettied up to go out. A dude dances with her for a second and then steals her purse, and Steve makes all kinda messes trying to give chase. By the end, Steve and both girls are standing out on the sidewalk watching the gun run away, and being impressed by Steve's futile, heroic attempt.
Steve was going to buy Fiona a drink anyway -- at which Fiona bristles, because Steve's kind of posh and because it's what she does -- but then the bouncer won't let them back in. They didn't stop to get a stamp while chasing the man, and the bouncer's being a dick about it. There's a very pointy moment where Veronica and Fiona sort of surge at the guy, while Steve hangs back, like they get way too mad way too fast in this technically perfect simulation of what happens when oppressed people find a fight they think they can win and/or against arbitrary authority. The Harper Valley PTA effect. Or you know, rioting.
Anyway, Fiona is spittin' and pissed and the guy ends up barring them all -- but only after she intuits that maybe the bouncer is in on it. (Which: How would that work? "And then after I take their money, you refuse to let them back in the club. We'll be zillionaires!") So whatever, they're done and Fiona's now broke, so they're going to take a cab home... But first, Steve punches the bouncer so hard he falls over and then the three of them run off into the night so Steve can give them a ride back.
Lip lasts about five seconds, up on the bunkbed, before he can't take it anymore. He needs to talk about two things, with Ian, and one leads to the other. First, the blowjob from Karen Jackson, which Ian doesn't believe because Lip didn't tell him right away -- they're close, in age and proximity both -- and then when Lip asks if he's ever gotten one himself. Ian pulls out the pot, lights a joint. They're both grateful for that. It's never been this strange before, with them. With sex. Ian gets nervous but admits he has, a time or two. And so why didn't he tell? Lip produces
Ian's gay porn, answers his own question.
Downstairs, they've got Steve's shirt off and Veronica's giving him a haircut, of course. The kids are all hanging around, too, interested in the heroic stranger. There's so much going on at the Gallagher house -- and so much to be ashamed of -- that once you're in, you're in. He was their buddy the second Fiona let him in the door. They go down the line introducing everybody, Debbie and the crazy one, and they talk about Veronica's many jobs. If Fiona is a casual dater, jobwise, Veronica's more of a serial monogamist. She did housekeeping at the Cook County hospital, where she got her nursing smarts we'll learn about later, but got fired for selling medical supplies on eBay.
Debbie's just remarking on Steve's big watch -- "Panerai... What'd that set you back, about six bills?" Welcome to Debbie. Keep an eye on that watch. The boys come down, clearly still uncomfortable, and I am sort of glad we didn't have to see how the gay thing went down. Lip, for being such a thug, is pretty fierce about his brother. It was crude and short-lived and Ian said nothing, I'm sure. Ian sits on the stairs, out of sight, in a sort of détente with Lip across the way; that's when Kevin comes in, Veronica's live-in boyfriend door, a bartender. There is much to recommend him, but there is also a wicked hard-to-swallow thing about his idiom of use. Which is to say, his last name may well be Federline.
Which would be merely sort of heartbreaking, except for how Veronica is black. So either he's a douchebag, or this show is.
"Yo!" says Kevin. And when he gets startled by the half-naked hottie in his girlfriend's lap, they tell him Steve decked that bouncer, Jimmy Clifton -- also black/no relation -- he goes, "Respect!" Things like that, on the reg, which I don't know what to do with. Sometimes with a Showtime show you just have to shrug. (Or, I guess, "respect." I do not. Either of those things, I do not.)
Turns out Jimmy Clifton didn't murder Steve because he's already had two or three convictions for like manslaughter, and he did five years for fucking up his own dad over an '87 Monte Carlo with 200K miles. So that's Jimmy Clifton. So Steve is doomed.
"Up the wooden hill," Fiona trills, taking a beer out of Carl's hand and ushering the kids out. Kevin grins at Steve -- "Let me take one last look at you while you're still alive" -- and the neighbors head home. Out on the street, Steve's car is something impressive. When Kev asks the deal, Veronica spins him a whole story about how Steve dropped out of high school and became a janitor at a dotcom startup and within a year he owned it. "Made his first billion by twenty. Two Jags, controlling interest in the Red Wings, 10,000 employees kissing his ass. Yes boss, No boss. Why shouldn't he ride around in style?"
Kevin finally figures out that she's fucking with him, and they have a fight that makes more sense in British -- "Take back dumb prick!" -- but Veronica is hilarious about it: "Hi, nice to meet you, I'm Veronica. What's your pre-tax income?" Kev changes to how Steve was half-naked when he came in, and Veronica explains that if he hadn't shown up, Fiona and Veronica were going to tag-team him. This finally resets Kev's brains and he starts thinking about having sex with Veronica and Fiona at the same time. She laughs and slaps his ass and they go have their requisite huge amount of adventurous sex.
"All quiet up the wooden hill?" Steve asks, when Fiona comes back downstairs. Steve poses a lot of things in terms of quizzes and yes/no questions, like, if he hadn't busted ass for Fiona's purse, would she even have noticed him? She explains that she's still not said she's interested, so the question is moot, and then Steve is saddled with this impossibly contrived, over-rehearsed speech that makes no sense regardless of country of origin: "You know, 90% of the world's problems are caused by tiny words that come in pairs. I mean, we're healthy and we're happy, but when people ask, we say, Not bad. You know, the first time that I saw you dancing -- about a month back, at Crobar -- I was desperate to buy you a drink. You know, normally I'm shy, so I told myself: I can't. She won't. We wouldn't. And then tonight, I see you there again. All the indications being that I'm getting... A second chance to make a good impression."
Justin Chatwin is awesome and all, but that's the kind of bullshit they used to cram in his mouth on Weeds and it didn't work there either. Difference being, the whole time he's talking that smarmy nonsense he's been getting closer and closer and hotter and hotter and hasn't stopped looking in Fiona's eyes for one second. "Tell me to stop and I'll stop," he says, and she doesn't. He keeps telling her to go slower, but she can't. Pretty soon he can't either.
Giant fuckfest, knocking things off the table, it's all very athletic on every surface of the house and yet also very sweet and hesitant, the way they're banging the shit out of each other. Steve's finger gets caught in a silverware drawer and Fiona doesn't even notice, it's pretty awesome, but just before she comes somebody starts banging on the door. They both scramble around and she runs up the stairs to get clothes or something, so Steve has to answer the door -- after a faceplant or two struggling into his jeans -- with his shirt still off.
It's the cops, which is weird for Steve especially, so he runs up to find Fiona, running into a wild Liam on the Loose, Debbie running to catch him, on the way. "Yeah, uh, cops? Looking for you?" She doesn't even have time for the weirded-outness of Steve at this time, and just heads downstairs. Where the cops have brought Frank home, like every night, with soiled pants and a deadly complexion. They dump him on the floor and the cop, Tony, looks at Fiona a little wetly, maybe because of Steve's shirtlessness. Everybody loves Fiona; Steve is clearly hot enough that "everybody" should be worried.
Does she usually leave her father on the floor like that? Yeah, every night. Always gone by morning. And then who was the black toddler running around upstairs? Which is really two questions, one of which has bearing on the situation between them, but both of which have the same answer: "Liam? Liam's my brother." And we won't be discussing it any further, if you really think about it.
It's a friendly, sort of sad goodbye that happens . Drunk dad on the floor, cops all around. He thinks it's a situation, he doesn't understand that it happens every night, even though it's clear it does. Steve's got a lot of things to consider right now, and needs to leave; Fiona, on the other hand, assumes that Steve's Ghetto Tourism trip has come to its logical end. She nods to herself: This is what you get for trying.
When Steve gets to the car he looks back at the window, hoping to see her -- hoping to turn back around and up the steps -- but it's just the rest of the kids, staring down from a window. He salutes, and leaves. Fiona goes to bed lonelier than before she met Steve.
day's tough; Fiona takes Liam with her to another job, cleaning up motel rooms, and her coworker offers to bring her a dozen tamales in the morning. Over at Kevin's bar, Frank's just shown up with his disability check in hand, refusing to leave. Once Kevin settles up his tab, there's not a lot left, but it's enough.
When Steve shows up back at the house, Fiona does everything she can to get him out of there. Tower of stolen paper product from the motel on the kitchen table. Project girls don't abort; he's just there to get the fuck he didn't get last night. But underneath that, maybe she's allowed herself to hope. Just a little. So then everything she's saying is not only the logical truth, but also a test. She gives him hell for awhile, and finally Steve breaks down, grinning but sincere. "Just when you think you've collared your dream girl, her incontinent, alcoholic father appears, wrecks everything... And she's blaming you?" She s
ays everything she can, everything nasty, implicating him in her squalid life, making him a part of the shame, but he's not buying.
"Quit pretending you don't even know me," Steve begs. The correct response. Tell me to stop and I'll stop, she thinks. But before she can reply, Lip's appeared. Steve is proud of himself for remembering the kid's name, but Lip's got a lot on his mind and doesn't need some smiling rich dude right now, so he gets mean. "Hey, it's Dead Man Walking! Jimmy Clifton called today, looking for you." He says he's at school because he's got a dentist appointment today, and Steve -- now he's getting desperate -- goes, "Little known fact: Don't just chew your food on one side, because it can buckle your jaw, which will buckle your hips, and affect your posture."
Well, you can't blame Lip for biting back, even as Fiona's mouthing at him to fuck off, and eventually he leaves. Fiona thanks Steve for trying to save her purse, and for "stuff," but before she can shove him out the door he's back on her case. "I'm not looking. Not right now." And not for you, not for the guy that always says the right thing and wears the right clothes and drives that car and pricks a hole in the trap and the numbness of the trap that makes it bearable, every single time, like days at the pool: You never notice how hot the water is until you step out for a second, and shiver. And Steve is wonderful, which makes everything else terrible, and he has to see her like that, and it's awful: Quit pretending you don't see this. Trying to keep the washer from rocking. He nods, understanding some-to-none of this subtext, and writes his number on the big family whiteboard before leaving.
Lip drags Ian to Karen's house for a last-ditch blowjob; her mom Sheila acts crazy some more and it's just like going home: "Karen! Honey, your little helper is here!" Can't you just hear Joan Cusack saying that? Inside, she offers them "homemade lime-chicken chimichangas," and when Karen's dad comes in, he looks around for his daughter. Lip tells him she ran upstairs to check Google Earth and see where Isaac Newton was born (!).
Sheila tries desperately to get a kiss from her husband, telling him to guess what she made for his lunch. Somehow, it's all very depressing. Like one of those Lean Cuisine ads where the ladies are so happy about their lunch. Also, I didn't mention this earlier, but their house is clown central, which makes all of it -- the weirdly permissive mom, the blowjobs, the crazy cooking, the mean dad -- about ten times more surreal. Cookie jars and piggy banks, some holding balloons and some bare-handed. It is grooooss.
Karen's dad guesses first "Cornish game hen with Asian pear," and then "wild salmon with baby carrots," but when his wife asks him for a kiss to tell, he snarls that he'll find out when he opens the damn bag. Sheila is totally out of it and totally trapped, like if you crossed Betty Draper with Annette Bening in American Beauty and then gave that person an acceptably dotty, sweet personality -- perhaps Joan Cusack's personality.
This whole time the gay one is getting a blowjob from Lip's tutee, right, so eventually something knocks an apple off the counter and it rolls over to the other side of the table and as shitty dad's on his way out, he bends down to pick it up and sees his daughter crouched with her face in Ian's crotch and she leans back and nearly smiles at him, not in a creepy way but like in a nearly pretending nothing is happening way, but wiping her mouth, and then things get really fast and scary and the boys are running around the house and jumping out of windows trying to get away -- and poor fucking Sheila is completely bizarre, screaming, "It's only a study group!" and that -- and finally the dad's out on the sidewalk in front, yelling "The farther you run, the more I will kill you!"
Well, somehow in all that Lip hurt his ankle, and of course Fiona assumes that they were jumping turnstiles -- and not, as the boys have lied, on the train getting injured by an old lady's walker -- and then Veronica shows up to yell at Fiona for not elevating the injury because it's a submetatarsal hematoma, and barks out orders to Ian about going to her house and getting all this medical stuff she rattles off, and also her smokes from her bedroom. Oh yeah, everybody on this show smokes. Of course.
So Ian heads out, but suddenly there's another knock at the door and there is much scattering because it's probably Karen's dad there to kill everybody, and Fiona's sort of insanely yelling, "Oh, what have you done? What have you done?" Only it's not mad dads or cops, it's a guy delivering a new washing machine. Hard to say no.
Speaking of temptation, check out Kev's giant wang where he's sleeping -- bartender, remember, so this is when he sleeps -- nude in the bedroom, which is where Ian is now standing, jaw dropped and going into some kind of Tiger Beats I Have Known fugue and trying to remember he's in there for cigarettes and not to go crazy with teen desire. Kev stirs and, thinking nothing of it, asks Ian to give him one of Veronica's cigarettes. He sits up naked and, shivering, Ian puts one in his mouth and lights it. He groans, taking it in. It's like a horror movie, but also like the total opposite of that.
Veronica walks Lip back downstairs, where the guy is hooking up the washing machine, because Fiona can only be expected to take so much and anyway, things fall off trucks sometimes and eventually it's your number that's going to be up. Only, inside the washer was a bouquet of roses with her name on it: Saint Steve, still not giving up. She's taken with the romance for a moment, but then it starts to sour on her.
There are many things this could mean, and of all those possibilities there's only one infinitesimal chance that this is really happening, and this guy of means really does like her. Any other way, she's more of a slag than when he came over before, and left his number, which she was already trying really hard to believe because it was easier than hoping.
Karen's dad rages around for a good long time about this and that, blowjobs, and Sheila's babbling right back at him, and promising to do anything at all, as long as he doesn't leave. Finally Karen's grossed out enough to start screaming at both of them, about how if he's willing to pull this shit and leave then he's not worth worrying about, much less begging to stay. Out on the lawn -- holding all his clowns, because turns out they weren't Sheila's at all, which is possibly my favorite visual detail in the whole episode, save one -- he's all, "Honor Thy Father!"
And this would be precisely when I fell in love with Karen: "GET FUCKED!" And the last clown come whizzing at his head, through the big picture window.
Fiona can't call Steve until she's at the motel job -- far from the house and what it means -- so she can call Steve to yell at him/figure it out/risk hoping just this one time. He refuses to tell her anything about the washer, just that he sent it so she'd remember his phone number. Which clearly worked. She lies and says it's in the yard and quickly will begin to rust, but he doesn't believe her. "Did the guy connect it?" Yes. "It's working okay?" She's a thing in a cage, who's given up so thoroughly on the future that she's come to resent it. And Steve, I will tell you, is being completely upfront, which we can see and she can't afford to see, so really this whole story takes place inside Fiona. Where things are hard, because they have to be.
Ian's job is working at a tiny Muslim deli/grocery, whose owner Kash is a young, sweet fellow with a beautiful white wife (Marguerite Moreau!") who wears a headscarf, and two really cute kids. He's not the kind that resists temptation very easily; not one of those kind of guys. He tries to do the right thing, but wave some pork rinds in his face and he's going to take a bite. And no matter how many times he promises he'll stop, the thing is that they're delicious. And it's hard to really believe something is wrong when there's nothing wrong with it. When nothing about it feels wrong.
The wife smells his breath, on the way out of the store, and Ian steps in to say the pork rinds were his -- probably not even from pigs at this point -- and she looks at him. Not mean, not hateful, not entirely stupid either. Just looks for a second; speaks softly and not without softness. "Ian, I am the one that signs your check. What's bad for him is really bad for you. If you are stupid enough to start lying for him...?"
"They're just corn chips with fake hair," the boys protest, and Kash's wife tells him to get his ass to the mosque, "So your dad stops blaming me for the fact that we're all going to hell." And to call his mom too, because she won't take her meds and won't listen to the white girl: "I don't want the cops dragging me out of bed again at four AM because she's out in the alley yelling that the CIA is stealing her trash." Ian asks whether that didn't actually happen: "Four years ago, yes. But now she's locked in the basement, making a helmet out of tinfoil. Enough's enough!" Beat. "I have to take the boys to Cub Scouts at the mosque before all the carpets are taken. She's your mother, get her to take her Thorazine."
If you think about it, this is one of the hardest roles in the show, because the deck is stacked: She should be a bitch, a harridan, a disappointed fucked-up lady. But somehow she is awesome, and not only because Marguerite Moreau is a wonderful angel sent to us from heaven to make things more excellent. She's not an obstruction or a suspenseful red flag or the Doakes, she's a woman. A woman who has made unimaginable changes to her life, and her soul, and has sacrificed a great deal for a man she loves a great deal, with whom she has built a life that as a natural consequence of its architecture holds her up to non-stop scrutiny. There are many ways she could have chosen to make her life easier, and none of them she chose. Plus her kids are adorable as hell.
Down the wooden staircase, half-asleep. Liam's bottle in the fridge, to the vodka. Fiona finds Ian on the couch in the loving room, all alone. He looks forlorn, but he's also tossing wads of stolen toilet paper at their dad's passed-out drunk face (Turn him over, people! Or actually, never mind. Carry on.) Fiona jokes about the long face: "Just tell me you didn't go and get some girl pregnant" It's a joke but only Ian knows the punchline. He looks down at their dad for awhile, musing. "He hates me." Fiona assures him it's just that he looks the most like their lost mother. "You probably scare him," she says, which brings back his smile. "Yeah, he ain't seen nothing yet." Ian promises he'll find field trip money somehow, hoping she'll stop worrying, but she picks up Frank's legs and shakes out some change, grinning.
"You must get sick of having to think for everybody." The sadness comes back, for a moment, but she tells him the story she tells herself: "Proves I'm wanted." He's amazed by her, the way she thinks this is her life. "Jesus, Fiona. If all you want is to be needed, then congratulations. You've got yourself a job for life with this joker." He's safely up the wooden hill before she starts sobbing.
Eventually she puts her shoulders back, breathes, pulls it together. Fiona tries to wake up snoring Frank, kicking him wherever he is. One little change. He doesn't move, breathing softly, and she screams at him. She sits down. "Good job, Fiona," she says. Putting his deadweight hand up against her face. "I don't know how I could do this without you. Thanks for all your hard work." Crouching by her father's prone body on the floor of the living room while her life goes by outside. "My pleasure," Fiona says, and heads upstairs with Liam's bottle.
But when she's safely gone, Debbie appears with a pillow and places it under his sleeping head. "Goodnight, Daddy," she says with a kiss. And then she's gone again. The things we don't even see them doing, for us. The machine of them, chugging along; Lip worrying at his brother's sex, until he can make sense of it. It runs on love.
But then, there was something. Nothing, and then something. Ian just saying it like that, and all the hope this bastard's stirred up again, fighting inside. Sometimes the work is great because she's so tired at the end of the day, by the time they bring him home, she can't feel anything at all. Sometimes not even that will work. There's a rule that says she can't add somebody else to the list of people to take care of. It's about selfishness and it's about the inevitable crash back down to earth. But there was something.
"If that wasn't bullshit, what was I wearing?" She's standing outside, far away, at the place where the tenements stop and the city starts. Cell minutes ticking away. She couldn't help herself. "First time you saw me? If that wasn't a lie."
He remembers, exquisitely. His smile so wide he can barely see the road. "Black top with gold trim, black shiny jeans. Thin shoes. Straps. Sandals. With your hair pinned high. Dangly gold earrings that made me smile. A big watch. Too big, so it slid up your arm. But it looked great." She's sat, now, on a stone wall, under the weight of him. She remembers that night. It felt like this.
"And you were dancing to a red-haired girl in a green dress..." Jenna, the hot one. It was Jenna's birthday. He was watching Jenna, she's the pretty one. Fiona was a consolation prize, or a part of a longer memory, who showed up again at CroBar, a month later. The girl who lost her purse and took him home. "So how come you're not stalking Jenna?" She can barely remember to keep the harshness out of her voice. If it's a game he's got good game. But what if?
"Because you think like that. And Jenna doesn't. Jenna dances for an audience. You dance like there's no one else in the room. Your life's not simple, Fiona. And you can't stop it from showing, because you're no fake." The tears come then, a little. Happy or sad, she doesn't know anymore. She's gotten so good at not being sad. "You're not lost," he says. "You don't need finding," he says.
Tell me to stop and I'll stop.
"This whole city belongs to the Jennas, but I'm sick of them. I swear, Fiona, you're nothing like anyone I've ever met. You make me want to enjoy my life again." He waits and then he wonders if she's hung up again.
She hasn't.
Steve sprints up the steps to the L, finds her finally on the other side of a passing train. Almost smiling, if she could smile -- if it wouldn't mean admitting anything. They head back down the metal hill and when he kisses her, she kisses back. The trains fly over.
"What have I ever done to anybody -- never mind you -- that made me look unreliable?" They're at dinner. Cloth napkins and wine glasses. She doesn't stick out; nobody's staring. "People like you are just way too used to getting your own way." He knows what she means but he needs her to say it so he can prove she's wrong. "Wait, all right. Yes/No. All you've got to do is agree or disagree."
Q: "He thinks the sun shines out of his own ass."
A: Agree.
Q: "He's overly generous, and that bugs me."
A: Agree. Actually, very agree.
Q: "Because I'm not used to getting spoiled."
A: A very bright smile. That word.
Q: "So I lose respect for guys like Steve, because people unlike Steve -- or people diametrically opposite to Steve -- have always let me down."
A: Getting warm. Getting hot. Wrong way, stop, turn around.
Q: "So deciding that he's overeducated and has more money than sense is somehow more socially acceptable than asking myself, for instance..."
A: You are fucking this up.
Q: "Why do the men I always date treat me like shit?"
A: There it is.
"Fuck you," she spits, and now they are staring, but something in his voice turns her back around. "Either/Or," he says. His eyes are completely open. He was being mean; he meant to be mean, a little. To make the point. To push it as far as they can so they don't have to talk about it anymore. To be mean so she'll know he's not mean.
Q: "...He's had an easy life."
A: "Definitely," she spits.
She tries to turn it around on him: She likes guys who've been around the block, who've been to jail, who know how to have fun. The diametric opposite of Steve, that's what Fiona likes. That's what Fiona deserves, and they both know it. Making this a particularly cruel game. Spoiled.
Q: "Fiona, I can't help my upbringing."
A: "So how come it's me again having to apologize for mine?"Q: "Who's asking you to?"
Only everyone. White people say color doesn't matter and rich people say class doesn't matter but the only reason they get to say that is because we're carrying them on our backs. The inability to believe in a world where it doesn't show on your face, isn't the first thing they notice, think. To imagine a person or a place or a time where the most interesting thing about you is the thing you hate the most.
But not Steve, you can tell. With Frank on the floor and Liam upstairs he came back, again and again, with her face memorized and a yen to spoil her, and love her, and enjoy his life, and watch her dance. So when he asks her to wait outside while he pays the bill, she knows she won't run. Not immediately. And the second she's gone, he slips the waitress a stack of bills and steals a valet jacket, and before you know it he's got a strange man's ride. He pulls up in front of the restaurant, grinning at her.
"I don't buy and sell cars. I just sell them. But the cars I sell are mainly... Not mine. Still looking for fun, Fiona?"
Maybe he was saving this for the second date. She can't believe him. Tell me to stop and I'll stop.
A: "Go."
In her head it sounds like she shouted it. Like they could hear it in the suburbs.
There's glass on the floor where Karen smashed the window; Lip's there helping clean up, helping board over the windows. Sheila bounces on her toes, in the kitchen where she feels safest. "I'm a bit off today, aren't I Karen? So, vodka? I could do Slow Comfortable Screws... Plenty of tequila, I think I'm out of lime, um, definitely gin fizz..." "Just a couple of Cokes, Mom," says Karen, and Sheila grins hugely, madly: "And some beers?"
Whatever it's about, she's not going to stop; Lip steps in. "Beers. Great, Sheila. Thanks."
Back at the window Lip asks about Karen's dad, what will happen if he comes home, but he's not coming home. "He's been looking for an excuse for months." They work on the boards and Lip finally asks her impression of Ian, his brother whose cock she sucked. He seems nice. "Right, but did he pitch a tent? Did you make him hard?" It looks so harsh on paper. They're kids, discovering science. He's a kid, trying to solve a mystery. "Ever try to play pool with a rope?" she says, answering the question, and the beers appear.
Frank discovers the new washer, sober for the first we've seen him or sober enough to put on a pair of Clark Kent glasses with one arm missing and get a closer look.
After Karen's, Lip heads to the Kash & Grab to find Ian. He comes in the back, the music goes diagetic on the radio but there's nobody there. He calls Kash's name a few times: Nothing. And then the two of them, old married Kash and tiny little Ian, come zooming out of nowhere with butter and snacks, stocking the place, grinning over at him. Lip thanks him for the tools they're using at Karen's, and the boys studiously ignore him. The vibe keeps his mouth shut for a second; they stack the butter and the snacks. Ian's always been a hard worker.
A lightbulb goes off over Lip's head, and he doesn't even yell, or smile. "You must be joking." They look over, confused. Terrified. "What, you're fucking him?" He drops the tools and pushes between them, back out into the street. They're wearing mismatched shoes. They think he's full of hate, or worse. They think he's made the discovery that tips everything over, but he's not: He came to Ian to fuck with him until they were okay again. Karen told him Ian was gay, and so he was. No longer the issue. It was going to be okay, but now Ian's making bad choices. Bad, old, married choices. But here they are, wearing the wrong shoes to the frozen foods locker, and all they can think is that Lip is going to destroy the world they've built.
Lip's waiting for Ian when he comes home; he can barely look up at the bunkbed. "He bought them for you, didn't he? Those shoes." Ian won't look. Ian's in ROTC, he's had training. You hear things all the time. But maybe there's a bit more Ian in Lip than we've given him credit for. Maybe Lip's not wrong.
"He's married! With kids! What else does he buy you, Ian?" Stuff. Now and again. "And you're happy with that? What's that make you, huh?" He's all over the kid, twisting his hair and shoving him into cabinets, pants nearly off he's pushing so hard. Trying to slap the rentboy out of him. Ian turns around, and gives it twice as bad. "Listen to me, stupid! You think you know everything, but you know shit! Ask me what I've got him, huh? Ask me!" Lip keeps pushing, because he doesn't know what else to do, but the words aren't stopping and Ian's pushing harder now. Hands around his throat.
"CDs! Dozens of CDs! Stuff that he's never heard of, stuff I think he might like, because I want him to like the same things that I do!" Lip's felt that way before. He knows what that is, what it means. He forgets to hold his fists up. "And a couple Sox tickets for his birthday. So what's that make you, Lip, huh? It makes you wrong, you fucking smart asshole!"
Lip breathes, terrified, and Ian nods. "Now go back to Kash and promise him that you're not going to tell anybody because he's done nothing to be sorry for, nothing."
He lets him go, and they recover, breathing.
Fake Muslim Cheats On White Fundamentalist Wife With Gutless Gay Boy, goes Lip's headline. Just a few more digs, to show who's boss. To show that everything's okay. Just keep talking until he knows you love him. Until he knows you'd do anything for him, as long as you don't have to say it out loud.
"Says more about White Sox fans than it does for the rest of us," Lip grins, and ducks Ian's last punch, out the door. Ian stands there, breathing, so keyed-up he can't even be relieved.
Into the house that night with Steve. Frank's sitting on the new washer, acting super weird. "Who's been eating my porridge?" he says, things like this, and then eventually slithers over to them, getting in Steve's face and asking him how much he weighs. "That would fit me," he says, jerking on Steve's jacket. Shooting for scary, motivation lurky; coming up with old and sad and dumb. "You can just ignore him," Fiona says, pushing Frank out of the way. Steve offers to leave, but Frank grabs his keys. "Who paid for this?" he asks, dancing past washer.
"He thinks he bought Ecstasy, but the only dealer he gets credit from is a schizophrenic." Steve doesn't know if she's kidding; he doesn't care if she's kidding.
Frank drags them out into the living room, all the kids up the wooden hill, and puts on some fucking horrible old-person music, Cream, while Fiona rolls a joint and he pours out shots to go with their beers. It was only a week he worked the chicken slaughterhouse, before he was hit by a headless flying chicken -- "I was lucky! It almost missed me!" -- so now they follow him around with a camera, hoping to find him uninjured. They never will.
He babbles and babbles; Fiona doesn't react until he brings up her mother, but he can't hear her. "Four-month-old baby. Fourteen-year-old girl, just had her appendix out. Eleven-year-old Lip, ten-year-old Ian, a seven-year-old, a five-year-old, and... Oh, and a Dodge Astro van! Calypso... Yes, Calypso Blue. What's the one thing that we needed?"
"Sterilization."
Fiona's face lights up a way it has not in a very, very long time.
Frank never makes it back to his point. "What could I do, Steve?" He went on a three-week bender, creating the life for Fiona that she lives today. Little known fact: It only takes a week to create a new habit. "I had a nervous breakdown..." He dances, the room whirls, he shouts. She loves him. She hates him.
There's a knock on the door, and she apologizes for her father, but of course Steve likes him. They're both on the make.
What happens doesn't matter. Kev and Veronica come over and change the Cream to rap-rock and then everybody dances and it's revoltingly uncool. Like one hundred thousand fathers playing air guitar. Like watching your mom at pole-dancing class. I'm talking air guitar to Weezer.
In bed, as the world wakes up, Steve grins. "Your dad made me follow you up. He gave me a condom." She laughs at him. "He must really like you. He usually just gives my boyfriends a dental dam." He holds her hand, tightly, and they look into each other's eyes. "Don't the kids wake up?" he asks, about the knees up down the wooden hill last night. "Would you?" Little Liam's somewhere in the foot of the bed, tangled in blankets; he waves them a good morning.
Carl's in the boys' bedroom, with a whole city of characters Sharpied on his chest and stomach. Lip can't find Ian; he's still got work to do. Ian's still not happy. He's scared, about Kash and about everything, scared Lip is right; feels more alone than ever. Making sure Carl doesn't see, Lip sneaks the porn out from under his bed, heading out to the van in the yard, where he knows Ian must be, smoking and listening to music. How can you be the good one if you're doing bad things? How can you know for sure that something is okay, when it's connected to so much that he knows isn't? When Lip gets in he takes out his earphones; he knows it's coming; when Lip pulls out the porn he shakes his head.
"How can that be good for you?" Lip chuckles, pointing to one act. "Or, or, or or or that? How can that be good for you?" Ian snatches them away, tired of fighting; thinking this is a fight.
"Anybody before Kash?" One. And Ian won't tell. "Name a single time I've let you down," says Lip, and Ian thinks about it, and realizes this was never a fight. It was science.
"It was a kid at school. I guess it doesn't really matter, because I mean he's long gone now anyways, but, uh... Roger Spikey."
Roger Spikey, aka fucking Donkey Dick Roger Spikey, aka the Original Beefmeister? Lip reconsiders that now; probably a rumor. "Not a rumor," Ian smiles softly, and Lip nearly giggles. "Whoa, that was a bit gay. What you just did there with your eyebrows, you want to watch that." Finally, Ian laughs. He hasn't laughed in days. He doesn't like lying. Lip's never seemed so old as he does today.
"But seriously," Lip says wonderingly, and he knows what's coming . "Like, up the ass? Do you get used to that? Can someone get used to that?"
It's a valid question. All through high school I was convinced that Kate Bush song "Running Up That Hill" was about this question. (Think about it.) But honestly, it's the same as every other kind of sex: If it sucks, you're doing it wrong. If it's not fun, go back to square one and start over, because life is too short. Your body is made for pleasure, not for accommodating other people.
"The whole point of the digestive system is one-way traffic," Lip conjectures. "It just is." Ian cracks up, finally, at how dumb that sounds. They're smoking cigarettes: That's what lungs are for? By that logic Karen should've bit off both your dicks.
Another sunrise. Fiona comes down to an orgy of breakfast, orchestrated by Debbie and Steve. Eggs, and pancakes, and sausage, bacon and hash, the whole thing. Seems Debbie's the only person that wakes up earlier than Steve does, and she told him it was her birthday... It's like panto, the whole kitchen erupts: "Hooo no it isn't!" and she swears she only said she wished it was her birthday. Two of a kind. He smiles down at her; he's not condescending and he knows she's not fooled. But he loves her, too.
"Sorry, Deb, I totally misheard that. Perforated eardrum on the right."
Fiona gets them moving, fifteen minutes before school, and everybody talks, and everybody babbles, and Steve just stares at them for a second, grinning. Fiona in the middle, whirling around; Debbie lying to get the whole family a special treat; Lip and Ian thick as thieves; the baby and Carl in the middle, popping sausage in their tiny faces.
This dream girl, that keeps the whole world turning. That turns the sun on in the morning and puts it to bed at night, for every single one of them. This family, like a jigsaw puzzle constantly rearranging itself around her. Hedging her in, trapping her in hell. Making her shine.
They talk and they laugh and they squabble about chores and they pull their money together and they hand the cell phone back and forth and without thinking twice they shove over, to make room for him. This family, of thieves and gypsies and confidence artists; they're like nothing he's ever seen. This jigsaw puzzle he's found his way into. It fits him perfectly.
Steve steps nimbly to the side, before joining them in the morning sunlight, and he pulls Frank's body gently out of the way. Another sunrise he'll just have to miss.
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