Your Own Kind of Famous
It was like when he’d won the spelling bee in the first grade. He’d heard from his girlfriend whose brother worked for the newspaper that they were going to print it up in the papers. She said, “Check the newspaper’s homepage. It’s already there.” Clarkston rushed into his parents’ home without bothering to knock, swinging open the front door onto the living room, where his mother, in curlers, was watching TV. When she saw him, she screamed, and her legs flexed and nearly knocked her out of the recliner. “What do you think you’re doing?” she said.
“Mind your biz, Mama,” Clarkston said with a giggle.
His father stomped into the living room and said, “I almost had a heart attack. What’s with the racket?”
“I need a soda,” Clarkston said. “You got a Coke?” He was already opening the refrigerator door and kneeling to look in the drawers.
“We got some RCs in the bottom,” Clarkston’s father said.
The boy — though he wasn’t a boy anymore, but twenty-two years old — grabbed the soda can and started toward the home computer, situated on a small desk in the living room, next to the entertainment center. Clarkston popped his soda top and took a swig and placed the can atop the computer tower and said, “I’m going to give you all a sneak preview of tomorrow. All the best news fit to print.”
“We’ve got to go to bed,” Clarkston’s mother said. “Your father had a colonoscopy this morning. He’s not feeling well. We don’t need this kind of excitement.”
Clarkston turned toward his father. “Look, here it is.”
The old man took his eyeglasses out of his shirt pocket and put them on and leaned over his son’s shoulder. He couldn’t stand to read it all. Clarkston Krutz of Murray, Kentucky. Pulled over. Drug charges. “Baggy” of Oxycontin pills. Arrested for intent to distribute. Charge lowered to possession. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to get out of this,” the old man said.
“Don’t you see?” Clarkston said. “It means I’m my own kind of famous.”
The old man and his son no longer seemed to speak the same language. And yet the young man spoke so confidently. He smiled at his father. The smile reminded the old man of how the boy used to be, maybe still was, clever and enterprising. The young man’s mother wasn’t listening. She was watching a romantic movie on TV. Clarkston had set up Netflix for them. He looked into his father’s eyes and thought he could discern a twinkle that signified a kind of pride, the same as when he won the first-grade spelling bee. After the school win, he didn’t go to State Finals. Slept in. That disappointed the folks. Disappointed everybody. He wouldn’t make the same mistake again.
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