Read Online Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris - Free Book Online Page B

aching feet,
     the Rooster set down his two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew and removed a fistful of prime rib from his mouth, saying, “Bitch,
     you need to have them ugly-ass bunions shaved down is what you need to do. But you can’t do shit about it tonight, so lighten
     up, motherfucker.”
    All eyes went to my father, who chuckled, saying only, “Well, I guess you have a point.”
    A stranger might reasonably interpret my brother’s language as a lack of respect and view my father’s response as a form of
     shameful surrender. This, though, would be missing the subtle beauty of their relationship.
    My father is the type who once recited a bawdy limerick, saying, “A woman I know who’s quite blunt / had a bear trap installed
     in her… Oh, you know. It’s a base, vernacular word for the vagina.” He can absolutely kill a joke. When pushed to his limit,
     this is a man who shouts, “Fudge,” a man who curses drivers with a shake of his fist and a hearty “G.D. you!” I’ve never known
     him to swear, yet he and my brother seem to have found a common language that eludes the rest of us.
    My father likes to talk about money. Spending doesn’t interest him in the least, especially as he grows older. He prefers
     money as a concept and often uses terms such as annuity and fiduciary, words definitely not listed in the dictionary of mindless
     entertainment. It puts my ears to sleep, but still, when he talks I pretend to listen to him, if only because it seems like
     the mature thing to do. When my father talks finance to my brother, Paul will cut him off, saying, “Fuck the stock talk, hoss,
     I ain’t investing in shit.” This rarely ends the economics lecture, but my brother wins bonus points for boldly voicing his
     uninterest, just as my father would do were someone to corner him and talk about Buddhism or the return of the clog. The two
     of them are unapologetically blunt. It’s a quality my father admires so much, he’s able to ignore the foul language completely.
     “That Paul,” he says, “now
there’s
a guy who knows how to communicate.”
    When words fail him, the Rooster has been known to communicate with his fists, which, though quick and solid, are no larger
     than a couple of tangerines. At five foot four, he’s shorter than I am, stocky but not exactly intimidating. The year he turned
     thirty we celebrated Christmas at the home of my older sister Lisa. Paul arrived a few hours late with scraped palms and a
     black eye. There had been some encounter at a bar, but the details were sketchy.
    “Some motherfucker told me to get the fuck out of his motherfucking face, so I said, ‘Fuck off, fuckface.’ ”
    “Then what?”
    “Then he turned away and I reached up and punched him on the back of his motherfucking neck.”
    “What happened next?”
    “What the fuck do you think happened next, bitch? I ran like hell and the motherfucker caught up with me in the fucking parking
     lot. He was all beefy, all flexed up and shit. The motherfucker had a taste for blood and he just pummeled my ass.”
    “When did he stop?”
    My brother tapped his fingertips against the tabletop for a few moments before saying, “I’m guessing he stopped when he was
     fucking finished.”
    The physical pain had passed, but it bothered Paul that his face was “all lopsided and shit for the fucking holidays.” That
     said, he retreated to the bathroom with my sister Amy’s makeup kit and returned to the table with two black eyes, the second
     drawn on with mascara. This seemed to please him, and he wore his matching bruises for the rest of the evening.
    “Did you get a load of that fake black eye?” my father asked. “That guy ought to do makeup for the movies. I’m telling you,
     the kid’s a real artist.”
    Unlike the rest of us, the Rooster has always enjoyed our father’s support and encouragement. With the dream of college officially
     dead and buried, he sent my brother to technical school, hoping