1st Edition (The Tommy Problem)

*Running off of the addition/edition word play i styled the piece off of a word problem, so the gaps are where i inked in an equation for each part of the story with text ideas rather than numeric characters. But i didnt know how to format that to the site, so you'll have to imagine.*





1st Edition

(The Tommy Problem)





Addition.

It’s the act of combining one thing with another. Merging. Joining. Fusing. Unifying.

The act of taking two separate things and making them a single whole.

And if you take one Chicago stripper, and add an element of danger, you will end up with a drug deal gone wrong. Multiply that danger by the number of guard dogs sniffing at your first sum, their noses wandering and exploring. The dogs are high school freshmen, passing uninterested from her purse to her ankles, almost clumsily. Then in far too quick an action they are pressed into her crotch.

She says she’s on her period.

Mulitply the danger again by how many times she lies. The danger now, is equal to, or less than, the amount of abuse that she will be shown by Customs agents. And later, the DEA. But don’t total this yet.

Because you can divide all of this, by the sum of the stripper and a college dropout that became a bouncer for Tommy’s. The name will serve also to reference the variable that will be their daughter.  When the DEA finds out that she’s pregnant and using, the back room police work stops. The men consider what damage they may have done in trying to get her to talk.

Enough, it seems.

She’s having the baby, almost eight weeks early, she says. But she’s a junkie. You can’t trust the math of a junkie.

Here you can do a bit of work with Statistics. Ask yourself what the chances are that of four corrupt police officers, there is one that has had midwife training. Those chances slim with you try to parallel that with the chances that one of those cops is willing to do more than dump the junkie in a poor neighborhood.  And when you factor in every ratio, you’ll come down to John Deeters.

John Deeters is a human, and mathematical anomaly. No other man would have birthed the child, and taken it home. Off the books.

Subtract from the situation a junkie who never should have lived anyway. The last things to ever be added to the original integer are a finger printed .22 LR Rimfire Smith and Wesson, and significantly less of the speed she was caught with in the first place.  The rest is subtraction, as her body is forgotten.



All of this = Me.



I’m Tommy. And while I am the product of a corrupt city, and a corrupt situation, that’s never really been me.  When the rest of the kids in my class took to rhymes instead of rhythm. I let them. But I was the kid who stayed up doing homework. It was really the only thing that made sense back then, math.

See, when you’re working with math everything is logical. There are rules, absolutes. And even when there are variables, you can narrow them down. Or solve them all together. Even when there is  a chunk of information missing, it leaves a silhouette. You can solve it later.

The real world isn’t like that. So I guess when you add all that stuff up. All that real world stuff. Yeah, you might just get another kid from the slums. A girl who’s mother got to work not givin’ a fuck real early. Who knows what the father knew or cared to know. And just because John Deeters took me home,

doesn’t mean he treated me right.

That’s what you might get, but it wouldn’t be me, so I guess...

















When I was in the third grade, our teacher Mrs. Stone, had us all do the same multiplication worksheet. Multiply my pride by each one of the worksheets I had gotten 100 on before. You’ll end up with a pretty big smile, and my favorite part of class.

But subtract from that smile the fact that every one of the other kids resented me for getting the right answers. Made fun of me. (Actually, before you subtract that, add to it the number of times they told me my brain was going to push out my ears, like the meatloaf that they served in the caffeteria, the kind that was crusty and burnt with that weird sort of ketchup jelly on top.)

Then your answer isn’t so big a smile. But still, a quiet pride.

And consider then that if my pride is greater than my self control, then I will react poorly when the kid behind me marks my answers wrong every time I correct one of his. Aaron, he was the weird kid that ate boogers and growled like a dinosaur, with his arms folded up, and his fingers twisted into human claws.

They tell you that everything you do on one side, must be done on the other. But I don’t think Aaron knew that, so when he checked my answers wrong, with his dramatic little swoop and self righteous ‘so-there’ face, I’m sure he was just being a prick.

But, as it turned out, Pride > Self Control so, it stung. Even though I did the problem right. I followed all the rules, all the absolutes. I even checked my work twice, but that didn’t matter. He still marked it wrong.

So the quiet pride that you had before, go ahead and subtract each one of the unjust marks my classmate gave me. You’ll end up with a little girl’s math homework, marked 40/100 but also polka dotted with little explosions of blue, where the ink ran with water. Like something had been leaking over it.

If math, even though you followed all the rules could still be marked wrong then …









Years later I became romantically involved with Ricky Marks, a dealer from high school. He was the tough boy, but he was also smart. I tried, as a girl will, to get him to use his brain, to see that he could be more.  One night, he had to ‘stop at a friends’ house’ on our way to some new romantic comedy that I loved dragging him to, and got me arrested on and MIP.

         When I was 23 Chuck Reynolds moved into my place after getting out of rehab. Three months later he charged four hundred dollars worth of porn to my cable bill, he was high.

         When I was 36 Daniel Traden, an unmedicated manic depressive with abandonment issues, confessed his ‘lug’ to me over the phone. The Ruger in his mouth made him hard to understand.

         When I was 75 Greg Jennings, a drunken painter who had also been my husband of 32 years, finished his masterpiece repenting for being as abusive as his father. Then hung himself over it.

         If you take these facts and work backwards you will find that X is equal to a savior complex. The character trait that causes Tommy’s martyrdom, is X. And if you multiply X, by the sum of the number of years I gave my heart to poisoned men and the number of nights I spent dying my hair late at night to hide the outliers, the grays,

         You’ll end up with a hopeless romantic. That even on her death bed will still believe that true love will solve all of her problems, as soon as she finds it. But she never will, so…













         If you were to total, 2 McDoubles, 1 large Shake, a Medium Coke, Large Fry and 5 piece chicken strips, you get the cost of a normal meal. Multiply that by the number of nights I sat at home watching those terrible Get Fit programs and promising myself I’d do it one day, and you’d get a rough total for most of my food cost.

         But you’d have to add that to the mortgage for my house, as well as utilities, and the payment on the SUV.

         But then add also, thecable and internet. The Netflix, and the Blockbuster rentals, and the cellphone plan, for (1 daughter, 2 sons, 1 father, me). And the credit cards.          

         You would also have to add in the payments for one of those fancy sleep number beds that conforms to your back when you sleep. The ad says the best sleep you’ve gotten in years, but I never slept all that well.

         No matter how much money I made, I couldn’t buy enough to fill me, and I never slept all that well. So…













         

Thinking back now, maybe I was trying to solve the equation too early. Maybe it takes all of it, the money, the relationships, the memories, the knowledge to equal me.



All of this = Me



But even now, after seeing so much, and doing what feels like so little, I feel like I’m still searching. Still trying to solve the problem. Trying to figure out what equals Tommy. I always did care more for actual math.

There were rules to it, it didn’t matter if I got marked wrong. As long as I followed the rules, at least I knew I was right. Life was different, it didn’t have rules. Or maybe it just plays by different rules. I think that maybe Aaron was right all those years ago, to mark me wrong. I was right on my multiplications, but I always was one for number theory. It was always about addition for me.

The act of taking two separate things and making them a single whole.

Always trying to figure out which pieces it took to make the equation equal. But none of it ever added up. Mathematical logic states that if,



All of this is equal to not me, than none of this is equal to me.



















Maybe addition works for some people. But sometimes the number just doesn’t get big enough to equal everything that a person is.