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dickhead
sometimes. Total fucking dickhead.” He paused. “Fine, let’s go. But
I am still pissed. Are you paying for dinner?”
    Alex: “Absolutely. N9NE at the Palms
tomorrow. Steaks and martinis are on me.”
    Gary: “Fucking dickhead.”
    Roger, now content that the trip was still
on, lost interest in the conversation and made a statement: “Okay,
if we are all still friends, I am going to pass out now. One of us
was up all night having sex.”
    Mike (with more than a tinge of jealousy):
“You are not still killing it with the hostess are you?”
    Roger: “No, no. It’s one of the regulars. She
is like forty and just got divorced. Crazy in bed. Fucking
brilliant.”
    With that Roger slouched into the corner of
the car and pulled out a Viejas Indian Casino hat and pulled it
down over his face. He lifted an empty twenty-ounce bottle of Coke
until it disappeared under the cap, spit into it, and issued his
parting words for the moment: “Okay, you double-headed-dildos, I’ll
see you later. Wake me up when the Stanford game comes on the
radio.”
     
     
    Interlude Two
    Roger (5)
     
    Most of what Roger Kemp remembered from his
childhood about his father, Jack Kemp, was him arguing with his
mother in the kitchen or behind a closed door in the bedroom. The
house they lived in, just outside of Sacramento, California, only
had two bedrooms and a small living room, so there were not many
alternatives.
    If the discussion was in the kitchen, then
Jack usually had at least four empty Budweisers in front of him,
though never more than six. Roger didn’t think about this until
much later. In his twenties, and now a bartender by profession,
Roger had the opportunity to observe firsthand many people’s
drinking habits. Most people either didn’t drink at all, only had
one or two drinks, or kept drinking as long and as much as the
situation allowed. It was very rare for someone to actually just
have four to six drinks, but that was his dad’s routine.
    Anyway, Jack did his arguing with his wife
much like he did his drinking, frequently but never too out of
control. So he and Sheryl, Roger’s mom, never seemed to reach the
breaking point because both would raise their voices but never
quite yell and there was never any physical violence. It was as if
they preferred slow torture.
    There were a fair amount of good times in the
Kemp household as well. In fact, the week before the day that would
spell the end of the marriage, the three of them enjoyed a lovely
vacation to Tahoe where five-year-old Roger played in the lake and
got sick eating too many tacos.
    But in the end, things unraveled very
quickly, for two reasons. Jack was a typical scumbag guy, and Roger
never slept well as a kid or an adult. So, on a Saturday night in
March of 1979, Roger woke up and went into the kitchen to get some
apple juice. He remembered to bring his cup with him from the
bedroom and felt he was well prepared. He was not well prepared for
what he saw next. His baby sitter, Jessica, who was a student at
the local community college, was bent over the kitchen table and
his daddy was behind her. They were both naked. Roger had no idea
why, but he knew this was a bad thing and was not something he was
supposed to see. To this day, the most vivid part of the memory was
the hideous orange and red wallpaper in the kitchen. He was
eternally grateful to that wallpaper for muting out the rest of the
vision in his mind.
    No longer interested in apple juice, Roger
ran back to his room and wished his mother was there, but she was
visiting his grandparents in Arizona. Roger began to wonder if he
should mention this to his mother at all. In the end, he didn’t
have to because Jack told her what happened when she returned.
Sheryl Kemp could put up with a lot of things, but for whatever
reason, infidelity was not one of them. She filed for divorce the
next week.
    Roger’s dad ended up moving to New York by
the end of the year. From then on, Roger lived with his