Burger King Parking Lot

My mother chose drugs over me, and my dad chose his dick. My mother got murdered, and my dad did not. With his breathing life, he decided not to go to work and provide like a single father would might have done. Nor did he manage to be like a dad at all. Instead, he lived off my mother’s murdered inheritance and fucked. He fucked and fucked and fucked as much as he could. Sometimes screwing women over financially so he could then pay to fuck some more. I saw this with my own eyes. Often times, I was physically too close. I’d be in the back seat of the car, as a prostitute would blow my dad. 

Her name was Flordia, and her two front teeth were missing. She looked like she was in her late 30s, but who knows? She could have been a lot younger. Crack can age women faster than time itself. She was one of my dad’s regulars that I would get to know for over a decade. I’m not sure what my dad saw in her. She was ugly and her breasts drooped low. Did I mention her front teeth were gone?!?

This was a time before cellphones or game boys, so I would have to silently wait for my dad to bust his wad. I’d have nothing to distract myself other than staring out the smudgy car window onto the Burger King parking lot. I’d observe families go in and out, peacefully unaware that just a couple feet away, inside a blue van, an ugly woman named Florida was sucking my dad’s big dick. I wanted to hop out of the car, and join a new family, but I knew life didn’t work that way. Life worked out like this. I’d glance at the back of Flordia’s weave bobbing up and down, but only for a second. I knew it was wrong because it made my stomach quiver. I really didn’t like being there. C’mon Dad, will you just fucking cum?  

Once he did, Florida wiped her mouth with her knuckles, routinely erasing the left over white semen from her dark skin. She collected her $40 dollars and stuck it in her purse. She looked over her shoulder and smiled at me, showing her two missing front teeth. 

“Bye Dixie,” she said in a deep raspy voice. She said it in a motherly way I thought, a way a woman would speak to a child. I was, in fact, a child. But now looking back, I’d like to think that in the warmth of her voice, there was a feeling of remorse of having made a child witness something she should have never seen.

Or maybe it was the crack cocaine that added to the depth of her voice, and she didn’t care at all the damaging affects it would later have on me.

Once Flordia left, my dad started the car. He peered in the review mirror at me and smiled enthusiastically with all his pearly white teeth.

“TCBY?” he asked, as if nothing unusual had just happened.

I rolled my eyes and shrugged. I wanted to get out of the car and run. Starting a new life sounded better than frozen yogurt. But I was wearing slippers, and the neighborhood looked bad.

“Sure, “ I mumbled. I was born defeated. That I knew.

My dad turned on the radio and began to sing lyrics to a completely different song than what was playing. He didn’t care. He made up his own words as the melody went on. The lyrics were ridiculous. Something about “chubby little kids in the night…”  

I lightly placed my fingertips on the cold smudgy window as we drove off. I said goodbye to my pretend family that I never got to know.