The Polish Hammer Poetry Corner
The Ballad of Extended Adolescence
Twenty miles away from where I’m sitting right now writing this column, my twenty-two-year-old son is sitting in a rented house staring at a computer screen of his own. He’s not writing a column or working on a novel that’s only going to fizzle out around the twenty-five-thousand-word mark, I can assure you of that. No, if that kid is on the computer, he’s playing some jackassy game on Steam or watching a Hentai porn clip, depending on how late he started his day.
Either way, you can bet he doesn’t have a care in the world. Nor should he considering, for the better part of the last year, I’ve been paying for his rent, his utilities, phone, car insurance, even his fucking Google Fiber so he doesn’t squander one opportunity to enjoy highly stylized, anime tentacles violate weird ass cartoon girls at the highest internet speeds available.
How did it come to this? Why am I putting off purchasing more original Clive Barker artwork for the sake of accommodating my grown son’s high standard of living?
I think of where I was twenty-eight years ago when I was his age. No doubt I was an idiot, too, harboring a largely imperfect understanding of the world around me. Same as I ever was. That rotten Polack blood flows through both our veins. But at twenty-two I’d already been running the streets like a maniac for half a decade. This kid demands his friends extend a twenty-four-hour notice before stopping by to hang out. At twenty-two I was on my own, paying my own way, too sexually jaded, already, to appreciate cartoon porn. Things were just…different.
Now, I’m not here to porn shame the poor bastard. What alarms me more than his penchant for streaming Lois Griffin gangbangs is his chronic inability to, not only hold down a job, but to even comprehend the need for employment.
I know intellectually he realizes that he lives in a capitalistic society, that everything costs money, and the price grows more substantial with every passing day. He just doesn’t care. Sometimes, I think if he could catch a Wi-Fi signal under a bridge, he’d be just as content living there furtively eyeballing Marge Simpson/Mrs. Flanders lesbian action than he would living in a house where I have to threaten his life every other day to find a full-time job or, at the very least, discard his empty Dr. Pepper cans and macaroni and cheese boxes in a timely manner.
He seems to have retreated into some early form of adolescence, a place where his aversion to work is downright literary. I’d almost applaud his uselessness on an almost Henry Miller level of willful dependency if I thought he were writing a manuscript or constructing a psycho killer themed screenplay or painting a canvas or cobbling his pity thoughts into a sequence of observational poems. Fuck. Anything except a mindless succession of hours playing Minecraft only to follow it up with eight-bit style, pixelated pornography featuring two skeletons boning.
He’d be the first to point out that it’s not like he’s never worked. He’s dipped his toes in the job market for abbreviated periods of time. His half-hearted attempts at employment has left us both vexed for various reasons.
When he worked evenings at Kentucky Fried Chicken, he was without deviation always scheduled to begin his shift at 5 pm. He invariably showed up for work closer to six. I could not wrap my mind around his dismissive attitude toward punctuality. At my most fucked up, I always arrived on time to fuck shit up. I asked him one day how the manager responded to his chronic tardiness.
“They’d want to know why I was late.”
It should be noted here as well that my son tends to express himself in cryptic non sequiturs and enigmatic deflections. Talking to him is like talking to a serial cheating spouse who is also autistic.
“What’d you say?”
“That I overslept.”
“For a fucking evening shift?”
“Yeah. They always seemed surprised, too.”
When he fell into a pizza delivery gig, I thought maybe he had found his place in the world. The job required little in the way of effort. The tips he received were robust enough, he could afford to upgrade the quality of the video games he was able to play. No more Roblox for that lazy son of a bitch. He was taking that graphics card out for a walk, every night, and I allowed myself to believe he was finally beginning to understand the correlation between money in his pocket and the opportunity to wrest more out of life than the dreary prospect of laying on a mattress getting aroused by rough animation of Peggy Hill pleasing all of Hank’s beer drinking buddies.
But, no, he misplaced that job as well, failing to call in when a two-week bout with Covid left him too weak to enjoy clips of a Futurama orgy, let alone the pleasure of slinging pizzas to potheads.
I don’t know. Maybe he’s the smart one. Maybe I’m the idiot. I think surely that can’t be the reality of it. I’m not a fool. I read books. My son won’t read the book I wrote, even after I offered him a hundred-dollar bill to just read the first story. He’s like… nah, I’m good. Yet, somehow, I’m working fifty-five hours a week to his three days every six months…
My son has watched me trudge miserably to work for two decades. He’s listened to my litany chronicling my constant plight of incompetent bosses who seem to purposefully undermine the good of the company in order to prove their superiority, doling out unrealistic production goals requiring overwhelming swaths of overtime in order to accomplish what will never amount to more than abject failure and ass-chewings. He’s watched my life devolve into a constant race to the end of the month. Every day chasing numbers forever beyond my reach.
Somehow, watching my life unfold in such a way, my son has become averse to work without ever really giving it a try.
I’ve got news for his punk ass, though. Seventeen more years, I’m going to be able to retire from that bullshit workaday life. He better figure something out before then…
Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Rat now living in rural Alabama. He writes when his pen allows it. He’s a husband to a lovely wife and father to some fantastic kids. He collects pop culture ephemera. On most days he prefers Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker and Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley.
THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER is a weekly column, posted each Tuesday morning.
