Kyle’s Story: Problems with Similes and Smiles

The last few years have been tough on Kyle. Losing the house he’d grown up in. Leaving his neighborhood. Relocating to a new city.

And now he’s moving into a house with a gruesome history. And he is not happy about it...

In today’s information age, with the internet, it’s impossible to hide much. Kyle has been researching his new house. He’s seen horrific photos of the crime. He’s been feeling anxious, wired, and most of all sick, knowing that he’ll be living in a house where an entire family was shot. He’ll be living in a house that was once a funeral home. A house that’s allegedly haunted.

It’s the sort of house he would have expected to read about in a tabloid, in a click-baity, SHOCKING article about the house being recently purchased by an eccentric recluse, or a ghoul like Marilyn Manson...

Kyle sits in the hotel’s dramatic lobby, with its walls made of black marble, and its furniture like something from an impressionist painting.

His parents meet him in the lobby, and as always, his dad stands out in a crowd, towering above everyone. Kyle thinks about how his dad looks like such a freak. Or a sasquatch. His dad looking like a less hairy bigfoot, with his over-scaled features, his big hands, his barrel chest and lurching gait. His dad ... with the body of a monster ... has the face of a monster, too ... with his square jaw, cleft chin, prominent nose and freakishly wide forehead.

Worst, most frightening of all, for sure, is his dad’s abnormally huge head. His dad’s head like a weird, warbly blimp. His dad’s head always unnerved Kyle to a degree, made him think of blimps, hot-air balloons. Kyle has long been tormented by an irrational fear of blimps, perhaps because they remind him of his dad’s head, or it could be from seeing footage of the Hindenburg disaster on TV, as a young child. Sometimes Kyle would lay eyes on his dad’s head and he’d picture the blimp crashing. He’d picture the flames in black and white and that “oh the humanity” soundbite.

At least his dad isn’t wearing a Panama hat. Thank God his dad isn’t wearing one of those Panama hats, Kyle ponders. To Kyle, there’s nothing as embarrassing as how goofy his dad looks in a Panama hat ... Kyle might hate Panama hats even more than blimps and hot-air balloons.

Even without a goofy hat, there’s still no way his dad could be wholly inconspicuous. His dad’s limping gait, slow and hobbled, leg dragging, was kind of like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. And just his dad’s colossal mass, how enormous he is, renders him instantly noticeable. People around the lobby, young and old, crane their necks, pop their eyes, and stare at him as if he were a freak.

Not that he blames them. Kyle had always thought of his dad being something of a freak of nature, that maybe his dad is the Missing Link, a result of scientific experiments, genetic manipulation, an escapee from a lab, perhaps. Or maybe he’s an escaped zoo animal, a rare species of gorilla. The way people stared, it was with that same mix of curiosity and fear you’d see on the faces of visitors at zoos...

But the hotel staff are more polite. Forcefully so. Dad insists they stay in 5-star establishments. This one, a JW Marriott, appears to have a policy that every employee smile and maintain that smile. Smile and stretch their lips as far and wide as possible, revealing as many teeth as they can. The receptionists, concierge, cleaners, whenever you’d see them, they’d smile like a kid on Christmas morning, like a Japanese toothpaste ad, that sort of smile.

It makes Kyle sick. He hates these places. He has a love/hate affair with everything to do with money. Part of him is happy to leave the mansion. He felt like a piece of shit growing up in a house like that. He felt guilty. Privileged. As a young boy, he’d thought it was normal, that everyone lives in such a house, but, when he was a little older, around 10 or so, he discovered poverty, through seeing videos online, and he felt so awful that others had to live in slums, wooden shacks, third-world conditions.

“How is that even legal,” he’d think... “How could the governments in those countries let their people live worse than dogs, in those dreadful slums. Places like India, a country with buildings like the Taj Mahal. India has billionaires living in skyscrapers, whole skyscrapers, to themselves, and then below the same private skyscrapers, they have millions of people living in tin shacks, huddled masses, stacked on top of each other ... People with no electricity or running water ... People openly squatting and shitting on public streets; people pissing, dumping garbage and sewage in the same streams drinking water is collected, clothes are washed ... It’s a travesty! It should be a crime!” he’d rage and vent in the comment section of YouTube videos.