Amber Bach
Samantha Bach named her first-born daughter Amber. Jack Bach made her do it and, for the rest of his 42 years, told the same crowd at the same bar where he’d conceived the idea one tequila shotted night his senior year of high school the same stupid joke that defined his self-image and his daughter’s: That his girl was named Amber Bach, just like the beer. True, the spelling of the beer was Amber Bock, but such literary speed bumps are of no consequence to those who drive off-road.
Amber was not always considered a teenage slut. Once, early in life, she enjoyed the admiration of neighborhood playmates for her spunky, tomboy spirit, and the affection of adults for her precocious sensibilities, sensitive wisdom, and great sense of humor. Her aunt used to come home with friends after a night at the Spaghetti Company or the Grapevine, and let her friends wake Amber up. They always wanted to. Six-year-old Amber would sit up in the bed she shared with her sister and mother, blink awake for just a second, then climb out of her bed and onto her aunts and start asking about the night out. She was funny, like a little adult. Kind of a novelty. Amber just enjoyed the conversation, not being talked to like a kid.
Her reputation for sluttiness started before Amber had ever kissed a boy. She was ten when a lady down the street talked to the moms about Amber. “She tried to get my husband to have sex with her!” Michelle was the lady spreading rumors, new to the neighborhood, with two small kids and a husband who hit on the neighborhood girls. Amber had met him only once, when she visited Candy, from down the block, when Candy was babysitting Michelle’s boys. Candy didn’t tell Amber that the husband was home when she called her to come over and watch a movie since the kids were in bed. Amber put her blue zip-front hooded sweatshirt on over a blue flannel shirt. She had Levi’s on, and walked the block in her mother’s worn-out pink slippers. Michelle lived across the street from Candy, in a house that had been abandoned the two years previous since Amber’d moved to the neighborhood. Candy, Amber, and Mina used to smoke cigarette butts on the back porch of the house, and Candy’s older brothers smoked pot and drank beer in the basement. You could get in through the back door and a broken window, but Amber did that only once, with Candy’s brothers. It was nighttime, and very dark, and scary and exciting and Joe Drummond had put his hand on her chest down in that basement and she froze solid when it happened, not sure forever afterward if they’d shared a special moment that made them almost a couple, or if he’d made fun of her in some creepy way. And when the rumors started in the whole neighborhood about her and Michelle’s husband, part of her felt like maybe the house retained some memory of what had happened in the basement. Maybe she was a slut. The more people believed it about her, the more Amber doubted her memory of Joe Hammond’s hand on her in the crumbling basement by the smelly mattress where the high school boys were drinking. She must have done something to deserve it; right? How else could it be that everyone agreed on a reality? It was terrifying to realize that her mind could be so unfastened to reality.
It became a problem in Amber’s life, that disconnect to reality. Finding out things about her very personality that she’d been clueless to.
Have you ever wondered how many personalities your own could splinter off into? Like the seed packets.
Tim Slips
On the second stair from the bottom, Tm slipped in the gob of spit. That’s how he fell down the rest of the way in the A stairwell and his head smashed open on the third-from-the-bottom stair and exploded brain matter onto Amber’s Sak’s Fifth Avenue dress. The dress was thin, fancy material, mostly light pink-ish, but in a cool, retro way that Amber planned to pull off equally as she sang Hot Summer Sun in the school Pop Concert that night, and at the swanky underground club downtown later that night with a pair of old biker boots. The blood spray was almost uniform enough to add interest and flair to the skirt, especially once it dried to a chocolaty retro brown, but not quite. It gave her away as a witness when David Alvord pointed it out to the choir director during practice, right before the show.
“Amber, can you come here a minute?” Mr. Charblau wiggled a curled finger at her and peeked over the top rim of his glasses. He wore a turtleneck, off-white, and a tan corduroy blazer with patches on the elbows. He was hip in some crowd he fashioned in his mind, but not to the students. Except for A Capella choir, because he hand-picked only six of them each semester. Amber didn’t know if she would try out for A Capella next year or not (you had to be a sophomore), but secretly thought about it. She didn’t know if she’d fit in, and her voice wasn’t that great, but Mr. Charblau told her last Friday he hoped she would be signing up for auditions next month. It was November, a week before Thanksgiving vacation, and Amber Bach was a high school freshman on the wrong side of the city’s tracks, stepping down from the bleacher’s 4th tier. She walked up to Mr. Charblau. David Alvord tried not to look her way, looking constantly. A booger peeped out one nostril, waving rhythmically.
Charlblau squinted meaningfully down at Amber. “The accident with Matt Trucker, Amber. It is very important that anyone who knows anything about it step forward and do their Redfield Flyer duty, here.”
Amber wondered whether Manny Frye would be at the club tonight. Her skin rustled at the thought.
“Amber, I happened to notice a particularly distinct spray of what appears to be blood on your skirt.”
She looked down at her skirt. The safety pin had let go sometime in the past two hours, and the folded over area was exposed. It did look pretty much like blood. Don’t make me say it, old man. Please, don’t make me pull the only and obvious card I have.
“It wasn’t from Tim Dopkowski, Mr. Charblau, if that is what you’re thinking.” Amber smiled at him. “That is pretty gross, actually. It’s just chocolate milk from lunch, and I had it pinned so it wouldn’t show. I don’t want to screw up the concert.
Charblau picked at whiskers on his chin. “I see. Well, perhaps your mother can run up a different dress for you before the solo?”
Yeah, right. “No, I already called.” As if there were another dress. Amber’s aunts had each scraped together money to buy Amber this one, as much to spite her step dad as to make Amber happy. “It’ll be okay, Mr. Charblau.” She reached down and pulled the fabric together again in a pleat that gave the dress a fitted, 1960s look. “I just have to find another pin, don’t worry.”
The crowd at the club didn’t get a chocolate milk story.
Amber is sitting on a wooden bench that runs across the back of the club. It is painted black, which is not successful in hiding its multitude of sins, even in the cave-like lighting. She is holding a cocktail napkin to a bleeding scab on her knee.
This is pretty stupid; the fucking dress is already bloody.
Yeah, but it’s not my blood.
If her expensive dress was going to be ruined, a waste of her four aunt’s hard-earned money and effort, it wasn’t going to ruined by Amber. Tim Dopkowski's blood was on it, not hers. And technically, that pig Billy Soory is the one who gobbed on the stair
She’d given both of them blow jobs before. Tim was nice, but Billy just about killed her with the whole not being able to breathe thing. Amber lifted the napkin off her scabby knew and drove a fingernail into the raw part underneath.
Royal Oak was a crummy town. It had never been good to Amber, anyway. She moved there against her will and into her doom. This story is hard to tell. Especially to you. I want to both represent the past fairly, and give you a feel for what life was like for Amber. Your mother. Not to excuse what certainly have been, and continue to be, your hardships, but to give you one more ingredient into the stew that life is for you. No missing pieces, Tim. No missing pieces.
Your mother wasn’t a keeper, you see. Nobody saw fit to look out for her in life, not the way a person needs. Now, you may argue that she didn’t look out for you the way you needed, either, Tim, and rightfully so. But this isn’t your story I’m telling right here, this is hers. Amber Marie Bach’s. The story of a child who became a girl and then a young woman, and how she managed to do that. The circumstances of her life that, if not entirely responsible for who she became and what she did, are at least the hammers that fell heavy upon anvils aimed in her direction, taking out chunks that shaped her as a human being, just like you and me. That girl eventually wound up as your mother, and your story is no less valid or compelling or worthy of an ear, Tim. But let’s just take a listen to hers for now, as a story in its own right; the story of attachment between the two of you, well I guess that would be a third tale altogether.
The house was shabby when Amber moved in with her mother, Samantha, and her new stepfather, Hal. Little sister Tina was there too, of course, but always so quiet and easygoing that she almost reads like background in Amber’s story. Not to Amber maybe, and certainly not to Tina, but from the vantage point of time or of objectivity, Tina is like a scattering of pretty flowers in the background.
Not so, Amber.
Amber was a stump of a clomped and dirty problem sitting plumb in the middle of a purty living room. Not before that move, mind you, but the transformation happened so swiftly or at least powerfully that most could hardly remember the spunky girl who she was before moving into that house.
It wasn’t the house that wrecked Amber, but the house is a bit of symbolism too hard to miss. Falling apart, uncared for, once a treasure. It seemed to be always gray and chilly outside in the new neighborhood that surrounded the house. Of course, that can’t have been so, but it did seem that way to Amber. Certainly upon reflection. It was tall and thin, the house, with peeling paint and a nubby, shaded yard that grew only thin, tall grass, sparse like the hair on her grandmother’s shins. Huge pine trees kept all but the crumbling driveway hidden from any random photos that dared get close. It was a depressing place to strangers; people didn’t like to walk by—they’d cross before getting to the house and walk alongside the park across the street. But Amber lived in there. Sitting on the ugly brick porch that Hal made worse by cementing over the missing bricks, in the summer Amber would watch kids in the park across the street. “Go play with them!” her mother would say, but she couldn’t. Their mothers had told the neighborhood kids not to play with Amber, that she was a bad influence. That Michelle had a big mouth and a wide net.
The thumbnail carved a trough in Amber’s skin, but only dented, didn’t break through. She took out an earring and dragged the post across; still just deep grooves in purple skin with brown blood washed along the shore.
Poke. Poke poke poke. Thar’s oil in them there hills. Tiny blood wells sprouted up and flooded the hidden area under her flapped knee scab, covering the throbbing nerves the earring had stabbed into life. Amber smiled and picked up her beer. A Rolling Rock. She didn’t even like Rolling Rock. It was piss water.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
Amber looked up. Tom was standing there with two other guys. They looked familiar, but they weren’t from Royal Oak. Maybe Madison Heights. You could tell by the hair: too hopeless. Guys from Royal Oak might be headed for prison half the time, but they were gonna look good about it. Tom could walk into anybody's party and turn heads. Business types thought he was stylishly tough; alley types knew he'd knock a head off if he had to.
***
The back door of the club was guarded by Schloff during the week. He was a big biker-looking dude with a leather vest, bare arms covered in tattoos, and a scary size and glare. He was also from a wealthy Jewish family in the suburbs, and studying to be a meteorologist. He saw Amber coming down the hall to where he sat on his battered old bar stool, and put down the book on cumulus clouds.
“Say hey, baybee,” he smiled at her. “What’s shakin?”
Amber touched his arm and positioned herself between Schloff and the back door. “I need you to let me out the door, Schloff.” She smiled and felt the cut on her lip crack back open. “Okay?”
Scholff yanked a bandanna out of his back pocket---his favorite, the one with Mozart toking a doobie---and cleaned Amber’s lip up.
“Who you hanging with tonight, little girl?” He tucked the hankie into his back jeans pocket. “This Ricky’s work?”
Amber reached for the door. “Seriously, Schloff, I’ve got to get out of here.” Her eyes caught sight of fuckhead walk by the back hall entrance carrying two beers. Not looking happy. “Please.” She gave him her best puppy eyes.
“You want to smoke one before you go?” He glanced toward the club innards. “Ain’t nobody gonna bug you if you’re with me.” Schloff stood up with some effort, and set his book down on the stack of Blatz cases next him. “Come on,” he said, and led Amber out the back door.
The alley behind the club was freezing cold and running with smelly streams of mystery liquid.
Amber was not always considered a teenage slut. Once, early in life, she enjoyed the admiration of neighborhood playmates for her spunky, tomboy spirit, and the affection of adults for her precocious sensibilities, sensitive wisdom, and great sense of humor. Her aunt used to come home with friends after a night at the Spaghetti Company or the Grapevine, and let her friends wake Amber up. They always wanted to. Six-year-old Amber would sit up in the bed she shared with her sister and mother, blink awake for just a second, then climb out of her bed and onto her aunts and start asking about the night out. She was funny, like a little adult. Kind of a novelty. Amber just enjoyed the conversation, not being talked to like a kid.
Her reputation for sluttiness started before Amber had ever kissed a boy. She was ten when a lady down the street talked to the moms about Amber. “She tried to get my husband to have sex with her!” Michelle was the lady spreading rumors, new to the neighborhood, with two small kids and a husband who hit on the neighborhood girls. Amber had met him only once, when she visited Candy, from down the block, when Candy was babysitting Michelle’s boys. Candy didn’t tell Amber that the husband was home when she called her to come over and watch a movie since the kids were in bed. Amber put her blue zip-front hooded sweatshirt on over a blue flannel shirt. She had Levi’s on, and walked the block in her mother’s worn-out pink slippers. Michelle lived across the street from Candy, in a house that had been abandoned the two years previous since Amber’d moved to the neighborhood. Candy, Amber, and Mina used to smoke cigarette butts on the back porch of the house, and Candy’s older brothers smoked pot and drank beer in the basement. You could get in through the back door and a broken window, but Amber did that only once, with Candy’s brothers. It was nighttime, and very dark, and scary and exciting and Joe Drummond had put his hand on her chest down in that basement and she froze solid when it happened, not sure forever afterward if they’d shared a special moment that made them almost a couple, or if he’d made fun of her in some creepy way. And when the rumors started in the whole neighborhood about her and Michelle’s husband, part of her felt like maybe the house retained some memory of what had happened in the basement. Maybe she was a slut. The more people believed it about her, the more Amber doubted her memory of Joe Hammond’s hand on her in the crumbling basement by the smelly mattress where the high school boys were drinking. She must have done something to deserve it; right? How else could it be that everyone agreed on a reality? It was terrifying to realize that her mind could be so unfastened to reality.
It became a problem in Amber’s life, that disconnect to reality. Finding out things about her very personality that she’d been clueless to.
Have you ever wondered how many personalities your own could splinter off into? Like the seed packets.
Tim Slips
On the second stair from the bottom, Tm slipped in the gob of spit. That’s how he fell down the rest of the way in the A stairwell and his head smashed open on the third-from-the-bottom stair and exploded brain matter onto Amber’s Sak’s Fifth Avenue dress. The dress was thin, fancy material, mostly light pink-ish, but in a cool, retro way that Amber planned to pull off equally as she sang Hot Summer Sun in the school Pop Concert that night, and at the swanky underground club downtown later that night with a pair of old biker boots. The blood spray was almost uniform enough to add interest and flair to the skirt, especially once it dried to a chocolaty retro brown, but not quite. It gave her away as a witness when David Alvord pointed it out to the choir director during practice, right before the show.
“Amber, can you come here a minute?” Mr. Charblau wiggled a curled finger at her and peeked over the top rim of his glasses. He wore a turtleneck, off-white, and a tan corduroy blazer with patches on the elbows. He was hip in some crowd he fashioned in his mind, but not to the students. Except for A Capella choir, because he hand-picked only six of them each semester. Amber didn’t know if she would try out for A Capella next year or not (you had to be a sophomore), but secretly thought about it. She didn’t know if she’d fit in, and her voice wasn’t that great, but Mr. Charblau told her last Friday he hoped she would be signing up for auditions next month. It was November, a week before Thanksgiving vacation, and Amber Bach was a high school freshman on the wrong side of the city’s tracks, stepping down from the bleacher’s 4th tier. She walked up to Mr. Charblau. David Alvord tried not to look her way, looking constantly. A booger peeped out one nostril, waving rhythmically.
Charlblau squinted meaningfully down at Amber. “The accident with Matt Trucker, Amber. It is very important that anyone who knows anything about it step forward and do their Redfield Flyer duty, here.”
Amber wondered whether Manny Frye would be at the club tonight. Her skin rustled at the thought.
“Amber, I happened to notice a particularly distinct spray of what appears to be blood on your skirt.”
She looked down at her skirt. The safety pin had let go sometime in the past two hours, and the folded over area was exposed. It did look pretty much like blood. Don’t make me say it, old man. Please, don’t make me pull the only and obvious card I have.
“It wasn’t from Tim Dopkowski, Mr. Charblau, if that is what you’re thinking.” Amber smiled at him. “That is pretty gross, actually. It’s just chocolate milk from lunch, and I had it pinned so it wouldn’t show. I don’t want to screw up the concert.
Charblau picked at whiskers on his chin. “I see. Well, perhaps your mother can run up a different dress for you before the solo?”
Yeah, right. “No, I already called.” As if there were another dress. Amber’s aunts had each scraped together money to buy Amber this one, as much to spite her step dad as to make Amber happy. “It’ll be okay, Mr. Charblau.” She reached down and pulled the fabric together again in a pleat that gave the dress a fitted, 1960s look. “I just have to find another pin, don’t worry.”
The crowd at the club didn’t get a chocolate milk story.
Amber is sitting on a wooden bench that runs across the back of the club. It is painted black, which is not successful in hiding its multitude of sins, even in the cave-like lighting. She is holding a cocktail napkin to a bleeding scab on her knee.
This is pretty stupid; the fucking dress is already bloody.
Yeah, but it’s not my blood.
If her expensive dress was going to be ruined, a waste of her four aunt’s hard-earned money and effort, it wasn’t going to ruined by Amber. Tim Dopkowski's blood was on it, not hers. And technically, that pig Billy Soory is the one who gobbed on the stair
She’d given both of them blow jobs before. Tim was nice, but Billy just about killed her with the whole not being able to breathe thing. Amber lifted the napkin off her scabby knew and drove a fingernail into the raw part underneath.
Royal Oak was a crummy town. It had never been good to Amber, anyway. She moved there against her will and into her doom. This story is hard to tell. Especially to you. I want to both represent the past fairly, and give you a feel for what life was like for Amber. Your mother. Not to excuse what certainly have been, and continue to be, your hardships, but to give you one more ingredient into the stew that life is for you. No missing pieces, Tim. No missing pieces.
Your mother wasn’t a keeper, you see. Nobody saw fit to look out for her in life, not the way a person needs. Now, you may argue that she didn’t look out for you the way you needed, either, Tim, and rightfully so. But this isn’t your story I’m telling right here, this is hers. Amber Marie Bach’s. The story of a child who became a girl and then a young woman, and how she managed to do that. The circumstances of her life that, if not entirely responsible for who she became and what she did, are at least the hammers that fell heavy upon anvils aimed in her direction, taking out chunks that shaped her as a human being, just like you and me. That girl eventually wound up as your mother, and your story is no less valid or compelling or worthy of an ear, Tim. But let’s just take a listen to hers for now, as a story in its own right; the story of attachment between the two of you, well I guess that would be a third tale altogether.
The house was shabby when Amber moved in with her mother, Samantha, and her new stepfather, Hal. Little sister Tina was there too, of course, but always so quiet and easygoing that she almost reads like background in Amber’s story. Not to Amber maybe, and certainly not to Tina, but from the vantage point of time or of objectivity, Tina is like a scattering of pretty flowers in the background.
Not so, Amber.
Amber was a stump of a clomped and dirty problem sitting plumb in the middle of a purty living room. Not before that move, mind you, but the transformation happened so swiftly or at least powerfully that most could hardly remember the spunky girl who she was before moving into that house.
It wasn’t the house that wrecked Amber, but the house is a bit of symbolism too hard to miss. Falling apart, uncared for, once a treasure. It seemed to be always gray and chilly outside in the new neighborhood that surrounded the house. Of course, that can’t have been so, but it did seem that way to Amber. Certainly upon reflection. It was tall and thin, the house, with peeling paint and a nubby, shaded yard that grew only thin, tall grass, sparse like the hair on her grandmother’s shins. Huge pine trees kept all but the crumbling driveway hidden from any random photos that dared get close. It was a depressing place to strangers; people didn’t like to walk by—they’d cross before getting to the house and walk alongside the park across the street. But Amber lived in there. Sitting on the ugly brick porch that Hal made worse by cementing over the missing bricks, in the summer Amber would watch kids in the park across the street. “Go play with them!” her mother would say, but she couldn’t. Their mothers had told the neighborhood kids not to play with Amber, that she was a bad influence. That Michelle had a big mouth and a wide net.
The thumbnail carved a trough in Amber’s skin, but only dented, didn’t break through. She took out an earring and dragged the post across; still just deep grooves in purple skin with brown blood washed along the shore.
Poke. Poke poke poke. Thar’s oil in them there hills. Tiny blood wells sprouted up and flooded the hidden area under her flapped knee scab, covering the throbbing nerves the earring had stabbed into life. Amber smiled and picked up her beer. A Rolling Rock. She didn’t even like Rolling Rock. It was piss water.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
Amber looked up. Tom was standing there with two other guys. They looked familiar, but they weren’t from Royal Oak. Maybe Madison Heights. You could tell by the hair: too hopeless. Guys from Royal Oak might be headed for prison half the time, but they were gonna look good about it. Tom could walk into anybody's party and turn heads. Business types thought he was stylishly tough; alley types knew he'd knock a head off if he had to.
***
The back door of the club was guarded by Schloff during the week. He was a big biker-looking dude with a leather vest, bare arms covered in tattoos, and a scary size and glare. He was also from a wealthy Jewish family in the suburbs, and studying to be a meteorologist. He saw Amber coming down the hall to where he sat on his battered old bar stool, and put down the book on cumulus clouds.
“Say hey, baybee,” he smiled at her. “What’s shakin?”
Amber touched his arm and positioned herself between Schloff and the back door. “I need you to let me out the door, Schloff.” She smiled and felt the cut on her lip crack back open. “Okay?”
Scholff yanked a bandanna out of his back pocket---his favorite, the one with Mozart toking a doobie---and cleaned Amber’s lip up.
“Who you hanging with tonight, little girl?” He tucked the hankie into his back jeans pocket. “This Ricky’s work?”
Amber reached for the door. “Seriously, Schloff, I’ve got to get out of here.” Her eyes caught sight of fuckhead walk by the back hall entrance carrying two beers. Not looking happy. “Please.” She gave him her best puppy eyes.
“You want to smoke one before you go?” He glanced toward the club innards. “Ain’t nobody gonna bug you if you’re with me.” Schloff stood up with some effort, and set his book down on the stack of Blatz cases next him. “Come on,” he said, and led Amber out the back door.
The alley behind the club was freezing cold and running with smelly streams of mystery liquid.
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