Papering the Window Panes
Teetering. I’ve always been drawn to that word.
A healthy life is about this mythical balance between everything: moderation. A place that most people don’t even aspire to reach, or, if they do, are often thrown off course by those that don’t. Those that they love that don’t, things they care about that don’t, jobs and projects and schedules that don’t let them. Teeter teeter.
My Dad drives a red Chevy Silverado. I call it The Tank. I’d call it Canyonero but the reference would be lost on him. I get in. Closing the door is a chore that almost requires both hands, but my reward is this roomy cabin that shuts the outside world out. It would probably be a better thing if we were actually going to have a meaningful exchange. We jump around as The Tank crosses a pothole-riddled street right behind the Randalls.
“Fucking potholes,” he mutters.
As far as he was concerned, there were only three real conversational topics in the car: the condition of the road, the poor aptitude of other drivers (“Idiots!”), and my life. One time, after he broke his foot, we briefly were able to talk about how his softball team was going. He’d definitely need some cleats, tennis shoes just weren’t safe on wet grass. Let that be a lesson to me.
“So, how is school going?”
“Fine.”
“What classes are you taking again?”
“Creative Writing, Spanish, CIA in the Third World, and, crap….Literature of the Sea. That’s it.”
“Sounds okay. You’re doing good with them?”
“Everything but Spanish.”
“Gotta put more work into it.”
Big talk for someone who hadn’t had a job in six years. He’d quit being a computer programmer for a medical company right after I graduated high school. I held him back and confined him to the one crappy hut in Bellaire that was hidden amongst the giant monuments of suburbia. All so I could be zoned to the right high school for me, in his eyes. Finally, he was free to move to Central Texas, buy some land and a trailer, and forget his troubles. And the rest of his life, too.
“I guess.”
It isn’t a long drive, but it feels arduous due to the lack of communication and the measured turns of The Tank. It’s almost the entire width of the road, and since I’m used to driving my bantamweight Nissan Stanza, it feels like I’m in a lookout tower. We tumble along on our destination, and suddenly a Toyota on a cell phone starts drifting towards Dad’s door.
He honks. “Fucking idiots! Now I remember why I don’t live in this city anymore.”
I chuckle, and roll my eyes.
“Your old man is funny, huh? Never could keep my big mouth shut.”
“You could use a slight anger adjustment, yeah.”
We pull in to Prince’s. This place always reminds me of Jughead from the Archie comics. There are hamburgers, and there is a crown. If Jughead were an answer on Password, those are the first two clues on the board.
“By the way, you left this CD in here, from when we were…up on the West Coast.”
“Oh, thanks,” I’d made it for him to listen to. There were songs, subtly placed ones, about people who bottled up inside and never did anything. “Memory Lane” by Elliott Smith, is one I can remember. Obviously that hadn’t helped.
“No problem. Can’t believe you’d forget something like that, you love music so much.” He slams his door before I even open mine.
**
Motivation is always hard to ascribe to someone. I could guess that my Dad’s motivation was to see me, but I have memories of his neglect as well as memories of his care. Jovial singing of an invented bedtime lullaby for me as an insomniac child, after I wake him up worried about what happens when we die. An image of him in nothing but tightie-wighties, snoring on the couch, with cigarette ashes all over the floor. Dad doesn’t have much structure in his life. Nothing is certain with him. I hadn’t even known he was coming to visit until three hours ago.
I’m not exactly sure when it started, but somewhere between the time I turned seven and eleven, my Dad became hooked on Vicodin. That had been the last time anyone had ever seen him. He stopped making me dance to The Beatles and started coming home, making dinner when I was there, then going to sleep. He always hurts now. The pain of a thousand missed opportunities mixed with regretful overthinking and created someone who can’t make it through a day without wishing he could change the past.
“I suppose you should probably know that I think I had a stroke,” he tells me as we sit down after ordering.
“Yeah?”
“I couldn’t move my upper body for a few hours, but then it went away.”
“Uhh…shouldn’t you have seen a doctor about that?”
He doesn’t respond. But we both knew the truth: he just doesn’t care about his own life anymore.
“So have you got a new girlfriend yet?”
“Haha, you always want to know this.”
He shrugs. “And?”
“I’m just not ready yet…after Candace…yeah, lets just say I need some more time.”
Sometimes I think he only clings onto his life in the hopes that I’ll get married and grow up on his terms, so he can be fully sure that I am ready to handle things. I am holding him in his place again. I was a burden at three, I was a burden at seventeen, and I am still a burden at twenty-three. A slow-paced dramatic movie that he has to watch until he gets the cheesy closure that life can be pretty great.
“Have you ever watched Capote?”
“Nope.”
“Great movie, I think I’m gonna leave it at your house. You can watch it and tell me what you think.”
“Um, okay.” I never watch movies he lends me. I already know in advance that they’ll depress me.
**
Ever feel like you’re spending your life writing the same story over and over again? I’ve written seven or eight different drafts of this one, mostly with the names changed and under the guise of fiction. Sometimes I’ve played up my Dad’s endearing traits, like how he always harasses waiters and restaurant managers when he feels either of us are shortchanged. Or the selflessness he showed when he donated his kidney to his brother. I’ve played up his attempt to commit suicide. I’ve played up his influence on my love life. His joblessness and self-isolation, and seeing shades of myself in him any time I decide not to go to a party or lose touch with a friend.
He walks into my room and sits himself on my bed.
“I’m here.” We hug, but don’t really feel any closer.
“Yep, you made it.”
We sit in silence, the TV still on. Rockets. Basketball, not a space launch. This isn’t the 60’s anymore.
“Rockets suck.”
“They’ve gotta get rid of Alston,” I go into my practiced spiel.
“Yeah. I know. He’s your boy.”
His breathing come slowly and heavily. Like at the end of Return Of The Jedi, where Darth Vader’s helmet comes off. Dad always wears hats. Nike Golf today. Sometimes it’s University of Texas.
It feels like he’s an alien visitor. An observer who sees through me, my whole life, and has information that will alter the scope of it. Not the advice like “You need to work on your endurance,” after my YMCA basketball games ended with me sucking wind. Nor how he implored me to take a bus to California because it would build character and self-reliance through suffering. The pearl of wisdom to avoid the pitfalls he did. He stares at me with this mix of anticipation and dread in his eyes. They falter slowly, as everything tends to do when you’ve done enough drugs to permanently delay time.
“Well this game sucks, time for a smoke break.”
**
My creative writing professors taught me that you can avoid a tacky TV-style closure by creating a small change in one of your characters. Well, there isn’t really anything to close, nor is there any change. I’ve tacked on quite a few endings over the years. I’ve let him talk me into another long road trip where he makes up for his poor fatherhood and I pretend to be a kid again so he can feel like it mattered. I’ve had him subtly solve girl drama. I’ve had us go our own ways with the knowledge that we had improved each others lives, and also with the knowledge that we both were killing each other. I’ve got as many endings to this story as the Goosebumps series had books. All of them are probably more interesting than what will likely happen, which is an anti-climactic death.
Teetering. That’s the only way I can ever describe our relationship. I reach out to him over the phone, tell him I can deal with the truth, he won’t let himself depress me any more. In a moment of drunkenness, he tells me something about his first wife, I can’t even remember her name. Sometimes he commits to calling me every week, and other times, like currently, we haven’t spoken for two-and-a-half months. It’s the opposite of moderation. Or more accurately defined, it’s the most moderate of all: a reliable instability where I’ll never know where I stand.
About five years ago or so, he visits out of nowhere on a balmy summer day. I have a paper to write, and Mom is doing a job for her business. He shows up completely blitzed. I don’t even want to know what he was on, because I know it was more than just Vicodin. He’s goofier and more upfront than I’d seen him since my early childhood.
He starts dropping subtle hints that he wasn’t happy that we were working even after he’d arrived. The Fun Genie was here–he had cash and good times, damn the responsibility! He orders pizza and after prodding us for awhile, The Fun Genie finally got us all in the living room to eat it. He’s babbling, laughing at himself for babbling, cursing his recently deceased brother. That bastard who gave up the fight. Hahaha. What a bastard. Mom and I look at each other.
“I just can’t believe that you guys are so wrapped up in your lives that you can’t spare a moment and be happy,” he says between big bites of pizza. Bites that he wouldn’t take if he was feeling how he normally felt.
“Sometimes things need to get done,” Mom in diffusion mode.
The Fun Genie stands up and puts his plate aside, and before I can even put my own tray down, he armlifts me out of my chair and into a close hug.
“I just love you so much, boy.”
I hesitate. I hesitate a second too long. My expected response chokes up in my mouth as I stare at this farce of a relationship where he can only truly admit this when he’s completely fucked up. His smile turns. The air gets colder. His moustache bristles.
“Then fucking forget it.” He grabs his Gatti’s mug, and adjusts his Longhorns hat like a pissed off Jughead would indignantly move his crown. I get out the “wai” in “wait!” The house door slams. I open it as another door slams—the door to his older truck, which was also red. Revving up. Speeding up. Off into the distance.
I watch his truck away until it can no longer be seen, then until it can no longer be heard. Teeter teeter.
I’m fighting my own father issues right now, but the similarities with my situation end with the communication problems you and your dad have. I got pretty lucky with my parents… they’re still together and they’re stable, though they have their own issues that bubble under the surface.
So I can’t say I identify – mainly because I hate it when people say “oh I understand blah blah” when they actually don’t know SHIT.
My problem is I want to tell my dad how I feel about him, but I just can’t bring myself to do it. I want him to hear it because he’s getting up there in age and if he goes before I tell him I will hate myself forever.
Anyway – back to the memoirs… focusing more on the writing aspect of it. Being a writer myself (screenplays mostly, but also a lot of other stuff, I won’t bore you with the details) I have to say I do like your POV. Nobody finds their “voice” until they’ve written hundreds and hundreds of page, but that will come. But you get across what you’re trying to get across. That’s not criticism, either. That’s a compliment. It sounds simple, but so many people get wrapped up in the LANGUAGE and the usage – and they completely miss out on the message of the work itself. I’m a big fan of keeping it simple and stripped-down.
Keep on it… and if you want notes on anything just hit me up. I like giving notes almost as much as I like writing itself. It helps stoke my own creativity sometimes.
Eh, I’m actually not too down about this anymore. I mean, I intentionally wrote it in a pretty depressing voice, but I think it sort of peers through that I’m just tired of the scenario more than anything. There have been much worse scenarios for people to grow up in, I’m sure. Comparison is sort of pointless.
I actually went through the whole cycle to get to this writing style. I came in and was just terrible…I have diaries of bad emo poetry, and that progressed to the stage where we try and use every word we can find in the thesaurus, and so on. I don’t know if any writer is ever totally sure they strike the right point between your voice and simplicity.
Writing is sort of neat in that every time I look back, I think “God I’m much better than I was even X months ago.”
The big simplicity kick lately has been spurred by reading “On Writing Well” by William Zinsser.
And of course, I wish you well with your parental unit. The facebook comment you left, about sharing with “the group”, made me laugh. I sort of consider whatever I write about my own life self-therapy first. I aim and hope that it manages to entertain someone along the way too, but writing stuff this personal is about expunging first for me.