I tilted the phone’s microphone away to hide my panicked breathing. I resisted the urge to say anything during the fifteen-second pause while the editor considered it. He said, “Here is the contact number for the Tourism Board of Spain. So sorry for your loss.”
I called the number I’d been given moments after I hung up with my editor and scheduled a face-to-face with a woman who handled media relations for the Tourism Board of Spain in Los Angeles. Little did I know, this woman—Luciana—would change everything for me. I wore the one tattered suit I owned and stammered and perspired through a calm exterior while feeling like a thief, but good timing prevailed. Luck was on my side that day, and the Tourism Board of Spain needed a writer to report on a new series of operas that was to be held annually in Sevilla (since cancelled)—oddly enough the next major city closest to Cádiz—and I could get a story in a magazine they wanted to be featured in. We discussed my visiting Cádiz, and Luciana was happy to set up an additional week’s worth of story scouting in Andalucia with a stop at Cádiz Tourism for my regional itinerary. Within moments, Dad went from covered with dust to something tangible and alive, something to smuggle.
With tickets in hand, I removed my shoes, belt, jacket, sunglasses, and cap and gathered my passport, traveler’s checks, and a cell phone. I threw everything into several gray plastic tubs for security checkpoint examination. I waited in line and felt like a criminal. It is an odd circumstance that an organization like the Transportation Security Administration uses tactics that would be criminal in any other situation but have become routine in the name of freedom: limiting freedom during its clearance process. I took tiny steps in my stockinged feet along with everyone else. I placed my suitcase with Dad onto the conveyer belt with the rest of my belongings. I kept the official-looking “my father is dead” documents in my hand with my passport and boarding pass. Everything slid through the cruel beige X-ray machine.
Dad was never fond of the medical community, and X-rays were probably the last things that he ever wanted to have in his life. As the conveyor belt rolled, security folks began to mumble and point, and I knew my suitcase had come into view.
When my suitcase came out the other side, a mustachioed man wearing a light blue button-down shirt and a humorless expression grabbed my suitcase and marched it over to a shiny steel table. He grabbed the zippers and began to open the case. He tossed my loose pairs of underpants and socks aside to get at the plastic drum. I approached him and squealed in a high-pitched lady voice, “Hey, be careful!”
He took two steps back and pointed at me and said, “Sir, back away from the case!”
I raised both my hands, OK Corral–style, took two steps backward, and dropped the level of my voice ten decibels and an octave lower.
“Sir,” I said, “that’s my father in that plastic case. I’m taking his ashes to be scattered out of the country, I have some paperwork if you want to take a look at it.” With my hands still raised, I waved the one that held my documents. I then slowly started to hand him my paperwork, which he did not look at, but lowered his head and said, “I’m really sorry to hear about your father, but I have to swab him. He might be a bomb.”
The mustachioed security guy never did look at any of my paperwork. Neither did anybody else.
I sat down in my narrow coach seat, with Dad carefully smushed into the plane’s overhead baggage, and wanted nothing more than to fall asleep. The airplane’s pressurized cabin whirled and breezed, rolling metal carts carrying snacks and water clanged into my seat, the passenger next to me read with one of those airplane Alcatraz spotlights, and I restlessly reclined, sat up, readjusted the seat’s pleather headrest, reclined, turned on my side, pulled my knees to my chest, and tried to rest my head on the tray table in front of me with the world’s teensiest pillow. When nothing worked, I paced around the plane’s aisles trying not to think about Dad.
✴✴✴
“Don’t worry, I’ll still be kicking your ass when you’re a hundred!” he said while he jabbed his nicotine-calloused finger against my bony chest. At seven years old, I found his threat comforting, and more importantly, I believed him. Dad stood in the glow of the refrigerator light in only striped boxers, which were all he ever wore when indoors. He had big arms and legs, a barrel chest, and thick, jabbing fingers. I could smell the cigarettes and Maalox on his breath, which was all he ever smelled like unless he had been drinking. Then he smelled like vegetables rotting in a garbage disposal, and this smell both frightened and thrilled me.
I wore the same powder-blue pajamas I had had since I was four. I was just as skinny as when they were first given to me. The bottoms came up to my shins and the top to my forearms. I never planned for more pajamas.
I had just cornered Dad in the service porch. Tears slathered down my face while I tried to explain what I was afraid of. Earlier that day in school, I had learned that smoking kills. My father smoked three packs of Salem menthols a day and, after the first, lit each one from the cherry end of the one he was still smoking. He was not in the mood for my blubbering.
I tried to tell him how glad I was that he would still be around for a long time. “Dad,” I said, and then I started hyperventilating. It was times like these that I was certain that Dad wanted a son with a thicker skin. This thought only brought more tears.
Without another word, and with a look of exhaustion, he lumbered away. He took with him a huge tumbler of milk, half a loaf of white bread, and a cube of butter on his silver bedtime tray. I remember thinking he could unnerve the most steadfast of “belly-bucking champions,” a term I learned from a show I had seen that pitted two shirtless fat guys against each other. They slammed stomachs for points, the same way bighorn rams proved alpha-male dominance in the wild but without the bellies or the points. Dad was my hero.
It was a relief to know that he was going to live to be at least a hundred and thirty, and his longevity made me feel better as I listened to him pound down the hallway. I had spent the early part of my life waiting for his departure, which happened often. My parents’ volatile personalities resulted in slammed doors and Dad needing to “get out of Dodge.” I had this image of him in my mind closing the front door behind him wearing a brown baker boy cap and his jacket collar turned up, holding a paper bag filled with jumbled clothes, and me in my same blue pajamas chasing after him toward the door—although I do not remember him ever owning a hat at any other time, ever. Sometimes he left without my mother’s encouragement when “a couple of drinks” turned into days or a trip to Vegas without a trace. While he was gone, my mother and I would go on bottle hunts around the house for his alcohol, or go on welfare. Or she would hole herself up behind her bedroom door, leaving me on the other side.
I thought if I were a better son, Dad would come home and stay.
When Dad returned, he would simply materialize. No fanfare or explanation, just him there in the living room, smoking a cigarette, shirtless, in his tattered boxers, having a coffee. I would be overjoyed. Sometimes he pulled me off to the side in our small apartment and crouched down to my eye level. His aftershave burned my eyes and made them water. He told me complicated stories of being lost or locked up but always planning on coming back home. He’d say, “How could I not come for you.” He hugged and kissed me. He apologized and promised no more yelling, or no more drinking, or no more leaving.
I would say, “Okay, no more Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?” He always agreed, and I wanted to believe that this time would be different, that he would stay for good. When I lay in bed and listened to my parents fight, though, I knew differently. There would be another day, another argument.
I stared at the ceiling under a dark blue haze and I knew there would be a day when Dad would be gone for good, but that seemed nebulous and far away, or not real—even if the knot in my stomach suggested otherwise.
✴✴✴
Dad was born to a fertile mother who had thirteen children—inc
luding three sets of twins in a five-year span—and a nondescript, distant father who left the family after eleven of those children were born. When Dad, one half of the first set of twins, spoke about his childhood, the subjects ranged from poverty to religious disdain, petty crimes to grand larceny. He told stories that smacked of surviving by use of guile and cunning, and words like “success,” “stability,” and “future” never showed up. He said it all with a smile. He had a romantic relationship with his own history, which painted 1930s and ’40s Chicago as a small town with rules that ran the street, rules he followed well or invented.
Coming from a poor family, Dad was never given the opportunities that came from social standing or money, but he knew how to hustle and was good with the tools he was given. He could fix a car with the metallic foil of a gum wrapper or hold court in a social gathering. He was smart and strong, with wide shoulders and hands, thick wrists, and bright blue eyes. My uncle Rick once said of Dad’s physical gifts, “He should have been a prize fighter.” Dad understood how to project confidence, and he lied with slyness. I, on the other hand, saw myself as too thin, like the shivering dog in the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland, all ribs and cowering.
As a kid, I was in awe. As an adult, envious.
✴✴✴
Our whole apartment shook as Dad bounded down the hall to answer the phone. It was dark outside but still early in the evening due to Daylight Savings Time. Dad often mistook a dark outside as the middle of the night if he had a few drinks during the day and came home to sleep it off.
“Do you have a fucking clue what time it is?” he said to the caller. I heard a brief pause before, “Listen, motherfucker, I don’t give a shit what you think you deserve.”
It turned out Dad was speaking to Chiam, a portly man, who wore a yarmulke and spoke with a heavy Eastern European accent, who had offended my mother. Rugalah cookies and baked apples were acceptable Jewishness, being a practicing Jew was not. Chiam was also one of my parents’ first tenants after they bought a four-unit building with money they did not have. (It was at a time when real estate was still affordable in Los Angeles.) Mom fielded phone calls and collected rents and Dad used his MacGuyver-like skills to fix everything under the roof of the four-unit building.
In the beginning, Chiam and my parents were cordial, but as Chiam’s list of grievances grew and his Judaica persisted, it was decided on that phone call that it was time for Chiam to go. After all, he was calling at six o’clock at night.
Dad said, “Uh huh, motherfucker. I will be glad to discuss this with you right this fucking minute…” and I tiptoed over to my bedroom door and closed myself behind it. I heard muffled sounds of him calling Chiam a “motherfucker” several more times before slamming the receiver down. I held my breath as Dad’s footsteps pounded past my bedroom to his. He opened a drawer and then slammed it shut. His keys jangled as he moved down the hall and out the front door.
Mom yelled after him, “Where are you going?”
My bedroom door stayed closed.
The rest of the evening was quiet, and Dad never returned.
In the morning, I woke with Dad standing over me. “Get up. You’re going to learn to paint today.” Within the hour, I was at the far end of Chiam’s hallway dressed in a small T-shirt and loose-fitting gray sweatpants with a missing drawstring. Every few minutes, the pants would slowly slide down my waist until I had to pull them up.
Chiam’s apartment was now empty. There were indentations in the carpet where furniture once stood. There were a few scattered papers strewn about like rolling desert tumbleweeds after a storm had cleared. Dad stood at the other end of the hallway with a paint roller in hand and cigarette between his lips that held together the smirk on his face. He wore a mustard-colored sweatshirt cut off at the shoulders that showed off impressive arms and stretched over his beer gut.
I quietly struggled with my roller, which had a long pole attachment. The roller slid across the wall, and in a few minutes I was covered in a million tiny, cottage-white paint dots. As I watched him, I could not help but think, that’s my dad. He was imposing and gruff, and he was not covered in paint like I was. He always knew how to be a guy. Something, even now, I had no idea how to be. That’s when I first knew, for a fact, I wanted to be just like him. After an hour, Dad and I were in different rooms when curiosity got the better of me. “Hey, Dad,” I called, “what happened to Chiam? Did he move away?”
Dad poked his head around the corner and looked at me, sizing me up about how much he should say. I felt a warm rush of guilty fear. My throat began to close and a blubbering started to build in me. It was a time in my life when everything made me want to cry. As he stared at me, I let out a short, audible breath, knowing that I had asked too much. I stood there with my roller dripping paint, curious and frightened.
Dad said, “Chiam did not treat your mother with respect. That’s my wife. No one disrespects your mother.” He did not elaborate, and no elaboration was needed. I understood.
I felt many things that day, but mostly I felt lightheaded. The 1970s were a time of social chaos and strong, unregulated paint fumes. After a few more hours in Chiam’s apartment, Dad took me outside to sit on the lawn. The sitting turned into lying on the lawn, which eventually turned into losing consciousness on the lawn.
I enjoyed chemical side effects. If I were more conscious about my dreams on the lawn, I am sure they would have been about how Dad’s scary ways created security. It was not the first time that I was grateful that he had scared the shit out of me. It would also not be the last time.
While I lay there on the lawn, it was the first time I experienced a memorable woozy. I could not have realized that I was more like him in that moment than I ever had been before.
Like many tenants that followed, Chiam sort of drifted away to a place that I learned not to ask questions about. Dad would be there to protect me and Mom, and it was better to stand behind him than in front when he stormed.
✴✴✴
My breath floated in the cold air as Dad and I rode along in his bumbling gold Chevy van, off to get a Christmas tree. It was Christmas Eve, and the yearly ritual of last-second tree shopping was an additional thrill, because I was included in what felt like a guy’s night. I must have been about eight or nine, and the prospect of doing something with Dad made me feel manly. So manly I felt I would burst into tears at any moment.
Instead, I held it in. One of my uncles asked me if I intended to be a sissy my whole life. They were all tough guys from Chicago, who scowled and ground their teeth at disappointment while walking chest out and head up. They trudged through the world with grit and flicked short-end cigarettes into the middle of the street. They were characters that walked out of a film noir. Dad was their ringleader.
On the other hand, I sniffled and wiped my nose on my sleeve; tears stained my face with regularity. I wept and whined about everything, because everything bothered me to the point of helplessness. If I struck out in Little League to end the game with the bases loaded, which seemed to be every week, forget about it. I crawled under the bed and stayed there to whimper for a couple of hours. In time I learned that men had to suck it up.
That night, I wanted to cry from tears of joy, although the thought that crying was still crying was not lost on me. I sat with Dad in our crappy, two-tone Volkswagen van, bundled in winter clothes. As I looked up at him through the dark, I felt part of the mystical father-and-son relationship I saw on television.
Sensible fathers wore glasses and calmly fixed problems with intellectual prowess. By the end of the episode, there was an understanding that TV-land fathers and sons were a team, part of an unbreakable family bond that held through all of life’s challenges. Dad did not wear glasses and did not talk like television fathers. He had a lilting, Midwestern accent, which replaced all of the “o”s with “uh”s.
He wore blue jeans and dark-colored sweatshi
rts that hid grease stains. His boots had watermarks from working in puddles. Dad was a plumber then, and as I looked at his fists around the steering wheel, I saw the random scrapes and the open wounds of someone who worked with his hands. At each red light, he would smile at me or wink with his blue eyes.
I would find out only later that Mom sent me along with him not for the experience and joy of riding with Dad to buy my first Christmas tree but to insure that he would come back home and stay the night. It had become common for Dad to disappear on Christmas Eve and return on Christmas Day—it would be less likely that there would be a confrontation while I was unwrapping gifts on Jesus’s special day. Dad was smart like that. I was tired but excited as we drove along, the metal tools clanging around behind us in the van.
Dad exited the car with a mission: to get the cheapest tree possible. He stomped through the Douglas fir needles and the pungent scent of pine. Without looking at any of the trees, Dad marched straight up to the unshaven tree maven and said, “What do you have for a buck?” Then Dad took a deep drag from his cigarette.
The tree man responded, “For a dollar, all I have is that brown tree sitting next to the shredder.” And the man pointed to a sad tree next to a wood chipper.
“That’s not even a fucking tree!” Dad said, and then he looked toward me for an agreement.
The sad tree had started to brown and missed a few key branches in the middle and a lot of needles, but I wanted it anyway. Not because it was nice, but because it was sad. Over the years, I had become accustomed to feeling bad for inanimate objects and began to give them human emotions, usually sadness or loneliness. It seemed unfair to force the sad tree, propped up by the wood chipper, to cozy up with its executioner. I don’t know why I created sad trees, lonely stuffed animals, or an unfulfilled plate of past-due grapes, but I felt sorry for everything—hence the incessant blubbering.
10,000 Miles with My Dead Father's Ashes Page 5
