While I knew he carried a gun with him at all times, a small .22, and had a fat hand that he would think nothing of pounding me with, I stilled myself with long breaths to look confident and relaxed, exuding the image of someone not to be trifled with.
Someone who would not use the word “trifle” when negotiating with a crackhead, for instance.
“I can score some teeth—all of them. I can use some dental work.” Manny leaned forward and opened his mouth wide, but he didn’t need to show me. I knew that Manny had only a few teeth remaining in his head. He was a human Jack-o’-lantern, and his breath smelled like someone left a cantaloupe in a suitcase in the sun for a month before opening it.
“I need,” he said, “I need one hundred twenty-two dollars. Yeah, I found this dentist who can put a whole set of permanent teeth, permanently in my mouth for one hundred twenty-two dollars. He’s a student dentist. You know, the guy who goes to school. The guy says he can fix my other teeth too, yeah.” Manny wiped his nose and sniffled deeply and wiped his hands on his jeans.
It was such an exact number. A number that would be hard to question, because it was meant to sound like a retail price for a dentist to charge. Of course, the number was also the most obvious flaw in his story.
Manny kept talking. I was still thinking about the brilliance of Manny’s choice of number. One hundred twenty-two dollars was not going to cover even one tooth, let alone thirty-two new teeth embedded in his head and major surgery to fix the decay and rot from pounds of drugs that had passed through his soft tissue and released all his teeth from his mouth from the beginning.
Manny explained that these were discounted teeth, and he could get better teeth for another fifty-four dollars. Manny was not looking to get a big score from me, just a short-term fix, and one hundred twenty-two dollars was plenty for tonight.
I was sold, but I didn’t want to take any chances. “Listen, I just went to the bank today and deposited all my cash, but I think I have the one hundred twenty-two dollars, unless you wanted to take a personal check?”
Manny smiled at the notion. A personal check would be worthless to him at three fifteen in the morning. While there was no honor among thieves, there was a code. We would play out this idiotic teeth-replacement charade. There would be no further conversation about the money or anything else, because the negotiation finished. I said, “Meet me around back. My girlfriend is sleeping.”
There was no around back, but Manny knew to leave and I would be out in a minute.
I tightly folded $122 in cash in my palm and walked out into the street. I shook Manny’s hand under a streetlamp. He held my hand for an extra moment and said, “I will get this back to you tomorrow morning. I promise.” It was the code talking. He then pulled his hand away with the $122 and pushed it deep down into his pocket.
“No problem. Glad I could help,” I said. Manny turned and began to walk down Fairfax Avenue. “I look forward to seeing your new smile,” I called to him.
He turned around, looking confused. “Huh?” I waved him off and he continued on his way. It was the last time I saw him. Truthfully, he could have asked for a grand and I would have given it to him.
Chapter 6
A few days later I got a frantic call from Daria while I was in Jerez. They had found a singer. As it turned out, the first mezzo-soprano of the Sevillian Opera House was in town for a benefit, and she knew “Ave Maria,” and knew it well!
Daria said, “Yes, yes, she will do it. It would be very exciting. She happens to be in town. This would be fitting for your father, yes?” I pressed the flip phone to my ear for about a minute and listened to Daria’s enthusiasm.
I was excited to know more of the charitable spirit of the fantastic lady soloist until I discovered that the one song would cost me six hundred euros. “Six hundred euros seems very reasonable,” I said, but I almost threw up in my brain. I didn’t blame her for wanting to be paid for her time, special consideration, and talent. I assumed her pricing structure also came from the likelihood that I sounded like a mental patient dragging around my dead father for a writing assignment. There was the reality of my pocketbook, at least that was the excuse I cooked up. I could have dug up the money if I decided to move forward with the mezzo-saprano. I just did not think Dad deserved it. Daria cajoled and I dreamed of the impact on Daria’s psyche had I forked out the cash to see Dad serenaded off into the great beyond by a real pro, but I had already decided against it.
I took my time before answering Daria. I wanted it to look like I was considering the generous offer, discount pricing, and efforts toward making Dad’s final launch a memorable one. Had I been in better spirits, thought better of Dad, had I been less self-centered, I would have, perhaps should have, jumped at the chance. It would have made a great story. I was just much too angry. I wanted him punished. I offered fifty bucks to any damn person who could sing that damn song—a song that I had not even heard before.
I went back to my hotel room, changed into a bathing suit, and jumped into the hotel pool. I told some sunbathing German blumkins that I was an Arabian Sheikh—it was more reflex than anything. Later, I propped Dad on the balcony for the sunset. I told him about the poolside girls and that he should have left me an inheritance. I also said, “So you know about the singer? Well. You know. It’s all process. I am working on it. I’ll forgive you eventually.”
A few days later, I got another call from Daria. They found a willing student at the local conservatory of music who had a soft spot for my story. She was glad to come out for thirty-five euros. She was nineteen and promised to wear black. I quickly agreed and hung up the phone feeling a sense of accomplishment, like I had done him a huge favor. In reality I felt like I had gotten away with something.
I drove through the town of Jerez looking for a bodega, for an interview with the owner. I never found the place. Dad sat in the back seat after I asked directions for the winery and instead picked up a hitchhiker. After I told Dad the good news about “Ave Maria,” I thought I heard cheery rustling coming from his black plastic home.
✴✴✴
Shortly after Manny disappeared with a mouthful of impressive teeth, I had gotten word from one of my aunts that Dad “might” be holed up in Phoenix with his older sister, my aunt Alice. I had not seen or spoken to Alice in ten years, but I remembered how they talked to each other, sat closely, laughed at the same things, and how Dad found every opportunity to have his arm around her.
They were close. She and I were not.
Her number was faded but legible. Calling her made me nervous. I expected awkward small talk that led to my awkward transition to ask about Dad. It felt like the call was disingenuous, and it was. However, my life had been all about being nervous, awkward, and disingenuous.
It was before the digital age, so the phone rang like normal, but only with too much treble and an empty hollowness, as if I had called the abyss. As it rang, I decided no more than six rings and I would not leave a message, if it were an option. I wanted to keep my options of calling her again open without looking like a stalker.
On the fifth ring, she answered.
“Oh, hello,” Aunt Alice said. While it had been years, I knew her voice well enough to recognize it. She had a gentle, Midwestern twang that swaggered with authority. It was similar to my father’s. I imagined her wearing a bright red, short-sleeved sweater with a simple gold cross dangling below her neck.
I said, “Hi, Aunt Alice, it is me, Devin, from Los Angeles. George’s son.” No one called Dad George, his baptismal name, except his brothers and sisters. Like most everything, Dad hated it. I continued, “I thought I would touch base.”
She said, “Oh, you would like to speak to George? I think you have a wrong number.”
“No, no, I would like to speak to my aunt Alice. Aunt Alice?” I asked.
The silence lasted several seconds, almost to the point that dared me j
ust to hang up before she started, “Oh, let me see if she is in.” This was lame. I heard her breathing into the phone, waiting for time to elapse. Stupider still, she did not even try inventing a second person. There was no pretend conversation on the other end. No mumbled or hushed tones or pantomimed footsteps across a squeaky wooden floor, just her breathing into the phone.
Even though it was clear to me I was, in fact, already speaking to Alice, I was not surprised by her reaction. There had always been an unwritten law among Dad’s siblings. While they might fight among themselves and not talk to each other for years at a time, they would never give up information to an outsider, anyone who was not part of their sibling clan. While I was Dad’s son, I was not part of the initiated group and therefore not to be entirely trusted with even the most meager of information. For a moment, I wondered whether my aunt would go as far as to tell me she was on an extended vacation on a remote island and unavailable for months, before she spoke again, “Oh, Hi Devin. It’s your aunt Alice. How are you? Is everybody okay?”
“Hi Aunt Alice. Everything is great.” I told her about my family and my fascinating bout of unemployment. She told me about her kids and her grandkids. We talked about my other aunts and uncles and cousins galore, until the conversation began to organically sag as I paced around the room and its cold floor in my bare feet and waited to turn our discussion toward Dad’s whereabouts.
Then Alice went with what I believed to be a preemptive strike. She asked, “Is your dad okay? I have not heard from him in years.”
Well played, I thought.
“I know, Aunt Alice. I have not heard from him in years either.” I exhaled more audibly, more frustrated than planned. “That’s why I was calling. I certainly didn’t want to bother him or anything, but I just wanted to pass along that I was thinking about him.” Aunt Alice knew something and I didn’t want to give her the opportunity to deny it by asking her directly.
Alice took several measured breaths into the receiver. “While I have not spoken to him in years, I have a friend that speaks to him sometimes. She said he was doing really well.”
It was my turn to think and breathe into the receiver. “Friend” was such an odd word to associate with Dad. After Manny, I wasn’t sure if Dad had any friends—even Manny stretched the meaning of friend in an oblong way. Dad had people that he had coffee with in the early dawn hours, but these people never had names or details attached to them. The more I thought about it, Dad was a loner.
I strangled the phone cord around my finger until it purpled while I debated whether or not to push the envelope. I wanted to pin Alice to the wall to force her to give me specific information. I also knew a direct confrontation over the phone would accomplish nothing, and then it stopped. All of the anxiety and interest finished. She had already given me something valuable. Dad was still alive and doing well, according to this mystery friend. My desire to know more just left, and so did the desire to track Dad down any further. I released the cord wrapped around my finger and the blood flowed back.
Alice and I chatted for another twenty minutes about nothing in particular. She told me about needing the garage door fixed. I told her about me getting a new-but-used car. Just before we ended our last call together she said, “You know, I love you.”
I said, “I love you too.”
After my call with Alice ended, I wondered that night why she did not just say, “Listen, Devin, your dad is laying low and does not want to be found,” but mostly, I had a small epiphany. Phone calls like these had lost their charm and Dad didn’t want me to know where he was. It was a painful realization. In the following days, I debated telling people Dad was dead.
Sure, I made a few more phone calls and participated in a few more rounds of hide-and-seek with relatives, but I had given up. I stopped looking for Dad. I told myself I no longer cared about him. This realization took place after speaking with Aunt Alice, or a few months later when I called Dad’s brother, Fred, who assured me that he would have Dad call. Or when I spoke with Uncle Rick a few months after that, who was now a pit boss at the Peppermill in Reno, who told me that he had not spoken to Dad in months but would be sure to let me know if he showed up at the Peppermill. Or maybe it was when Aunt Jesse said…
It did not matter. Dad was hiding, and I became tired of cutting off my circulation by wrapping the phone cord around my fingers. I was in my mid-twenties and understood who Dad was because he had told me. He always said, whether he sat on a barstool or at Thanksgiving dinner, “Your old man is like the wind.” It was a charming line. On the surface, it pointed to Dad’s strength, and people smiled when they heard him say it because it had a folksy, almost pagan ring. I understood it to mean, even at a very young age, my father was unreliable and unpredictable. He was being exactly who he had always been, even though I wanted him to treat me differently than the rest of the world. I wanted to feel like I had a special place in his life. Hell, I was his son, after all. Now that I was less like an only child, I had more reason to see his wind-likeness. I felt betrayed.
Then it hit me: Dad’s behavior was not about me. It was a brief moment of clarity, and I hung up the phone for good.
Dad cushioned himself from life for years, perhaps his entire adult life. The evidence was on display, and I had ignored it in spectacular fashion. I waffled between acceptance of Dad and a loud “good riddance.” The thought of him drove me to bars and drunkenness. I pretended not to care, which manifested in more drinking. Now he cushioned himself from me. I leapt to the assumption that he must be dead rather than figure out my feelings. How else could he treat me like this? I went through a brief period that could only be described as self-inflicted mourning. I sulked and took handfuls of Vicodin that I kept in a Mickey Mouse Pez dispenser and felt sorry for myself for being an orphan. I ignored the fact that my mother was still alive.
All I knew was that Dad had left a paid-off building in Los Angeles and moved to Las Vegas with a red Chrysler Maserati that he drove with two feet, one on the brake, one on the gas—his love for action equaling his apparent love of smoking brake pads. He pissed the money away betting on the pass line and field rolls at the craps table and renting a mirrored house with an indoor swimming pool, and the cash dried up. The craps dealer’s long wooden stick came and swept up all Dad’s dough. He spent a relative fortune in a few years of looking strong and playing to impress. It had been enough money to keep him secure for the rest of his life.
In the meantime, I had moved just outside of San Francisco to a small town called Pacifica, to work on my drinking and penchant for dating broken women and feeling bad about myself. I took only what could fit in my trunk: an acoustic guitar, a small television, and a pile of clothes. I lived on the side of a hill that faced away from the picturesque Pacific Ocean and hung a heavy bag in the middle of the living room as I had developed a hobby of hitting things when drunk.
In the beginning, I took a sales job in the computer industry and worked as the one Caucasian in an all-Chinese company. I wore pressed suits. I showed up on time and rigged my phone by lodging a paper clip in the hock switch, then a string to the paper clip and the string to my wrist. I replaced my handset with a headset. When the phone rang, I raised my hand and was always the first person to answer sales calls. I stayed late and eventually convinced my employers that I deserved the title “King of Sales” on my business cards. At home, when I hit the heavy bag, I methodically placed a sponge across my knuckles, wrapped my hands, and taped everything to not injure myself. I put myself on a 4,500-calorie-a-day diet that consisted mostly of protein powder shakes and sweated myself into the best shape of my life.
My compulsive enthusiasm was short-lived. I began showing up late to work, stopped dressing in slacks, and started taking Valiums in the office toilet. Stopped making commission. A feng-shui master decided that I should have my office boarded up because of the money that was flying out of the door. When I got home, I lost th
e tape and wraps and pounded the heavy bag until my hands bled. My life was disintegrating quickly. The reason was only clear in hindsight.
I wanted to be the King of Sales, just like him. I wanted to be physically imposing like him, a drunk like him, distant like him, but I was disgusted by myself. I felt like I had succeeded in being my father and felt my world spinning around me, dragging me further down.
Dad called one morning out of the blue. I had not spoken to him in over two years. “Devin, it’s your father.” Although it had been ages, I acted casual and pretended things were better than they were with him and the rest of my life. It would be a common thread of presenting the opposite of the truth, no matter what. I had no money, so I quit my job, which made sense at the time. Then, I went to the local bar and bought the whole place a round of drinks. I had used Dad’s advice. If you cannot be strong, look strong. Buying a roomful of acquaintances a beer insured I would get one in return and also made me look like a big shot to the drunken ladies at my local haunts. I was completely busted and waiting for my last paycheck.
“What’s going on, chief?” I said.
“Hey there, sonny boy.” He said it with song in his heart and a lilt of good humor in his voice. Without a pause and without a summary of the last couple of years, he said, “Float your father a deuce for a few days. I have something really big going on.” Not even “how are you?” Then he let out a sort of chuckle that let me know all was good in the world. Floating Dad a deuce for a few days translated into me giving him two hundred dollars forever. He had floated me numerous pretend loans, although I was a teenager the last time I had asked him for anything.
10,000 Miles with My Dead Father's Ashes Page 14
