by Herbert Gold
“All due respect, Dan, Dad, maybe you could have done something sooner to find me.”
“How could I even know?” Unnecessarily, he cleared his throat, as if he might cough again. “With all due respect…” Stopped. No echoing sarcasm allowed. “But you were the one who knew you must have a father, you were the one, you could have – okay, you were a kid, your mother didn’t…”
And now he did cough, phlegm included.
“Margaret,” she said.
No more explanation, though no explanation had been offered. Margaret in Mendocino didn’t believe in father hunts. That history was unalterable, despite Amanda’s anger about the ancient story of her childhood. Dan was sad for the same reason.
“I know I asked the first time we met, I asked this already, but I guess I was thinking about other things, remembering your mother, trying to… You know how it is, you meet someone, you register a look, they say their name, you’re still registering the look, so you have no idea what name they just said… When’s your birthday?”
“I already told you.” Tole you, Projects talk, D’Wayne’s wife.
“I know. You did. When?”
“January Nine.”
“Okay, thanks.”
She wrinkled her nose in a grin that involved nostrils, not lips. “Funny thing, I remember yours and you never told me.” Tole again. “March Three. Mom wouldn’t tell me your name, but she thought birthdays were like a big-time mystic thing, shared that much with me. She believed in sharing. What the fuck’s so mystic, she said, trinity about the number three? Especially when she was a Wicca? March the Third and Month the Third of the Christian year…?”
“January Nine. I’ll remember.”
Kasdan wasn’t sure she believed this promise. He hoped she might learn to feel it in her body like a kind of love, a kind of love-making. Flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood, feel it like an offer and a plea for forgiveness.
At present, she had other nourishment on her mind. Through a mouthful of yesterday’s BLT from the refrigerator, heavy on the mayonnaise, she made her own offer. “That piece of shit you drive? I don’t want you to buy me a car, but you ever decide to upgrade, you really should, man your age, it ain’t safe – whyn’t you pass it down to me? Shopping sometimes, and D’Wayne gotta go to work, what if the kid has like an emergency?”
Although it worked okay for him, the Fiat wouldn’t be any good as a trade-in. But why should he answer this at all? Kasdan may not have been the most insightful new dad of this daughter munching at her sandwich, but he recognized nagging manipulation when it hit him in the face. Okay, maybe in due course, he could pass the Fiat down, yeah, sure…
“Just kidding, Dad. Hey, kidding! You love your piece of junk, sorry I called it shit, many apologies, it’s your blankie, like you’re committed. Everybody gotta love something.” A germ of mercy stopped her. She pulled at her front teeth. A sliver of bacon was stuck there.
“At least you were kidding without opening your mouth too much,” he said. “Your mom – mother– Margaret, she taught you to chew with your mouth shut.”
“Learned that all by myself. Figured it out, man, ’cause I hate spitters. So thanks a bunch.” She stared at her hand with its smear of mayonnaise. “Dad. But D’Wayne, something else, what you never asked? I’m gonna tell you anyway. He ain’t that much older’n me, just built big, works out, born like that – big. It’s only eleven years, not like a father complex. Even in the Projects, he ain’t old enough most times be my daddy. Was y’all here thinking that was my thang?”
“No.” When D’Wayne came to mind, she slid into her fake ghetto act. Dan Kasdan’s daughter had not grown up to be perfect. The veteran court translator knew that D’Wayne wouldn’t say ‘y’all’ if it signified one person, singular; a man of pompous grammatical experience understood about such things. Amanda was laying on the collard greens with chitlins, the fake ghetto, to make a point. “No,” he repeated, to be on the safe side, with all due respect for his only daughter.
“I ain’t no D’Wayne’s baby-mama neither, I’m his certify wife, Dad – only one he got.” She blinked challengingly straight into her father’s face. “Plus, only one he gets.”
“Great. As long as he’s good to you and Sergei.”
“Which he is. We gonna keep it that way, bro.”
She was being bilingual, like her father, and arrogant, as he didn’t think he was, not usually. Since he had had his fill, he said, “Enough of that, okay? And I ain’t your bro.”
“Badda-bing,” she added thoughtfully, but seemed to agree that her point was made and she could come off it.
Dan Kasdan and Amanda were wrestling together like children, like an inaccurate father and a daughter inaccurate in her own way; a daughter who graduated from high school, got good grades, pretty good ones, could have gone on from there but didn’t. It was all not having a father’s fault, wasn’t it?
She had already told him that D’Wayne aced his G.E.D., not like the other Project boys. Nobody had any call to feel sorry for Amanda and D’Wayne. They were husband and wife with their beloved son, forever and ever, no matter what trouble came their way, one for all and all for one. They were even legal according to the paperwork of the stupid State of California and the fucked-up U. S. of A. They were different from the fatasses who give the world babies, what daddy? And tote them around on MUNI, stinking up the bus. Did you know, Dad, there are even white cunts – excuse it, chicks – get stuck by some dummy on a magic night of romance and then hitch a ride to Mendocino to join a coven, screw around with growers, and don’t have the sense or the consideration for their daughter to hook up with a rich one? A grower like the one Amanda knew with ponies, an Italian espresso machine, and kids he took care of until they put him in Vacaville? And then due to megavitamin therapy, he convinced the shrinks he was cured? And they let him out? And he let his kids all ride around the corral on his ponies? Margaret had this trick she learned from some Tantric witch, you squeeze the muscles down there where it counts, maybe could have used them to grab a future daddy for more’n one enchanted evening, weekend max, before he…
“Let’s get back to the subject. How long were you looking for me?”
“Never did,” she said. “Don’t flatter yourself. Never did.”
He knew she was lying, she knew she was lying, and she knew he knew. Therefore she decided to amend the lie: “Not for a long time, but then one fine day I did.” Decided on further amendments: “Pestered my mom, you recall the lady – Margaret? She wouldn’t say. But a kid” – scrunched her face into a knot: “we hoff our ways.”
The context was all off. She must have heard a television comic doing movie Nazi torturer; even her ghetto act was better. She was nervous; things come out wrong in nervous times; Kasdan was used to his translation clients blurting in court while Ferd Conway shouted, “Objection, Your Honor, objection!”
“Tell you what, Pops. If I find you… if I find you… you’ll be the first to know.”
His very own daughter making up for lost years by making a joke. That meant progress, right?
“When we was younger…”
Were, he thought, and had the good sense not to say aloud.
“… you wasn’t looking for me and I wasn’t looking for you.”
“Were,” he said.
“No, I weren’t.”
The pedantic court translator and newfound father had noticed at 850 Bryant, and in deposition or mediation with interracial and interethnic couples – “mixed” was the preferred term – that either the white one learned from the black or brown one or the other way around. Sometimes it got mutually mixed up, which may have been the case with D’Wayne and this daughter of Dan Kasdan, his grammar and final g’s not being passed along with his genes. Amanda was rhythmically socking her fist into her palm, probably a pastime which she had picked up from D’Wayne, signifying boredom, needing to do something other than having this conversation; signifying that she was not rea
lly bored, but uneasy and needing to pretend boredom.
There were further comments which she hadn’t yet learned how to make, but she tried a further comment: “Oh Dad, I wish…”
He waited for something more.
Nothing more came.
There had to be more.
“So?” he asked, and she answered, “So.” So it wasn’t yet enough if it ever would be, although he had asked the question and she had given the answer, both uttering the same word, so. Not my fault was an explanation which excused nothing, even if sung together like a duet.
Her eyes were wet. This didn’t seem right to Kasdan. He couldn’t tell if it was anger or something different. It should have been his eyes and he should have been able to know what her wet eyes meant. Maybe it meant she had allergies, like her father.
Her eyes, he decided, were wet with emotion, anger or tears.
Now she swiped her arm across her eyes and puffed out her cheeks. Kasdan didn’t know what his daughter was doing, except that she had a plan in mind. She said, “I ain’t need to be white chick rich, Dad, or Dan? Should I call you that? But I wouldn’t mind gettin’ negro rich, you dig?”
He dug. It wasn’t exactly a new plan. He thought of suggesting she could stick a feather in her hair, channel her inner Native American, and declare war over wampum. Sarcasm was not a productive way to unscramble their history, put together their future. He said, “You can call me Dad.” He said it as mildly as he could, but he was flatlining on her sudden swerves. His beloved daughter, the pain in the ass. He seemed to recall that Margaret also had sharp teeth and a way of biting, but driven by horniness, he must have decided she was just funny. Those were the days, weren’t they? He was younger then, wasn’t he? He said: “Amanda, you can come off the rap now, please.”
Amanda’s father Dan, also a pain in the ass.
She sneezed. “The baby powder,” she said.
And yet he didn’t long for the days with his buddy Harvey, with Ferd Conway, with his clients, with the Indian and Pakistani all-you-can dinners. He knew where he stood with them. Knowing where he stood wasn’t enough. Amanda might be too much.
Things used to be easier. What was going on in him was like a chemical imbalance and a chemical rebalancing. When things used to be clearer, things were still murky, nights were lonely; Harvey’s companionship only lasted through a couple of beers and maybe dinner; late afternoons in the fading winter light admitted sharp glints of despair; spite toward Ferd Conway hadn’t yet led toward a drastic decision that, yes, an incident of fatality and profit might be nice. Nothing but love was supposed to be clear. Even love wasn’t.
It may have been something chemical in him, but Kasdan decided the wetness of Amanda’s eyes was tears, tears of anger or tears of love, or – his chemistry still speaking in him – or maybe not, only his own acute searching of her eyes. He was confused about himself when he should only be confused about Amanda and his grandson. Cows just stand there in the herd, chewing their cud; but shouldn’t a man, even a court translator with his job of sitting, receiving, and monotone delivering, pursue what he desires until he gets it? Wasn’t that the plan about Ferd and the payday result?
“You know what’s a bad thing?” he asked. “The worst of it might be, and we should probably make the best of it, is I’m the only dad you’ll ever have.”
“I don’t think about that.”
“Okay, listen, plus, you’re the only child – you’re grown up now, you’re not a child, I know that – you’re the only kid I’ll ever have.”
She pinched a smile in his direction. Her lips crinkled and fluttered, and fell into a fleshy pout, and then pinched out the smile again. “Unless some overage punk springs another surprise on you, like I did, you think?”
It could happen, he thought. No, it couldn’t. Yes, it could.
“I doubt it,” he said. “Okay, but you’re smarter’n you let on. You got me there. But I doubt it.”
It seemed as if they were agreeing about something. Maybe this was progress, even if he wasn’t sure what they were agreeing about. He wondered if the pink blotching at her cheeks was a rash, an allergy. He might have had a remedy for that if he had seen her grow up. “Dear,” he said softly, which didn’t mean all he meant.
“Okay, hi,” she said.
The city was creaking behind them, traffic, subterranean rumbles in pipes and walls, San Francisco bent by premonitions of earthquake. In his state of anxious attention, he thought he could make out the hiss of electricity flashing through wires, water throbbing in hollowed concrete underground, the earth turning, getting ready for upheavals predicted by both geologists, astrologers, and witches in their covens. Buildings would sway, maybe fall. Kasdan believed he would never rest again unless he could discover his daughter for real, not merely confronting this resentful young woman with sturdy arms, no longer those of a girl, and breasts, ample ones like the breasts of her mother when an incident had taken place in the nearly forgotten past. One night it happened, must have happened, or maybe in a late afternoon, that the spark of Amanda was created through no will or intention of either the careless insistent person or the somewhat willing other person. But maybe Margaret had planned an outcome.
“So Dad, I was wondering, excuse the question… was she hot? Did you think she was really hot?”
He had thought so, probably, as best he could recall. He let the question pass.
“Something fierce was she? One of those chicks they had in those days? On Haight Street? So you couldn’t help yourself? It was meant to be, haha? Destiny? Really cool?”
“Please,” he said.
“Your karma was it?”
Let her get it out, Kasdan thought, she has a right. But when it’s out, shouldn’t that be enough? “In those days,” he began, and then thought better of it. Excuses didn’t work in Municipal Court, either. So shut up, he advised himself.
Shutting up didn’t much improve the ventilation. The air was filled with abiding anger, with floating motes of regret, and with the smells of baby powder and crackles of bacon. It remained necessary for Dan Kasdan, as the more responsible or at least the older person around here, to say or do something helpful. Something helpful did not consist of self-justification, excuses, nor even apologies; heartfelt apologies might go partway if there were a responding heart. He reached for a move historically tested during times of stress: “Are you hungry? Want a bite? That half a sandwich, all it was – you in the mood for a slice? There’s a…” He knew he was yapping. “There’s a Soup Box down past the corner. Hey, we both know the neighborhood…” Yap, yap, yap; Kasdan disliked himself. And then, as if checking out menu options was their business: “Pizza, or that falafel place – the Saigon fish sit-down…?” Yap! Shut up! “A baby that time, it could happen, the way a lot of us were, the way I was then, those days, Margaret probably told you, your mom, I guess we didn’t think at all…”
A dog barking in the street outside seemed to have a better idea of what he was going through than he did, and expressed it better. That mutt with its exasperated yapping communicated less confusion than Dan Kasdan, court translator, did.
He needed air. He needed a walk on Ellis, Eddy, Taylor, or O’Farrell. He hoped he wouldn’t scare off his buddy, the dog.
Amanda stood, saying nothing. Had she finished?
“Now, here we are, so can’t we just do the best we can?” he asked. “Can’t we try that? Isn’t that fair?”
“Try that,” she said. He didn’t know if this meant she agreed. He believed they should find each other when they could, and they should keep trying, and right now they should find a place for a decent hamburger, nice fries, a side of tomatoes for the benefit of life eternal or fully vitamined health while they waited for life eternal. Or whatever Amanda wanted.
D’Wayne wouldn’t worry if he found them gone when he returned with Sergei. After all, Amanda was safe in her father’s company.
Limbered with strolling along, life a little eas
ier out here on Ellis, they found the strength to review a few details. Dan to Amanda: “I want to love you. Let’s practice for that.”
Staring at a slowly cruising Cadillac, a confiscated vehicle containing two alert plainclothes guys, just for something to stare at, she muttered, “Okay, I’ll try, too.” And then: “Maybe.” And then: “I don’t know.”
They were both ignorant of a certain state of being, the entity of father and daughter, and of what such might be. At this moment in the Tenderloin, on the street, life seemed a little easier, but not what Kasdan would call actually easy. He touched Amanda’s arm. She didn’t pull away. He let it rest a moment and then removed it. She didn’t bring up the subject of the Fiat or money. Maybe they were making progress. Even the dog he had heard yapping was silent. He had touched her arm for a moment and she didn’t pull away.
The next time they saw each other, it might be as if this moment had never happened, but it had happened anyway. Amanda intended to defy good sense, her father’s good sense, because it was necessary in the obeying of her own good sense. Even if it was not. It was still complicated, wasn’t it?
“Hey, see that asshole over there? Here every day?” Amanda asked. “Ain’t even got enough brain left to unzip before he pees.”
“This neighborhood,” Kasdan said, “it’s been okay for me, but you’ll want to move when the kid gets a little older.”
“D’Wayne doesn’t mind. I don’t either, it’s homey, Dad. I’m like you, especially when cash flow’s kind of tight.”
– 6 –
Absolutely, absolutely, Dan Kasdan deserved a break, or if he didn’t deserve it, at least he needed it, absolutely. Feeling not very bright, he knew there were many questions he should be asking himself, the present one being why the break he chose was to accept an invitation for what Ferd Conway advertised as “the boys’ weekend of fun and frolic.” Of course, there were those pleasant prospects on offer, a drive down Route One to Big Sur, tucked among mountains, sea and forested canyons; they might find bears, deer, whales, sea lions; they would surely see waves cresting on stony beaches, redwood cabins hidden in narrow niches, back-packers hiking and bearing buttons and stickers devoted to causes ecological, political and astrological.
