“Sometimes all I see is differences. It’s hard not to.”
“You were a dirty dog, Tone. I was a dirty dog. You got it from me. I’m not ashamed to say it.”
I thought of what Danny had said in Alameda the night before.
“Let me tell you one difference between us. You got married young and you were unfaithful to your wife and thus your young children and the life of your family. I did all of my fucking around in my thirties, without a wife or child. It wasn’t even fucking around. I was living the life of a man in a large city inhabited by many beautiful women. The numbers were in my favor. But I’m married now. In six months my wife is having our first baby. I’m a different man than you. I’ll respect my wife and the life and sanctity of my family. I’m not so stupid as to fuck it all up with my zipper.”
At this point my rage and derision for my father were so heightened that I thought I just might run us off the road. But I couldn’t think of what this kind of death would be called. Death by misadventure? That’s how dear old drunk Malcolm Lowry went. But no, on the contrary, this would be pure adventure. I supposed they’d have to call it a homicide/suicide by Winnebago. Right here in Vegas, a Winnebago homicide/suicide. They might talk about that one for a while, at least until an escort went missing in the desert.
“I can’t talk to you when you’re like this,” my father said. “You’re totally unreasonable.”
He had a point. I was, after all, considering ending his life and mine by running our tin can off the road. It didn’t matter that while growing up he was the most unreasonable person I knew and I’d been forced to live with him for nearly two decades. Why was I still unable to get over events like him shoving my face in dog shit? Or, in his version, toward dog shit? What is the difference, in terms of the psychic wound, in shoving a small boy’s face toward rather than in dog shit? I’d say the difference is nil.
I ran atop some of the road Braille and it made the staccato sound of gunfire.
He said, “Please drive safely.”
From the freeway I noticed the signage for a famous strip club.
I pointed and said, “One night I spent five thousand dollars at that strip club.”
“That’s more money than most folks make in a month. We all know where that got you, smart guy.”
Any time I mentioned my profligate spending he turned quiet with rage. I wanted him to shut up for the next thousand miles or so and this might do the trick.
Moab was about five hundred miles away and I knew that the sooner we made it there the sooner we’d make it to Aspen and I could escape this RV and check in to my hotel, and shower, and drink some bourbon with my veteran friends and relax.
I was aware that I’d started the journey with my father only about eight hours ago, and that the journey is supposed to be the point, and that I had things I wanted to extract from my father during this trip—I wanted him to apologize for not attending my brother’s funeral, but at this point I couldn’t stand the man. The hatred I felt for my father at this moment rivaled the hatred I’d felt for Ava at the worst of our relationship, when she called me from a hotel in Miami, high on cocaine, to tell me she was about to sleep with a man she’d just met.
Maybe it sounds strange to compare a father to a lover, but it isn’t, really. All family love is also a romance, and every romance suffers. And my romance with my father had been suffering greatly since approximately the day my brother had been buried thirteen years earlier and my father had decided not to show up. Goddamn, I hated the man for that. That is a long time to hate your father. To stomach this hate any longer just might kill me, I knew. But parts of me loved the hate.
I needed to calm down. I felt the stress coursing through my neck and across my shoulders and down my spine. It felt as if my spine were in a vise, and with each mile we traveled the vise tightened.
I said, “How far do you want to make it tonight?”
“As far as you can go, Tone.”
“Why don’t I try to make it all the way to Moab? We can check out the Arches first thing in the morning.”
“Damn, Tone. That’s near eight more hours down the road. You can make that? Don’t kill us.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Maybe you need some more of them jalapeños?”
I did not need jalapeños. The adrenaline that my rage at my father produced might keep me awake for days.
He said, “I think I’ll try for some shut-eye if you don’t mind.”
“Not a bit, Dad. I’ll see you in the morning.”
He stood and steadied himself. The RV shook and rattled. My father’s oxygen cord hung and swung in unison with my rhythm on the road. The noise the oxygen tank produced always haunted me, the mechanical breath it forced down into my father’s lungs sounded like a tire slowly deflating. He retired to the back cabin.
I drove on through the desert. Occasionally I passed a big rig. I blasted through the desert like a massive comet rumbling toward the Earth. My father never allowed me to take the RV up over sixty-five without a stern admonition about safety and gas mileage. But now he was asleep in the back and the road and the desert and the RV were all mine. I felt like a teenager. I thought of the night I took out his 1970 Impala, a monster of a car with a sickeningly fast engine for its time. I picked up two friends and we drag-raced all over the suburban sprawl where we lived. I beat a Mustang and a Camaro and I lost to a Corvette. When I pulled into the driveway at five a.m. I ran over our mailbox. That one had been difficult to explain.
But here in the desert my father was in the back cabin and there was no one to explain anything to. I hadn’t driven over one hundred miles per hour since I’d busted up my BMW in Germantown. The beastly RV was no one’s idea of a race car, but one hundred miles per hour felt the same in your stomach whether you did it on a motorcycle, in a BMW, or from the command post of an RV. Any slight wrong move and it was all over. I saw visions of the RV busting into thousands of pieces all over the desert. They’d need the NTSB to figure out what the hell had happened.
I slammed the accelerator to the floor. The V-12 engine screamed and whined, and our massive tin shell hurtled across the desert. The turtle and his son are on the move.
Everything in the rig shook and rattled: I thought the TV above my head was going to fall out of its carousel. This was the earthquake I wanted. I heard my father’s metal oxygen canisters rubbing up against one another, a shrill, nervous sound. The refrigerator door slammed open and food spilled all over the floor. I knew that in the back of the cabin my father was being thrown all over the bed like a cowboy riding the fiercest bull at the county fair. I was the fiercest bull. I made it to ninety-five miles per hour. The big beast disappointed me and refused to be pushed faster. I kept it at ninety-five for twenty miles.
I blew by big rigs and minivans and a yellow Porsche. The Porsche driver must have felt emasculated because a few minutes later he tore past me like a rocket; he must have hit 130. How I wished I were driving that Porsche.
I PULLED INTO Moab at about seven in the morning and my father continued to sleep. I parked at a gas station. The cabin of the RV was a total mess: tools and boxes of food and oxygen tanks were strewn all over the floor. I’d clean it later.
I stepped out. My road exhaustion heightened all my senses. The smell of a desert town early in the morning is unlike any other—damp smoky earth and history and the mountains on fire from the sun. I’m rarely up this early. It made me feel that I was a part of society.
I stepped across the street to support the local economy by purchasing a cup of coffee and a breakfast burrito at a café. The clientele were a mix of tough construction workers wearing Carhartt, tar, and mud, and young carefree outdoorsy people in neon fleece and hemp products. I wore flip-flops, food-stained jeans, and a red-and-blue plaid flannel shirt I’d bought for three dollars at a truck stop a few hours before. A handful of swishy elderly British men sporting brand-new walking shoes and smart sweaters snickered and judged us all for our sartori
al calamities.
I entered the RV and my father was bent over the sink, taking one of his inhalers, doing the morning routine of tuning up the lungs. He looked at me as though I were an intruder. He was in white briefs and a white T-shirt, his Uniform of the Day. He’d worn this ensemble every morning of his adult life. His white hair looked Einsteinian. His blue eyes shone wild. He could not speak during the administration of this medicine. He wanted so badly to speak. He held up a finger in the air, telling me to wait. I knew this gesture from my childhood. It meant “Stand by for your punishment.”
He gestured around the room at the mess that my racing had caused, and shrugged his shoulders and frowned. I liked this game. I shrugged back and moved to the front of the cab and sat down to call Christa.
We talked about the Baby Animal. Christa had never been to Utah. I described to her the beautiful landscape and the sensation that one was not only in another state but also on another planet. I promised to take photos at the park.
My father said, “What the hell kind of mess is this, Tone? It looks like we got robbed.”
“I hit some rough road last night, Pops.”
“That wasn’t just rough road. Utah’s got good road. How the hell fast were you going? You damn near knocked me out of bed.”
“I got her up to seventy-five,” I said.
“I think you’re lying to me, Son. How goddamn fast did you go? Jesus, my oxygen canisters all came loose. You coulda blown us sky-high.”
“Eighty, Pops. That’s all she’d go.”
“Can you clean it up? I thought you said seventy-five?”
It took me about half an hour to tighten and tidy the place. I went back across the street and bought my dad a burrito. And finally we headed to Arches National Park.
I admired how much a fan of national parks my father was. He aimed to see as many of them as possible before he died. When I was a kid our road trips always included a national park or two. I’d always thought it was because my dad was too cheap to pay for other family entertainment—sporting events, a deep-sea fishing trip, a house on the beach for a week. And money might have been a part of his motivation. But later I realized what a fine education in the natural riches of the country we’d received on trips to the parks. It was also for my father a point of patriotism: Look at what belongs to our country. At a visceral level, as a veteran of a foreign war, he felt a bit of personal ownership of these parks: I fought for this, I saw men die for this.
I dropped my dad in front of the visitor center and parked the RV out by the big rigs. Moab was at four thousand feet and I noticed the elevation already affecting him. Once we got to Aspen we’d be near eight thousand.
The desert sun beat down hard on my face as I walked through the parking lot. My dad had not made it far, only about fifteen feet toward the door. He leaned against a bronze sculpture of a bighorn sheep.
“Goddamn, Tone,” he said, shaking his head. “Lord, what I’d do for a new set of lungs.”
Seeing my father incapacitated out in the world was a totally different experience from seeing him stuck in his RV. In his RV he ran the show—all his meds, his oxygen, his timers, his potions, his magic, were available, and the disease seemed manageable. But under the intense winter desert sun, in front of the visitor center, he looked weak and small. I wanted my father the mountain cat to take down that bighorn sheep, but all he could do was lean against the bronze sculpture and pray to the Lord for a different set of lungs.
My rage at my father melted.
Strangers stared at my father and his oxygen contraption. I hated the strangers for staring. And I’ll admit I was ashamed of his disease, the stupidest disease a man could possibly come down with, COPD. It could have been the flight line chemicals he spent decades around, but most likely he did it to himself by smoking for forty-five years. What a stupid goddamn disease and what a stupid man. My father was sixty-nine years old, and other than his failing lungs, the man was an ox. With healthy lungs he would have lived to be a hundred.
We drove north through the park, up Park Avenue, and frightened other road warriors with our bulk. At every viewing point we pulled the beast over and I got out of the rig and hiked as near as I could to a rock formation and took pictures. I snapped the Organ and the Three Gossips and the Tower of Babel. Snapped the Petrified Dunes and Ham Rock and Balanced Rock and the Garden of Eden.
At the Windows Section I had to take a proper hike to make it to the sights. It was hot enough that I took a bottle of water with me.
“Be safe, Tone,” my father said.
I walked out into the desert because my father could not. I looked at the groups of friends and families on their way back to their vehicles, laughing and carrying on as friends and families do. I felt robbed. In my twenties, before my brother died and while my father and I still enjoyed a loving relationship, I had dreamed someday of family vacations like this—a healthy group of Swoffords heading to a splendid sight in Yosemite or Yellowstone, my father hiking with my family and me.
But at the Arches I walked alone. Christa sat at home in Brooklyn writing her own book about her own dysfunctional family, and my father sat in his RV, a half mile away from me, taking his meds and asking the Lord for a new set of lungs.
The Windows are an impressive rock formation. I took some snaps. I walked as far from the crowd as I could and looked out on the desert. In the end, the Windows and the Tower of Babel and all the rest of them are just rocks. Someday gravity and erosion will do their work and these massive formations, too, will be dust. But the desert will remain a large expanse of nothingness and everything.
I took my time walking back to the RV. My father’s illness had transformed him from a man of constant action and movement into a man who might die from too much action and movement.
“How’s it look?” he asked.
“Looks like a rock with massive holes. Good stuff.”
To our west was another formation, and I decided that we must have at least a few photos with my father and me present. I stood my father up against an old ranch fence and took his picture with a beautiful expanse of desert and towering massive red rocks in the background. I ordered him to smile, and he did offer a big smile. His oxygen tube was wrapped around his face, and his Einstein hair blew wildly in the wind and he looked happy. My old sick father leaning against the wooden ranch fence with towering massive red rocks in the background looked handsome and even beautiful. I switched spots with him and he snapped my picture. I suppose I could have used the timer and taken a shot with us both in it but it didn’t cross my mind. I’m sure that someday I’ll regret that.
We made our way out of the park to grab lunch in Moab. By the time we hit the road it was almost six. I knew a storm would hit Aspen overnight and I wanted to arrive by midnight so I could get the keys to my room. My friend Dan, who had my keys, would be crashed out if I arrived any later. I hadn’t showered since we left Fairfield. I wanted a shower and a fire in a fireplace and a few shots of bourbon. And none of those things were available in the RV.
AN HOUR OR so out of Moab my father said, “We need to empty the septic. If we get on up that mountain and all that shit freezes it’ll be a goddamn nightmare. You want your old man to shit in an icebox?”
“Shit freezes?” I asked. “When was the last time you emptied that thing?” I’d been careful to take toilet breaks on land.
“Hell, Tone. I don’t know the last time I emptied it. Three or four months ago? Not since your mom and I went to Mexico. We gotta empty it. It’ll ramp up our gas mileage heading up the mountain.”
Outside Grand Junction my dad saw a sign denoting a septic dump at the next rest stop.
We pulled into the stop. Some weekend ATVers were dumping from their small camper trailer. It was a man and his young son. The kid must have been ten or twelve and the guy was my age. I watched as the man instructed the son on how to pull the septic tube from the rear bumper of the trailer and then do the dump.
They pulled awa
y and I pulled our rig into the spot.
My father said, “I think I need to get out for this, Tone.”
“Are you serious? Dad, I’m mildly educated. I can figure out how to dump the shit out of your RV. It can’t be rocket science.”
“I have my system. If you don’t follow my system this time then next time the system will be totally fucked.”
“The system is called gravity. Your septic system is above the dump. I attach the tube and open the lever and God or whatever you want to call it does the rest. If a twelve-year-old kid can do it, so can I.”
“That was a very rudimentary system they were running on that rig. You see that thing? That was from the eighties at the earliest.”
“Gravity barely changed from the eighties to today.”
“I’ve got my system, Tone. I’d appreciate it if you follow it.”
This displeased me greatly. It would take my father twenty minutes just to walk around to the other side of the RV, and then if I was dumping the shit at his slow and meticulous pace, this could take us hours. The storm was coming and the last thing I wanted to do was spend another night in this RV, or even at a Motel 6 in Glenwood Springs at the bottom of the mountain.
It turned out that my father’s septic system was slightly more complex than what the ATVers before us had sported. There was a red tube for evacuating the system, a black tube for washing the system out, and a white tube for refilling the entire system with new water. My father directed me throughout. I had flashbacks to my boyhood and receiving instruction from my father on how to change the oil on a car or how to roof a house or how to run a hot wire from a breaker box. I suppose these are skills that a boy should learn from his father, but ultimately my father’s lesson plans included a major dose of his anger and my humiliation when I didn’t complete a task exactly as he’d detailed.
In order to stay sane while following my father’s directions for flushing the septic system, I fantasized Jack Rebney of Winnebago Man fame. Rebney became known for the profanity-laden outtakes from a 1980s Winnebago instructional video he’d recorded. I turned my father’s directions into Rebneyesque insanity:
Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails Page 21
