What you’ve got here, you fucking fuck, is your basic septic fucking system that moves your sick shit from your asshole down into the toilet on this piece-of-shit fucking Winnebago. See those goddamn flies? The flies are here because you are a lazy fucking prick and you waited four months to empty your fucking feces from the goddamn Winnebago. The issue here is not the fucking Winnebago but you, the asshole who drives the Winnebago and thinks he can shit in it endlessly, as though this is a goddamn toilet at Yankee fucking Stadium. Your fucking Winnebago, I see you got the thirty-four-footer because you didn’t have the fucking balls to buy a forty-footer, so your fucking thirty-four-footer won’t carry as much of your putrid shit so now you must ask me, Jack Rebney, the Winnebago Man, how to empty your shit store, right? Well, what the fuck do you want from me? Do you want me to get down on my fucking hands and knees here in Grand fucking Junction, Colorado, and empty your shit for you? I guess you do, you lazy fucking prick. So here we go: the 2008 Winnebago has a holding tank that holds what we call the fucking gray water, which comes from your kitchen, where you wash your dishes, and from your sinks and shower, when by some fucking chance you wash your rotten fucking ass. There is also the black water, which, no shit, is the water in which your shit and piss are held. It is important to never cross-contaminate the hoses. If you do this you are a stupid fuck and you deserve dysentery or whatever fucked-up third-world disease you get because you are fucking stupid. So now you have emptied the gray and the black water and you, fucking numbnuts, have managed to spill some shit and piss on the sleeve of your flannel, and how does that feel to have your parents’ shit and piss spilled on your flannel fucking shirt? That’s payback for all the times you shot shit and piss out of your goddamn diaper and all over your loving parents when your numbnuts were the size of fucking raisins. Now you attach the fucking white hose to the tank and fill it up with non-potable water. Non-potable means you cannot fucking drink it, so don’t be a dumbass and drink from the fucking sink in your fucking thirty-four-foot Winnebago. Don’t even use that water to brush your fucking crooked and rotten teeth. So now that this bullshit took you almost an hour, you better hurry the fuck up or that storm is going to catch your stupid ass and you’ll be sitting at the bottom of the mountain sleeping in this fucking piece-of-shit recreational vehicle while all your friends relax in their very nice ski condominiums. So don’t be an asshole. Get the fuck out of my face.
WE PULLED INTO the village at Snowmass, above Aspen, around two in the morning. My friend Dan was incommunicado, so that meant I’d be spending one more night in the RV with my father.
We found a good parking spot in the rodeo grounds parking lot. I made a few bags of microwave popcorn and my father and I sat at the kitchenette table and drank beer.
Snow began to fall in big clumps. At eight thousand feet my father had serious trouble breathing. He could speak only a few dozen or so words before needing to catch his breath.
He asked me, “I gotta know, Tone. How long is it gonna be before you get this venom out? This is our third trip. That’s a lot of goddamn gas. And you still seem pissed off at me. I don’t know what you want.”
“I want to know what happened in Vietnam. I want to know why you cheated on my mother. I want to know why you didn’t go to Jeff’s funeral.”
“My answers are never good enough for you, Tone.”
“How many times did you cheat on my mother?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ten?”
“I have no idea.”
“Twenty?”
“I have no idea.”
“Thirty?”
My father shook his head. He pounded his arm, karate-chop style, against the table. “You sound like a fucking lawyer. ‘Would it be between five and ten, or ten and fifteen?’ Does Vietnam count?”
“Vietnam doesn’t count,” I said.
“Vietnam don’t count.” He chopped at the table. “Does Taiwan count?”
“No.”
“Taiwan don’t count. Does Texas count?”
“Texas counts,” I said.
He frowned. “Texas counts. Does Spain count?”
“Spain counts.”
“Spain counts. Does Germany count?”
“Germany counts.”
“Does Copenhagen count?”
“No.”
“Copenhagen doesn’t count.” This pleased my father.
He twirled his oxygen line and thought about Copenhagen. With the backs of his fingers he scratched the beard on his neck in an upward sweeping motion exactly the way I do. He must have appreciated the freebie I’d given him. His marine brother was dying in a hospital in Copenhagen when he visited. That means while his brother died in a nearby hospital and his wife and two infant children were alone in Seville my father was in his hotel room banging some girl he met in a Copenhagen bar.
“Does Japan count?” he asked, somewhat hopefully, I could tell.
“Yes.”
“Japan counts.” He exhaled heavily, defeated. I could see him in some dim Shinjuku sex parlor. Who knows, he might have taken me with him and had the mama-san watch over me while he took care of business in the back. I wouldn’t put it past him.
He asked, “Does Guam count?”
“No.”
“Does Okinawa count?”
“No.”
“I don’t understand your logic, Tone. No on Copenhagen but yes on Tokyo?”
“Combat deployments don’t count and cities where your brother is dying don’t count. I assume you went through Guam and Okinawa on your way to Vietnam.”
“That’s correct. Does Hawaii count?”
This was a tough one. My father took leave from Vietnam in Hawaii and my mother met him there. I was conceived on this trip.
“Yes, Hawaii counts.”
“OK. I don’t remember anything.”
“That’s good work, Dad. I think it qualifies you as a pussy hound.”
He paused. He let my compliment soak in. He glanced at me and looked away. Now he wasn’t certain whether it was a compliment or not. He took the barrel-chest pose, hands on his knees, attempting to open up his chest as wide as possible. Physiologically this did nothing, but it must have helped psychologically: If I open my chest as wide as possible to the world, the world will offer more oxygen.
He said, “When I was stationed there in Moses Lake, Washington, we’d head to Spokane on weekends.” He chopped at the table a few times. “That university there, Gonzales?”
“Gonzaga.”
“Gonzaga. It was a good pussy town, Spokane was. We’d go down to the lakes. That’s where the girls hung out. This was before I married your mother. We met a lot of girls. Back on base one Monday morning, I worked for two German civilians on a roofing crew. I pulled into the warehouse where we worked. One of the old Germans pointed at me and then pointed at my car and he said, ‘You are Scheidenjäger.’ And I said, ‘What?’ And he pointed at my car. ‘There are panties hanging from your bumper. Scheidenjäger. You are pussy hunter.’ From then on I was known as the Pussy Hunter.”
That was my father’s explanation for decades of infidelity: I am pussy hunter.
I won’t lie. A part of me liked this characterization. Virility is intoxicating, and virility in one’s father means the gene has been passed down. My father was a very handsome young man, and I like to think of him scoring women all over the world, why not? But he was also a married man and my mother’s husband, and a cheating bastard.
I looked out the window. Over a foot of snow had fallen and I couldn’t see five feet beyond the RV. On the radio they said we might get eight feet overnight.
“I don’t know what to say, Dad. You lived an amorous life that some would envy and others would despise. It’s hard to listen to one’s pussy-hunter father detail his worldwide pussy-hunting exploits. I don’t know what to do with it.”
“I always loved your mother. This was never about you kids or your mother. The world was different back then. Men were
different. What qualified as acceptable behavior was different.”
“Maybe I’ve wanted to know too much.”
“Then it’s my turn, there are some things I want to know, too. Like why all you want to do is talk about our differences. Makes me think you are afraid of our likenesses. Look in the mirror. Look at your nose and your chin. Your eyes. Look at your hairline. You are Swofford. You got Swofford blood, boy. You can’t change that. You ran all around the world and fucked all the girls you wanted, just like your old man.”
“I wasn’t married.”
“OK. Next question. Why did you ignore your Granny when she wanted to give you a medal from the Daughters of the Confederacy?”
“This again? Give it up.”
“You got your questions, I got mine. Now answer me. I’m genuinely interested to know.”
“I didn’t want a medal from a neo-racist organization. Fuck the Daughters of the Confederacy. I did not grow up in the South. I don’t care about the DOC. It’s a bunch of old racist white ladies holding on to bullshit ideas about why the South got their asses kicked in the war.”
“Now you not only disrespect your Southern heritage but you disrespect your blood.”
“I have no emotional link to the old dead Swofford Confederates whose gravestones Granny shines.”
“You’re pushing me, Son. You got Swofford blood. My great-great-grandfather Solomon Willis Swofford fought for the Confederacy. You got linkage whether you like it or not.”
I thought, You want me to push you, old man?
I said, “You care more about those Swofford Confederate gravestones than you do about Jeff’s. You didn’t attend your own son’s funeral. You disgraced yourself and your entire family.”
My father and I have been having this fight off and on since shortly after Jeff died. I’m like a pack of hyenas at a felled buffalo. And when I’m done with that I want another. And now give me another.
I say, “What happens if I die tomorrow? Will you show up? Or will you stay home and get drunk alone and cry in the corner rather than show your face? Is that how you’ll show your love?”
When my father is extremely angry, at his angriest, he gets very quiet, deathly quiet, and his face looks ghost-white, and the anger sparks off his face like micro-explosions. I know that if he were capable he would try to beat me physically right now. I know that he would like to beat me down into the ground with the same force and remorselessness with which I would like to ruin him.
He cleared his throat. “You will never understand what it was like for me to lose my firstborn son. There are no words. You will never understand. I couldn’t handle it. And I won’t apologize for how I behaved. It was all I could do. Goddamn, Son, how many times I have to tell you? Wait until Christa has your baby. Then ask me that question again.”
“All you could do after your thirty-five-year-old son died was drive around to the same shitty GI bars in Fairfield where you’d been drinking for thirty years? Did those people offer you solace? Where are they now that you can barely breathe or walk? You think they care about you? What did they offer you then? A couple of free rounds because your son died? Your family was there in Georgia, in your hometown, grieving for your son. I was there. Kim and Tami were there. We grieved for our brother. All of your brothers and sisters were there grieving for their nephew. Mom was there. Mom. The woman who gave birth to him. You want to pull some hierarchy of grieving bullshit? OK. The woman who gave birth to Jeff sat in the room with him the night he died. She read his Bible to him and she listened to him expel his last breath. And she attended his funeral. You lose.”
I knocked the bowl of popcorn and the two empty beer cans off the table.
“You cheated on your wife, you mentally and occasionally physically abused your children. One of your sons died and you didn’t go to his funeral. You can’t guarantee that you’d go to my funeral. I know your mother died when you were a month old, and I know that fucking sucked, Dad, I can’t think of a sadder way to grow up than carrying that horrible knowledge with you. And I know your half brother died. And I know you watched people die heinous deaths in Vietnam. And I know that Jeff died. That is one shitstorm after another, but it gave you no excuse to treat your children the way you did.”
My father was scared. I knew it. And I liked it. He looked anxious and he could barely breathe, the elevation had nearly knocked him out.
He said, “I need a Xanax, Tone. Can you hand me my meds?”
I handed him his meds backpack overflowing with medications. He shook while he looked through the bag for the right bottle. He shook one out and took it down with a gulp of water.
“The elevation. I didn’t think about the elevation. I can barely breathe. Goddamn, Tone. I need those new lungs.”
“I need an apology.”
“I won’t apologize no more, Tone. I’m done. I apologized a couple years ago about my behavior. I’m done. I don’t know what else to tell you. I want to help you get the venom out. It’ll kill you, Son.”
“You never really apologized. You said that you understand that the way you treated us kids then would today be considered child abuse. That is not an apology. That is a finely crafted disavowal of responsibility.”
I stood over my father now. He could barely breathe.
He said, “Get the venom out. Do you want to beat me? Do you want to kick my ass the way I once kicked your ass? Will that help? You can do it, if that’ll help.”
I ignored my father and walked to the back of the cabin. Yes, I did want to beat him; I wanted to grab him by his neck and shove his face in a pile of dog shit and tell him he was stupid and tell him he would never amount to shit, and I wanted to beat his face in, and bloody it, and I wanted to make him weep and cower the way he had once made me weep and cower. I felt sick to my stomach. I lay back on the bed and closed my eyes. I thought of Christa and the Baby Animal. I thought about the life we would live and the loving home we would build for the Baby Animal, without rancor, without violence, without hatred. But still I wanted to go to the front of the rig and beat my father.
And then the rig started to move. I looked out the window, and yes, we were on the move. My father had started to drive. The snow was up at about five feet now, it was deep, and it was four in the morning. I walked to the front of the cab.
I said to my father, “Where are you going?”
“I can’t handle you anymore. I’m dropping you off. There is a bus stop down the road. You’re such a big man. You can take your suitcase and get out of my rig. I can’t be treated like this anymore. I can’t help you. You can take your venom with you.”
My father drove wildly through the massive and empty parking lot. He didn’t know where he was going; he could barely see and he certainly couldn’t see his way out.
“Goddamn it, Tone, how do I get out of here? Where is the exit?”
I stood above him, he in the captain’s chair, speeding in circles around the huge snowy parking lot. The lot was the width of two football fields and he drove it like a madman, looking for an exit, but the lot hadn’t been plowed and there was no way out. Cabinets banged open and food and tools flew about the back of the cabin in a reprisal of my show from the night before.
“Tell me how to get out. I want you out of my rig.”
“You’re going to kick me out of your RV at four in the morning in the middle of a blizzard? You do this and you might never see me again and you’ll never see my daughter.”
“You’re a big man, Tone. You don’t need your pop. You don’t even like me.”
He gunned it on a straightaway. Our tracks in the parking lot made it look as if we had our own little ice car race going on. When my father said that I didn’t like him it was one of the worst things anyone had ever said to me. Because I did like him. Sometimes I didn’t love him, and sometimes I hated him, but he was an immensely likable fellow, with a charming Southern accent and whiskey barrels full of engrossing and engaging stories, some of them far too bawdy for hi
m to have told his son, but still, he had the stories and he had the charm and everyone loved my father. And I loved him and I even liked him. I didn’t want to be him. I didn’t want to be the kind of father that he had been. I hated him for not being a good role model. I hated him for not giving me a happy family history to tell. If I want to tell a story of longevity, and commitment, and happiness, I will have to make it my own. As he sped around the parking lot trying to find a way to evict me during the snowstorm, I loved my father more than I ever had before. I loved him for standing up to me and telling me to get rid of my venom. I loved him for showing me what kind of father not to be.
“Stop,” I said. “Just stop the RV. You can’t get out of the parking lot. If you want me out of here I’ll walk up the hill. It’s a mile to the lodge. I know where I am.”
My father stopped the vehicle and slumped over the wheel.
“Goddamn, Son,” he said. “I was not a perfect father. I am not a perfect man. But cut me some slack. I love you. I love your company. I love your fellowship. You are my son and I love you.”
I dropped to my knees at my father’s side and I put my hand on his back. I rubbed his back. I looked out the massive RV windshield and saw nothing but a thick white snowfall, a blanket of white. A purity and newness I’d never seen before.
“I’m not a perfect son. I love you, Dad. And I like your company, too. Let’s get some sleep. Let’s get over this.”
WE SLEPT TOGETHER in the back of his RV in the queen-size bed. I hadn’t slept in the same bed with my father since I was three or four years old. It took me a while to fall asleep. I was exhausted from fighting with my father and driving twelve hundred miles in a day and a half.
My father slept next to me in a deep quiet. The only sound in the world was his oxygen machine feeding him what he needed in order to live. The workings of the machine sounded like the distant whine of an airplane engine.
I thought of one of the few Vietnam stories my father ever told me. His unit was assigned to go deep in the bush and build landing strips for C-130 cargo planes. The planes were to land empty and leave full of evacuated villagers and the few belongings they could carry in their bare hands. It was a classic and totally absurd Vietnam tactic: if you bomb the entire infiltrated village to high heavens then there will no longer be a village for the Viet Cong to control. On one of these missions the timing was super tight. They had twenty minutes to evacuate the village and take off before the bombers arrived overhead to drop their loads.
Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails Page 22
