When I was a kid, my grandmother always accused the men in our lives of making what Mary Poppins calls, “pie crust promises.” Easily made, easily broken. My father is the king of pie crust promises, and though I might have tried to emulate him in the past, today, I do not make such promises.
“Your car’s here,” the cranky woman behind the desk interrupts any sort of choice my mom thinks I might have. I look outside and there sits a Town & Country minivan.
“That’s my car?” I ask the woman.
My mom and I crack up. She jokes, “Well, I guess if your dad wants to escape, you’ve got the van.”
“Shit, I can take some of his friends too.”
It almost makes it all worth it. My mom and I get inside the minivan, and I turn around to my imaginary kids in the back, “Billy. Sarah. Quit it!”
My mom laughs, and then she stops. She squeezes my hand as I try to figure out the heater. “I love you, K.” She watches me, and I try not to add any more gravity to the moment as I put the car in gear. I look at her and smile, “I love you too, Mom.”
The night before, I was in Los Angeles with plans to go out with Jimmy Voltage. We had already seen each other a couple of times because whatever happened in Oxnard followed us safely home to L.A. I love traveling with a new crush in mind. It somehow makes all journeys sweeter. I don’t even notice the security lines, the weight of my bag, the delay in takeoff as I daydream about what it might look like to do this trip to New York with Jimmy one day.
Unfortunately, I am doing this trip with a vicious cold, which made me cancel my date with Jimmy the night before. His band was having a show, and I was going to play groupie for the first time ever.
Before he went to the show, Jimmy came over anyway. His arms. His eyes. The small scar above his brow. His hands. If there were few reasons to fall for this man, his hands could be enough. Strong, thick, tan, even his knuckles. He spread them across my body. I could feel the meat of his palm against my ribs. We talked and laughed and kissed. The time clicked by, but Jimmy was busy tracing the round of my belly. He looked up at me and smiled, “I guess this is how people miss shows.”
And it is. It’s how they miss so much. I walked him outside, I kissed him goodbye, and he left for his show. And I went inside to ready myself to see the man that quite literally started it all. The next day, I fly to New York and rent my minivan. I drop my mom at her apartment in Manhattan, and I drive three and half hours alone to the federal penitentiary in Allenwood, Pennsylvania. It’s a recently renovated facility in the middle of an old farming town. It looks like a fancy high school in a suburban neighborhood, but when I get to my father’s building, the innocuous sign which reads “Maximum Security” reminds me of where I am. I am processed by the guard, sent through two metal detectors, and then led through many gates, holding rooms, and hallways. The trip gets more surreal with every step.
Being here reminds me that as much as I tried to pretend I was just like my father, there is nothing about my life that speaks to this. I do not understand this world with its high small windows and endless walls. I do not belong walking behind this guard with his 9 mm and long baton hanging from his belt. And though I might have spent my whole life wishing and praying that my daddy would come home, I realize that this might have been more his style than the safe, suburban existence my mother worked so hard to give me.
The last time I saw my father was in Tallahassee in 2005. Before that, I had not seen him since I was ten years old. In 2003, my father was released from a Nevada prison after serving twenty-one years of his sixty-six year sentence. He was supposed to go into a halfway house in Florida. He never showed up. A year and a half later, they arrested him on escape charges. I had flown into Tallahassee on a Friday for his sentencing.
“DC Docket No. 03-0031. United States of America versus Daniel McGuiness.”
My father turned around to look at me. He wore an orange jumpsuit. His wrists and ankles were shackled. A pair of sunglasses hung from his shirt collar because at fifty-nine years old, on the day he is being sentenced in front of his twenty-seven-year-old daughter, my dad still had to look cool.
I testified on his behalf because I was the only non-criminal character witness he had left. “I have not seen my father in seventeen years. I want him to be a part of my life. I want a chance to have a normal relationship. Through letters and phone calls, he has helped to make me who I am today, and if a man’s worth is to be judged by anything, I believe it should be by the quality of his offspring.”
I am not kidding. I said that. In front of the judge. It’s a matter of public record. I am such an ass. And not only because I used the phrase, “the quality of his offspring,” but because the quality of my father’s offspring was not too stellar at the time. I tried to get in to visit my father that afternoon, but the sentencing had run too late, and the prison was closing. I was supposed to leave that night, but I booked a room at a local Comfort Inn and headed to the bar.
I started with two shots of Jaeger, and by the time I made it to my third beer, and fourth shot, I wanted some weed. I saw four gang-banging black dudes playing pool, and I figured they had to have a connection. As they left, I followed them to their car because this was how the tables were turned in my world. I lurched up to them in a Jaegered stupor, and they all froze, as though they were afraid of me.
“Hey guys, I am here visiting my dad in the federal pen,” I slurred. “And I need to score some weed for the night.”
They all looked at me like I had lost my mind. As I often did when I was drinking, I thought of my father’s street cred as my own. But as I stood there in pink corduroys, ballet slippers, and a button-down shirt, I was a far cry from gangster. No one said anything at first, some of them began to get into their car, and then one guy smiled and said he could help me.
Later that night, after I added two bottles of wine and a couple more beers to the mix, I got in my rental car and drove drunk into the hood. One of the other guys came out to my car to sell me the weed. I tried to invite myself inside because I heard they were having a party, and I like parties, but the dude was already sketched out enough by this crazy honky and just told me to get home safe.
That was the last time I saw my dad. And now, I walk into the great, big visitors’ room, sober but feeling more lost than I did years before.
“You look great!” my dad says as he sits down across from me. I am sitting at a table in the middle of the room. I can feel the winter outside.
“Thanks, Dad. So do you.”
“No, I don’t. I’ve gained twenty pounds in this place. They don’t let us go outside enough, and the food is disgusting.”
I smile because I don’t know how to respond. It’s funny how we can imagine a scenario in perfect detail. The emotions, the setting, what everyone is going to say. We can spend years picturing it, and getting ready, and thinking everything is going to go exactly as planned. And then you get there, and it all goes out the window because really you have no fucking clue what to say or do or even how you’re supposed to feel. As I sit across the table from this white-haired old man with a nose that looks like it’s been broken way too many times, wearing a pair of prison issued huaraches, I know that as much as I am his daughter, that in so many ways, I am not. I wish it were easier for me to reach out to him. To feel the bond that I always thought was so natural. He grabs my hand. He can’t hold it for long, or the guards will say something, but I look down at it, and it is unrecognizable to me. As this strange old man sits there, looking at me expectantly, all I can do is cry.
“Oh Kris, don’t do that,” he says, looking away, and I wonder whether I look like a stranger to him too. I don’t remember if I felt this way in Tallahassee. I feel like we had more of a bond there, some sort of mutual understanding about who we both were, but now I think we are just two very different people with very different lives. We don’t know how to take care of one another like this: in this maximum security prison, with its cold, white linoleum floor
s and its other prison families and its hardened inmates who have all somehow found themselves lost from the people they once loved so much.
I get up to go into the bathroom to try to compose myself. I stand there in the empty visitors’ restroom, holding rough tissue paper to my nose. I look like a child who just found out that Santa Claus isn’t real. I look blown apart by this man who I thought would be able to put me back together. I don’t know what this trip is for anymore because it’s not a reunion, and as much as I wish I could offer my dad a solution, some vision of the better life that is out there for him, I do not make pie crust promises.
“I’m an old dog, K,” my dad tells me. He is being released within the month, with no immediate plans to go straight. “And you know old dogs and new tricks.”
“I know that,” I say. I look away as I tell him that I don’t know that I can still be his daughter if that is the lifestyle he is choosing. I wish that things had been different, but I also know they never could have been. He would have always been looking for the last big load, and had my daddy actually come home all the years I wished for him to, he would have turned our lives upside down.
“I love you so much, Kris. You have no idea,” he says as he squeezes my hand. They are words I have heard before, and I understand. He never grew up, and never will. I just wish I could stop dating guys like him. I wish I could stop falling for the hopeless romantic who looks at me all starry-eyed and then disappears. As he tells me later, “I’m not coming back here, kid. If they get me again, I’ll go out in a blaze of glory.”
Underneath the bravado, lies an element of truth. I don’t know if we’ll ever see each other again. This might be it. And sadly, it might also be better that way. Because I just can’t picture what our relationship would look like. I cannot see it in any kind of detail; I cannot place the setting, and I have no idea what we would say. I wish so badly that I felt differently. I wish this trip had been filled with laughter and inside jokes and hope for what the future might hold. But as my pockets bulge with used tissues, it has been filled with nothing but sadness for what we might have once had and what might never be there again—the innocent love between a little girl and her daddy.
He walks me to the edge of the visiting room, right to the line where it says, “No inmates past this point.” The guard walks to the gate to lead me out. Dad and I have already hugged and kissed. I step over the line. And he’s standing there in his prison garb, and he’s too far away to touch now. And so I salute. And he salutes back. The guard leads me out down the long, sterile hallway, back through the metal gates, and I walk out into the cold Pennsylvania air. The tears freeze on my face as I return to this world of sunsets and snowfall and the great wide Pacific, and my father is left there behind a chain-link fence, with high small windows and guards who won’t let us touch.
I get in my minivan, and later that night I cross the George Washington Bridge. I call Jimmy. I do not talk about my dad. I tell him about Manhattan, twinkling in the distance; I tell him about the beauty of the Poconos; I tell him all that I can without telling him the truth. That my heart is broken, that I can’t figure out where my father fits in my story anymore, that I am afraid I will never see him again, and that I am so very tired of loving men I cannot trust.
8
Date Eight: The Way We Are
Everyone thinks their grandmother is special—filled with wise sayings and funny quips and the occasional horrific sexual comment. But if there were a market for quirky grandparents, my grandmother would pretty much take the cake. If she ate cake.
Nana, as she is known worldwide, has been a source of humor, anxiety, and love from as far back as I can remember. She’s like any other one-named wonder: Madonna, Cher, Elton—a diva at her best, something else at her worst. When I was a baby, she was probably one of the hottest grandmothers around, with her Farrah Fawcett do, string bikini tops, and multiple long, gold necklaces. But then when my dad left, and she moved in, Nana just became the hippest grandma on the block.
Between her permed blonde hair and her CP Shades knits, her turquoise jewelry, and her Rolex watch, I idolized her as much as I hated her. Because for every time she hunted through the sales rack at Neiman Marcus so she could buy me a designer dress, she would also rip me down for not being cool enough, hip enough, in the know. I don’t know what exactly I was supposed to know at eight, but apparently talking to myself and playing video games were not it. A firm believer in the ethos, “It doesn’t matter if you are rich, so long as you dress it,” Nana obsesses on how things look on the outside. She is like a narcissistic fashion designer, watching her looks walk down the red carpet, screaming at the models, the set designer, anyone who will listen, “Everything must be perfect!”
When I was little, there were three things Nana and I always agreed on: music (preferably Whitney Houston and Guns N’ Roses), books (Danielle Steele and J.D. Salinger), and movies (anything starring Robert Redford or Gene Wilder). We watched The Way We Were as many times as we watched Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. And I learned everything I needed to know about romance from Hubbell and Katie. And from Nana. Because it is Nana whose four marriages taught me that strong women have trouble settling down. It is Nana, whose greatest love was a married man fifteen years her junior, who showed me that more often than not, it is the ones we cannot have whom we love the most. At seventy-five, and as single as one can be, she now quips that men are only good for two things: breeding and heavy lifting.
And I learned everything I needed to know about family from Charlie and his Grandpa Joe. Because that, to me, was Nana. Although impossibly critical, she was my older pal, my wingman, taking me to school, dancing with me in the living room, and joining in my birthday parties as though she was one of the kids herself. Even today when she visits, we sleep in the same double bed, just like Grandpa Joe and the rest of the family. Nana taught me that even when the rest of the world deserts you, for better or worse, your family will always be there.
I return to L.A. from visiting my father, and Jimmy Voltage and I make plans for our first real date. He picks me up, and we go to a lovely restaurant up the street. We sit outside. We smoke. We talk. A little awkwardly. I still have a cold, and I blame it on that. I get up to use the restroom and discover this backroom with high ceilings and dim light and wide, cold walls.
I come back to the table and take my seat across from Jimmy. I tell him, “That backroom makes me want to dance.”
“Really? Why?” he asks.
“I don’t know. There was just something about it. It wanted to be danced in.”
He stands up. “Show me.”
I have been waiting years for someone to say that. Show me. I lead him to the room. And we slow dance. And he kisses me. I feel just like Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were, with the cool guy sweeping me off my feet, acting as though he has never seen anything like me in his life. I laser the memory into my brain. Take the photo and develop it immediately. I know it will hurt someday so I burn it in deeper, just to be sure.
We go back to Jimmy’s house to kiss more, but take a break to go outside to smoke. I know that Jimmy Voltage and I have the physical part down so I am not quite sure why we are having such trouble with talking. But then again, so did Hubbell and Katie. And like Hubbell, Jimmy is that all-American guy with the too-cool style and the sense that even in his darkest moments he has always been a golden boy. And I am the nervous, talkative nut who doesn’t generally catch myself a Hubbell.
Maybe it’s just that Jimmy and I come from different worlds. He likes rock music and westerns and motorcycles and has tattoos. He has lived his whole life in California, and fixes things, and reads biographies on Lee Marvin. I don’t know rock music or westerns or motorcycles and only have one tattoo that no one can see. I have been many places, and don’t fix things, and just learned who Lee Marvin is. But that didn’t stop Hubbell and Katie, at least not at first. They were also from different worlds, and somehow, slow dancing was enough. Jimmy as
ks me if I’ve ever read Newsweek, and suddenly I am telling him how I was once obsessed with the conservative editorialist George Will. He just looks at me. I would like to say with rapt attention, but it’s more like sleepy boredom. Sadly, this doesn’t stop me. I continue, “I was really into Ayn Rand at the time. I even wrote George Will a letter about his take on Hillary Clinton’s insurance reform.”
Jimmy doesn’t even blink. I don’t know if I am showing off, or if I am just trying to make conversation, but it appears that he was trying to have another conversation.
He clears his throat and says, “Yeah, I was reading in there about corporate titans. I guess you forget what it’s like to stand at the head of a business. You know, to really have that responsibility.”
There is a strange pause, and I am beginning to feel like two actors who have incredible on-screen chemistry, but the minute the director yells “cut,” have nothing to say to each other.
I shrug, “Yeah, it’s not all about power and greed.”
“I guess not.” He sounds disappointed, but I have faith that it’s simply a matter of settling into this thing, of finding the spaces where we do meet, like on the dance floor and in his bed. I put out my cigarette. I don’t really know what else to say. I stand up, and Jimmy grabs me from behind, and that type of conversation is far more comfortable.
51/50: The Magical Adventures of a Single Life Page 5
