Dear Father, Dear Son

by Larry Elder

  She tried shutting Champ in the garage, but he howled like he was being tortured. She tried chaining him to a tree, but he cried even louder. She tried indoors. Champ immediately planned his prison break.

  “He-e-e-re, Champ!” I called one day when I came home from school. “He-e-e-re, Champ!”

  Nothing.

  “He-e-e-ere, Champ!”

  “I had no choice,” Mom said later.

  I cried for three or four days.

  “How could you?” we screamed.

  We pleaded for Mom to go and get him back. She refused.

  “Now, of course,” I told Dad, “I know this decision wasn’t made lightly, and would not have been made without you both agreeing.”

  “That’s right,” Dad said.

  “But we were devastated.”

  “We didn’t know what else to do. We didn’t have the money.”

  The good news is that Champ led to Cream Puff. One Halloween night, a brown tabby kitten followed us from house to house as we trick-or-treated.

  “Mom,” I said when I got home, “this kitten followed us all the way home. Can I keep him?”

  “Okay,” she said. “What’s his name?”

  “Cream Puff,” I said.

  I couldn’t believe it. She always said “no” when we brought home a stray animal and asked if we could keep it. Years later, she admitted that she felt horrible about Champ, so she promised herself that the next time we brought an animal home, no matter what—mouse, pigeon, or dinosaur—she was going to let us keep it.

  Cream Puff was a beloved family member for almost fifteen years.

  “And Cream Puff wasn’t afraid of Mom. He’d bite her on the ankle if she was in the kitchen and didn’t feed him.”

  Dad chuckled. “Maybe I should try that—bitin’ her on the ankle.”

  We both laughed.

  “Why have you never gone to church?” I’d wanted to ask him that all my life.

  I never saw Dad set foot in a church. He never attended any Sunday services, though our church was only four blocks away. When we moved to Haas Avenue, he never even stuck his head in the door of our new church. My mother never asked him to go, at least not in front of us.

  “When I was livin’ in the country, my mother made me go every week, sometimes more than once a week. The preacher was a big deal, the biggest deal there was. Wasn’t no black doctor or lawyer down there, but if there was, he still would’ve been bigger. There wasn’t nobody rich, no wealthy businessmen. The preacher was it! Strutted around like he was Roosevelt. All slicked up, smelled good. Wore nice suits, drove a fancy car, lived in the biggest house down there. This is durin’ the Depression! How is it you end up rich bein’ a preacher? Don’t make no sense. It ain’t supposed to be about money, supposed to be about people’s souls. Right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “And he had all these women in the choir lookin’ up at him and smilin’ and shakin’ their bodies at him when they was up there supposed to be singin’. And why do people wear their best clothes on Sunday, spend all that time gettin’ dressed up, pickin’ out what hat to wear? Who they supposed to be impressin’? God? It ain’t no damn fashion show. They just showin’ their neighbors what kind of clothes they have that you don’t. What does God care about what you wear? Turned out the preacher was havin’ affairs with two or three of them singers even though he was married and had a couple of kids. Damn near got shot.”

  I laughed.

  “Most every week, I’d hear my mother gossipin’ with her friends about who was sleepin’ with who, and who had left his wife for who, and who she thought might be sleepin’ with who.”

  He shook his head.

  “They talked about that shit more than they talked about salvation. Damn soap opera. So I looked at all the crap that goes on—people like my mother givin’ up their money that they work hard for all week—money that we needed. I didn’t have no long pants to go to school, but she could give this man some money every week. People gettin’ dressed up to show off, affairs goin’ on with the preacher. And all the while the preacher standin’ up there wavin’ his arms and wavin’ the Bible, supposed to be preachin’ the Gospel. I said ‘Shi-i-i-it.’”

  “Not all churches have that kind of stuff going on,” I said.

  “More than you know.”

  “And even if they do, what does that have to do with you and your relationship with God?”

  “It has a lot to do with it. If the man who supposed to be His messenger ain’t followin’ the message, how can he give it to me?”

  “So you think people who go to church are fools?”

  “To each his own. Count me out.”

  I asked him if he believed in God. I assumed he didn’t, and that Mom reluctantly accepted, but didn’t like, his lack of faith.

  “Yes, I do,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “Why does that surprise you? You don’t have to go to church to believe in God and to try to do right by people. Some of the biggest sinners show up right on time on Sunday and walk in the church—and then go right on sinnin’ when they walk out.”

  “Why did you send money to your mother every week,” I finally asked, “after the way she treated you?”

  “She’s my mother, brought me into the world. She had problems. Just didn’t know what she was doin’.”

  “Was it your way of saying, ‘I made it—even though you kicked me out, I made it’?”

  “No, I just knew she could use the money. So I tried to help.”

  “That simple?”

  “That simple.”

  “Mom didn’t like it.”

  “I know.”

  “And?”

  “Well, if the situation was the same, I hope you’d help her out every week—just like I did mine.”

  “Did you ever wish you had a brother or a sister?” I asked him.

  “Sometimes—especially in the country.”

  “Because you were lonely?”

  “No, to help me fight. See, if you walked down the road, and a white guy was comin’ toward you, there wouldn’t be no trouble. If you walked down the road by yourself with a friend, and there were two white guys walkin’ toward you, there wouldn’t be no trouble. If you were by yourself and there were two white guys, you better get ready to fight. If there were two of you and three of them, it was gonna be a fight. They were cowards. They only started somethin’ if you were outnumbered. A brother would have helped even things out a little.”

  “Dad, if you could do things over, what would you do differently?”

  For several seconds, he said nothing.

  “You never thought about this?” I asked during the silence.

  “No, I haven’t. Why do you think I’m takin’ so long? I really haven’t given it much thought.” He played with his coffee cup, and leaned back against the wall. “What would I do different …?” he said to himself.

  “Unreal,” I thought to myself.

  “Offhand, I can’t think of nothin’ I would do different. I kind of like the way I handled things.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Not that I can think of. I always wanted kids. I always wanted my own business. When I started the restaurant, I told myself if it didn’t work out, I could use the buildin’ as a shoeshine parlor, and if that didn’t work I could use it to keep supplies for a janitor service and clean office buildin’s. So I had my bases covered if I struck out with the restaurant. I always tried to think things through. If this happens, then what? If that happens, then what?”

  “That’s it?”

  “Wait, come to think of it, there is one thing.”

  I knew it. Financial decision. Personal decision. Should have married her and not her. Should have moved here and not there. Something he did or said that he wishes he could take back. Hell, doesn’t he think he might have treated his own kids with more kindness—even if it was our fault for overreacting and for not understanding him better?

  “I wi
sh I had a little girl,” he said.

  “A little girl?”

  “To a little girl, Daddy is everythin’. I’d love to walk in from work and have Daddy’s little girl run up and kiss him sayin’, ‘Daddy’s home!’ Always wanted to know what that felt like.”

  “That’s it?”

  “But I’m happy with my three boys. Wouldn’t send ’em back for anythin’.”

  “That’s it?”

  “All I can think of—and that one’s kind of out of my hands.” He laughed. “Yep, got no control over that.”

  “But what about decisions? You said you got divorced because the woman cheated on you. And you had a marriage annulled. You wouldn’t have done those things again.”

  He leaned back again. The question, that way of thinking, was completely foreign to him. He shook his head again.

  “You can’t look at it like that. Ask yourself, would you a’ done it if you thought it through? Did you learn anythin’? Okay, it didn’t turn out the way I wanted it. What did you learn so you can make better decisions next time? The only way you’re not goin’ to make a mistake is if you don’t do nothin’. If you get up out of bed and make decisions, some of them are guaranteed to turn out bad. So what are you goin’ to do, stop gettin’ out of bed?”

  I nodded.

  “What about you?” he asked. “Would you do things different?”

  After that, what do you say? But I answered as honestly as I could. “Dad, we don’t have time for all the things I would do differently.”

  “Well, that’s too bad.” He didn’t ask me, “What things?” because, to him, it didn’t matter.

  “You can’t be that hard on yourself ’cuz it’ll affect the next one you make. Just try and think it through, do your best, make adjustments, and keep on steppin’.”

  15

  SHIT HAPPENS, SO DEAL WITH IT

  “When are you gonna get married?” he asked.

  “I told myself a long time ago I wouldn’t get married.”

  I remember standing in the kitchen at the old house feeling smothered by the tension between Mom and Dad. But the biggest reason for that vow is this: I never wanted any child of mine to feel about their dad the way that I felt about mine.

  “Oh, I’ve had girlfriends, especially one I met in college.”

  We were freshmen, and I already had a girlfriend in Los Angeles. The girl I met in college had a boyfriend in Canada. Fine. We agreed to be “just friends.”

  “What happened?” Dad asked.

  “You really want to hear this?” He never asked me about my love life, and it was the last thing I thought we’d be talking about.

  “I do.”

  “Well, I had never met a black person from Canada.”

  “What do they call themselves,” he laughed, “African-Canadians?”

  Her name was Phyllis. She spoke French and played folk guitar. Short curly hair and light brown eyes. Perfect teeth. Never wore braces. She introduced me to Arlo Guthrie and I introduced her to the Four Tops. She taught me how to order in French and I taught her how to curse in English.

  “Arlo Guthrie—any kin to Woody?”

  I wouldn’t have guessed that Dad knew that kind of music. “His son.”

  Dad nodded. He was really interested. He kept asking “Then what?” and “What did she say?” and “What did you do?”

  I teased Phyllis for laughing at practically everything. I bet her I could crack her up just by holding up a number-two pencil. I put the pencil one inch from her face and stared at my watch. She laughed. Dad laughed.

  “That’s somethin’ I’d do,” he said.

  The friendship even survived the summer—me in Los Angeles working a summer job at a gas station, her in Toronto on an internship with, I think, the United Way of Canada.

  “Then what happened?”

  We had been friends almost a year.

  “Strictly platonic,” I said.

  She was sitting on the floor in my dorm room listening to music, and I was at my desk reading something.

  “Larry, what do you want to do after college?”

  “I don’t know yet. Make some money.”

  “No, really. What do you want to do?”

  “I want to make money.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “’Course I’m serious.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all? That’s hard enough.”

  “I mean, that’s it?”

  “Well, no.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “I want to make lots of money.”

  Dad laughed.

  “I laughed too, Dad, but she didn’t.”

  ‘Oh, c’mon, she was jokin’, right?”

  No, she was not.

  “Okay, Phyllis, what do you want to do when you graduate?”

  “I want to help people.”

  “Well, I think that’s great. So, you go help people, and I’ll make money.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “’Course, I’m serious.”

  “I can’t, I can’t believe—”

  “Who doesn’t want to make money?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Yeah, your father teaches philosophy at McGill, and my dad was a janitor who busted his ass and started a café. I shared a bedroom with one or both of my brothers until the tenth grade. Nobody’s going to pay me to sit around and talk about existentialism. I want to make money.”

  “What’s existentialism?” Dad asked.

  “Well, it’s kind of complicated. But it means there’s no meaning or purpose behind the stuff that happens in your life—that your fate is in your own hands and that you have the power to determine the outcome of your life no matter your circumstances.”

  “You mean shit happens so deal with it.”

  “Ah, yeah, pretty much.”

  “How much tuition did we pay for that?” he laughed.

  “Apparently, whatever it was, we overpaid.”

  “So what happened with Phyllis?” Dad asked.

  “She told me I was shallow.”

  “Shallow?” Dad seemed baffled. “Because you wanted to make money?”

  “Shallow and superficial.”

  He shook his head. “Maybe I didn’t miss much by not goin’ to college.”

  “You’re right, Dad. You didn’t miss much.”

  “What ever happened to your friend, you know, the basketball player?” Dad asked.

  “You mean Perry?”

  Perry and I met in the second grade. I didn’t know until we were adults that his single mom was an alcoholic. His dad drove a bus, but I only saw him once. Perry was aggressive and angry.

  “His home life was awful,” I said.

  In the fifth grade, our class picked the best kickball players for an annual game against the sixth grade class. Perry was the best kickball player in the class, but almost nobody voted him on the team. They hated him. When Perry played against the other students, he didn’t just beat them. He taunted and ridiculed them.

  When he pitched, he wouldn’t just strike you out. He would announce the pitch, throw it, then laugh and deride the batter after he struck out.

  “Sounds like Muhammad Ali,” Dad laughed. “So the kids retaliated.”

  “Guess who they picked instead?”

  “You?”

  Despite my own doubts about my ability, the students had picked me as one of the starting players. So when class ended that day, I approached the teacher.

  “I think it’s unfair,” I told her, “that Perry didn’t make the team. He’s the best player in the class, and I would like to give up my place for him.”

  “What did the teacher say?” Dad asked.

  “She said, ‘Okay, if you feel that strongly about it, he can play instead of you.’”

  “Wish you had talked to me about it.”

  He said that Perry needed to learn that ability is one thing, but getting along with classmates is just as important in life.
Ridiculing and belittling people will, at some point, get in your way. This could have been a very important lesson to him.

  “Perry got what he deserved for treatin’ his friends like shit. Now let’s talk about you.”

  Dad folded his arms.

  “You had a chance to play in the, what do you call it—kickball game—and you didn’t take it. It opened up a door for you, and you should have walked through it. Are you sure you asked the teacher to let him take your place because you thought it was the right thing to do? Or because you didn’t have any confidence in yourself?”

  “A little of both.”

  “And it didn’t do Perry any good.”

  He was right. The teacher started a pattern that persisted throughout Perry’s elementary, junior high, and high school career. He got a pass—one of many until the end of high school.

  He was far and away the best basketball player on the team. And there’s a lot of pressure on high school coaches to win. But when it came to the practice sessions, he came late or not at all. Still, the coach played him.

  One time Perry walked in late, and the coach chewed him out in front of his teammates. Perry took off his jersey, balled it up, and threw it in the coach’s face. And Perry still started the game that evening.

  “Ridiculous,” Dad said.

  The big colleges came to take a look at Perry. UCLA, Notre Dame, Marquette, USC, North Carolina, Duke. All of them. He was that good.

  But then they asked the coach about Perry’s “head,” his willingness to put the team first, his “coachability.”

  Now, a high school coach’s currency is his credibility. So the coach did not lie. He told the big college recruiters of Perry’s surliness, anger, and refusal to follow orders. He warned them that Perry was undisciplined, would disrupt their program, and become a “coach killer.”

  Bye-bye Notre Dame, bye-bye Marquette, bye-bye Duke, bye-bye all the major schools. All of the big schools—any of which Perry could have easily played for—refused to recruit him.

  “Where’d he end up?” Dad said.

  “Small college.”

  He knew he should have been at a first-tier school, not a small, undistinguished college where his skills could not improve, given the low level of competition. His attitude remained defiant, and he failed to attract attention to “move up” from his small school to a major college. He started showing up to practice even later, smoking dope, and cutting classes. Soon his coach, despite the pressure to win, kicked him off the team. Then he dropped out.