Lord of California

by Andrew Valencia

“Good. So here’s what I’m thinking. I’ve been on the road all morning and I need a drink. And I’m guessing this place wasn’t designed to keep up with the likes of us. So I say we take this primo bourbon back to your place and see where the day takes us from there.”

  Before I had even finished speaking, I knew Dad’s interest was piqued. He arched an eyebrow and shook the ice in his otherwise empty glass. “Where do you imagine it will take us?”

  “I don’t know. But I’ll tell you one thing. I’ve got the number of some ladies on the peninsula who put your valley girls to shame.”

  He didn’t laugh or make randy comments like you might expect a man to do in such a situation. He simply took out his wallet and placed a folded bill on the table next to his glass. Between his weight and the constant pain he was failing to hide, getting up from his seat proved noticeably difficult for him. He pressed both hands flat against the table and pushed himself up with such strained force I worried the legs might give out. I wondered if he could even handle being with a woman in the condition he was in, or if he was merely determined to prove his virility to me as I had once been forced to prove mine.

  He stood breathing heavily with both hands at his lower back. Lines of sweat glistened across his bald head. He said, “All right. Let’s get moving.”

  Growing up in one of the more affluent parts of the Bay Area, I had seen plenty of luxury cars when I was young, but nothing quite so luxurious as the German convertible Dad somehow had acquired. He drove with his seat back as far as it would go and still his stomach nearly engulfed the steering wheel. I tried to picture him driving alone with the top down, his remaining hair tousled by the wind, the very picture of graceless middle age striving and fighting against the dying of the light. I didn’t have much time to think, though, before we arrived at a tract of small condos with the same drab, weather-faded look that betrayed most US-era properties in the region. Dad huffed and panted his way up the short staircase. The symptoms of his illness were becoming increasingly unpleasant to witness; walking behind him on the steps, I could smell the sickly, bilious farts seeping silently out of him, and had to breathe through my mouth to keep from gagging. When we got to the door, he couldn’t find his keys in either of his front pockets. He looked back at the staircase with an expression of pure misery before remembering he had stuck them in his back pocket. I followed him inside.

  He flipped the light switch and said, “Generally I prefer a very minimalist arrangement. Just a bed, bath, and mailbox to come home to. Too many complications in your day to day life will keep you from focusing your energies on what matters. You’ll learn that in due time.”

  “Minimalist” was a good word to describe the condo, though “dingy” and “paltry” would have suited it better. Whether it had been built before disbandment or not long after it, the whole atmosphere and character of the place, right down to the smell of the air, seemed old and decrepit, like the sort of bombed-out shell of an apartment where you could imagine war refugees cowering to escape the violence outside. The main living area had a single sofa chair with a cushion so compressed it couldn’t have offered more than psychological protection from the springs underneath. Beyond that, there were tables and lamp stands situated at various points along the walls, very much like the furnishings of your standard roadside motel room. Through a space between the stove and vent hood, I could just make out a sink and countertop on which rested a dish rack loaded with plates that probably never found their way into the cabinets above. Of course it didn’t strike me as odd to find Dad inhabiting such a place; in the grand narrative I had composed for him, he was every bit as much a monster as the troll from the nursery fable, and so it wouldn’t have been too difficult to envision him living in squalor under a bridge while his money sat idle in an account or deposit box. I went to the kitchen and found two clean glasses at the bottom of the rack.

  Taking the flask from my pocket, I said, “I’ll stick with vodka for now, but I’m eager to see what you think of the bourbon. The guy at the shop said it was a rare find even for them. They only had a few bottles left in stock.”

  Dad collapsed onto the sofa chair and snorted skeptically. “He works on commission. Of course he’s going to say that.”

  I unscrewed the cap on the bottle and eyeballed at least two shots over the clouded white ice cubes from his freezer tray. He took a small sip to begin with, smacking his lips together in consideration. Then he raised the glass again and knocked back more than half of what remained. I watched it flow into him. He leaned back in the creaking chair and sighed bracingly. He said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if you overpaid. But for what it’s worth, it is a very nice label. Better than most of the swill you find these days.”

  “Glad you think so. Drink up.”

  I poured some vodka into the second glass and sat on a corner of the square coffee table. Across from me, Dad was already getting sleepy-eyed, or at least the energizing discomfort he had been suffering through all day had transitioned to a seemingly painless lethargy that appeared to suit him just fine. He was even smiling slightly, positioned as he was with his head tilted back, balancing the glass on his stomach between laced fingers. I tried to think of any other time in my life when I had seen him genuinely contented and relaxed, but nothing came to mind. In my memories of him, which seemed so much more real than the sick old man before me, nothing could break the current of hostility that permeated everything he said and did; not even that night at the whorehouse, not even all the whiskey and fatherly pride his money could buy.

  I said, “By the way. I don’t know what this means to you, but Mom passed away four months ago. She’d been fighting cancer for a while, and it just proved to be too much for her. Thought you should know.”

  Dad raised his head slowly. The frown he formed his lips into was less jarring to me than his smile, but there was a forcedness to it that felt particularly disrespectful, as though he still couldn’t bring himself to be honest with me, even if doing so would have meant admitting that my mother’s death didn’t bother him. He said, “I’m sorry to hear that. She was a good woman, Rachel. You were fortunate to have a mother who put your well-being above everything else.”

  I raised my glass. “Cheers.”

  Again I watched him drink. Again he seemed to grow more relaxed and groggy. He said, “Of course the real test of a woman’s character is how she treats her father, and her husband after him. That’s one feature of the modern world that’s taken an incalculable toll on the foundations of society, the notion that a woman or girl is independent from the man who looks after her. Years ago, some misguided fools got it into their heads that the man-haters were right, that the innate differences between the sexes are just superficial, and that women can take care of themselves. Well, I ask you, how many women were able to go without a man’s protection immediately following disbandment? And how many girls who didn’t have a man’s guidance succumbed to degradation in those years? Well, let me tell you, opinions changed for the better once the Republic was founded and normalcy returned to civilian life. Suddenly the time-honored truths passed down from the noble lords of old weren’t so superficial.”

  Dad tilted forward in a way that suggested he was going to stand, but instead he leaned the bulk of his girth on one armrest and spread his legs out indecently. Drops of whiskey trickled from the corners of his mouth. The air conditioner must have been operating at full blast, but still his face was sweaty. He looked like a newborn baby, bald and pudgy and dripping with amnia. His mood was even unpredictable.

  “Jesus fuck. When I think of all the bullshit that passes for popular wisdom, all the poisonous ideas that have been carried over from American times, I get so frustrated I can hardly stand to remain alive. If the mass of people were only capable of recognizing, if more than one or two percent of the population had any rational faculties whatsoever, then maybe I could tolerate their company more than I do. All my life, for as long as I can remember, I’ve had to fight their stupidity
, and it’s always been an uphill battle. When I was a boy in the US, it was a very patriotic time. People used to talk about freedom like it was the most important thing in life. But I always knew they were full of shit. I knew from a young age that if you were to give them what they were asking for, of the ones that survived, ninety-nine point nine percent would come to curse their freedom in time. They would beg for the chain before long. But would they admit it? Would they ever learn to accept that the ones in a position above them were there for a reason? Hell, no. They would tear it all down before that. Their father, their husband, their employer, their God. They would snarl like animals and bite their masters’ hands rather than confess their own weakness. And those of us who were born stronger? What can we do except grit our teeth and try to bear the insults? That’s the burden I’ve been carrying my whole life. That’s the burden I still carry. Christ.”

  This time he really did stand up, straining with both hands against the armrests as he slowly emerged from the sunken compression in the sofa chair. Staggering a little bit more with each step he took, he found his way to the rest of the bourbon. He could barely keep the bottle steady, and ended up with more on the counter than in his glass. He lost his balance turning and had to brace himself against the beam.

  “Sometimes I wish I could feel the way they do, the stupid, happy people of the world. Just once I’d like to know what it’s like to be free of this weight. I think about my father and how happy he was every day of his life. He was so simple he didn’t even realize how mediocre he was. He thought because he knew a lot about science that he was an intelligent man. He had his wife and his job and a family of his own, and that was all he ever needed. I always knew I never wanted to be like him. More than that, I knew I never could, be like him. I never felt any shame or guilt because of my abilities. But as I get older, it’s so exhausting, living like this day after day. I’ve tired myself out just talking about it.”

  He set his glass down and backed away from the counter. At the rate he was deteriorating, I knew if I didn’t get him off his feet now, pretty soon he would collapse of his own accord, and that once he fell he would be immovable. I snuck up and held him by the shoulders.

  I said, “You’re not well, Dad. We need to get you to bed. We’ll visit the doctor in the morning.” Throwing my arm behind his back, I led him step by step to the bedroom. It was almost like dancing in a way. The cheap box-spring mattress squealed sharply under his weight as he settled onto the bed. As soon as he was positioned halfway comfortably, he shut his eyes and fell into a deep, semi-comatose sleep. I pinched his cheek to make sure. “Dad. I’ve got something important I need to tell you.”

  I waited for a response, standing over him and watching for any disruption in the rhythm of his breathing. When it was clear he wasn’t waking up anytime soon, I set about searching the shabby little room for any spare quilts and blankets that could be used to constrain him. Fortunately, the master bedroom was as slovenly kept as the front room was sparse, and all it took was a few quick tugs to bring the bed sheet out from under his leg; it had long ago receded to the bottom left corner, leaving the rest of the mattress exposed. From there, it was simply a matter of locating a pair of scissors and cutting the sheet into strips that could be tied securely around his wrists and ankles. I dove into the task with an energy and sense of purpose that, under different circumstances, I’m sure would have made the old man proud.

  I once heard an atheist talk about space dust. It was during my final year of high school, when guest speakers would come in all the time to lecture us about college and opportunities for the future. One day, I believe it was in the early fall, an astrophysicist came to give a short spiel about whatever UC campus he was representing, and toward the end of his presentation he started veering off onto tangents (he was an older scientist, already retired from academic work, and far too soft-spoken and frail to hold the attention of three hundred exhausted seniors for very long). One of the things I remember him talking about, though, was space dust.

  As he put it, “I’m not a spiritual person. That is, I don’t believe in a divine creator. But I do believe in a common link between all carbon-based life in the universe. The carbon that’s in your body right now, it’s existed in one form or another since the aftermath of the Big Bang over fourteen billion years ago. It hasn’t changed since then, at least on the atomic scale. Maybe, at one point in time, the particles that make up who you are existed as cosmic dust floating out in space. Perhaps one of you sitting in this room today shares the same carbon that once formed a hair follicle on the head of Julius Caesar or a skin cell on the face of Marilyn Monroe. In this sense, we are all connected to one another on the most basic level of existence. We’re all descended from the same dust from outer space.”

  Between the Augustinian phase I was going through at the time and my general loathing for student assemblies, it’s not surprising that I hated listening to the old scientist rhapsodize about the meaning and origins of life. Too materialist. Too much muddling of science and philosophy. That’s the verdict my seventeen-year-old self arrived at, and years later, after my perspective had changed, I could look back with a hint of nostalgia on how misguided I was then, while simultaneously finding new reasons to tear down the learned astronomer’s premises from a more enlightened vantage point. For even in a universe without God, the astrophysicist was still searching for ancestors among the comets. In place of the blood, clay, or celestial spermatozoa the theologians looked to as evidence of our shared beginnings, the atheist substituted iridescent dust drifting aimlessly through the Milky Way. That simply wouldn’t do as far as I was concerned. To my young and newly godless mind, there could be no freedom and progress until we as a species divorced ourselves from any mystical notions of a common, elemental denominator. We can only move forward when we stop looking to dirt for answers.

  For the man who called himself my father, there was no freedom or progress to be had, not until he broke down and gave me what I wanted. He slept fifteen hours straight and awoke screaming in pain and vomiting uncontrollably onto his chest and mattress. He railed against his bonds until his ankles were bruised and the loose headboard had left a ceiling-high crack in the drywall. It was all a matter of waiting on my part. I had suspected I might have to employ arcane stress positions to get him to talk, but the pain of his own body proved torturous enough to suit my purposes. By the time the sunlight broke between the closed blinds of the small bedroom window, he was slipping in and out of consciousness, gagging constantly on his own bile as his ghostly pallor gave the pearls of sweat on his forehead an almost brown or golden hue, like a thin broth. He writhed constantly, extending his abdomen out as far as it would go, as if to distance himself from his enraged entrails as much as possible.

  I said, “You’re in bad shape, Temple. If I had to take a guess, I’d say it’s either your appendix or your liver, but in either case you should have seen a doctor some time ago. I can help you get the medical attention you need. But first, you need to tell me where you keep the money you’ve saved up over all these years. You need to point me to your checkbook or banking statement, something that will let me get my hands on what I’m entitled to. Which, I’ll tell you right now, is a pretty sizeable amount by my reckoning. And I’d say you’re not in any position to haggle given the state you’re in. So why don’t you spare yourself the prolonged agony and tell me where the money is? That’s your only way out of this.”

  Dad’s eyes rolled back behind his brow. I picked the bucket up from the carpet and splashed some ice water in his face. Partially digested globs of food clung to his cheeks and to the matted furls of his beard. He mumbled “hospital” and his head slumped down against his collarbone. I doused him again.

  “Don’t try to pretend like you don’t have anything saved up. You’ve been living alone, working nonstop for years. You couldn’t have spent it all on liquor and whores.”

  “Hos . . . hospital.”

  It occurred to me th
at the only thing keeping him from passing out entirely was the pain itself. In this way, pain became my greatest ally, the arbitrator coaxing him along in a language I could only half-speak at best. Dad, of course, was perfectly fluent in pain; he had caused me plenty of it (emotional, physical, and spiritual) and now his toxified system was using his own vernacular against him. And still there were moments during his suffering when he appeared almost peaceful, as the sick sometimes do, I’ve heard, when the fever dreams take over and the reality of their illness is briefly obscured. But then his gag reflex started up again and the force of his dry-heaving knocked him back into cognizance. He looked around the room and saw me standing beside the bed. He tried shutting his eyes to me again. Worried he might not reemerge this time, I decided to take more active steps toward attaining my goal. I plunged my hand into the water and struck him across the face with an open palm.

  I said, “Listen. There’s only one way I’m leaving San Jose today, and that’s with a large sum of money in my pocket. So either you tell me where you keep your bank book or deposit box key, or I’ll start looking for them myself. It can’t be too hard to find something in this cracker box. But you won’t like it if I have to go looking. Because once I find it, I just might be inclined to leave you tied up here on your own without anyone to help you. Think about it. Strapped to a bed, rotting away from the inside. Imagine that and then tell me it wouldn’t be preferable to pay a ransom instead.”

  As he listened, Dad stretched his neck out so that the point of his head was nearly brushing the headboard. He hocked a wad of phlegm into his mouth and spat at me with so little forward momentum that the loogie arced almost instantly and landed on his own sick-covered chest. It was a bit of petty vindictiveness on my part, I know, but I reached down and took his pillow away. His head fell flat against the exposed mattress, and as I began tearing the room apart from corner to corner and top to bottom, I thought I heard him whimpering softly.