by Mary Karr
San Francisco has other myths that recommend it, other draws besides the bead-bedecked boys. The only two books you own by living poets come from San Francisco’s City Lights Books—a dwarfish little pamphlet by Allen Ginsberg and its companion text by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. They fit neatly in the cardboard box you’re taking to Los Angeles.
Meanwhile, you’re waiting for courage. You hope to marshal enough of it to go inside and say goodbye to your daddy, who has decided to deal with your final departure as he’s dealt with the past three years’ occasional departures. He ignores it. There’s nothing so dire that Daddy can’t let it slip by with a stoical stare. Before you have to meet that gaze and turn from it so the weight of it is borne on your back for all the days you live away from this house, you try to get your hope-machine pumping.
The map usually does it, staring at it. You drag your ragged thumbnail along the trajectory you’ll follow across the state of Texas (ear to ear, as your daddy says), the whole yellow desert you’ll pass through ending finally in a vast wash of royal blue. The Specific Ocean, you call it, for you’ve learned there’s often a slanted truth in words you blur like this.
You finally sit your bony ass down on the concrete porch where the night’s chill of heavy dew seeps through the butt of your jean shorts. You try for a few minutes to refold the map as it was in the wire cage at the Fina station. But it’s a dismantled mechanical bird in your hands with no Tab B or Slot C to make sense of. You mean to write a poem about that, too, but it keeps coming out all wrong in the ticker tape that clicks through your head. You very much dread saying goodbye to your daddy, who has, in fact, ignored your upcoming trip so well that even your emptied room and the plates you stood wrapping in Leechfield Gazette classifieds escaped comment.
There Daddy sits in his straight-backed posture, all right angles on the faux leather chair in clean khakis and shiny black shoes. Six in the morning: all dressed and no bar to go to. He is not smoking. Not smoking for him is a form of pouting. He’ll also turn down food when he’s mad. Say, Y’all go on, I’m not hungry. It’s his way to say that nothing anybody has interests him one sliver.
When you bend over to hug him, he smells of coffee dosed with whiskey. His mere presence in its dogged absence makes you cry, and the tears fall from your face to his khaki back where they hit and darken the weave. Behind him there’s an entire wall of books that first set the engine of your yearning in motion and over many years of reading and study led to this disapproved-of departure. Next to the wall of books is a painting of the seacoast at High Island that your mother did in the early fifties before you were born.
Maybe it’s no accident that you have camped at that very spot a hundred nights, sleeping-bagged under Meekham’s Pier, so you could be there when the good waves rolled in with the main tide just before dawn. Maybe that painting of Mother’s kick-started this longing for the sea that your readings of Moby Dick only augmented.
You dab the back of your hand against your eyes so you can better see the wrinkled majesty of your daddy’s profile against the white wall. He’s looking off into the painting like old Ahab scanning for whale, but the corners of his mouth pinch down. And while you know it’s his standard look—nothing personal—the innate distance in it fuels your own diffidence. It’s what keeps you from talking to him overmuch or questioning his whereabouts or offering details of your own. You sense his actual, upcoming geographic distance from you as a keening whine in the base of your skull.
What you crying about, Pokey? he finally says. (Probably there was tenderness in that voice, but you first heard it as annoyance.) He roots through his pockets for a handkerchief. You just stand there, your face wet. You finally say that you’re gonna miss him.
Where you going? he asks. The question’s posed with that airy wonder that makes you puzzle over what the whiskey has left unsinged from his head.
When you say California, he winces at you in disbelief.
He says, Who told you that? Who told you you could do that? As if anybody has told you much of anything related to your comings and goings for years. You’ve long since stopped slithering in and out of the house through your window screen. You’ve come and gone at all hours, weekends and weeks at a time.
Suddenly, the threads that tie you to your daddy seem frail as spider’s silk. You fumble for something that will impress on him your earnest competence in planning this trip. The work ethic usually gets him, and in spurts you will work hard. You tell him how much money you’ve saved. You mention the two factory jobs you have lines on—one silk-screening T-shirts, another fiberglassing catamarans. He doesn’t ask you where you’ll stay, so you don’t have to lie about the friends of friends who vaguely agreed to let you park the truck in their driveway. But you lie anyway.
In your lie, you build a rolling assortment of town houses on the beach. There are boats listing on the bay and sleek polished cars in numbered slots. You don’t even fully believe such a world exists off TV shows, but still you tell your daddy about it. Then you decide it belongs to Beth Ann Guidrey’s uncle. You choose her because your daddy’s especially fond of her, but he never runs into her divorced parents who might disavow the story.
The TV is on some rerun, but your daddy stares past it. He’s off inside his own head, where he goes to wander—you imagine—some solitary rows of low-growing peanuts or fat watermelons still held to the vine, which rustly world hasn’t existed since 1920, when he was a boy in the fields around the logging camp trying to hide from work in the far, low furrows. You have been wiped from his consciousness in one clean swipe.
He stares and stares as if by looking away from you like this, he could, after a minute, look back to find the girl in pigtails you once were and whose plate he still composes with piles of black-eyed peas and cornbread slathered with oleo.
He finally says to the TV screen, You want me to make you some breakfast?
He asks you every morning. And every morning you say you’re not hungry.
From the far juncture, you’ll imagine you can see inside his heart better. Your daddy is tired with a generalized alcohol-soaked heaviness that has nothing to do with any body. Later, you’ll hear he has a mistress much younger than he is, a waitress, whose husband—once he discovers this betrayal—will put a bullet first through her skull, then his own. This will cause your daddy to weep like a child and curse at anyone who tries to hold him and flail out as if to strike you, which you know he would never do.
You will also someday realize the impossibility of your daddy’s dilemma with regard to you. Sure, by not forbidding you to go, he silently endorses an insane plan whereby you leave home with little more than a hundred dollars for an unknown region with this gaggle of boys whose chief recommendation is that they’ve all so far managed to evade—despite the cops’ best efforts—serious jail time. In fact, your older sister, Lecia, likes to say, If the law don’t want them, why should Mary? If, however, your daddy had forbidden you to go, you may well have damned him for that. The truth is, for whatever reasons, you’ve become strange to each other. He stormed the beach at Normandy, drives a truck, hangs out at the American Legion or the VFW with other men in work clothes. You’re embracing the skittery surface of surfing and psychedelia. The atmosphere between you has gone muddy. You are a mere scarecrow in his telescope lens, and he in yours.
Maybe it’s only after your daddy’s been dead fifteen years that you create this longing of yours for him and his denial of it, because it’s easier to bear the notion that he rejected you than vice versa.
Goddamn lying bastards, your daddy finally says. And you see he’s fixated on the TV. Then he says, You don’t need to go to California. His reasoning for this judgment is so ancient he doesn’t even bother repeating it. Like all his advice, it’s endured in the same form for seventeen years. The grooves it’s worn in your young head have been played too often. They produce only static: His parents rented him out to Kansas sharecroppers for field work when he was just a boy. He never want
s you to feel turned out that way, and since the only bona fide reason for going anywhere is (as he sees it) either a war they make you fight or a financial flamethrower on your butt, you don’t need to go.
He says, You need to stay right here at forty-nine-oh-one Garfield. California’s ass.
For him that’s the end of it. The television starts the chirpy music from Dialing for Dollars, a show he used to watch with reverence, shushing all talk and waving off phone calls while he waited each day for the phone to ring. Not long ago, he noticed that the chopped up phone books they drew numbers from weren’t just Leechfield but included other towns, even other counties.
Hell that’s not local, he said the first time he noticed that they were calling Beaumont.
Lecia was teasing her platinum hair for a date. The can of Aqua Net she fanned around made your eyes burn. She said it was local to the broadcast area. You know for a stone fact that she tells people your parents aren’t her parents because she’d rather be an orphan raised among distant-cousin-type lunatics than someone who shared up-close your family’s tainted genetic material.
Your cheeks are cool from the tears. You’re shocked again by how little room you take up in this house. You turn to the small blue screen, where this year’s Oil Queen is slipping her small hand into the chicken-wire barrel of sliced up phone books. Her flipped-up hair is dyed Elvis-black. She wears a small tiara pinned over her bangs. Her organdy prom dress rustles when she hands Cowboy Dan the Weather Man today’s number.
This is the moment your daddy waits for each day, when the exchange is revealed so he’ll know exactly what town it is. He says, Hell that’s long distance! That’s Jasper County. He beams a righteousness worthy of Abraham at the goddamn lying bastards on the TV.
You have been dismissed again.
In truth, you dismissed him long before, but you won’t be able to face that for years. You shrugged off his hand when he tried to hug you. When he nagged you about breakfast, you waved him away. You can’t admit to yourself that you first turned your back to him. So you invert the rejection—this distance, your scorn. They’re now his attitudes aimed at you. In reality, he’s an old man in his sixties whose raggedy-looking daughter refuses his every word and whose flight from him seems—no, is—unimaginable.
Suddenly you can’t bear to stand in the same room with him another instant. Part of you expects him to stop your leaving. You can well imagine the blue truck chugging into your driveway, then your daddy’s ropy arm reaching inside its window to draw out that long-haired surfer boy you fancy in order to tear him the proverbial new asshole. Your mother promised this wouldn’t happen. But the seed in you that fears it is also—in the most locked box of yourself—the part that wishes your daddy to claim you back. Of course, you wouldn’t stand still for such restraint of your freedom, but part of you yearns for the old order and his old self—possibilities currently sliding by. Intuitively you know that years of wandering lie ahead for you.
In the kitchen, your gray-haired mother is reading a massive book on art history and digging into a grapefruit half with a serrated spoon. You ask her, Is he gonna stop me going?
This gets her attention, for your exasperation with your daddy is a mirror of hers, which makes this a moment of conspiracy that already feels like betrayal. She looks up and sets the spoon down. She says, What’d he do?
He told me I couldn’t go, you say.
She rolls her eyes. Asks what you expect. Finally, she says, I wish I was going with you. She tells you how she feels like a sinner abandoned to the purgatory of this black sucking bog where everybody but her gets to leave.
Years later, you’ll learn to respond to your mother’s complaints about Leechfield with the useful information that she did leave, and then came back. Sometimes, in moments of fury you’ll say, Leave now if you’re that miserable. That sentence hasn’t yet been formed, much less has it gathered the weight of long-studied conviction you’d need to speak it aloud. But on this day, in the yellow light of your kitchen, her unhappiness loads you down with unnameable guilt.
In the living room, your daddy’s talking to the TV again, this time to a Sabine Pass car salesman who puts his freakishly homely daughter on a kitchen stool for all his commercials. That girl is ugly, your daddy tells the TV. He says, Have to tie a pork chop around her neck to get the dog to play with her. Make a freight train take a dirt road.
You study your mother’s beautiful clear face under its dandelion of white hair and see she’s clearly tired of the green world and only loves what she can draw through her eyes from a page. For years you’ll only come back to her when you get a ride or plane fares go down or the weather’s good enough to hitch. In your chest, a chasm is opening.
Your mother still somehow cannot fathom your leaving her in this madhouse, though she groomed you for it and urged you to it.
She finally tells you that he’ll be fine, your daddy. She says, He won’t make a scene, I promise. You make her swear, and she hooks your pinky with hers like a kid. She goes back to art history, while you go back to the dim cloud of guilt at escaping this place she finds so wretched. You feel like a prisoner whose reprieve sparks despair in the remaining inmates. She starts digging in her grapefruit again as if she’ll find in its pith the wisdom she wishes for.
You say, That’s all I need, for him to snap and hit somebody.
She says, I told him we couldn’t stop you. You’d just go anyway, and then we wouldn’t know where you were.
Actually nothing could be further from true. In fact your mother’s unbridled enthusiasm for this half-baked enterprise of yours sets a cold wind blowing through you. You’re waiting to think up something revelatory and definitive to say when the black cat jumps up on the counter and starts nosing in her saucer.
Your mother says, Ever see anybody else’s cat like grapefruit?
The doors between you are closing. It’s true you’ve brought all the rhetorical tricks you learned in ninth-grade debate club to selling your mother on this idea for the better part of a year. (It’s only when you’re grown that you know how blatantly you lied with your resolve to leave: you were scared.)
Your mother rolls her eyes at the cat lapping grapefruit juice, says, Everything that comes into this house is crazy—whether we choose them for that or they get that way, I don’t know.
When you go to pick up your surfer pal Doonie, his mother stands by the silver garbage can holding a dripping paper bag of trash. She’s got on her bank-teller’s dress with its black-and-white houndstooth check, her glasses hung from a gold chain around her neck. She’s watching the boys strap the surfboards tighter to the racks and rearrange bags and boxes of albums in the truck bed. Worry pinches at her intelligent face, so you feel prompted to speak to this undisguised horror that you’ve halfway prompted.
You say, I’ll look after them, Miz Deets.
She shakes her head, comes back with, And who’s gonna look after you? She drops the garbage sack into its place, then stoops to pick up the lid. She stands there holding it a second like a shield before she fits it to the can.
Then she turns to you and says: Your mother’s actually letting you do this?
This type of question sometimes obliges you to invent stuff—some scene of parental concern with your mother bribing you to stay while your father storms in the background. But you lack energy for any more deceit about your family’s actual nature. On another coast, in another town, you plan to exist free of such duplicity about family and self. You’ll drive from this place and through some transforming aperture into a world where your new self—golden and unalterable—will gleam.
So to Miz Deets you just say yes, your mother is letting you go, and this admission feels like a personal blight. It somehow speaks ill of you that your own parents can relinquish you with such ease.
Doonie hops off the truck-back to hug his mother goodbye as hard as she’ll let him. She tilts her head to one side saying don’t get my lipstick all over. Doonie has the angular b
ody of a praying mantis, and she holds him by the elbows and kisses the air in his direction while wind whips his curly hair around their faces. When she pulls away, you can see her eyes have filled. Don’t worry, Miz Deets, you say. Your face assembles itself into National Honor Society certainty, this expression that says: I’m a by-God American. Bring it on.
But Miz Deets seems unmoved from her doubt and worry. She says, Mary, I was your mama, and you getting in that truck with all them boys, I’d tie you to the bedpost.
This is not meant to hurt. It’s just flat reportage.
You wedge into the truck with your so-called brothers and pull away from the last parental outpost, the vehicle rattling down the narrow road toward the interstate. The boys fire up a goodbye joint, and you suck down more than your share. Your young body is instantly a fresh-lit arrow notched and drawn back and about to be loosed. There’s even a poem about this you intend to write, but in the little notebook you carry you just set down some drifty lines about flaming arrows fired at the sun.
One of the surfboards bolted onto the truck roof is way longer and thicker than all the others. Its underbelly sports a wicked rectangular scar. And in fact surgery was done on it. Following an idea copped from this Jimi Hendrix movie, Doonie cut a window into the fiberglass, then hollowed out a niche in the foam. The resulting hole was filled with an unbroken brick of moss-green pot and various baggies of pharmaceuticals.
Add to those substances your fiercely clung-to ignorance and your need for velocity, and you have a dangerous cocktail.
Someone should stop that truck and the future it chugs toward. Though Miz Deets looks worried, she’s ultimately like other parents and lacks faith in her own powers to control your leaving. You pull away from her feeling naught but hope, though before those six bodies in your company have hardened into adulthood, several will be cut down by drug-related obliterations. Two will take their own lives. Two will pull time in jail.
