Praise for 10,000 Miles with my Dead Father,s Ashes
“With asides spanning from his pot-smoking, pill-popping teenage years to his later adult failures as an average American man, this…hoot of a memoir rings with themes that will appeal to many readers coming-of-age in the 1970s and ’80s. A candid and humorous tale.”
—Kirkus
“Riveting, funny, emotional. I laughed out loud and cried real tears.”
—Krista Vernoff, executive producer of Grey’s Anatomy,
Shameless, and Charmed
“Devin Galaudet writes that his dad ‘wanted to lift off the lid to life for me and show me its flailing innards’ and that’s what Galaudet does, himself, in these pages—he lifts the lid off a complicated, volatile, father-son relationship and shows us all that is flailing and painful and hilarious and poignant within. Gallaudet’s journey with his father is deeply, engrossingly, unique, yet also has much to say about what it means to come of age as a man in America. A compelling and unforgettable read.”
–Gayle Brandeis, author of The Art of Misdiagnosis:
Surviving My Mother’s Suicide
“How do you write a travel book about a serious topic…while still keeping it fun and highly readable? I had no idea—until I came across 10,000 Miles. This is a story that needs to be widely read.”
—Chris Guillebeau, New York Times bestselling author of
The Art of Non-Conformity
“An achingly poignant odyssey consummately crafted and disguised as a personal family memoir.”
—Lon Milo DuQuette, author of My Life with the Spirits
“[Devin’s] writing is creatively intriguing, well crafted, with a very strong narrative voice.”
—Alma Villanueva, author of Song of the Golden Scorpion
“Devin Galaudet captures the wrenching, often funny intricacies of grieving for a less than perfect father. Love and violence, abandonment and slapstick comedy commingle in this poignant and real story of how we come to terms with our parents in their varied and often complex manifestations.”
—Kate Maruyama, author of Harrowgate
“Devin Galaudet has taken on one of the toughest subjects a writer…and a man…can attempt: coming to terms with his relationship to his father and summoning the courage for a final goodbye. Galaudet writes with a great eye for physical detail, compassion, intensity, and humor. 10,000 Miles with My Dead Father’s Ashes promises to be a guidebook for the rest of us who might undertake a similar emotional journey.”
—Kent Black, editor in chief at Palm Springs Life magazine
“Galaudet writes with a voice that is vulnerable and even painful at times, but it’s also always entertaining and downright funny. He’s clearly an excellent storyteller and traveling around the world with him would undoubtedly be a blast! His writing is the next best thing.”
—Kenneth Shapiro, editor in chief of TravelAge West
“Devin Galaudet tells his story of love and loss with humor and poignancy. This is a candid, moving work about a scared boy trying to find a way to be a grown man.”
—Telaina Eriksen, 2010 and 2011 Pushcart Prize nominee
“Anyone who’s scattered a parent’s ashes knows it is a confusing mix of sadness and irony. Devin captures both perfectly.”
—Peter Hancoff, writer, producer, troublemaker
“Truly moving, cohesive, and rich in wry cynicism, Devin’s writing is taut and can teach us all something about the love a son has for his father,”
—Kat Kambes, writer
“In small details like finding parking, Galaudet reveals the inner landscape of losing a parent, interspersing dark humor to give the reader the space to breathe through the intimacy of grief. Galaudet’s travel memoir shows us that no matter how far you travel the language of grief and compassion are the same.”
—Angela M. Brommel, author of Plutonium & Platinum Blonde
This is a Genuine Vireo Book
A Vireo Book | Rare Bird Books
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Copyright © 2018 by Devin Galaudet
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to print, audio, and electronic. For more information, address:
A Vireo Book | Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department
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Set in Minion
epub isbn: 9781644280058
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data
Names: Galaudet, Devin, author.
Title: 10,000 Miles with my Dead Father’s Ashes : Or Mi Padre es Muerto
en la Bolsa / Devin Galaudet.
Description: First Trade Paperback Original Edition | A Vireo Book |
New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA: Rare Bird Books, 2018.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781947856165
Subjects: LCSH Galaudet, Devin. | Galaudet, Devin—Family. | Fathers and sons—Biography. | Fathers—Death. | Spain—Description and Travel. |
BISAC BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary
Classification: LCC HQ755.85 .G41 2018 | DDC 306.76/620922—dc23
For Shea to understand your exceptional yet flawed family tree.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Author’s Notes
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1
I hate to be the one to tell you this, but your dad’s dead.” She spit it out in one piece. I stood in my living room in my underwear and bare feet with the phone glued to my ear. The gardener was outside my window using one of those contraptions that made an incessant grinding noise, but there was no doubt as to what I heard. And I knew it was true even though I hadn’t told her who I was.
“Is this Devin?” she’d asked.
And I’d responded, “Who’s calling?”
Dad taught me early not to offer too much. Maybe it was a collection agency or someone I had knocked up, or one of fifty other things I did not want to deal with at the time. I still answered the phone this way, likely from some residual fear I clung to that the world was not a friendly place, even though my life had been content for ages. I suppose old habits die hard.
The sensation swarmed up my body. I launched into big, uncontrollable, heaving sobs that left me shaking. Every time I slowed down, the crying returned. My reaction surprised me, as I had decided that Dad was nothing more than a distant pile of unresolved resentments. His death had been long expected and perhaps overdue, at least in the land of intellect.
My emotional terrain, however, was another story.
The call came from a woman named Cathy, who described herself as Dad’s wife of fifteen years. She confided that she was thirty years his junior and that he helped raise her two daughters. Dad had died of a heart attack two weeks prior, lying on his stomach with a cigarette in his hand in their trailer in St. George, Utah, while Cathy was at work. Nothing seemed wrong when she left him in front of the television.
He had told Cathy several times that when he died, there was to be no funeral. He had instructed that no one from his family should know about his death until after he had been cremated. His dying wish was that he be scattered off the coast of Cádiz
, Spain—to return home while “Ave Maria” played. Really, he wanted to be sent into outer space on a rocket, but he knew that was not going to happen. Cathy sighed before and after speaking, her words spilling out in one long, struggling breath.
I shook my head and gulped for air between tears. Dad wanted to return home to Spain? He wasn’t from Spain. He was French, German, and Irish—and to my knowledge, he had never even been out of the United States. As for “Ave Maria,” he would not be caught dead in a church. And he’d been living in a trailer park in Utah? He was a city guy.
None of it made sense.
✴✴✴
The voice on my phone machine had said, “Devin, it’s your father. I am at the train station—come and get me.” I hadn’t heard from him in three years. Once again, he had managed to trick me into thinking he was dead, which was a relief. After fifteen years of disappearances and returns from the grave, I decided he was like Dracula, a charismatic leech who would need to have a stake shoved through his heart to get rid of him. Clearly he was not ready to go and made a point of bothering me every blue moon.
Another message followed. “Devin, it’s your father. I am at 7-Eleven. Come and get me.”
At 12:22 a.m. the phone rang, my aunt on my mother’s side letting me know that Dad was waiting at a specific 7-Eleven about half a mile from my house.
She should go get him, I thought. I was sleeping. Pretending to be interested in seeing him would be a chore, and I was finished.
I got out of bed and dressed anyway.
I pulled around the corner and into the 7-Eleven parking lot. He stood there under the dim fluorescent lights wearing a purple “Go Utah Jazz” T-shirt and plaid shorts. His hair was much thinner than I recalled, and I shuddered at the mortality of my own fraying hairline. I had never known him to wear purple or short pants or to have thinning hair. He weighed seventy-five pounds less than I had ever seen him before and his skinny white legs glowed pale in the light. I barely recognized him. He had always had wide shoulders, big arms, and a gut for days. He was the guy that taught me to stick up for myself and fight well outside the Marquess of Queensbury. He was now a former tough guy, and that did not compute with what I understood of the world. A nearby homeless man looked like he planned to roll Dad.
Life had caught up with him. He was a geezer, some old guy that had replaced my father. The father I knew had a presence that did not require explanation. The shell before me was weak and used up, something ineffable beyond weight loss, which screamed, “I give up.” In an odd way, I saw him in the same way I looked at a lost child. My heart sank. I slowly put the car in park. I needed time to think and to prepare to act as if nothing were wrong.
As I exited the car, I said, “So, what do you say, Slim?” Dad stood there with his hands in his pockets and a cigarette sticking out perpendicular to his face, which held no expression. I threw an arm around his neck and kissed him on his cheek. He smelled of menthol cigarettes and men’s cologne from a discount drugstore. I hadn’t noticed the oversized suitcases at his feet and the large brass elephant that sat on top of them when I drove up.
He did not look at me, somehow sensing my disappointment. “Help your father in your car,” he said. He always liked referring to himself in the third person.
It was late and I was feeling increasingly nauseated.
As I unloaded the car at my place, Dad sat on the porch and lit up a cigarette. I threw some linens and an old wool blanket that smelled of cedar and mothballs on the couch before schlepping in his luggage with the elephant.
We talked as if nothing had changed, although it had. He had disappeared one too many times, and I was exhausted from it all. I had moved on with my life without him.
Without getting up from the couch, he reached over and grabbed the elephant by the trunk and handed it to me. “I want you to have this,” he said. It was awkwardly shaped, with huge ears that fanned out, and its trunk curled in front of its tusked face. I felt its weight and coldness.
“What am I supposed to do with this?”
“What are you, weird? It’s from Africa.”
“It not from Africa,” I said. “It’s swap meet fodder.”
To an outsider, this may have sounded harsh, but Dad smiled, the first smile I had seen since I picked him up.
“Well, maybe not the real Africa,” he said. “Just take the damn thing, it weighs a ton. You should get it melted down and make something else out of it, like a gazelle.” Then he laughed to himself.
We chatted about nothing important. I never asked questions like Where have you been for the last few years? Do you own a telephone? I had already asked them before, many times. He would answer only, “Your old man, he’s like the wind,” or some other bullshit fortune-cookie answer. I sat there with the elephant in my lap in the rocking chair across from him until he let out a snore. I watched him for a minute, debating. Was he as pathetic as I thought he was? Was he worthy of my compassion? He wanted something, probably money, which I would eventually give him.
I put the elephant down in the middle of the room. Then I went to sleep.
In the morning, he could have eased into it, but instead he got right to the point of his visit. “Your old man needs a car,” he blurted with coffee-and-cigarette breath. He then began to describe my old car—the car I had just had towed away by a charity that fulfills wishes to dying children. It had been sitting in the driveway for months collecting a layer of gray dust. I had no money to get it fixed and couldn’t justify keeping it around any longer.
I apologized with a tinge of undeserved guilt and told him I would buy him a great steak dinner, something with lots of butter, when I got home from work. I felt as though I had let him down, again. As if I had rejected him. I showed him how to use the remote, kissed him, and gave him a twenty and the spare key to the front door.
I came home that evening to find the front door wide open. His two suitcases were gone, as were half the groceries from my fridge. The sheets on the couch were rolled into a ball and he forgot to leave my key. Or a note. He forgot to take the brass elephant, which still sat in the middle of the room. Still, I was relieved.
He died within the year. Had I known it would be the last time I would see him, I would not have changed the locks.
✴✴✴
I hung up the phone with Cathy and stood with my hands on my hips, looking around my apartment for clues as to what I should do next, trying to slow my breath and catch hiccups. I attempted to see him in my mind as tall, handsome, and strong and hoped to have fond memories flood me. Nothing came except how I stole two of his Budweisers and a pack of Salems into the yard one Thanksgiving to become a man without him.
I held on to the news for an hour before calling my father’s twin sister, Gloria, first. My voice shook, and I was unable to get words out. She said, “Don’t tell me anything. I don’t want to know nothing,” and hung up the phone.
Everyone else—uncles, aunts, cousins—said how much they loved him. How much he had given them. The stories started with how loving he was and I listened to them until they were through, could almost feel the shrugs that punctuated their stories.
And then they’d ask, “Whatever happened to him?”
I did not have many answers.
✴✴✴
Immediately after Dad died, there was a lull in my confused feelings about him. Over the next several weeks, Cathy and I talked regularly. At the time, I had not been to St. George, Utah, his last earthly home, and had no relevant details about anything in his life. Cathy told me what she could.
She told me she was thirty years Dad’s junior, which made her only a couple years older than I. She had two daughters that Dad had helped raise since the girls were small. She talked about Dad with love in her voice and explained they had moved many times before they ended up in a trailer park in St. George, Utah, a place I eventually saw as both beauti
ful and isolated. They fought and split up more than once, and they always came back together. She stayed with him through illness. “I had to stop letting him drive,” she said. She had a habit of pausing between sentences, as if she had disappeared from the conversation. “You never knew when one of those things would hit,” to the seizures Dad began to experience a few years prior to his death.
Her voice rose and fell with concern, frustration, and hope as she talked, clearly having drunk the Kool-Aid. She believed everything he had fed her, a quality I was certain Dad liked best. The most significant and disturbing example was his brown briefcase. He told her its contents held a secret that would take care of her for the rest of her life but instructed her not to open it until after he died.
She waited a full week before cracking it open. In the brief time I had gotten to know Cathy, I learned that she had a hard life filled with family instability, a lack of opportunity, and little money. She must have seen Dad as a charming, good-natured man, and—in theory—a long-term provider. At the time of Dad’s death, she had been working for the local market collecting baskets in the parking lot. While honest work, I cannot imagine this being the life she had planned out with Dad. He played her like he did me and everyone else.
As she described the suitcase scenario, I pictured her fumbling with a butter knife against some cheap, snapping combination lock covered in gold spray paint and glued to an imitation leather briefcase binding, and her brow crinkling at the possibility of some escape from her grind. I doubt she seriously believed her finances would be transformed by Dad’s secret treasure, but she probably expected some breathing room from, say, a life insurance policy—some space to let her mourn properly.
I felt myself dreaming along with her toward a happy conclusion, hoping she would tell me she found some sustaining stash, even though I knew the ending of the story long before she got there.
She took a deep breath and sighed. “Well, after the briefcase opened, there were a few scraps of paper with some numbers on them. You know, nothing really important. One of the numbers was yours.”
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