Dad said, “Work with wood, or some other fucking thing. Learn to build. Trust me, women love it.” He put his filth-covered hand on my shoulder. “Learn to fix things, but plumbing? Leave that for the fucking idiots. The work is too hard.”
It was not the act of sitting in a cramped space to see him fish out something disgusting from a drain that made it great for me. It was traveling to and from the job. He worked in a lot of neighborhoods that had character. I got a vicarious thrill of accomplishment walking through the fear of what I knew was a dodgy part of town. I still have an odd fondness for old blood stains on cement.
Downtown Los Angeles in the 1970s had an edge to it, and I was afraid of everything. Dad had an ability to walk through the crowded, clanging streets with a careless cool. He always had his wits about him, pointing out the marks, hustlers, junkies, and thieves without second-guessing himself. It all made sense. He was a street guy. He came from the south side of Chicago—from the baddest part of town, I assumed.
After jobs, Dad and I went into any store I wanted, both of us smelling of old metal tools. Dingy bookstores with peeling wood paneling selling mildewed comic books were my favorites, but I also loved auto part stores where everything smelled of rubber, or household junk stores, which resembled what normal stores would look like after an earthquake. Then we went to Orange Julius for a drink. We rarely spoke on the way home until after I had slurped down all the orange chemicals from the styrofoam cup and made the straw gurgle on the emptiness.
Dad then said something like, “How’d you like to live over there? If you want, I could turn around and dump you on one of the corners.” And then he would make a fast turnaround one of the blocks.
He laughed all the way home.
I remember fighting one night with my mother when I was about fourteen. I said the word “fuck” in a sentence directed toward her. Dad walked into the room and grabbed me by the arm, walked me out the front door, and threw me into the car. He drove down Sixth Street while I pressed my cheek against the cold passenger’s side window and ignored anything he said. We eventually drove in silence except for K-Earth, the station for keeping fifties and early sixties music alive, until we pulled over to a corner around Alameda and stopped. The night’s cold chilled me when Dad got out of the car. He stomped around the front of the car and unlocked my side and opened the door. He pulled me out and then shut the door as I shrugged him off of me. Around us there was nothing but a few streetlamps, boarded-up shops, fencing topped with razor wire. About a block away, I could see a small orange fire with a couple of figures warming themselves in front of it.
Dad walked back around the front of the car and hopped into the driver’s seat. I was confused, looked at him quizzically through the glass. He said, “If you don’t like it where you’re at, stay the fuck here!” He turned on the ignition, turned on the headlights, and drove away. For the first minute, I looked around as if it were a joke. I mean surely a skinny, drippy crybaby like myself should not be stranded on a deserted street, right?
My heart pounded so hard I thought it would explode as I watched the red taillights of Dad’s van turn the corner and disappear. I had no money and no jacket. The cold nibbled at the tops of my bare arms, reminding me how pencil thin they were as they poked out of my cheap white T-shirt. I had a habit of chewing on the neck of my T-shirt, and this one hung lifeless, all the elasticity sucked out of it.
A guy leaning against a graffiti-covered building across the street watched the whole scene but stood there unimpressed. I tried to breathe slowly, to calm myself. When I felt the guy across the street staring at me, I started to walk.
I stayed in the middle of the empty street, under the safety of the streetlamps, frequently but nonchalantly looking behind me. I walked close to the fire. Not near enough to feel its warmth, but near enough to see the two men. They were both black, wore ragged clothes, and did not acknowledge my existence, which was fine by me.
I knew I was being punished, but it was thrilling. Whatever sense of danger I think Dad expected me to feel, I felt—only more so. I stood there for a moment and drank it in.
Moreover, nothing horrible was happening. Nobody came with a net or a knife gleaming in the moonlight. Nobody dragged me into a windowless van or tried to rob me. I stood in the glorious, terrifying void until I saw two flashes of lights behind me.
It was Dad’s van.
Dad smoked a cigarette and looked straight ahead. Through the glass, he said, “Get in before I change my mind.” The stereo played “Runaround Sue” as we drove home wordlessly, Dad staring ahead and me staring at his hands.
✴✴✴
After a couple weeks of silence, Cathy called to tell me she needed to meet me and had enough gas money to make the trip from St. George to Los Angeles. We met at the Farmer’s Daughter Hotel on Fairfax Avenue and across the street of the farmers market. It was Dad’s motel and his motel of choice when his family came to town. The place was a dump historically, but the new owners had painted it dark blue and made its restaurant hip after the megamall across the street was built.
I was always surprised at my willingness to get behind the wheel and drive to a place I did not want to be out of a sense of obligation. I arrived numb, more confused than sad over Dad’s death and not at all interested in making new friends. We met in the parking lot. Cathy wore a pink jumpsuit, which matched her phony, bright pink nails exactly. She was plump and blonde with her hair pulled back into a ponytail. She smiled at me, and I tried to smile back. I wore blue shorts and flip-flops and a baggy T-shirt. Everything on me was loose. I had stopped eating.
My jaw clicked from the tension in my face when I said hello, and she gave me an awkward hug, or I awkwardly received it. I then stood there with my hands in my pockets wondering whether we were to sort our issues with Dad, or what? Little did I know Cathy would stay a week.
I said to Cathy, “It is really a pleasure,” which was not remotely true, but it was all I had. My stomach gurgled and churned. My throat got tight. I wanted to barf, but I held a residual sense of duty toward Dad and felt compassion for Cathy. I knew that Cathy wanted something from me. I just did not know what.
Our meetings blurred together from lunch and dinner and chats and my sluggishness. I shared the details of my life and my heavily edited memories of my father, because there had to be a positive spin, but mostly I listened.
“I really miss him,” she said over and over, with a smile that came from love. Each time she looked almost surprised by her acknowledgement. As if his death had not sunk in. She told me about their long talks and how he made her laugh. Her eyes misted many times during her visit. She shared he was still floating around their trailer they shared in St. George. She’d told him, “Okay, honey, you can stay for a little bit, but you have to get ready to go home to Cádiz.”
Then she looked skyward.
Cádiz? I thought.
“Cádiz is a city along the Mediterranean Sea in Spain,” she explained. “All I know is he wanted to go home to Cádiz.”
The statement was curious. What home? I thought. He never lived in Spain, at least not that I knew of. He didn’t fly. He wasn’t a boat guy. I scratched my head. “When was he in Spain?” I asked.
“Well, you must have known,” she said with her ponytail pulled askew. “He talked about it all the time. He lived up a hill by a crooked tree,” she said.
It all smelled of bullshit, but I kept my thoughts to myself.
“Maybe he wanted me to take him there. Maybe he just wanted me to see Spain with him. He was a good man.” Cathy looked to the side and let out a soft sigh and cradled her head on her hand. I squirmed in my seat.
Good man? Cádiz? I should have asked more questions.
She handed me a Polaroid photo of him looking aged and disheveled, wearing a hospital gown and a chrome halo glued to his head, sort of like a lampshade without the shade. He looked
lonely and weary. “One day we were driving and he just started shaking and flipping out. That’s how we learned about the brain tumors.” She told me about his hospital stays. “We all thought that the brain would get him. No one saw the heart attack coming,” she said.
I handed the photograph back to her as quickly as I could.
The day before Cathy left, we sat quietly in my car next to a park, underneath a big shade tree, all talked out. We were listening to the birds and kids playing in the distance when Cathy said, “You know, he told me about the storage unit.”
She said it like it were code. I looked at her, expecting more to the story. She stared at me, waiting for me to elaborate.
I said, “What storage unit?”
She crossed her arms and looked out the passenger window and let out a heavy sigh. “You know the one. The one where the statue of Brigham Young is pointing. That big Mormon Church and the statue is pointing at the storage unit. You know the storage unit,” she said, and she turned toward me and tilted her head in an attempt to will me to understand, or more likely to come clean.
I said nothing.
“Okay,” she said, “your dad said that you knew all about it. There was the storage unit and that you knew the combination to the lock. He said you had lots of storage units, but this one was important. Remember. In the back. Behind the tarp?” She waved her arms as if to pull aside an invisible tarp to help guide me along. She continued, “Not the crate to the left, but underneath the empty crate on the right. Do you remember now?”
It was like Dad to offer specific directions to the treasure but vagueness about his prizes. Cathy said nothing about what was supposed to be in the crates—gold bars, masterpiece paintings, stacks of cash. Dad left that to the imagination.
All I could do was shake my head, while Cathy waited, looking at me like I was playing dumb. I knew she suspected that there must be a treasure in the crate and that it was rightfully hers but I had beaten her to it, that I must have swindled her out of her fair share of the fortune.
Dad was an expert of the short con, but his long play was much more powerful. I assumed he developed a story that, even in death, would make it look like he would always take care of her. He never wanted to be the goat for breaking her heart, and leaving her without a future, so Dad sold stories. How she must have felt giving him her youth and left, in the end, with memories of an adventure, which is maybe the best we can ever get. And through it all, I was jealous. She had him all that time.
“I did not know of any storage unit, or crates, or anything of value hidden by the statue of Brigham Young, or any place else.” I tried to explain more about the dad I knew. I said, “I think he wanted you to know that you had a future that he just could not provide. He must have loved you a lot, but he pissed through a small fortune in Vegas.”
I don’t think she believed me.
I later drove down Santa Monica Boulevard and around the Mormon Church looking for a storage unit place or a garage where Dad might have left crates of money for me and Cathy.
There was none.
In the years that followed, Cathy crept into my mind often. I assumed her final years with Dad must have been total crap, but she stayed with him. She stayed with him while she pushed carts together in the local town market parking lot.
He was old. His looks had faded. He was bloated and chain-smoking with brain tumors and seizures and absolutely zero dollars, all the while lying to her about a secret stash of money that would surely belong to her one day. I saw him as a million empty packs of cigarettes crushed into alleyway litter and scattered aimlessly across the asphalt. There must have been years when Dad’s charming shtick finally stopped working altogether—not because he was no longer smart, but because he had given up. I saw it in his face that last time in the 7-Eleven parking lot. I felt it as he dropped the brass elephant in my lap and it crushed my nuts. It was impossible not to see what that life must have looked like to Dad from the rusted, cramped trailer in St. George, his world held together with bungee cords, electrical tape, and stories. The idea made me sick, but Cathy stuck by him.
Dad was lucky to have her, and briefly, I felt compassion.
I was around two years sober and spent a fair amount of time looking to make conscious acts of honesty, but in my heart, I know that if there had been a treasure, I would have never shared it. A day later, Cathy drove back to St. George, Utah, with less than she’d left with—namely his medical records and a huge, bright yellow envelope filled with X-rays of Dad’s brain tumors, just in case there was something wrong inside my head too.
✴✴✴
Months after his death, Dad still lived in some abyss in my head, showing up in my dreams or participating in fairly realistic, two-sided conversations while I did the dishes. I had been working an extended gig in Las Vegas, one of Dad’s favorite haunts, at the time. Vegas was a miserable place to live in the summer. I remembered walking through the automatic double doors, which led from frosty air-conditioned casinos into invisible packets of flaming photons that seared my face like brimstone. Everything looked as though washed in red and my eyes burned all the time, but the money was good.
The job was as a location scout on a big-budget commercial, and I had settled into three months of Vegas culture, paperwork, and meetings with city and county officials. My days of drinking and gambling were long over. I was single for the first time in years and stayed off the strip in one of the few hotels in Vegas without gaming, my temporary home away from home.
During my stay, the hotel hosted a parade of organizations and events: the world championships of yo-yo followed by an odd fourteen-year-olds’ cheerleading event. Then came the computer hackers’ convention, also known as Def-Con, Lustfest, and so on. No matter who came to town, I never fit in with the spirit of the hotel, or of Vegas.
Unfortunately, I was transitioning in my life and working for a real blowhard, who did very much embody the spirit.
“Yo, D, come here a minute.” It was my boss, Jerry.
Jerry wore brown loafers without socks and Oxford shirts that were bursting at the buttons from his distended stomach. He had dark wavy hair, a stubbled chin, a small purple potato for a nose, and wore sunglasses at dusk. When we worked in his office, which was his hotel room on that job, he usually wore only a loose-fitting towel around his waist, his ass crack somehow visible from every direction—even facing forward. His voice boomed in a way that suggested professionalism was his top priority. I disliked him from day one but resolved to make the most of things.
And so I hung with him, standing by a table of drunken honeymooners playing fifteen-dollar blackjack at the Venetian Hotel with my hands in my pockets, trying not to count the cards but doing it anyway. A previous incarnation of myself would have been escorted out by the pit bosses by now, but times had changed.
I was comfortable with my life now, even if I was not always comfortable with me.
My boss wanted a drink, and he wanted me to accompany him so he didn’t have to drink alone. I was a terrible wingman. Vegas depressed me. The casino world, I had decided, had changed. The accountants took over for the mobsters and made gaming, eating, shopping, or having fun in Vegas cost-prohibitive—or maybe it was just me.
“Yo, D,” Jerry called again. I walked over to the Venetian’s octagonal bar. It was a slow weeknight in the casino. Slack-jawed zombie people milled about, but without the roar of craps-table excitement or incessant ponging of the slots, the place felt deflated. My boss leaned on the railing with a beer and an Asian woman, who was obviously a prostitute. She was tall and thin—early thirties, I guessed. She was the kind of skinny that grinds its teeth even in the afternoon. As I walked up, Jerry said, “This lovely has a question for you.”
She said something I couldn’t make out through her thick Chinese accent. I turned to Jerry, who clarified, “This lovely one is Audrey,” and he put his arm around her teen
y waist. Audrey had frosted hair and caked-on aqua-marine eye shadow. She wore tight jeans and a fake alligator belt with pink suede boots. Her bowling-ball implants heaved against her button-down shirt as she coyly batted long, phony lashes at me and said something that sounded like, “Hello, how would you like to roll on the bed with my friend?” and I waited for Jerry to translate.
I faced her with my hands on my hips like I was ready to start a steeple-chase and bolt at the first chance. I had a lot on my mind. Cathy had called a couple of days earlier, her voice small and defeated: “I think your dad wanted me to go to Spain for him,” she said. “With him,” she corrected herself. “But I don’t think it is going to happen. Money’s tight, you know.”
She was broke, more broke than I was. The likelihood of her winning the lottery or saving enough cash for the trip to Spain was slim. At the same time, once I knew Dad’s final wish was to be scattered off the coast of Spain, I felt I was the only person who could stake claim to that job. Cathy had moved in with another guy already. A biker guy or a truck driver, I thought. She was still in St. George. Still working at the market, too, and I did not want to have any more information than that. Perhaps I thought she moved on too quickly, and perhaps it had taken me far too long.
Either way, I’d earned the right to scatter that jackass.
So I stood in front of an overly painted prostitute and thought about my dead father and his ashes. His final wish would now be officially my problem.
Cathy had said, “I really want to take him, but I know I might never be able to. You know. And I think you probably might make it one day. Your dad said you’re really resourceful. Maybe you can come get him, and make sure you take an awful lot of pictures of Cádiz for me.” As I was feeling progressively more awful for Cathy, a young blonde hooker appeared at the other prostitute’s side.
10,000 Miles with My Dead Father's Ashes Page 3