10,000 Miles with My Dead Father's Ashes

by Devin Galaudet

  The blonde posed with her hand on her hip, open-mouthed, with small blue eyes, and she wore a red formfitting tube dress without a hint of underpants. She was no more than twenty-two. “Really a pleasure. I’m Charlotte,” she said, extending her hand like royalty and throwing in a half curtsy for good measure. I took her hand, and she turned a full circle and squealed with glee as she wrapped my arm around her. She took a moment to gyrate into my pelvis before spinning back out and finished with another curtsy. It was a dance move that she had practiced well. Then she pulled me to her and whispered into my ear, “I want you.” She stroked my hand, licking her lips, and staring alternately into my eyes and crotch, and Jerry said to the ladies, “Do you mind if I chat with my partner?”

  He looked back and forth to both women.

  I looked behind me to see where his partner was.

  He took me by the arm and pulled me out of Charlotte’s grip and walked me over to that dead casino game with the giant spinning wheel.

  Once we were out of earshot, Jerry said, “So, what do you think?” then he looked back at Audrey and Charlotte, who sent come-hither winks and blew kisses at us.

  I said, “I think they’re both retarded, but I think yours is the worse of the two.”

  “No, what do you really think?” he said. He then smiled toward them, nodding his head.

  “Really,” I said, “I think they are both retarded.”

  Off to the side, bells chimed to announce a jackpot.

  “Well,” Jerry said, “I think Audrey and Charlotte are a pair and they come as a package deal. They want eight hundred bucks for the two of them. What do you think?”

  I thought about dumping Charlotte at a shelter for runaways. I thought about getting Audrey in a headlock and scrubbing her face clean with lava soap and a steel wool pad. Mostly, I thought about getting out of Vegas.

  “No, dude, I am not in,” I said.

  I was—am—no saint, but a wave of judgment filled me. I am also really cheap. Besides, this was Vegas. There were about a million drunken women running around waiting to have a story to tell, but Jerry did not want to work that hard. I moralized myself above the trappings of Vegas. I had moved beyond the gambling and drinking but not beyond obnoxious self-righteousness.

  Jerry put his hands to his head in exasperation. “How much petty cash do you have in your room?” he asked, and before I could answer, he continued, “Okay, so I am going to take them both. So we’ll go back to the room. You’ll go to your room and get the eight hundred. No, make that nine—I think the Chink will take it in the ass. Then you come back to my room with us and hang for a little while.”

  I threw my hands out while I flung my head and shouted at the ceiling. “What for?” I said. “I am ready to take a nap. How about I drop off the money and split immediately, good? I don’t need to be there.” I was okay with him using the money that we needed to administer a huge commercial, but hanging around with Jerry and the hookers for another fifteen minutes seemed unreasonable.

  Jerry looked down and shook his head. “Naw, man, I have to take a huge shit. I can’t have them sitting around in my room by themselves.” I grumbled to myself and paced in a small circle. I felt like a weasel for not quitting on the spot. He was distracted and said, “It’s settled then.” He and I walked back to the prostitutes and he said, “So, babies, how about we party?”

  I sat quietly as fluorescent lights bounced off the windshield on the cab ride back to the hotel. Jerry and the hookers laughed up a storm.

  At the hotel, I made small talk with the girls while Jerry took a crap that shook the walls and created a palpable stink, easily outmatching the ceiling fan above our heads. Charlotte pulled out one impressive breast, double-checking my commitment to not fucking her.

  “It’s quite lovely,” I said. And it was.

  I guessed she wanted no part of Jerry.

  Charlotte tucked away her boob and sat on the couch next to Audrey. Both seemed oblivious to the stench that seeped through the walls. Jerry emerged like a breaching whale wearing aftershave that smelled like Pine Sol and said, “Ladies! Heh, heh, heh.”

  I gave Jerry $1,000 in petty cash and leaned in to remind him that I was not responsible if there was a problem repaying the till. Before I went to sleep, I jerked off thinking about Charlotte’s one impressive breast. Then I dreamt about the awful trailer park my dad died in. In the morning, I would drive to St. George and see Cathy one last time.

  Chapter 2

  Cathy greeted me like an old friend in the trailer park where she and Dad lived. I felt nothing. The ride up from Vegas had me thinking about why. Why Dad disappeared. I wish I could say that we had some major falling out, but I can’t. He and Mom divorced when I was twenty, and he left for good. It was not entirely surprising. I always remember him as a drifter at heart, a Boxcar Willie–type always looking for a joyride to parts unknown, but I never expected a mobile home in the desert with cinder block steps and shag carpet that reeked of cigarettes.

  And then eighteen years after that, here were Cathy and I lunching and chatting about her family, me struggling to pay attention and mostly wanting to leave from the moment I had arrived. After Cathy gave me Dad’s ashes, I placed them in the front seat of my car. He was in a small, brown vinyl satchel with drawstrings on it. I stared out at the Red Rock Mountains and considered the journey back to Los Angeles, the miles that lay ahead.

  The plan was to have one final talk, to catch up, no matter how one-sided it might be. The man-to-man talk that was so long overdue. I would talk about the parts of my life he missed, as there were many. I would tell him all about what became of his family. Maybe throw in a few anecdotes about old friends. I turned the ignition, revved the engine, looked down at the leather bag that contained my father, and realized there would be no talk. Regardless of my personal belief in a thriving spirit world, he was no longer here. And more importantly, I had nothing to say.

  After I returned home from St. George and Vegas, things were supposed to go back to normal. Instead, I checked the refrigerator every fifteen minutes, paced the living room, missed sleep, checked my email compulsively—anything to avoid Dad and the strange pang of honoring him biting at my heels. He was a jerk, after all.

  Guilt finally won out several weeks later, and I decided that Dad needed a funeral. Well, that I needed to have a funeral for him. A funeral is one of those customs both appropriate and barbaric to me. There is something to be said for celebrating those we love by feeling sad in a group and taking a moment to say flowery things about life and death. However, it is also a fuss and an expense, and perhaps I understood why Dad wanted nothing to do with the ritual.

  At the same time, I have often wondered if Dad’s decision to go without a funeral had more to do with being alienated by and owing money to most of his family. I wondered if he thought no one would show up or say something nice about him. Still I wanted something for me, a chance to say goodbye. I imagined it as celebration of the contributions he had made on this planet—at least the positive ways he had influenced me.

  I might have made the drive to St. George, Utah, to pay my respects under the willow tree and wear black. I imagined myself sitting cross-legged by his gravesite attempting to ask questions. Even in my imagination, though, there was nothing more than the breeze or far-off birds chirping. None of my questions would be answered, but the ritual has a way of washing a situation clean, even if a funeral in St. George would have been foreign and unfamiliar to me.

  I wanted to have the funeral my way, in familiar surroundings, as a way to have some control over him beyond simply saying goodbye. I wanted something to acknowledge that I was upset by Dad’s death, and I wanted to be purified. However, in hindsight, I also wanted to get sympathy for the way Dad disassociated himself from me and died in a rusted-out trailer, cigarette still burning in his hand, in a section of town that I can only charitably describe as �
�lowend.” A place the dad I knew would have described as a “fucking shithole filled with idiots.” I wanted a cosmic apology from him living his life differently than what I wanted. Or I wanted tears from my friends for my grief.

  There had to be a funeral.

  ✴✴✴

  The lights had been dimmed and several candles lit. It was dusk, and the golden light cast warm shadows through the cracks between the drapes. A single white rose sat on the altar I had made out of low-grade plywood and painted black.

  My fellow initiates sat in a half moon on a variety of mismatched chairs. We wore white ceremonial robes and sat in silence until I stood up and placed the brown sack with Dad’s ashes in it next to the white rose. I can only imagine what my father would have said.

  I assumed Dad had received an ethereal invitation to the event and was floating at the top of the room as a puff of smoke, looking down with his arms folded across his chest, trying to make sense of the scene. Dad, while not a caveman philosophically, would not have seen much value in my occult sensibilities. I stood and walked to the west side of the altar, lighting a big pinch of pungent incense. The sharp odor filled the room.

  My friends and I were all bent on celebrating the life of my father (who would have thought them all idiots) and helping me mourn the loss of Dad (who would have also thought me an idiot). This memory is firm. I had moved far, far away from Dad’s Catholic roots. He grew up surrounded by robed nuns who demanded unquestioning obedience while he wore schoolboy short pants and embraced the Virgin Mary.

  Once, growing up, I asked, “Dad, what is God?”

  He’d been on his way out of the living room, shaking a brown bottle of Maalox. He turned back with bloodshot eyes. “You want to know about God? You want to know about religion?” he said, standing there in striped boxers and looking as if I’d threatened him. “Expect beatings and poverty. It is all the same fucking deal.” Then he stopped in the doorway. “Do you want a beating? I could give you one.”

  He unscrewed the white metal cap and took a long sip of Maalox that left a chalky white film on the top of his mouth.

  I shook my head.

  Even with Dad’s disdain, I went off seeking God in my late twenties. Over the years, I had sat in churches, mosques, and synagogues. I pranced in a weed-cluttered backyard with a chubby pagan in stretch pants named Raven. I donated my time, attempted confession, wore crystals, chanted, prayed, and chakrah-ed my way through most every spiritual and religious dogma possible, finally ending up with a small group that was one part secret society, one part archaic mysticism, and one part high-school-popularity-contest losers. I liked its socially progressive leanings and one-hundred-year-old esoteric writings by Victorian snobs that tried to explain the universe in a cohesive formula that could be used by all. I gave them a B minus in content but an A plus in intellectual superiority. I decided that understanding God was a pursuit for those who had too much time on their hands, but not that day. I wanted a sign. I wanted the burning bush that made me tremble in my boots, if only for a little proof that there was some great beyond with Dad holding court in it.

  Now, the eldest woman stood in front of the altar with her short gray hair and glasses, raising her arms to the sky. She led a creative visualization about my father being in a happy place and some mentions of me seeing him finally crossing over the veil to walk amongst the light. “Go into the light,” we cajoled the sack with Dad in it. “Go into the light.”

  Surely the chanting would piss him off enough to comment.

  I closed my eyes and waited for an image of Dad flying Superman-style into a vortex of halogen light bulbs. I got nothing, and I started to cry anyway. It was a good one. I opened my mouth and started to ramble on about Dad and my extra special relationship with him. It was sincere, but not accurate. True or not, they all sat there and witnessed. The men watched and focused meditatively. The women put their arms around me and gave me what I needed: the validation for a boy who lost his father. It was all so sentimental. I was conscious enough to be grateful.

  Sure, it was silly, but no sillier than any other ritual that required an unseen world and old white men as prophets. It was here that I first truly examined the afterlife with clear goggles. It was a moment that offered me comfort and trauma. There I was, crying about my father and the light of heaven.

  Then I heard my father’s voice.

  Not the kind of fantastical voice that foretells fear or a diagnosis of a psychotic break, but the kind of familiar parental voice that weaves its way into a child’s thoughts and never quite fades away. The voice clanged, both scolding and comforting, with a practical sensibility and a way of cutting through the nonsense.

  Dad said, “What kind of bullshit is this? You’re sitting in a dress. Do you really get laid in a costume like this? Would you put on some pants?”

  “It’s a ceremonial garment,” I argued. “It’s sacred.”

  “Why don’t you just put out a few pictures of your father up around the house and move on with your life, you fucking idiot.”

  I was torn. I wanted to embrace the hopeful fable that Dad and I would one day meet again, perhaps as blooming flowers planted in the same soil, or two tree frogs on a really low branch; however, I began to have my doubts about all of it. I wanted all that stuff about religious immortality and a watchful God to be true, because having to think about the end being just an end and nothing else was a total drag. There would be no white light during the rite. I sniffled and pondered what it would be like when everything just stopped. No reincarnation, no dispersing, no knowing bullfrogs on low-hanging limbs, just unconscious nothingness.

  A few hours later, my pagan friends and I went to Koo Koo Roo’s, a quick-serve, faux-health joint, to discuss the Tree of Life and other esoteric things and eat roasted chicken slathered in an addicting house sauce. Between the genuine tears of sadness and the nagging headache that comes from fighting such tears, I thought about whether it was possible to remember only the good and simply let go of the bad. Later that night, a future ex blew me in the living room while I thought about whether the funeral accomplished anything at all.

  ✴✴✴

  The next day I threw Dad on the dresser in my bedroom and left him there for several years. There was no “Ave Maria,” no Cádiz, no gaggles of mourning, black-laced señoritas. Occasionally I’d look up at him thinking, “One of these days I ought to…” but I had not lifted a finger to make his bullshit last request of returning him “home” to Spain come true.

  The top of the dresser accidentally became a shelf for incomplete projects: the impulse-purchase mandolin that I never learned how to play, the family photo with the broken glass that needed reframing, the rainbow-colored set of paints—I don’t even remember what I wanted to do with those—the incense burner that reminded me to meditate, two unfinished paperbacks, and a small box of unorganized receipts. It looked like a tiny garage sale from my unproductive life. Fortunately, the dresser was tall and kept failure out of view.

  I am not sure what prompted the words one random afternoon, but I remember looking up at the brown vinyl bag and finally saying, “Okay, it’s time for you to go.”

  I said it out loud. My voice sounded certain, which surprised me—and also convinced me. I was again penniless, and in-between jobs, but Dad was going home.

  I dragged a green bentwood chair next to the dresser and pulled Dad down. He left a ring of bare wood where the dust could not reach. I plopped him on my bed and loosened the vinyl straps to help him breathe. Inside was a hermetically sealed, black plastic drum about a foot high, rectangular, with rounded corners and tapered at its base. It was small and sturdy. On the lid was Dad’s full name: David Henry Galaudet. With the drum came official-looking transportation documents, which I had stuffed inside for safekeeping. Below these sat a Polaroid picture of his last family. I was surprised that I missed it when I added Dad’s travel documents befor
e I left Utah, and that Dad was not a pile of carbon and bits of bone in a sack.

  Cathy was missing a couple of teeth. Sandy, who had graduated school, stood next to her new husband, Pete, who had just joined the army. His arm was around Sandy’s younger sister, Kelly, a pending baby begin to show while she held the latest one in her arms. Kelly’s guy friend, who wasn’t the father to either baby, stood with his hands in his pockets. I had taken the Polaroid picture of them in front of Kentucky Fried Chicken, which was prominent in the photo’s background. They had been nothing but nice to me, and I was still angry.

  There had been a time when I would have stood atop Dad’s pyramid. They had replaced me. I also knew calling them to sponsor a trip to scatter Dad was out of the question. I’d traded my film industry job for a hammer and a screw gun, but over the last few years I’d also written some travel articles for a trade publication read by travel agents. Up to that point, I had received a few free trips to write travel articles in-between construction jobs.

  I loved writing but felt like a fraud. I lacked technical skills and much of a vocabulary; the use of the dreaded comma baffled me. Secretly, I imagined “real” writers would find out where I lived and stab me with pointy quills while I slept until poison ink flowed through my veins. However, until that happened, I tried hard to write well and planned to lobby for a trip to Spain.

  I hoped to approach Spain’s national tourism organization and plead for free airline tickets, room and board, and whatever else I needed in order to write a fifteen-hundred-word story about Flamenco dancing, small plates of food, or Picasso. It seemed like a long shot, but nothing better came to mind.

  I also needed to justify the trip by getting the approval from the editor I was writing for. I made up an elaborate story about the importance of Spain to his readership and its importance to European history, but when he answered the phone, I told him the truth. “Hey there,” I said, “my father has been dead, sitting on my dresser in a sack, for several years. I also discovered that I own a mandolin. He is supposed to be scattered in Spain somewhere off the coast of Cádiz. It all sounds like bullshit to me, but I promised I would do it. Can I write you a story or two about Spain if I can get them to pay for the whole thing?”