“Dad, this is horrible, but I can’t stop watching.”
Toward the end of the first match, when the matador finally found the bull’s off switch and the bull’s carcass was eventually dragged away, I imagined Dad must have had his own final moment that felt like the bull. He lay in front of the television in his tattered boxers, smoking down yet another cigarette next to a billowing ashtray after having been jabbed one too many times during his life, thinking, Okay, kill me now. And the Universe said, “Gotcha.”
✴✴✴
After the start of the second slaying, I admitted to Dad, “So I don’t know what the hell is going on.” An English-speaking Spaniard named Mario, who sat a few seats away, began to bend my ear about the nuanced points of bullfighting and the national pride felt “by every Spaniard” about it. He wore a wide-brimmed hat and chain-smoked brown cigarillos in a way that made those around him slide away. His wrinkled button-down shirt stretched, leaving pale gaps of stomach that would make sensible people pray for zippered clothing. We spoke in turns over a beleaguered young couple who sat between us until he bulled his way into the seat closest to me—sandwiching me between his cigarillos and Dad’s beer—and pushed the young couple to the other side of him.
He explained, “Ah yes, footwork, concentration, and stillness, this shows the true heart of a warrior.” I cozied up to his nicotine cloud. The matador hopped as the two-thousand-pound brown bull ran a tight circle around him, and Mario jumped out of his seat.
“Oh, did you see that? Appalling,” he said as he pointed toward the ring, and jeers filled the arena. “Such a tragedy. He is too frightened.” Then he waved his arm toward the ring with disgust. “Ach, you have to wait to see a real matador, one that has experience and finesse.”
He kept talking about feet positions and posture, and I faded away to liberate peanuts from their shells. I scanned the seats around me, watching all the portly men with opinions about the match. I finally said, “But isn’t the bull just going to die at the end?”
Mario flung his arms out wide and said, “Of course. It is too easy to kill this thing. There is always more perfection and more to discuss.”
As dead bulls piled up and the sun sank lower on the horizon, Mario continued to educate me on the bullfights. In between the action, I told Mario about Dad, Cádiz, “Ave Maria,” and the roller derby. The bullfight replayed itself several more times, always punctuated with the sharp end of a long sword.
I sat depressed as Mario lectured on, and the rise and fall of the cheers and boos moved without cease. My malaise broke when the man on the other side of Dad tried to move the beer to the ground, and I watched as foam slid over the brim of the paper cup and down its sides.
The arena was hot and crowded. People wanted to stretch out, but I didn’t care. I told him, “Mi padre es muerto, pero quiere cervasa.”
Dad is dead, but still wants beer.
I said it with a half smile to calm any frayed nerves, but I had already decided to punch him in the mouth and get arrested. The Spaniard was thin, well-dressed, had thick dark hair and sunglasses, and sat next to his pretty girlfriend. He waved his hands at me, as if to say, “Come on, put your drink on the floor so I can have a few extra inches of space.”
I put the beer back on the bench. It was the space I had paid for and that was Dad’s spot. I stood up with vinegar in my veins and I flexed my boney arms. The prospect of getting thrown into jail on Dad’s behalf, defending his seat, would have been the honorable thing to do. The slender and stylish man looked at me as if I were a nut. I remember thinking that if Dad’s ashes were there, I would have beat the guy with them. I could almost see the gray cloud of Dad floating over our seats as his jug broke open.
Then Mario stood up and put his hand on my shoulder. “I think we should enjoy the bullfights again.” I turned to Mario, saw his kind face. The anger in me died quickly and I sat down.
Dad was proud. I could feel it. So I sat there with Mario and Dad on uncomfortable benches and watched a little more death until the sun fell behind the arena and everything felt colder.
I left before the last match and thanked Mario. I could not just leave the beer representing Dad sitting in the sun and so I carried him through the aisle and up the stairs, my back to the arena as the next bull stormed into it.
After several years of sobriety, I was not going to drink the beer, regardless of the obvious poetry. Then, it crossed my mind to dump it in the garbage can, which might have been poetic on another level. Instead, I slowly poured the beer in a thirsty, oversized plant just outside the arena.
Just as I wanted more from the bull, I wanted more from my father’s final moments than to be filled with fighting and flailing. The reality is Dad had died alone in a crappy mobile home in a crappy trailer park in a crappy town. It was a far cry from what I had hoped or expected of him. In both cases, the deaths of the bulls and Dad were sad but predictable. It gnawed at me in a distant way.
I did not want to think about Dad and watch a bull get slaughtered at the same time. The two had too much in common. I wanted to remember Dad only as a badass.
✴✴✴
Sheer, striped-print curtains hung from cheap white rods and blew softly in the April breeze. Dad and I lay on our bellies watching Vin Scully, the voice of Dodgers baseball, while eating from a tray of Ritz crackers and a jar of Skippy peanut butter on the bed in my parents’ bedroom. I was thirteen, and the Dodgers were playing the Chicago Cubs.
Although the Cubs were in last place, for one summer, we never missed a televised game. Dad wasn’t much of a fan, but he never let an opportunity to reminisce about his days growing up in Chicago slide by. The stories had a similar thread: elaborations about arguments on train cars, Golden Gloves competitions, and walking down the wrong street late at night. Every story he told offered a moral of how to defend what he called a “life of integrity.”
This day he would tell me about how he ran into and eventually arm-wrestled Ernie “Mr. Cub” Banks for twenty bucks. I remember how he described things with enthusiastic hand gestures, biceps flexing, and a mock demonstration of the event, which knocked over the jar of peanut butter, sending the butter knife across the room before landing in an open drawer of rolled socks. Even though he lost to Ernie, Dad remained my hero. He began to spin another tale about Chicago when he abruptly stopped and pointed at the window and its billowing curtain. Along with the flowing curtains was an arm reaching inside the window. It took a moment before I realized what was wrong. My heart leaped into my throat. The next thing I saw was my father, carefully and calmly sidling near the window. As Dad grabbed the arm, the scent of peanut butter filled the room, and I thought how much louder struggles are in the movies. I was equally amazed and scared. It seemed graceful as my father pulled the arm farther through the window with one hand as the other hand reached toward an old hatchet he kept in the top dresser drawer for situations like this.
Dad made a point of showing me all of the locations throughout the house where he had hidden weapons. When I was younger, he pulled an eighteen-inch pipe from between the cushions of the couch, one end carefully wrapped in silver duct tape for a better grip. “Remember, step into it when you swing this at someone, just like in baseball.” He stepped toward me, swinging the pipe at my ribs, stopping short of hitting me. “Go straight to the head, but the ribs are an easy target, and it is good because it sets up the second shot,” he told me. This time he backhanded the pipe toward my face, again stopping before carefully pressing the cold metal against my temple, jaw, the bridge of my nose, and neck—showing me the key strike points to get my important ideas across. “Remember, don’t be a fucking pussy. It’s just like baseball.”
He went on to explain that he preferred heavy, blunt objects for outer rooms of a house: bats in the living room, pipes in the dining room, that sort of thing. He reasoned that blunt instruments were good for breaking bones and teeth,
for negotiation without permanent injury, which might lead toward a road of rehabilitation. “Everyone deserves a second chance,” he said. However, break-ins through a bedroom window required a devious mind looking for an element of surprise on a sleeping or disabled victim, an act less worthy of forgiveness. Slicing-type weapons, he explained, were good for ending things quickly. He always told me, “Just make sure the cops understood you felt your life was in danger.”
The arm belonged to a young man, maybe in his early twenties, wearing a red-and-black football jersey, who was struggling against being pulled farther into our home. Dad’s fingers strained toward the hatchet, which was just out of his reach.
“Don’t just fucking sit there, give me a hand.”
I scrambled out of bed toward the dresser, knocking over the tray of Ritz crackers with a crash. I wanted to close my eyes and pray this would go away.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Dad grunted.
I picked up the hatchet with both hands and hesitated with it. It was dark brown cold metal with a worn wooden handle and heavier than it appeared. Outside, there was a loud bang. A second young man was now pulling the first back out the window. Dad tried to grab him with his other free hand but missed. The two men took off running and Dad leaned out window to get a better view of the thieves. He turned for his car keys, grabbed a handful of my hair, and pushed me down the hall and out the front door. The thieves were running down the street as we hopped into Dad’s gold Chevy van, the kind with the bubble window in the back, and raced after them.
My hands gripped tightly around the hatchet. I tried not thinking about what might happen. Still, I imagined having to swing the hatchet full force at one of the guys. In my mind, I saw blood spatter and Dad egging me on to do it again.
We skidded to a stop in front of Mr. Roberts’ house as they ran up the driveway. “Those fucking morons are trapped,” Dad said, smirking, and he reached behind the driver’s side seat, pulling out a monkey wrench. I knew he was right. The Roberts’ had tall fences in their yard. He looked at me and then calmly said, “Don’t be a pussy, all right? Be a man and defend your fucking home.”
We both got out of the car and walked up the driveway. Dad held the monkey wrench in one hand with its head resting on the top of his shoulder. We then walked past Mr. Roberts’ guava tree. On more restful afternoons, Dad and I would occasionally stop by and feast on overripe guava that had fallen in the grass. The two were trying to scale a tall black sheet-metal fence in the Roberts’ yard. When they saw us, the one wearing the blue zipper-front hooded sweatshirt turned and charged toward us. His jeans were cuffed and his hands were clawed, which did make sense to me, but I still didn’t know how to defend it. His tennis shoes slipped slightly on the wet grass just as he got to my father. He seemed to move in slow motion. I knew I had enough time to get a good swing at him, but my arms felt like Jell-O, my legs buried in cement.
Dad brought the wrench off his shoulder and down across the guy’s temple. The sound was full, much bigger than I had expected. The bones broke simultaneously throughout the entire side of his face. His body went limp before falling backward in the same way old football clips showed opposing players driven into the ground by Dick Butkus. The guy lay on his back in an unnatural position in the damp grass, and the whites of his eyes bulged through his closed eyelids in a way I had never seen before.
The guy with the red-and-black jersey looked much younger than he did when he was dangling in my parents’ bedroom window. He began to sob. “I’m sorry. We are poor. I promise never to bother you again. I know nothing. Please, please leave me alone.”
I knew he was telling the truth and felt badly for him. Dad paused for a moment and then gestured, as if to usher him past us and down Mr. Roberts’ driveway. With great hesitation, he started for the driveway. When he got in front of me, Dad yelled, “Be a man and fucking crack this guy. Do it now!” Without thinking, I raised up the hatchet with both hands. The young man covered his face with his hands.
“Dad, I can’t do this. I really want to, but he said he was sorry—and I don’t know if I could do it anyway.” There was another pause, then Dad stepped forward and came up with the wrench, catching the first guy underneath the chin, snapping his head back and spraying blood across my Los Angeles Dodgers Home Field T-shirt, before he hit the ground.
Dad turned toward me in disgust and nodded at his van. Halfway down the driveway, he put his arm around me. Neither one of us looked back. Dad methodically buckled up for the half-block ride home. I knew what had happened was wrong. Still, I rarely thought about those men—boys, really—again. Dad had a strong code of ethics about taking care of the family, because no one else would.
There had to be a penalty when we were crossed. There had to be a reaction.
“Don’t worry, they won’t be back. I think they learned something today. Everyone deserves a second chance.” He swiveled, turning around in the driver’s seat before sliding the monkey wrench back in its usual place, and then turned the ignition. As we pulled in front of our house, I felt older. He smiled at me and said, “You can let go of the hatchet now.” He was still my hero.
✴✴✴
After I put down the hatchet, Dad and I started drifting apart. The drift was both cosmic and practical. From the practical side, I had solid reason to take shelter from Dad’s life lessons. He was nuts. I still appreciated Dad’s manliness, unpredictability, and the obvious respect he received, but I was growing up. The next four years passed quickly and had become like a video game. With each new level, everything moved faster, less time to react, more room for error, so much to explore.
I spent most of my free time playing the Atari 2600 Tank Battle game against the computer, holed up in my room surrounded by half-eaten plates of food. My grades nosedived. I felt insecure and awkward. My face turned red and erupted in zits. The process was primal. I had questions, but I did not know what they were. I would not have asked even if I knew. I lived in a house without discussion. Communication revolved around basic questions about survival or the acceptance of a demand.
“Is Dad home?” I asked my mother.
“No,” she said.
“Is there anything for dinner?”
“It is in the pot from last night. Get it yourself.”
I was un-uniquely miserable and alone.
I began to steal and snoop during the summer before middle school. I crouched on the cold tile counter in the kitchen when no one was home. The small brown bottles were lined up on the second shelf next to the chocolate Ex-Lax bar. I took one pill from every brown container and broke off five squares of the Ex-Lax, which tasted good in the beginning yet was problematic later. I snuck the pills into my room. This was not a conscious effort on my part to learn what any of the pills did. I just knew that they were supposed to do something, and I wanted something different. I woke up dazed, and then I sat on the toilet for an hour. This was no deterrent.
A week later, I found myself in the living room closet. It was a dark vacuum of curious debris. It had historically become the hiding place for my Christmas presents and anything else that could be described as miscellaneous. In it I found on the floor a 1970s Playboy magazine and a fancy bottle of Drambuie liqueur.
Within the year, I routinely disappeared to sneak pills, smoke cigarettes, think about women, and seek out more porn when the closet Playboy became too familiar. I discovered a Dorothy Stratton Playboy in a nearby sewer, which was better than finding money. Damp filth slathered across it. I lay in the gutter and stretched my arm deep into the sewer’s grate, but I couldn’t reach it. The habit of searching alleys and sewers for free things extended the thrill of stealing and getting something for nothing. I struggled with Dorothy’s manhole cover and finally pried it up with a small crowbar I had stolen from my father. I muscled the manhole cover over far enough to fit into the sewer. Thick, rotting goo covered the magazine, but I decide
d after all the work to get it, I had to keep it, and took it home with a sense of accomplishment. I threw it in the ivy-covered walkway between my room and a fence billowing with vines for later use. When the clumped pages of Dorothy stopped working, I began to steal porn from several of the local mini-markets, not to mention cigarettes and pills.
In time, I added gambling into my every day, starting with the Rossmore shuttle bus to Hollywood Park, where I gave the tall, delinquent kids money to bet on the horses when I should have been in English class. I imagine this was my attempt to find a kind of adolescent independence and something to quell an almost constant feeling of fear. My new hobbies fueled another reason not to see Dad: I didn’t want to get caught.
By the time I was fifteen, I had built a complicated, satisfying, secret life.
I crawled under the bed, tore a hole in the bottom of the box spring, and filled it with my personal contraband: stray cigarettes, a cheap Bic lighter, a few cans of Budweiser, a pack of Zig-Zags, a bud or two of cheap dope, a travel-sized mouthwash, cough drops, and several toilet paper squares wrapped around a small cache of blue Valiums, white Vicodin, and a few highly prized Quaaludes—my favorites.
The porn was harder to hide because under the mattress was simply too cliché. I eventually pulled up the carpeting in my closet, threw the stash of porn under the unstapled corner, and piled my junk on top. The Dorothy Stratton issue started to stink from soaking in the gutter water and so I pushed her out under my bedroom window screen into the ivy-strewn side of the house, to eventually be eaten by rats. The bottle of Drambuie was slowly sipped away and refilled with olive oil—as if no one would notice—and then carefully thrown away in Dorothy’s sewer when I felt certain the bottle that hid in the back of the closet had been forgotten.
10,000 Miles with My Dead Father's Ashes Page 7