“You again,” he said with an Irish accent and sneered toward Dad, who sheepishly pointed to himself and then slowly looked around him acting like “Who, me?” The bartender continued, “I have already told you never to come back, never to darken this fine establishment’s doorway. How dare you? Should I get the bat?” He reached under the bar while maintaining eye contact with Dad. I held my breath, ready to run toward the exit. I felt the warm sensation of panic rise up from my stomach and fill my face, flushed with underage guilt. Dad stared at the bartender and the bartender stared back at Dad. I looked back and forth to them both. A moment later, Dad put both his hands on his belly and laughed hard. Dad said, “This is Michael, the worst fucking tender in all of Los Angeles.” Dad then reached across the bar and hugged Michael across the shoulders.
Michael smiled wide and turned toward me. “You must be the kid,” he said, sticking out his hand. Michael had a strong, powerful grip. “I have heard a lot about you.”
Dad said, “He’ll have a Budweiser.”
Michael said, “Do you let your father order for you all the time?”
I smiled and cleared my throat and croaked out, “Just this once.”
It was on the barstools of Bergin’s that I began to see Dad as a man rather than the hero or villain. He became something beyond a mere jerk. I watched how he interacted with those around him. He lit everyone’s cigarette, hugged everyone he met. He had an endless stream of acquaintances and not a single bad thing to say about anyone. As he loosened up, he began to talk about women differently, with a chiding elbow into my ribs, “Did you catch the cans on that fucking broad?” The fact that he spoke about women outside of his marriage to my mother made no dent in my ethical understanding. I was part of the cool guys, sitting in a bar talking about “broads.”
Over time, I began to unravel his moral code from my seat at the bar. I began to understand that he had no moral code. He never directly admitted to anything, but he enjoyed people, even if he didn’t seem to trust them. It was all about word choice. To some degree, his life was just as murky to me as ever. He never knew anyone well. He just “met” a guy. He never bought or stole things. He “found” them. I remember one morning waking up to him sitting on the coffee table. There were twenty-five pieces of pristine Roseville pottery, popular, collectible, hard to find, and expensive.
I knew about the Roseville because Dad had opened a small furniture shop called Nothing’s New, a name my mother made up and still takes credit for its double-entrendre’d genius. The store was small, with one large window in the front. Inside the walls were lines with old steamer trunks, dressers, desks, tables, nightstands, vanities, and chairs. When the store was full, furniture was stacked three layers high with a middle aisle. On top of every flat surface were small sets of colored Depression glass and bud vases and old glasses or postcards, and anything else that could make a little money. The store opened at a time when antiques were particularly hip. Dad scoured antiques books to learn and develop an eye for the good stuff, although I am not sure he cared. He liked the “thrill of the hunt.”
He talked about the newly discovered treasures almost compulsively. It was also one of the few things we did as a family. We had been junking for years. Dad knew most of the dealers from all the times he sold our furniture or had to restock the living room. They all had gaunt faces with bags under their eyes. I discovered their worn-out expressions came from the hunt for the career-ending find of a priceless heirloom that would fetch millions at auction. The prospect never overcame the reality. Junking was a full-time job that saw Dad and me sifting through boxes with a flashlight in the dark and in the back of someone’s pickup truck before the swap meet started.
Of course, most of Dad’s finds came from other sources unknown.
Dad’s eyes were jaundiced and glassy, and he smelled of Budweiser. He tapped out a Salem regular before pulling out another to light. Before I said anything, Dad said, “Look what I found,” and waved his arm across the sea of pottery, plastic bags, and crumpled newspaper balls that sat on the floor of the living room. I took a moment to absorb the scene. Dad had found many things in quantity in the past: multiple sets of skis, African masks, paintings, brass beds, even some oil wells along La Cienega Boulevard. This became the first time I questioned his finds, just shortly before I started working for him. “Dad,” I said with a hint of sarcasm, “you just found twenty-five pristine pieces of Roseville pottery? That seems impossible. Did you rob someone?”
I did not expect an answer.
Dad looked at me and the amber tip of his cigarette glowed orange as he dragged in nicotine. “I have some more in the trunk. I know this guy. And what the fuck is it to you?” Then he smiled wide as if he let me in on part of a secret. Truth is, he seldom let me in on the secret, but his smirks let me know there was more to the story, which was more than most got. His smirk meant that the Roseville would be sold at far less than its value at Nothing’s New.
He started the store with a former neighbor and local muscle named Manny, who collected owed money under the cloak of darkness for businesses in the area. Manny had teeth the color of phlegm. He had dark skin and light eyes. His crooked nose trailed off to the left side of his face. He had big round shoulders, an Afro—though I was pretty sure he was white—and a gut that rivaled Dad’s. Manny was forever pulling up his pants from falling down. He also enjoyed cocaine. In many ways, he was like Dad. Manny became indebted to Dad after Dad bailed Manny out of jail for pimping and pandering.
Oddly, I loved Manny.
Even when I was young, I knew he was impulsive and unstable. Dad was a thug out of necessity from a lack of education and schooling, but Manny would have been a criminal under the most fortunate of circumstances. It was his calling. Still, there had always been a sense that Manny and Dad had an honorable agreement both based upon years of knowing each other and often dissolved at a moment’s notice. They made up just as quickly. Manny was also our next-door neighbor.
Of course, Dad and Manny’s business relationship soured quickly and required police intervention. Dad kept the store and Manny kept a few bucks as something that resembled a buyout. Without many prospects, I was ushered into the fold.
Nothing’s New taught me about life and my first real lesson came when I found Dad with an African-looking statue in the large parking area behind the store. We had just bought ten pieces of art and several strands of colorful beads from a tall African man who claimed to be a prince from Nigeria.
The statue was a primitive wood carving of a nude male with a huge dangling schlong. It had been painted black, except where the one of its long feet had been broken off.
Pointing at the break, “Do we have the foot so we can glue it back on?” I said.
He looked at me with a half smirk, “What are you, weird?” He reached down and grabbed a small handful of brown dirt from a dry puddle and rubbed it on the break to darken it. Then he snapped off the other foot and applied more dirt to the whole statue. He pulled over the hose and splatted the statue with water and then rubbed in more dirt. He motioned me inside the store and then closed the back door behind him, leaving the statue in the sun.
Within a couple of days, a man came into the store and picked up the statue. He tried to stand it up while he called to the back, where Dad polished a glass and I sat drinking a beer. “What happened to the statue?”
Dad walked to the front of the store, still cleaning the glass. “It’s from the Bumbura Tribe from Mali,” Dad said and smiled. “It’s an interesting story. This is a ceremonial burial idol. When someone died in the village, they would carve a doll like this and bury it with the body…”
The man interrupted, “Yes, but what about the feet? It’s broken.”
“No,” Dad said, “it is done on purpose. It is something the Bumburas did for only the most important people in the tribe.” Dad took the statue from the man and turned it around carefu
lly eyeing the figure. “This guy is probably a chief or a medicine man. It is hard to know from these markings.” Dad looked up to the man. “They broke off the feet so the soul never wandered away from the village.”
Pretty soon, one by one, all our African art had a tale attached after they were dirtied up. I learned the art of the story.
✴✴✴
I bought the biggest sunglasses I could find at the Oklahoma City airport to cover my black eye. I also parted my hair on the side to let my long hair fall across my face. Sort of like when I used to wear a twisted bandana around my neck anytime I received a hicky. My eye had swollen purple and yellow, and the bruising started at the top of my cheek and ended around the upper corners of my left eye. I could open and close it a little, but the dull ache at every blink reminded me that I had been punched in the face to go along with several other purple-and-yellow marks that decorated my body that had been hit. Then I sat in economy class of a Delta Airlines flight back to Los Angeles, the nonstop air-conditioning drying out my sinuses and aggravating my eye.
Dad waited for me in the airport lounge in the bar area just outside the gate. It was during a dreamy time in history when family could still meet their loved ones at the airport, in the terminal, drinking alcohol at a makeshift bar. It was a time of innocence.
As I made my way down the tunnel from the airplane into the terminal, and before my eyes adjusted to the fluorescent lights of LAX, I could hear my father’s voice above all the airport chatter.
“I knew they would hate you in Oklahoma,” he said. The hair on the back of my neck bristled. “How could they not hate you?” he continued. I still hadn’t made it out of the gate but saw him laughing, holding his stomach.
I wished I had a better story for Dad, something that started over something worth fighting over. In my fantasy bar fight scene, there would be a stare down, no blinking allowed. Patrons would whisper among themselves about the new guy looking at Tex, or some other name for a regional tough guy. The drunks at the bar would surround us like a schoolyard circle and we would then circle around each other, feeling each other out before any punch was thrown. Master Ito, a three-hundred-year-old Japanese martial arts master, who was my sensei, would accompany me. His ability to communicate with me telepathically would help me in my dismantling of all my enemies.
I had always wanted a bar fight on my résumé, something that would initiate me into a ready-for-anything manhood club. Nothing like that ever took place.
I stood at the Round Up, a cowboy bar with sawdust and peanuts shells on the floor, and tried to ignore the generic country band playing Willie Nelson covers while I prayed some girl would start a conversation with me. There was smoke in the air, colored lights, and lots of people. It was the perfect climate for a headache.
I nursed my beer belly up to the bar when a cowboy came up to the waitress station where I stood and hit me in the face, hard. Not knockout-power hard, but surprising and jarring; I didn’t see it coming. The kind of hard that snapped reality into a fuzzy dream state where an assessing voice took over.
I have just been punched in the face? No, I am not dead, but my left eye throbs. Do I know this person who just punched me? Why did he punch me? I was just standing here listening to this crappy country band. He is still standing here. He just punched me in the face again. This is all very confusing and upsetting. I should do something before he punches me in the face some more. I don’t like being punched in the face.
The conversation lasted a split second before I took action toward the cowboy hat and plaid shirt.
At the airport bar, Dad didn’t move. He sat there, slowly swirling the beer suds around in a tall glass as I slowly walked up. He had a huge sly grin. “You make your father laugh,” he said, and he let out a huge laugh and took a drag off a Salem regular. I hated his laugh. It was always at someone else’s expense. I hoped he choked on the cigarette. So I lit a cigarette to punish him by smoking at him—it was my way of saying “fuck you.” I had not had a cigarette since I left Oklahoma City. I was nuts without nicotine.
He said, “Okay, I knew you would have to be smart with one of those fucking hay-bailing types from some farm who was not interested in your mouth. Did you at least get in a punch? Something? Anything? Tell me something good. Did you represent your father well?”
I sheepishly looked at the ground. Dad then laughed wildly. “Well, no. I tried to hit him with a barstool,” I said. Dad narrowed his eyes at me like he was looking at something tiny. “The fucking guy just cracked me. I was just standing there having a beer, and bam.”
It was only after I was on the plane that I realized that the Round Up of Oklahoma City probably had ample history that required the barstools to be screwed into the ground.
“I guess we punched each other a little and then started wrestling,” I told Dad. “Then a whole bunch of guys wearing matching T-shirts pulled us apart and dragged me outside.”
I looked at the floor and avoided Dad’s amusement.
I was angry I got knocked around and proud-ish of the experience. I told Dad, “They said my kind was not appreciated in their establishment. What kind of shit is that? Then they stood there watching me and I walked back to that dump I stayed in a couple of blocks away.” I was stunned, angry, and bloodied from a cut inside my lip. I felt tougher, and proud that I didn’t get a bigger whooping from a cowboy wearing a real cowboy hat and a bolo tie, a tie I dreamed of strangling him with later that night.
I gazed into the mirror in my motel bathroom. The blood in my face pulsed as a badge of honor, and I watched my eye swell closed. I experienced the rush of my first barroom brawl. It was not much, but it was mine.
I took up boxing and some martial arts in the years that followed, under the illusion that I liked it. This changed after many “whomp” sounds that clanged against my head during every sparring session. I sucked at fighting.
However, when I stood in front of Dad in the airport lounge, I just felt like a knucklehead who had been punched out by a cowboy in Oklahoma, without a redeeming story.
“Yeah, Dad, you should see the other guy.” To this and my pathetic delivery, Dad laughed even louder, and reached across the table, wafting cigarette smoke across my nose, and gave my shoulder a squeeze before pulling my large sunglasses away from my face.
“You fool, you don’t fight with a bar stool in a bar, you fucking jerk. Stick a lit cigarette in the guy’s eye.” With his reassuring arm around me, we walked toward the exit. “Did you at least get some broad to blow you?”
“Sure, Dad,” I told him, even though we both knew it was bullshit.
Dad was right about the fighting part of it. He always told me to avoid wasting energy, get scary before the other guy does. Stick a cigarette in his eye. Break a glass in his face and move on. He had told me stuff like that twenty times. If the fight would have taken place at home in town, I know what his advice would have been. Wait a week and hit him with a hammer on the back of his head. Just fuck him up. When he was on the ground, make sure he knew who had hit him, then hit him some more.
My eyes burned as I stood in the middle of the airport feeling bruised and confronted by my thug father, who would have handled himself so much better and broken a bottle into a guy’s face before moving on. The proud-ish-ness waned. Why did I feel like a moron? Still, I wore the Eskimo Joe’s commemorative tank top until it was rotting off my back fifteen years later.
As we walked toward baggage claim at LAX, he dangled his set of store keys from Nothing’s New in front of my face. “Oh, by the way, Mr. Kickass,” he laughed. “Here are my keys to the store. I won’t be needing them. I am giving you the store and I am leaving your mother”—a statement my mother would contest, demanding that it was she who actually threw him out. His words rattled in my ears and I tried to make sense out of what he had just said.
While I grew up in a house with the dreadful constant of ja
gged arguing or unyielding quiet, I never considered that my parents would actually break up. Their otherworldly bond seemed based on rules outside the system of human logic. I could never see either of them with anyone else.
Their separation made sense and was long overdue. Unfortunately, I didn’t want to work. Selling stories was fun, but who had time for a store? My own life had been consumed by higher priorities: chain-smoking, vodka, stolen pills, ten-dollar games of seven-card stud, fast food, and the never-ending quest for an angelic slut.
I ran around with a fake ID I purchased at the Clovis Flea Market outside of Fresno, California. I used the name Drake Valentine.
Drake was the divinely inspired name that intended to be the older, smoother, and more confident version of myself. The ID was two for five dollars, and had a hand-drawn, patriotic-looking eagle in the center and a birth date ten years older than mine, with my baby-faced smirk in the upper left. For credibility, my new identification was laminated. Drake would not be caught dead at the Clovis Flea Market, but the ID worked all over the Pacific Northwest, until a bouncer from a bar catering to obese white women who wanted to hook up with black guys checked my ID against a book picturing all known California identification cards. “Sorry, man. I can’t give this back to you.” The second card was thrown out of a car when I thought a cop was going to pull me over and I got paranoid. Drake would now be in his late fifties, but likely dead from venereal disease if I could match the intention of his inspiration.
I eventually smashed the golden end of a lit smoke out in someone’s face. It was after getting a trim at Supercuts during an overcast day. The hot embers flashed across my knuckles and burned the back of my hand. I saw the black smudge across his cheek as we were pulled apart by others getting a haircut. It was pointless. I ran home before the police could arrive. Like most things from Dad’s world, it was an acquired taste with little payoff. I just kept thinking I was doing life wrong, but I was willing to learn anything to be a man, like Dad.
10,000 Miles with My Dead Father's Ashes Page 10