10,000 Miles with My Dead Father's Ashes

by Devin Galaudet

  Two hundred was not a lot of money under normal circumstances. However, my new normal searched all the pockets of my clothes for stray, crumpled dollars. I was sixty bucks overdrawn at the bank.

  However, now was different, and I did not want to look as penniless as he was. “I would love to send it, but I have this thing going on over here, and most of my liquid is tied up. It’s really wild, if I had more time, I would tell you about it.”

  Dad said, “I don’t know if it is as good as what I have going on over here, but if you can’t help out your old man, what’s a caring father to do.”

  I reached for my cigarettes and found the pack empty. “How about in a few days? When I do I will send a tray.” It was something about the way I said the word “tray,” as if I were pushing my play by offering him more imaginary money. There was a waver in my voice. The kind of cracking voice that dogs understood as weakness. It spoke volumes to Dad. We both knew that I had no intention of sending him money. And hearing him take a slow drag on his cigarette from the other end of the receiver let me know that the game was up and I had lost.

  The fact I had nothing to give him was irrelevant. I should have kept an emergency stash in case he needed it. I should have taken care of him the way he took care of me when he was around. None of these thoughts might have been a reasonable account, but it was the way we played. I imagined he would have robbed a bank, lied, cheated, and stolen to get me what I needed. During his long pause, I wondered why he was not lying, cheating, and stealing on his own behalf, but intuitively I knew he wanted the money from me.

  His singsong voice flattened to disdain, a prerecorded message that played, “Yeah, that’ll be great.”

  “Great, where are you staying these days, and I will get it out to you as soon as possible,” I said.

  He said, “Don’t worry, I’ll find you. Your old man is like the wind.”

  Then he hung up the phone, in many ways, for a final time.

  I had avoided giving him two hundred dollars I did not have. I then shouted, “Fuck you, you asshole. Go find your own fucking money,” at the phone that sat on the brown carpeting in my living room.

  The guilt crept in. I should have borrowed money, sold my car, had a garage sale, and sold the heavy bag that dangled from the ceiling. Later that night, I knocked over an overstuffed amber glass ashtray into my brown shag carpeting and left the butts and ash in a pile on the floor. I punched the heavy bag bare-knuckled until the knuckles on my right hand tore open. The frayed skin on my hand seemed well-earned. When I finished punching, I poured alcohol over my hand and breathed in the pain.

  On the plus side, the following morning I went and bought CDs on a credit card. I picked up music by Barbra Streisand and Garth Brooks and played love songs on my guitar while my heavy bag swayed from the ceiling. As much as I wanted to be some beer-guzzling tough guy, a charming, slippery character, I did not wear it well. I resented looking at the shoes people wore, looking for the outline of a knife in a back pocket or someone eyeing the crowd at the bar with too much interest. There were too many potential weapons and crazies. Living with Dad’s paranoia was too much work, and the creepy dark cloud followed me everywhere. I was still trying to be like him and it had taken a toll. Without him, I preferred a good story. I was a straight guy that liked literature and show tunes. I needed a change but worried it might be in the genes.

  ✴✴✴

  “I want to go home.” For her, this would be a medium-sized town in the Pacific Northwest. And she was my then girlfriend, Chris. We had been sitting on the couch in the middle of the night, neither one of us able to sleep.

  She had silky golden hair, powder-blue eyes, full lips, and poreless skin that made her appear more honest than she was. She left block print notes that read, “Cee you thair in ten minuts,” and then did not show up. She wrote many charming notes littered with spelling mistakes that became less charming as time wore on. Technically, she was my fiancée, and not my first.

  I had come home in the middle of the night claiming to leave for a pack of cigarettes without returning and she met me in the street wearing an oversized blue nightshirt that had trouble containing her boobs. “You’re an asshole,” she said, and hit me across the arm.

  I flinched, with my arms lamely defending myself. I wore a small T-shirt, which exposed my skinny arms to the night air, and extremely faded blue jeans with nothing but white strands at the knee that held the pants together. I stank of cigarettes and vodka, and I took several big steps back. Without thinking, I grabbed a handful of the strands and tore them out. When Chris moved forward, I took her hand and said, “I love you. I am so sorry.” I twisted the strands and tied them around her ring finger on her left hand in a double knot. “Married in the eyes of God,” I said.

  I woke in the morning, my head filled with gravel, to Chris’s voice on the phone with her mother. She sat on the green mohair couch I had taken from the store with her arm fully extended, admiring the twine wrapped around her finger.

  Problem averted and another started.

  I eventually found a hand-painted porcelain ring at a swap meet for five dollars when the “married in the eyes of God” ring disintegrated on her hand in a bar. Dad only said, “You’re a fucking idiot, but she seems like an okay girl. Remember—this is it. It’s not getting any better. So have an escape plan.”

  I didn’t need one.

  She said, “I miss the drizzly, gray days. It makes my skin prickle.” Her reason was good enough for me. We looked for the fastest way to get her back home. That night, I surfed the alleys connected to several department stores until I came home with three cardboard television boxes and a thick roll of packing tape suitable for all her stuff.

  I eventually put my then fiancée on a bus that left in the middle of the night from a bar that sold Russian beer and played quartet jazz to hipsters. The location was San Julian and Sixth Street, and we met the Green Tortoise bus line in the parking lot of the bar, a bus line known as being the cheapest possible means of transportation on earth and perhaps best known for caravanning Dead Heads around the country. The bus’s doors vapor-locked open like Tupperware that belched out the smell of vacuum-packed garbage, body odor, and cheap dope.

  Unfortunately, it was not Tupperware. It was a bus.

  And it was not rotten eggs. It was people.

  I looked at my future former fiancée with a bit of pity. As people rolled out of the bus to stretch and find oxygen, I held my breath and leaned into open doors of the bus to see what my future ex had to look forward to. There were worn sleeping bags strewn about next to boxes, tattered suitcases, and unconscious people. Everything was dusted in a distinct layer of cracker crumbs. The bus lacked seats, so people piled in on an open spot of awkward metal flooring to create what I saw as a human stew. It must have been even more disgusting once inside with the doors closed. I waved my girlfriend toward the entrance and said, “Seattle awaits,” although I should have said, “This sucks. Let’s get you a plane ticket,” but I didn’t. Chris hugged me one last time from the top step of the bus and climbed aboard before sitting down on an open bag of Doritos. There was no heart-wrenching final goodbye, and I watched the Green Tortoise pull away and cough its way through the vagrants and fog of late-night Los Angeles on to her new life without me.

  In many ways, it paralleled my relationship with Dad, an empty, heartless goodbye. This was my bigger issue. What happened to Dad? Sure, I had grown used to a lifetime of his unreliability and even short-term disappearances, but this was different. It was the late eighties and Dad had officially disappeared. I was in my early twenties and had not heard from him in two years.

  Little did she know, I had been told by Dad, numerous times over the years, that I knew nothing. I didn’t know where he was living, where he was working, or how to track him down. It was easy not to know anything. I had no clue where he was. I was still moping around after Chris
left but found pills, booze, and floozies a reasonable enough substitute, when the phone rang before dawn on a weekday.

  I let it ring several times before answering without a hello—another tactic Dad taught me. A woman’s voice began, “Hello. Hello. Devin?” The voice wasn’t familiar. She sounded upset and hurried. Between the time of the call and her tone, I knew it was likely about Dad. “Can I help you?” I asked.

  “Is this Devin, Dave’s son? He gave me your number,” she said.

  It would not be the last time Dad would use me as some sort of ethical collateral. Because I didn’t know her and had been taught well, I repeated, “Can I help you?”

  She was confused and out of breath. She said, “Yesterday, I locked up and there were forty cars on the lot. I told him, ‘See you tomorrow, Dave.’ And in the morning, nothing. Not one car. They are all gone.”

  As she spoke, I knew Dad had stolen all her cars.

  “Who are you?”

  She stopped talking for a moment, was taken aback by my question.

  “I’m Sheryl,” she started, making a point to fully articulate her name, “your dad’s partner. I just don’t know what to do. He always said not to call the police, but what if something is wrong?”

  “Where are you calling from?”

  Again, she stopped suddenly before slowly answering, “Our lot’s in Florida…” She continued talking, but I stopped listening.

  I thought, “Okay, Dad’s by Fred, my uncle.”

  Fred was Dad’s younger brother by a year, but the two could not be more opposite. Fred exercised and did not drink or smoke. Fred was reliable and stayed in the same place for his whole life. I made a mental note to call Fred later. As she talked, I felt little in the way of sympathy for her, but this call was good news. Dad was alive and doing well. He had just stolen forty cars, or its hot-market cash equivalent.

  “I’m not sure what to do,” she said, “so I called you. Do you know what’s happened?”

  She began to cry on the phone.

  I told her I had to be at work.

  Two days later, the phone rang again. She said, “I know you must know something. How could you not? He said you guys had a close relationship. He said you talked all the time. He’s your father. You know where he is. If you don’t, then you should know where he is.”

  She was right. I should have known where he was. I had been trained not to ask too many questions or expect too many answers. It was a futile place. She was angry. I knew the feeling well. When my sadness and disappointment did not stand up for themselves, my anger did.

  I listened and paced around the room on tiptoes. The old hardwood had places it creaked. I didn’t want her to think that anything she said held meaning for me. I didn’t want to sound like something she said made me anxiously pace around a room on a telling floor. Still, her hostility made it easy to be a little passive-aggressive.

  “Yeah, I don’t know what to tell you, but I wish you good luck finding him, and tell Dad that I send my love.” I detached, but with enough consciousness to measure in angry sarcasm, which I knew pissed her off. While her anger plotted to confront me, my indifference to her plight and loyalty to Dad had the same opportunity. Still, I didn’t want her to get me involved in this, so I backed off. “Listen, I am sorry, I have not spoken to Dad in ages and I live three thousand miles away.”

  “What you did is illegal and wrong,” she said, and then implied Dad was a shady character and that he and I had been planning this all along. Compassion crept in. I wondered what the woman on the other end of the phone looked like. That’s when it struck me. I needed to end this call. I was not his caretaker.

  I said, “Do you think he would make a big deal about my closeness with him, then have him give you my number and then when you get screwed, you think he is going to come to me telling me about it? Are you nuts? You lost your business. I lost my father. I’ll probably never hear from him again. For all I know, he could be dead trying to sell or protect your cars.” Then, I slammed the handset down on the receiver.

  I doubted he was dead, he was too slippery, but I did pace the creaky floors as if I were right.

  Over the next several weeks, I received a few garbled phone machine messages from the sad woman in Florida, which ranged from fuming to distraught to pleading. Each message reminded me that her financial life was ruined. She was in debt. I also had heard nothing from Dad. I was right. Dad didn’t call for a long while.

  I never called her back.

  ✴✴✴

  After I cut up my suits and threw them over the ravine near my apartment, I ran from Northern California. I spent months bouncing around Europe. I drank beers, chain-smoked, and chased women who spoke with strange foreign accents who gave me food and shelter. I funded the rest with a pilfered credit card from my mother. Emotionally, I vacillated between thinking I was bulletproof and wearing a macramé sweater vest. Dad disappeared completely.

  I returned to the safety net of Los Angeles with a plethora of escapade-like stories and a swaddling malaise of sadness over my life that seemed more fitting of a midlife crisis. I was twenty-seven and had no game plan. Within a week of my arrival, I dreamed that I needed to visit a local spiritual bookstore where books would fly off the shelves and change my life.

  In the morning, I visited the now defunct Bodhi Tree bookstore on Melrose. Strolling down the aisles of homemade bookcases, among the smells of patchouli incense, flower petal tea, and tie-dyed shirts, I browsed in the used section for spiritual books. I carefully scanned as I read the spines for something out of the ordinary, something that might jump out at me. I looked for the “change your life in a meaningful way” section.

  I just wanted to believe in something and was willing to do most anything. I visited pointy-topped churches and bowed at synagogues. I cleaned the mikveh, which is a disgusting job. I read the Qu’ran, the Tao Te Ching, and Zoroaster. Over time I found my niche.

  I was back at the mystical bookstore and picked up a copy of Magick Without Tears, written by the dubious Aleister Crowley, a nineteenth- and twentieth-century occultist/screwball. The book entertained me as I flipped through its complicated wording about spiritual alchemy, but what I found most intriguing, stuck between a couple of pages, was a business card that had a funny symbol and a phone number. I set the business card on my nightstand and I took it as a sign. I looked at the card every day until I finished the book.

  The following afternoon, I picked up the card and dialed the number. My hand shook while the phone rang several times. I hung up from nervous excitement. I walked into my closet and pulled the chain to turn on the light. Then I walked down the hall and into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. I sat down. Then I stood up. Then I dialed the number again. A woman’s recorded voice said, “Please leave a message.”

  I hung up the phone. What does that mean? Is it code for something? I asked myself. I walked into my closet, then into the kitchen. I ate a yogurt. I sat down and called the number again.

  The recorded voice answered and beeped. “Hi,” I said, “I am not sure I should be calling you but perhaps I should.” I stood up and paced around the living room. “If you think I should be calling you because I have the right number, please call me back. Maybe we have a lot in common.” I didn’t know what I was referring to. I left my number but not my name and hung up the phone again. I sunk my head in my hands and thought, What the hell was that? I had watched way too many horror movies.

  Two days later, I came home to a flashing red light on my answering machine. I ran across the room and hit the play button as I jumped in place. The woman’s voice said, “I am not sure who you are, but maybe you should have called. You have our number.”

  It was another sign. I called back immediately, bouncing across the room. I did not know it at the time, but I celebrated feeling that someone was going to fix me. I felt something better than any drug I had
ever taken: I felt hope.

  “Yes, I think I should be calling you. I just think that. What should I do? There is something to do, right?” I enthusiastically yammered for another minute as if I’d found a sack of unguarded money. Two days later I received an address inviting me to what I assumed was an underground lair, an underground lair meeting on Wednesday at seven o’clock at night.

  The street was dark and the house set behind a large shade tree. The blinds were closed and a crack of amber light slipped between the curtains and out into the street. Whispers sounded as I stepped up to the landing, which had a big globe at the doorway with a huge, sturdy oak door that felt like bricks when I knocked on it.

  “Come in,” a voice said.

  I pushed against the big door, which dragged on the carpet and revealed a crowded room of fifteen people squeezed together. “Have a seat,” a man in his forties said, who sat in front of them and wore a dark sweater and had a ponytail. He held a whiteboard covered in gibberish. The room smelled of dry-erase markers and oldness. The people were an eclectic mix of hippies, preppies, slobs, and intellectuals.

  After I closed the door, I sat on the floor and listened. It was the tarot, but Hebrew numbers and correspondences to the planets, and loads of symbolism that floated way above my head. The conversation and questions were as dense as the oak front door, and I was mesmerized.

  Six months later, I found myself in a smoky room filled with the heavy scent of incense, blindfolded and being asked to adhere to strict principles and take serious direction to explore who I was and what I wanted, in the most flowery of arcane language, or face the awful and unseen consequences provided by an elegant, yet humorless, universe that rang more like Christianity. It was the most fantastically creepy moment in my life, and I had no idea what I was doing.

  I stood dressed in a white robe, which could only be described as an ill-fitting dress. After a multitude of wordy speeches from the guy with the ponytail and a few somber agreements on my part, I found myself initiated into the top-secret world of modern occultism, which is a little bit of witchie-poo accoutrements, unisex robes, and alphabet math.