10,000 Miles with My Dead Father's Ashes

by Devin Galaudet

  Occultism, for me, was an escape through complex rituals of symbolism taken from the ancient Egyptians and Kabbalists. It called from the writings of Golden Dawn mystics that came from the late 1800s of Victorian England. I poured through their writings like I was on a mission. On the surface, and to the laymen, ceremonial magick is both comic fodder for horror movies and real-life evil that attempts to get chummy with guys that walk around on cloven hooves. Both views are not at all accurate.

  On the inside, the cult, my cult, was structured with lots of homework that had much more to do with self-awareness than wickedness and reading a variety of sacred scripture. Actually, most of the initiates were just looking for a safe place to be who they were hoping to be. It was all so dull but manageable, and it encouraged change. I quit smoking, drinking, and drugs. I entered into long-term, although volatile, relationships with women who had zero interest in reclaiming their inner Raven or hearing the astral Moon-silver song.

  This world was not as crunchy as it sounded. Rituals were to be performed in exactness in order to juice the symbolism in its most meaningful way and thereby creating the best-altered states of consciousness. I studied Hebrew, tarot, and the tree of life, whose glyph offered the most mental masturbation. It was fun, but thick and hard to digest, like a double bacon cheeseburger. I felt important and enlightened, though neither was true. I learned Egyptian mythology and wrapped the whole process into a flimsy notion called Thelema, which combined Eastern philosophy into Western mysticism. My brain billowed like sheets drying on the line on a windy day from all the possibility life and consciousness held.

  I was still fairly new to the whole “secret society” thing. Without pills, cigarettes, and booze, the inside of my head became a flashing billboard sign of every wrong I had committed or felt was done to me. I found a hobby to get rid of some aggression and regrow my lungs from years of chain-smoking: running.

  The museum was nearby, and I ran in a pair of old-school gray sweatpants, which had been cut off at the knee and had a drawstring. I wore a white bandana (so my grand Caucasian-ness would not be confused with either Bloods or Crips) on my head, schmata-style, and an ancient pair of white high-top basketball shoes. The soles had worn through, but I ran with them in the rain anyway. It had become a routine.

  I ran around the tar pits and up the back entrance, past the harmonica-playing hobo who never missed a day, and around the hilly grounds. Over the course of a month, my initial trudge of jogging, I slowly learned how to run.

  It had rained recently, and the streets were damp and uncrowded. One of those small, almost regular moments in life that made the tumblers click together into a lesson learned—as if by magic—soon followed. As I started to put on my high-tops, I found something inside the shoe that impeded my foot. When I shook out the contents, out rolled a severed rat head. It looked up with a half-snarled expression and its black marble eye stared at me. The sight barely fazed me.

  Clearly it was a gift from the cat, a special present to me from her. As the rat keep staring at me, I noticed a little severed rat hand, with its little rat fingers about a foot away. About a foot from the rat sat a small pile of rat gizzards. I got a newspaper and scooped up all the bits of rat. After I cleaned up, I started to leave for my run, but then it hit me. Where was the rest of the rat?

  I crawled on all fours with a flashlight looking for rat parts, under the bed and under a chest of drawers and all over the house, because it is not okay to have half a dead rat in my house. The thought stuck with me.

  It was obvious. The pills, booze, and cigarettes were the rat I could see, but what about the rest of the rat? It was this thought that kept me on a quest of sorts, and one of the sole reasons I had to start looking inward.

  Dad would have said, “What the fuck is going on with you? Don’t shit me. Are you loony tunes?”

  The old me thought my newfound spiritual self was an idiot. I was both proud and ashamed of it. I was the morality pendulum swinging as far away from my father as possible, but I didn’t know it at the time.

  I marched along on a new road and every couple of years Dad would show up at the front door, haggard and unshaved. His breath progressively labored and smelled like a sewer. And he was distant, like when he had stayed switched off the last time he asked for dough.

  He arrived as if we were friends that had drifted apart. His hugs were not as tight or powerful, but maybe it was his age. Dad was aging rapidly, in his late fifties/early sixties. His beard was gray but his hair still chocolate brown, though thinned and waved lifeless. His teeth had fallen out and were replaced by awful dentures that filled his head with bright white, ridiculous-looking, jumbo chicklets. His body was still bloated but not as strong. He shrank. He lost the spunk and swagger that I idolized. He took breaks walking up stairs from exhaustion and still smoked cigarettes like they were a cure rather than a cause. Rumors swirled from Dad’s family that they were tired of giving him money.

  Over the next several years, I thought about Dad and whether he had been on the run and hiding because it was too hard to look for the rest of the rat. The only thing I knew was that whatever he was doing, I needed to do the opposite.

  Over the next ten years, I saw Dad just a few times. Each time he was smaller. Each time he had less to say. Less fire. Each time I pressed a couple hundred in his hand before he left and then I felt like shit. Each time he took the money the same way a homeless guy on the corner did, but without saying “God Bless you” first.

  Each time he left, I closed the door behind him in a way that I thought it would be the last time I would see him, secretly hoping it would be, but he kept coming back.

  My life had turned around and I was in search for half a dead rat. While I still thought of Dad often, I mostly lost all respect for him and all the emotion I had for him. I saw him and felt almost nothing. I also cut him no slack for not living up to my expectations, for not aging with dashing style like Lyle Waggoner or Tom Selleck. He was a blob that he had just given up on life. We headed in opposite directions. He slid to a logical destiny, and down the path of justifiable anger and self-righteousness. It took me another decade to realize that I was a self-important douchebag.

  Chapter 7

  I returned to Cádiz midmorning with two hotel appointments left for the afternoon. I was tired and needed to wipe the sweat on my brow on my sleeve often. Maria stood in the lobby of her quaint hotel with one of her employees, holding a handful of brochures. She wore a thin summer dress and a yard of eye-popping Mediterranean cleavage. She spoke almost no English, and she was perfect. I was a sad guy preparing for his father’s seaside funeral. She spoke Spanish the same way warm butterscotch tastes. Over the next forty-five minutes, I asked her to marry me. Eight times. My stupidity requiring her employee to awkwardly translate.

  After making an ass of myself at my previous appointment, I got in my rental car and left Old Town Cádiz. The car was empty as I drove to a modern hotel in the new part of Cádiz and banished Dad to the car’s trunk because I had enough. Dad was slipping away.

  New Cádiz had high-rises and even fresh cement walkways that skateboarders love, and wide streets without shadows from all of the efficient street lighting.

  I arrived to find code-height curbs and brand-name coffee places on every corner. It was all so generic and familiar. The hotel sat by the ocean, but I couldn’t smell the saltwater or fresh bread in the air. The streets lacked the bustle of people and little shops. Cars whizzed by, making the only movement around me a blur. I left what I imagined Dad would have loved about Old Cádiz and the rest of Andalucia.

  I could see why Dad would have loved old Cádiz, even if he had never visited. The city had character that creaked in the wind but was far from used up. Its vibrancy and charm were unmistakable. As I drove away from old Cádiz, I left his old world behind in exchange for a bland one, a fucking orderly, ordinary, corporate world. The new section of Cádiz ha
d conveniences but lacked adventure and the spirit of the unexpected. The realization filled me with melancholy. Everything was clean and sanitary, and predictable. I sat in my rental car and felt alone.

  No one was riding shotgun with me anymore, and soon Dad would officially belong to Spain. My feeling about Dad’s new reality and my life without him seemed permanent but fragile. I was now sentenced to live out the rest of my life as a sober, corporate dud.

  I had one final meeting that day. I met with several business guys all named Pablo, who represented a five-star hotel chain I would stay at in Nuevo Cádiz. They all wore double-breasted dark gray suits and starched-white button-down shirts, and all parted their slicked-back hair on the left side. I wore the same green linen shirt I had worn all day. It was crumpled from my suitcase and smelled of overripe armpits. We met on the fourth floor in a high-tech office with glass walls and a long oval table that overlooked the hotel’s pool. I realized the Pablos were everywhere and the people who were not Pablos aspired to be them, and I wished I had a gun so I could kill myself.

  The Pablos offered me rehearsed small talk and corporate jargon about luxury business centers with breakout rooms and expensive dining and Internet options at a premium. I should have been writing it all down for a future story about business travel in Spain. I didn’t pretend to care. I didn’t pretend to take notes. I kept my hands behind my back, clasped together, as they walked me around the hotel’s presidential suite or poolside or through the impressive spa that smelled of sandalwood incense. They were polite, and I wanted to smash them all in their identical faces.

  Instead, I smiled vacuously, nodded at appropriate times, and occasionally said things like, “uh huh.” As they took turns talking about their hotel’s amenities, I pondered being half an orphan and began to understand luxury as being synonymous with triteness.

  After my hotel tour, I numbly thanked the Pablos for their kindness and expressed my insincere desire to work with them in the future. I gave them all firm handshakes and left with an armful of hotel brochures with glossy covers featuring airbrushed white women wearing wide, floppy hats next to pools of glistening water. Along with the brochures, there were neatly packaged DVDs of the hotels with press releases printed on customized stationery with raised letterhead.

  When I got to my room, I waved my credit card magnet key in front of my door and it magically unlocked itself. I threw all the brochures, DVDs, and press releases in the wicker garbage basket in the corner of my free room, courtesy of the Pablos. I threw Dad on the nightstand then flopped myself on a bed of one-thousand-thread-count sheets and played with my credit card–sized room key.

  My mind drifted to Old Town Cádiz. I thought about how Old Town Cádiz’s hotel keys were the old skeleton kind that had giant brass fobs that took up too much space in my pocket and offered little security to my room. They are the keys of gamblers, I thought. Houdini could never decipher modern locks, making his tricks useless in a modern world. Those clunky skeleton keys with tarnished brass fobs had seen better days and had lost their value in a modern world.

  Dad would not have seen it that way. Dad would have said, “Those fucking keys are our history. Everything in life is supposed to be imperfect and inconvenient and a bunch of fucking aggravation. Then once in a while you have an adventure. Then you get to tell a story, and that’s your history.” Actually, Dad would have said, “It’s your fucking history, jackass,” and punctuated it with a hand gesture that pantomimed hammering a nail. It would have made sense to me, and maybe only me.

  I fell asleep in my pants and woke with small Spanish coins that fell out of my pockets during the night and stuck to my belly in the morning. They left an imprint. I threw Dad in the trunk along with my suitcase for the homestretch for our return to Old Cádiz. While I grew fond of toting Dad around in my backpack and carrying on conversations with shadows, I knew it was going to be an emotional day. I was going to a funeral and needed some space.

  After a couple of tourism meetings in the morning, I returned to Old Cádiz on Friday around two o’clock in the afternoon. The city felt strained, like remaining coffee grounds trapped in a filter. The shops looked hollow, cats napped uncomfortably, worn pedestrians shuffled along, and I felt it all in the back of my throat. Cádiz had somehow changed, but not completely. All those tiny cars pressed up against each other, in rows along the road, a claustrophobic’s parking nightmare.

  And so began the merry-go-round experience of finding a parking space in Cádiz. Parking anywhere in Spain is a hassle, but I learned over my two-week visit to park accordingly, just like everyone else. I parked on the cobblestoned sidewalks, on the exposed roots of giant elderly trees, on the patio of a restaurant, and once I double-parked on a one-way road, trapping miles of passengers behind me while I visited the dingiest bathroom of all time.

  I drove in increasingly larger concentric circles around unusually shaped blocks, getting farther and farther away from my destination. This was fine by me. I was not looking forward to saying goodbye to Dad or my newfound friends at the tourism board. They took all my confusion, bad Spanish, and additional requests on Dad’s behalf in stride. I looked forward to their occasional check-in calls, but I was not feeling grateful.

  I eventually found a nice spot several blocks away from Cádiz Tourism under a big shady tree, and I left Dad to meditate in the car. The weight and the reality of scattering my father’s ashes finally took form. It was awkward and cumbersome, like trying to carry an empty refrigerator box. My arms could not reach all the way around it, and I could not know what was ahead of me, but I moved forward with faith that there would be solid ground with every blind step. Faith has never been my strength.

  I began to sweat. I cleared my throat like I was sick. I felt light-headed. I took a deep breath and smelled the warm bread of a bakery down the road, the sea air of Cádiz, and the exhaust of too many little cars. Everything I saw had a bluish haze to it.

  I took the tiny elevator up to the fourth floor and felt my cheeks flush and the bile in the back of my throat build. This was it. This was the funeral that my father never had. It wasn’t the jovial celebration that I’d hoped. When the door to the elevator opened, I walked in expectant. Where was my singer? Who should I talk to first? Should I sit or stand? Be patient or not? I had a switch in thinking. I hoped that the girl from the conservatory arrived early so we could just leave and get this thing over with. I did not want too much time to loiter around the office. I tried to look up and make eye contact, but I didn’t want to see anything. My vocalist was not anywhere.

  It was 2:30 p.m. and I wandered and listened to the office buzz. People walked back and forth, speaking quickly on the phone. I imagined my return to Cádiz to move smoothly with a light tone, maybe some joking with Daria and Cesar, but I just wanted this done. I wanted to see a young girl dressed in black with big boobs and a Viking skullcap with horns preparing for an aria. The image felt important as a beginning, an ending, and a symbol of completing Dad’s final wish. Daria waved and smiled from her desk and said from across the room, “I’m sure she is just running late.” I wanted to walk over to her but felt glued to the patch of carpet on the perimeter of all the desks.

  I stared at the clock on the wall, watching the second hand slowly grind around in a circle. After two long minutes, I turned around to see if anyone was coming out of the elevator door. I walked over to Cesar and tried to act casual. I had taken a liking to him during my brief stay the first time around in Cádiz. Standing there with my hands in my pockets, I rocked back on my heels before I spoke.

  “So, any word on the singer yet?” My breath was short and anxious.

  He looked up from his game of Windows solitaire, smiled, and shook his head. “Nada, but don’t worry,” he said. “She will come.”

  But she didn’t come, which left me to pace. I finally walked over to the corner, where Daria was sitting. Then to Juanita, who simply shrugged her s
houlders at me.

  Over the next forty-five minutes, I continued regular combinations of pacing, clock watching, and panic. And still no sign of a songbird. I know the office rooted for me, which I found reassuring considering I must have been becoming a pest.

  Finally, at 3:15 p.m., Daria received the call. I raced over to her desk along with several others who were now pacing along with me. After several long pauses of Daria nodding her head with melancholy, she told me, “Your young singer from the conservatory said that, regrettably, she will not be able to make it. She has come down with—” Daria then bent down and began to fish around for something. She pulled out a Spanish/English language dictionary and pointed to the word, “laryngitis.”

  While in time I would to come to appreciate the beauty of the situation, at the moment, I began to crumble. Without needing to say another word, the entire room stopped and snapped into action. They picked up their phones to make calls on my behalf. I should have been grateful, but I was too self-absorbed to see much beyond my immediate need. I could only wonder how a room full of Spanish people could not know how to sing “Ave Maria”? Isn’t it the Catholic national anthem? However, I had never heard the song either, because my father, a Catholic, didn’t want me to know anything about the religion. He told me one too many stories about having chalkboard pointers broken over his head, scolding and smiting nuns peddling dogma that he wanted nothing to do with. I was helpless and returned to helpless pacing and quietly prayed that my new Spanish family would come up with something.

  The minutes stretched by. Friday afternoon in Spain was the wrong time to get anything accomplished. I felt my time in Cádiz slipping away. A couple of other ladies approached me just to smile and be nice. But I didn’t want their attention, I wanted a solution. I didn’t want to feel alone and vulnerable. I wanted to give Dad the exact send-off he wanted and look tall and confident doing it. If I did, maybe success would undo forty years of a failed, despondent relationship. I could feel like I was a good son. But it was not meant to be.