by Sheba Karim
“I wasn’t sure who to address this letter to,” I began, “because if you had stuck around I’m not sure what I would have called you. Abba is a Muslim thing, and you’re not. Pitaji is what Hindus say, but it seems pretty formal. Maybe Dad, but for some reason that sounds weird. So, I decided to call you, the father I would have wanted but will never have, Poppa.”
Umar sniffed.
“To be honest, I haven’t spent much of my life thinking about what it would have been like to have you. I don’t even know what we would have done together, because I don’t know what fathers do, I mean, except from TV, or what I’ve seen or heard from my friends. For most of my conscious memory, it’s been me, and Shoaib, and Mom. I can’t imagine it any other way. I can’t even say it would have been better, only different; just because a father sticks around doesn’t mean he’s going to be good at it. Of course, there were moments—I hated any time in school when we had to draw or talk about our families because even if their father didn’t live with them, most of the kids at least knew where their father was.
“But I did think about you. I kept your photo hidden in my drawer, and I wondered if I was like you. I wondered if you’d ever reach out, if I’d die without having met you. I wondered why you left us, concocting stories, like maybe you’d embezzled funds and were wanted by Interpol and had to go into hiding forever. I wondered if you had another family, and if you were good to them. I wondered who took that photo of you, if you loved her, if she loved you. When I dumped Doug, though, I started thinking about you a lot more. The way I treated Doug made me ashamed, and I wondered if I was a lot like you after all. Did I inherit some of your nature? If I looked like you, was I predisposed to act like you? So, that’s why I went to see your brother. He really isn’t a fan, but I guess you know that already.
“Of course I couldn’t not meet you. It was like the stars were aligning—the road trip, your brother emailing me back, everything. I wasn’t expecting fireworks, but I guess I expected you to be more interested in me, in my life, in my mother and Shoaib. I thought you’d, if not apologize, at least try to explain why you left. I thought we’d look at each other and feel something, the tug of shared DNA, but there was nothing.
“And deep down I thought maybe we’d go for a long walk, and I’d tell you how I was mean to Doug, and you would tell me not to worry, because I wasn’t like you, that I was capable of healthy, committed relationships, that it was a momentary blip. It’s crazy, to think I was hoping to get this reassurance from you, but see, the thing is, even though you left us and never looked back, I thought you were a better person than you are. But you’ve run away from all forms of responsibility your whole life, and you’ll never be Poppa to me, or anyone. I feel sad for you, but I’m now okay with you not being in my life. I need to focus on the people I love, who’ve been there for me. I need to focus on being kind, and that means surrounding myself with people who are kind. It’s good I met you, because I can stop all that wondering. I think most of the time, it’s harder not to know. Knowledge can be painful, but it comes with a sort of peace. So here—in this cemetery, underneath this lovely weeping willow tree—I lay you, the father I never had, to rest. Let me go my way, and you yours.”
Halfway through, my voice had started trembling, but not enough to make me stop. There was something about the act of reading aloud, of giving voice to your pain, that was undeniably powerful.
“That was really beautiful,” Umar said, dabbing his eyes with his scarf. “And you’re not like him, you know.”
“I know.”
“So now,” Ghaz said, resuming her role as funeral MC, “we must bury the letter.”
“Bury the letter? How?” Umar asked. “Did you bring a shovel?”
“Uh, no. But we could use our hands?”
“No way,” he objected. “It’ll take forever to get the dirt out of my fingernails.”
“They’re painted black!” Ghaz had insisted on painting our nails black for the occasion.
“I second Umar. No hand-digging,” I said.
“Okay. But we need to do something, you know, for finality,” Ghaz explained.
“Why don’t we burn it?” Umar suggested.
“Yeah, that makes sense. My father’s Hindu so he’s probably going to be cremated,” I said.
“Awesome. Who has a lighter?” she asked.
We stared at one another.
Ghaz groaned. “I guess we go get one.”
“There are only warehouses around here,” Umar pointed out.
“We can head back. There’s a gas station near our Airbnb.”
As we walked toward the entrance, a maintenance truck was heading down the main path toward us. Even though it was a public cemetery, and we were doing nothing wrong, we collectively tensed, because we were three brown people in an otherwise empty cemetery dedicated to Confederate soldiers. The truck slowed down as it approached, and we all smiled, Ghaz adding a finger wiggle wave, and the two old white men inside waved back.
As we passed through the gates, I happened to look down. Beneath another plaque in memory of Confederate officers and soldiers, something else had been laid to rest, an empty forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor in a brown paper bag. King Cobra, the label read.
The juxtaposition made me smile.
Twenty minutes later, we were at the gas station near our place, huddled between the ice freezer and the back wall of the convenience store. Ghaz handed me the lighter.
“Good-bye, Poppa,” I said, lighting a corner of the letter. As we watched it burn, an old Mustang pulled up. Two cracked-out peroxide blondes emerged, one younger, one older, dressed in denim miniskirts and skimpy tank tops and platform heels, black mascara streaked like claw marks beneath their eyes.
They observed the three of us standing around the burning letter, which now lay between us on the asphalt. The older woman took a swig from a two-liter of Mountain Dew and nodded, as if to acknowledge that we were, all of us, up to no good.
“Ashes to ashes,” Ghaz said, using her foot to brush the letter’s remains behind the ice freezer.
She and Umar hugged me, and I hugged them back. As silly as it was, it had helped. Being made to describe my sorrow had forced me to give it a form, and giving it form gave it borders. It was a deep sorrow, yes, but it was small in comparison to the good things in my life, like the two friends who were chasing each other, laughing, into the convenience store because one of them had decided he really wanted some Mountain Dew.
Twenty-Seven
“HELLO, FRIENDS,” our Lyft driver, Ed, greeted us as we entered his car. A unicorn dangled from his rearview mirror. “Off to the honky-tonks this fine eve?”
“Yes,” Umar said. “Should we not be?”
“Ah, it’s not my kinda thing. But if you’re visiting Nashville you have to check them out. You know, when you visit New York for the first time, you gotta see Times Square.”
“I hate Times Square,” Ghaz said.
“There’s a few things you like about it,” Umar corrected her.
“Oh yeah? What’s that?” Ed asked.
“Some of the billboards are nice,” Ghaz said, but since she left it at that, so did we.
“How long have you been a Lyft driver?” Umar asked Ed.
“Three years.”
“What’s the craziest thing that’s happened?” Ghaz inquired.
“Well,” he said, “that depends on what you mean by crazy—like crazy terrible or crazy weird?”
“Mmm . . . crazy weird.”
“I got a ride request from Franklin, and before I picked him up he called me and said, ‘You got three hours?’ I said sure, and when I picked him up he was wearing sweatpants and a lounge robe, and he had his hair pulled back into a ponytail so tight I was like, that has to be hurting his face. He got into the car with a laptop and some other techie equipment, and he had me drive around for three hours straight while he worked on his computer.”
“What was he doing?” Umar said.
“He told me he was a fixer—that if a celebrity got into trouble, they would contact him and he would fix it.”
“Fix it using his computer?”
“I guess so. He kept getting phone calls, and I heard him speak in at least four different languages—French, Russian, English, and German.”
“Dude, that is shady,” Ghaz said. “I wonder what he was doing.”
“I have no idea. I thought it was better not to know too much. But at the end of the three hours, we stopped at a taco truck on Nolensville and he bought me lunch, which was pretty cool. I’ve got tons more crazy stories. A lot of the city may be turning into this fancy high-rise condo-boutique hotel-land, but there’s still some Nashville weird going on.”
“Nashville weird,” Ghaz repeated.
“And here we are,” Ed announced, pulling up to a corner of Broadway.
The honky-tonks went on for several blocks, flashing lights and loud music, the bars’ balconies packed with bodies, the sidewalk thronging with people, a mini Las Vegas of country music. Not only did all the honky-tonks have live bands, some featured a different band on every floor, the musical cacophony extending on both vertical and horizontal axes.
“And here we are,” Ghaz said. We still hadn’t left the corner. “Let’s do this.”
“Um, this is, like, the heart of whiteness,” Umar said. He sounded nervous, and I knew he was looking at the overwhelmingly white crowd and fearing a sea of Sylvias.
“Look, there’s a black guy,” Ghaz pointed out.
“You mean the bouncer?” Umar said.
“Hey, a piano bar,” she said. “That sounds like a good place to start.”
Relieved that Ghaz had zeroed in on a destination, we plunged into the chaos of the sidewalk, weaving our way through the drunken revelers toward the piano bar.
The centerpiece of the bar was a stage with dueling pianos. The piano players were two fratty-looking guys in T-shirts and baseball caps. They were talented, bringing their own unique style to the audience song requests, like a high-speed rendition of Elton John, or a jazzy version of Prince. The stockier piano player could do a great falsetto.
We sat at a table near the players, where there was some floor space to dance. On either side of the stage stood two bouncers, their arms folded across their chests.
“Bouncers?” Ghaz said. “How bad can things get at a piano bar?”
Umar nudged us, gesturing at a bachelorette party. The young bride was in a skintight white dress and cowboy boots, torn white veil pinned to her big blond hair; the bachelorettes were dressed in matching tight black tank tops that said I’m Poppin’ Bottles.
Five seconds later, another bachelorette party walked by, the bride in a gold sequined dress and a sash that said Bride and Bitches, the bachelorettes in skimpy black dresses, capital Bs glittering on their chests.
“I guess bachelorettes like the honky-tonks?” Umar said.
No sooner had he said this than a third bachelorette party passed, the girls in matching white tank tops that featured their individual titles. Too Hot to Handle. Slayer. Dancing Queen. Bridezilla. The two brides before had looked pretty young, but Bridezilla looked like she was sixteen. A plastic penis-shaped whistle hung from her neck.
“Someone go tell Bridezilla about statutory rape,” Ghaz said.
So far, everyone had used the dance floor as a crossing point, but then two women next to us started dancing. One looked like she was in her forties, the other maybe twenty years younger. Though the piano player was crooning a heartfelt rendition of Adele, they were dancing like they were in a hip-hop club.
“What’s their deal?” Umar asked.
“I think they’re mother and daughter,” Ghaz guessed.
It was a strong possibility. They were both blond, with the same narrow face. They both wore Daisy Dukes and cowboy boots, except the mother had on a tube top and a Mardi Gras–style necklace of shiny purple beads, the daughter a more modest short-sleeve T-shirt. The mother started grinding low to sad Adele, holding her drink high and tossing her head back as she hooted.
“How are they so wasted?” I said. “It’s not even nine p.m.”
The daughter started freaking the mother from behind, spilling her drink down her mother’s tube top.
“Good thing she’s drinking something clear,” Ghaz said.
The mother ran her hand sexily across her wet cleavage, then licked her fingers.
“I think they call this a white trash train wreck,” Umar said.
We were mesmerized.
Mother and daughter were approached by a guy. Like most of the other young men we’d seen so far, he had the clean-cut, fresh-faced look of white boys raised on meat and corn and athletics. He was good-looking, bearing a resemblance to Matt Damon. His T-shirt said IDF in bold letters.
“Oooohh,” Umar said. “He’s pretty hot.”
“Do you see his T-shirt?” I said. “Doesn’t IDF stand for Israeli Defense Forces?”
“He looks more Friday Night Lights than IDF,” Umar said.
“Maybe it stands for something else, too,” Ghaz said.
We assumed IDF would make a move on the daughter, but he hit on the mother instead, and now they were grinding, the mother’s arm hooked around the back of his neck as she humped his thigh. The daughter seemed thrilled that her mother was getting some. She started to dance a circle around them, egging the couple on. Then the mother lifted her arms over her head and attempted to shimmy backward while maintaining crotch-to-thigh contact. She fell on her ass, then her daughter laughed, and IDF helped her up. He started twirling her around, which seemed a bad idea given how drunk she was.
A waitress appeared with a tray of three shots that IDF gallantly handed to mother and daughter.
“Dude, I don’t think they need any more alcohol,” Umar said.
They all downed the shots and the mother and IDF resumed their seesaw grinding. The mother seemed more and more off balance, and suddenly, she stopped dancing. We leaned back in our chairs, alarmed, as she came careening toward us, mouth agape, eyes popping out. At the last moment, she veered to the empty table next to us and proceeded to puke all over one of the chairs, covering it in a white, watery vomit gravy.
“Oh my God,” Ghaz breathed.
The mother stood up, shook her head a little, picked up a used napkin from the table, and wiped her lips. We assumed she’d go to the bathroom to wash up but instead she turned around and danced her way back to IDF, who grabbed her ass and drew her closer.
A second later, they were making out.
“I’m sorry, I can’t watch this anymore,” Umar said. “We gotta go.”
We waited until we were back on the street before bursting into laughter.
“I can’t even . . . what was that?” Ghaz cried.
“Nashville weird?” Umar said. “Or honky-tonk normal?”
“I think we’ve seen enough,” I said.
“Come on. One more bar,” Ghaz begged, insisting we go to a bar called Tequila Cowboy, because she’d decided she was in a tequila mood.
From the entrance, we could see packs of bachelorette parties roaming the bar in matching outfits. The age range of the patrons was impressive, from the barely legal brides to a geriatric sitting at the bar one whiskey away from the grave, and everything in between.
“Is it me or are the guys here generally better looking than the women?” Ghaz said. “That almost never happens.”
“It’s true, a lot of these women are busted,” Umar agreed. “Some of the guys are cute in that corn-fed kind of way. But almost everyone is straight.”
We headed to the bar, passing a wasted white frat boy dancing badly by himself, thrusting his hips at any woman who came within a certain range. The bar smelled like spilled beer with a hint of bile. The bartender had knotted her T-shirt right underneath her ample breasts, exposing her pierced belly button and taut stomach. She poured Ghaz a shot of tequila, then lined up a row of beer bottles between her thighs
, leaned forward, and snapped off their caps one by one, handing me the one that had basically been in her crotch.
“That’s what I call a fishy beer,” Umar said.
“You guys!” Ghaz cried, gesturing upward with her empty shot glass. “I think there’s a bull upstairs!”
On the second floor was a mechanical bull, a crowd watching as a dyed blonde, wearing black lingerie underneath a transparent white lace dress, climbed on. With a whoop, she began riding it before it even started moving, and when it did move she tumbled off immediately but recovered quickly, jumping up from the mat and shouting “Yaaaaaahh!” as the crowd cheered back.
Umar shook his head. “The shit you get away with if you’re blond.”
“In a transparent dress,” I added.
“So this is Sylvia’s bull,” Ghaz said. “I’m gonna do it.”
“Are you serious?” I asked.
“Hell, yeah,” she said, pushing her way through three guys in black Harley-Davidson T-shirts and getting in line.
Another woman went next, her heft making it difficult for her to climb onto the bull. She was thrown off in seconds, and the button-down shirt frat boy who followed lasted only a few seconds longer. As Ghaz approached the bull, the crowd grew quiet. She had her yoga face on, slight frown, intent eyes. She rested her hands against the bull’s flank for a moment, did a round of deep breathing, and climbed on. The bull started to move, more slowly than for the others, and I suspected the male operator was going easy on her. As the bull began to buck back and forth, Ghaz squeezed her thighs tight, gripping the strap and trying to move her body with the bull instead of against it. The crowd began to cheer. Emboldened, she smiled and lifted her arm. The bull jerked backward, and she fell off, but she’d managed to stay on for about thirty seconds, which was impressive in bull time.
When Ghaz got up, she mouthed something at us.
“Take that, Sylvia.”
As she made her way back to us, Ghaz was in her element, accepting people’s high fives, briefly flirting with the two guys who hit on her, accepting a shot from a guy in a turquoise-beaded cowboy hat.