My Father’s Guitar & Other Imaginary Things: True Stories

by Joseph Skibell

  PRE-SWEETENED WITHOUT SUGAR

  We set about our work with the alacrity of little advertising men. On our hands and knees on the linoleum floor, the crayons from our big thirty-two Crayola pack scattered between us, we devoted a Sunday morning to the task.

  My sisters were behind the whole thing. They’d seen the ad in the funny papers—they could read; I couldn’t—or maybe our mother had pointed it out to them.

  Funny Face packaged soft drink mixes were new on the market back in 1964. They were meant to compete with Kool-Aid, the original granulated drink mix. Crammed full of cyclamates, they were advertised as “pre-sweetened without sugar.”

  Each flavor had a different Funny Face character on the package, each drawn, snaggle-toothed and cockle-eyed, as though by the imprecise hand of a child. Injun Orange was an orange in war paint and feathers. Chinese Cherry was a slant-eyed cherry with a Hop Sing pigtail. Lefty Lemon was a baseball-pitching lemon. Loud-Mouth Lime had a big mouth. Rootin’-Tootin’ Raspberry was a cowboy, and the front man of the bunch was a beach bum named Goofy Grape.

  The company was running a coloring contest. Kids were asked to color a picture of Goofy Grape and send it in. First prize was a Funny Face soft drink stand that you could set up in your own front yard. Second place was a wristwatch with a picture of Goofy Grape on the crystal, third place was twenty-five dollars worth of coupons or something like that.

  I was a better colorer than my sisters, and my picture came out best, and as my sisters were filling out the entry form on my behalf—name, age, address—a thought occurred to them: as impressive as my picture was, wouldn’t it be even more impressive if it had been colored not by a five-year-old but by a three-year-old kid, and what harm would there be, really, if they knocked a couple of years off my age and filled it in as three?

  In a moment of childish paranoia—we were Jewish children, after all—they had second thoughts. What would happen if the judges checked and discovered that I was really five?

  Two little Macbeths, in so far there was no turning back, they decided instead of changing my age back to five to fill in our brother Ethan’s name on the entry form, since he was really three.

  When, a few weeks later, a small purple package arrived, I knew instantly what it was.

  “I won! I won!” I shouted to Annie Quattlebaum in the front hall as she brought in the mail. Annie had worked for my grandmother years before, helping to raise my father and his brothers, and now, fallen on hard times, she was living with us. “I’ve won the Goofy Grape watch!”

  “Oh, no, dear,” Annie said, holding the package back from me. “This is for Ethan. You see, it’s got his name on the address label.”

  Now, the curious thing is, I don’t remember what happened next. No one, including me, actually remembers what happened between the arrival of the package in its purple wrapping and Ethan’s taking possession of the watch. I can only imagine I protested, first to Annie, then to my parents, but that somehow, in the intervening weeks, my sisters had forgotten all about their clever subterfuge. My parents, as gullible as the judges it seems, never wondered how their three-year-old might have colored well enough to win a national competition, or perhaps they simply couldn’t be interested in our childish quarrels. Maybe Annie put her foot down and forbade me to even speak of it to them. It’s reasonable, I suppose. On the face of it, my claims—that I’d colored the picture but that believing the judges would find the work of a three-year-old more compelling, my sisters had changed the age and then, covering their tracks, inserted Ethan’s name in a contest he just happened to win—seem exactly the sort of thing a lying child might come up with.

  Whatever the case, Ethan was given the watch. When he was twelve or so, having no personal stake in it, he scratched Goofy Grape’s face off the crystal and tossed it into the back of a bathroom cupboard.

  Over the years, the story became one of those anecdotes that are shared in families, a sweet little story about two bossy little girls running their little brother’s life. The story, in its many retellings, always skips the part between the arrival of the purple package and Ethan’s being given the watch, and all these years later, I find that’s the only part of the story that interests me.

  WOODEN NICKELS

  Tiger was the first man I ever saw with a beard. I was only five or six years old. We were living in Amarillo then, and Tiger, passing through on his way to Vegas, stopped at our house for the seder. He was married at the time, his wife a heavy-set gentile woman with a short blonde ponytail, whose career as a dancer he managed.

  “She was a very intelligent girl,” my father told me years later. “Her father was a college professor, I think.”

  The Tigers—Mr. and Mrs.—roared into our driveway in the painted-over hearse they traveled and lived in—sometimes, I was told, but not anymore, with a pet monkey. They bounded inside like the tigers prancing around in human clothing in The Story of Little Black Sambo, a book I loved, Tiger presenting each of the children with a small wooden coin that had a caricature of his face—grinning, leering, winking—stamped onto it encircled by a logo that read:

  Tiger was my father’s cousin. They were born eight days apart, and they grew up as close as brothers, if not twins. First sons of sisters, they played together, performed magic tricks together. They were bar mitzvahed together, and they were always being compared, with Tiger always coming up short.

  “Why can’t Jack be more like Irvin?” his mother, Rose, wrote to her sister Mimi when—incredulously I checked the date on the letter—the boys were not yet two.

  Except for Tiger’s echt-beatnik affectations—the savage van Dyke, the mustache curled up at the ends, the hipster’s lope and drawl—they even resembled each other. They had the same tall forehead, the same wiry dark hair, the same posture, the same broad shoulders, the same slender legs; their skin was the same olive color; they were the same height.

  At the seder table, I felt as though I were looking at two versions of the same man, one civilized, the other feral, and this was confusing to me. Dad was the picture of sober rectitude. A young father of four, returning from work each day promptly at six in his dark suit and his narrow tie, he was like a Lutheran pastor in a Bergman film: strict, exacting, a disciplinarian. It was unfathomable to me that he could so warmly welcome into our home his wild and untamed twin.

  FORTY OR SO years later, my uncle Richard sits down next to me on the couch, and gives me a penetrating look. Richard is my father’s youngest brother. With his ochre skin and shock of white hair, he looks like a Cuban aristocrat.

  “Nephew,” he says. He often calls me Nephew. I call him Favorite Uncle. It’s a nickname he gave himself. “What’re the chances do you think I could talk your brother into looking into all of Tiger’s stuff for me?”

  “Well, it’s hard to say,” I tell him. “I mean, it’s hard to get Ethan to do something he doesn’t want to do.”

  I say this with a slight edge in my voice, as though it were a defect in my brother’s character, but then I think: What’s so wrong with not doing things you don’t want to do?

  Tiger had been dead for a year or so.

  “And he had all his stuff stored in a barn on a chicken farm in upstate New York,” Richard tells me, “not far from where Ethan lives. Couldn’t be more than, I don’t know, thirty miles from his house. No one knows if any of it’s worth anything, but I’m paying a hundred dollars a month to this farmer up there to keep all that crap. Not me personally, but the estate. I’m the executor. None of Jack’s nieces or his nephew want any of it, but if there’s something of value there . . .”

  “Like what?” I say.

  “Oh, hell, I don’t know. Jack was supposed to have collected posters . . .”

  “Posters?”

  “. . . circus posters, vintage circus posters, and I don’t know if they’re worth anything, but if they are, we might as well do something with them, don’t you think?”

  “Well, I guess . . .”

&nbs
p; “So if Ethan won’t do it . . .”

  “He won’t.”

  “. . . if the estate paid your way, would you be willing to go up there and take a look at it all for me?”

  TIGER HAD ACTUALLY mentioned this stuff to me, or at least a part of it a few years before. We were heading out to a farm in Giddings one Sunday morning to buy Samantha a dog. Barbara and Sami were already in the car when the phone rang. I picked it up, and the voice on the other end roared out a kind of hipster growl: “S’Tiiiigggerrr!”

  I’d never gotten a call from Tiger before, but I’d been told about these calls by my sister Susan who used to get them frequently. Tiger faxed her something once, and behind the document he’d intended to send—placed crookedly on the machine’s screen, I guess—was a copy of his résumé. After every listing, Susan told me, there was a line explaining why each project had failed: “investors backed out” . . . “lost funding” . . . “idea stolen.”

  “Tiger, is that you?” I said.

  It was, he said, and he was calling because he had a collection of books, collected over a lifetime, that he didn’t know what to do with.

  “I was talking to your dad, and he told me that you liked books, and so I thought you might want to have them.”

  This was an odd way of putting it, I thought. It wasn’t really a question of liking or disliking books, although I suppose there are people who dislike books. Certainly over the years I’ve met a few, especially in Texas, where often they serve on school boards. Rather, it was a question of whether the books themselves were worth reading.

  They were stored at a friend’s place in upstate New York, he told me, and all I had to do was rent a U-Haul—“But it’s gonna take a U-Haul”—and I could have as many as I wanted. “I mean, some of them are real classics.”

  Because my life was fairly unsettled at the time—we were living in Austin again, with no clear plans of staying or leaving; I had no idea where I might keep a U-Haulful of books—and also because Tiger’s reputation preceded him, I declined.

  But now, with Richard explaining to me that half of Tiger’s worldly possessions were stored in a barn on a chicken farm in upstate New York—the other half was in a storage locker in Dallas—and with the estate offering to foot the bill, the absurdity of the thing appealed to me.

  And I told him I’d be happy to do it whether Ethan joined me or not.

  WHEN I WAS a kid, Tiger’s occasional visits to Lubbock sent a kind of terror through the family. No one wanted him there, but no one knew how to ask him to leave. He’d arrive with an empty suitcase, and by the time he departed, it would be full of my grandfather’s old clothes. My parents took him to dinner at places they never went to or didn’t care if they ever returned to. “Do you have apple pandowdy?” he asked their waitress once when she came for the dessert order. “Makes your eyes light up and your stomach say howdy?” He filled the pockets of what had been until that afternoon my grandfather’s sports coat with dozens of unpeeled shrimp from the all-you-can-eat buffet. “A little something for later,” he said, patting the fabric of the coat, and he loved nothing better than to lie on the couch where he slept, eating sardines out of the can, dipping pieces of rye bread into the oil.

  “This is the great Jack Tiger, famous movie producer from New York City!” we’d overhear him making cold calls in my sisters’ bedroom.

  During one of his visits, Ethan, feeling unwell, slipped out of the living room and went into our parents’ bedroom to watch television.

  “Did he make you sick?” our grandmother asked him, coming into the room and finding him there. “He makes me sick, too!”

  Tiger always seemed to be traveling through Texas during a family crisis. Though he’d known nothing of her illness or her death, he showed up, quite out of the blue, at my mother’s funeral, wailing inconsolably—more inconsolably than the actual mourners who were pretty inconsolable—and needing a place to stay.

  “Tonight: all right, Jack,” his aunt Jeanette said as she made our sofa up as a bed for him, “but after that, you’ve got to get out of here. You’ve got to let these good people alone.”

  At my mother’s shivah, he boxed me into a corner to talk screenwriting. “A close-up is punctuation, punctuation!” he growled at me. “You go in close on a tube of red lipstick. Why? Punctuation! That’s all it is!”

  At sunrise the following morning, I rode with my father, as he drove Tiger to the bus terminal. The two of them sat up front—they were only fifty-eight at the time—and from the backseat they looked like they always did, like two versions of the same person, Dad the well-dressed, well-kempt version, all colored in between the lines, and Tiger a whirl of frenetic energy, his stuffing coming out of his seams as he rambled on obsessively about secondary Japanese markets and direct-to-home video.

  As I listened to their conversation, lines from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience kept going through my head:

  Tyger Tyger, burning bright,

  In the forests of the night:

  What immortal hand or eye,

  Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

  I CALL DAVE Cole, the chicken farmer in upstate New York, to let him know that my brother and I are considering coming up and taking a look at Tiger’s things.

  “I’m dividing the film from the rest,” he tells me. “It’s an immense amount of material. A lot of it is 3-D. Very futuristic. I have to take my lady friend to the hospital today to visit her niece, but once we’re back it shouldn’t take me more’n two hours to go through the rest of it. But you’re gonna need more’n a car just to haul the films away.”

  “Do you really want a carload of film?” Ethan says when I call him afterward. Though he’s willing to accompany me, he reiterates that he’s not really interested in doing any of this. Disenthused by his reaction, I put off calling Dave Cole again, but then Dave calls me. He’s found forty copies of a 3-D Frankenstein. “It’s heartbreaking to throw all this stuff out. There’re twenty-five milk cartons, all crammed with books!”

  He asks me where I live, and when I tell him, he tells me he has a son-in-law in Atlanta who just had a stroke. “Forty-one years old, he can stand on his left foot, but he dudn’t even know his right foot is there. He was twenty-five years in the army, lied about his age to get in. No, he must be forty-seven now.”

  “Forty-seven’s still young,” I say.

  “Still young, yes, it is,” Dave says. “Dr. Richard tells me you’re coming up here to check everything out.”

  Dave calls Richard, an orthodontist, “Dr. Richard.”

  I tell him I’ll talk to Dr. Richard and to my brother Ethan and see what we can do.

  “You were never out here. It’s sixty feet long and maybe fifty feet deep. We left a path so you could move through it to get at everything, but then it became too much and we had to fill in all the paths.”

  MAYBE IT WAS his beard when I was a kid, but Tiger always seemed two-thirds animal to me, as though he were a real tiger forced, for some reason (Why can’t you be more like Irvin?), to live in the world as a man. He could never find a place for himself within human society. His appetites were too large, his touch too fierce, his dreams burned too brightly in the furnace of his brain.

  At sixteen, he changed his name from Jack Goldman to J. G. Tiger.

  “The G was for Goldman,” Dad told me. “And Tiger was because if you meet somebody named Tiger, you’re not going to forget it.”

  He dropped out of East Texas State Teachers College after half a semester and ran away with the circus. In Canada, he left the circus to become a tout at the track. He returned to Dallas with a fat roll of cash, driving a 1952 Lincoln hardtop named El Tigre. Among El Tigre’s custom features was a hood ornament shaped like a leaping tiger. Tiger drove El Tigre in the Dallas heat with the windows up and a telephone handset pressed against his ear, so he appeared to be conducting business on a car phone in air-conditioned comfort.

  He opened up a recording studio, though he n
ever made a record. For a while, he had an opium dope show. He promoted restaurants and wrestling matches. He even wrestled himself, unspectacularly by all accounts, as the Baby Tiger.

  Eventually, he joined the marines. Stationed at El Toro in California, he served his country as the night water tender on a military golf course, turning the sprinklers off by the dawn’s early light and on again at the twilight’s last gleaming.

  After the military, Tiger invented Birdicure.

  “Parakeets were very popular as pets in the fifties, but they’d get sick and die,” Dad told me, “and so Tiger set up a laboratory in Aunt Rose’s house. He figured out the appropriate dosage of penicillin for a bird, and he put that amount into tablet form.”

  He hired children from the neighborhood. They sat at Aunt Rose’s kitchen table, stuffing the pills into the bottles and Scotch-taping the instructions to them with their little hands.

  Dad was an officer in the navy, stationed at the time in Hawaii.

  “There was no air conditioning, so your mother and I slept with our windows, these big lanai windows, open.”

  One night, Dad couldn’t sleep. It was two in the morning, and he was lying in bed. Everything was quiet, and through the open window, he could hear a little thudding sound far off in the distance. Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop. He couldn’t stop listening to it. It kept getting louder and louder until eventually he recognized the sound: it was a motorcycle. The sound kept getting louder as the motorcycle got closer, and nearly half an hour later, he heard it putt-putt-putting onto the base, then onto their street, then into their cul-de-sac, where it stopped. Dead silence. A moment later, there’s a knock on their door.

  Dad gets out of bed. He puts on his robe. He answers the door. A special airmail deliveryman in leathers and goggles hands him a letter.

  Dad looks at the return address. It’s from Birdicure, Inc., Dallas, Texas.