Wednesday's Three Word Wednesday

The word prompts over at Three Word Wednesday are disarray, rabble and validate.

Old Habits Die Hard
I guess it was some big secret, but my dad was founder of some hippie group called the Monkey Wrench Gang or something.
I guess others got all the credit, though, as he met my mother at a roadside taco stand in Matamoros, Mexico after some big dustup with the Texas Rangers over some damaged road equipment near South Padre Island. Something about bird estuaries and, I dunno, whatever.
I knew him as a guy in a suit, selling insurance and personal portfolio investments.
That is, until I found his battered footlocker in the basement.
I asked if I could start wearing the Army jacket with all the patches and he got all weird on me.
Got weird on all of us.
Mom kept asking when he was going to get a haircut. The brushy mustache he grew came in gray, but he didn’t color it or anything.
I noticed that my pot stash began to dwindle.
That’s when the news started warning of some new eco-terrorist threat, especially after several Hummers went up in flames over at Carmody’s Dodge, Chrysler, Hummer.
Over dinner one night – meatloaf night, I guess – he made this dam of mashed potatoes between two slabs of loaf and mom asked what he was doing and he mumbled something about “Praying for a pre-cision earthquake” and taking his fork to bust up the potatoes so that the butter flowed into the green beans.
Mom, she just shook her head.
Me, I guess I was curious.
Dad grew more secretive about his den, the pictures of fishing buddies, the gold plastic golfing trophies, the musty deer head on the wall. He didn’t lock the door – mom would have gone ape-shit over that – but he did ask that anyone announce their presence before asking for admittance.
It’s where he started teaching me stuff like delayed timer fuses, homemade napalm and how to bend nails into caltrops, these wicked little landmines that dad said “would forever remain fondly in his heart,” since he dumped a shitload on Texas Highway 48 outside of Brownsville – stopping the Rangers and leading him to mom.
“I remember, she was drinking a Jarritos, strawberry, and eating a couple of shredded beef tacos,” he said. “Most beautiful woman I had ever in my life laid eyes on. Made an honest man out of me.”
His eyes clouded for a minute, then a smile came over his face. He put a hand on my shoulder, cocked his head and said, “Let’s go catch a movie.”
Giggletown 24 was a temple of excess. The gaudy neon, the sea of concrete where people parked their SUVs that had never seen a speck of dust, a drop of mud. There was a valet, for chrissakes.
“The rabble,” he mumbled, pushing his way through the crowd to buy tickets.
We sat near the back of the main theater, waiting through the trailers for the main feature, when dad pressed an M-18 smoke grenade into my hands.
“Pop it, drop it and casually get up an leave when it rolls a few rows down,” he said.
As I put a shoulder to the swinging double doors, I heard dad yell,
“FIRE!”
The panic was immediate. The disarray, ultimate.
Dad stood with his arms crossed, protected from the chaos by the air hockey table, and watched with amusement at the mayhem he created.
When the police showed up, he nudged me with an elbow, said it was time to “get truckin’.”
But in the smoky haze, my dad just couldn’t help himself. He casually stopped Margaret Templeton, herself wild-eyed in the upheaval that was the Cineplex lobby – she looked like an idiot in the blinking bowtie and multi-colored vest and rhinestone-covered nametag – put his hands up to calm her and asked:
“Could you be a dear and validate my parking pass?”