Things You Didn't Know About My Father

I have this residual portrait of my father, which my brain snapped on a sultry June day in 1974; we’re doing 85 in dad’s puke-yellow Galaxie 500, headed east on Interstate 80 somewhere in the middle of Iowa. 

His hair is perfect (and I did not steal that from Warren Zevon). It really was. In the 60s, he rocked a crew cut, but the 70s hit and until he died, dad wore his hair in this perfect pompadour. All volume and length up top, and tight on the sides. His sideburns, which at that moment in 1974 had just the first few inklings of gray, grew thick and heavy down to his earlobes. 

I’m sitting in back with the coolers and a couple of small suitcases; my brother, six years my senior, slumps against the door with a roadkill bingo game he bought especially for this trip to Chicago. The boards are heavy cardboard and you slid this little red plastic tab over whatever mound of rotting flesh you could make out on the shoulder or in the grassy median. He refuses to give me one, and I think playing solo bingo is stupid.

All the windows are down, the Midwestern wind is fierce and not a follicle of my dad’s hair is out of place. He’s wearing a polyester shirt with a wide collar like ship sails. The shirt has green paisley patterns that to me look like parameciums, which we had finished studying in biology the past semester. 

Clamped between his teeth is a Garcia Y Vega English Corona cigar, the box is next to me, each cigar nestled in its own white aluminum screw-top tube. 

Mom and my sisters are somewhere behind us in mom’s white Impala with the blue top. She’s trying to keep up, and in this age before pages and mobile phones, no doubt silently cursing my father as she grips the wheel and pushes on the accelerator as much as she dares. 

He turns his head to me, smiles and winks. This is the moment I snap this residual image that resides in my brain. Still.

Certainly not this picture, which comes years later (but unfortunately resides in my brain as well). The grayish skin, the white, hairy back. The multiple bruises gone yellow across his already sallow chest. 

The medical port sewn into the space between his right nipple and shoulder; the drain tubes coming out of his back from where they took the cancer - and part of his lung - out. 

He doesn’t wink. He barely smiles. 

“I’ve got to piss again.” It’s both a command and a comment. A fact that has to be dealt with. 

His hair disappeared with the chemo, but by the time he died, it was back with a vengeance. We buried him in his favorite suit. His hair was perfect. A silver pompadour that simply shimmered. 

My father was extremely strong. He got it from his father. He once told me a story about a time when his dad came home, tight from the gallon jug of wine he’s already downed. The youngest of six, dad and his three brothers were roughhousing in the bed they all shared in the back of the row house in Massachusetts while his two sisters, their room closest to the kitchen and thus they were able to gauge the old man’s drunken condition, went dead silent. Giggle and screams came from the back bedroom. What he did, he picks up the old school solid metal iron from the potbelly stove - steaming from the heat - and chucked it through the kitchen wall (lath and plaster), the bedroom wall (lath and plaster) and it imbedded itself in the opposite bedroom wall (lath and plaster) six inches above my uncle Stanley’s head. The boys, he said, never made another sound whenever granddad was in the house. 

The strength thing skipped my brother and landed squarely on me. 

When he entered the U.S. Air Force, he was rail-thin and stood just under 6 feet tall. Maybe it was his hardscrabble upbringing (his brothers taught him how to swim by throwing him into a lake, where he was subsequently bitten by a water moccasin, then for a bag a candy, sold him out to the Catholic priest who molested him). Maybe  it was the knowledge that he was the baddest guy in the room; a sell-accepted knowledge that behind the full-toothed smile that made ladies swoon  was the fact that he could level a devastating punch that not a lot of people could come back from. My father did not suffer bullies. 

Red was huge, and used that advantage to pick on anyone not his own size. My dad was sitting on the steps in the barracks and Red was tormenting some kid from Ohio. Dad stood up, sauntered over to Red and said, “Why doing you pick on someone your own size?” “Who, you?” Red said. And with a single shove, dad pushed Red down the flight of stairs, where Red tumbled all the way to the barrack’s front entry. Red was my dad’s best man; dad was his best man. They last talked three days before dad died. 

My father was a radio operator in a B-36 Corsair Peacekeeper during Korea. He never served in the air above Korea, but he did burst both eardrums. My mom said he had that ‘husband selective hearing;’ but he was seriously deaf, even with the hearing aides. He got out of the Air Force and since he was in Nebraska anyway, went to work for the Nebraska Ordnance Plant, making parts for the SM-65 Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile. 

My father never tied his shoes. He was busted in rank twice for refusing to lace up his boots. From the 60s to the 90s, he wore zip-up leather boots with Cuban heels. In the 2000s, he switched to tennis shoes with Velcro enclosures. 

My father had a tremendous sense of humor. When he showed up for his military physical, he brought with him a small glass bottle of apple juice, which he poured into the sample cup while no one was looking. “This looks a little cloudy,” the nurse said when he handed it to her. “You think so? Well, let’s just run’er through again and see what we get,” he said, as he downed the entire contents of the sample cup. 

The nurse nearly fainted. 

My father was a serious ladies man. When he met my mother, he had three other girlfriends - and my mother could see all three of their porches from her house. She did not suffer fools, nor the kind of guy who would string the ladies along, and told him so. I think he was kind of scared of her, but the moment they met, he became a one-woman man. He proposed on their second date, where she hesitated, and said: “Your days of carousing are over, get it?” And he did. And while he remained an admirer of the female form (we’d get drug to Omaha’s Westroads Mall, where as a teenager we’d scope out women; dad was a breast man, while I continue to be a butt man). He died still madly in love with my mom, who died four years before him. 

He had nor formal education, but dad was smart in an understated way. Thanksgivings and Christmases during the 80s would find us gathered at the kitchen table playing Trivial Pursuit or Facts In Five. Dad never once played with us, but he would saunter into the kitchen to refill his coffee and as he left the room, would blurt out the answer to every question he overheard. He never got one wrong. When his health started to fail him I’d come down from Sioux Falls a week a month to take care of him. We’d watch Jeopardy every night at 6:30 p.m. He kicked my ass  a lot. 

My father had his own musky smell. If you’d ask mom or and sibling to describe it, you’d come up with different answers. For me, I’d say somewhere between salty and sweet, but with an herbaceous overtone. Not freshly dug dirt, but maybe a tree sapling and dirt. You could tell what side of the bed was his, because of the scent. Even if you washed the bedding, there it was. 

The smell thing skipped my brother and landed squarely on me. 

My father hated his job, which he made a career out of for 50 years. He sold insurance for Mutual of Omaha and got really good at it. He was a member of the Millionaire’s Club, meaning that he sold over a million worth of policies in a given year. For that, he and my mother were rewarded with trips around the world. He felt tremendous pressure to make a better life for his wife and kids. Growing up, we used to dig through the couch cushions to come up with the $2 for family movie night at the drive-in. Mom would pop popcorn and put it in a paper grocery bag; the oil would soak through and the taste was wonderful. That pressure led him to drink heavily for 10 years. It all came to a head one night with a knock-down, drag-out fight between mom and dad, where my father put his fist through three solid wood doors. We watched from the backyard, through the big bay window. My uncle Roger came over and with one punch, put my father down. When he awoke, mom whispered into his ear and said, “It’s either your drinking or me and the kids, your choice.” He quit that day. To help his recovery, we taped up an intricate mural around the basement walls, which he painted on for weeks. I remember early in, he had to hold his right hand with his left, to steady the brush from shaking too much. I was 13. He never took another drink for the rest of his life - 33 years. 

So my father felt like he was two people. One that was all white light and good, the other ink-black and malevolent. Before he died, he called me (from his bed to the basement, where I was sleeping) at 3 a.m. to talk. And thus started two nights of deep discussions in the middle of the night. He was consumed with worry. Frustrations over not being a very good man across the arc of his life. “You’ll never understand,” he said. I laughed. We talked some more; I gave him my perspective on my life. He teared up.

That darkness and light thing? It skipped my brother. And I inherited it. For better, or for worse.