His pockets are no longer full. The sound of change and jingling keys that once echoed through the halls are a memory. His hands, that once found warmth in the plaid caverns of his jacket, are gone.
For the wake we dressed him in a flannel shirt like the one he always wore; the one tattered at the end of its sleeves, the one I pulled at as a child, trying to direct his attention my way. The one he was wearing when the paramedics found him at the back of the city bus, no longer breathing. Unable to revive him. He’d spent breakfast chasing a high, and with one white cross too many, overdosed. He’d boarded a ride he’d never leave. One missed stop after another.
The flannel had covered the sores on his neck and back and protected me and my brothers from his secret. But Phoenix was a hot place in the summer, and I found it to be a strange choice in attire.
“Daddy,” I said, “Aren’t you hot? Why are you wearing that?”
He smiled and swallowed his shame. “You writing a book?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Well, tear that page out.”
I was used to this response when I asked questions I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to.
I lowered my head and tried to hide the frown that anchored to my smile.
I was his only little girl, and he hated to see me hurt. He tousled my hair.
“Because, honey…” He flexed his arms like the wrestlers we watched on TV together every Thursday night. “It’s illegal to show off these guns.”
Not that the law ever stopped him. Prison didn’t change him. I still looked at him like he was my hero when he got out because I didn’t know where he had gone. I was told that my father was sick, and I prayed every night he’d get better so he could come home. And he did. Everything had always gone back to normal because my mom hid the truth like he did for as long as she could. But he would never get better.
I was seven when he scooted into a booth at Denny’s with me and my brothers and a foggy glass tube, splattered with burn marks at the end, slipped from his black and red flannel onto the floor. He scurried to pick it up and hushed me violently as I questioned its purpose. My older brother, who was thirteen, already knew our father’s secret and kicked me hard beneath the booth in order to shut me up. I remained quiet and uncomfortable for eighteen years to follow.
There is a stain on the chest pocket of the jacket, where he once kept his cigarettes, Camel Light 100s. It is starting to rip from the former use. I run my fingers along the tearing corner, trying to ease the fabric back into place. Beneath the tips of my fingers is a strange stiffness, something hidden underneath the fabric. I slip my hand inside and pull out a card, it is a peach color with cacti on it and in large black font the date: FEB 29th. It is the bus pass, from the day he died.
I cry and water drips off the card. It was the last item he’d ever conceal. The last thing his broad, thick hands would ever touch. For a moment the card feels warm, but then there is emptiness, like the once filled pockets.
Mile Marker: 312, that’s the last place we left him…what remained. Now we grasp at the memories, fading as colors do with time.
I can recall the words, but can’t hear the sounds anymore, “You’re a good egg.” But where is his voice? Torn from ears, like the pages of the book he always asked if I was writing.
I was writing…poetry of anger, self-pity and hurt. Now I write with a different kind of pain, for having never asked for forgiveness, for having been so selfishly angry, for watching a sick man die without a kind word, without so much as “I love you.” All I can do now is ask the dead man for forgiveness because I never tried.
A man whose voice I can’t remember, for as I get older, he just gets further away.
Somehow I am deader than the dead man.
I can’t say his name, or admit his passing with sincerity, not without tearing up.
Sorry, Dad.
There it is. It’s real now like the copy of Thor’s first appearance, Journey into Mystery, which he gave me. His memory sits beside it in the remains of a dulling floral arrangement smashed together into a jar.
How much I miss him is breaking me up. It’s in every page I write, hidden in every hurt I carry, as it’s the root of all my madness. Because there’s a little girl inside of me who will never know what it’s like to dance with her father, not just on the day of her wedding, but ever.
But should I marry, I will cry. On what is supposed to be the happiest day of my life, my day, I will make it about him…Staining an over-priced gown with tears because he never met the man of my dreams. He never stared him down and made him prove his worth. Or lived long enough for me to understand mine.
Mine.
He once sold his copy of The Death of Gwen Stacy to pay my hospital bills. He always said, “Do you know what I did for you?” And I thought it was his regret for letting go of something precious, but I discovered too late that it was his way of saying that I was worth more. But he’d never see that understanding or sell anything again.
Someday I will be worth more and I’ll buy back the issue, but for now, this is all I have, Journey into Mystery, just a little girl with her comic books, and without her dad.
It’s painful.
Because I miss him. Because I love him. And because I am so irrevocably sorry. For understanding and forgiving so late.
Growing up I was taught to never stop believing, that Alabama was where the skies were blue, and if you found yourself in times of trouble, there would be an answer, so let it be.
When my father died I stopped believing, Alabama and its blue skies were miles away, and there would never be an answer.
***
Everything I know about life I learned from my Dad...To love, to appreciate, to fear, to loathe, to respect…To pretend that everything’s okay, when everything is not. Because mom and him are fighting and its echoing through the walls.
To know when to quit and when to pursue.
All these things and more I learned from watching him.
The man who made me…
And taught me how to hold my own. How to say yes and when to say no. How to read through comics—T-A-L-E-S O-F A-S-G-A-R-D—Tales of Asgard. How to treat boys like Wonder Woman with my fists raised in response to compliments instead of embraces. Because all boys wanted one thing: what Ben Affleck wanted from Liv Tyler in Armageddon…And to “remember Armageddon, Sonja,” remember Bruce Willis and his shotgun because my father would kill any boy who touched me. Because I was his little girl and he loved me.
Him, the man who took my drugs for me.
Teaching me that meth will destroy everything you love…That substances are inappropriately named, containing nothing of true substance, like all the important things he taught me. Like how to hurt when you lose, but not how to be proud when you win, when you achieve, when you are worth something.
For everything he taught me, there was something I had to learn myself: how to love myself. How to have faith in what I could not see. How to deal with anger. Anger for someone who couldn’t help himself. Anger for a man whose demons I let define him. And how to forgive, to forgive him, my dad.
The man who loved me in the best way he could.
With wide crooked smiles and impressions to make me laugh: Yoda, Donald and other famous fouls, Macho Man and Hogan, Wayne and Garth, Bill and Ted. With simple gestures I couldn’t see, because nobody taught me how.
But now that I’m older I better understand, all that I’ve learned, all that I am, is in part because of him. And perhaps that’s what it means, to be “Dad.” To be him.
And in accepting that, I know who I am.
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