“Why?”
“I came for Mick’s birthday.”
“Just for the day?”
“Yep.”
“But isn’t that really far?”
“Not so far.”
“When are you leaving?”
“Later tonight, but your mom and I talked. You guys are going to come stay with me next summer in Los Angeles.”
“Really?! The whole summer?!”
I stare at his face trying to memorize it, to give sharp outlines to the blur in my head. Eyes, brownish green. Hair, black, curly. Mustache, thick and bushy, covering all the space between his mouth and his nose. Crow’s-feet. Lines on his forehead. It seems the sun is shining on him, even in the dark room in the basement.
We have breakfast with Mom then he takes us to the field in front of the school to play baseball. He has us stand in the outfield with our gloves as he hits balls to us to practice fielding. He tells us to crouch, to keep our knees bent and our bodies low with our gloves centered between our legs. We chase down grounders and line drives. We kneel afterward at home plate and he says we’re going to get pizza for lunch. We walk the two blocks back to the house on Breys Avenue.
Some of the other kids are tossing a football in the street as we walk up with our dad. He’s tall, in his orange-brown cowboy boots with the big heels, hairy with olive skin so different from my white hairless arms, my overbite which makes my mouth stick out in a funny way like the apes in Planet of the Apes. It feels like walking with a trophy, with a tank, like walking through Yankee Stadium with Babe Ruth. I want to scream, “Hey everyone, this is my dad you little shits! He’s only here for the day. He flew from Los Angeles where he lives, though he could’ve ridden his motorcycle over the mountains if he wanted to.”
The boys are silent as we walk by. That’s the power of a dad, I think. Your own private pit bull, your own private genie, your own private Zeus.
He takes us to Shakey’s where he lets us order two bottomless Cokes and an extra-large pepperoni pizza. I can’t help but stare at him as we walk to the booth to sit down, to take note of the dip of his walk which has the slightest rhythm to it, almost like a dance, his hand swinging just a little lower than it needs to, the smallest bounce between strides. He comes up behind me at the table, puts his hand on my shoulder and pats me on the chest. There’s a closeness to it. I think, I am a son. I have a father.
I memorize the walk, trying to get the rhythm down. It doesn’t quite work without the boots. His speech has a music to it. “Let’s get you boys some pizza. If I don’t eat soon, we’re gonna have ourselves a fuckin’ problem.” He’s not afraid to swear in front of us, like we’re in on something, just us boys. And he swears so poetically, so effortlessly. “Those goddamn Padres suck shit this year. They only got like two bats on the whole damn team.” “That shitbird Reagan couldn’t find his ass with his own hands.” “It’s a good truck but the fuckin’ carburetor is busted again.”
The fuckin’ carburetor. I repeat the words under my breath, practicing for emphasis. The trick is to roll the word “fuckin’” out like it’s nothing, like you don’t even care about it, like it’s just a short detour on the way to the word “carburetor.” Oh, did I say “fuck”? I didn’t even realize. I don’t even know what a carburetor is but when Dad says that word between bites of pepperoni pizza, when he shakes his head, I shake mine too as if to say, “Yeah Dad, no fuckin’ shit. It must be the fuckin’ carburetor. That’s your problem right there.”
I repeat the phrase in my head, trying to imagine ways I can work it into my daily speech. “Well, Derek, see the problem with your bike is the fuckin’ carburetor.” And “Ah well, Mom, I hate to say it but the reason the oven won’t turn on is the fuckin’ carburetor.”
“And don’t even get me started on Thatasshole Reagan,” he says, pulling a stringy piece of pizza from his mouth. “I tell you what, if your mom loses her job, it’ll be because of Thatasshole Reagan. Thatasshole will say anything to get elected.” He’s been called Thatasshole so many times by so many people I don’t even know his first name. When I heard the name “Ronald” Reagan on TV, I figured Thatasshole must have a brother who’s running for president.
When we get to talking, Dad says that Synanon wasn’t so bad. Tony and I are on our third glass of sugary-sweet soda. I’ve mixed Mountain Dew, Sprite and Orange Crush with it to make what we call a Suicide. I don’t want to go anywhere. I wonder if we could live right here in this red booth next to the big window at the Shakey’s on Market Street drinking pop and listening to Dad talk. “Synanon was a great place, before it went bad. We used to say we were in the people business. We did one thing: we took people who had problems and we turned them around so they were a better person.”
“So why’d you leave?”
“Well, after so long, Chuck started to buy his own bullshit. Waddya gonna do?” He puts his hands out, raising his shoulders.
“Did you really carry a gun, Dad? Before Synanon? Like a real shotgun?” Tony has told me these stories, about the drugs and the fights and the crime and Chino state prison. He collects them. We both do. And we know this is a rare moment, alone with Dad with our pop and bellies full of pizza.
“Oh, sure. I had to.”
“But couldn’t people see it?”
“No, I used to wear a long brown trench coat to hide it. I didn’t really use it but you never know. Having a gun pointed at your head is a lousy way to spend a Saturday night.”
“What did you do? Did you rob houses or steal cars? Was it like organized crime?”
“More like dis-organized crime. We wrote bad checks and stole credit card numbers. We ran some drugs. We were too high to be very organized about it.” He lets out a cackle and looks me in the eye, a joke we share, just us guys.
“Weren’t you scared in prison?”
“Not really. It wasn’t so bad. The trick is to make everyone think you’re crazy. That way they leave you alone. If someone walked up to me trying to give me a ration of shit, I would just start screaming at the top of my lungs. After a while, people got the point, you know?”
He tells us this like it’s information we might find useful someday.
“And never take no shit from the guards. ’Cause they’ll try to make you feel like you’re nothing. You can’t let anybody treat you that way. Especially those sonsabitches.
“I had a number. They give everyone a number. Mine was A-73581. When they lined you up, they would call you by your number instead of your name. And I would say, ‘Fuck you, I have a name, asshole. Call me by my name.’ I got to be such a pain in the ass they didn’t want to deal with me because it made them look bad if they didn’t react. So they’d say, ‘I’m gonna lock you in solitary.’ I’d say, ‘Big deal. I’m locked up. Right? How many times you gonna lock me up?’”
There’s a rhythm to the stories, a pace, like he’s told them a thousand times. He’s not embarrassed or ashamed. It’s more like this is what he knows and he’s not going to pretend to know other things. He knows about prison and he knows about cars. He knows about drugs and he knows about Dope Fiends. He knows about baseball, horse racing and those fuckin’ carburetors.