“You’re a smart kid and you can do more in life than I ever did and that’s what I want for you. I fucked around a lot when I was your age and it didn’t do much for me. I never thought you’d go that way.”
He looks over his racing form. “Your brother was dealt a different hand and he’s dealing with it now and that’s good. But you have a real chance to do something special.” He puts his racing form down and looks at me very seriously.
“Don’t fuck it up. Don’t do what I did. Go do something better.”
His fist is balled on his knee and he taps it gently, the black hair on his hands against the faded blue jeans, the tiny dot tattoo on the knuckle of his middle finger. Is this tough love?
I fight the urge to cry because we are at the racetrack with the men and boys don’t cry. For so long, I just wanted to be near to him, to be like him. All those nights alone in Oregon wondering what it means to be a man trying to piece it together like re-creating an image from a dream.
“I love you. You’re my son. You can do things I never did. You know, I never wanted to get locked up.” I see the memory fill his eyes. “We tell funny stories and all, but it was terrible. Being in prison is terrible. Being an addict is no fun. It’s just darkness and you’re alone and you can talk a big game but you’re really just some dumb-shit kid running scared. I wish somebody had told me that when I was your age. I would’ve never gone to prison. But there just wasn’t anyone. I think I maybe would have been a scientist or maybe a musician. I was in the Synanon choir. I got a good voice, you know.”
I try to imagine him holding a guitar or a saxophone, standing on a stage in sunglasses with the Allman Brothers or Jackson Browne. I want him to be proud of me, more than anything in the world.
“Anyway, let’s lay an extra bet on this next race. This is our horse.” He puts his arm around my shoulders and squeezes me, letting it hang there for a moment while the earth stands still.
I tell him about the nights we destroyed property in the neighborhood, about Flesh and Duck and the time I almost OD’d, when the world was spinning and I was three inches tall in my head. He nods and says, “Let’s just say it’s good you got it out of your system early.”
There is no judgment, just a warm feeling like he is on my side.
I wonder if this is just another way Mom lied to me about the world. Your father who left me for a tramp. Your father with nine fingers. Your father who only likes sports and cars. I know the words by heart, the implication that our lives are a story of escape and he is the villain. But here he is next to me reasoning with me, trying to get me to go down a different path. He doesn’t even want me to become a Jollett man. Or maybe he wants to change what that means.
Dad and I go to the track every weekend for a while, while Bonnie recovers from her surgery and Tony is in his drug rehab. I learn to box my exacta bets and to broaden the Pick Six field on a race when I’m less sure about the winner. I learn the names of the guys who, like my dad, go there to sit in the sun and take in the day, to let the future have some possibility. They even start to ask me about my bets. Who ya got in the fifth, kid?
Sometimes we don’t talk much. We just sit there and eat and stare off into the distance. There’s that old feeling of being connected as if by a string. He doesn’t say it but I know he likes sitting there next to me too, to just be a father who has a son.
When Bonnie goes back to work, she gets a promotion. She’s going to be the first woman to be a vice president in the history of the company where she works. She says she’s honored and she knows lots of women could’ve gotten there first but there was something called the glass ceiling that men put in their way. She started as a telemarketer but she just worked her way up with that big warm personality of hers, making calls, then training salespeople, then managing them, then starting a whole division of the company and bursting right through that glass ceiling. Dad and I are so proud of her, even though she has to work a lot. She says it’s all men in the meetings at her company and that women have to work harder to make the same amount of money and I just think, Who wouldn’t want Bonnie in charge?
She says Dad doesn’t mind staying home with me while she works. “Say what you will about your father, he’s always been a huge supporter of me and my career. He always tells me I’m good at my job and he’s thankful that I work to support us. That’s hard for some men. Not Dad. I work sixty hours a week and he makes sure I never even have to wash a dish.”
It’s weird because I was always told by Mom what a Neanderthal Dad is because he likes sports and old cars and so it just seems like so many things she told me that weren’t true about him. Bonnie tells me, “It’s like how he never once missed a single child support payment. Never once in your entire lives. He sent a check every month and it arrived on time.” It’s strange that Mom never mentioned this when she talked about how Dad abandoned us and I’m starting to think maybe he never abandoned Tony and me. He just didn’t want to be with Mom anymore.
The promotion means Bonnie is going to be gone more working late so one day they sit me down for a Big Talk and tell me Dad is going to stop doing his sunroof company and start another company selling “gift specialties” from home so Bonnie can work more and he’ll be at the house when I’m done with school. He tells me someone needs to look out for me so it may as well be him.
“That woman could talk a dog off a meat truck,” he says, cooking his favorite dinner, short ribs and fried potatoes. She went to Synanon when she was nineteen, when she was marching for civil rights and attending sit-ins, when she was still a teenager, a “blond bombshell” who wanted a better world. She never went to college. She joined the commune that became a cult instead.
Dad cooks and keeps the house clean and talks on the phone with different businesses trying to sell them pens or cups or hats with their company logo on them. He wakes me up early on Saturday mornings for my chores so the two of us can get them done while Bonnie sleeps, before we head off to the track. I can feel how much he’s placed his hopes on me. It’s weird, to have this new idea of the man I’m becoming, that I might become, that I don’t have to be a Dope Fiend or a fuckup, that there might be something else waiting for me.
We finalize our Pick Six order and head to the ticket counter to place our bets. All around us are men yelling at TV screens and men discussing horses and men slumped over their racing forms as I follow him through the crowd. All these men with their dreams, their systems and schemes.
The crowd gets thicker so it feels like we’re walking through a tunnel. I keep my eyes on Dad’s red shirt and blue jeans in front of me, trying to stay close.
He never knew his father, not really. It was just his three brothers running wild and his mother cleaning hotel rooms to make ends meet. I wonder if maybe sometime long ago in another life, in a hospital bed or a jail cell or a dirty couch in the Synanon lobby next to a bucket filled with puke, feverish and shaking, he hoped to have a son someday who could do the things he never could.
When I get home that night and the day’s events flash through my mind, I see him walking in front of me through the crowd of men. They form a tunnel around us, all these angry men with their high hopes for something new. I can feel their breath on my neck, the smell of beer, the thick ankles and cigarette smoke as I follow my father down that path. The tunnel darkens as we walk deeper into it, the way it does in a dream, following the logic of dreams, like we are heading for the center of the earth, a sacred place I imagine on cold nights when I just want to hold everyone in my family close. We follow the path down as it turns from men to dirt and we hear the sound of the track echoing behind us until it is cold and there is the faint sound of water. It’s quiet as we enter a bright room. There’s a crowd of people there, Dad as a skinny young man with a smile on his face and a black spit curl leaning against the wall with a lit cigarette; Mom as a sad little girl with striking green eyes and big Dutch cheeks standing alone in a corner; a teenage boy with dyed black hair, angrily pounding a broken leg against the ground; a bearded man with thinning black hair lying on the ground taking swigs from a bottle in a brown bag. Bonnie as a teenage girl, hopeful and smiling as she stares down at a small blond boy with an enormous overbite and a potbelly running between the adults, looking into each of their faces, searching for something. There’s my grandpa Nat and my grandma Juliette. My aunts and cousins. My grandpa Frank in his chair and grandma Frieda smiling in her robe. There is a small green urn with white marbling sitting on a shelf above them, above that is a floating blue image of a man with a thick mustache talking to the little boy with the overbite. He says, We are here together and we will always be. Nothing can ever change that. Not even death can take it away. That’s what it means to be an F-A-M-I-L-Y. No matter what happens, we can always meet here in this room a thousand feet beneath Hollywood Park.