Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails Page 4

  THIS IS A story about my father almost getting his ass kicked in a dive bar in Fairfield, California, three days before Christmas in 1996. The next day I’d go hiking on the Lost Coast with my roommate, so I visited my father in Fairfield for an early Christmas. Since I’d returned from the Marine Corps four years earlier my father had insisted on being buddies. He called me “Bubba.” He called me “Old Tone.” He thought we should hang out and drink and talk about women. He liked talking about cars but he loved talking about women even more. He might be halfway through a story about the 1956 Thunderbird that he and my mother drove from Washington State to Georgia, and then he’d pause, thinking of all the women he might have had along the way had he only been single.

  “That car,” he’d say, “was a pussy magnet. I’d loan that to single guys on the weekends and they’d get so much tail.”

  The bar where we drank was just outside Travis Air Force Base. When I was born it was called Cats. It was a strip club back then. I imagine that just prior to and shortly after my birth my father probably put in some quality time on tip row at Cats. Strip bars across the world are filled with men whose wives are heading to the delivery room.

  I’m quite certain that this Christmas visit was the first time that my father told me about Margarita, his “Mexicana lover,” as he referred to her. He’d once told me about going to a whorehouse in Juárez, and at first I thought he was conflating the stories, that the sad prostitute from Juárez was a stand-in for all the Mexican women he’d wanted to or had slept with. My father’s storytelling is maddeningly circular and often devoid of proper pronouns and temporal markers, and back when he drank, this confusion-laced narrative style was even more pronounced. After half an hour of hearing about Margarita I realized that she was a real woman and that when they’d met she’d been married to another Air Force guy and had lived outside an Air Force base somewhere in Texas and that at this time I was seven years old.

  I said, “So you cheated on Mom with a married woman?”

  “Her old man was an asshole. He never fucked her. And what your mom never knew never hurt her.”

  I thought of my young mother: a woman who gave up college for life as a military wife. I see her drying dishes at the sink, apron tied in a bow at her waist. My father’s poison, his lies and marital misdeeds, piles up in her bloodstream as she goes about the house. There she is: a happy wife and a generous and loving mother, there she is changing my diapers, tending my brother’s bloody knees, dressing my older sister.

  A photo: we are on the lawn of the Vacaville house, my mother, brother, sister, and me. My younger sister has not yet been adopted. It’s Easter 1973, I’m two and a half years old. My mother is dying and the only person who knows this is my father, the man taking the picture, the man poisoning her blood and the blood of our family with his lies and misdeeds.

  So we were at the bar that used to be a strip club, one of my father’s locals, and the bartenders and other regulars knew him. They called him Alabama John. They talked about so-and-so, the Fuckup, and so-and-so, the Wife Beater, and so-and-so, the Drunk. I sensed that they envisioned themselves in a television show: as famous as all the famous drunks in television shows about bars, because in the television shows no one pukes in the bathroom and no one bangs up the family station wagon on the way home; in television shows the drunks are pretty and handsome and witty and well-read and never too obviously drunk in public, the place where most drunks spend a lot of time drinking and embarrassing themselves.

  The actual bar was shaped in a circle, with the liquor shrine in the middle. The liquors on offer were low- to middle-shelf. Beer came in the can. My father alternated between blended scotch and soda and beer. I guessed this was some old trick for getting less drunk. I’d always thought that the trick was alternating water with drinks or not drinking alcohol at all.

  “Look at that hot Mexican girl over there,” he said. “Damn I love the Mexican girls. I bet her name is Margarita. She’s with a fucking convict. Look at that piece of shit covered in tattoos.”

  Now I followed him: drunk in a bar sees a pretty Mexican woman, thinks of the Mexican woman he cheated on his wife with, tells his son the story of his infidelity so his son knows that he was once a virile man who could have any woman he wanted.

  “Hey, Pops, maybe it’s time to roll. I can drive.”

  “It’s early. Let’s have another.”

  I had a girlfriend at home in my bed in Sacramento. What was I doing out on a Friday night with my father in a shitty dive bar in Fairfield?

  He got up to take a piss. He needed to navigate through the area with two pool tables in order to make it to and from the bathroom. On the way back from the bathroom he nudged the pool cue of the young ripped Latino guy who was with the pretty Mexican girl.

  My father was fifty-six and still holding on to his good looks and dark hair. Despite decades of smoking, his skin was taut, and because of working outside he had a suntan that announced vitality. He had a bit of a beer belly because he’d never exercised. But he was a laborer from a long line of laborers. In the past two hundred years there had been a few businessmen, a lawyer or two, one professor, but otherwise the Swoffords had been farmers or laborers. His arms and shoulders were strong, the strength gained by humping ninety-pound bags of concrete and stacks of four-by-four studs, hanging Sheetrock, laying roofs, digging ditches.

  He considered himself a pretty bad motherfucker, the kind of crazy bastard only a fool would mess with, the kind of crazy bastard who would challenge an ex-con on a Friday night in a seedy bar in Fairfield.

  My father had his finger in the guy’s face, the way he used to shove his finger in my face. I started across the bar. By the time I got there the ex-con had my father shoved against the wall with his pool cue crushing my dad’s chest.

  “Hey, brother,” I said. “That’s my pops. He’s an old man. He’s just drunk and talking shit. Let’s walk it off, man. No one needs this. It’s Friday night, no way to start the weekend.”

  “Your pops needs to watch where he’s walking. He’s been bumping into my cue all night, and looking at my girl like he’s gonna try to fuck her. She don’t fuck old men.”

  “You never know what she does when you’re in jail,” my father said.

  “You’re lucky I’m on parole. I’d break your face.”

  I peeled the cue out of his hand and pushed him a few feet back.

  To my father, I said, “Go back to your seat,” as though chastising a kindergartner.

  The ex-con stared at me. He was a beast. He’d crush me.

  I said, “Sorry, bro. He’s being stupid. Holidays. Bad time of year.”

  We settled back into our seats. One of his drinking pals took a couple digs at my dad. He didn’t appreciate it.

  “This place is full of assholes,” he said.

  But we stayed for another.

  It took him a few minutes to cool down.

  “So, Bubba,” he said. “Tell me about this little hiking trip you’re doing with Mike.”

  My father rarely asked questions about my life. Mostly he talked, about cars and women and how the government was screwing him, the post office, the DMV, the IRS.

  His question surprised and excited me. My father, interested in my life!

  “It’s going to be great,” I said. “The Lost Coast. It’s one of the most remote hiking areas on the West Coast. We’re getting dropped off at the north trailhead and picked up three days later twenty-five miles south. We probably won’t see more than two or three other people for the whole trip.”

  “Twenty-five miles?” he asked. “That’s it? That’s a little Boy Scout hike. I can hike that trail better than you young bucks. You think you’re tough? You think you’re hot shit? Why don’t you do fifty, down and back?”

  “I don’t think I’m tough shit. That’s the way people do the hike. It will be difficult in parts. We have to know the tides to navigate beaches. There might be intense weather. It’s no Iron Man but it’s no
t a Boy Scout hike either.”

  “Well, when you ladies want to do some serious hiking, when you want an old pro to teach you how to hike, like we did back in the jungle, give me a call.”

  I could only laugh. I laughed in his face, and said, “Dad, you couldn’t hike two miles without having to stop and catch your breath. In my entire life I’ve never seen you exercise a day.”

  He got snarly. I remembered this nastiness from when I was a kid, a brand of anger and bravado and quick temper that constantly threatened to explode: a bucket of dynamite with a short fuse.

  “OK, Tone. You think you can take your old man? You think you can hike farther than me? You think you’re stronger than me? You want to take it outside, is that what you want?”

  At this point in my life I was of out of shape. I’d rarely worked out since leaving the Marine Corps, but was still fairly solid; I hadn’t lost much muscle, and I worked in a warehouse five nights a week, palletizing about a ton of groceries every night. I’d crush him.

  “No, Dad. I don’t think that’s a good idea. Why don’t we have another drink?”

  At the time my father was living with a woman in a house they’d bought together, but for some reason he’d wanted to stay with me in a hotel, so we’d booked a room at a budget chain. After drinking a while longer we returned to the hotel and ate at the chain restaurant nearby, the kind of place where you can get pancakes, eggs, three kinds of sausage, and hash browns for five bucks.

  I slept fitfully. I wanted to be back in Sacramento in my own bed with my girlfriend. But here I was in a roadside hotel with my drunken father. In the middle of the night he got up and puked all over the bathroom. I left at six a.m., without a shower, without saying goodbye.

  I sat in my beat-up pickup truck in the parking lot for a while. It was a chilly Sacramento Delta morning, some drifting dense fog rolling in through my windows, the wetness of outside gathering on me and the interior of the vehicle. I thought I could sit there forever in my junker truck in the fog.

  IN TWIN BRIDGES, Montana, I sat in the passenger seat of the RV in a massive truck stop parking lot. We’d pulled in at five a.m. when it was still dark outside but now it was beginning to be light. A heavy fog had descended on the mountains to the north and west. The truck stop overflowed with big trucks and cowboy pickups. I watched the cowboys and the truckers get out of their rigs and head toward the restaurant that promised “Eggs as Easy as You Want ’Em, All Day.”

  At the kitchen sink my father administered his inhalants, and he coughed and gagged, bent over barrel-chested at the waist.

  “Breakfast, Pops?”

  “Not for me, Tone. Not sure I can make it.”

  The restaurant was seventy-five feet away. He was in really bad shape.

  I ate alone at the counter. The chatter behind me was about hay, and horses, and barns. I liked Montanans. Good people. I’d spent some time here over the years. My older sister had lived in Montana for more than a decade. And my ex-wife’s parents had retired to a spread in Whitehall, thirty miles up the road. Sarah Freeman and I had divorced before I saw the finished place. I had not seen her parents in six years. They were two of the finest people I had ever met and I missed them immensely. It was difficult for me to think of Susan and Les without weeping. I recalled a mentor once telling me that it took a man ten years to get over a divorce.

  AT THIS POINT I was pushing six years, a long recovery considering Sarah and I got married six weeks after we met.

  After our first night of sex, over omelets at a crappy Iowa City diner, Sarah said, “Let’s get married.”

  And I replied, “Yes. Let’s.”

  It was March 27, 2000. We decided to marry on Friday, April 21. Sarah had her poetry workshop on Mondays and I had my fiction workshop on Tuesdays, so Friday would work. We were broke, so we couldn’t do Vegas or Mexico, and her parents lived in Chicago, so we had to go west: destination Omaha. We swore silence; that we’d tell no one. At the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a fishbowl devoid of privacy, we would pull off a privacy coup.

  On the drive to Omaha from Iowa City we stopped at a restaurant called The Machine Shed. I remember eating a massive breakfast. I had some second thoughts about marrying Sarah. There was plenty of reason for pause. We had only known each other for six weeks. We were both in graduate school. I’d met her parents but she’d not met mine. I ate my massive breakfast—three eggs, bacon, sausage, biscuits, and pancakes. Sarah ate a single poached egg. And neither of us brought up any of the reasonable objections to getting married so soon.

  At that point in my life she was the most beautiful woman I had ever known and I still don’t understand why she wanted to marry me. She came from a Hyde Park academic family. I came from a military family. She’d gone to Reed College out of high school; I’d joined the Marine Corps and then hit the Sacramento community college circuit, eventually transferring to a state university. When I talked to her about having been in the Marines I might as well have been telling her about the few years I worked in the carnival or the time I traveled in a flying saucer.

  Judge Samuel V. Cooper married us. We paid his two clerks twenty bucks each to be our witnesses. I wore black loafers, gray slacks I’d bought at Nordstrom a few years before, and a blue long-sleeved shirt. She wore patent leather high heels that looked as if they might have cost a few hundred dollars but that she’d found at a discount store for seven bucks. She wore a black pencil skirt and a black blouse and her grandmother’s pearl earrings.

  Judge Samuel V. Cooper told us that he could give us the traditional municipal court vows but that he liked to personalize the affair, based on his Native American heritage. We agreed to follow his lead. He said something about the couple and the village and the village building shelter for the couple. He said some things about rain and lightning. It all seemed to make sense to us. We traded plain gold rings.

  We walked outside, to a bright sunny Omaha day. An old couple nearby offered to take our picture in front of the courthouse. I felt certain that Sarah Freeman and I would remain married forever.

  BACK IN THE RV my father and his lungs were up and running and he wanted to hit the road. The radio said we might hit snow on the other side of Bozeman. We needed to make it to Billings tonight, and a storm would stop us in our tracks.

  We pushed along I-90 at a good pace. I was exhausted. I wanted to deliver my father to his RV park and check into my hotel. My girlfriend would already be there from Manhattan. She practiced emergency room medicine, and I knew she’d come prepared with pills for all that ailed us both: pain, anxiety, insomnia, malaise, and roadway ennui.

  But for now the hills and farmland of central Montana ensorcelled me.

  My father sat next to me in his tighty-whities. His handsomely silver Einsteinian hair looked as though it were going through a chain reaction. I wore a pair of yellow boxer shorts with black dachshunds on them, cowboy boots, and a green T-shirt that declared GETTIN’ LUCKY IN KENTUCKY. Quite a sartorial sensation this morning, the Swofford men.

  My father reached across the cab and grabbed my forearm, and said, “Tone, I think we need to get some things out in the open and clear the air. I think you need to get some venom out.”

  So this was the reason my father had asked me to fly to Fairfield and drive a thousand miles with him in his RV. It was a reconciliation ploy. I drove a few miles in silence. I popped my ears, stretched my neck, cleared my throat. I banged my left foot against the door. I felt a rage like none other come over my body. The rage burst at the top of my head and oozed down my body like lava. But the rage was good. I wanted the rage like I wanted those pills stowed in my girlfriend’s carry-on. The pills were legal, prescribed by a doctor. The rage was legal, too.

  “What makes you think I have venom?” I asked calmly.

  “Look at you, Son. The steam is coming out of your body. I can feel your rage.”

  “Why do you think I have rage?”

  “I don’t know. Only you know what enrages you. But I can
tell you it’s not good for you. It’ll kill you. And if I die before you get it out, it’ll kill you even faster.”

  I drove a few more miles. Yes, I had rage. Yes, I had homicidal rage. Yes, I had fantasies about killing this man. Don’t all sons fantasize about killing their fathers? But I suppose most sons get over it by their early twenties. Maybe I’m just a slow learner. After all, it had taken me six years to get a bachelor’s degree.

  I focused on the beautiful landscape. I stared at massive free-range cows.

  “Do you really want to know what enrages me? Because I will tell you. But I don’t think these are things that you are prepared to hear. They are not pretty things. They are not the kinds of things that families like to talk about at this point in the life of the family. By now everyone is supposed to be over their shit, they are supposed to have their own families, and they are supposed to move on and shut up so the older generation can look in the mirror and lie to themselves about what kind of parents they were. By parents, I mean you, Father. Mom is not a part of this conversation. Mom was a saint. All she did was try to protect us from you and your bullying ways.”

  “I don’t need to talk about your mother.”

  “I don’t care what you need to talk about. I spent my entire childhood being spoken to and being told what to do by you. You never asked me questions. You told, you directed. You would have been a wonderful tyrannical film director. I remember that you liked to talk about Generalissimo Franco from your time in Spain. You admired the guy. You considered him a benevolent dictator. Do you know how many people he killed?”

  “What does Franco have to do with this?”

  “A man is the sum of the men he admires.”

  “Jesus, Tone. What kind of crazy talk is that? What is burning you up, Son?”

  I liked the sound of the rush of the road beneath the RV. It was a humming, a mad march. I could take us over the cliff like a herd of bison. My father did not want to hear what I had to say. He considered the case closed on most of my grievances, the statute of limitations expired. I knew this much from a letter he had written me a few years earlier. He wanted me to tell him that I was over all those bad times from my childhood and now we could be friends. But my father failed to recognize that what I wanted and needed was a father, not a friend, not some old dude who would tell me stories about banging prostitutes in Juárez. I had plenty of lunatic friends who told better prostitute stories than he. What I needed was a father who would ask me questions about my life, ask me what I strived for, ask me how I’d failed, ask me why my marriage hadn’t worked, tell me to give it another try with another woman, tell me that having a family was worth sleeping with only one woman for the rest of your life. Even if he didn’t believe it.