His True Self

The old, beat-up SUV rumbled beneath us, only on to keep the air conditioning on our faces in the still parking lot. The radio was humming out some indie tune, a woman’s gentle, jazzy voice. My legs were stretched out on the dashboard as I relaxed in my seat, and my dad was leaning towards the window, cracked open just enough to let out the smoke from his thousandth cigarette of the day. We were having a conversation, gentle, harmless. I said something about the weather, he muttered something about missing NASCAR. We both joked about how long my brother was taking to do his written licence test. It was easy, not forced for the first time in forever. We were having a good time.
“I used to drive a race car,” he said.
“I know, dad.”
“I used to go hangliding too, and parachuting. One time, the pilot let me take us up. He wouldn’t let me land it, though.”
“Why not?” I’d heard the story a thousand times. It was like a rehearsed conversation.
“Because once we got up high enough, we jumped! Parachuted down and landed in the middle of a field.”
“That’s awesome, dad. You really had fun when you were younger.” We both knew I meant it in more ways than one.
“Yeah. I used to be able to do it for hours. One time, after my band did a gig, I went to the back with a woman. Didn’t come back until morning. When my friends finally found me, they asked what I’d been doing. ‘What do you think?’ I said. And you know what they said?”
“What, dad?”
“‘For all this time?’ Well, yeah! The trick is to start with older women.” I started to fidget. Picked up my can of no-name pop, put it down. Watched myself lace my fingers together. “My first time was with an older woman. They’re patient. They’ll teach you. Then I got good, and well… Then I got famous for the singing. Women threw themselves at me. You know about my fan club, right?” Sure I did. All old women with sweaters that had his name on it.
“Blue hairs, you called them?” I asked. I already knew.
“That’s right! All of them old, thinning white hair. A bunch of blue hairs in blue sweaters with my name. I hit number one in Canada, you know.”
“I know. ‘I Never Figured On This’, 1981. A real accomplishment.” I wasn’t lying here. My dad really was famous for a while. Nobody remembered him anymore, but sometimes I listened to his old records when I missed him – the real him.
“That’s right.” We sat in silence for a while. This time, he was the one who fiddled. Changed the radio station to a talk show that made us both laugh. My brother had been in the testing centre for over two hours. I’d taken half an hour to do mine.
The conversation continued. Dad lit up another smoke, I finished off my chips and pop, and we talked about television and life and his side of the family. He criticized my mom, I ignored his faults for a while, and it felt right. It felt right to be able to talk to my dad. My mom kicked him out when I was seven, and he hadn’t really been close to us since. Sure, he came every other weekend for a couple of hours, but it was all shallow talk. NASCAR, what movies we’d like to see, that sort of thing. More recently, all he talked about was taste. The radiation and chemo had knocked out his taste buds, and he hadn’t tasted anything for about two years. And I hadn’t heard anything but complaints about it for about as long. We just never had real conversations. We rarely ever talked on the phone. Sometimes he called at night, and you could tell he was drunk. He’d slur his words, repeat himself, reaffirm his love for his children. Over and over again. But today was perfect. He was being perfect.

And I didn’t know what to do with that. I’d been silently mad at him all day. I wanted to be mad at him. I wanted to go home and complain to my friends about how creepy he was and make up excuses not to see him anymore. But here I was, having a good time. How did that compare?
He’d come that morning like any other, started chatting with me and my brother. The three of us are never really inhibited with each other. Between their Asperger’s and my general awkwardness (possibly attributed to being raised around the two of them), nothing was out of bounds. We talked about showers and shaving and nosepicking and hot chicks and every possible thing that wasn’t acceptable in the general public. The problem was that I did have boundaries. They were hard to reach, but my dad reached them that day.
“Any man,” he was saying, “who sees a nice pair of boobs and doesn’t check them out is just sick.” My brother nodded in agreement. “I mean, take Kinnery for example. I check her out all the time.” He turned to me. I tried not to look disturbed, but I was suddenly very self-conscious. “I mean, you have a very nice body. You have a nice figure, really great boobs. It doesn’t mean I want to fondle them, but they’re very nice.”
Great. Just what I wanted to hear from my father. The same father who I couldn’t stay with overnight. It wasn’t a coincidence. Last time, he’d touched my chest. Granted, I was nine and didn’t really have one, and he was seriously drunk, but even though he slurred out, “Now honey, that was an accident, you know I’d never do anything like that to you,” I never really could believe him. Then there was my uncle’s fiftieth birthday party. My dad got so drunk he offered to sleep with his 20-something niece, and then offered to come down and sleep with my cousin and I (we were both eleven or so). He offered me an alcoholic drink and ended up passing out in the corner. I was embarrassed by my dad, and not the way most kids are. I wasn’t embarrassed because he hugged me in front of my friends, or wore stupid clothes. I was embarrassed because I was always scared he would hit on my friends, or get drunk. The latter was probably irrational – he never drinks before 9:00 at night – but the thought still scared me enough that I wouldn’t let any of my friends meet him.

Yeah, it had been a weird moment. But here I was, enjoying myself with the same guy. Well, the same body. He really is like two different guys. Sometimes, he’s the alcoholic – creepy, annoying, disgusting. I would cross the street if I saw him coming and didn’t know who he was. But sometimes, he was his old self, the self I never met, the self that died with his fiancée before I was born. The self that sang and drove race cars and jumped out of planes. That’s the one I loved, even in the small glimpses I got of him. That one is the soul. That’s the one I love.
I probably should have said something. Told him how much he made me uncomfortable, told him that I missed the real him when he was like that.
But instead, I spent a nice day with him waiting for my brother (who finally did pass his test, after two tries), and went home. And that night, I listened to his records, and tried to connect with the dad I loved.