hot like rollers

July 2007-
My Dad is in town. He and his girlfriend are visiting with us before we all go down to the beach in Savannah, GA. This brings mixed emotions. On one hand I want him to be and act normally. To be a parent. To advise me about mutual funds or saving for home renovations. I want him to show me the electrical  box in  my house and to tell me what to do if we blow a fuse. These are little girl fantasies, I know he will tell wild stories and pat me on the ass.

When I was a kid I used to think it so neat that he would tell terrible inappropriate stories. I thought it wild how he would flirt with every woman. I loved that he talked around me like an adult. Everything he said was so vile and exciting. Now as I sit across from him at our patio table, I am wiser and know he makes up most of his stories. His jokes and long-windedness makes me uncomfortable. I don’t say much. He takes forever to tell a story and they always begin with how wealthy he was as a kid.

He starts one now. “You know I am eating seafood again” I think that I wouldn’t know anything about his diet seeing as I have seen him once a year since I was six.

“You didn’t know this, but we had a summer home in Wisconsin.” This doesn’t sound right at all. In one story, my father has said that he spent the summers with his nanny because his parents were both drunks. “We were wealthy, so wealthy oh, my the summers we had” He starts. I can feel my eyes glaze over, I am a bit angry because I have no idea about what part, if any, of his past is true. I won’t know what to pass on as fact. I won’t know what to tell you when you are grown or ask questions.

He refills his wine glass again and goes on. “Oh fuck, what is that fish? OHH help me out, babe, this fish was about a 50 pounds... its part of the pike family..” He stretches his arms out as wide as possible. I look at him. “Everyone made me eat the fish” He goes on. “We had huge summers parties with at least 12 people around the summer table.” This sounds pottery barn, and imagery pops in my head. Pretty glasses on the table and candelabras in the trees. I remind myself it isn’t real.” “Smoked ! The bloody fish was smoked and they made me eat it!” He swirls his glass. “Sid! What is that fish, you know the one,..in the pike family, it has a nuzzle”
 Sid comes out to the patio from the kitchen. He adapts to the situation and instantly, being the non-sour genius, pops out the name of the fish.

“Yes!! Oh Yes they made me eat that fish” dad adds again. “Bloody Smoked!”

Dad has a few chosen words that he pronounces with a British pronunciation. They are as follows:
Basil( baz-il)
Bloody
Love (to an unknown woman, on the phone or to the waitress at the table)
Tomato and Potato
Mercedes (MER-SA_DAS)
And several others
People assume that he either lived in England or has travelled extensively.

He has done neither.

We make it through the meal with Mary insisting on helping and advising. “Sal, can you transfer the rice into a bowl for the table?” Sid asks me.
“Oh we don’t have to do that” Mary says. “I would like to” I respond. I transfer the rice to a pretty glass bowl. “Sally, you don’t have to do that’ she says, twice. I ignore her. She’s a repeater and this irritates me. Its not her fault I am ill at ease, but I can’t help but resent her.

We make it through the meal. Sid, my dad and Mary go through 3 bottles of wine and this is after the cocktails they had prior to our meal. Dad tells stories of his job about which entails selling chemicals to companies who need them to mix with other chemicals they have bought from other individuals. Eventually, These chemicals are blended and make things like dry-cleaning fluids and anti-freeze. He has been doing this for a while. He is a chemical broker and works when he wants to. He has a partner, Mike Scanes both of whom make quite a bit of money. Mike is well off and works hard. My dad from what I can tell, works a little and has enough money to be comfortable. He doesn’t have a family or a wife, so mainly the money is spent on girlfriends and himself.

We chat for a while, the conversation gets a bit dramatic due to the booze, I imagine. But somehow, despite my being pregnant and sober, I manage to keep up. We discuss the war and we discuss energy fuels. Smart things to talk about. I make good arguments to energy alternatives and then part of me wonders whether I am still trying to get the old man to think of me as being even mildly intelligent. To my father, my brother Tod holds that label. He’s the one who made A’s in high school and the one everyone made sure went to college and that his tuition was paid for. He was the magical brilliant boy who legends tells, fixed the magnetic tape on the refrigerator at 6 years old. The story goes as this: Parents and neighbors stood around our kitchen swilling cans of Coors at my fathers urging and watched how my brother reached for appropriate tools and repositioned the magnetic tapes realizing how my father, in his attempt to replace the stripping tape had mistakenly positioned one negative side to the other negative side. This miracle, explained why the refrigerator door would not close and in fact, explained why it would in fact swing open. Tod is the one presently getting his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering. Collage money well spent it turns out. This is more past resentment, I am ashamed to say. Yes, I wish I could get past this, but I haven’t. I was forgotten as a kid by my father, forgotten in the college arena, and I am overlooked now. I sent myself to college and have the loans to prove it.

I was thought to be cute, quick-witted and street-smart and I guess they assumed I would survive adulthood. They expected me to not get pregnant, not get hooked on drugs or to be some drunk by the time I was 17 simply because they couldn’t imagine it because it would reflect badly on them. They never asked me once if I had plans for college, or plans for anything for that matter. They never raised me. We were sort of roommates.

So here sits the old man now, glassy-eyed and drunk and fabricating everything about his delightfully wealthy blue-blooded childhood. I have my own spun pieces of how his childhood might have been.

His parents were both alcoholics. I imagine his childhood being pretty traumatic as a result. They were very rich during a time when few were. Both parents were closed off emotionally and he and his sister were handed off to others. My father has said that he vacationed during the summers with his nanny’s family in the country to be away from his alcoholic parents. During the school year and before he was shipped off to Culver military school as his father and his grandfather before him, he had to endure the coldness and drunk binges of his parents. The house in Springfield Illinois were he grew up was majestic and detailed. A huge Victorian with porches and gingerbread woodwork and a coach house that at one time housed slaves in the back. This I know to be accurate as I have seen photos in the newspapers. The captions told of grand times in the house. And grander parties. This was my father’s home as a child.

He tells of stories when the parties would go on and on. He would be awakened as a small boy in the wee hours of the morning and told to play the piano downstairs for all the guests. I imagine him led to a large ballroom surrounded by bleary-eyed drunks and then climbing up on a pile of velvet cushions on a piano bench. He would perform until the guests tired of the novelty of a child playing Mozart and Bach. Music was his only demanded performance, everything else he did was largely was ingnored.

My father has always had a gift of music. He still plays piano with a passion but with an equal reluctance. He plays by ear and can recognize a tune from old and play by it memory. His love is for jazz and some classical pieces as well. His voice was at once time clear and precise, unending and he’ll belt out a song when he feels it move over him. I remember him singing in the car as a kid. And I remember him laughing at my brother and I when we sung with him to Rick James’s “Brick house” once in the car. This is one of my finer memories of my father. He was honestly laughing at my brother and I singing this very adult- themed song. Now that I think of it, I bet two little kids singing anything from Rick James would be pretty funny. I tried my hand a bit at singing as well. I had piano lessons as a kid and wouldn’t practice, but singing came easy. There were no lessons at all, you just had to open your mouth. The secret to real success with voice is to really feel the music and let yourself go. I couldn’t ever stop worrying about how I sounded. My mother had been through countless music classes and the like herself. She played piano, but unlike my father had to have the music in front of her. She was even a music teacher at our elementary school. She was hard on me and voice, or maybe just honest. She often said I was out of key or not staying on the melody. “Look at the notes on the page Sally, they don’t go up that high” “but can’t I sing it like I’d like?” I’d say. But I think she was pretty impressed at my voice but she wanted to control it, the criticism and the training just didn’t work with me.

I heard popular signers on the radio play around the melodies in their music and I probably sang like that. I had solos in church and in my music classes in middle school and high school that I won out from a hundred or so kids. I was in summer stock plays when school let out for the summer. One of my music teachers in high school is a local success here in Atlanta and has some national recognition. She is a black woman who has sung for everyone from the president of the united states to Coretta Scott King. Her name is Babby Mason and she stays mainly on the gospel scene. I auditioned once for her when we were preforming in high school in a musical called God spell. I remember being late for the audition and finding her alone in the music room. She reluctantly said I could still try out and I remember being thrilled that no one else was there to hear me sing. And I sang for her and she looked at me with surprise and then said very seriously “Are you going to be a singer when you grow up?” I don’t remember my response, just the shine in her brown eyes and the warmth in my chest.

My father didn't show his being impressed with my singing capabilities either. I remember my brothers wedding and we were signing Nat King Coles’s “Unforgettable” He and I were standing around signing acapela. And he would stop suddenly and correct me some how. This putting the focus back on him. I knew what Natalie King Coles part was because I had listened to it on the radio and perfected her version. It was neither a harmony or another scale, but somewhere between the two. Dad didn’t think I was hitting the mark and had to command more attention to the two of us by constantly advising me. This took all the spontaneity out of the moment for me and once again it was all about him.

I never sang again with my father.

So here he is now with my husband and me in our new house with our new baby on the way. It should be a reunion, but I am uncomfortable and unforgiving. I wish I could get past all these little pains in my past. I wish it didn’t matter but anger always surprises me with its hearty nature. It seldom dies quickly no matter how you try. As I have gotten older, I merely feel like I can compartmentalize my anger, putting memories away in sections like one would organize a laundry drawer.
I know that the real anger steamed not when he divorced my mother, but rather when he left my brother and I with her in the South and moved back to Ohio. This is real separation. We seldom saw him as kids because he travelled so much and when he left the state we saw him so much less. I have very little memory of him as a child. I guess he was there, my mother has old videos, we are on the beach somewhere, possibly Nag’s head and he is there, cigarette in mouth, rolling up my pant legs before my brother and I jump into the ocean. I was surprised to see him in the videos, my memory is not as sharp as the flickery old tapes. Everyone had fathers in our group of friends and neighbors, but to me, there was just a hole. Even worse, the lack of knowing there was a hole just part of me never knowing the balance other kids had in their lives or the safety they must have felt. Maybe dad splitting was a good thing as he was not one to invest in us anyway because when he was home he visited the neighbors more than us. And his comments and disciplines could be so damaging. He told me that I was a bad kid when I cried for my mother when I was left with him and I remember he told me I had discipline problems once when he picked me up from school because I was sick. My mother didn’t think I was a bad kid as far as I know, no one else did either.

I feel as I age the anger might be worse than when I was a child and I feel it is possibly because of my love and relationship with Sid. He drinks too much sometimes which is a firmilar sin for me and renascent of my father, certainly, and I worry like mad about it, but he is devoted and loving and patient and a joy, a real joy in my life. In short, what a man should be and what a father should aspire to. Dispute all this past pain, I choose wisely in choosing a spouse, and grasshopper... I expect you to as well. The real pain went not into bad partners or dates, specificly, but went into feeling that I was different and undeserving. The sadness went into my fearing and misunderstanding any type of authority, to cheat myself of safe logical decisions and to take less than what I deserved. To this day I fail to realize where I have come from and claim what is rightfully mine.

For the first time, I am standing up for myself when it comes to family. I am causing waves. I look difficult and I frustrate my mother and father and even my brother. I have said things like “You will not speak to me like this and want do you want, really from me, after all of these years?” I call the shots.
I feel I must protect my child and my husband and especially myself. Anyone who doesn’t add to my life’s joy or who tells me I can’t do something can fuck off.

Dad is here now and knows I have changed. I don’t laugh at every clever thing he says. He says this to me in so many words. I can’t argue this fact with him.

They, he and Mary leave in the morning. We are staying at Sid’s brother Dan’s house that he shares with his partner, Matthew. Both of whom are delightful. We pretty much direct the social activities. Dad knows somehow that it has become my way or the highway. If he and Mary decide to hit a pub or bar or something, he knows he won’t see me so he is a sport and goes along with the groups direction. We go to a sandwich shop and dad picks up the bill. Afterward we are all waiting outside for him, what is he doing? I ask Mary. “Oh, and she smirks, he’s getting a receipt for the sandwiches.” whose cost I gather might be 25 dollars or so. “So if anyone asks, we were all talking about chemicals” Dad is ripping off the IRS in other words. This pisses me off “hope the IRS never calls me” I say to Mary, then I add “Sid is so honest when it comes to reporting all of his income”  Her face sours. She knows my father is an ass, doesn’t she?

Dan has an art show in one of the galleries in Savannah on this evening. It is a nice night and I am having a real pleasure watching all of Savannahs finest characters. I find myself having a good time. They have wine and light munches at the gallery which Dad hits like a tornado. He gets pretty buzzed as we are there for quite a bit of time. The higher social level is filled with eccentrics who like to tell dark stories about their pasts upon introduction, past drug use and subsequent incarcerations, endless gossip, all the while tending to their dogs, which travel with them everywhere.

I fit in like a glove here.

I have a very small amount of wine mixed with tonic water which unbelievably relaxes me a bit. I talk to Mary a bit about her mother. I do not have any energy for this but I realize I am being a bit standoffish so I try small talk with her which encourages her to prattle on and on.

Afterward Mary and Dad meet Dan and Matthew, Sid and I at a local restaurant. Good Italian food, not fussy like one sees in Atlanta, and we rack up quite the bill. I am seated next to Mary who I mange to have additional conversations with and I am surprised how utterly exhausted I am.

The bill comes and is put in immediately front of my father which he ignores. Matthew finally picks up the bill and my father ignores this. Perhaps he is drunk, I am not sure, I snatch it out of Matthews hand as we are his uests for the weekend and I pay for it. It is close to $200.00 bucks.

Sid and everyone ask if this is okay, do I need any money? Etc. It is the typical “I’ll get the bill” conversation and everyone is involved- except Dad.

I am pissed. When we finally get up to leave he asks innocently
“Wait! Where is the bill?”

“You owe me $260 bucks” I say out loud so all can hear, snapping my purse closed.

“We will get you next time” Mary whispers in  my ear. More bullshit, I think to myself. “Who you, Mary? You are going to pay for something?” I imagine myself saying. My father has made a past of ripping off his children but his girlfriends have always made it clear to him and the public that they never pay for anything, they are, after all, and I quote “a woman, a blond, and from Texas.”

Texas is a state that legally must give equal pay for equal work, albeit reluctantly and I am sure holds many liberated women, yet the Texan women all cover their gray, wear loads of make-up, they all hide their age and never pay for anything. And most sadly - most of whom have one time or another dated my father until of course he cheated on them. And this is liberation?

We follow Dad and Mary out to the car and there is no mention of repaying me the dough, which doesn’t surprise me. Driving home with Dan and Matthew I am furious but I cannot say anything, I mean, I am a big fat bitch anyway about him and I simply must tone it down somehow.

“What’s the big deal?” the often silent but sane part of me whispers.

The next night is even a better performance. Dan and Matthew agree to cook at their place, to be able to kind of keep the visit moving along and to not incur anther large resturant bill.

So Dan and Sid go out and get food for dinner and I take another on of my world famous naps. I just feel so overwhelmed and exhausted, its just unbelieable.

Dad and Mary arrive terrifically buzzed. Mary comes into the house with what Texan women discribe as a “roadie” as in, barkeep - give us one drink for the little ol’ roadie. Mary’s drink of choice this evening is scotch in a little plastic cup with wilting ice cubes that she must have snuck out of the bar they were in. They brought nothing else but their own buzz and their own booze.

My father is now 74 some odd years old. The women he dates aren’t lovely and frail and in their turtleneck years. They do not wear wide brimmed hats, hum songs and grow tomatoes. They all look like aging old nightclub dancers and Mary is certainly one of them. She has very large dyed red hair that has been hairsprayed into a big red dome. You can look through what looks like red cobwebs and see her very white shinny scalp. She also has painted on red eyebrows to match. She must use a lip pencil. I have never seen naturally occuring scarlet colored eyebrows so I often catch myself staring. She lines her little eyes with black kole pencil all the way around, thus making them seem even smallar. She tops this all of with black clumppy mascara which makes her skin look transparent and paper thin. Her lips are drawn in thin lines and often perced when she glares at my dad. She is buxum and bold and growls out tired retorts when asked questions. She is sarcastic which normally I would respect but I am over having relationships with these colorful woman. I see them once every two or three years and then they misterously come down with some insanity that my father can’t tolerate.

And then poof! They are gone in the night.