Sunday B Sides

When I was 4 years old, my biological father decided he was going to leave us for good, and though he had put us all through some pretty good beatings, I remember feeling absolutely terrified at the thought of him abandoning me, my mother and my younger sister.

We lived near Waco in a big white house next to my grandfather’s mobile home manufacturing business. It was very late, and my sister and I were taking a bath together upstairs. We heard him yelling and breaking stuff in the way he always did, and we heard our mom crying, and this was all normal. He was an artist and a drug abuser, a draft dodger and a barber, by trade. When we lived in Memphis, he dabbled a bit in being a pimp, which apparently is a pretty cool profession these days. But the man couldn’t catch a break, I suppose. Perhaps all the really good pimps had already claimed Memphis. Maybe he would have had better luck in a place like Tulsa.

What wasn’t normal for us was the look in our mother’s eyes when she burst into the bathroom and pulled us out, carrying us both under her arms, running down the stairs, her little, worthless pawns. She pressed us up against the car window, but he wouldn’t look at us, drunk as he was. He couldn’t figure out how to start the car, but he had been bright enough, anyway, to lock the doors.

She rushed us to the driver’s side. I know she was screaming words at him, but I don’t recall what these words were. They would have had to have been some awfully good words to reach him in that driver’s seat. The car started, and he drove away, and that was a goddamned awful feeling. Lord knows where he drove to, but it was a far away place. I remember thinking, why don’t you take me? I remember wondering if I should be ashamed for my willingness to join his abandonment of my mom and sister.

And then they always try to tell us kids that it’s not our fault when a parent leaves, but really, if you think about it, it is. We suffocated that man and kept him from being a famous artist. Who the hell can concentrate on his oeuvre when you got all these goddamned mouths to feed? And children don’t understand this enough to be quiet, they really don’t.

The result of all this is that I am the absolute worst party guest.

If you invite me to a party, I will leave long before the final hour without saying good-bye. If you catch me on the doorstep I will lie to you and tell you that I’m just going outside to make a phone call or retrieve something from my car. And when you turn around I will get in that car and drive away. If there is any sort of meeting at work I will be the third to arrive and the first to leave, not loud and drunk like, but surreptitiously. New Year’s Eve is the absolute worst, because the closer it gets to midnight the more I want to fly away, and if you lift your glass to mine you will find it’s just not there. I openly admit to secretly longing for that moment when I will be at the wheel of my car, the doors shut, the windows up and the ignition hot.

In this way, and in no other, are we the same.