It was a long road to Kingman’s interstate highway on-ramp. I-40 loosely follows old Route 66, the ‘mother road’ I crossed four times in the back seat when Dad transferred between the Atlantic and Pacific fleets.
Mike and I spent a long day on 95. Riding with the dead exhausted my body and perplexed my mind. From a desert landscape, we entered Las Vegas, the city most celebrated for unmatched opulent decadence. I searched for the casino where I had stayed at before and whose camping rates were so good that I burned money at the gaming tables. I remembered its name and expected billboard directions. But with too many signs and cars, I couldn’t focus. Before I knew it, I was on the outskirts of town, too tired to make another run through the city. I stopped for gas, grabbed a brochure with directions to Lake Mead National Park, and decided to head there instead. Cruising the Vegas strip in an SUV towing a trailer would be insipid. I should have planned my route better.
I called ahead to secure a campsite, drove to the ranger-staffed entrance. paid the entrance fee and bought a senior pass pass for all National Parks, asked directions to the campground and left Vegas in my rearview. I arrived after hours and found my registration form posted on a corkboard. I filled in my details, deposited the fee, and waited for the attendant in a golf cart to follow to my site. The transient subdivision, with trailers, motorhomes, truck campers, fifth wheels, and tents spread itself into terraced streets leading down to Lake Mead. The place was nearly full. I was lucky in the overflow section.
Missing exits had thrown off my itinerary. Meeting Mike messed with my head. Missed exits were my mistakes. Not finding the casino in Vegas felt like cosmic intervention. I locked my trailer door, ate, and slept.
The next morning, I got up early, stowed loose gear, unhooked hoses, cables and became mobile. Like an impatient old woman wanting a ride to church, Mike sat quiet in the passenger seat waiting. We passed Lake Mead’s famous Hoover Dam. I didn’t stop because I’d seen it before and would rather buy a postcard.
Mike fiddled with the MP3 player until the Rolling Stones’ “Let It Bleed” erupted through speakers. The volume was too high for conversation. I dialed it down.
“Do you remember when my dad died? You came by the house, and we took a ride?”
Mike thought for a moment. “Not really. There was a lot going on, and you were fucked up.”
He was right. I was fucked up and unstable. It was Saturday morning, three days before high school graduation. I was 17. Dad was dead, and my life was a mess. I turned the music up. The morning after Dad died, I saw his ghost in my bedroom. A fuzzy halo crowned his head. Neither of us spoke. He didn’t look like a Sunday School angel. By the time I rubbed sleep from my eyes, he was gone. Later that morning, Mike arrived on a motorcycle borrowed from his brother-in-law. He parked on the lawn in front of our concrete stoop and knocked at the door. I stepped from the the house full of neighbors, friends, and family to meet him. He handed me a spare helmet and we rode down Shore Drive all the the oceanfront strip On the way, we stopped to smoke cigarettes and talk. His visit and that ride were more precious to me than all the casseroles and condolences. I didn’t mention Dad’s ghost.
Dad had died 300 miles west of Norfolk in a Veteran’s Home in Roanoke. We called it a VA hospital to make it sound more like a treatment center than a home for troubled veterans. Mom and I went there once thinking we’d bring him back home. I waited in the parking lot while Mom went to get him, but instead of packing his bags to leave he had earlier that morning wrapped a sheet around his neck in a half-hearted suicide attempt. He wanted to stay. It was the last time I saw him alive.
Not long after, Dad called Mom to say he had stomach cancer. Two weeks later, a VA doctor called to say he was dead.Within a couple of days, people swarmed the house with food and sorrow. Friends, neighbors, and relatives offered condolences. Some of the words said enraged me, especially the ones that began, “He’s in a better place…” I have no idea if death what brings, and I don’t know where death took him.
When he lay dying, EI imagine his thoughts were as muddled as mine mid stroke were when I lay in intensive care. The hospital in an airport of souls arriving and departing. I heard lullabies played when newborns arrived. and coded broadcasts sound to summon help for the dead and dying. Morphine kept me from pain. I was ambivalent about life or death and became Elliot’s “pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”
At one point when I lay befuddled in intensive care, I saw outside my open door, a man push a harp on a guerney through the hall. I lay naked on my bed beneath a hospital gown. I was elevated in my bed with bags of fluids plugged into my veins and a bag attached to a catheter to collect my urine. Electronic devices beeped as they charted my heart beat and pulse. My life had been reduced to the elemental. Doctors, nurses, attendants and sometimes policemen walked the halls, but this harpist was a rarity. My nurse said he calmed people in their final moments. I thought about that then asked my wife to bring me a gun when I asked for a harp.
I don’t remember Dad’s favorite music, but I always think of him when I hear Hank Williams. At his funeral, we sang “Eternal Father,” and the organist played “Anchors Aweigh.” Masons in aprons surrounded his casket, performed their rites. Shipmates dressed with rows of medals walked his closed coffin down the chapel’s aisle. He was taken aboard a ship and slid from a plank into the Atlantic Ocean. We didn’t accompany him to sea. Mom said the Navy preferred that we stay ashore. A photographer documented the bugler, flag-draped coffin, and sailors in white saluting his immersion into the sea. None of them knew the Chief Radioman they buried that day. I’m his son, and I didn’t know him, but they performed their duties as if they cared—or so it seemed in the photographs.
Two of Dad’s brothers drove from Alabama to attend the funeral. It was their first and last visit to Norfolk.
I visited the oldest brother in Birmingham a couple years after the funeral. I was on my way to a teacher’s college in rural southwest Alabama, a school his son recommended to me. Dad’s nephew joined the Navy rather than face the Vietnam draft. He was stationed in Norfolk and visited us before and after Dad’s death. After two days in Birmingham, the uncle asked me how long I planned to stay. I left the next day and never visited him again.
As an adolescence, I blamed God for Dad’s mental illness. I hated his psychotic breakdowns.. Mom said his problems started in childhood. She never cared for his family. Whenever we traveled coast to coast between fleet assignments, we visited his people because not to stop would have been rude. His mother, Miss Lela, stayed with us for a while. I still have her chamber pot as a keepsake. Mom’s family lived closer, in North Carolina. We visited them often. Her father was the finest man I ever knew, and her mother loved me no matter how bad I behaved. Things happen. Childhood trauma may cause mental illness, and Alabama, where Dad was from and spent his youth, is known for eccentric people. I graduated college there, worked there for a year, felt dissatisfied and joined the Army to see the world on the government’s dime.
Dad left home in May 1942 to enlist for war. His extended family lived for a century and a half in three neighboring Alabama counties. He and his three brothers enlisted. Three joined the Navy, one joined the Marines. All of them survived. Dad and his younger brother stayed in the Navy for a career far from Alabama’s farms and textile mills. By choosing to become a radioman, Dad learned a technical trade and shipped over often enough to dress in the uniform of a Chief Petty Officer, the rank he craved from his time as an able bodied seaman. No one fucked with Chiefs.
Barbers Point was Dad’s last duty post. He had a mental breakdown and lost security clearances necessary for his job. His breakdown also cost him the prestige and privilege of rank as well as the admiration and obedience of junior seamen. When we left Hawaii, he was mid-forties. Our return to Virginia was a devolution. Dad no longer wore the uniform he had worked so long to wear. We returned to the neighborhood and the home purchased during our first stationing. I left Norfolk in fourth grade and came back in seventh to live in a racially segregated civilian suburb and attend an all-white school. I didn’t fit the culture of Norfolk’s junior high school. It was far worse than elementary school in Waikiki and had no escape except through expulsion, quitting, or graduation. My old stateside friends moved in a a different world.
When school started, I wore my Sunday best: a white shirt, dark pants, black lace-up shoes like the ones dad wore to work. I was the new kid. Nothing unusual about that. On the first day, we mumbled the Lord’s Prayer and Pledge of Allegiance. We were seated alphabetically in desks bolted to the floor. An obviously well dressed according to fashion girl who was stranger to me but known to others strutted between rows of desks loudly announcing what brands of clothes each student wore. Sharp featured and lacking charm, she reached my desk and said,
“You’re not wearing anything Ivy.”
She was right. I had no idea about Ivy League fashion. She, on the other hand, was a self-appointed authority on what to wear. No one stood up to contradict her. I was 11. “Dressing for success” with clothing labels and uniformity wasn’t part of my world. I knew words to respond to insult, but I stayed silent. Telling her to “fuck off” would have kicked my school year with a bang. I had a cleaner mouth back then.
In Hawaii, we wore t-shirts and tennis shoes. An untucked Aloha shirt was considered dress up. Kids ran barefoot in Waikiki. If she’d tried her fashion critique there, Gaylord Faboda, a fourth-grade classmate, would have said ‘fuck off.’ I never really knew Gaylord well. He local, and I was haole. I remember him fondly now. He and his friends were the most profane people I had ever met, and when I repeated their words at home, Mom washed my mouth with a dish rag.
I thought returning to Norfolk would feel like coming home, but it was just another stop along the way. I was happy to leave Virginia.
When I was introduced as the new guy in Oregon, I was 38 years old, a meaningful addition to a branch office of a retail brokerage firm in a small western town. I went to lunch at a diner with a new colleague. He talked about the ebb and flow of people, how locals got scammed by fraudulent schemes, how newcomers aused traffic and raised home prices. He mentioned his family lived there for generations, and he had no plan to leave.
I told him I understood all that and added, “You know what I always say about locals?”
“What’s that?” he asked.
I said, “Fuck ‘em.”