“Okay,” I yawned. “I’ll bite. What are you doing here?”
“They’re painting my place. The fumes are awful.”
He said this in an offhand, exhausted way.
“What color?” I asked.
“White, I guess.”
“White? Your place is already white. That apartment’s not even a year old.”
“Believe me,” he said. “It needed it.”
“Oh, it did, did it?”
“Those walls were driving me crazy,” Dad said, reaching for his vegetable juice.
Robert Redford tromped on and on through the snow, giving shit to all the Indians. His Hollywood buckskins never got dirty, and the scenes started to blend together. At some point I drifted off, shirt open, dozing on top of a motel bedspread, the antennas on the rooftop above whistling the soundtrack to my life, and this was how I spent my last night of freedom in the land we used to call “America.”
Chapter Six
Which brings me to the second great fallacy of life — the notion of “climax.”
This is how it supposedly works: You’re going about the normal business of living when an event occurs that forces you to drop everything and cast a long glance toward the approaching brakeman of fate. A moment of sudden definition has arrived, a point at which life’s manifold possibilities narrow to one true course, and grand decisions must be made. Destiny beckons, and the future falls clear as the scythe through the field. Common side effects of climax include tunnel vision, loss of balance, hearing voices, and occasional bladder or bowel failure.
Climax, of course, is an illusion. High powers suddenly call us to action? Mundane days spontaneously become epic? Don’t make me laugh. It’s understandable that people are drawn to moments in which they feel like actors in a larger drama; it’s only natural to let such moments stand in for all the days that slip away. But there’s no shorthand for existence. Time spars with no stunt double.
The need to have life rise to a higher plane is strong enough, however, that history is littered with examples of “false climax”:
After the last battle for Persia, Alexander declared that crossing the Hydaspes River had been the glory of his life, the reason he was born. Little could he know he was still to conquer Egypt, Media, Scythia, and India.
Rome didn’t crest and fall with the ascension of Nero, as the armies and Senate expected, but with the conversion of Constantine centuries later.
John Wilkes Booth told reporters in 1860 that performing Hamlet for President James Buchanan was “the greatest role of his life.”
In N’Gosa’s biography of Nelson Mandela, we learn that, on the eve of his incarceration for life in the Kittleton Afrikaner Penitentiary, Mandela ordered his followers to hold a funeral for him, complete with coffin and song. How could he know that his life would “climax” five more times, Moses-like, before he became the leader of his people twenty-seven years later?
So, the following morning, when I woke itchy and nit-ridden in that oven of a motel room, my life was not without historical precedent for the day ahead. A feeble light penetrated the heavy drapes, setting aglow the nappy fibers of my father’s bedspread, which he’d neatly made, folding and tucking the corners. I wasn’t about to go hunting him down, though. My scalp was on fire. My armpits, too, were aflame, and I’d rather not talk about the troubles I was having down below.
I took a shower so fierce and scorching that my skin puffed red, and my hairline felt as if it receded an inch. To no avail, however — the nits had incubated and hatched, and a good scrubbing only served to work them up. How I’d have killed for a Q-tip! I don’t want to go into it, but my underwear turned out to be a lost cause, and I was forced to proceed with my day in the French manner.
Still flushed from the shower, I dressed and stepped outside, where my hands steamed in the crisp air, as if the cold were trying to burn off my fingerprints. Except for my van, every car in the lot was gone. On the horizon, the Thunderbird Casino went through its morning calisthenics — its flashing banners pumped up and down, while neon fountains of light climbed, climbed, then dropped and gave us twenty.
I had Keno’s ball in one hand, the key to my van in the other, and I told myself just to forget my father and go. But I smelled coffee brewing, and I couldn’t help wandering past the bleak, tarped-over swimming pool, smelling of frozen leaves and granulated chlorine, to the Lollygag Lounge. Inside, dark corkboard lined the walls, its surface quilted with tacked-up photos of patrons, mugging for immortality in this hall of good times. Twin TVs broadcast at each end of the bar, in the middle of which my father sat alone. While one television broadcast news images of faraway fires, typhoons, and sundry disasters befalling remote points of the globe, my father watched the other television set, the one showing muted interviews with pop stars.
I took a stool next to my father.
He opened his mouth to speak, but I cut him off:
“There you are, my boy,” I said, mimicking his fake-cheery voice.
“Good morning to you, too,” he said.
I looked around at the empty bar. The corkboard had been darkened by an eon of cigarettes, and the thousand faded photos stuck to it formed our Greek chorus. Above, I was drawn to the TV footage of cattle with blistered lips and cracked hooves, to the chicken fires that were lighting the night skies of Hong Kong.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
Dad rapped on the bar. “Best breakfast in town,” he said, though I’d never even heard of someone eating here. Respectable adulterers left this place long before first light.
“The biscuits,” Dad said, “are celestial. Light and buttery as love.”
That bitter note of irony was my cue not to take him too seriously. It was meant to throw me off balance and invite me into our usual rapport — a well-trodden mode in which we avoided all topics of consequence. I’ll admit I was in the mood for a day like that, where we drove around without talking, slowing to look at places we knew already, or just staring off the dam at the turbulent water below.
I looked at the bottles of booze, some of them plastic, lined up in front of the bar mirror.
“I’m serious,” I said. “What are you doing here? You want to go on a bender, why not stay at the casino?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “The T-bird’s the best place to crash in town, but it’s not so good to wake up there.”
“Who is she?” I asked.
He pretended not to hear me.
A waitress came out of the kitchen area. She was about my father’s age, and she held three empty coffeepots in one hand. Dad and I were the only people in the place, so when she saw us she looked surprised, then just shook her head. She came over, her face looking steamed from the kitchen though it was just past dawn and the bar hadn’t even opened. She set the pots down.
“You again,” she said to my father. They held each other’s eyes a moment.
She stuck a ballpoint pen in her hair. She casually leaned toward my father, and together they regarded me. “That him?” she asked.
My father had this strange expression on his face, as if he were seeing me through her eyes, as if I were a stranger he was interested in getting to know.
“He’s the one,” Dad said.
The waitress looked at me, as if to confirm some aspect of a story she’d been told. “The professor,” she said, then pointed at Keno’s head. “What’s with the paperweight, Professor?”
Dad answered for me. “Probably some petrified dinosaur egg,” he said. “The boy likes to dig things up. He roots around in the past.”
“A dinosaur,” she said to me. “You gonna bring it to life, like in the movies?”