Dreams of My Father

When I was a kid and my mom would send my dad to the grocery store every 6 weeks on the off chance that she could convince him to go to the grocery store, he would always come back with New Foods. What’s a New Food you might ask, well a New Food is something that hadn’t existed before he apported it from the shelf at Albertson’s and lumbered it home through the front door. “What is that?” my mom would ask. “It’s a pear,” he’d say. And from that point on there were now pears on the planet. Then he’d pull almonds and bleu cheese out of the brown paper bag like some kind of idyllic housewife and then it’d all click why God had been so adamant about not eating the pear off the tree because it was clearly some kind of gateway drug to something much worse. Also, this was around the time that an alien’s toddler had dropped a smartphone out the window of a flying saucer and it landed in Steve Jobs’ vegan hot tub, so those were getting pretty big, too. Of course my dad had a smart phone. He probably had the first smart phone, just walked around one day on the sidewalk by Best Buy and heard someone say “smart phone” and decided that this was what my mom meant by groceries. His Myspace bio was “BlackBerry addict” and he would let us play Brick Breaker in the booth at TGIF’s while he tried to explain to my mom what a mortgage was. Unfortunately I think I paid more attention than her because afterward I would go on Yahoo! every day where I ended up successfully predicting the 2008 recession based on how stressed out all the men in the thumbnails looked.

He ended up switching permanently to Android. That’s the thing about my dad, the guy who eats pears just couldn’t get behind the iPhone. My father is full of these little contradictions. When he got really big into motorcycles I thought I had him all figured out, and then one day I walked into the kitchen at 3 AM to grab a yogurt and found him comatose in front of a unicycle compilation on YouTube. But the main reason he was contradictory was because he was born in California but lived with us in the Florida panhandle. I think he must have felt like the opposite of the Geico caveman from those commercials, like somehow a group of cavemen found a guy from the 2000s and thawed him out. Covid was a really exciting time for him because he would wear his neck gaiter like an ascot. “I’ll try the blackberry,” he mused one evening at Chili’s when he took my roommate and I out to dinner. He had been perusing the non-alcoholic daiquiri menu for 3 hours. “Coffee. Black. Absolutely no ice,” the note I slipped the waiter read. 10 years prior he definitely would have ordered the coffee. He was first in line at one of those classified military auctions and brought home a Recession Keurig one winter. “You can brew hot chocolate in this thing.” This was around the time he bought a pool table for the sun room (obviously we had a tiki bar) but was so protective over it that he forbade anyone from touching it, even his friends who would all just stand around it talking about how fun it would probably be to play it. I don’t blame him for not letting us rat kids touch the pool table because he had seen us all playing Super Monkey Ball on the GameCube and knew that we were getting really big into spheres.

We would all play video games as a family back then. My sister and I both had the image in our heads of the neighborhood kids as a group of rowdy peasants on the brink of revolt so we didn’t have anyone else to play with. Yoshi was always his go-to when he could choose his own character, and I thought, my God this pear guy, it never ends. But another thing about my dad was that he was really good at just watching us play, too, or even just watching whatever YouTube video I would have set up for him in my bedroom like a movie theater. We watched the entirety of a three-hour Dragon Ball parody series and he was following along like he was watching the real thing, in fact I think he still thinks that because he laughs whenever he sees Piccolo still. But he could throw on a great movie, too. I remember the only times I’d ever see him really heated was when someone wouldn’t agree with him that this actor was in the last movie and so on. Every weekend at his house meant that we would have to stop by the Redbox in front of CVS and decide between Ant-Man or We’re The Millers for a few hours. “That’s Paul Rudd,” he spat out while choking on a handful of kettle corn. And I would think to myself, oh yeah that really is Paul Rudd and I know who Paul Rudd is now. Something about my dad meant that movies were events-in-themselves, so because of him I always gravitate toward the Thursday night preview showtimes for a big release. He’s all medieval about movies, I’m talking he’ll crawl into the theater now with a loud tray of nachos because he’s treating the endeavor like a royal joust. But back in the day because of Obama or ObamaCare or ObamaNachos or whatever he would just teach us how to hide boxes of candy in our socks. That’s another thing I got from my dad, the idea that the movie theater is essentially zoned as international waters. If you commit a crime at a movie theater, no you didn’t; they don’t count. The weekend after we’d seen Now You See Me we walked up to the ticket kiosk, realized we didn’t have any money, and then he swiped a defunct AMC gift card to pretend to buy our seats and walked away whistling. I’m convinced that I’m going to get into a full-on brawl at the movie theater one day, just tackling the guy in front of me because he’s holding up the whole line trying to buy a whisky sour for Toy Story. But if I do, no I didn’t.

You’ve got to understand: if you have money, keep it away from my dad. Scientists are still puzzled by what exactly is going on there. I’m trying to think of a good analogy for the man and the image of a cockroach keeps flashing in my head. Somehow he just always gets by, no sweat. Maybe it’s a symptom of California, but I’ve never seen him stressed about anything, and that makes me stressed because I worry about a lot of things in general. I mean I’ve definitely seem him worried but it’s always about reasonable stuff you know? But when it comes to money I’ve seen it literally come out of the sky when he needs it. The Friday night before my friends and I were going to hang out at the mall, my dad was driving me to his house for the weekend and he somehow spotted a pile of cash just on the shoulder of the interstate. He counted the bills: one, twenty, a hundred, two hundred. “Here you go,” and he handed me a fistful, his watch glimmering. I wear the same watch on my wrist every day. I think he wore it as a sort of insurance policy like pirates with their gold teeth. As for me, it’s like he once said. There’s nothing more important than time.

My dad has a very peculiar sense of style. If not for his being 5 feet tall, you could probably spot him in a crowd. Back in the day, he would alternate between Ed Hardy on the weekends and the same Dillard’s button up that he’d save for court appearances. Obviously he ironed both of them himself, which is funny because now when I see a wrinkled Affliction tee I think it looks a little sloppy. And of course there was the earring. My sister was worried that he had it on the gay ear. “How do you know which ear is the gay ear?” I asked her once, and she answered that the gay ear is whichever ear he has pierced. So years later when I went to Claire’s with my wife I made sure they got both of mine, and it wasn’t until I felt the sting of the second lobe that I stopped drafting my lawsuit in my head. As for his shoes, you’ve got Sperry’s, Vans, or nothing. I could never fly on a plane with my dad because I’m too afraid that I’ll walk out of the Burger King to find him getting his shoes shined. I don’t ever want to be in someone’s airport story.

In 2013 I started my first year of high school, and that’s usually around the time guys start beefing with their dads. Well, that couldn’t be me, because my dad went vegan my senior year. He tried to justify it because I think he felt self-conscious after I found him in our garage watching a video of a shirtless surfer dude doing bodyweight calisthenics, but this whole health kick in general drove our family nuts. He had already earned the nickname Molasses because of the way he just sort of moseys at his own pace, but his cooking brought it to a whole new level. You ever spend all day mapping out metabolic pathways only to find out that dinner tonight is vegan General Tso’s chicken (huh?) and it’ll be ready in oh I don’t know six hours (what?). Swinging open the fridge to find only a box of La Croix and a white jar labelled “Veganaisse” will give you crazy food aggression later on. When I came home from college one night for Sunday dinner at my grandma’s and I saw the ribs on his plate I felt like those moms on Dr. Phil when the son agrees to go to rehab, like thank you Lord He is risen, He is risen indeed. But even then I shouldn’t have been surprised, because when we lived in that $3,000/month loft downtown he balanced it out with a fridge in the pantry that kept nothing cold but a half-drank bottle of wine and a single slice of salami. And no dogs, don’t you dare bring a dog to this loft. I don’t want the lawyer next door thinking that I’m the kind of guy to bunk with a dog. Instead I kept busy, dropping ice cubes atop all the pedestrians on the sidewalk under the balcony. Anyway, the vegan phase ran parallel to his self-help kick. You remember those Tai Lopez ads you’d get on YouTube, hey I’m here in my garaaaaage. He watched the whole ad without skipping it, which ended up being like 20 minutes long and by that point he didn’t even remember what video he’d initially clicked on. He tried to be one of those “book a week” guys, reading everything from Marcus Aurelius to this one Scientology guy who had a whole chapter in a car sales book called “Stop Being A Little Bitch”.

It drove me up the wall, the whole audiobooks thing. The aux cord in the Lexus ended up on full-time Audible duty. Learning how to drive with this guy in the passenger seat wasn’t bad enough, now there’s Grant Cardone in my ear talking about some Chapter Nine Stop Being A Little Bitch. The way my dad taught me how to drive was like this: He didn’t. At red lights he would show me a video on /r/IdiotsInCars where something absolutely unforeseeable would happen, like a piano flying out of a semitruck and landing on a playground three blocks away. “What do you do when this happens?” I still don’t have a good answer for that. And then after church he would start quizzing me, not on traffic rules or anything but more like what color was the car behind me 20 minutes ago. “Uh, I think it was white?” Yes, and what kind. “Oh, uh, eggshell?” Wrong, wedding cake, but eggshell would look pretty good on a Civic. Now pull into this Starbuck’s drive thru, we’re running late for Thanksgiving and your aunt doesn’t have a Keurig yet. One time I’d had enough finally and I told him one Sunday morning nope, you’re fired. Mom is gonna teach me. Mom ended up being even worse because her truck didn’t have a speedometer and she always drove in the middle of the lane, so I licked my wounds and went back to Dad University. “They always come back,” he said. Now I still don’t really know how to parallel park or what north is but you better believe that I can tell you the color of every car that’s been behind me.

My dad has had so many jobs over the years that you would think I’m making all of them up. When I was in high school he ran the sales team at the Harley-Davidson in our city, right there between all the used car lots. I remember after his interview he came home with a big inventory book that he had to memorize; the next week right around Christmastime he rode up to the driveway on a Street Glide. From that point on we’d all be in the kitchen getting tacos ready and blasting Train on Pandora just trying to settle into the weekend and then glasses of water would start shaking on the table like that scene in Jurassic Park. Once you heard that motorcycle fuming down the highway you just had this feeling that everything was gonna be OK, your dad’s here. And of course you had to ask how many bikes he sold because that was going to determine the whole trajectory of your weekend. 2 was standard, 3 was great, 4 meant hey, we might get cable again. I used to do my math homework right in the lounge at Harley, and my dad took a lot of interest in my education for someone who had more of a Tony Soprano experience in community college. I remember in my senior year he found out I was thinking about majoring in social work:

“Social work? How’re you going to make any money with that?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I didn’t think we did that around here,” I replied.

After I graduated with my master’s degree in information technology in 2022, my dad would frequently tell people guess what pal, my son has a master’s degree. I thought that was nice but one day I heard him saying that he had paid for the whole thing, too. Quickly I reminded him that no, Dad, I had scholarships, remember? All those Florida lottery players had contributed the majority of it.

“Exactly,” he said.

I realize how abnormal it is to have a dad like mine; more than that I realize just how lucky it makes me. Because you know what there really is something liberating about just doing whatever you want, just sort of getting by on coffee and vibes. I think I’m a pretty neutral blend of both my parents but I definitely got my “Who Cares” sense of time from my dad, and as for whether that’s good or bad all I can say is “Who Cares”. End of the day, I wouldn’t choose any other dad, and honestly there are way worse options to watch your pets when you go out of town. Even now I can glance down at my wrist and see his old watch looking back at me, and I can take a few minutes out of my day to wonder what my dad would do. Now there’s definitely been plenty of times where I try to do the opposite because I know the last thing he ever wants to hear is that I’m doing what he would be doing, but that doesn’t stop me from just drinking an undertow every once in a while. Finally, and this is something I hope I’ve made even just a little clear: there’ll always be a seat at my table for my dad.

I woke up early this morning with a new state of mind:
A creative way to rhyme without using nines and guns.
Keep your nose out of the sky, keep your heart to God,
And keep your face to the rising sun.