my father’s .25. It was always with him, in the La-Z-Boy, at church and even as the eighth grade choir warbled through Englasis On High. And each day, without really knowing it, I was holding my breath, right up to my fifteenth birthday when my father took his gun to the rooftop of the Sherex Chemical Company to jump.
By then, my father had come to spook easy. And it was my job to ease him out of it. In this way, I was his watchdog too. Tension strung in trap wires around him and anything could pluck the strings: a door slammed by the breeze, the backfire of a muffler, a hunter’s random gunshot that pierced the silence of our woods and my father’s corresponding jolt, duck, a violent swing of his head, the injection of panic into the air from his electrified body sending a ripple effect through me. When he jumped, I jumped. So having Dad in the La-Z-Boy meant a break from the worry. My father was like his gun; the safety latch might be on, but it could go off anytime.
It wasn’t until I had a life of my own, free from my own jolts and ducks and wide eyes that swung around wildly, that I could lay claim to the feeling, to understand that what lay just under the surface of my father’s happy-go-lucky appearance, and resonated out into our family through the conduit of myself, was something so big, so incomprehensible that it could never be touched or opened by any words or healed by the passage of time. And to a kid, that was far larger than anything spoken at all.
There was so much craziness that went down back then, so much Technicolor madness that defied anyone in the Tri-County area from ever believing it, that I’m surprised we even made it out as a family. And by family I don’t just mean the initial clan of us, the four of us who were at best odd-shaped puzzle pieces from entirely different boxes, but the extended cache of strangers that were folded into our drama along the way. Because honestly, without the punctuation of their presence and the adrenaline that swirled around it, I don’t think I could have stood another day with the suspenders or the bullhorn, the skates or the fringed western wear without grabbing at least one of the guns off the top of the fridge and blowing my brains out.
Even though my father came of age in the Sixties, he was cut of a different cloth than the era. My dad never went to Woodstock. He didn’t protest the war. He did not wear leather vests or fringy things. Never in his life did he don sandals or moccasins, smoke pot or down a fifth of whiskey. And I don’t think my dad even knew what the term “tie-dye” meant. He was a lanky sprout of a kid with Alfred E. Newman ears that sprung out from the side of his head and a smirk that turned him into a west side slurpee the second he flashed it.
He dropped out of school at the age of seventeen to register for Vietnam because he thought the uniform would get him girls. And when the officer that brought him on pitched an extra week of leave for every friend he signed up with him, he volunteered the names of his three best buddies, walked out of the recruiter’s office and promptly blew off boot camp to take his three promised weeks off. He was AWOL before he even began.
My own mother had scarcely made it through the ninth grade when she was married off by her mother, my Grandma Madge, to a carny—what those who worked in the carnivals called themselves—in his fifties named Smokey. At the same time Dad was doing his two months overseas, Mom was travelling with the Grand Ole Opry, trick riding horses and being one half of a side-winding whip act, all in fringed leather. The original white showman’s jacket she wore before I was born hung in my trailer closet as a teenager, radiating the smell of decaying leather and mothballs.
Mom and father, both from the west side of Columbus, existed thousands of miles apart until the trajectory of their lives careened them into one another with a violent crash. Within the span of a few months, my dad was flown back to the States from Vietnam and checked into his first government-issue psychiatric ward and Mom was a widow after walking in to find a cold, stiff Smokey propped up in bed. It was only later I’d hear the whispers that she’d been questioned about his death.
When my dad came out of the mental hospital at age 20, he took the first job he could get at the gas station at Grant and Sullivan. Mom pulled in and less than a month shy of Smokey being cold in the ground had a real boyfriend lined up. Their first official date was on Valentine’s Day; they married in March. Six months later a baby was on the way. That baby was me.
I guess looking back there were signs all along, ominous forewarnings that we would all end piled up at the bottom of that dead-end dirt road desperate and feral as a trapped cat. And the lynchpin of them all orbited around my father and the first singular memory I have of him just shy of turning four.
I remember we lived on Cedarleaf Road in Ohio.
I remember the picnic table in the backyard was a giant wooden spool for electrical wire which Dad had rolled home from the base where he worked.
I remember getting parked on top of the refrigerator when Planet of the Apes came on, my father’s reason being I’d sit still straight through to the commercials if I was afraid of tipping off.
And I remember looking out the living room window from behind heavy mustard-coloured curtains to see my father on his hands and knees in the gravel drive.
He had come home early after being fired.
He pushed a jack under the sedan, hiked his pants up by the loops and plastered a shock of greasy hair across his forehead. I watched his skinny arm pump as the car began to rise.
When it was high enough to teeter, he got down in the gravel and shimmied up flat under the car, his fingers inching out to grasp the rusty frame. In slow motion, he began to rock; back and forth, back and forth, until his body slid out from under the chaises with each hoist of his arms; like a low, heavy chin-up.
I was standing at the storm door by now, watching through the glass when Mom sauntered up behind me. Her arms grazed my hair as they folded into lockdown over her chest, the heat of bristle rolling off her. And it was then that I first felt the gulf between the rest of the world and my father, a chasm so dark and bottomless that even then I sensed it could swallow him whole.
But in that moment I also knew that I would reach across and save him. I would be his bridge back. And in reaching for my father, I would not let him fall.
The car swayed lightly, his face wedged under the tyre and with every rock my body winched forward, until it pressed solid against the pane wet with cold. I touched my fingertips to the glass and bore my eyes steady into the front end of the car. I would not let it fall.
“Jesus,” Mom hissed, “He can’t even do that right.”
I stared harder, willing the car to stay.
On my father rocked.
And it was only me that stood between them.
That’s where my father remains forever etched in my being: just out of reach, on the other side of the glass. From that day forward, carved in my heart was a hole which no other love but his could fill. With a fragile liability that led him out to the drive to wedge himself under the car and a three-year-old omnipotent enough to feel she alone could save him, we were crippled from the start. But this was the template from which my love was stamped and I could no sooner change it than a duckling could undo its imprinting at birth.
Like the Quakers, the Gregory family lineage had always managed to linger slightly on the brink of extinction. My mother’s dad put a gun in his mouth when she was still a girl, my dad’s mother died young of a stroke, his own father only hovered above death, living in a perpetual alcoholic stupor behind cases of Bud Light stacked to the ceiling to keep out the light of day. And, with the eventual death of the last withered-up great-grandparent, the first portrait of our remaining family clan is snapped.
It is a blustery, winter afternoon in Columbus, Ohio, on a piss-grey day, lined up next to a cement wall cascading the carcass of a bush that used to be alive in the months of green.
There is something to be said for the fashion of the Seventies; something haunting, almost surreal in what people actually wore out into the world.