Copyright © 2017 by Michael Mazza
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead; businesses; companies; or events is entirely coincidental.
Text design and photo on pages preceding chapter 1 by Linda Koutsky
Photos by Margaret S. Sten: Pages preceding chapters 13, 21, 26, 32, 34, and 44
Photo by djgis/Shutterstock.com: Pages preceding chapter 41
Photo by Patty Chan/Shutterstock.com: Pages preceding chapter 49
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Printed in the United States of America
For Marco and Vincent
1
My Charger clocks eighty-three miles an hour up North Harbor Drive, past the airport, headlights blazing, tachometer redlining, the V-8 roaring as if it’s heading into war. I’m checking for police lights in the rearview mirror, ’cause if I get one more ticket, it’s sayonara, license. Christian is way out of my head, and the kiss I was enjoying minutes ago has been replaced by sheer dread. I’m expecting Daddy’s latest “episode” to be a real psychodrama, and it worries me that things are turning for the worse. ’Cause if the meds aren’t taking and I can’t handle him, I mean, if that’s the case, then what’s next: the kook hotel?
I grip the eight ball, downshift through the yellow light, and fishtail onto Rosecrans, the Charger biting the street at such an angle that my phone skates across the dash and my surfboards clatter in the back seat. The plastic Gloomy Bear hanging from the rearview mirror looks as if it’s dangling in zero gravity. I want to rip it up to eighty again, get to his Point Loma home at light speed, but there’s a big-butt solar RV turtling across two lanes, and I’m hitting red light after red light. I’m forced to downshift and swing past the RV, “S” through traffic while expressing myself in not-so-nice language. Then it’s a left, right, left-left past the Pita King, and another left before the Charger growls up to his house.
Pacquiao’s sun-beaten Honda Civic is blocking Daddy’s driveway, and the only spot I can find is down the street near the Imperial Apartments, which sound glammy but are closer to poo-on-a-shingle suburban Los Angeles, like, forty years ago, back in the 1980s, when Daddy was making his bones as a navy seaman.
Even under the stars, the lime-green Charger is gecko bright. The car was Dad’s love child, rolled off the Detroit assembly line in 1970: 383 Magnum four-barrel, Holley single-pumper carb, five-spoke wheels, chrome hood pins, and a black R/T bumblebee stripe banding the trunk. He sold it to me for a buck shortly after my twenty-fourth birthday this past March, after Congress cut his military pension down to nothing, and with gas at nine dollars a gallon—yeah, like I can afford a fill-up. Pacquiao talked him into a more energy-efficient electric self-driving Toyota, which he deemed “a piece of crap” until he discovered the merits of being able to get completely shit-faced, pass out, and return home without the risk of seriously hurting somebody.
I kill the engine, lock up, and scoot across the street past several stucco houses and an ancient pierced and tattooed couple on their deck listening to U2 and enjoying what looks to be their hundredth cocktail. They need to move their butts, paint their house, and trash the dead transmission sitting in their driveway, ’cause it’s bringing down the neighborhood. Not that my Dad’s house is a jewel that belongs on the cover of a real estate magazine or anything. He owns a two-bedroom California beach bungalow with shake siding that’s weathered to a deep gray. The fence has maybe one more year before it goes, and the white trim around the windows is beginning to peel. If I weren’t training my hind end off every day, I’d help him attend to some landscaping. But the place is nice just the same: comfy in an unpretentious, kick-off-your-shoes sort of way.
I knock on the front door.
Pacquiao answers.
“Did you hide his guns?”
“In my trunk.”
“Where is he?”
Pacquiao points up. I follow his finger, confused.
“On the roof,” he says.
Pacquiao is Daddy’s middle-aged Filipino friend from Manila. He lowers his voice and leans in, his breath smelling of beer.
“I tried to talk him down, but he just stared,” he says in his clipped accent.
We walk around to the side trading worried glances. Then I climb the ladder, peer up over the gutter, and look to the far end of the roof. There’s Daddy, barefoot in his long black trench coat, a lonely silhouette perched Batman-like, staring at the bay. I don’t want to startle him because I’m afraid he might jump or fall twelve feet to the ground, so I climb down. Pacquiao is waiting.
“How long has he been up there?” I whisper.
“I came by couple of hours ago to drop off a capstan and find him there. I called his name, but no answer.”
I climb back up and crab low across the roof in the moonlight, my Nikes crunching against the tar shingles. When I get to the middle, I stand up. All of San Diego is laid out before me: a panorama of colorful downtown lights spilling across the molten black glass of the bay.
“Daddy,” I say, low and sweet, but he doesn’t answer, so I go formal. “Captain J. Xavier Long? It’s your daughter.” Again, no answer. I wait a beat—an eternal moment where the only sound is the annoying squeak from the roof’s mermaid weathervane—and calculate my move. Slowly, surely, I creep up behind him. When I’m inches away, I reach out and take his hand.
“Dad,” I say, “come down. Spend some time with me.”
When our eyes meet, his, which are usually blue and vodka clear, are red and watery. His hair is a whirly reddish-gray mess, like a mini-helicopter just hovered over it, and I wish he’d scrap those green, above-the-knee basketball shorts and the Scorpio Yacht Supply T-shirt with the droopy neckline. Daddy’s all tats, which is cool, I guess, since he is, after all, a seaman, following in a long tradition of body art. But he’s from that generation that made statements of conformity with tattoos, and like every child shunning the acts of their parents, I’ll just mention that I’m ink-free.
“Daddy,” I say, but he’s still, his Scottish face bulldozed. He stares at me in the moonlight, gears meshing, and then breaks into a rueful smile.
Minutes later, we’re on the ground and in the house. Greeting us is a pleather couch, Daddy’s super-ugly recliner, some big oak furniture, and ratty pile rugs, all in a glorious fur ball spectrum of beige, which is what his personality’s become on those stupid