Folks said my father was a drunk and a no-good bastard, but we marched behind him with maracas and rhythm sticks shaking our little bums to and fro like elephants, tails linked, trekking together across sub-Saharan Africa in a makeshift conga line, up and down the carpeted stairs of my grandparents hushed, refined home till we fell out hurting with laughter to the wild Latin music he played on the Victrola record player.
We, his children and our cousins, for once unified in our separate orbits, would have followed him anywhere like he was the pied piper of Hamlin. I can still feel it in my bones dancing, the only one in a room full of uptight, white-ass bastards listening to live, wild-ass-shaking music and they too buttoned up to tap their little foot.
That’s a gift he gave me in a shrunken life with too little love and too much anger shared. But I forgive him now, not because I have understood him all these years later as I crawl toward my own mortality, but because I am his daughter, more like him in ways than even I could say or see. Because who in their right minds ever sees themselves as others see them?
That gift, that brash fearlessness in a sea of politeness, has made me for good or ill, the ‘man I am today’, the rotten-apple fallen too close to the tree he would have made cider from, cheerfully smashing the juice out of it, worms and all.
Whether he loved me or did not, whether he ever felt anything like love and what that might have meant to him, I know who I am because of who I knew him to be, a brawler, a penny candy thief, a guy who borrowed other guys tools without asking, and if he returned them at all, they came back unrecognizable to the owner.
Ponderous, how he ever connected to the polite world, foul mouthed, with a chip on his shoulder, itching for a fight. Black haired and handsome as a movie star his charm carried him a long way in a world that favored looks enough to ignore impropriety.
Unapologetically himself, he caused his children in countless ways to quake in their boots. Years of therapy later, they still couldn’t dig his DNA out of their everyday miasmas.
Memories poisonous with rage, but laced with so much laughter, if you let it all out at once, it would shake the rafters of the ridiculous out buildings he built, with chewing gum and spit and too little skill.
But why should I be ashamed of him? Everyone has to come from somewhere, and if you knew us both it would be unmistakable, despite all his protestations his Airedales were the only daughters he’d ever wished for, I was his as much as any twin could have been.
He picked blackberries as if he was a black bear whose survival depended upon it and perhaps it did. Touching the earth or things of the earth might have kept him somewhat sane, kept him from falling completely to the demons men of that age and wars were possessed by.
Maybe under all his barbed prickles, he was as acridly sweet as the blackberries he forced us to pick on those endless, steamy, bug-bitten summer days.
