My father called me not too long ago. He’s coaching six-man football in a town called Valentine, which is a town in West Texas that is little more than a road and a post office. I say he’s coaching six-man football, but I don’t think they had enough kids to make a team this year.
In the mornings, he’s up at five and drives the school bus out on those ranch roads to pick up the kids. He tells me he’s seen some pretty mornings. He’s got a dog, a Dotson that I can’t stand, one of those little yapping things that won’t let anyone touch it. He’s got a cat he calls Bessie Smith. He calls himself "retired-rehired." He called me to ask if I thought it was a good idea for him to go see a band that was playing in Marfa, or if he should just go to Valentine and rest up for the morning. I told him I’d just go home if I were him, that he wouldn’t be missing anything. Later in the night, I got a text message from a girl that lives in Marfa. She said that she had just danced with my father.
When I was a kid, my father would take me to the cement basketball courts in Ft. Davis where we lived. He’d drill me, and by the time I was three years old I could dribble two basketballs at once. After school I’d sit in the gym, and watch him working out the high school kids. My dad never used a whistle like a lot of coaches do. He said that whistles stopped practice. His practices were coordinated by the buzzer. When time went out on the score board, the buzzer would ring out and the boys would line up for the next drill. There wasn’t any standing around. Even after games, win or lose, the boys were to sprint off the court into the locker room.
The man loves basketball. He got me a full-length mirror and with a bar of soap, he drew a straight line down the center of the mirror. I was to practice my shot in front of the mirror, making sure to keep my elbow in line with the soap line. He didn’t like me playing pick-up games 'cause he was afraid I would develop bad habits. After home games I’d often help him with the laundry. If they had won, he’d make up a song or two. If they lost, he’d be somber, like someone recovering from a surgery. Like something had been ripped out of him.
He’s softened in his old age. When he was younger, he’d get in your face. He’d spit when he yelled at you. I recall him berating a friend of mine when we were in Junior High. He said, “Lackey, are you smart enough to play this game?” In Junior High, in the team’s lockers, we had a folder. Inside the folder was a list of our priorities. They were: God, Family, School and Basketball. At the house we’d get calls from the local paper asking for a quote. They’d say, “Is Coach Mac there?” and I’d say, “Which one?”
My mother is a coach as well. She coaches volleyball in Odessa.
The town calls him Coach Mac, his friends call him Bucky, and my mother calls him Brent. In town, I was Coach Mac’s kid; to my father’s friends, I was Bucky’s kid. Bucky was a nickname; its origins are no longer known, or else he just won’t tell me. I know his name is Zane, just like his dad’s name is Zane. I’ve gotten a lot of flack in my day for my name; people think I made it up. Especially now that I’m living in New York, where people move simply to change their names.
Zane isn’t all that uncommon a name in Texas; there was a popular Western writer by the name of Zane Grey. He wrote a book called Riders of the Purple Sage. My granddaddy was Zane Grey McWilliams. There is a story about Van Gogh. How he had a brother that died when it was baby. The family had buried the baby, and the family would take little Van Gogh to the graveyard and the name on the tombstone was Van Gogh. The family had just recycled the name. Apparently this had a lasting effect on young Van Gogh. I have had a similar experience, seeing a bunch of medicine bottles with my name on them; a room at an old folks' home with my name on the door.
In the summers when I was a child, my father would earn extra money teaching drivers' education to the teenagers in Ft. Davis and the neighboring towns. The drivers' education car would be parked in front of our house for two months out of the year. Those cars had the brake peddle on the passenger side. I would accompany my father to those neighboring towns. I’d sit in class while he taught and draw on notebook paper. He was always giving me paper to draw on when he wanted me to sit quiet, though I never really had a problem sitting quietly.
During the breaks in his classes, he’d take me to the high school gym and pull out a rack of basketballs and drill me. Sometimes a crowd would gather. One summer, he sent me to Abilene Christian University to attend a basketball camp. It was a week away from home, staying in a dorm room. I didn’t make a single friend, but the instructors were kind to me. I played pool with my sister, who also attended the camp. When my father picked me up and we were waiting for my sister to come out of her dorm, I found a baby bird that had fallen from a tree. The bird was obviously not going to make it, so my father broke its neck.
Once, my little brother and I came across a jackrabbit that had been hit with a car. I went home and got my air rifle and tried putting the jackrabbit out of its misery, not knowing that I wasn't going to kill a jack rabbit with a Red Rider air rifle. I handed the rifle to my brother, then grabbed a chunk of wood, bringing the wood down on the rabbit till it was dead.
Summers also meant that it was time to install the air conditioner or the swamp cooler. We’d climb to the top of the roof and my father would swear and curse the swamp cooler. I’d be there to ferry tools to him, or to hand him the garden hose to wet the pads of the cooler. He’d complain about money. He’d try to get me to talk about myself. That was the summer we moved from Ft. Davis to the town of Alpine. Someone wrote curse words with the dust that had gathered on our family's suburban van. My father thought I did it. I told him, why would I vandalize the car I had to ride in? I guess he thought I was mad at him for moving the family. Then, he found out that I was drinking. After that, my father sent me to an ex-player of his that had become a minister.
I spent a weekend with the man and his mother in their ranch house. The minister took me driving on a dune buggy and we chased a family of javelina across a field. In the mornings, his mom would cook us breakfast and we’d say grace. One evening we were hiking, and the minister asked me if anything was troubling me. I never answered him.
My father had tried to retire from coaching, but when I was a junior in High School, he took a job as the head coach of the Alpine. I never knew what to call my father on the court. I never called him dad; I rarely even called him coach. I just said yes sir and no sir whenever I was called upon. My father didn’t want the town to think he was favoring his son, so I sat on the bench a good bit. We still did the team's laundry together.
When I graduated from high school and moved away, my father gave me his tape collection. He had accumulated a lot of cassette tapes; the majority of them were mixed tapes with bizarre titles. I wish I could remember some of those titles so I could reuse them.
I moved to Levelland, Texas, which I don’t recommend. I was going to school and working at a Sonic drive-thru. I would come home after work and put a cassette tape in. I kept the tapes that I liked. With the others, I would record my own songs over them.
I told her I knew what she meant. Once sports are over, it’s like being amputated from yourself. I remember sitting in my rented room in Levelland, pining over games won and lost, thinking that if I would have tried harder, pushed for more playing time, I wouldn’t be in Levelland. I began a strict work-out regiment, running and lifting weights, but it wasn’t the same. College was a bust, my shyness was still there, I wouldn’t eat at the cafeteria, and I wouldn’t join any intramural teams. I still had that abject anger that I never understood, that I always thought I’d outgrow.
On weekends, I’d drive to Lubbock to hang out with my two high school friends. I was dropping out of classes and spending more time in my rented room, poring over my drawings while listening to my father’s cassettes. I moved outside of Dallas, then moved back to Alpine. I went to work drilling water wells and working on windmills. I took a job making pottery for two years, after which I went back to water wells. During these aimless years, my father would often stop by my house with a six-pack of beer. Sometimes, he’d bring along a coaching buddy of his.
He’d have me play guitar for him and his friends. My father was the lineman coach for the football team. He was studying sumo-wrestling moves that he was teaching the linemen and taught me a few moves. I very rarely visited him at his home. I thought of myself as an orphan, though my parents lived thirty minutes away. My father and I no longer went out to the cement courts, but we did drive around together. A favorite road of ours was Pinto Canyon Road. We’d listen to Bob Dylan albums, and my father would talk about his favorite lines in the songs.
We’d drive around Marfa and he’d point out a trailer he lived in when he was a student teacher, where he met my mother. He told me how, on his honeymoon, he stayed at the Starlight Hotel. We would drink in bars together, though my father rarely had more than two. Sometimes, after a particular tear I’d been on, I would post a note on my door not to knock unless you were Jimi Hendrix. My father would always knock anyway. He would hand me a beer and tell me how much he liked my sign. He’s a funny man, my father. Once, we were drinking at a bar in Marfa and a woman leaned over and asked us, “Doesn’t this remind you of Soho?”
My father asked her, “Soho New York, or Soho London?” Then he got this shit-eating grin on his face. He leaned over to me.
“She thought I was just some dumb local.”
We were driving in San Angelo, one of the times my granddaddy Zane Sr. was in the Shamrock Hospital. A truck pulled up beside us, then quickly speed off. My father said, “I wish I had his truck and he had a feather up his ass. We’d both be a little bit tickled.”
At the hospital, Zane Sr. was recovering from chemo. He still had his hair. Zane Sr. had a bad habit of commenting on how fat the asses were on the nurses. My father would try to quiet him. Granddaddy would get visits from old friends; football players. They’d talk about their high school games. Zane Sr. had had a scholarship to Texas Tech, but choose to join the Navy during WWII. After the war, he went on to play football at Howard Payne College.
I accompanied my grandmother Arvena outside the hospital so she could smoke. I asked her how she was getting along, though asking questions was superfluous--she was just happy to sit quietly with me. Her answer came back short.
"We’re making it okay.”
We sat on a little bench and she put her hand on my leg. She said I was getting skinny, though I don’t remember I time when I wasn’t skinny. After her cigarette, I led my grandmother back to the hospital bed; my aunt and my dad were swapping stories. A favorite of mine goes like this: My father is colorblind, as is his mother. My father and grandmother were out shopping one day for a suit. I can’t remember what occasion called for my father to wear a suit. It might have been a date, or it might have been a job interview. Either way, they were shopping for a suit. My father tries on a handsome suit, comes out of the dressing room, and both he and my grandmother agree that it is a handsome suit. So the suit is purchased and taken home. When they show the suit to my aunt, she breaks out laughing.
The suit is lime green.
A year went by. My father enlisted me in helping him move Zane Sr. and Arvena to the Ballinger Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center, or the nursing home. I won’t dwell on this, though I will say that was a hard day to get through. After it was over and we were driving away, my father looked like he did after those ballgames he lost.
On the drive home, as we got some distance between the nursing home and us, we fell into joking--about women, about granddad, about sports. We were still miles away from any town and the sky was grey. We were talking about a particular moment in one of our last basketball games together. It was late in the fourth quarter and I drew a foul. I was set up at the free-throw line. I I made the first shot, I’d get a second shot, and we needed the points.
The referee had been an ex-player of my dad's. I was familiar with the ref enough, his brother-in-laws had showed me where he stashed his Playboy, so there was some history there. The ref hands me the ball and says to me, “McWilliams, let's see if you can make this shot.”
I made both shots. My father beamed a little as he drove. We didn’t speak for quite a while after the story. Without looking at me, he told me that high school sports wasn’t all that important really. I nodded and told him I figured that much. I remember having a football coach my senior year in high school who told the team right before a big game that these were the greatest years of our lives. I thought to myself, Christ, I hope that’s not true. It was good to hear my father didn’t think so.
After the fight I went to my parent’s house. It was late at night. My father was up watching ESPN. I sat down on a chair. I said, “Dad, I fucked up.” He said, “That’s easy to do.” He let me sleep on the couch. The next day, I finished up with work and was on my way to get my things from the shared house. My father asked, “She’s not gonna shoot you, is she?”
I said she wasn’t, but I wished he hadn’t of put the thought in my head. I drove to the house but she had changed the locks already. I later found out that she had burned all my things. My guitar, which was a graduation gift from my parents, my clothes, all the writing that I had done since high school--all of this she had burned in a fire pit in the courtyard. She even burned my Stetson hat, the hat that had belonged to granddad, and the hat I had worn during my windmill days. So it was amazing that I briefly reconciled with this girl, by way of chocolates and tequila.
When I worked construction, it was to save money to come to New York. I told my father that I was moving to New York. He told me to keep my nose clean. My last night in Texas, I was with some friends of mine who work in the oil fields in Odessa. We went bowling, then we headed to a bar called Woofers and Tweeters. My oil field buddies had affectionately renamed the bar Hookers and Tweekers. It was karaoke night, and guys in black cowboy hats were going on stage and singing Top Forty country songs. I tried hitting on a girl by telling her I was moving to New York City. She was unimpressed. I should have told her I was moving to Dallas. I arrived in New York with a hangover.
I didn’t make it to the funerals. My father told me he understood I couldn’t be there. I had been in New York a year, and some of my old habits were already peeking out.
I was drunk, and I had thought I locked my keys in my apartment. I had also been fighting with my girlfriend. So I scaled the wall to get in through the window. I took a fall, two stories’ worth of a fall, and broke my femur in two places, requiring immediate surgery. The episode left me with a metal rod in my leg. I also lost some of my back teeth, and cut up my face.
My father flew up from Texas to see me through the hospital paper work and keep me company. On the night he arrived from Texas, the visiting hours at the hospital were over so he couldn’t get in to see me. My tattoo artist friends took him out on the town in Brooklyn. When I saw him in the morning at the hospital in Queens, he looked like he was feeling the effects of a hangover. His first order of business was to get me another bag for my catheter. Then he showed me some of the plays he was working on for his six-man team.
We were lucky enough to have a room to ourselves, so he spent the nights with me there in the hospital, sleeping in his chair. For some reason, from either the impact of the fall or the morphine drip I was on, I was unable to have a bowel movement. This worried the doctors. My father said, boy, we got to get you shitting. He helped carry me to the toilet. When I shat, it was like I had made those two free throws in the fourth quarter, he was so happy.
I had to have a blood transfusion, and my girlfriend brought her laptop to the hospital so we could all watch movies together. We watched a movie called Atonement, which I couldn’t stand--and I don’t think it had anything to do with the discomfort from the blood transfusion. My father said he enjoyed the film. On one of my father's last days with me in the hospital, he helped me take a shower. The five or six steps to the shower were excruciating. Having to stand erect in the shower was nearly unbearable.
“I’m getting real tired of this shit," I told my father.
He said I sounded just like Zane Sr. When he helped me back to the bed, I told him I was sorry. He told me that there wasn’t anything to be sorry for.
It wasn’t too many days ago that my father called me. He says it’s getting cold in Valentine. He say’s he’s looking forward to summer when he can do a little work on the house. He asks me if I’m keeping my nose clean. He tells me to give him a call from time to time.
In the mornings, he’s up at five and drives the school bus out on those ranch roads to pick up the kids. He tells me he’s seen some pretty mornings. He’s got a dog, a Dotson that I can’t stand, one of those little yapping things that won’t let anyone touch it. He’s got a cat he calls Bessie Smith. He calls himself "retired-rehired." He called me to ask if I thought it was a good idea for him to go see a band that was playing in Marfa, or if he should just go to Valentine and rest up for the morning. I told him I’d just go home if I were him, that he wouldn’t be missing anything. Later in the night, I got a text message from a girl that lives in Marfa. She said that she had just danced with my father.
When I was a kid, my father would take me to the cement basketball courts in Ft. Davis where we lived. He’d drill me, and by the time I was three years old I could dribble two basketballs at once. After school I’d sit in the gym, and watch him working out the high school kids. My dad never used a whistle like a lot of coaches do. He said that whistles stopped practice. His practices were coordinated by the buzzer. When time went out on the score board, the buzzer would ring out and the boys would line up for the next drill. There wasn’t any standing around. Even after games, win or lose, the boys were to sprint off the court into the locker room.
The man loves basketball. He got me a full-length mirror and with a bar of soap, he drew a straight line down the center of the mirror. I was to practice my shot in front of the mirror, making sure to keep my elbow in line with the soap line. He didn’t like me playing pick-up games 'cause he was afraid I would develop bad habits. After home games I’d often help him with the laundry. If they had won, he’d make up a song or two. If they lost, he’d be somber, like someone recovering from a surgery. Like something had been ripped out of him.
He’s softened in his old age. When he was younger, he’d get in your face. He’d spit when he yelled at you. I recall him berating a friend of mine when we were in Junior High. He said, “Lackey, are you smart enough to play this game?” In Junior High, in the team’s lockers, we had a folder. Inside the folder was a list of our priorities. They were: God, Family, School and Basketball. At the house we’d get calls from the local paper asking for a quote. They’d say, “Is Coach Mac there?” and I’d say, “Which one?”
My mother is a coach as well. She coaches volleyball in Odessa.
The town calls him Coach Mac, his friends call him Bucky, and my mother calls him Brent. In town, I was Coach Mac’s kid; to my father’s friends, I was Bucky’s kid. Bucky was a nickname; its origins are no longer known, or else he just won’t tell me. I know his name is Zane, just like his dad’s name is Zane. I’ve gotten a lot of flack in my day for my name; people think I made it up. Especially now that I’m living in New York, where people move simply to change their names.
Zane isn’t all that uncommon a name in Texas; there was a popular Western writer by the name of Zane Grey. He wrote a book called Riders of the Purple Sage. My granddaddy was Zane Grey McWilliams. There is a story about Van Gogh. How he had a brother that died when it was baby. The family had buried the baby, and the family would take little Van Gogh to the graveyard and the name on the tombstone was Van Gogh. The family had just recycled the name. Apparently this had a lasting effect on young Van Gogh. I have had a similar experience, seeing a bunch of medicine bottles with my name on them; a room at an old folks' home with my name on the door.
In the summers when I was a child, my father would earn extra money teaching drivers' education to the teenagers in Ft. Davis and the neighboring towns. The drivers' education car would be parked in front of our house for two months out of the year. Those cars had the brake peddle on the passenger side. I would accompany my father to those neighboring towns. I’d sit in class while he taught and draw on notebook paper. He was always giving me paper to draw on when he wanted me to sit quiet, though I never really had a problem sitting quietly.
During the breaks in his classes, he’d take me to the high school gym and pull out a rack of basketballs and drill me. Sometimes a crowd would gather. One summer, he sent me to Abilene Christian University to attend a basketball camp. It was a week away from home, staying in a dorm room. I didn’t make a single friend, but the instructors were kind to me. I played pool with my sister, who also attended the camp. When my father picked me up and we were waiting for my sister to come out of her dorm, I found a baby bird that had fallen from a tree. The bird was obviously not going to make it, so my father broke its neck.
Once, my little brother and I came across a jackrabbit that had been hit with a car. I went home and got my air rifle and tried putting the jackrabbit out of its misery, not knowing that I wasn't going to kill a jack rabbit with a Red Rider air rifle. I handed the rifle to my brother, then grabbed a chunk of wood, bringing the wood down on the rabbit till it was dead.
Summers also meant that it was time to install the air conditioner or the swamp cooler. We’d climb to the top of the roof and my father would swear and curse the swamp cooler. I’d be there to ferry tools to him, or to hand him the garden hose to wet the pads of the cooler. He’d complain about money. He’d try to get me to talk about myself. That was the summer we moved from Ft. Davis to the town of Alpine. Someone wrote curse words with the dust that had gathered on our family's suburban van. My father thought I did it. I told him, why would I vandalize the car I had to ride in? I guess he thought I was mad at him for moving the family. Then, he found out that I was drinking. After that, my father sent me to an ex-player of his that had become a minister.
I spent a weekend with the man and his mother in their ranch house. The minister took me driving on a dune buggy and we chased a family of javelina across a field. In the mornings, his mom would cook us breakfast and we’d say grace. One evening we were hiking, and the minister asked me if anything was troubling me. I never answered him.
My father had tried to retire from coaching, but when I was a junior in High School, he took a job as the head coach of the Alpine. I never knew what to call my father on the court. I never called him dad; I rarely even called him coach. I just said yes sir and no sir whenever I was called upon. My father didn’t want the town to think he was favoring his son, so I sat on the bench a good bit. We still did the team's laundry together.
When I graduated from high school and moved away, my father gave me his tape collection. He had accumulated a lot of cassette tapes; the majority of them were mixed tapes with bizarre titles. I wish I could remember some of those titles so I could reuse them.
I moved to Levelland, Texas, which I don’t recommend. I was going to school and working at a Sonic drive-thru. I would come home after work and put a cassette tape in. I kept the tapes that I liked. With the others, I would record my own songs over them.
***
My sister visited me in New York a few months back. My sister went on after high school to have a college career in athletics. Both my sisters and my brother went on to have college careers. I should point out at this moment that I am not bitter, and have never felt the slightest amount of sibling rivalry. I have always taken pride in my sisters' and my brother's accomplishments. I am thankful I can put that in writing. Anyway, she’s living in California now with her husband. She told me how, after her sports career was over, she had become depressed. She didn’t know how to manage her time.I told her I knew what she meant. Once sports are over, it’s like being amputated from yourself. I remember sitting in my rented room in Levelland, pining over games won and lost, thinking that if I would have tried harder, pushed for more playing time, I wouldn’t be in Levelland. I began a strict work-out regiment, running and lifting weights, but it wasn’t the same. College was a bust, my shyness was still there, I wouldn’t eat at the cafeteria, and I wouldn’t join any intramural teams. I still had that abject anger that I never understood, that I always thought I’d outgrow.
On weekends, I’d drive to Lubbock to hang out with my two high school friends. I was dropping out of classes and spending more time in my rented room, poring over my drawings while listening to my father’s cassettes. I moved outside of Dallas, then moved back to Alpine. I went to work drilling water wells and working on windmills. I took a job making pottery for two years, after which I went back to water wells. During these aimless years, my father would often stop by my house with a six-pack of beer. Sometimes, he’d bring along a coaching buddy of his.
He’d have me play guitar for him and his friends. My father was the lineman coach for the football team. He was studying sumo-wrestling moves that he was teaching the linemen and taught me a few moves. I very rarely visited him at his home. I thought of myself as an orphan, though my parents lived thirty minutes away. My father and I no longer went out to the cement courts, but we did drive around together. A favorite road of ours was Pinto Canyon Road. We’d listen to Bob Dylan albums, and my father would talk about his favorite lines in the songs.
We’d drive around Marfa and he’d point out a trailer he lived in when he was a student teacher, where he met my mother. He told me how, on his honeymoon, he stayed at the Starlight Hotel. We would drink in bars together, though my father rarely had more than two. Sometimes, after a particular tear I’d been on, I would post a note on my door not to knock unless you were Jimi Hendrix. My father would always knock anyway. He would hand me a beer and tell me how much he liked my sign. He’s a funny man, my father. Once, we were drinking at a bar in Marfa and a woman leaned over and asked us, “Doesn’t this remind you of Soho?”
My father asked her, “Soho New York, or Soho London?” Then he got this shit-eating grin on his face. He leaned over to me.
“She thought I was just some dumb local.”
We were driving in San Angelo, one of the times my granddaddy Zane Sr. was in the Shamrock Hospital. A truck pulled up beside us, then quickly speed off. My father said, “I wish I had his truck and he had a feather up his ass. We’d both be a little bit tickled.”
At the hospital, Zane Sr. was recovering from chemo. He still had his hair. Zane Sr. had a bad habit of commenting on how fat the asses were on the nurses. My father would try to quiet him. Granddaddy would get visits from old friends; football players. They’d talk about their high school games. Zane Sr. had had a scholarship to Texas Tech, but choose to join the Navy during WWII. After the war, he went on to play football at Howard Payne College.
I accompanied my grandmother Arvena outside the hospital so she could smoke. I asked her how she was getting along, though asking questions was superfluous--she was just happy to sit quietly with me. Her answer came back short.
"We’re making it okay.”
We sat on a little bench and she put her hand on my leg. She said I was getting skinny, though I don’t remember I time when I wasn’t skinny. After her cigarette, I led my grandmother back to the hospital bed; my aunt and my dad were swapping stories. A favorite of mine goes like this: My father is colorblind, as is his mother. My father and grandmother were out shopping one day for a suit. I can’t remember what occasion called for my father to wear a suit. It might have been a date, or it might have been a job interview. Either way, they were shopping for a suit. My father tries on a handsome suit, comes out of the dressing room, and both he and my grandmother agree that it is a handsome suit. So the suit is purchased and taken home. When they show the suit to my aunt, she breaks out laughing.
The suit is lime green.
A year went by. My father enlisted me in helping him move Zane Sr. and Arvena to the Ballinger Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center, or the nursing home. I won’t dwell on this, though I will say that was a hard day to get through. After it was over and we were driving away, my father looked like he did after those ballgames he lost.
On the drive home, as we got some distance between the nursing home and us, we fell into joking--about women, about granddad, about sports. We were still miles away from any town and the sky was grey. We were talking about a particular moment in one of our last basketball games together. It was late in the fourth quarter and I drew a foul. I was set up at the free-throw line. I I made the first shot, I’d get a second shot, and we needed the points.
The referee had been an ex-player of my dad's. I was familiar with the ref enough, his brother-in-laws had showed me where he stashed his Playboy, so there was some history there. The ref hands me the ball and says to me, “McWilliams, let's see if you can make this shot.”
I made both shots. My father beamed a little as he drove. We didn’t speak for quite a while after the story. Without looking at me, he told me that high school sports wasn’t all that important really. I nodded and told him I figured that much. I remember having a football coach my senior year in high school who told the team right before a big game that these were the greatest years of our lives. I thought to myself, Christ, I hope that’s not true. It was good to hear my father didn’t think so.
***
Not long after my father's fiftieth birthday, I was caught cheating on a girlfriend I had. She had thrown some punches. It all happened at a backyard party in front of spectators and her little sister, who was yelling, “Hit him.”After the fight I went to my parent’s house. It was late at night. My father was up watching ESPN. I sat down on a chair. I said, “Dad, I fucked up.” He said, “That’s easy to do.” He let me sleep on the couch. The next day, I finished up with work and was on my way to get my things from the shared house. My father asked, “She’s not gonna shoot you, is she?”
I said she wasn’t, but I wished he hadn’t of put the thought in my head. I drove to the house but she had changed the locks already. I later found out that she had burned all my things. My guitar, which was a graduation gift from my parents, my clothes, all the writing that I had done since high school--all of this she had burned in a fire pit in the courtyard. She even burned my Stetson hat, the hat that had belonged to granddad, and the hat I had worn during my windmill days. So it was amazing that I briefly reconciled with this girl, by way of chocolates and tequila.
When I worked construction, it was to save money to come to New York. I told my father that I was moving to New York. He told me to keep my nose clean. My last night in Texas, I was with some friends of mine who work in the oil fields in Odessa. We went bowling, then we headed to a bar called Woofers and Tweeters. My oil field buddies had affectionately renamed the bar Hookers and Tweekers. It was karaoke night, and guys in black cowboy hats were going on stage and singing Top Forty country songs. I tried hitting on a girl by telling her I was moving to New York City. She was unimpressed. I should have told her I was moving to Dallas. I arrived in New York with a hangover.
***
Both Zane Sr. and Arvena have since passed on. My father would call me on the nights he spent in the hospital with them sleeping in a cot or in a chair by there side. He’d call saying he needed to vent, but we never talked about much.I didn’t make it to the funerals. My father told me he understood I couldn’t be there. I had been in New York a year, and some of my old habits were already peeking out.
I was drunk, and I had thought I locked my keys in my apartment. I had also been fighting with my girlfriend. So I scaled the wall to get in through the window. I took a fall, two stories’ worth of a fall, and broke my femur in two places, requiring immediate surgery. The episode left me with a metal rod in my leg. I also lost some of my back teeth, and cut up my face.
My father flew up from Texas to see me through the hospital paper work and keep me company. On the night he arrived from Texas, the visiting hours at the hospital were over so he couldn’t get in to see me. My tattoo artist friends took him out on the town in Brooklyn. When I saw him in the morning at the hospital in Queens, he looked like he was feeling the effects of a hangover. His first order of business was to get me another bag for my catheter. Then he showed me some of the plays he was working on for his six-man team.
We were lucky enough to have a room to ourselves, so he spent the nights with me there in the hospital, sleeping in his chair. For some reason, from either the impact of the fall or the morphine drip I was on, I was unable to have a bowel movement. This worried the doctors. My father said, boy, we got to get you shitting. He helped carry me to the toilet. When I shat, it was like I had made those two free throws in the fourth quarter, he was so happy.
I had to have a blood transfusion, and my girlfriend brought her laptop to the hospital so we could all watch movies together. We watched a movie called Atonement, which I couldn’t stand--and I don’t think it had anything to do with the discomfort from the blood transfusion. My father said he enjoyed the film. On one of my father's last days with me in the hospital, he helped me take a shower. The five or six steps to the shower were excruciating. Having to stand erect in the shower was nearly unbearable.
“I’m getting real tired of this shit," I told my father.
He said I sounded just like Zane Sr. When he helped me back to the bed, I told him I was sorry. He told me that there wasn’t anything to be sorry for.
It wasn’t too many days ago that my father called me. He says it’s getting cold in Valentine. He say’s he’s looking forward to summer when he can do a little work on the house. He asks me if I’m keeping my nose clean. He tells me to give him a call from time to time.