It was early in the morning, a week before my 18th birthday, and I was sound asleep when I heard my mother calling on the phone. She rarely called me and if she did, it was to yell at me while asking where her TV remote was even though I was never home. I knew it had to be serious, so I answered instead of letting her call reach my voicemail.
"Hey, mama. Is everything OK?" I asked. My voice was filled with a raspy lull as I wiped the sleep from my eyes.
"Hi, mijo... I... I don't know how to...to tell you..." the pauses between her words gripped me with anxiety as anguish overcame her voice.
"What's going on?" I asked as I flung off lethargy and cloaked myself with angst. I will never forget that day. That was the day none of my questions could ever be answered. My age melted from me like hot wax on the side of a candlestick. 9-year-old me was left naked, wandering in the purgatory of my mind, for the rest of my life.
"It's... it's your father. I'm sorry. He... he's..." as her voice trailed off into a hum, I became beside myself. Not in an erratic way, but as if I was literally sitting next to myself; half of me feeling emotionless and the other half was imploding with everything and, somehow, nothing at all.
The first time I met my father was at his funeral.
Memories have a way of defining our perspective and sometimes justifying our decisions. Unlike animals, our memories become distorted over time; they are no longer complete facts, but an autobiographical fiction, like a fresh picked cotton ball versus a lint ball of equal size. From a distance, you couldn't tell them apart, just like a memory partially excavated from your hippocampus, the details are blurred, and without further digging and restoring fallacies, those memories are enough to fill gaps you didn't know were missing.
When I was younger, the only memories I had of my father were of photos that didn't include me, and stories from my mother that hardly seemed real; they felt like they never dug themselves deeply enough to grow into anything meaningful. My mom had a neat habit of telling my sister and I horror stories about our father, simply referred to as "Ronni". Our life never knew him and although my childhood was brightly aware of his absence, it never bothered me until those gaps made themselves apparent on the other side of a sign labeled, "Rite of Passage". I'm not sure what our mom's purpose was for telling us those horror stories and I often wondered what my life would've been like never having heard them. Maybe I would've filled her days with questions about him, what does he look like? Is he funny? Was he good at baseball? How tall is he? Or maybe our mom was simply telling us the truth about life rather than peeing on our heads and telling us it was raining. For me, it was always raining, but I happily jumped into the puddles—no shirt and no shoes. For my sister, it was always raining urine.
My sister isn't much older than I am—about a year and a half—but she absorbed the world differently than I had growing up. Teachers loved my sister; she not only followed direction, but she managed to exceed expectations in the most creative ways. I was always jealous of her and how effortless it seemed for her to think outside of what was asked of her. She'd highlight the border of an empty image in a coloring book with a marker and then use a similar colored crayon inside of the image. I don't know why that amazed me, but it made me feel insecure about my thought process. I used to drive my first-grade teacher nuts with coloring assignments. If the point was to cut the image out, then why would I need to stay in the lines? My logic figured that if I colored outside the lines, then I'd be done much quicker without the stress and anxiety of fearing the borders. I witnessed some of my peers crying from coloring outside the lines by accident and I had no desire to feel that way, so I hurled myself in the opposite direction. Without knowing it, I was afraid to feel less than the landing I was already standing on—I was afraid to disappoint myself—and based on my father's history, as breathtakingly detailed by my mother, I was already predisposed to torment myself and everyone else around me. Even so, justified logical reason empowered me and it motivated me to be absurdly different.
Over the next couple of years, I became oddly comfortable scoring against the grain as the Ronni stories settled onto my skin, like water on the surface of a Spanish moss plant. The tiny gray scales of the plant trap water until the plant can absorb it. The first time the stories reached the marrow of my bones was the day that my mother told me I was just like Ronni. I must've been about 9 or 10 years old and the only other memory I had about that moment was being outside of my abuelita's house. I can't imagine that her outburst wasn't warranted, however the weight of her outburst wasn't the last time that arrow purged the spirit right out of my soul. There are only so many times that your spirit can get dislodged before your soul doesn't care to put your spirit back where it belongs. No one leaves all the arrows in, because if we did, we would all look like porcupines. Instead, like everyone else, I pulled them out one at a time. Some took longer to unearth than others, as some arrows became buried in my skeletal system or entangled in my digestive, cardiovascular, or nervous systems. The worst pain of them all, is when a small dart traps itself in the respiratory system. They tend to linger and gradually collapse your lungs, like a nail in a tire. And even though my mom wasn't responsible for firing all the arrows, she was responsible for the one that started the barrage. All that to say, arrows and darts alike, they all come out and I was left with holes in my body, like a sheet of quarter-inch basswood from a shotgun scattering spherical projectiles. Over time, I learned how to clog the emptiness the only way I knew how to stop from bleeding out.
There are junctures in life when time is personified. It becomes human, purposefully inhaling headstones and exhaling the dust from the inscription. I began to bury myself, and after that first arrow, I questioned who I felt like I needed to be. If the me that I had always known wasn't accepted by my own mother, then who did I need to be for her to love me? If it wasn't okay for me to be me, then there's no way that I could be me with anyone else. Her words created a severance, a new space in my head, that was amplified over time through distorted cognition. That day was the beginning of a new education, an inherent trait that was passed down from my father's arteries to my throbbing veins thirsty for the stage. I was gifted—talented even—having the ability to change the space between the lines by changing the wavelength of light reflected off the mirrors that encroached my space. By the time I entered high school, I had become a master chameleon. In the time it took to shake someone's hand, I was able to read their weaknesses. The person's bodily orientation to mine, the location of their free hand, the length of eye contact, how many times the person blinked while introducing themselves, the style of handshake, the pressure, the texture of their skin, what they smelled like, their choice of shoes, the type of hair style, the slight nuances of their mouth while reaching for my hand, and a dozen other idiosyncratic tendencies that I could pick up on without blinking an eye. I knew people better than they knew themselves and the longer they were in my reach, the more I was able to read their pain and shape-shift into the person they wanted to associate with.
I filled my high school years with a cesspool of people that I amassed while climbing the ranks of popularity. I was well-liked by everyone, highly recruited as a three-sport freshman, skipped classes without repercussion, and was dubbed "Mr. GQ" by the senior class Principal. Life was easy and getting by had nothing to do with grades and everything to do with creating an experience of who everyone was craving to manifest. People generally want to identify with someone that looks like they should be successful in hopes of piggybacking or latching on to a coattail. In high school, most kids will do just about anything to claw past who they don't want to be perceived as. I played that role while living in a dilapidated double-wide on the wrong side of the tracks—and no one ever knew.
Graduation was a week before receiving the news about my father. We graduated the largest class in Texas State history; twenty-seven buses carrying 800 students convoyed us to the coliseum—the same place Longhorn graduates walk the stage. It was massive and surreal. At the end of the ceremony, people scurried to congratulate each other and offered hugs, kisses, and last good-byes. Every athlete that signed a National Letter of Intent donned their college caps and took photos with their coaches, family, and friends. I wish I could say that I took those moments in, but I brushed them off as if this chapter of my life was finally beneath me. I shook hands with coaches, teammates, friends, and teachers all singing praises of my future. The more I heard them, the more I relished on the stage I had built, but the heavier I felt. Suddenly, I was hyper-aware that I had to live up to the expectations I framed in front of everyone for the last four years. My family and my closest friends and their families gathered to take over half a restaurant after graduation. I grew up in Texas, so barbecue was always everyone's first choice. Everyone insisted that I sit at the head of the table so they could honor my accomplishments, but the seat began to rage with heat once the orders went out and the questions came firing in.
"So, Duke," my uncle started, "have you decided what you're going to school for?"
The wobbling tables made more noise than the people sitting at them. Everyone's head was turned in my direction, as if they were silently rubbernecking a car accident on the highway.
"Absolutely! I'm thinking about..." I couldn't finish answering when my mom interrupted.
"He's going to be a doctor!" My mom exclaimed with certainty and pride.
"I thought you were going to major in Poli. Sci. or Criminal Justice or whatever makes you a lawyer." My best friend, Joe, interjected.
"No. He's going to be a surgeon. They make a lot of money and he's smart, so he'll be a great doctor!" My mom raced to correct Joe.
"Well, I'll tell you what, if you're thinking about becoming an Architect," Joe's stepdad added as he stretched a hairy arm to the middle of the table for a dinner roll, "I own a firm in Austin if you ever need any help or an internship or a job right after college. Let me know, son."
"Thank you, Frank." I said, "But I was thinking about..." my girlfriend interrupted before I could clarify my thoughts.
"The only thing he can think about is playing baseball for UT! The head coach thinks he can start as a freshman!" My upper lip curled towards my nose, as if I was trying to smell my lip. Begrudgingly, I glared at her as she buttered an already buttered dinner roll, set it on a small white plate, and slid the plate in front of me without a hitch in her stage presence. I looked at the roll, letting out a noticeably heavy sigh, and wished I could be the one being eaten, digested, and flushed away forever. My mom gently placed her hand on my back and smiled, adoring my girlfriend's pride in me.
The "oohs" and "aahs" echoed throughout the room as that became the hottest table topic to discuss. Questions raced back and forth across the table, like level 9000 of Pong; "how many games do you think he'll win?", "how many batters will he strikeout?", "how many awards do you think he'll win?". They all began to envision my future success as a star baseball player and a pre-med student or a lawyer or an astronaut or Oprah Winfrey.
"Hey, Duke?" My uncle asked loudly. "Do you think you'll play football or run track like you did in high school?"
"OH!" Frank lively expressed as he darts his attention in my direction. "Have you spoken to Coach Brown?"
I looked at my uncle and squinted while blinking an awkward amount of times. I opened my mouth as if to say something, when Joe chimes in and tosses a winner to my uncle.
"Who do you think will draft him?" Joe gleefully asked.
"He'd look good in a Cowboys jersey!" Frank clamored.
"Oh yeah!" The collective group exclaimed.
Exhortations about getting drafted to an NFL team and which teams could use me to win a Super Bowl suffocated the air. Among the wreckage of conversations at the table, I heard a pin drop, and from the looks of some of their faces, I wasn't supposed to hear it. My uncle, gloating about his nephew's predisposed athletic abilities, murmured to my opposite end of the table.
"You know, his father played baseball in the minor leagues...".
As long as I had been alive, I had never heard anything positive about Ronni come out of anyone's mouth. In fact, no one ever talked about him, other than my mother. I was dying to know more, but I pretended not to hear what my uncle had said. Luckily, the food had come out and the only thing more important, to my mom, than hiding from that Snapple fact, was eating. I had spent years curating tough veneers of skin so that nothing regarding Ronni could penetrate my skin deeply enough for all my repressed memories to weep through. I felt all my questions battling to get through, but my life immediately after graduation kept my thoughts busy enough to keep the retaining wall intact.
A week later, with my mother's afflicted tone on the other end of the phone, a flood of emotions tortured everything I had ever known about anything.
"The funeral is next week, and your sister wants to go." My mother feared. "You don't have to go; I know it's your..." I hung up before she could finish. As I placed my bare feet on the carpet of my room, the weight of my thoughts lunged me into a panic. I stuffed a duffle bag with random articles of clothes, threw my phone on my bed, grabbed my dog and headed for Honey Lake without telling a soul. My best friend's stepfather, Frank, had a cabin on the lake, and he'd often let us use it to throw parties whenever we wanted. He was a large, bearded, burly Mexican man; real cool guy, but could be mean at the flick of a switch. For as many parties as Joe and I irresponsibly hosted at the cabin, we were far too afraid of Frank to leave it less than stellar. Over many weekends and longer nights, we raised the value of his cabin by remodeling and repairing a lot of our misguided damage. Behind the cabin were old, thick Ash trees that framed the scene of a downward, curving green and yellow meadow to a dock just wide enough for three kids to run and jump off of at the same time. Me, Joe and his cousin, Eric, used to hunt for lightening bugs and then race to the dock with the fireflies bestowed in our hollow hands. We'd sit on the edge of the dock, with our toes wiggling in the water, peaking an eye through a small hole between our thumbs, enchanted by the strength and color of their bioluminescence. I couldn't wait to get to the cabin and lay on the dock with my dog, Huxley, and stare out into space; but my stomach was churning as I cycled through anger and sadness, pounding the top of the steering wheel and combing Huxley's mane as I drove into the night.
Honey Lake was a five-hour drive and the exhaustion of sustaining the amount of oscillating emotions surging through my body took a devastating toll on my vision; my eyes felt like chalk on dry wool. It was nightfall by the time I arrived, and everything was blurry. I needed to flip the breakers to turn the power on, but I didn't bother. It was too dark, and I was too tired. I had been to the cabin so many times that it was easier to navigate with my eyes closed. A small metal container held a spare key and was stashed behind the housing of a sconce on the left side of the vestibule door. The bench between the vestibule screen door and the wooden cabin door created more of a mud room than a vestibule. I sat down, untied my boots, and slid them under the bench. I walked in, because the cabin door was never locked, and dropped my bag near the door as I stepped inside. As soon as the door opened, Huxley ran inside and straight to the back of the cabin. The back of the cabin was the great room and the social hub of the home; it accommodated the largest kitchen I had ever seen. One of the counters extended to the outdoor kitchen through large-span, tri-fold sliding windows; receiving plates of food through the opening was seamless. No other room in the cabin was as fascinating to be in as the kitchen. Floor to ceiling windows and doors painted a wide view of a West-facing Honey Lake in the distance, which composed unforgettable sunsets reflecting watercolors of violet and orange sherbert skies on its glassy still waters. The 12-foot center sliding doors opened to a massive interior-exterior soft cedar wrap-around deck, transforming into a romantic, moonlit dance floor at night with thousands of market lights waltzing above in the tender summer breeze. The cabin at Honey Lake was my favorite place to just... be. After letting Huxley out back, I fed him, picked up my bag from the floor, and tucked myself into the California King size bed in the master bedroom. As I laid there, staring at a static ceiling fan, I felt my mind allow my nerves to decompress, like untwisting a water hose and watching the water fall softly from the mouth, as if to exhale. For the next few days, I spent a great deal of time dissecting my life up to that point. The only problem was that I made an even bigger mess by making the emptiness deeper, never really finding the infection and then covering it up with band-aides that couldn't cover most of the wounds. Sepsis was bound to strangle me, and I knew where it would begin, just not when or how.
***
The morning of the funeral was restive and stolid, like the rhythmic spasms of a dog gagging while helplessly waiting to see the cause of its turmoil with disappointment. My mom offered breakfast on the stove, but I declined and waited outside for my uncle to pick me and my sister up. When he arrived, my sister hopped into the front seat and I disappeared into the back. Every person we zoomed by, I thought about what they were going through in life or where they were going. I wondered if they became who they've always wanted to be or if they were being dragged through life. Maybe the lady sitting at the bus stop was happy and maybe the guy pushing the kid on the swing was overwhelmed with regret. And even though it was summer, I felt like I watched leaves descending from trees all around me. As we pulled into the cemetery, everything seemed to have been ebbing and I couldn't explain why I felt that way.
My uncle and sister greeted people and graciously accepted condolences from strangers while walking to find seats in front of the casket. My uncle made his way to the front while I kept my head down and sat just far enough away from the open casket as to not see a dead body. Meanwhile, my sister found all five of our half-sisters and sat with them instead. By the time my uncle found me and moved me to the next seat over, the procession had begun, and everyone had established their places. A lady had been seated in front of me. Her dark brown hair was warped into a neat little bun under a black, merino church hat. I couldn't stop staring at the little piece of lint on her overly sedated, wet-sand colored sweater. Its puny, wee shreds of fiber in tight grasp, like Velcro, hooking on to its oblivious well-knitted host. It pierced me, like an arrogant smirk; mocking me for floating about as if it was destined to be on her right shoulder all along. The free fibers paraded in the gloomy summer breeze without a care in the world. What if the wind caught it and destroyed its purpose? It could tumble in the gust, confused and lost and pummeling against roaming debris. I squinted my eyes as a devilish grin graffitied my face. I slouched forward, like death over the shoulder of an anxious man living in dread. With a crawling reach, I pinched my index finger and thumb together, inching closer and closer to the slender fibers tickling from my breath. My mouth beamed like the mischievous grin of the Cheshire Cat.
"I've got you now you smug bastard." I whispered to myself, and just before I could dismantle the piece of lint off its throne, my uncle nudged me.
"Hey, Duke, you want some gum?" He said while pulling his hand out from the inside of his blazer pocket. I looked at him and then at his hand.
"It's Bazooka." I responded while looking at the gum like it was a janitor wearing a top-hat plunging a toilet. It seemed inappropriate considering the setting. I looked back at him, puzzled. We stood up and he urged me to start walking to pay my respects to a father I've only met in photos.
"Why do you have Bazooka?" I berated, gesturing my hand to accept his offer. He slapped the Bazooka brick in my hand and winked at me. How odd, I thought, to react to my condescension with a wink. His brother is gutted in a wooden box and he's winking and handing out gum wax-wrapped in a tiny comic strip. I had never seen my father and his brother together. Maybe in photos, but I couldn't recall seeing any of them in an album or otherwise. I glared at the Bazooka in my hand, slid my thumb across the letters, and stuffed it into the front of my jeans pocket.
"You don't want it?" My uncle asked, with a blank expression as he looked across a sea of leaches.
"I do. Just saving it for now." I said with a shrug.
We slowly conformed into a single file line to glance at the open casket that cradled my father. It was too quiet—eerie even. The shuffling of dress shoes, the whimpering cries, the noses being blown in handkerchiefs, and the soft condolences were all muffled compared to death's demand of life. I stared at the ground as we grazed closer to the casket. I couldn't tell if I wanted the line to speed up or slow down, but the branches on the ground were a pleasant distraction. I'd step on the thick, dry ones just to hear the fracturing sound that a bite of an apple would make, hoping that it would drown out the cacophony of death molesting my ears. Death didn't seem to bother my uncle. He stood in line like he was waiting to get checked out at the grocery store. I peered as he put his right hand on my father's chest and walked right past the casket, not even looking at his own brother; as if to say, "Alright now". How was I supposed to follow whatever that was? It was then that death's volume petrified me. I just stood there, monolithically on blades of grass, catatonically replaying the skin on people's faces contort when they looked at his dead face. People veered around my statue, some patted me on the shoulder with a pretentious empathy, believing they understood what it felt like to be me. I felt their weary eyes frowning at me in mourning. My uncle looked at me, waving for me to get moving, but I couldn't feel my feet. Instead, I found myself buffering in deep thought.
It seems as if death and love evoke a profound connection to everything, but what's the difference between them? In that moment, time had expanded, like an unraveling film reel, and it was the space between seconds that I was plunged into a narrow gap; a stolen fragment of time as life, as I knew it, became a thin echo—a waiting room of sorts. The walls were closing in and I was in a tug of war with how I was demanded to feel about myself from the glare of my entangled environment and the density in which reality gently placed in my thoughts as barbaric nightmares that carried me to the bottom of the Dead Sea. Death raised the awareness of reality to my line of sight and thrusted a single, solitary mirror in front of me. Like a sort of regression of images, it created a vivid impression of reality, unlike a self-perceived reality, that creates only a mirage—and a shadow at best—of who I believed myself to be. I couldn't take a step, in any direction, without seeing a mirror and asking myself, "who is that?". I didn't recognize myself in any of the mirrors because I had become a version of someone else's expectations. I followed their rules, like the funny looking images I'd see of myself in a house of mirrors. They're all me, but each mirror deformed me into a different version of itself. I couldn't remember who I was because I had forgotten what it felt like to live in my own skin.
In what felt like hours in the depths of myself, was only a few unresponsive minutes in the real world. An elderly black lady put her hands on my face and hugged my eyes with hers. A tear embarked down my cheek and puddled in the crevasse of her right hand purlicue. She gently pulled me in to her space and whispered with a sweet, deteriorated voice.
"Hi baby, I'm your father's grandmother."
I looked at her, comprehending her as if she were a poem. My stomach swallowed my heart, like a stone placed on the surface of a lake. Other than my uncle, my father's side of the family was a figment, never to be defined into detail. My head reclined onto her shoulder, and as she tenderly embraced me, I closed my eyes and collapsed into a sobbing mess. And to think, here I was believing that I was living in control of my self-devised grand scheme to survive, when in reality, I wasn't in control at all. Like the flame of a birthday candle being blown out, we watched my father's casket drown into the dirt.
Happy birthday indeed, dad—happy birthday to me.