Another Bullshit Night in Suck City Read Free Page B

say now.

ulysses
    Many fathers are gone. Some leave, some are left. Some return, unknown and hungry. Only the dog remembers. Even if around, most disappear all day, to jobs their children only slightly understand. Gone to office, gone to shop, men in suits hiding behind closed doors, yelling into phones, men in coveralls, reading pornography in pickup trucks. The carpenter. The electrician. They drive to strangers’ houses, a woman in a robe answers the door, they sit at the table with her, she offers coffee and cake, they talk about the day ahead. By nightfall you won’t recognize the bathroom, he promises. Monday we start in on the roof. Many end up sitting around the house all day, sneaking sips in the woodshed. Many drive to other towns, make love to a woman they’ve been making love to for years. Some continue to yell at their sons from the grave, some are less than a tattered photograph. Some sons need to exhume the body, some need to see a name written in a ledger. Some drive past a house the father once lived in as a child, park across from it, some swear that if they could gaze into his face just once their hearts would settle. One friend inherited some money and hired a private investigator to track down his lost father, paid a thousand dollars to find out his father was dead. All my life my father had been manifest as an absence, a nonpresence, a name without a body. The three of us sat around the table, my mother, brother and I, all carrying his name. Flynn ?
     
    Some part of me knew he would show up, that if I stood in one place long enough he would find me, like you’re taught to do when you’re lost. But they never taught us what to do if both of you are lost, and you both end up in the same place, waiting.

winter
    (1989) My father wraps himself in newspaper some nights, stuffs his coat with newspaper, the headlines finally about him, though he isn’t named. Just more heartstring pieces about “the homeless.” Get it straight, I’ve never flung a knife or shot a bullet at anyone. I’ve only been locked up for two of my fifty-nine years. I’m no jailbird . The nights drop below freezing and still he sleeps outside. “My toes,” he writes me, “are being cut off.” On wet nights he wraps himself in plastic, a Hefty trashbag sealed with duct tape, he weaves himself a cocoon, lies on the ground, puts his feet into the bag and pushes until they reach the bottom. Leaning forward, he tightens the plastic around his ankles and tapes them, and then he tapes the bag around his waist. This way, in the night, the bag won’t slide down his body.

two hundred years ago
    If you had been raised in a village two hundred years ago, somewhere in Eastern Europe, say, or even on the coast of Massachusetts, and your father was a drunk, or a little off, or both, then everyone in the village, those you grew up with and those who knew you only from a distance, they would all know that the town drunk or the village idiot was your father. It couldn’t be hidden or denied. Everything he did, as long as you stayed in the village, whether shouting obscenities at passing children or sleeping in the cemetery, all would be remembered when they looked at you, they would say to themselves or to whomever they were with, It’s his father, you know, the crazy one, the drunk, and they couldn’t help but wonder what part of his madness had passed on to you, which part you had escaped. They would look into your eyes to see if they were his eyes, they would notice if you were to stumble slightly as you stepped into a shop, they would remember that your father too had started with promise, like you. They would know he was a burden, they could read the struggle in your face, they would watch as you passed and nod, knowing that around the next corner your father had fallen and pissed himself. And they would watch you watch him, note the days you simply kept walking, as if you didn’t see, note the days you knelt beside him, tried to