photo: random street poetry near ANB Harbor and The P-Bar on Baranof Island, spring 2012: Sometimes, just as clear as the light in the air, the universe comes along and wallops you with a message, and don’t ever believe anyone that says otherwise. Since the point of taking a break from being inside at the bar was to go outside and have a smoke, reading paired up well, and by the third or fourth line, now sitting out there in the alley with the trash cans, taking this one in, remembering:
As about a 13-year old kid, trying my level best to understand the guy, it was the fact that he acted out in risky, often dangerous ways, unexpected twists going from a mostly predictable, clean-cut and polite person, to a cynical perverted swearing pirate literally with a twist of his head, it all kept me guessing. There was a tolerance, a forbearance by everyone else around the guy, an accommodation. There was no questioning or discussion beyond anger and fighting, insistence on being right, an adult acting as a child: he seemed to be owed something.
Manipulation and deception were his tools, words chosen particularly for their ability to stick in the mind of a kid, building trust on some lousy idea about honesty that came only from him, lurching emotionally from too stupid to get peanut butter out of a jar! to sitting on his wallet outside in the car, waiting in front of the grocery store, while my brother and I went inside to steal food for him to eat, to fondling and grabbing, groping, patting and touching that in any other time or place would have landed him in a jail cell. Cigarettes, Wild Turkey, and Busch tall-boys were so interesting, high school went by the wayside – with his blessing – and was as simple to quit as walking out the door and never going back. Wandering off alone, far away, is something that has never changed, but running away then, even making it all the way out of the state once, was the priority.
The worst form of shame and humiliation is the kind that lives only inside and cannot be talked about. The lcd clock would flip over digits late at night sometimes, him in his own bed just on the other side of the wall from where I slept on a couch, and my teen mind was doing math: I wanted to kill that guy.
Nobody expects a parent to be perfect. Nobody expects their parent to be the villain.
Upshot is, all that craziness and carrying on like a kid, it all ended up driving everyone away, even from each other, never once having gathered together again as a family, never once having spoken at all in decades, impossibly disconnected by really super fucked up circumstantial decisions and one guys incongruous, distorted mind.
It was April of 2012 and the roe herring fishery was just getting rolling on the west side of Shee Atiká, and the little town that was home for me was busy, summer was on the doorstep. Sitting aft, watching a friend emptying a winters-worth of stuff out of her 30-footer, the sun was really hot, the phone vibrated across the fiberglass deck, scooping it up before it went over the rail, reading.
See, people call them ‘smart‘ phones, but I haven’t carried one around in years, all that distraction, walking around looking at your hand like there’s some kind of an answer in there, where the feet should land next, or maybe just another excuse for bad behavior for some.
Flat as they are, they skip real nice across water though, if you chuck them just right. The bar was a block away, and there was some poetry waiting to be discovered.
It was a text message:
Dad is dead.