Chapter One: A One-Way Ticket on a Train Called the Crescent City "I have something to tell you, Charlie..." This is my father talking, he's dying. "When your mother was giving birth to you, she had a bowel movement -- "
"What?"
"She didn't mean to, Charlie."
My father and I had seen each other infrequently over the past several years, and now we were supposed to be enacting a solemn deathbed scene, my father having summoned me to a Charlottesville, Virginia, hospice where he was waiting for cancer to complete destiny.
"I wasn't around when your sisters were born," he said. "As I'm sure your mother told you, I never quite mastered the husband-father thing."
That's one way of putting it...my mother had put it many other ways over the years, in fact all my life she sang to me the litany of my father's sins: drunkard, gambler, womanizer, felon, heartbreaker. He left our family -- my mother, my three older sisters, and me -- when I was four years old and didn't reenter my life until almost a decade later when my mother, against her better judgment, allowed me to spend a summer in New Orleans where my father hustled a living with his half brother, James Joseph Pelikan. When I told my mother yesterday that Dad had called from a hospice and wanted me to come visit him before he died, she said it's probably a trick, he's not dying for real, he wants money, don't give him any, don't go see him, don't give him the satisfaction.
That single summer I was supposed to spend with my father in New Orleans stretched into three years, from when I was thirteen until just before I turned sixteen, years that broke my mother's heart and programmed me for life.
"From what I gather," the old man was saying, "a woman usually gets an enema before she goes in to give birth but you came on real quick and there wasn't time -- "
I told him I didn't want to hear it.
"I was out in the waiting room when a nurse asked if I wanted to see you get born...I figured, what the hell, in for a dime, in for a dollar. I arrived all suited up and masked just as your mother was bearing down to get you out and I guess she squeezed her bowels -- "
"Why are you telling me this?"
He held up a quaking hand, trying not to laugh. "The nurses are wiping away the shit while your mother is bearing down and shitting even more, which is the moment you choose to arrive, right in the middle of it all..." He laughs and loses his breath, then catches it again. "So that's what I wanted to tell you, you were born in shit and blood, it was a mess."
"Thanks, Dad."
"I just wanted to tell you...to let you know I was there at the beginning."
"Thanks."
"And also to say, life's tough...you're born in shit and -- "
When I suggested he leave it at that, the old man fixed me with a dull gaze. "So how's your business?"
"Good, knock on wood."
"Lunch boxes and Barbie dolls?"
"Collectibles, memorabilia..." He knew what my business was. For the past three years, since I turned thirty, I've been doing it full time, buying and selling toys that Baby Boomers played with as children, but I also deal in political memorabilia and occasionally rare books, old coins. I started out as a broker, purchasing items only when I knew I had a willing buyer. But I came across so many good deals from sellers desperate to unload collections (often a widow eager to sell her dead husband's "junk") that I leased a warehouse and began buying and storing items for eventual resell...this is either going to make a lot of money someday or lead to bankruptcy.
"You don't do PR anymore?" my father asked.
"Not for three years, Dad."
"Schmoozing."
"What?"
"All that stuff you did for that PR company, marketing and media, you told me, it's schmoozing...like you learned from me and your uncle James Joseph back when you lived in the Quarters."
"Yeah." My father's dying, I wasn't going to dispute what he should be taking credit for.
"That skinny little black-haired girl, you still shacking with her?"
"No, we broke up last -- "
"How many's that since college?"
"Girlfriends?"
"Serious ones you couldn't keep, yeah."
"Couldn't keep?"
"If you can't make it work with women, Charlie, that's just one of the things you got to accept."
Where do parents get their ideas? I told him, "I parted on the best of terms with all my old girlfriends, in fact the ones who've gotten married have invited me to their weddings -- "
"You take it as a compliment...you're so safe that old girlfriends invite you to their weddings? Any of my old girlfriends, they didn't want me in the same state when they were getting married."
"All I'm saying, Dad -- "
"Is how tame you are..."
"Is how I'm not leaving behind a lot of bitterness and anger."
"Meaning what?"
I shook my head.
"Meaning what?"
"I'm not the man you were, Pop."
He stared at me and blinked, then said, "I'm laying here dying and you're insulting me?"
"Forget it."
"And what did you mean, the man I was?"
I shrugged, but of course he must realize it's true...my father was in the past tense now.
"You're more like me than you want to admit," he said. "Marketing, schmoozing, trading, selling, working deals, hustling...the apple doesn't fall far from the tree."
Because he abandoned the family when I was four, as a child I had no distinctive memories of him, but when mother wasn't around, my sisters would tell stories of our father...how he could talk birds from trees and make everyone laugh, how people at a party waited upon his arrival like they were auditioning for The Iceman Cometh. When he was tapped out he'd bust open your piggy bank to steal the last quarter, but when he was flush he gave extravagant gifts all around, and people who knew him but didn't have to depend upon him loved our father dearly for his bonhomie. A thief and con artist, in spite of his moral corruption he was a physically beautiful man, according to my sisters and to photographs they had hidden away like contraband from our mother, who upon finding any lingering evidence of her ex-husband, would burn the item like it carried typhoid.
My father's good looks and high spirits and felonious nature were all still evident when I was a teenager and lived with him in New Orleans, but now, in this hospice room, he is desiccated and traumatized and it seems that the tubes in his arms and at his nose, instead of helping, must be vacuuming life from him. Mother would be pleased.
"I got a deathbed assignment for you," he announced.
Assignment...I remember that word from hanging around with my father and James Joseph, how they inclined to the dramatic and instead of asking me to run an errand or do a little job, they'd bring me in close and whisper about an assignment they had for me. Usually these assignments were mundane, run get a pack of cigarettes or go tell someone to be at a certain place come midnight...but occasionally James Joseph would offer something bizarre. One time he had me running around the French Quarter gathering up things I thought might be soothing to pygmies...who supposedly were being imported into this country as jockeys but ended up being so stricken by the crowds and shouts at the track that, between races, they needed to be kept in quiet rooms, surrounded by items they found soothing. Even at the time I knew it was ludicrous...but my uncle was such a magical man I would've gone to sea in a paper boat for him.
I guess this pygmy memory made me smile because suddenly my father was demanding what the hell I thought was so goddamn funny.
Funny was me bringing pygmy-soothing items to Pelikan who laid my treasures on the cypress bar of the joint where he worked, a place called Your Mother's, and questioned me carefully why I chose a piece of colored glass or red foil, please