Dreams of Fish
Fragments
The Seven Deadly Social Sins
My Enemy
San Francisco, Strippers, and Satan
New Town
Interviews with the People in My Neighborhood
First Dateh
Reunion
Tasty Recipes
Job Search, Pt. 1
Republic, Pt. 2
Scientology
The Girl Who Works at Tower Records on Thursday Afternoons
Meat Market
Fun Pranks
My Best Friend is My Dentist
Tips For Scoring With the Ladies...
My father was a tough son of a bitch. When I would hear children talking about how strong their fathers were I would sit silently knowing they had never met my dad. He owned a grocery store and would spend his day fighting with assorted people. He openly swore and used racial slurs in front of anyone, at anytime, with no regard for propriety. Whether he was arguing with salesmen or wrestling with shoplifters and drunks, there was always a conflict. He carried 150 lb beef carcasses on his shoulders in the morning and in the afternoons stacked bags of rock salt, flour, and dog food. He would come home occasionally with his hand entirely cut open and would say, casually, “Ah…so I cut it on the fucking meat saw -- big deal.” He was a former sergeant in the Army during the Vietnam War who had never owned any cars aside from pickup trucks. None of his trucks had any less than eight cylinders and no part was ever made outside of US borders. He wore work boots, jeans, and a work shirt everyday for at least thirty years. He drank Budweiser straight from the can and ate red meat every night.
A couple of months after my mother divorced him, dad handed me the first present he ever bought me: a Daisy 880 BB gun for my 10th birthday. He frowned silently as he saw my expression. It was understandable -- I probably reacted the same way had he bought me a can of oven cleaner: unlike my father, I had no interest in guns. It was not that I was all so different from him. I liked sports; I just wasn’t good at any of them. I liked girls, too, but they tend to not notice the boys who get thrown into trashcans by the other boys. I wanted to be tough, to be able to push the other kids around, but I was small for my age and even for someone years younger than myself. As a result, I lived for our stereo and television set. Music was what I loved and chose to immerse myself in. I knew all the lyrics to all of the popular songs on MTV. I would get teary with emotion watching the contestants in the Star Search singing competition. Most children watched cartoons on Saturday mornings. I would sit through them just so I could see the latest dance steps on American Bandstand and Soul Train.
Obviously I was a constant source of disappointment for my father. Once, he walked in on me in the living room while I was watching MTV, singing along to Cyndi Lauper's “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” He looked at me then the television screen before he shook his head saying, ”You’re breaking my goddamn heart, son." He walked out. It was reaction that I would see time and time again. It was how he would respond when I asked him to buy me a sequined tuxedo with tails, a top hat, and a walking stick, or when I told him I wanted to sign up for after school choir, or especially when he walked into the kitchen and discovered me making cre`me brulee.
We walked outside together. I held the BB gun and he held a plastic case of BB shot. He was going to teach me to shoot and I was going to finally learn to be a man. We walked through his property, ten acres of eucalyptus trees and old plywood.
“Did you learn to shoot in the Army, dad?”
“No,” he said, “I learned to shoot when I was a kid. That’s why I was the best at marksmanship in the whole company by the time I went to the ‘Nam.”
The 'Nam...it was a phrase that thoroughly intrigued me. I pictured a war torn jungle, blood pouring off of dead bodies and bullets flying through the air. My father was able to trod through the mud and stench and destroy the enemy. He was a machine only programmed for strength and bravery. I asked him what he did in the Army.
"I trained people. I taught them how to fight...and how to survive. I did a tour of the shit. It was rough there and I'm not proud of what I had to do, but I did it and I'm alive today."
He looked at me for minute as we continued to walk. I was short, skinny and my hair ended in a rattail. My glasses covered most of my face.
“Goddamn it” he said. He shook his head as he scowled. His scowl was a permanent expression on his face. Even when he was smiled, which was hardly ever, his eyebrows and the vertical lines between them pointed directly to the center of his face. We walked a little before he began explaining the fundamentals of firearm safety.
“Now the most important thing when you’re shooting a gun is what it is you’re shooting at. You miss what you’re shooting at and it might bounce back and hit you. You’ll lose your eyeball. Then you’re fucked. You play grabass; start shooting without looking and you might hit one of our neighbors. They’d sue us and we’d be screwed. If I get my hands on you after that, trust me when I say that you’ll be fucked. Or you might shoot your gun without looking and you shoot out one of our windows. I get my hands on you, and you’re fucked. All I’m saying is that if you’re not careful, you’re fucked.”
We reached his tool shed, a small wooden shack full of gardening equipment and tools. We kept garbage out there and he dug through the one of the bins for beer cans. He lined up five empty Budweiser cans on an old sawhorse. He put an old rug behind it.
“What’s that for?”
“So the BBs don’t fly off and hit you in the eye, you dumb shit. Weren’t you just listening to me or are you stupid?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer the question. The truth was that there were no suitable answers to his questions. Instead, I silently nodded.
“Son, you only shoot CANS, do you understand? I don’t want you shooting anything but CANS with that gun. You got it? CANS. Mexi-CANS, Afri-CANS, Puerto Ri-CANS….”
He laughed hysterically, the top half of his face stitched into a frown. Like his questions, his laughter was not always something that had a suitable response.
“What about Ameri-cans, dad?”
“Hell, shoot them, too!”
He kept laughing and I just nodded. When he was finished he showed me how to load the rifle with BBs. Then he had me pump the rifle’s action. He stood behind me and positioned the BB gun in my hands. His hands were calloused and strong. They felt like they were carved out of rock.
“Look through the sight. What you see there is what you’re going to hit. You see a can?”
I saw the Budweiser logo.
“Yeah.”
“Pull the trigger.”
There was a soft pop and a loud metallic sound as the can fell off of the sawhorse.
“Now try it yourself.”
I did the same thing and shot the rest of the cans. He set them up again and I shot them all off without missing. I did the same thing countless times. He sneered in approval.
“OK, son.”
OK, son. It was the highest compliment had ever given me in my life. I felt like I finally had some standing. I was on the right track. All I needed to do from here on out is start drinking beer, lifting heavy weights, and kill a couple of Vietcong. We walked back to the house where Rita, his pregnant girlfriend, made us dinner.
I spent the rest of the weekend by the tool shed shooting down cans over and over again. The tool shed turned into Nam. The Budweiser cans had turned into communists, Mexicans, Africans, Americans. I shot them all, hardly ever missing. A bird flew down to a nearby tree. I shot it and killed it. The neighbors’ cat walked by and I shot it in the ass. It screeched and ran off. Other birds came and a few paid dearly. By the time the sun went down, I had run out of BBs. The cans were each reduced to a mesh of holes. There were three dead birds lying on the ground. When I went back to the house, dad was home from work. He had brought me two more containers of BBs.
The next day, he didn’t go to work and watched me shoot cans while he drank beer. He set up a television and watched the news. The correspondents repeated their stories over and over. Dad told me to watch my posture, to hold the rifle barrel up. It worked. I shot more accurately.
A news story about hippies was on the air. It was the fifteenth anniversary of Woodstock and clips of the concert were shown. A man in a fur vest was playing an acoustic guitar while his girlfriend, an amphetamine-thin blond in a tank top and headband sang in a shrill voice. They intrigued me. I imagined a time when, walking down the street, everyone looked and acted in such a way. Then I imagined my father and became confused. For as long as I could remember, he wore the same clothes.
“What are you looking at? Why you stop shooting?”
“Did you dress like that, dad?”
“Hell no. Back in the sixties, I beat up pissants like that. Then they sent me off to Nam.”
“How did you get the store?”
“Shit…you ask a lot of questions. When I came back from the war I finished up my business degree and graduated at the top of my class. I had offers from the best accounting firms in the country but your grandpa told me that I had to run this goddamn store. I said, ‘What if I don’t?’ and he said, ‘Then you’re not in the family anymore.’ I did what I had to do, son. I was a man about it and did what had to be done. I’ve been miserable at this goddamn store ever since. But that’s part of being a man – hard work. That’s something you need to learn.”
It felt like I had a good start by learning to shoot. I shot more cans and then we went out to a restaurant to eat dinner with his pregnant girlfriend. We went home and watched the Green Berets on television. It was inspiring. I wanted to be apart of what they were, a group of men fighting against pure evil.
The next morning, on Sunday, I woke up early and set up the cans. I loaded the rifle, pumped the action, and fired the second I saw a can in my sights. The BB ricocheted off of the top of the Budweiser can. I heard a loud ping and felt a sharp pain around my eye. This was it. I pictured my father. I didn’t listen to him and keep my mind on what I was shooting. My eyeball was gone forever and I would have to wear a patch. Dad was going to kill me: I was fucked, and it was my ass.
I walked back to the house. The BB hit me below my eye, next to my nose. It was bleeding but it seemed to have bounced off somehow. I went inside the house where dad was watching TV.
“What the hell happened to you?”
“The BB bounced off of…”
“GODDAMMIT! GET YOUR HEAD OUT OF YOUR ASS SON.”
He took my rifle from my hands and walked out of the room. I wasn’t sure what he was going to do. As tough as he was, he had never hit me before. He came back into the room.
“I DIDN’T GET YOU A FUCKING GUN SO YOU COULD PLAY GRABASS. I GOT YOU A GUN SO YOU COULD SHOOT CANS, YOU UNDERSTAND?”
He had me put a paper towel on the wound, the same treatment he used for his hand when he cut it on the meat saw. It would later turn into a permanent scar. I would never see the gun again. I would never hear any more compliments along the lines of, ‘OK, son’ from my father again, either. Instead, I retreated back into the world of pop music for the rest of the day, singing along bitterly to Casey Kasem’s Top 40.
After he took me home that night, my mother asked me what happened to my eye. I told her. Then I asked her about my dad, about how they met. He never went to Vietnam, she said. He was stationed in Korea during the war. He was a mailman for the military there. I asked about how he got the store, and she said that he wasn’t able to find a job because he never completed his degree, so my grandfather let him run the store.
“Is he really as tough as he seems?”
“Oh sure.“ she said, “He is. He’s the toughest man in his whole world.”
My father was a tough son of a bitch. When I would hear children …