Chapter Four
Dad at the End
So, let’s talk about my dad. I’ll
begin with the end, because it’s what I remember the clearest. On July 8, 1980,
he put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. I was thirteen years old; my
sister was nine. He didn’t kill himself in our home, though I’m sure he would
have, given the opportunity. He was, as I mentioned earlier, in a shitty little
trailer. He was in a shitty little trailer because my mom had finally had
enough of his raging, and his lying, and his infidelity, and kicked him out.
She was actually in the process of divorcing him when, one summer night while
we were at home the phone rang and mom picked up and I could tell she was
talking to my dad. A few minutes later she screamed and ran out the door,
jumped in the car and drove off. I was used to being home alone with my sister,
so I just hung out in my room and listened to my Uncle Terry’s record
collection. Uncle Terry was my dad’s younger brother, and as there were zero
employment opportunities for a young man living in Crossett, Arkansas (unless
you wanted to work at the paper mill, which he emphatically did not), Terry had
come down to Texas to see what he could find. Brantleys have always had
terrifically horrible timing, and so he arrived just as my mom had kicked dad
out of the house and the family was breaking apart. As Dad had no room for
another human being in his shitty trailer, my mom had agreed to let Uncle Terry
stay with us – which I thought was awesome. My Uncle Terry had essentially
introduced me to rock ‘n roll while driving me around Crossett (he called it
“cruising”) in his Chevy Vega, replete with eight-track tape deck, and a
wickedly cool assortment of tapes ranging from Aerosmith to Bob Seger and the
Silver Bullet Band, to Credence Clearwater Revival to Boston, to Louisiana’s
LeRoux. I had a profound belief as a kid that my Uncle Terry was the coolest
dude on the planet.
Anyway, Terry was rooming with
me (we had bunk beds, baby!), and I had an all-access pass to his record
collection. And that’s what I was into when, about an hour or so later, one of
mom’s friends from work arrived at the front door. I think it was Ms. Kitty (I
swear that’s her real name). I was trying to explain to her that mom wasn’t
home while she was trying to explain to me that mom had called her and asked
her to come and stay with us, as she was going to be out late. This naturally
produced an interrogative from me (Why?),
which was met with what I later understood was a terrified silence. See, Kitty
already knew. She knew my dad was dead. She knew because my mom had called her
from my dad’s trailer where she and my Uncle Terry found him sprawled on his
bed with the back of his head mostly missing, and had told her to get over to
the house but to say nothing to me or my sister. Can you fucking imagine being
put in that position? I mean sure, I get it. The kids need watching, and that
kind of news has to come from family.
She couldn’t have just walked in and said, “Hey
kiddos. I’m sorry, but your dad just killed himself and your mom and uncle are
going to be with the police for the next several hours sorting things out. Who
wants to watch The Rockford Files?”
Little sister, Dad and self, taking the obligatory "bluebonnet pic" that is required by Texas law every Spring.
I just had to walk away from
the computer for nearly an hour. Thirty-five years and this shit is still hard.
I’m older than my dad was when he died. I have been on earth for more years
without him than with him. Plus, I’m finding it really hard to find anything
funny to say about this story. I’m worried that some readers are going to think
I tricked them into a really tragic, unutterably sad life story, like Angela’s Ashes without the witty Irish
banter. It’s been said that all comedy is born out of tragedy. I have my doubts
about that, simply because I’ve never been able to imagine farting in an
elevator as tragic. Maybe if the fart triggered a brain aneurism, okay, that’s
awful. That would suck. But then I immediately think about the guy delivering
the eulogy. How do you tell the story of your best friend’s death from a fart
in a crowded elevator, the pressure of which triggered an aneurism, without
laughing yourself insane? Maybe all comedy is
born of tragedy.
I’m getting sidetracked. We’re
at the part where Ms. Kitty has come to stay with us, and she knows the
terrible truth but my sister and me don’t yet. I remember asking a few more
questions that made Kitty even more uncomfortable, and I finally deduced that
something was going on with my dad. So I called him at his shitty trailer. It
was really late by now. The first time the phone rang and rang, so I hung up
and called again. This time somebody picks up and I hear a dude say, “Hello?”
“I’m looking for John Brantley.”
(Long pause.) “Yeah?”
“Who is this?”
“This is Detective (whatever the hell his name was) from the Conroe Police Department.”
“Um, okay. Is this the residence of John Brantley?”
(Longer pause.) “This is his former residence. Who is this?”
“This is his son. What do you mean by former…”
Click.
The fucker hung up on me. The motherfucking cop who was
investigating my dad’s death, who was, at that moment, poking around my dad’s
trailer and his meager earthly possessions, who was interviewing my mom
standing not five feet away, fucking hung up on me. When I called back nobody
picked up.
Later, when my mom finally
returned with Uncle Terry, both of them in tears, and I asked what was going
on, they told me my father was dead. And when I asked how this had happened,
they both leaned on a time-honored Brantley tradition when dealing with really
bad news: they lied their asses off. I was told my dad had died as a result of
an accidental discharge from the pistol he kept under his pillow. Now, I knew right off the bat this was a
big-ass lie. My father was not an educated man. He was denied certain
opportunities in life due to his father being a raging alcoholic asshole who
could keep a job but spent most of his wages on booze. My dad grew up poor, and
angry. He also grew up around guns. He knew how to handle them, and he
respected them. A respect for firearms was one of the pitifully few good things
he ever taught me. So when my mom looked at me and fed me that line about his
accidentally blowing his own head off, I smelled, but could not call, bullshit.
A day or two later I caught
her out. She was on the phone with a friend and I overheard her talking about
my dad having killed himself. When she looked up and saw me, I just stared her
down until she got off the phone. That was when she laid the truth on me, after
which I was to regret not believing the lie she tried to feed me. Believing the
lie would have made the next several years a little easier, maybe.
According to my mom, dad
called that night, July 8, while we were all at home. She said he sounded
drunk. She was getting a lot of angry, drunken calls from him ever since they
had separated. She was about to do what she usually did – hang up – when he
said something that brought her up short. According to Mom, what my dad said
was, “I want you to remember this sound
for the rest of your life.” She heard a sharp crack and, being a
farm-raised girl, knew a gunshot when she heard it. She said the last thing she
heard before she dropped the phone and ran out the door was a song coming
through the receiver, a country song by George Jones:
He Stopped Loving Her Today.
I’ve never doubted that
version of events. That kind of over-the-top melodramatic insanity was just the
kind of thing my dad was capable of. I’ve tried long and hard to think about
what would have to happen to me in my life to make me so vindictive as to blow
my own head off, knowing that it would completely fuck over the other person’s
life. Disassociated from reality as only the suicidal can be, still I believe my
father knew what he was doing. He knew my mother would carry the guilt of his
suicide around, and he knew she wouldn’t be able to handle it. And she
couldn’t. Right after the funeral she crawled inside a bottle, and she didn’t
come out of it until over twenty years later.
Whatever else he was – strong,
charismatic, mentally unbalanced – my father was, in the end, an asshole. I
don’t say that lightly. It’s not an easy thing to admit that your father was an
asshole, particularly in light of the old saying that the apple doesn’t fall
far from the asshole tree. I have tried really, really hard over the last
thirty-three years to recall one positive memory of my father. Something I
could point to and go See? My dad had his
faults, but when he did this thing here for me, that was a really positive,
awesome memory! Except I can’t. I’m serious. I’m not trying to garner
sympathy here, people. I would happily break laws if it meant I could pull up
even one happy father / son anecdote. How about that time he took you fishing? Yeah,
I remember. We were sitting on a dock at Lake Conroe, I’d had my line in the
water for seven hours (it wasn’t seven hours, it was probably seven minutes), I
got up to walk around, and the rod and reel I’d left sitting on the dock –
which belonged to a friend of Dad’s and who was letting me borrow it – suddenly
sprang to life, jumped in the lake and swam away. In the 21st
century we might call that a “teaching moment.” In 1979 he just screamed at me
until I started crying. Then he screamed at me for crying.
Well, how about that time in little league baseball when you actually
made a good play? You know, that terrific throw from right field all the way to
third base to cut down a runner who was trying to stretch a double into a
triple? Yeah, I remember. Dad wasn’t at that game. Okay, then. What about the time in judo class where you - as a white
belt – executed a perfectly timed throw of a larger, more experienced opponent
who was definitely not taking it easy on you? And your dad was right there, and
he saw the whole thing! Yeah, I remember. His exact words were, “We gotta
go.”
I’m not saying I have no good
childhood memories. I’m just saying that the ones I have don’t involve him. So,
just so you don’t walk away thinking I’m a total Debbie Downer, here are some
of my more cherished moments from childhood:
My first 45 single: it
was “Frankenstein” by the Edgar Winter Group, and I traded my Evel Knievel
action figure with Stunt Cycle to get
my hands on that tune. That was THE moment that music became an intimate and
integral part of my life.
My first French kiss: was
with Stacey P., and she was “going” with my best friend at the time, so I
suppose I should have been more conflicted about it. But the first time an
actual girl (and a pretty one, too) put her tongue in my mouth, time stood
still, the universe exploded in a kaleidoscope of colors I didn’t even know
existed, and every soft-rock ballad I’d ever heard in my life to that point was
playing in my head at the same time.
I would go so far as to say that my first French kiss was actually better than
my first sexual experience, which was way more funny than it was intimate.
Making out is still one of my favorite things in life.
Funyuns and CARtoons: when
our family first moved to Conroe, Texas, I was in elementary school. We moved
into an apartment that was called a townhouse simply because you had to walk
upstairs to get to the living room. That first weekend we went grocery
shopping, and I was allowed to pick out a snack, and something to read from the
magazine rack. For my snack I chose a bag of Funyuns. Not because I’d had them
before and enjoyed them as a snack, but because they had the word “Fun” in the
name and they vaguely resembled onion rings. I was perusing through my usual
choice in comic books (basically anything from the Marvel universe; DC Comics
were for pussies), when something altogether different caught my eye. It was
the front cover of a comic book I’d never heard of: a brilliant caricature of a
1972 Dodge Challenger, with its big block engine poking up sky-high out of the
hood, huge mag wheels in the back, cherry red with black rally stripes. And
sitting behind the wheel was this kind of ordinary guy, thin, with glasses. And
sitting beside him was this hot babe, and their muscle car was bearing down on
this muscle-bound dude who you just knew,
without even knowing the story of this picture, used to pick on the guy driving
the car. From that moment on I bought every single issue of CARtoons magazine until they folded in
1991. And I will still, on occasion, eat a bag of Funyuns. Though typically the
occasion is either a road trip, or when I’m drunk enough to think that eating a
bag of Funyuns at my age is actually a good idea.
Next Week, Chapter Five:My Life As A Dog (Part I)
No comments:
Post a Comment