Yes, Dad.

I wrote a version of this 13 years ago as my Dad was dying. I found and rewrote it today.

“I know I haven’t been the best father,” he says.  His voice cracks into a higher pitch as he says it, a perverse inversion of the process he must have gone through some 60 years ago as a teen.  “But it wasn’t all bad was it? We had some good times?” He reaches a bloated, soft hand to hold mine.

My eyes dampen as I smile at him, forced.

“I remember so much of your childhood.  I remember running you around the leaves in the wheelbarrow.  Or the time you were so sick we took you to the hospital.  I remember walking in the fields.”

I nod, because the moment’s not about me at all. “Of course Dad,” I say. “There were a lot of good times.”

There weren’t of course.  Which is why we both escaped.  Him into the bottle. Me into the nerd.

He’s here to continue a process he started about two years ago and which he will shortly conclude. The moment of his death — the rattling, morphine-soaked weeks of me sitting by his side playing guitar into the void — is still a ways off, but it echoes backwards in time. His death is fully in the room with us.

He’s in a process of saying goodbye.

As a 25 year veteran of Alcoholics Anonymous, he’s long been through the motions of apologizing to my sister and I for all the things he thinks he did wrong.  But with his health failing, he’s saying it differently this time, trying to rewrite the plotline of his life to be less tragic or even villainous, and more misunderstood beat-hero.

I said my goodbyes to him a long time ago.  At 15, really, when I walked out of the house in a blizzard with a backpack after one-too-many screaming matches and hiked 6 miles to a friends house. I never spent another night with him, and when he cleaned up, years later, he was already an old man. Sober, and thus a complete stranger.

“I remember when we moved into the house on the farm.  You were 3! You loved running around the yard so much, and we planted the garden together. You were such a good kid,” he imagines, reconstructing the narrative from savored fantasies of his role as a Father.

“Yes Dad,” I say. 

We moved into the house on the farm when I was 5 or 6. I was an early reader. I resented the move even that young. But the store in town sold comic books. 1973 was a year of Spirit reprints, Shazam, and Conan and Tarzan. I spent what little money I had on them, and shoplifted the ones I couldn’t afford. And I read them sitting on rocks in the woods, because he never bothered to stray that far from the kitchen where the bottle was.

“And then you met Paul, next door.  I remember him being around all the time.  It’s great you had such good friends around,” he says.

“Yes Dad,” I say.

Paul was indeed a great friend.  In reality, he was my only friend for much of my childhood, put together mostly by the convenience of being next door.  He came over to my house exactly once I can remember, because I was so ashamed of my aching house, my thread-bare family and my simple life. By comparison, Paul’s house was a paradise of enough food, enough money, and to my pre-teen mind, familial bliss. I had a spare bed in Paul’s room I slept in every night I could.

When I turned 10, two things happened that changed my life.  The first was Paul getting an Atari 2600.  The second was seeing Star Wars for the first time. From that point on, I was as nerd as nerd could be.

“So, I’ve got all this stuff I just don’t know what to do with.”  He pauses for breath. Then for words.  He has congestive heart failure and a dozen other issues that make it very hard for him to focus for more than a few minutes.  As I’ve reached the age where he began his own long decline, the echoes of his rasps and his groans and aphasia act like klaxon screams every morning. Get up. Move. Get outside. Stay sharp. Use your brain. Be kind to people.

Stay off the booze.

It hurts to see him struggling. I well up again.  “I have some great horns. I have one of your grandfather’s horns, he bought it when he was a kid.  It’s so good. I hate to sell it.”

“Yes, Dad. I’d love to take it.  I’m sure Peter will want it as he grows up.  He seems drawn to music,” I say.  We’ve been making these exchanges for the past two years.  He shows up with something “he’d hate to sell” and I dutifully put it in the basement. He walks away feeling like a patriarch, instead of the odd man he’s become, using my stable household as a museum for an imagined life.

“I remember you weren’t really much into music growing up,” he forgets.

It’s true that I never wanted to learn to play Jazz Trumpet, the vocation that led him inexorably to disappointment and malaise. But by the time I left the house, I had a record collection in the hundreds, and had spent my puberty building Heathkit audio gear in the basement with a soldering iron while he slept off his afternoon drunk each day after school. I played drums. I played guitar. I played piano. I played Gang of Four and Joy Division on his stereo.

I never really needed to worry about waking him up.

“I don’t suppose you want my computer or anything.  I can’t really type anymore.”  At this I start crying in earnest.  If there’s one thing I can trace through my bloodline it’s writing. My grandfather was a newspaperman, my father was an English teacher, and I, well, I guess I write too, even in a science fiction age where I don’t even know what being a writer means anymore. But it’s in the genes, and I am not without empathy for the loss.

“No dad, I’m pretty set on computers. Have been since before I left the house.”  He looks blankly at me. 

“Really? You had a computer back then?”

The first real money I ever had came from my grandmother in the form of a birthday check for an extravagant amount of money - $1,500 if I recall - in 1980.  And I knew there was only one thing I wanted in the world for that much money, an Apple. The Apple II Plus got me through the next 5 years of my life, well into college, when I moved “up” to an Atari ST. 

I want to reach back from 2024 to 2011 when he sat there, wheezing in the kitchen. I wish he could understand how my entire world exploded in 1980.  How armed with my Apple and my 1200 baud modem, I discovered, or perhaps invented myself. I learned how to hack the phone system to log in to bulletin boards all the way across the country in California, where people played games, shared software, and posted grainy pictures of naked women.

I want to tell him about the first time I read the Lord of the Rings, and how much more that meant to me than any book he ever had in his alcohol fumed office. 

I want to tell him about the first time I kissed a girl, late at night on New Years Eve, after we’d played an epic evening of Atari in Paul’s attic.

I want to tell him that the only time I was ever grateful he was my Dad was when he would drop me off at the arcade with a $5 bill and leave me the hell alone.

I want to tell him all the true things.

But instead, I just say “I love you dad.”

It was true, in the sense that the zero-point energy field which grounds reality is probably more like Love than Newtonian physics. But mostly it was compassion without delay.

It is what he needed to hear.