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(Step)Father Visiting · Oct 6, 09:48 PM
I’ve been edgy & out of it all day. Probably because my father is coming for a short visit tomorrow. I had my TA take my Intro Creative Writing Workshop, so I didn’t have to go to the office. I had intended to get a lot done around the house & to post a bunch of things to my class websites, but mostly I farted around & didn’t accomplish anything. I haven’t even felt like listening to music.
My father, Lou Duemer, who I’ll pick up at the airport tomorrow, is not my “real” (as in biological) father. I never knew that man & my mother, dead these twenty years, never spoke of him. She married Lou Duemer when I was five years old & he adopted me, changing my name from Rains to Duemer. Somewhere in San Diego there is a microfilm copy of the adoption papers with my childish signature Joey on it.
We were a family built on silence. My mother was clearly frightened by the life she led after leaving the family truck farm in Imperial Valley just before the Second World War. I actually like to think of her as having a great time—smoking & drinking & reading poetry. I still have her copy of the Oxford Book of English Verse annotated with check marks & the names of friends beside poems, presumably, that made her think of them. I also have an early memory—an infant’s memory—of lying on my mother’s lap looking up at her taking a long drag on a cigarette & then tipping her can of Hamm’s beer down so I could take a swig. I remember the happy babble of voices. The Land of Sky Blue Waters.
That was the happiest moment of my life. I was filled with satisfaction & contentment. I think my father may have been in the room & I have an infant’s memory of the room: an archway filled with light to my right as I lay in my mother’s lap, darkness & the doorway to the outside to my left. My real father, the one named Rains. Yes, I could go get the records, but what would the records tell me?
And then my mother seems to have lost her nerve. She retreated into the hard Protestantism of her own upbringing. Lou Duemer, too, was apparently recovering from a failed first marriage. (I can identify—I married young & unsuccessfully.) I don’t know how they met. Probably at the Otay Baptist Church, where they were married a little later. I told you we were (& are) a family of silences.
My earliest memory of Lou Duemer is going down from my mother’s apartment with him to get ice cream at the corner store. “Let’s race!” I say. “All Right,” he says, & takes off, the six foot tall man running at full speed away from the five-year-old boy. He waited for me at the corner. “I win,” he said. When I was thirteen, up early to do my paper route, he was helping me fold the Sunday edition—something my mom usually did—& though I cannot remember the actual details of the argument, I remember assaulting him with my flashlight: the hundred pound boy running in rage against the six-foot-two ex-Marine. He swatted me away & then my mother intervened. Throughout my childhood he wielded a relentless Christian Fundamentalism against joy, creativity & self-expression in our household. My mother & I shared a love of poetry that enraged him. He taught Sunday School & preferred the company of unimaginative boys, who universally thought of him as a jolly good fellow.
When I left for college I left all that behind. My father contributed nothing but his poverty to my education—his unemployment qualified me for financial aid when I was a freshman at the UW. I have been on my own ever since.
He is old now & increasingly infirm. He lives on Social Security, boarding with the minister of his church, who is I can assure you without a shred of irony a saintly man. He has a part-time job as a security guard at a Wal-Mart: he rides around in a golf cart with a walkie-talkie & reports anything suspicious. I do not contribute any money toward his expenses.
My wife cannot understand why he wants to perpetuate the relationship when I would have gladly let it go when my mother died. I tell her that he is attempting to redeem himself by constructing a story of a normal family life. We never, ever used the term “step-father,” in my family, though it had to be obvious to everyone that the blond slip of a boy could not be the son of the tall dark-haired man. A family of silences.
My (step)father is engaged, understandably, I suppose, in the creation of a retrospective narrative of ordinary family life; but the distance between this fantasy & reality prevents me from doing anything more than playing along from a great distance. We only see each other every couple of years, but even these brief encounters drive me crazy. I would be much happier if we could just forget about each other, but I find myself a character in a story that runs contrary to the truth of my life. I collaborate in a fantasy, but the collaboration seems more just than forcing reality on an old man.
I take no moral comfort from this puppet show.
* * *
happy trails
— steve 10/06/2004 10:42 PM #
(I’m dying to add something clever here, but, I… man, was that fine.)
— gail 10/08/2004 01:14 PM #
— Artichoke Heart 10/11/2004 03:21 PM #