The Visit

"The Visit"

I remember the first time you told me you loved me, but I don’t know why.

It was such a normal, average day - extraordinary in no way except your presence. One of those rare times when you made time for us, although you really only came around because you were low on money, company or maybe just self-esteem.

I watched you swagger up the sidewalk to our tiny apartment, clumsily dodging the boxes lining the walk beneath the window, each bursting with the trinkets of our meager existence. It was moving day again, but how would you know that?

What I mistook for a manly swagger that day I now know was actually an off-kilter stumbling gait, the remnants of too much alcohol and too little sleep. Too much you and not enough us.

You didn’t even glance at the cardboard carriers of our impoverished life, perhaps because none of the contents were yours. You stumbled by me, mussing my curly red hair with your shaking fingers, smiling lazily in my general direction and the euphoria came rushing over me in a sweet, hot, delicious wave.

My lead heart pounded fiercely in my malnourished chest, banging against my ribs as if it would spring forth and leap into your arms just as I wanted to. That's all I ever wanted from you...recognition and love, but they were both impossible for you to pull off.

But there, in that blissful moment in time, emotion overwhelmed my quivering insides like morning swamp fog engulfed the bayou, an agonizing blend of excitement and disappointment. That's what your visits always brought. They were the realization of a blurry dream in which I could hold one sliver of your attention, garner one nanosecond of adoration from you. You know, the one where you are holding my tiny hand in yours and walking with me through a sea of daisies. Cliche, yes, but it was all I ever wanted from you. I still smile when I think about it.

Instead, your arrival that day was but another awkward moment in time for both of us, too soon becoming a reality that reeked of day-old British Sterling, cigarettes and cheap booze. Together, they were the sum of you and individually they make me queasy to this day. That uneasy, yet somehow thrilling blend of “I can’t live without it” and “Get it away from me before I vomit.”

You were in rare form indeed that day, sweetly smiling as you tripped over your own bare feet in front of the whispering nosy neighbors. They were always told you were an operative with the CIA to explain away your constant absence. I would have told them nothing, but they were the strangers I clung to as friends and family in each of the half dozen or so homes we moved in and out of each year. The ones I bragged to about your ability to do the New York Times crossword puzzle in ink within minutes, roll three Yahtzees in a row and chase aspirin with raw sausage and whiskey. You were like a inebriated Superman to me, constantly dodging bullets, forever flying somewhere over us and never letting your feet really touch the ground.

You were so drunk that day you didn't even blink, girlfriend at your side, before flirting with the manager's wife as she flitted by to watch us for a few hours so Mom could work. She almost tripped right over me as she returned your gaze.

I don’t know if Mom knew you were coming, but I was glad I saw you first. If she'd seen you first, perhaps she would have ordered you away again, convinced that we were better for a lack of you. But I wanted you to stay. I clung to you with the grip of a giant, assuming that if you could not ignore me, maybe you would realize that you loved me and stay.

When Mom did see you, she smiled, but I'm sure it was out of habit. Then again, perhaps she was just as grateful for your brief attention as the three kids you left in your wake.

We were all intoxicated by your presence and you were just intoxicated.

She kissed you too long, melting in your embrace once more, just as she did each time, as your bar room accomplice glared at her from across the room. The lingering left just enough time for Mom to walk to her third job at Joe's Bar.
It was just as well. That way she didn't have time to listen to your lies, meet your tawdry under-aged new distraction or soak up just how much you'd changed.

You looked even more sickly than the last time you'd graced us with your disheveled presence; your faded, torn jeans showing as much wear as your rugged, weathered face. You were once so tan and lively, but looked so pale and gaunt in the hazy gray of a day without sun.

I must admit you were somehow still inarguably handsome, even as the dignity leaked from you onto the broken sidewalk. We should have abandoned you as easily as you always did us, but you intrigued us, taunting us with your sunshine, then assaulting us with your darkness.

Your obvious flaws fell away like feathers in the wind the second you cupped my tiny, gaunt face in your rough hands, hands so yellowed from years of smoking they looked like they were stained with mustard. Your listless, glassy eyes poured into mine as you said those three lovely words, the world transforming from a deserted wasteland of misery into a sweet technicolor wisp of fantasy:

"I love you."

I needed to hear it everyday, but this time would have to suffice for three more years.

As the raindrops fell into your already messy bluish black hair, curls slipping loose from their pomade prison, your sky blue eyes drank me in for the first time in five years. I feigned happiness for you, entertaining you with rapid fire descriptions of my excellent grades and general contentment. It was part lie and part smokescreen thrown up because I was too terrified that you would recoil and withdraw at the hint of any drama or trauma. I was ten, but thanks to you, already owned the soul of someone who had lived too many years on borrowed time.

An “old soul,” friends and professors would later call me, one with far too much baggage for its age, far too many lies still dangling carelessly from tiny lips. A mean average of one too many nights spent wondering where it all went and where it would all go; where I ended and where you began.

It laid the groundwork for years of puzzling depression and anxiety; crippling sadness and self-loathing oozing from me like blood from an open wound. Ready and willing to court disaster, so ready to leap in feet first, my salt became any and every random, aimless comment I was convinced was about me.

Laughing in the hallway when I walked by: "I'm ugly."

Giggling in the girl's bathroom between classes: "I'm stupid."

No amount of straight A's, beauty pageant tiaras, rich boyfriends, scholastic awards or dirty money seemed to soften the sting of your absence and everyone seemed to know. 'Maybe if I accomplished THIS, he will come back' became my secret mantra.

I kept it pushed so far down, keeping company with every other emotion you burdened me with. But you know what? Though you took so much and gave so little to those of us who worshipped you always surprised me and it never, ever lessened your impact.

For a while, terrified of becoming you and at the same time doing so with little or no effort, I could find other ways to feed the monster that rumbled inside me. I found it so easy to figure out the hiding places of my best friend's dad's stash and where more than a few neighbors kept their hidden hauls of alcohol.

I learned to carry a big purse and would weigh it down with the tiny bottles one neighborhood flight attendant brought home before running home to lock myself in the bathroom with them.

I would save the quarters my mom's male friends often offered me to do cartwheels and backbends in front of them to buy "drugs" from kids at school, only to find out that I'd overpaid for baby aspirin.

When my drinking and drug use didn't get me the attention I so needed, I found other vices.

Men made such easily manipulated band-aids to the pain. They saw the vulnerability you wrought, happy to think they were the ones taking advantage and yet somehow surprised when they were tossed aside a short time later. Old, young, married, single, rich, poor, kind, cruel - they all somehow reminded me of you. But, ultimately my playthings, like your conquests, were little more than bubblegum when I was craving steak.

Were you damaged before you were even born or did that come later, an ebony shadow relentlessly chasing you down until your brilliant life lay wasted in pieces, shattered against the walls you constructed for yourself after years of self-involved enlightenment? Never have I both hated and loved someone so much and mixed it altogether in some sort of cosmopolitan, socially acceptable cocktail I would later regurgitate for a string of therapists who shook their heads a little too much.

“Were any of your dreams about your father of a sexual nature?”

“Have you ever tried to kill yourself?”

“Would you say the earth orbits the sun or the sun orbits the earth and for how long?”

Questions they already knew the answers to. Such useless, inane questions for such a useless, inane life.

Had that life been someone else’s instead of mine, I would have wished it snuffed out long ago for its own good. But, because I had as much pride as you coursing through my blue-collar veins until I bled ink, I could not let it, or myself - or you for that matter - go.

Not that I didn’t try.

With every year came another reason to hate the fragile box that seemed to entrap me in a childhood doomed to fail. You may have been the convict of your lack of conviction, but we were the ones who did the time.

As the oldest and therefore the most experienced at your self-absorption, I was a show, an oddity with her insides on the outside, brazen and open for everyone to see in my transparent cube.

They would gather to watch me, feeling sorry for me, but somehow still transfixed by my determination to extract myself from the gloomy confines of my daily existence. I was a spider in the toilet. A gory car accident on a lonely stretch of highway. All who witnessed or fell victim to my debauchery or charm could not face me and yet they could not turn away.

And I gave them quite a show.

The irony was that the deeper my sadness reached, the glossier my exterior shown. When I was truly suicidal, the rest of the world thought I was downright giddy. Denial and optimism were my brethren on those horrid days, as essential to my survival as breathing.

Locked inside, my angst was both a cloak of disgust I wore dismally and a badge of honor I would have gladly given up had it not been my saving grace so many of those lonely, seemingly endless nights. Nights when I destroyed my room searching frantically through my sparse belongings for something that smelled like you, that reminded me of you in any way. I was convinced that if I lost all material ties to you that you would disappear for good, mere ashes in my hand amidst a blinding hurricane.

The piece of Chilean money you'd won in poker. The WWII lapel pin you stole from a former boss. The dented tin you once kept your loose tobacco in. A paper bag you'd tossed out the last time you were here that once held your cash. As long as I had some pathetic token of your life in my posession, perhaps you would return to retrieve it – and us. Sometimes it was nothing more than one of your used rolling papers stained with tobacco dust, a piece of pulp you had discarded as you'd discarded us. It was stained as I was, both codependent and willing to once again be used at the same time.

It's true that you consistently let me down, but I still craved more of you.

I can still feel the uneasy blend of loneliness and claustrophobia on a couch shared with two toddlers in our tiny trailer, which was a vast improvement over one shared with you and any of the tattered girls you brought home to entertain yourself.

Those poor lost and bewildered girls that looked like those big-eyed children paintings you always thought were so "edgy." Pregnant, homeless, addicted to everything, but you in particular. They’d take whatever you would so graciously dole out to them, just as we would. But every sliver you gave away left less and less for us to hold onto.

Often, I would meet them only when they were in bed beside the two of us. I don’t know why you didn’t move me before beginning your nightly seduction or why my presence at that time – in that place – meant so much when at any other time and place it seemed to mean so little. I was such a light sleeper, every creak and moan forcing my tiny lids open long before those of mom’s, but maybe that was the point.

You wanted to open my eyes to who you were and what you were all about when all I did was worship you, defend you, love you. Or maybe you were just too drunk and turned on to care.

Was the record player really on that night or was that just my way of forcing Mom to come to accept what I had grown so accustomed to? Weightless, I slid my skinny legs off the bouncing bed onto the floor, finally moving to my hands and knees so that you would not see me leaving.

I tried to awaken Mom by telling her the record player was on and it was keeping me awake, but she just groaned, rolled over and went back to sleep. Was she so blissful in her ignorance? Or perhaps she was just too fatigued from cleaning hotel rooms for three days straight to acknowledge me acknowledging you.

I wish she had stopped you.

I wanted you to feel as apologetic and remorseful as I felt over something as simple as spilling cocoa on the rug. I wanted her to scream at both of you, to shout at you and throw things at you, beating you up instead of herself for a change, but she didn't. She never would.

“I will change, please forgive me,” I heard you say in my head, though the words apparently got snagged on your forked tongue because they never came out. Besides, even if you had said the words, it wasn't as if you weren't accustomed to making promises you couldn't keep.

When you left before dawn the next morning, one hand clinging to your pregnant, stumbling diversion and the other grasping frantically at the front of your Levis, you took more than just my heart with you – you took my innocence and faith in the world. And still I loved you.

I chased you for years to come, writing letters that went unanswered only to find out later that Mom stored them in a shoebox under her bed because she didn't know where to send them.

You would pop up here and there, insisting that you could watch your own children long enough to go to the beach and then leave us abandoned on an isolated stretch of sand to be with one of your girlfriends. I didn't even blame you, to be honest, because I knew you were too drunk to remember you even had kids that day, much less where you'd left them. Mom rode her ten speed thirty miles in stifling July heat to rescue us from the Sheriff's office.

One time Mom called the cops because there was a trashy white van parked across the street from our house for several days only to find out that it was you and a guy you'd met in jail a week earlier seven states away. God I hated her for that. After all, you'd camped out for three days straight forgoing food and women just to say Happy Birthday to me, only to almost be hauled off in handcuffs as a homeless deviant.

When I did manage to track you down, our time together was more about me using my meager earnings as a fast food worker to fund your bail and drinking than spending quality time together. But at least I had you all to myself.

Ah, those precious moments spent picking your gorgeous wavy locks out of the pool of vomit you'd passed out in. I'd bruise my back and arms so much trying to lift and carry you into the tub everyone in the locker room at school thought I was being beaten, but you hadn't bathed in days.

As disturbing as that daily ritual was to me, it beat the hell out of the things I had to do when I wasn't able to keep an eye on you. Like sewing the gaping wet slit in your upper thigh you got in a bar swordfight over someone's wife. It reminded me of the Sunday school story I'd heard years ago about Moses parting the Red Sea, so I asked God to help me, summed up all the courage I could muster and used your lighter to sterlize the needle. I tried to stop the bleeding by myself, but my hands were too small to make much of a difference. Thank God they were big enough to call an ambulance for you before mom and her boyfriend were awakened in the next room. Sure, you won the girl, who felt so sorry for you that she could not leave your side, but you ultimately lost, you always ultimately lost.

And so did I.

I would be on my best behavior for you as I would for no one else and seek your approval even in your absence. You inadvertently helped me achieve many great things in my life, but only because I thought each momentous event would become a bonding moment for us. I could rollerskate, ride a bike, win a speech contest, nab a trophy for this or a certificate for that, but ultimately, making you love me seemed to be the one thing in my life I could not accomplish.

Will your reckless essence ever leave me? Even now, as I stand staring blankly at your tombstone, I can still feel your presence in my life as sharply as I can the day I learned it had ended. April Fool’s Day, 1986.

I had brought food to your desolate campsite the day before and honked furiously because you weren’t there to pick it up and I was going to be late for work. You were there because you'd lost yet another job and yet another apartment and all I cared about was salad bar duty.

The guilt of that day still haunts me.

The sting of shock I felt when the sheriff's deputy walked in on that unseasonably cold spring day left me reeling in the center of a spinning restaurant. It is as palpable now as it was more than two decades ago.

As my teens ended, I thought I could finally say goodbye to you, move forward, seek a man who was your polar opposite and would adore me. Instead, I ended up spending more than a decade with a man I thought I knew only to be abandoned by him as well and left to raise our children alone, just as my mother had.

Surprisingly, you didn't hold the patent on weakness of character.

If I concentrate hard enough, I can remember the jagged lines of your face with that little crooked scar on your cheek made by a broken beer bottle. That coarse gray, white and black peppered beard that made you look much older than you were, but somehow still wise and all knowing.

Sometimes, when I knew nothing save a nuclear war could awaken you, I would trace those delicate lines as I gently pushed the washcloth across your face and hair, sopping up your perspiration.

I remember the sandpaper-like surface of your skin as if I touched it five seconds ago, but I do not remember your last words to me. They may have been "I love you." I hope they were, but I doubt it.

You were never there for me, no matter how many times you said you wanted to be or that you would be if you thought for one moment that your presence would be a good one in our lives. You always said you'd find a job and settle down so you could make us all proud, but that idea, like most of your other promises, never came to fruition.

I have always grappled with the thought of becoming a retrospective incarnation of you every single day of my life, bound and determined to have better, to BE better, but I’m not sure I am or will ever be.

I can tell you that despite the uninspiring example you provided, having children of my own has made the world a place worth living in. You'd have loved them and they would have loved you, but I could have never left them alone with you. I would no doubt become the one threatening to call the police or hiking miles in the snow to pick them up when you passed out.

Perhaps it's better that you're not here to meet them.

Despite all the things you took away, you did help instill in me a sense of desire and passion for a better life that I don't think you ever so much as glimpsed. I fight and struggle and stand tall in the face of anything thrown at me, defiantly refusing to back down until my kids have what they need. I have to thank you at least for that.

I've found parenthood is not about avoiding or crumbling under the hardships, it's about showing your kids how to cope with the ugliness in this world and in us all until they can conquer their fears and trials on their own. In fact, whatever warrior spirit I have remaining is there for my children alone, for I am always too stubborn or stupid to cry Uncle.


You'd probably call me boring, but I no longer party with people just like you. Most nights, we sit at home and eat homemade meals at the table together, one of the many benefits of self employment. We watch movies together or play games and talk about our hopes and dreams. You had your share of them, for sure, but we are willing to do the work to make them happen in real time.

It's true that in my darkest hours, I am stricken hard by the desire to "take the edge off" life with a drink or two or call up a partying friend to go clubbing. In the end, though, I am able to sum up discipline you never had by running into my children's rooms and watching them sleep until I am whole again. Yes, I'm afraid of becoming you - even of them becoming the grandfather they never knew - but cannot for one fleeting second imagine being without them. How did you take our existence so casually?

"She was strong and she loved with every fiber of her being," I want my tombstone to read.

So different from the one I would have written for you...

"Here lies a life unlived, flawed and never boring. His potential was great and untapped, but still we love him."

Now in my thirties, just when it seems I can finally let go of my dashed expectations of you, I can feel your spirit loom over me when it seems every ounce of strength, of that independent kindred spirit you claimed we shared, seems to have been wrung out of me.

But by sheer will, I refuse to break and for that, too, I thank you.

You lie at my feet now, broken and battered, the victim of one too many bar scuffles, packs of Camels and shots of vodka. That sense of entitlement and pain no longer smeared all over your face like one of your whores’ red drugstore lipstick – cheap and meaningless in my world, but everything in yours.

The look that has replaced it more closely resembles peace than anything you probably ever knew during life.

Do you have to look up or look down to see me now and watch the grandchildren you never met grow up without you? Did you finally find your heaven among your 40 years of hellish existence? Do you regret anything? Everything? Nothing at all?

I still feel that steel blue gaze, usually surrounded by the telltale crimson ring of insomnia and alcohol, watching me wherever I am. Those blurry circles that were once so electric to me now snuffed out like one of your half-smoked, hand-rolled cigarettes.

The rapier wit, fierce intelligence and blinding charisma that made you so easily digestible is gone now, reduced to dust in a body that finally gave up years after you did.

If I were to stab my bare hands into the earth containing your grave, nails clawing mounds of damp Louisiana bayou dirt frantically, would I find closure?

Or would I continue to have dreams in which you come to me so soft and comforting in the night to help me with homework? Or the one in which you call me on the phone, beckoning me into your grave? Despite it all, I often follow you. Those visions seem so real that I awaken horrified, sweating, gripping the phone in my hand, looking around for a trace of you, just as I did as a child. Part of me actually still expects the ringing phone to have your voice on the other end. After all this time, I still expect you to waltz back into my life at any time, in any place, just as you’ve done a thousand times before.  Even after all that you have done to us and all that you have not done for us, I'd give almost anything to have that happen.

Of course, when I envision you alive now, I am involuntarily overcome with that blend of apprehension and excitement, anticipation and disgust that you always seemed to nonchalantly shrug off and yet I need it.

If time truly does heal all wounds, then perhaps enough years have not washed beneath the bridge. Perhaps there are still far too many spaces to fill in, experiences to live for, intersections to traverse.

Do you still have that rhinestone bracelet I placed in your suit pocket right before I kissed your cold, hard cheek in that beige satin lined casket? Beige. As if you could ever be represented by beige. I almost dropped it when I noticed the black shiny thread used to sew your mouth shut and the caked on makeup the funeral home had used that turned your skin a grayish blue.

Your response to my last kiss was almost as emotionless as it always was, distant and cold; but at least this time, you couldn’t get away.

Did you carry any other piece of me with you to the grave? How about your other two children? They weren't allowed to make the two day trek to see you lowered into the earth, but it really didn't matter. Though they weren't even teens yet, they'd grown up so used to doing without you that the trip would have just seemed pointless and grueling. I spent two hours on the phone that night trying to convince them to care, detailing my start at the sudden pop of the guns when the soldiers saluted you and how carefully they folded the flag into a triangle for me.

I had forgotten you'd gone to Vietnam. I had forgotten you were once brave. It was not a color I was accustomed to seeing you wear.

I think you'd be happy to know you still haunt us, that we rarely let a moment go by without your ghost on our heels. Ironically, the impact of your life on us is felt now more than ever. We all still wrestle with relationships, leaving before anyone can hurt us just as you taught us to. We still grapple with the sharp stab of our fear of abandonment and the self-destructive demons that seem to lurk beneath our collective skin.

Maybe you left us with more than you thought. Call it an indisolvable stain that cannot be washed away or a dirty gift hidden deep inside, but we'll take it.

I don't know about them, but I for one do pray that I can eventually let you go. That I can at least learn to open myself up to people and possibilities that you could never absorb. That before I close my eyes for the last time on this earth and hopefully meet you again, I will understand you.

I know that I will tell my children I love them before I fall into my own grave. I’ll tell them for me and I’ll tell them for you, even if they will not understand for years to come.

And what kids they are. You sincerely would have loved them. They may have even helped you recapture fleeting emotions like love, pride and honor you once held so firmly in your grasp.

I see tiny shards of you in them, no doubt accidentally passed along from my own blood. My son is quietly brooding like you and even looks like both of us, the characteristic trusting blue eyes and sharp Widow's Peak marking another generation. But, unlike you, he is a happy, loving child and though he is stricken with autism, a neurological flaw that oddly mimics your behavior, he is not defined by it.

Your granddaughter, on the other hand, is more like me and Mom. She thrives in the spotlight, could talk the white off rice and craves approval. If I ever meant anything to you, then there aren't enough words to describe what she would mean to you. She shows few signs of even being from the same blood as you, save perhaps rare quiet calm, but has the kind heart, compassion and intelligence that you always swore you gave me all by yourself.

They're both beautiful people in an often hideous world, but unlike you, they do not rely solely upon their good looks and charm to thrive. I am teaching them to master everything that comes their way the best I can. It's so hard not to buckle under the strain of struggling to keep your influence locked in that closet I tell no one about, but every day that they are alive they make me live again.

Living is great, you should have tried it.

I am breathless at all the hope and wonder that they've filled me with, consistently filling the holes in the putrid swiss cheese that was once my heart. I think I can thank you for that as well, for without your indifference, I would never understand the impact of unconditional love and respect.

God I hope your own children gave you something as positive and wonderful in your life. I hope we made you know love and all the flaws that it overlooks and forgives.

You were our nothing and our everything.

And still we love you.