Song of a Misspent Youth

My old man, kook that he was, warned me never to tell a woman how much money I made or where I lived or what I did for a living. Of course, he had married five times.

He spent a lifetime on the run and because he didn't trust banks, the fields between here and the Missouri River all the way to Chicago are filled with mason jars stuffed with money and secretly buried. So secret that the hills never gave them up and he died before he could go back and dig them up, and since he never told me about it - I'd heard it from my Uncle Jerry, his younger brother - my inheritance shared the secret with the nematodes unless some lucky farmer dug up a jar or two during spring planting.

Anyway, my old man was real far out like that, completely irrational and dangerous to everyone around him. Once, when he worked at a wire rope plant, he willfully crossed the line and parked himself inside the garage of the foreman's wife.

It didn't take long for him to be discovered, since the foreman lived right across the street and his wife usually left the windows open for everybody to hear. All I know is that I had to go to the hospital and see him and he couldn't even see me since both eyes were swollen shut nor could he wave since all ten fingers were broken.

Again, years later, my Uncle Jerry later told me that my old man had stepped into an elevator and two beefy yard dogs followed him in. When the doors opened, the two guys walked out. My old man didn't.He was nutzo like that, living fast and hard like a roller coaster car sailing off the tracks and into the blue black of night and a helluva scream all the way down to the pavement below. We lived in a state of permanent disaster.

One minute he'd pull up in a gleaming white Chevrolet Impala convertable that was so new it hurt your eyes to look at the windows they reflected the sun so much. In the next minute, the repo men would be hauling our sofa and dining room table right out the front door.

He was famous in town as an all-night craps shooter, and infamous in our family for pawning his mother's TV whenever he was flat broke and needed a stake. Poor Grandma Cholee, she'd cry on Sundays because she knew she'd be missing Ed Sullivan, even though she couldn't understand a lick of English. I remember sitting in the backseat, the car door would abruptly open and a TV flung towards me and I'd have to move just in time to avoid being flattened.

And she would be chasing him around the side of the car, wagging her finger, a short, pear of a woman half his size yet he would be fleeing as fast as he could. Then my old man would come through and always bring her back a better TV, sometimes they'd be color sets.Delirious in victory, he'd take us out for orgies of chilidogs and chocolate malts, his two favorites.

In times of despair, he was worse than George Washington in his public weeping. He blamed everything on the fact that he was Mexican-American and couldn't get a fair shake ever.He'd been a cop (actually a bailiff), a fireman (shooting craps upstairs while the crew jammed into the firetruck to put out a fire), a soda jerk, a yard dog, an insurance salesman, a sergeant first class in the army, a part-time teacher, a restaurant manager, a grain elevator inspector, and a kidnapper (his fourth wife who tried to leave him).By the time I'd grown up, his looks had faded, his weight ballooned and his hair was salt and pepper and thinning.

When I was just a kid, he was as lean as Gary Cooper and strong enough to pick me up with just one hand. He used to order me to punch him in his stomach as hard as I could. It always hurt my hand. He could be a mean prick with a belt, whipping my ass in a frenzy and not knowing when to stop even when I was bleeding. He constantly smoked and liked to drink his friends under the table.

One time he took me and my brother to see the 101 Dalmations, the cartoon, and left us there all day. We watched the entire movie seven times in a row, a record for us. He'd gone to the tavern next door and promptly forgot about us. My mom had to pick us up. When he finally came home later that night, she yelled at him so much that he immediately turned around and ran out the door, dodging the plates.

He didn't come home for two days after that. When he did, he had a dozen roses in his hands and he gave me and my brother a dollar each to beat it and go down to the Dairy Queen for a while. Being seven and six years old, we didn't know what change was and that he expected some back. It was one of those blood on your ass beatings when we came home, our tummies sick with dilly bars and Mr. Misties. Ever since then, it's been hard to feel good eating ice cream.

One time he promised he'd take us fishing. We got up at four in the morning and drove all over town. First he went to his ex-wife Dianne's house, and told us to stay in the car. Two hours later we went over to his friend's house, Steve Annigan, the guy who owned a garage and whose wife always made us drink milk when she babysat us, which we hated since we were soda pop drinkers. Finally, we drove around the city twice, stopping so he could get cigarettes and make phone calls. We never made it to Rochester Falls.

Instead, he drove us to Der Wienerschnitzal. We had chili dogs and chocolate malts. I never did learn to fish and to this day, when asked to go, I always decline.He died in 1993 in a freak accident. His car battery kept dying and it turned out there was a short in the overhead interior light that was draining all the juice. He didn't know that.

After changing the battery three times, he bought a juicer and was charging up the final battery inside his garage. It was August and one of the worst summers in the history of Missouri, with old people keeling over in their homes if they didn't have air conditioning.

He just closed the garage while the battery was charging so as not to let the cool air out. He'd had about three beers by then, even though he was diabetic and wasn't supposed to drink as the doctor had warned him. But tell that to a guy who owns a liquor store. So he goes upstairs to take a leak. Or maybe he's sitting on the John reading a sports magazine. Anyway, the exhaust from the car filled the house fairly quickly, and fat-headed, he fell and hit his head on the toilet bowl stem. That's how his wife found him.

All that because of a broken car light.

They buried him on August 16, the anniversary of Elvis' death, his hero.Anyway, his death, bizarre as it was, is not what I want to tell you about. What's remarkable is the way he lived and all the crap he got away with. My old man could be a real shit, but in his prime he was tall and good-looking and fast-talking and always drove a shiny car and he was the biggest polluter of women in three counties. Yeah, him and Elvis, fat-headed to the end.