My Father’s Keeper. Julie Gregory

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       Chapter Two

      Even though my father came of age in the Sixties, he was cut of a different cloth than the era. My dad never went to Woodstock. He didn’t protest the war. He did not wear leather vests or fringy things. Never in his life did he don sandals or moccasins, smoke pot or down a fifth of whiskey. And I don’t think my dad even knew what the term “tie-dye” meant. He was a lanky sprout of a kid with Alfred E. Newman ears that sprung out from the side of his head and a smirk that turned him into a west side slurpee the second he flashed it.

      He dropped out of school at the age of seventeen to register for Vietnam because he thought the uniform would get him girls. And when the officer that brought him on pitched an extra week of leave for every friend he signed up with him, he volunteered the names of his three best buddies, walked out of the recruiter’s office and promptly blew off boot camp to take his three promised weeks off. He was AWOL before he even began.

      My own mother had scarcely made it through the ninth grade when she was married off by her mother, my Grandma Madge, to a carny—what those who worked in the carnivals called themselves—in his fifties named Smokey. At the same time Dad was doing his two months overseas, Mom was travelling with the Grand Ole Opry, trick riding horses and being one half of a side-winding whip act, all in fringed leather. The original white showman’s jacket she wore before I was born hung in my trailer closet as a teenager, radiating the smell of decaying leather and mothballs.

      Mom and father, both from the west side of Columbus, existed thousands of miles apart until the trajectory of their lives careened them into one another with a violent crash. Within the span of a few months, my dad was flown back to the States from Vietnam and checked into his first government-issue psychiatric ward and Mom was a widow after walking in to find a cold, stiff Smokey propped up in bed. It was only later I’d hear the whispers that she’d been questioned about his death.

      When my dad came out of the mental hospital at age 20, he took the first job he could get at the gas station at Grant and Sullivan. Mom pulled in and less than a month shy of Smokey being cold in the ground had a real boyfriend lined up. Their first official date was on Valentine’s Day; they married in March. Six months later a baby was on the way. That baby was me.

      I guess looking back there were signs all along, ominous forewarnings that we would all end piled up at the bottom of that dead-end dirt road desperate and feral as a trapped cat. And the lynchpin of them all orbited around my father and the first singular memory I have of him just shy of turning four.

      I remember we lived on Cedarleaf Road in Ohio.

      I remember the picnic table in the backyard was a giant wooden spool for electrical wire which Dad had rolled home from the base where he worked.

      I remember getting parked on top of the refrigerator when Planet of the Apes came on, my father’s reason being I’d sit still straight through to the commercials if I was afraid of tipping off.

      And I remember looking out the living room window from behind heavy mustard-coloured curtains to see my father on his hands and knees in the gravel drive.

      He had come home early after being fired.

      He pushed a jack under the sedan, hiked his pants up by the loops and plastered a shock of greasy hair across his forehead. I watched his skinny arm pump as the car began to rise.

      When it was high enough to teeter, he got down in the gravel and shimmied up flat under the car, his fingers inching out to grasp the rusty frame. In slow motion, he began to rock; back and forth, back and forth, until his body slid out from under the chaises with each hoist of his arms; like a low, heavy chin-up.

      I was standing at the storm door by now, watching through the glass when Mom sauntered up behind me. Her arms grazed my hair as they folded into lockdown over her chest, the heat of bristle rolling off her. And it was then that I first felt the gulf between the rest of the world and my father, a chasm so dark and bottomless that even then I sensed it could swallow him whole.

      But in that moment I also knew that I would reach across and save him. I would be his bridge back. And in reaching for my father, I would not let him fall.

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