It was an early spring evening. I like those nights when the clocks have been set ahead an hour and the sun doesn’t go down until seven or so. It was my third night parked out there, indiscreetly I thought, just watching the building. It wasn’t much. Just an old store front that was now decades past its retail prime, living a new twenty-first-century life as a place for the indigent.
I got a sudden twinge of familiarity. I was on a stakeout again. It had been over twenty years since I last did this. That time was during my sophomore year in college. I got a part-time job as a Pinkerton Investigator, working out of the San Francisco office—the same office the great Dashiell Hammett had worked in while scribbling his potboilers for detective magazines like Black Mask. I only lasted the summer as a sleuth, but what I’d learned was coming in handy today. Park on a sidestreet where you can see your target. Make sure you’re in a nondescript vehicle. Don’t do anything to draw attention to yourself. Be as inconspicuous as possible.
I sat there in the Miata. It was no different from the millions of other Miatas on the road, save for its history as an instrument of attempted suicide. I sat and I read the paper and made cell phone calls. There had been two fruitless nights so far. Maybe this one would be a bust as well. Maybe, even if I achieved my objective, it would still be a bust. I didn’t even know what I was doing there. What the hell did I expect to accomplish? My wife certainly didn’t think it was a good idea, so I hadn’t told her how I was spending my evenings. Only that I was going out to run some errands. Sitting there alone those evenings, I spent a lot of time in my own head. I mulled over things I hadn’t remembered in decades. I remembered Pappy.
When I was a kid, the part of school I dreaded most was Monday morning. The kids would all come in and talk about the neat things they’d done with their fathers over the weekend. We were regaled with tales of fishing trips and 49er games, campouts and model rocket launches. I had no dad stories. I was left out yet again, faced with one more area where I lacked a common frame of reference.
Then, one Friday night, I couldn’t sleep so I got up and turned on the television. While flipping the channels, I chanced upon an old black-and-white 1950s TV series starring James Garner. It was a Western called Maverick. Maverick was the story of two poker-playing brothers, Bret (played by Garner) and Bart (played by Jack Kelly) who traveled the old west going from card table to card table. They were witty, sophisticated, and smarter than most of the people they met up with, and yet they were cowards who would rather run or fast-talk their way out of a fight than throw a punch. I immediately related to them.
The Maverick brothers had one other characteristic that endeared me to them. Every episode, they found an opportunity to quote their wise father, a man they called “Pappy.” The quotes were funny, erudite, and practical in a roguish sort of way. When challenged to a gunfight, Bret might say, “As my old Pappy used to say, a coward dies a thousand deaths, a hero only one. A thousand to one’s a pretty good advantage.” When being accused of leaving the poker table while he was ahead, Bart might retort, “As my dear Pappy used to say, the only time to quit when you’re winning is when you’ve won it all.” You never saw Pappy, but his presence loomed as large on the series as that of the brothers.
The following Monday morning, when one of the boys was going on and on about the barbecue pit he and his father had built over the weekend, I chimed in.
“As my old Pappy used to say, the two biggest evils in life are hard liquor and hard work.”
The kids laughed.
When I came to school late one morning and the boys wanted to know where I’d been, I said, “In the words of my old Pappy, time waits for no man . . . unless he has a broken watch.”
Again, they laughed.
I finally had a father. Not a father who did stuff with me, but a father who was charming, witty, and wise. Nobody ever asked me where he was or how often I saw him or what he did for a living. Luckily, nobody was staying up past midnight on school nights to catch Maverick reruns or the jig would have been up. Pappy became as much a fixture in the schoolyard as the fathers of the other boys. He had sage advice for every occasion. Some I took verbatim from James Garner; other gems of wisdom I wrote myself in a spiral notebook I kept. I was always waiting for just the right opening to unleash the perfect “Pappyism.”
I was smiling and thinking about “Pappy” when the screech of tires brought my attention back to the storefront. A man who had crossed the street against the light just missed being roadkill by a matter ofseconds.
“Why the fuck don’t you watch where you’re going?” he yelled in an obvious attempt to save face.
It was the same attitude. The same sense that whatever he wanted to do was what would be done, and the hell with the rest of the world. It was still, “Quit cutting you eyes at me.”
Sylvester made his way across the street and went into the place. He looked smaller than I remembered him. It could have been that I was bigger now. It could also have been the colon cancer that I heard was ravaging his body. He was only fifty-nine, but he looked much older. Maybe, with enough of life’s abuse, black will indeed crack.
Through contacts I have in law enforcement, I had tracked him to this shelter. It had been twenty-five years since I’d seen him last. A few months before my sixteenth birthday, I had gone looking for him. In spite of all of the pain and the misery he’d caused, despite all of the anguish and hurt he’d brought to my spirit and my soul, he was still my father. My mother was gone and I was a teenager in search of a man’s guidance. For better or worse, I needed my Pappy.
I found him working on a loading dock in San Leandro, not far from the apartment complex. Learning this made me angry at first. It had been years since the knife incident, and he knew that Mom was dead because his own mother had attended the funeral. This also meant that he knew that Grandma was raising his children all by herself, and here he was just a few miles away and he never even bothered to look in on us. He never cared enough to see if Grandma needed anything.
I pushed all of that to the back of my mind. “Water under the bridge,” I said to myself as I walked up to him as he hoisted a large box onto a truck.
“You got big,” he said when he saw me.
“Yeah. I’ll be sixteen soon.”
“I’ve got a break in a couple minutes. Let’s get something to eat,” he said, taking off his heavy leather gloves.
We went to a local Denny’s and talked for a long time. I told him about school and my sisters. I told him my dreams for the future. It was nice. It was the first time I remembered having a conversation with him about anything.
That meal turned into many. I would come by his work and we’d go have hamburgers or eggs and talk.
“Your birthday’s next week,” he said one night at dinner.
“Yeah. Monday.”
“I want to get you something,” he said. “Something to make up for a lot of birthdays.”
I set the hamburger I was nibbling down on my plate and looked at him with anticipation. He’d never given me anything, ever.
“I have a buddy who has a car dealership in Oakland. On Tuesday, I want you to take off school early, around lunchtime. I’m gonna pick you up and take you there to get a car of your own.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Really?” was all I could blurt out.
“Now, it won’t be a new car. I can’t afford that. But I’m sure we can find something you’ll like.”
“Thanks, Dad. I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t say anything. It’s something I owe you.”
A car! I was going to get my own car!
For the next week, I walked on air. I told my buddies that I’d be tooling around in wheels of my own. I scoured car magazines and used car ads to get some ideas about what I might want to drive. I talked to mechanics I knew about what to look for and what to avoid once we got to the car lot.
The night before my birthday was like Christmas Eve when I was a kid. I was so excited I could barely sleep. I was turning sixteen, and I was going to get my license and my own car. It would be the best birthday ever.
Grandma wrote me a note asking that I be excused from school at ten for a doctor’s appointment. She picked me up and took me to the Department of Motor Vehicles to get my driver’s license. She had the foresight to realize that I would want to drive my car home from the lot once I got it. That would be half the fun. I aced the test and was home sitting in my living room by noon. Sylvester was to arrive around lunchtime. Grandma made me a birthday lunch that I was too excited to eat.
I sat watching the door like a puppy dog waiting for its master to return from work. Soon it was one o’clock. Then two. Then three. No Sylvester. I wanted to call him and see how late he was running, but I couldn’t. I didn’t have his home phone number. I didn’t even know where he lived. I called his work, but was reminded that his shift didn’t start until nine in the evening. Soon it was six o’clock. Then seven. I still sat in the chair looking at the door, forlorn.
“Come on in and have something to eat,” Grandma said, putting her hand on my shoulder. “I made your birthday dinner, lasagna, just like you asked me to.”
“I’m not hungry, Grandma.”
I sat in that living room until Grandma finally insisted that I eat something and get into bed. The next night, I called Sylvester’s job. I was told that he was no longer employed there. I never saw or heard from him again. Twenty-five years. Now I sat watching this angry little man jaywalk into a homeless shelter. Now what? Do I go in after him? If I do, what should I say? What do I want to say?
I used to have dreams where he’d walk up to me with his arms stretched wide to hug me.
“Son . . .” he’d say right before I decked him.
“I’m not a little boy anymore and I’m not a woman. Let’s see how you fight now, you son of a bitch!”
That feeling wasn’t there that evening. I just wanted to ask why? Why were you so mean? Why did you hurt us that way? Why didn’t you do the things that a father is supposed to do? Why didn’t you take me camping and give me an allowance? Why didn’t you teach me how to talk to girls? How to throw a curve ball? How to survive as a black man in this society? Why didn’t you give me sage advice like Pappy? Why didn’t you show up on my birthday? Why? Why?
As I pondered these questions I saw him walk back out of the building. Before I knew it, I was out of the car and walking in his direction. He moved slower than I remembered, his pace laggard with age and disease. I was within five feet of him before I finally said something.
“Excuse me,” I said.
He turned and looked me in the face.
“Yeah?”
“Do . . . you know what time it is?”
It was all I could think of to say.
He looked at an old watch on his wrist.
“Quarter to seven.”
“Um . . . thanks,” I said as I watched him turn and jaywalk back across the street. He didn’t know who I was. All of this trouble, all of this anxiety, and he didn’t even know who I was.
I walked back to the Miata in a daze and started the motor. I was halfway home when I burst into laughter. It was a sidesplitting, hearty laughter that made me lose control of my faculties. I had to pull the car over to the shoulder of the road. I was laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe. I could feel my bladder starting to give way.
“Forty-one years,” I thought. “It took forty-one years but he finally gave me something. The time of day!”
I pulled into my driveway just as my son Adam was parking his truck. It was a vintage Ford pickup. He’d had it for a week. I got it for him for his sixteenth birthday. As he hopped out of the truck, he said, “Hi, Dad,” and hugged me. As I held my son in my arms, I realized how much time I had wasted thinking that I had missed out all those years. I hadn’t. Not really. Sylvester had.