My grandma, bless her soul, thoroughly hated the smell of cigarettes. She hated the sight of them, hated the packaging, hated the ads, the billboards, the butts, the ashtrays, the ashes, the word itself, and definitely hated the fact that her only daughter, my mom, chose to have a child with a man who smoked hourly. That would be my dad. That would be the barely sober individual I barely saw, barely knew, who had spent most of the years of my life sleeping in an auto-repair shop on the other side town—at my grandma’s request—who convinced my mom this was the only way not to end up in the ICU. So I didn’t get a real dose of fatherhood until the day of my junior high school graduation when my father had arranged for me to begin working at his garage. The grand plan was scheduled to commence with him driving me to my graduation, an image that sickened me to the core because I’d be arriving in a parking lot full of wealthy classmates in a rusty half-ton pickup that said “Pepito’s Garage.” This seems like a petty concern in retrospect but let’s note that I’d spent my years in the smart classes with all the smart rich kids, slogging from room to room, period to period, desperately pretending they were my socioeconomic peers, hoping they might one day see me as I saw them—admirable, white, promising. Summer vacation was now starting and my dad considered his plan the long-overdue obligation of a son to help his father’s business: answering the phones, using good English, managing the books, cooking the books, schmoozing clients, mopping the floors, checking emails, and, of course, setting up tax evasion—all at the ripe old age of fourteen.
You’re the only one I can trust, he said to me.
He needs to be in summer school, said my mom.
This is summer school. This is life school.
He needs to study. He’s competing with kids who have tutors and computers.
It’s my decision.
The—
I’m his father.
What he needs is to marry a good Catholic girl, said my grandmother well after he’d left, well after the argument had been won. Irish Catholic, she said, believing we needed to lighten the bloodline. She opposed my mom on most issues, generally leaning too old-world for us, disagreeing on small things like how could Frida Kahlo be a real Mexican if she abandoned God? My grandmother led a challenging life, staying healthy just long enough to see me get my first promotion within the financial world, with a title that left her confused on every level, never understanding how the word “bank” could apply to someone whose job looked nothing like a bank.
Then why I can’t be one of your customers, she’d say to me.
I told you, Grandma.
Because I don’t have enough money?
No, because I don’t have customers. I handle accounts. It’s banking for institutions. There’s no, like, ATM.
But you handle accounts.
The people are the accounts.
People are not accounts.
Si, grandma.
That’s not nice, hijito.
I manage accounts. That means I interact with representatives from each institution, with people who are my contacts at different firms.
So you’re a manager?
No, I manage their satisfaction in terms of how they’ve done business with us. I buy them drinks. I buy them golf. I get them schwag. Ninety percent of my day is mailing out logo’d schwag to reps who choose our company for an interinstitutional transaction.
I don’t know that means.
Grandma . . . neither do I.
It was an odd thank-you to the one person who sacrificed everything for me, having shielded my youth from the brutality of my own DNA. She had to support both me and my mom in the face of how badly my father tried to undermine us. You need to stand up to him, she’d tell my mom, over and over, and my mom would speak up, occasionally—and got hit for it—occasionally—and did finally ban my father from our home, which led to a month of hope—my hope—that maybe this ban would last, which, of course, it didn’t because he did come back. I’d see him in the kitchen the next morning and he’d put his hand under my chin and say, Mijo, if there’s one thing I gave you in this world, it’s this nice face. He meant how likable I looked, using some word I refused to remember—poso or something. He meant slick and charming, and he took any opportunity in line at a store with me to ask the people near us if they’d ever seen such a likable face. Watch him charm you out of your last dollar, he’d say. And within several months came his suggestion that I stay with him long term, which my mom fought against hard enough to bring to a stalemate. Several months went by with no word from my father and I was praying daily that he’d somehow lost interest in me, or forgotten me, or a meteor smashed his head, or he was recruited by a distant military. I was praying and praying—praying right up until the day before my graduation, walking home from school, walking through my front door, crossing the middle of my living room to pass through a startling wall of cigarette breath, several million singed molecules of nicotine informing me that he was back in our home that day and that my summer with him was now inevitable. No, I would not be embarrassed at that graduation ceremony arriving in a rusty pickup truck because my father never took me to it. He drove us straight to the auto shop instead, and within a week beat the shit out of me for having miscounted the cash and beat the shit out of me all summer, actually, so that there I would be, twenty-three years later, older, wiser, in Paris, at the top of the stairs of a small hotel with my head immersed in a cloud of someone else’s fumes, reliving a pent-up dread I didn’t know I still carried, replaying all the irrational conclusions that came along with it. I was about to run from something totally unknown with no capacity to see the mechanics of why—no capacity to see that it wasn’t the fear that was forcing me to relive that childhood memory. It was a childhood memory that was forcing a grown man to run.