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I grew up around the smell of tobacco. Dad, despite his asthma, was a smoker, though he would argue that his type of smoking wasn’t as bad as what the public service announcements and school assemblies warned everyone about. He didn’t smoke cigarettes but actual pipes stuffed with tobacco, though Hell if I ever truly understood the difference.
Sven, also known as one of the few of my father’s past associates to answer my email, was also a tobacco smoker. When he called me to coordinate our meeting, he was nice enough to warn me about the smell before I came over. It was bad, he admitted. And then he went into the lecture all smokers give you about how they want to quit, how they are working to quit, how they are putting in all of this effort, and how hard it is to quit smoking despite their resolve. I listened because I knew that’s the important thing to do in that situation. A smoker who gives you that speech already feels ashamed, so you shouldn’t shame them. And really, there’s no assurance or platitude you can offer that’s going to help them get over that addiction. They are right when they say that it’s hard to quit smoking, and there’s nothing you can do to make it easier.
But when I got to Sven’s small home, I–who had spent a childhood around tobacco smoke and its residue–nearly choked on the air that greeted me on his doorstep. It was the most intense tobacco smell I had ever encountered. At first, I thought that my tolerance had weakened after so many years living a deliberately smoke-free life. It had been a treat to myself after a childhood of getting mocked by my peers for the smell of tobacco in my clothing and hair. Consequently, I had never thought I would willingly wander back into a smoker’s den, but there I was, choking down the urge to cough, the urge to reject the tobacco-stained air. And I did so not because I wanted to inhale that familiar cloud of smoke but because I didn’t want to be rude. Sven was doing me a favor, after all.
And he was a nice enough person by the looks of him, and while I know looks can be deceiving, but there was a sincere kindness in his dark eyes. He was slightly older than my father would have been, had he still been alive, and he carried the years in his face. Maybe his hair had fallen out from the weight of time or maybe it was just unfortunate genetics, I couldn’t be sure, but it was long gone. But Sven had picked up other things along the way. His build was rather stocky, but his towering height hid it well.
Sven had agreed to an interview about my father with a sort of restrained eagerness. He didn’t like to be interviewed, I could gather, but he did like talking about Will Vogel. He’d worked with my dad almost forty years before he and I met. When it came to exact dates, his memory was fuzzy, but he could agree that he had worked with my father at a photocopy shop in a small town a few hours’ drive from Stella Maris. Sven didn’t dispute the dates listed on my father’s resume. He was just surprised to see that so much time had passed.
When he said that to me, I didn’t understand how he could be so surprised, especially since he and my father had stayed in some form of contact until he died. That or the decade of silence that followed said death should have said something about changing the calendars. But when I looked around his home, I realized how foreign of a concept the passage of time must have been to him. His home was trapped in the 90s, it seemed. All the floors were carpeted, and all the walls were intact, creating sectioned off spaces that flew in the face of the modern open concept look that let in light and also a great deal of annoyances. Said walls were made of wood panels that were–once upon a time–painted a dark red, but the paint had faded in whatever sunlight the walls got. Said sunlight was not fair or consistent in its coverage, so neither was the fade.
As a society, we tend to associate smoking with “lower class” or “being poor.” The preconception serves as a justification for looking down on people who find comfort through smoking. But even that need to self-soothe points to some sort of stressor, like an economic stressor, which is just another way of saying poverty. Honestly, I almost wrote a thesis in college about that, but then I thought about my father and cried in that potential advisor’s office, which is the sort of thing a student cannot come back from and completely changing their project is probably the right thing for them to do in that situation.
Regardless of failed academic ambitions, it was still something I thought about. Then there was the related issue that the cost of smoking materials can be fairly high, draining resources that could have gone elsewhere. Which means, it might have been a self-perpetuating cycle. One smoked because they were stressed about a lack of money for all their bills, but said smoking took money away from their bills. Which meant they had less money for expenses and could once again stress about their bank balance. Which required more smoking.
I looked around Sven’s home. Though I tried to not be judgmental–as a general rule but especially right then–I saw so many spots that could have used the funds that had likely gone into his tobacco habit. And though it was not good data, it still supported my theory.
I wasn’t just assuming he had the money at one time or another, of course. That would have been rather rude. I’d done some sleuthing on Sven before I got to his home. And though I won’t explain how, I knew what he and his wife did for a living. She was a nurse, and he worked in IT for the same hospital. They weren’t paid too poorly, given the median salaries for their positions in the region, but to look at their home, one wouldn’t think that.
But that was a rather mean thought to have. It was yet another reason to hate myself. That list was growing, but my inability to engage in small talk was one of the more relevant entries on that list.
With great effort, I mustered a small smile and did my best to feign competence. “Thank you for meeting with me,” I said as I took a seat on his couch.
The couch was leather, and surprisingly hadn’t aged too poorly. Or maybe it wasn’t old at all. Maybe it was a recent purchase aged by the smoke of his pipe. I couldn’t be sure. I didn’t want to be sure, so I did my best to not think about it.
“Of course, of course,” he said. “Your father was a good man to me.”
Deep within the sound of his voice, a hint of a German accent lingered. He either immigrated as a child or his parents were immigrants and had him shortly after they came over. In either situation, a tether to the homeland lingers, but it is weak and delicate.
It was another assumption on my part, but it was one that could bring us closer. I knew what that sort of life was like. My mother was an immigrant. And as her child, I found myself maintaining a difficult balance, that push and pull between my present and a past world I hardly knew.
I nodded. “I was surprised you replied to me. It had been so long not just since my dad died but since you and he worked together.”
There was a flash of sadness in his eyes when I said died. It was the sort of thing I felt too, but I was skilled at hiding it.
I reached into my black purse and pulled out the small pencil and notepad I had hastily packed when I left the cottage that morning. One would think those things would be at the forefront of my mind. This was a research trip, after all. I would need to use whatever Sven told me for my project, and I couldn’t solely rely on my memory for something that important. But that was assuming he would say something of value to me, which seemed like a bit of a gamble in hindsight.
“You must have been close to my dad,” I said.
Sven didn’t accept that assessment, but he did not have the words to deny it. I watched him stumble in his mind, like he was scrambling for some sort of alternative to give to me, but nothing came to mind.
While I waited, I thought about what Ellie would say if she was there. Or rather, I thought about what she would say to me as we walked back to the car together, reflecting on how that talk had gone. She’d probably talk about how men of their generation weren’t socialized to have or care about friendships. “Closeness” was a dirty word to them, so I probably shouldn’t have used it.
“I guess,” I started as I scrambled to save this conversation, “It would be better to start back at the photocopy shop, right? Were you and my dad on the same shift?”
The best sort of affirmation I could have gotten was then given to me: Sven laughed. “No, no. Your father was my manager.”
I nodded. “Was he a good boss?”
The sadness flashed again. Its sudden appearance didn’t bother or deter me. Long before that conversation, I had stopped being afraid of sadness. It wasn’t a boogeyman hiding in the corners of someone’s eyes ready to devour me with sharp, serrated teeth. It wasn’t a monster of that or any kind. Rather, it was my North Star, leading me back to something that vaguely looked like home: i.e., my father’s memory. Sadness and that memory were delicately intertwined and could not be pulled apart by mere human hands. Or as a theology professor of mine once said, grief was the shadow of love held in the light. The only way to avoid grief was to never have love or to keep it so far buried in the figurative darkness that even a sliver of light cannot kiss it. In either situation, you were not living. I don’t remember if he was taking that from some text, consciously or not. It might have been the sort of thing he had heard a peer say once and never bothered to source, either because he wanted to keep credit to himself or because the source was–for whatever reason–unspeakable in polite conversation. And sourcing was the sort of thing that I, as a writer, should take more seriously, but regardless of the moral imperative, I never looked into it myself.
But even still, I let that thought anchor me as Sven’s sadness rose and fell like the tides. In that sadness, I was looking at his fondness for my father while he was telling me his favorite story about him.
As Sven said, my dad was his manager at that photocopy shop just a few roads down from the small home Sven was currently living in. And Will wasn’t a “ballbuster,” to use Sven’s word, by any means. All he cared about was that the shop ran well, so if it ran well even when you were fifteen minutes late from lunch, then he didn’t have a problem with you. If you need to have a chair at the register to check customers out, then take that chair even if the owner of the shop gave you shit for it. But from what Sven remembered, the owner didn’t come around that much. He didn’t like the way Will ran the shop, but he also knew that the employees were more loyal to Will than to him. So he kept himself scarce, and Will kept doing what he needed to do. And apparently, one of the things that he needed to do, in his mind, was overlook just how terrible of an employee Sven was. Another thing was to invest in Sven and help him find his way.
“One day, your dad told me to get into computers,” Sven said. “Not what we were doing but the actual computing machines.”
I nodded and glanced down at the notes I had prepared before I arrived. The dates of my father’s degree caught my eye.
“That was when he was doing his mail away courses, right?” I asked.
It was, much to the nameless owner’s chagrin, but my dad marched on undeterred. And he was trying to get Sven to do them too.
“But I didn’t want to,” he said.
“Were you skeptical?” I asked. “I heard a lot of people were skeptical about computers at the time. Or that’s what my dad had said.”
My dad had talked a lot about that moment in history. It was a moment of triumph for him, after all. Maybe people liked the idea of computers and all that those devices could do, but their imagination was limited. They couldn’t see the possibilities that would come in the near future or the way the world would shift entirely. Dad couldn’t either, but he didn’t need the specifics to know that this was the train to jump on.
Sven struggled with his answer. “I didn’t think enough about computers to have an opinion. I didn’t care about them all.”
“Why?”
That was a terrible question. It was painfully predictable, but because I needed details about what was lurking behind the curtain of Sven’s choices, that single word question was really the only route I could go down. But as a question, it was incredibly open ended and placed the burden of directing the conversation not on the asker where it belongs but on the person answering. That was a heavy weight, and I had just dropped it onto him, rather rudely.
After a few moments of thinking it over, he finally answered, “I was ready to be at that shop forever. Or something like it. The pay was consistent. And I wasn’t good at job finding. I didn’t think any other business would have me, so why bother trying?”
Sven kept rambling through his reasons, trying to find the real heart of his hesitation. Despite his efforts, his search did not yield much. But all the while, I sat there, wordlessly, and watched him as he dug for an answer.
I held my suspicions close to my chest, but I thought I knew what the answer really was. His remarks, disjointed as they were, sounded like a sort of aimless depression that can strike a young person when said young person doesn’t want to die but can’t bring themselves to live or define what it means to live. In that state, coasting through things feels like the best compromise. And maybe it is–on some technical level–the best outcome one can hope for until some sort of intervention comes along.
For Sven, Will Vogel was that intervention.
“So what did my dad say to get you to change your mind?” I asked.
“He didn’t say anything.”
I cursed in my head. This is the sort of back and forth that leads up to someone describing a crime, usually fraud. I braced myself for it. Mail away courses had to be great for cheating, right? There was no way to verify who was sending in things. I could come up with a dozen scenarios, all terrible ethically. And as I sat with those images, I dreaded what came next.
“He signed me up,” Sven said.
Oh thank God, I thought. That wasn’t so bad.
“He took my social security number and all that stuff from my personnel file.”
Fuck. That was bad.
“And enrolled me.”
At least, Sven didn’t seem angry about it. Quite the contrary. He was grateful. In this situation, hindsight was kind. But in the moment, when Will told him what he had done, Sven snorted. He wasn’t mad about it (and thank God for that because that sounded like a crime on my dad’s part). He just thought it was pointless. He thought Will had wasted his time, the tuition money, and the like on Sven. But my dad didn’t agree. He thought Sven was the one being wasteful of talents only my dad could see.
“He thought that despite how terrible I was as an employee, always late, always mouthing off, left early, my girl was always over, all of that, that I’d actually be good for this line of work.”
Will overlooked a lot that his employees did. Everyone on the staff had some sort of vice or bad habit that he never mentioned to them. But by his own admission, Sven was the worst offender of the lot. If anyone needed to be let go, per the demands of the shop owner, it would be Sven. But Will resisted.
“And here’s the thing, Mia, that guy [redacted attempt at remembering the name of the photocopy shop owner] was about to push his luck. He had a plan about how he was going to make it without Will. He was just waiting for Will to give him a reason to fire him.”
And Will was pushing his luck by keeping Sven on the staff. Meanwhile, to complete the triad, Sven was pushing his luck by letting the shop’s upkeep wane. He was the only person who dared to test my dad’s rules.
And as a result, “I was expecting to be fired, you know?”
But Will didn’t fire him. He made him a deal, instead. If Sven did those mail away courses, Will would keep overlooking how bad of an employee Sven was. For Sven who only wanted to keep his paycheck, it was a fair trade, but it was a trade that would change the course of his life.
“Your Dad jumped into IT right at the first of many booms, but for me, I missed a few waves but still landed on my feet.”
That was when he got the job at a hospital a few towns away, met his wife, married said wife, and brought her the house they still lived in. There’s more to the epilogue than that. They had a slew of children who had gone to college, moved out and had their own children. And those children were on their way to be successful either through college or whatever startup/hustle culture creation they sold to a bigger company. I didn’t want to ask Sven if his family had ever known poverty, which would mean that my father’s gamble on Sven’s future hadn’t just paid off, but it had outright broken a family’s curse. It might have been nice to know, but it would have been incredibly invasive. So I didn’t ask.
In any event, I was still smiling when he finished his story. And at that end, he said, “I learned a lot from your dad.”
“Yeah?” I said, hopefully. “He was a good teacher.”
“Yep. Taught me a lot about what makes good tobacco, too.”
Fuck.
I didn’t stay too long after that. Though I didn’t admit it, the smell of his home was overwhelming. At least I knew why, though. It wasn’t just that my tolerance had gone down but that he smoked a very similar strain to my father’s. I couldn’t take that smell anymore. I couldn’t handle that memory. The sadness that I knew pointed to my father washed over me, but I didn’t want to see him right then.
Sven escorted me out. And while he offered to answer any questions I had over email or in person if I wanted to make that drive again, he didn’t mention that I hadn’t written down a single thing he said. Maybe he hadn’t noticed. It was possible he found himself so immersed in a memory laced with the sorts of emotions he had been socialized to avoid that he completely missed what I was doing or not doing. Then again, perhaps he didn’t understand how interviews work or what the interviewer is supposed to do. Maybe he wondered why I wasn’t using a recorder. But he didn’t ask, and I appreciated that because I didn’t know how to explain that I didn’t need to write that story down. I already knew it.
I climbed into my hastily purchased car as Sven waved to me from his doorway. The doors locked once I was settled in, as I waved back to Sven and slid the key into the ignition. With one turn of my wrist, the engine turned over. It was all so easy, which I guess is what one would hope for from a recently purchased car, one that I might have paid too much for. But if I did, then it better work well and make my life easier, no matter where I find myself, whether I’m driving to work or to the store. Or if I’m in an unfamiliar town for a funeral or wedding or interviewing an old coworker of my father’s whose story of triumph had been told to me by the aforementioned father, but when Dad told me the story, the lackluster employee whose apathy turned into the key to his salvation wasn’t the son of some German immigrant or a German immigrant himself but Bill Gates. And if you know anything about Bill Gates, you would know that he never worked in a photocopy shop in the American Midwest. Moreso, saying that Will Vogel was the reason Bill Gates went into computers sets you up to be laughably wrong.
To my credit, I never thought that part of the story was true. I didn’t think my dad saved the famous Bill Gates from a life of mediocrity. I was never that naive. But there was a part of me that thought the entire story was false. And yet, all of me needed to believe that some form of it was true. If it were, then it meant that I, his writer-daughter, wasn’t his only legacy. It meant I didn’t need to justify my father’s life. I was free from that burden. Bill Gates or whoever Dad helped do that work for me.
But it turned out that having that confirmation did nothing for me. I didn’t feel relief, only more confusion, for finally knowing that my dad had saved someone.
I pulled off of Sven’s street, wondering why Dad lied. Why not just put Sven in the story where he rightfully belonged?
That’s the sort of question that only my dad could have answered, but that limitation wasn’t much of a deterrent to my wandering mind. After all, there was a time when I could figure out his answers to some of my questions just by extrapolating from the things about him I knew. Did Dad like my haircut? Well, he liked it when I wore my hair shorter and didn’t understand fashion, so if my hair was short, then he probably did. Was Dad proud of me for doing so well in my computer class? Well, he worked on computers and believed it was still a growing industry, so probably. Did Dad want me to get my ears pierced? Well, he was big on personal responsibility, and I was a teenager, so we were probably fine.
But then I kept growing, and new situations kept coming up. The bag of Dad-isms didn’t have an answer for all those new occasions, and my forgery ability grew sloppy from overuse.
Then my book came out, a book that had not so subtle jabs at Mom and all the problems she and I had. Maia’s mother was a stand-in for my own. My heart had bled onto those pages, and the resulting stains hadn’t been removed in editing. Dad would have hated that, despite my attempts to mask the connection. But even if no one could have pieced it together, Dad would have likely seen those inclusions as disrespectful. And while I had my reasons for writing all those things, he wouldn’t have understood them. He wouldn’t have listened to me try to explain them. To him, there would have been no excuse for it.
But it helped me, it gave me the closure I couldn’t get otherwise and the apologies Mom could never come up with. That had to be worth something, right? It produced something. I would think that something had value, and I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t see it that way. If writing and publishing that book made my life more bearable and if other people reading it made their lives more bearable, then it had value. There was something better than an excuse. There was a justification. So would he understand? Would he overlook my peace of mind or the betterment of so many other lives in favor of our family’s pride?
I didn’t know. Nor did I know if I should care about the opinions of someone who felt compelled to turn a true story into a lie by making it about Bill Gates. I kept my eyes on the road as I drove through roads surrounded by corn fields, but I was very aware that I was surrounded by corn. Its ears would have kept my secrets if I finally just broke down and screamed. I wanted to scream. I wanted to, in some way, somehow voice any of my many frustrations about the mess Dad had left me to deal with. Sure, he couldn’t have known I’d have to pull his life story together for a surprise sister, but in some way, this was my story too. It should have made some sense to me. It shouldn’t have been laced with weird authorial choices that would then have to be corrected in editing. I shouldn’t have had to live with the fact that my father lied about the stupidest of things, like Bill Gates working in a photocopy shop in the Midwest.
Though a clenched jaw, I let out a half scream and asked myself why I was even bothering. But that was a stupid question. I knew why I was doing this. It was for the sister who, after so many weeks, still hadn’t called me. I didn’t know why she was waiting. I couldn’t even begin to fathom why she hadn’t just picked up the phone and dial my number, so I couldn’t try to mimic some sort of explanation, to write some version of her story that painted me in a favorable light. And that was all I knew how to do.
So I should have asked Ellie, right? She was so much better at understanding people and their motivations than I was, but we weren’t talking. I was still ghosting her.
But this whole debacle was the sort of thing I could mention to her, right? It was noteworthy enough. But at the same time, it would have been an easier thing to bring up if it had, in fact, been Bill Gates. The story would have had significance.
And suddenly, I understood my father's point. The logic clicked. And so did my self-loathing.