4 The Visit

Despite the flareups in the letters, Les and his second wife Betty continued to be Keith’s only visitors, arriving twice a year in their thirty-five-foot “fifth-wheel” trailer pulled by a Dodge Ram diesel that cruised smoothly at sixty-five, as the old man proudly told his son.

Keith noticed that whenever Les took his seat on one of the hard metal seats in the open visiting room, his eyes began darting toward the exit, and he usually left before the scheduled visiting period was over. The son observed this behavior with bemusement. He looked forward to the visits, but he reminded himself that he and his father would always be out of sync. He wrote about one of the visits:

I learn that Dad and his wife are here when I come back from lunch. I get into my good clothes and make it down to the visitors’ room. Even before he comes in, I know what to expect. He’s begging me to see his side. We make eye contact, and I can see tears in his eyes—not tears of joy to see me again, but tears of knowing his son is in prison for life and he has to come to visit. They’re tears of self-sympathy, as if what I’ve done has affected his own retirement and motivation. I kind of laugh to myself at how pathetic this is.

We hug each other, and I feel the mass of flexed muscle he tightens up to show me his power. He holds a white piece of paper in his left hand. It is the questions he wants to cover in the visit. Very businesslike.

I’ve gained weight, but he doesn’t show any negative response, only that I look better, my color is better than the last time. He’s buttering me up for the kill. “Do you want anything, Son? Pop? Candy?” I get a Snickers bar and a coffee. Betty keeps the Snickers coming, more coffee and some jelly beans. They remind me of the jelly beans Mom used to put on top of our birthday cakes.

Dad covers the bad news and good news first—then on to the real purpose of his visit. “I almost didn’t come this time, Keith,” he says. “I cried at how you still are blaming me for what you did. But no! I came in here to see my son. I have to love my son no matter what he’s done.”

He says, “Keith, when you wrote about me shocking you in the greenhouse, you made it sound as if you were seriously hurt. Son, it was in fun! You got it all wrong. It wasn’t 220 volts, it was 12, the same voltage we used in the lighting.”

We both know better, but I won’t argue. The 220 was for the three big exhaust fans. I helped to wire them in. Dad says he shocked us kids with 12 volts, just for a joke, and nobody complained because they could hardly feel it. I just let him talk. If it made him feel better….

It’s a typical day in the big open room. These visits are life and death to some of the inmates. A black guy is talking nasty to his white visitor. He leans into her face and spits, and the guard on duty picks up the phone. Two other guards grab a guy who’s talking with a little old lady—his mother, I guess. They must suspect her of passing dope. That means this visit is over, he’ll have a full body-cavity search, and the next time mom sees her son, it’ll be through glass.

Dad is fidgeting around, taking it all in, but there are other things on his mind. After a while he says, “Son, let’s get something straight once and for all. You have a bad memory. Why did you blame me when you were arrested? Why did you do that?”

I tell him, “Well, Dad, it was real easy to just say you’re an alcoholic and you really couldn’t help yourself.”

He says, “You didn’t have to say that, goddamn it! Sure, I drank when I was younger, but I was never an alcoholic.”

I say, “Dad, you were drunk every day by noon.”

I’m watching him squirm, like he’s thinking, Goddamn it, I wish I could just stand up and pop this punk and teach him a fucking lesson. That’s what I’ve been waiting for. One day he’ll snap. He’ll take off his belt one more time. And I’ll drop him.

He’s so upset about being called an alcoholic, he’s shaking. I’m thinking he’s really in a bad position. He’s lost control of me and everybody else in our family….

He says, “Son, I still have a hard time believing what you’ve done. You must have been on drugs.”

I deny this, but it doesn’t satisfy him. I tell him, “The consensus of opinion about serial killers is that it comes from their parents.”

This is not what he wants to hear. He says, “Didn’t you write me a long time ago that I was a good father and it wasn’t my fault?” I tell him that I sent him the letter he requested so he could show it around. He tells me to stick with that story because it was the truth.

He says, “It wasn’t your mom’s fault, and it wasn’t my fault. It was that thing between your legs. Thank God your mom isn’t around to see you in here. What would she think of you now, Keith?”

I say, “Mom isn’t with us anymore. She’s dead.”

He asks what the state will do with my body when I die. I tell him I think they’ll incinerate me with the rest of the trash, or hang me up in the yard for a piñata. Dad doesn’t get the joke—death is a serious subject for him since his prostate cancer.

I tell him to spread my ashes along Interstate 90 from the flatbed of a 379-Series Pete conventional tractor with plum paint and a Vari-shield and ten grand worth of chrome. Make sure it’s washed and waxed. Then I wonder, Is he worried about my dead body or does he just want control of my ashes?

I wolf down another Snickers bar and the rest of the jelly beans. He has a couple of questions about driving truck, and I can see he still feels competitive. He starts talking about shifting gears, and I have to tell him he’s got it wrong—“It’s basically a five-speed, Dad…. Then you come back to second instead of first…. That knob in the center position, you shift it like a super-eight…. Then bring the other knob up, 1 23 4 5 6 7 8 9 10. That one’s like a super-ten, but you have a double under….”

He’s barely listening, pretending he already knows the shift sequence. When he’s finally reached the last question on his list, he tells me he has to leave because some friends are waiting outside. I’m thinking, Friends outside? You got a son inside, you son of a bitch! Which is more important? There’s still thirty minutes left!

To keep him around, I point out Randy Woodfield, “the I-5 killer.” He’s talking to a gorgeous young woman with big tits. Randy is a handsome guy, a star jock, drafted by the Green Bay Packers. It seems like he has a different female visitor every week, and they all have big tits.

I say, “Dad, look over there. That’s Jerome Brudos, the lust killer. He made lampshades out of his victims’ skin.”

I point out a couple of thrill killers, Price and Bradbury. Dad keeps saying they look like ordinary people. Well, what the hell does he think we are? Hannibal Lecter? We are ordinary people. We don’t have horns.

This visit ends like all the others. We hug and say good-bye, and he whispers, “You need a good licking for what you put me through.” He can never leave without saying that. He says, “I wish I could just put you over my knee.”

Whenever he leaves, I make sure to tell him I love him. It might be my last chance. And he tells me the same. Tears well up in his eyes. Not me—I never show tears. Tears are a sign of weakness. When you cry, you’re always crying about yourself. It’s self-pity.

As he heads toward the exit with Betty, I remind myself that he’s got cancer and other medical problems. All those years of breathing tobacco smoke and welding gases and blacksmithing fumes ruined his lungs. Every time he gets a cold he’s at risk of pneumonia. He’s never far from his oxygen tank. He’s on antidepressants.

Sometimes after the visits I feel worse than when he stays away. Maybe I’m in here to force everyone in my heritage to shape up, to take heed of being a good parent and show love to one another. I am the person in the family that created the most impact on everyone else, so much that it shook up the foundation of everyone named Jesperson and they will only have to mention my name to bring in the reality that being selfish and doing anything illegal will destroy their way of life. My terror is now their hidden terror. Never will they outrun the horror of my story. I will be ever etched in the back of their minds for all of the generations to come.

I feel power in their pain.