We all go through the portal
Yeah, no one’s immortal
But the time and the place puzzle me
I’m a prisoner of the details
My theory always fails
To free me from death’s mystery
—“They All Fall Apart” (Thornton/Andrew/Davis)
MY PARENTS, BROTHERS, AND I WOULD MOVE TO DIFFERENT TOWNS, but my dad was kind of hotheaded, so he’d lose jobs and we always ended up coming back out to my grandmother’s place in Alpine. He had a bad temper and would tell somebody to kiss his ass just like that. He worked as a car salesman sometimes, but he was mainly a teacher and a basketball coach. Small-town basketball team, that was everything where I was from. Imagine a more intense version of Hoosiers, that was kind of like my dad’s bag.
My mom said my dad was crazy about me until I started talking. After that, he didn’t seem to like me that much. He liked my brother Jimmy. He didn’t have much time to decide if he liked my brother John or not. John was about five or six when my dad died, so he was more like a son to me and Jimmy. I was twelve when John was born, Jimmy was ten. We kind of raised him after our dad died. My mom was having readings there at the house and we were watching John.
John was very quiet as a kid. He grew up and joined the Army, where he became a medic, and when he got out, he went to the University of Louisville. He went through part of medical school, but then he had a family and started having to make a living. He couldn’t really afford medical school anymore, so since then he’s been an RN. He’s been teaching nursing, which I think is a great thing for him. He’s one of the few people in the medical profession that I can actually stand, other than Richard Dwyer, a doctor who saved my life, but I’ll get into that later. John’s a very smart guy who knows about every fucking disease on the planet, so what I try to do is never talk about that shit with him because if I have one conversation with him about medicine and the new germs and shit they’re finding, in my mind, I’ll have everything in the world. I’m a little like Woody Allen’s characters, like a neurotic Jewish guy from New York. I’m a hypochondriac and everything else.
Anyway, my dad used to whip the shit out of me with a belt, and he hit me a couple of times, too, with his fist. But when I was sixteen, I hit him back. Then it pretty much stopped.
When I was fourteen, my dad got a job at a cable plant, so we were able to move into a three-bedroom brick house. That was the American dream where I came from. But when I was seventeen, right after I graduated from high school, he was diagnosed with lung cancer, that type that you get from asbestos—and he died eight months later. He was forty-six, I think.
My dad never stayed in a hospital. After he got sick, Jimmy and I shared a bedroom, my mom and my little brother shared another bedroom, and we had my dad in this other room. He was only in the hospital when he went to get cobalt treatments and shit like that, so over a period of eight months I got to see firsthand what it looks like to have your parent die right in front of you. Where they deteriorate into nothing and don’t look like themselves, you know what I mean?
Until he got sick, my dad was pretty healthy. He was only five-eight, five-nine, but he was a tough little son-of-a-bitch. He was a boxer in the Navy. I never looked like him or anything. He had real light-colored hair and blue eyes. Somebody told me one time that all the Old West outlaws, 80 percent of them or something, had blue eyes. Very few gunslingers and outlaws had dark eyes unless they were Mexicans or Indians.
A lot of people to this day want me to hate my father, and I never did. I never liked him, but I didn’t hate him. I loved my father, he was my dad. We never had a conversation that I remember. I remember just little pieces of things where he actually did something with me. Like, he would take me and my brothers to see the blue herons during the time of year they were flying through this marshy, swampy area out in this field.
My dad was a little bit like the Great Santini. He just loved football and thought I had to be a football player or I was an idiot. He would throw a baseball around with me a little bit and come to my games, even though he always thought baseball players were pussies. He’d say, “You piano players and baseball players are all a bunch of queers.” I could live with that. But if I lost one of his tools, I was fucked.
In his defense, his dad was like that, too, all those guys back then were. Willie, my son, will have seven of his friends over here at one time playing video games and hanging out on the porch. Coming down the stairs, I’ll see some kid I’ve never seen in my life at my refrigerator and I just let him do it—I’m nice to them and all—but when I was growing up, you’d go over to your friend’s house and you prayed that their dad never saw you. You’d go hide in another fucking room. I was scared of everybody’s dad, and to this day I have a problem with older men. Robert Duvall is like my mentor, and I desperately want him to like me, but at the same time I’m scared to death of him.
But when my dad was dying, that was it. I saw him deteriorate into this little bitty skinny bald-headed guy that weighed eighty pounds or whatever, and I still looked at this mean motherfucker as some kind of hero, because he played football, because he was a coach, because he was my dad.
I used to carry him, get him under the knees and under the arms and literally carry him to the table to eat, because he didn’t want to eat in the bed. He looked like somebody out of Auschwitz if you saw him, but he still wanted to do things like a regular person. I can remember many times carrying him to the table, and we would crumble up corn bread that my mother made for him in a glass of buttermilk—it’s a Southern delicacy—and he’d eat it with a spoon. But he would take two or three bites, puke all over the table, and I would carry him back to his room.
I guess when the cancer gets in your brain you start thinking all kinds of crazy shit because he started to think he had spiders and snakes on him all the time. He would yell in this weird voice that didn’t even sound like him, and I would have to go in there and pretend I was getting the spiders and snakes off of him. But once I said I got them all off, he was pretty satisfied.
He also started admitting all this shit to me, but I don’t think he knew he was doing it. One time he went, “Don’t ever call him Daddy.” And I said, “Who?” And he said, “That man your mama’s going to marry, don’t ever call him Daddy.” I said, “All right, I won’t.” Sure enough, she married this man and I never called him a fucking thing.
I didn’t cry until years after my dad died. I forgave him for all the shit because now, looking back, I understand all that he went through. He was a guy who couldn’t articulate things, and he was trapped inside a head that he felt like he was more than. I forgive him for everything, and I love him, these days, because I saw his fire and his passion, about sports, at least I always thought he was all right.