Fairway

Fairway

November 21, 2016

It’s 1:00 AM, and I just can’t seem to get comfortable in bed. I have a fight later today, and will be weighing in in a little more than five hours, but that’s not what is keeping me awake. Well, not really. I’m a little nervous, and I have a terrible case of cotton mouth from water deprivation. Can’t put any more weight on… But I’m used to all of that. It’s par for the course before a fight.

Meiya is sleeping peacefully next to me. Lucky.

I look out the window and listen to the ambient noise that’s coming through from the traffic below. Normally, I’d be irritated to hear anything at this hour in the morning, but now I draw a little comfort from knowing that others are awake as well. I feel out of place here. I’m caught up imagining the crowd at my fight this coming evening. If the member portraits in the hallway outside our room, and in the athletic facilities below are any indication, they won’t be my kind of people. From dignitaries, to former Olympians, to ex-presidents. Even a young Donald Trump…I think his hair was real then. Who can be sure? All of that, and I still wanted to be here. The Arthur Mercante Collegiate Boxing Invitational at the New York Athletic Club. I earned the right to be here; I’m the best fighter on my team by far. If only I could just put it all together in the ring, where it counts. Even if the idea of a bunch of trust fund kids and scumbags from Wall Street critiquing my performance tomorrow is making my skin crawl.

My coach’s room is just down the hall. If I text him about this, we could probably talk. He hasn’t slept much since Vietnam, so I’m almost certain he’s awake as well. I have to smile, since lately, my insomnia is starting to rival his.

But I don’t have PTSD. Not me. Right? Nah. I don’t need to see anybody. What’s a therapist going to tell me about myself that I don’t already know?

I could talk to coach now. I know he’d be happy to listen, but at this hour, I think it would be more counterproductive. I need to sleep.

I wish it were easier for me to talk to people about this stuff. To ask for help when I need it. Funny how my surrogate father is far more willing to listen than my biological father was. I still feel as if I’m imposing on him when I do open up though.

Now, hunger pains accompany my growing thirst. Five more fucking hours. Why am I even doing this?

February 2008

I was at the old house, in my childhood room in Cheshire, Connecticut. As I sat on the edge of the bed, I found myself holding back tears. I didn’t want to be there. Any happiness I had felt – or thought I felt – in this house was long since gone. Every single fond recollection of the time when my parents were together was tainted with the tension I always felt around my father. I once overheard a family friend call him a “carrier.” Carrier of stress, unease, discomfort, what have you. I could feel it even then, a good thirty feet away, separated by multiple walls. He was in his home office, furiously toiling in search of a job, which would ultimately prove futile.

Under the conditions of my parents’ separation and impending divorce, I was obligated to spend every other weekend with my father, besides seeing him once a week for dinner. I fought my mom every step of the way on that. Those weekends were miserable, and this one was living up to my expectations.

Sitting on my bed, I couldn’t tell if the tears were from anger or profound sadness. Maybe just teenage angst. I was thirteen, after all. What a wonderful age.

It was a gloomy, cold Sunday. I guess I was just running out the clock. Waiting until I could go back to the apartment my mom and I shared for a few hours of relief. Even that would be fleeting; the next day, I’d start another painfully awkward week of middle school.

I wanted to lie down. Maybe stare up at the ceiling for a few hours. Nothing was all I felt like doing. I didn’t have any vitality for anything else. But, my stomach started to growl. I realized that it was well past noon, and I hadn’t eaten yet. I wanted to ask if we had any food in the house, but I’d already been screamed at twice that weekend. Once, for talking to my mother on the phone, and once for…search me. Being in the way, maybe?

While making as little noise as I could, I snuck downstairs to the kitchen and checked the pantry. Nothing. Some flour and sugar. A few old extract bottles whose contents had solidified around the caps, making them impossible to open. In the fridge, it was more of the same. Quarter-filled condiment bottles about to expire and some grated parmesan on the door, with nothing on the shelves. As I contemplated going to the basement to look for something canned on my dad’s storage shelves, I noticed how cold it was. He could barely afford food anymore, so the fact that the heat and power were even still working was a miracle.

I didn’t have much luck in the basement either. There were only a few cans on the shelves – mostly expired green beans and corn. And one lonely, expired can of chili. It had only gone bad a couple of months earlier, though.

I could call my mom and ask her to bring something. I knew she would, but at the expense of my peace of mind for the rest of the day, or longer. My dad would have a coronary if he caught me on the phone again or knew why I was calling her. So I could either go hungry, or risk catching something from whatever might be festering inside that can. My stomach growled again, and I let out an involuntary sigh. I hadn’t eaten in almost a day.

“Fuck me, right?”

November 21, 2016

And now, I’m hungry by choice. What kind of bullshit is this?

Whatever. He wasn’t all bad. Honestly, I felt a little sorry for him, since I could see through it all. Whoever said that my father was a “carrier” was right. Above all else, he was a carrier of insecurity. His constant attempts to compensate for everything that he wasn’t made those around him anxious. Always living above his means at the cost of financial stability. Always having to be the funny one: the life of the party. It was painfully obvious to me that that wasn’t him. I could recognize that he was more of an introvert, like me. Not that he would ever admit that.

I wonder what he’d think of me if he could see me now. Of how far I’ve come as a man since we last spoke. Of how far I’ve progressed in boxing. What would he think of Meiya? He wasn’t all bad. I’d want them to meet. I think.

The more I think about that, the more desperately I hope for some kind of afterlife. And the more I’m convinced that it’s just some fairytale we tell ourselves so we can sleep at night.

I still have his ashes. They’re in a container somewhere in my mom’s apartment. His last will and testament stated that he wanted them spread somewhere on Cape Cod. My parents and I used to vacation there when I was a kid. One to two weeks every summer for six years. He paid for it with money he didn’t have, which he and my mom fought about constantly. He just had to rent out a beachfront cottage, go to high-end restaurants, and splurge on everything.

I still don’t understand it. He always spoke so nostalgically about our vacations in Dennis Port that I’ve begun to think that he lived in his own reality. Did he just block out the fact that we would routinely have our power or water cut off? That we once went without a landline for almost a year? Or that his friend had to drive to our house while we were away and rip foreclosure notices off the front door? It really is amazing what I thought was normal back then.

His thought processes still confuse me. Did he think he’d earned those vacations? His constant heightened stress levels may have led him to think so, even if his bank account balance didn’t quite agree. Am I still grieving, or just struggling to understand? I think, in all honesty, I mourned his loss bit by bit in the years leading up to our estrangement and, ultimately, his death. As it became apparent that I’d never have a serviceable relationship with him, I think I started to distance myself emotionally.

It was what I had to do. All I could do.

I can’t help but imagine what I’ll feel as I scatter his ashes on the Cape. Out of the fourteen years that he and my mother were married, I think his only escapes from reality were those vacations. Two weeks per summer for six years. Twelve weeks in fourteen years. He always wanted us desperately to be that rich, globetrotting family. He’d talk about vacationing in Europe as if it were totally feasible. Not some pie in the sky fantasy. Even as a young kid, I could see it for what it was. I didn’t particularly want that life for myself, but it made him happy to think about. And if he was happy, it meant that he wasn’t on my ass about something. Like my getting a B+ on a test, or “disrespecting” him in some trivial way.

Oh well. Everyone has issues, I guess.

Of course, that final memorial act could quickly go wrong. All it would take is a slight change in wind direction at precisely the wrong moment…gross. Stop it.

A salvo of car horns reaches my window from seventh avenue below.

For some odd reason, the movie Due Date comes to mind. A typical odd-couple type comedy where an eccentric aspiring actor, played by Zach Galifianakis is forced to drive cross country with a hi-strung businessman, played by Robert Downey Jr. Galifianakis’ character just so happened to be carrying his father’s ashes in, of all things, a coffee can. He had planned to spread the remains near the Hollywood sign before making his attempt at silver screen stardom. However, one macabre mishap during their trip led to the father’s ashes being mistaken for coffee grounds.

After the ensuing disgust, accompanied by dry heaving and gagging, Galifianakis quips, “In life, he enjoyed coffee. And in death, he was enjoyed as coffee.”

I let out a snicker as I bring a hand up to my cheek. I can only imagine. What if that happened to me? It certainly wouldn’t make for as poetic an ending for him. I imagine he’d be at least a little pissed off if he could see it happening. After all, he preferred hazelnut flavored beans to plain.

That does it. I snort a little as I rush to stifle a laugh. I look over at Meiya to make sure I haven’t woken her. I’m shaking from holding it in and, all the while, I know I shouldn’t be finding this remotely as funny as I am.

After a couple of minutes, I’m able to regain some composure. I take a few deep breaths and look out the window again.

He wasn’t all bad.

—

2:00 AM

We used to go golfing together. It was one of the few things that always seemed to bring us together no matter what else was going wrong in our lives. It didn’t matter how bad the court battles between my parents got, or what terrible argument we had gotten into over the phone that week. We could always go out onto the golf course and just talk.

“I always play better when I have you out here with me,” he’d say. Often after we’d both ripped drives up the center of the fairway. We needed some distraction like that to connect. Neither of us was ever much good at expressing ourselves otherwise. At least to each other.

The more I think about that, the more I find room to forgive him. He really was trying. But I think, sometimes, his inability to communicate was from some fear of screwing me up like his father did to him.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that parenting, in a way, can be thought of as damage control.

I’m not forgetting all the difficult times. However, when I remember my father, I’d like those late afternoons on the golf course to stand out more than everything else. Highlighting the more pleasant memories doesn’t have to mean forgetting the negative. That will always be there, but I don’t think that dwelling on it will help me either.

2:30 AM

I sink under the covers, and lean over towards Meiya. After kissing her on the forehead, I roll over and try to get some much-needed sleep. I have a fight today.

End

~Sean Donnelly