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I was sacked out with some bimbo that I had picked up at bar the night before when I got the phone call from my older brother telling me that my father was dead. It was about five in the morning and my mouth tasted like a dirty ashtray rinsed out with stale beer. The bimbo laying next to me was bleach blond and fat. She was stretched out on her back and snoring so loud I was surprised that my always nosey neighbors hadn’t been pounding on the walls and threatening to call the cops as they so often did when I had a small get together. The bimbo looked familiar. Not because we had just recently fornicated but like I had seen her somewhere before familiar. Probably in one of my classes or around campus. I was studying film at UCLA. I wanted to be a filmmaker like Kubrick.
“Dad is dead” was the first thing that came out of the mouth of my pathetic brother, a GED graduate that had spent his whole life in Minneapolis working at a roller rink. “Suicide. He shot himself with his shotgun.” he sobbed. “Mommy just found him. She came back from walking at the mall and found him sitting there dead in his office.”
I rolled out of bed and walked into the kitchen and reached into the fridge for a cold Lucky Lager, popped the top and killed the bottle in three long gulps. Damn, that tasted good. “I’ll call you from the airport to give you my flight numbers.” I replied to my sobbing sibling as I stifled a huge belch and hung up the phone. I heard the bimbo groan, roll over and fart loudly.
It was late spring in Minnesota but a sloppy wet snow was falling the day of my father’s funeral. Open casket. Dad had shot himself in the chest not in the noggin. My brother had taken my mother to his house to spend the night at his house along with the whining brats that his wife seemed to pop out on an annual basis.
I walked into Dad’s office and sat down in the very chair where he had decided to take his own life. It smelled like lemon Pledge and Mr. Clean. My mother had done the clean up herself. There wasn’t a spot of blood anywhere.
It wasn’t a big surprise that the old man had done himself in. We always seemed to know that it was coming sooner or later. It was just surprising that it had taken this long. He had been a young naval officer on Guam during WWII and had helped screw up the arrival and departure times of the USS Indianapolis. The ship that had delivered the atom bomb.
Everybody knows the story. Damn thing got torpedoed, sank like a rock, and a shitload of sailors got killed by sharks. No one knew where it was. Only the captain of the ship got screwed, he got court martialed while everybody else walked. Dad blamed himself his whole life even though he stayed in and retired. When we moved back to Minneapolis he took a job with the government. Never talked about it to us, we never asked. He’d go on weekly trips, come home, get drunk for two days, and life went on.
I opened up his liquor cabinet and poured a shot of vodka into a glass. Fired up one of Dads unfiltered Camels with his battered old Zippo that had the name of some long gone base in Japan on it. This was my first time in his office, the door had been locked my entire life until now. The room was spartan. A desk and chair and a small single bed. The bed spread looked like you could bounce a quarter on it. Typical.
A long neck beer case was sitting next to his desk with the word OPEN in magic marker on the top. I slammed the shot, poured another, and pulled the box over. It was filled to the top with records. Dads service revolver was sitting on top of them. Military, medical, prison, surveillance, police reports, paid informant reports, mug shots, even some porno shots. I picked the box up and took it over to the bed and began to separate the files.
Must of been hundreds upon hundreds of documents on just two men. Both of them originally from Minnesota. Down south of here. For years someone had been documenting or trying to, every step of their life. Obviously that someone was my father . But why? Why in the hell would he have all this shit?
By the time I had some semblance of an answer the light of morning was starting to shine in through the window. I had killed the old mans bottle of vodka and smoked up almost half a carton of his smokes. My lungs felt like crap but I wasn’t close to being drunk.
Two young men, boys really. From the same part of the country, close enough that they might have even met at one time. How their lives could become so entangled so closely in such a mixture of drugs,narcs, and eventually murder and they didn’t even know each other? And what was my father doing in the middle of all this? That I guess I’ll never know. He took care of that with his shotgun.
The files were all separated on the bed. Coded. Batfish and Juice. Two different men, two different piles. But their story is just like their lives. Intertwined in the words of the snitches, narcs, prison guards, mental ward attendants, cops, and thugs who walked through their lives.
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