I watched Jackie Brown for the first time a few nights ago and thought of you, Dad. Though I didn’t remember your birthday was coming, I remembered Jackie Brown was the only Tarantino film you ever had anything positive to say about. You walked out of Natural Born Killers, which Tarantino wrote; walked out of Pulp Fiction, which was all his. In the ‘90s, I didn’t get it. I knew you hated violence, but you also loved art, so I couldn’t fathom why Tarantino’s wit and aesthetics didn’t override the gore for you, or why you couldn’t seem to see the beauty in the gore itself. If you’d told me anything of your childhood, of the reasons you became the draft-dodging, vegetarian, landscape-painting, guitar-playing, 9-to-5 refusing son of an academic on the Nobel Prize committee, the genesis of your insistence on being anything other than a great man, I might’ve had the chance to understand you—even comfort you—before you died. You could, if you wished, have marked this world deeply, but chose to tread light, to leave no trace that stank of oppression or carnage. These last thirteen years, I’ve gathered stories you told my mother and stepmother: the family pets disappearing in the night, and your concurrent suspicions that your father had slipped them off to the lab for experiments; the way your mother—once a free-spirited, jazz-singing bombshell—drank, in part because your father neglected and left her for a colleague, drank until she died of cancer on Christmas day. And I’m certain there was more you told no one: not the wives you married, much less the daughter you raised. Like what hardships—besides hunger—befell you those months you lived homeless in San Francisco; like the horrors your quadriplegic uncle divested to you from his tour in Korea (that other pointless mid-century bloodbath most of the country forgot); like the lies you heard your father tell, the favors exchanged, the fine-suited fakeness more loathsome to your principled soul than death. And speaking of death, of course you welcomed it. You’d be damned before you’d jerry-rig a failing body into gimping along for a few more years, like your father, whose quadruple bypass cost more money than you earned in all your fifty-six years. And of course you let your teeth rot. And of course you kept riding those green, skittish horses—sometimes breaking them, but more often yourself being broken. And of course you wouldn’t see a dentist, cardiologist, or chiropractor, because fuck them for charging an arm and a leg to fix a toe or a finger, and fuck the system that enabled them, and fuck, most of all, The Man. And so you died the way nature intended—without intervention, and without repair. If you’d shared even a shard of your sorrow with me, I might’ve sooner had the blessing of being pierced with the truth of why: why you needed the sweet justice of Pam Grier’s sass and strength; why you needed to see a good woman get away with doing a bad thing; why Jackie Brown was the only Tarantino movie you ever had anything positive to say about. Today, Dad, on your birthday, I finally get it.