Dad was a two-bit TV cowboy from the 60s. “Buck up, Slim.” That was his catchphrase. He said it in the last scene of Ranchero Dawn before putting a slug in the gut of the baby-faced Johnny West, who won an Oscar that same year for an epic WWII movie and never did TV again. It was the kind of catchphrase that stuck. The kind that gets hung on you like a life sentence in a show that started in black and white and went technicolor in season 2.
When Dad left Mom for “a make-up artist half his age” and stopped coming to my school plays, he told her, “Buck up, Slim.” She threw a Stinger at him by the pool, leaving ten years, broken glass, and a creme-de-menthe stain on the concrete. I didn’t see him in real life again until the finale.
In high school, I landed the role of class clown with a drinking problem. In college, when the deviants at Pasadena Community found me blacked out drunk in front of Ranchero Dawn, they nicknamed me “Slim.” It stuck. When they shot me with finger pistols, I would press one to my temple and pull the trigger. It got a big laugh.
Dad was on TV in the 80s. Guest spots on Love Boat and a network regular as the nosy old bucket-hat neighbor. “Buck up, Bucket Hat.” The deviants liked that one, too. I only hated it a little, but I dropped out anyway. That’s when the real trouble started. The auditions, rejections, and hard years piled on like late-night reruns.
Dad called me one night when I was strung out on J&B and blue benny’s. I couldn’t breathe when I heard his gravelly faux-cowboy voice. Even in that fog, I knew it was him. Who knows how he got my number? It wasn’t Mom. She drank herself silly with a convoy of rough men and fresh husbands before the cancer put its hands on her. He was coughing hard, and the oxygen tube in his nose was whistling when he told me he was dying. There wasn’t much to say. He called me “partner.” I told him I would come.
It took me a week to clean myself up enough to drive the rust-bucket clunker Mom left me. On the way, I stopped in front of the old rental in the Hills. In my mind, I imagined Mom by the pool in her cat-eye shades. Dad roughed my hair before putting his sheriff’s hat on my head. When the long palm shadows gave up, we disappeared inside. Mom and Dad pinched together down one end of the couch while I played on the shag carpet. The blue flicker of the TV filled the room–the perfect ending. Fade to black.
I had never been to a nursing home before, at least not the kind for dying two-bit stars with no money. I stayed outside a bit for a quick smoke with the other death-watchers. Dad’s room smelled like Pinesol and old flowers. It was the perfect setting for one of those bad laugh-track sitcoms. “Hollywood Has-Beens” brought to you by Pall Malls. That was his brand. There was the buxom nurse with a southern accent and flip mouth, the fish-out-of-water chief doctor – just in from being fired from the big city hospital—and the young black orderly with his own catchphrase: “Ain’t that somethin’!” He’s the breakout star.
At sunup, the orderly pulled the shades and cleaned up Dad’s mess. He stuffed the soiled sheets into a plastic bag and looked at me with a wide grin. “Buck up, Slim,” he said, making his fingers into guns, shooting them into the air, and blowing off the ends. “Ain’t that somethin’!” It stung hard until the mechanized laughter welled up and faded out. Roll credits.
“It is,” I said, and sat on the edge of the bed to watch Dad die.
