Programmed
To
Suffer
Delusions
The glow of the two-in-the-morning television screen lit up the living room. He’d been on the floor again, reruns of M*A*S*H. Marlboro red cherry moved around the atmosphere, a living room satellite circling his head. A thin grey wool blanket, and a pillow skillfully placed on the floor like a man watching cattle under the stars. I don’t remember the last time he slept in a bed, or if he ever did.
Half in tune with the program he floated off to places I couldn’t see. His eyes changed color from blue to black, then over to the faded eyes of a blind man. A thick black mustache curled over his top lip. Saltine crumbs found a home deep within the follicles. Next to the blanket, a half-eaten package of Saltines rested next to a can of sardines and an opened can of Chef Boyardee ravioli. The fork he used to eat the red goop without heating it up was half under the broken flower print couch he’d bought at Goodwill months earlier.
The day he bought the couch he was supposed to take me to a baseball card show. Jim Rice was signing autographs. I spent an entire afternoon in my bedroom looking through all my cards to find the perfect card for him to sign. I’d waited patiently for weeks to meet Jim Rice because Dad never took me out much. On the day of the show, we got into the red Lebaron, the car he rented to drive us to Orlando the year before. I’m not sure why he still had it, I thought he bought it. Rent-to-own like half of our furniture.
Fans from all over Massachusetts waited in line to have their memorabilia signed. Jim didn’t seem happy about meeting people but for the right amount of money he smiled. I didn’t say anything about his smile that hid an angry face. I grew up in a world where it didn’t matter what you did for a job: grave digger, grocery clerk, tire repair, it only mattered that you showed up. Jim Rice showed up.
Dad pretended to look at racks full of cards, sports magazines, and hats, but like always he drifted. A night full of screams and other assorted sounds of terror occupied him in the middle of the day at Al Forbes Sports. I counted the people in front of me, I was twentieth in line. I felt nervous, what could I say to Jim Rice? That I remember the game against Baltimore when he refused to hustle after the ball and The Orioles went up by two, but later he made up for it by sending a homer over the Green Monster. You can’t knock a man for being lazy on occasion. The cities of history have collapsed under the weight of perfection.
My thoughts about what to say were interrupted by a man shouting on the other side of the store. I heard an attention gathering crash. A larger man had his hands around Dad’s throat. Jim Rice picked up a stack of papers and went out the back door. The man asked the owner of the store to call the police. He claimed Dad tried to lift his wallet, but the manager of the store asked for proof, and when the man couldn’t provide any the manager refused to call the police.
When everything settled down, the manager reassured the line of people that Jim Rice would soon return to sign autographs. My father was asked to leave, in turn I had to leave. Five people away from meeting Jim Rice. Another ten minutes or less and I’d have a baseball card signed by one of the best bats on the Red Sox. Dad let me down often. He lied, cheated, and stole. I never spoke up, in fact, I often defended him. When I should’ve been playing pond hockey and going to the movies to see Friday the 13th part four hundred with my friends, I was busy defending Dad’s actions. Deep inside I wish the big man snapped Dad’s throat, letting him drop dead right there in the middle of the store. I swallowed the feeling out of shame, out of guilt. Who’d stick up for him? Like always, I shut up and walked to the car and climbed in.
Dad swore to me he didn’t try to steal the wallet, even though I knew he did. He begged me to believe him like I was a judge, and he threw himself at my mercy. “I like Wade Boggs better anyway,” I told him, looking out the window at the passing stones in St. Bernard’s Cemetery. I was known for being quiet, awkward, weird, but I wasn’t known for fits of anger. The levels reached deep inside my heart, black iron melting and bubbling for the right moment. Dad carried on, made promises about getting groceries and how he’ll make it up to me by buying me a Boggs rookie card. We didn’t get groceries, nor did I ever see the Boggs rookie card. Instead, we pulled into Good Will.
I’m not sure why, but when stressed out we walked around the Good Will. Dad walked the aisles like he had an axe to grind, a crime to figure out. His hands rattled a bit whenever he was trying to calm himself, and then he noticed the flower printed couch. He grabbed the price tag and ripped it off. The couch looked homeless, tattered, like the previous owners had abused it for the last thirty years, and when it grew up and the owners could no longer abuse the fabric, rip it by the seams, and flick ashes on it, they dumped it at the Good Will.
The couch was purchased, and Dad rented a van from U-Haul, and I helped him load it. We carried it into the apartment and placed it on the floor. “I’m going to fix her up new,” he said proudly with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, “you’ll see.” That was months ago. The couch suffered the same fate as me, always in the background looking in on my father, hoping someday he’d get it right. That the day wouldn’t be about him, but about me, the couch, or the hundred other items and people he shattered over the years. I waited for the day when I didn’t have to stick up for a man twenty-seven years older than me. It never came.
My aunt and uncles shut up when I walked around the corner, and their faces turned from a stone anger to instant smiles. I knew they were talking about Dad and how he fucked up again, and it was my job to correct them, and they let me. They pretended he was no longer a thief, con and liar when I handed out my twisted version of the truth. My entire family thought I didn’t notice what he was doing, that I was oblivious, but I understood the con of the open hand. Things in plain sight are what you want to see and believe, with Dad the truth was inside fiction. If willing to look hard enough through the entertainment you’d find the reality of who he was. Protecting him, sifting through his fictions, was a twenty-four-hour job that no one paid me for.
One night after we arrived home from a day of driving around and doing nothing, the lights were out. The food in the fridge had spoiled. He didn’t pay the electric bill, but he had enough money for cigarettes and cans of cola. I looked at my baseball cards in the darkness of my bedroom. The streetlight outside my window provided just enough light so I could read the stats on the back of the card. I didn’t act angry in front of him. I accepted what life had handed me, and I continued being the best version of myself in my bedroom. I couldn’t use my television, the dark stole both the words in my books and from my mouth.
“I’ll have the lights on in no time,” he said before I let the blackhole of my bedroom swallow me. “I’ll go buy some groceries tomorrow, too” He bought crackers and peanut butter for me along with warm Cokes. After he provided me with the wholesome meal, out from the closet he pulled an extension cord, ran it underneath the door, and plugged the cord into a socket in the hallway of the apartment complex. He then dragged the orange cord through the kitchen and into the living room and plugged his television in.
It was around that time he started dating the woman who’d eventually become my stepmother. Earlier he left me alone without much food in the dark and hot apartment so he could see her. I watched reruns of CHIPS, followed by NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. Horror films didn’t scare me back then and still don’t. My father scared me. Not knowing what might happen next scared me. Can I take a shower and wash my clothes, or will my classmates make fun of me again for smelling like poverty?
I ate peanut butter crackers, drank a couple of warm cokes, and watched the people in the movie barricade themselves inside a house. They didn’t know what was coming, they didn’t understand what was happening to them and why. The dead were coming back to life and eating the flesh of the living. The living didn’t stand a chance. I sat on the Good Will Couch playing with the frayed fabric and watched with an intense feeling in my stomach. When it was over there wasn’t a soul to hug me goodnight. I went to bed in my room without power. Later, I woke up at midnight when I heard Dad come home and turn on the television. His bedroom was a mess, empty, and never used. The living room floor was his home. He feared sleep.
I went back into my room and slept a while longer, then, after trying to pee in the dark, I walked out into the living room; he was asleep. Columbo was on the television. The Saltines had made the jump from the floor and were now in pieces all over the Good Will Couch. Dad’s body, twisted and contorted on the floor. His hand slammed on the carpet, but he was still asleep. I couldn’t make out what he was shouting. Loud moans that sounded like pleas locked up inside of an old backyard freezer.
“I’m sorry,” he said with his eyes closed. “I’m sorry.” He begged over and over. “I’m sorry.” I stood there listening and watching him. He scared me, chills ran through the hairs of my head, and I waited for what would come next, but there never was a next, just a lengthy list of apologies to the many faces who appeared to him behind his eyelids. I wanted to lay on the floor next to him and tell him he’d be okay, but whenever I found the courage to be soft, he’d pop up and yell out incoherently and swing at the air. He reached for someone but no one, then as if it never happened, he’d light a cigarette and return to the enormous letdown of a father he’d always been.
He’s been dead four years now, and a few months ago I decided to tape old photographs of him around my tiny office, most of them from his childhood in the early 1950s. I did it to remember a man I both hated and loved. And on nights like this one, warm, silent, alone, I, too, want to scream, and not for myself, but for Dad. A man who never understood that it’s okay to stop the war within and look in the direction of love. That he didn’t always need to hide that scared twenty-year-old kid who spent two tours running through the jungles of Vietnam watching murder, mayhem, loss, blood, and madness. That it’s decent to apologize to the ghosts of the people he was ordered to kill to keep himself alive. We all need ongoing friendships with ghosts throughout our lives. They remind us that we are still among the living.
