Tomorrow makes 300 days. I think I know what I’m going to write about, but I’m still thinking.
On the eve of that, I wanted to offer a memory I don’t often share.
Most of you know my father is gone. He’s been gone for longer than he’s been gone, really. I try, when people ask, to think of nice things to say, but I’ve been thinking about him more lately than I have in years. I think part of it is that I’ve come home, and while he’s not here, and the people who knew him aren’t really here anymore, I have memories in places, and while they’re all much older, I sometimes see some of the women he used to use me as a prop to hit on. I saw one the other day at Wal-Mart. She didn’t recognize me. Or if she did, she was nice enough not to say anything.
I’m a sentimental person, but I really don’t miss my father, and I feel bad that I don’t. I mean he was awful to me, and I watched him be awful to my mom, then to his next wife (who died in their bed) then to his next wife who also died before he did. But my mom loved him, and I only exist because the two of them felt enough love to have me. So… I feel like I owe something to that whole process.
I feel like if I can share one fond memory of the guy, perhaps it could break the cycle of me remembering him as the man who hurt my mother, who embarrassed me, and who never really seemed to do anything positive in my life. If you watch, though, like my every attempt to find happy memories of him, it’ll end up with me not really remembering him fondly.
So here’s a story.
My dad was cheap. Like super cheap. His days with me (it was always picking me up for the day and going to do his errands– his visitation day that was required for the $25 of child support he hardly ever paid. Like $25 was going to help anyone) consisted of going to K-Mart, then to Target, then to Big Lots, with lunch in the middle and a stop wherever the woman he was trying to make time with worked. Fun times.
But there was this promotion at Burger King back then. For some weird reason, they were angry at one guy who had never tried the Whopper– a certain Herb.
There was this commercial:
My father was my opposite in so many ways. One of those ways is that he was smooth (or at least he thought he was). He didn’t embarrass easy. He wasn’t awkward, and he didn’t like to make jokes or have fun. At the age of like seven or eight, the last time I spent any significant time with him (significant in hours– I rarely spent more than 4 or 5 hours with him unless it was X-mas eve, which I always spent with his family, people who I barely knew and who, other than my grandmother, didn’t care to know me), he would prefer to spend his time complaining to me, a child, about how he couldn’t pay his bills. Never stopped him from having a fancy car or spoiling his girlfriends, but his bills apparently were hard to pay on his police officer salary.
Anyway, he wanted his cheap Whopper sandwiches. So Mr. Smooth walks up to the register, orders two whoppers, large fries, drinks, then he pops out “oh, I’m not the Herb you’re looking for.”
His name was not Herb, by the way. Not that it matters, but just as a point of order.
“Pardon?” the cashier asked.
Again, Swaggy Dad let’s loose with “I’m not the Herb you’re looking for.”
The cashier, which I think he was trying to flirt with, still looked confused.
“I’m not Herb,” he said insistently.
The other cashier, in the other line, bellows “We aren’t doing that promotion, sir.”
My father’s face turned blood red. He paid full price for the Whoppers.
It was the first time I saw someone treat him that way, and it was the moment I realized how different I was from him, even as a child. To this day, I’d laugh something like that off. In fact I’ve said more embarrassing things waiting in line. I like to cut up and have fun casual conversations with people.
I needed to see him as the rest of the world saw him, as a guy who was trying to be cool and utilize a silly burger discount through uttering a code word.
I still laugh when I imagine it in my head. Him there, hair slicked back, aviator sunglasses tucked into his shirt collar, leather jacket that I think he shoe polished, wearing jeans with those boots that only French guys or circa 1985 go-go dancers wear (the tight ankle/mid-height heel ones with the zippers that go up the side so the front is smooth), leaning on the counter like he’s all cool, holding his blinged out money clip, repeatedly telling the attractive cashier half his age about his status vis-a-being-the-Herb-she-was-looking-for.
He was a sleazy fool with bad moves and few moves that went beyond his cop stuff.
He was never the Herb anyone was looking for.
Maybe that’s why I stopped looking long before he did.