Leaving Washington - the rare and noble Lubemobile.
Despite being broke, I managed to spend the last month riding parental goodwill throughout the country, attempting to cure my growing insomnia, frustration, and sloth. These travels took me through a lot of airports. Luckily, I never got groped by any TSA agents – but I did play Seven Minutes in Heaven with a baggage handler. At least I didn’t have to take my shoes off.
My first trip took me to the rocky deserts of Phoenix, where I hung out with my dad and two sisters in the unholy 80 degrees of December. As I flew over the city, I came to a realization that the main difference between Phoenix and the Middle East – both barren, highly conservative regions led by corrupt officials who have at best a heavy disdain for egalitarian human rights – is swimming pools. Maybe I was simply flying over a good neighborhood, but every other house had a backyard that was half turquoise with irrigated water. It got me to thinking: maybe to create peace in the Middle East, we should give the people there swimming pools.
I saw a few strange things while in Phoenix that had nothing to do with the local culture: a television remote that had Braille on it, a basketball game on the Cartoon Network, a video of the Metrodome caving in from a Minnesota blizzard. But the strangest thing I saw on this trip was my dad.
In all his glory.
My old man is a professional gambler, and like all professional gamblers he aspires to be one of two people: Kenny Rogers or Confucius. Like most gamblers, he was never a source of family stability – or anything not resembling sloth – so I found it weird that my old man was now the caretaker of a new puppy which had the horrible name of Baby. Despite having years ago sent me a weird email in which he considered getting some tropical fish to fill some void in his life, this is the first living creature he has been responsible for since my parents got divorced 13 years ago. Surprisingly, he seemed to enjoy the responsibility – though I fear that the dog will get less attention once it gets older and less cute.
Odder still was some of the shit that came out of his mouth while I was there. My dad is one of those strange and outlandish people who doesn’t get how he could have strange and outlandish children (and all three of us are). He derides my warped sense of humor, yet a decade ago called me in the middle of the night, stoned and telling me terrible jokes about cow tits and poor Mexicans. During the brief period I lived with him in Phoenix, he got stoned (again) and started freaking out about how amazing the live-action Flintstones movie was. In another late-night phone call, he told me that he signed me up to be a salesman for some acai berry energy drink because (he said) he thought it was a fantastic product. But no, I’m the weird one.
One of the main topics of conversation during this trip was my dad’s shut-in gambler girlfriend, an old oxygen-huffing gold digger who had dated my old man on and off for the better part of a decade. The recent drama involved this prune suckering my dad into buying her a phone, following that up with some ungrateful shit-talking. My sisters and I ganged up on him, ultimately convincing him to get back the phone and kick her to the curb, but he weakly defended his troubled relationship by calling her “the hottest 64 year old on oxygen.”
He followed up that gem by diving one of my sisters and I around town, ultimately taking us to eat at a well known Chinese restaurant he kept mistakenly referring to as PG Chang’s. On the ride there, he proclaimed his faith in a god of some sort before loudly pondering the possibility of what his life would have been like if he was gay. Um… I guess that since I owe my existence to the fact that he boned my mom, I should say… thanks?
He would follow this up by saying that if he had been gay, he would have gone for our slick as oil waiter. After a few drinks, he got weird and started talking about his marriages. Of my sister’s mother, my old man gloated that he had fooled her into thinking that he wasn’t one of the biggest potheads in town, which seemed kind of sketchy to say. Of my own, he bragged: “When we first met, your mom and I had a lot of sex!”
It was at this moment when my selfish gratitude for my dad’s heterosexuality began to wane.
The Singing Cowboy helped, though.
The old man went on to suggest that I write his biography, but, in so many words – and no doubt never having read a word of anything I’ve written – he wanted me to tone down my weirdness and make it more accessible. The first hitch came quickly, as he recounted his side of the story of when I got kicked out of a casino for pissing in an empty parking lot and embarrassing him in front of all his fellow gamblers – conveniently forgetting the part of the story in which I watched him play poker for 14 hours straight and would have rammed my head through a wall to get out of the casino. Oh well; a modern classic fails.
I like my dad, and we had a good time in total, but it helps if there’s a slight barrier between us. As such, I’m glad I stayed at my local sister’s place, where I slept on her gigantic couch and beat back sleeplessness. And after our time was over, the old man took me to the airport, and after a few days at home in Washington, I set out again and exchanged the desert for the snow.
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