Safety

Note: This piece is fairly intense and will make it clear that my decision to call my Substack “Occasionally Funny” should be taken quite literally. One of the things I want to do in this space is practice some truth-telling as I contemplate writing a memoir. I do have – I hope you’ll come to agree – many funny stories to tell. But this is not one of them.

My father, still in the blue Air Force flight cap and khakis he’d worn to work that day, moved with silent purpose toward our apartment complex’s outdoor swimming pool. He carried me with one hand, fingers through the waistband of my denim shorts, so I was bent and face down. I was barely four and it’s one of my earliest memories, but I can still see the dry grass going by beneath me.

Decades later I would learn that my mother had greeted him upon arrival with the news that a neighbor had caught me inside the short pool fence with no adult supervision. I couldn’t swim. Neither could Mom.

Dad snatched me up from where I’d been playing off to the side of our front yard and said, “I guess it’s time you learn to swim.” He started toward the pool.

I don’t know what I thought would happen next, but it wasn’t this: He was tall and strong, an excellent athlete at 24, and as we approached the pool, he stepped over the fence without breaking stride, lifted me up and tossed my flailing little self into the deep end.

I had no idea what to do. I struggled and sank. I could see him, all blurry up there, bent over the water, yelling at me and gesturing. Finally, he reached in, grabbed a hand and yanked me upright onto the pool deck. I coughed and sputtered. He told me to kick my legs next time and he mimicked a dog paddle. Once I’d caught my breath, he picked me up and threw me in again, a little farther out.

So it went for four or five more tries, however long it took for me to get to where he could throw me into the middle and I could paddle myself to the edge and crawl out of the pool. Once he was satisfied, he took my hand and we walked wordlessly back to the apartment, where Mom told me to leave my wet clothes on the floor by the front door, go up to the bathroom and dry off, then get on some dry clothes and come down for dinner. What had just happened was never discussed. I have never loved swimming in pools, although I was the first kid in my air base youth group to earn a lifeguard card.

One day around the same time, just Dad and I went on a grocery run in our Chevy Bel Air. I loved these trips because he let me sit up front and he’d stack phonebooks and cushions so I could see out. He’d tell me stuff about the cars and places we drove past, and I’d sit there beaming, thrilled to be with him.

Then, at one stop, I forgot myself and bolted into the street before he could come around and grab my hand. Some guy screeched to a halt to avoid hitting me, then he honked and yelled at Dad to get control of his kid. Dad told him to fuck off, then he told me to get in the back. We drove home in silence.

When we got there, he didn’t pull into the parking lot, but parked out on the street at the curb. “Stay there,” he said, as he grabbed the groceries and walked the short distance to our apartment. Soon he was back.

“Get out and stand in front of the car,” he commanded.

I did. “Look at that,” he said. “See how big it is? Now get down on your back, right here.”

He maneuvered me a bit, then slid me under the car so my head was wedged between the street and one of the tires. He put his hand on my face and pushed me hard enough against the rubber and the asphalt that I ended up with little scratches on my cheek and forehead.

“See now? If you don’t stop doing stupid shit like running in front of cars, that’s what it’ll look like right before you get squished and killed.”

That fear lives in me. I walk with a limp and am somewhat stiff-legged because I’ve had five knee operations and my lower legs are partly paralyzed from an illness I had in my 30s. Seeing me lumbering along anywhere near a crossing, drivers will often stop and wave me across. We have these little standoffs where I shake my head and wave them through until they give up and go.

By the time I was five my mom realized she needed to divorce him, not long after he taught me a lesson in manners by back-handing me out of a chair on our screen porch when I reached for the last hamburger on a serving platter without asking if anyone else wanted it. She told me many years later that she’d realized he was going to seriously injure me with one of his teachable moments, and that he was so overwhelmed by his duty to keep us safe that he would not be able to stop.

I got one more crucial lesson before he was sent away, and it came at night.

“Be quiet and come with me,” he whispered as he yanked me out of bed and stood me up. “I’m gonna show you why it’s dangerous to steal things.”

I was confused. I hadn’t stolen anything and wasn’t planning to. Then I saw that he had his Colt 45 in hand. The Colt is a massive handgun that fires a bullet nearly half an inch across. I had seen him shoot it a few times out in the boonies and even with my fingers in my ears it made them ring. I had seen what those bullets could do to overripe cantaloupes and peaches.

Dad had gotten up to pee, looked out the window and seen some kids in the laundry room, busting into the coin boxes. He shushed me one more time and off we went toward the brightly lit room and through an open door. He pointed the gun at all of them as he bellowed orders to lay down on their bellies with their hands behind their heads.

I stood there in my jammies, a little behind him, my fingers in my ears because I was sure he was going to kill them to teach me about stealing. They whimpered and pleaded with him in Spanish.

“You see?” he said to me. “You gonna remember this?”

Before I could say anything, a calming voice that turned out to be a sheriff’s deputy’s said from somewhere out in the dark, “Sir, please lay down your weapon and step back. We’ll take care of it now.”

I don’t know how it all worked out, or if or when Dad got his sidearm back. I do know that not long afterward, I was standing beside the Bel Air with my sister, both of us crying as he hugged us and told us he’d be seeing us on weekends.

I would grow up fearing and hating him, then cruelly rebuffing him when he tried to reconcile and apologize. When he went to fly combat missions in Vietnam, I hoped he’d get shot down.

Then, when I was 31 and trying to kick 17 years of blackout drinking, I had to come to terms with both my fear of my dad and my love for him.

I opened my heart a little and began to get to know him. I learned that crippling fear (and the booze that held it at bay) coursed through generation after generation of men in our family. We made a pact that neither of us would make excuses for what we’d done, and I came to accept that, as terrifying and wrong-headed as his lessons were, he was quite desperately doing the best he could to give me something he’d never felt: a sense of safety.