The Mexico of My Father's Body

The Mexico of My Father's Body

When I was young, I remember my father once believed that my mother did not believe his name was Stewart. He had become obsessed with the notion that she had constructed another life for him that she believed he hid from her.

He set about to prove that he was who he was by creating a routine in his life that she could not find fault with - that she could come to count on as HIS LIFE.

In the mornings when he woke at five-forty-five, he made sure to lay in bed, curled around her on his side with his face buried into her ear. He would whisper in the absolute lightest tone that was close to breath only, that he was sorry, but he had to get up and get ready for work. It didn’t matter to him whether she was awake or not. He would do this first thing every morning. Having made sure his slippers were precisely placed the night before, he swung his legs around and out of bed and into the slippers.

While I was his son, I didn’t have such high regard for my father’s sensibilities toward his status with my mother and that might be why there was such tension between us and between his regard for me as his son and his regard for me as a separate entity.

When I saw your face this morning I understood what I might have looked like had I seen my father’s face, unshaven, turning crimson, and not wanting to rouse my mother. There was no laughter there, no humor or even likability in your eyes seeing me and my checked-but-churning demons. I reached into the fridge for the carton of milk, raised it to drink, but instead put the container to my moist forehead, ignoring you. You told me that you no longer held your faith in who I was. And so I moved in my mind to a place that held room for only me. There with the refrigerator light glowing around me, you left and I stood there for a long time.

It was light when I next thought of my father as me, coming to an image of me as my father and there was no smile, no time for a smile as there were no words, no sentiments, no actions I could take to bring myself back to the world that held all of the people like you that had come into my life.

When I took my late-night walk, I saw two boys on one bicycle - one on the pedals, standing, and one on the seat behind him, legs trailing. I wondered what their parents thought of them being out that late. They looked to be only ten or eleven years old and they were wild-eyed. It was chilly and they had no coats. I thought to give them mine but then, I only had one and how would I get them to stop and how would I get it back?

Once, when he didn’t know I was watching, I saw my father stop a boy - like the boys late at night - and take his name and phone number down. He raised his voice and I could hear him from underneath the window that I had been peeping into. He told the boy all sorts of things that he would do if he saw the boy out at night that late again. I heard him tell of things that I could not have imagined my father doing.

It put such fear into me that I could do nothing but run home, sneaking into my room and giving up the treat of Jane Diviss stepping out of the bath. Jane, wrapped in her soft pink towel to show me for my enjoyment alone, just enough of a crease between her breasts to keep me from telling my best friend, Peter. Just how might I ever be able to survive an inquiry from my father upon discovery at my late-night theater post?

I would be tangled in juniper and holly, dirty knees from crawling across the azalea beds. My father would stand upright and out away from the house and say in a normal volume, “Theodore, what the hell do you think you’re doing?” And with a swat to the back of my head, he would tell me to get home. I wonder if he would stand for a moment, looking into Jane’s window. Might he wish for more than my mother? More than the small paperback books in the bottom of his bottom drawer?

How might I, with magazines of my own in my bottom drawer, excuse myself in stopping these boys? How might I excuse myself from not stopping them? I was like lard in the fridge to these boys’ purposeful transit. They had to move to get somewhere. I found my destination in not moving - not deciding. In not choosing. Were they as dissatisfied with their destination as I was?

If I am not able to be satisfied with my destination, maybe the places I have been, could, at least, appease my sense of lack of destination in my life. Numbers have the credibility of certainty to me. The number twelve-oh-two has followed me around all of my life. I only say 1202, because it’s actually another number. But since I am so connected, so entangled with this number, I’ve been forced to use it for all of my bank account PIN numbers, my computer passwords, and have even insisted on safe deposit box and telephone numbers containing this combination.

The place that brought my awareness to this recurring number was the house at 1202 North Thirteenth, just off of Vine Street in Kansas City, Missouri. I say the Missouri part because no one ever goes to Kansas City, Kansas, but everyone thinks Kansas is where Kansas City is.

1202 is - was - a two-story condemned house next to the building that was to become my business location and home in 1985. There is no one thing about this house that brings me home to 1202, the number of my life. There are many things that I remember about it, though. And I can imagine the junkies, sniffling and cold, in the boarded-up room that had been the bathroom, heating up the liquid in their tarnished, blackened spoons. They were gone when we took the house. All the life and close-to-life that had been there was gone. Except for the chicken. The chicken lived in the bathroom - in the bathtub - the rim of the bathtub being its perch. I’m not sure if a chicken can be colored, or if it has to be a rooster to have color, but we called it a chicken and it was brown and red and orange and absolutely beautiful in its contrast to the smoke-darkened, water-damaged bathroom in 1202 North Thirteenth.

From that time on, 1202 has appeared on pencils, ticket stubs, serial numbers on expensive camera equipment and I have been going through my memory boxes that I keep in the garage I found that had its own street number of 1202.

The garage that my father ruled over in Delafield had no street address of its own, but it could have been a whole empire unto itself, the way my father had it set up, and with his rules for conduct and operation of its features. After a rain, the hard-packed dirt floor smelled like the nightcrawlers my brother Randy and I would snatch up in the garden after dark and after we had watered the dirt to bring them out, our hands smelling like them and the dirt and the slime that covered them.

I could never get used to the clear, viscous covering when there were maybe fifty or sixty of them in one Folger’s thirty-two-ounce coffee can and my brother would make me put my hand into the pile of them up to my small, eight-year-old wrist.

When it became late afternoon, the sun had been moving over the green, paint-chipped rowboat that we tied up to the boat wreckage just off the island. The smell of those worms seemed to stick to the can, to the bottom of the seats in the boat, and to my hands and fingers that I tried so hard to avoid wiping my nose on but couldn’t.

On that day in the summer on a Sunday after the rain and after Reverend Jones had gone home, getting his fill of fishing and drinking beers with my father, I stood in the opening of the garage. The gray-painted doors were swung fully open to let any kind of breeze in to counter the almost full-on sun beating down on the asphalt shingles. My root beer Popsicle melted in between my sucks on it and while I watched my father work away on his latest project. He sang a Frank Sinatra song in his deep and sensual singing voice - a voice that made me believe he was more than just my father. I stood in the doorway in the shadow the sun made from above and behind the garage - through the breaking of my Popsicle in half; through the root beer become mostly ice at the bottom of the stick, and through the entire song my father sang underneath the fluorescent light above his cluttered worktable.

His arms were working, moving, laying imaginary paths across the tabletop. Arms like celery stalks held together with red rubber bands top and bottom and bunched up in the middle, flexing, hard, bare and sweating. Maybe his arms were the Mexico of my father’s body - the country that was not seen underneath his thick, dark blue work shirts that were continually splattered with welding sparks, leaving mysterious holes of different sizes all around his wrists and forearms and shirt front.

I imagined my father working in Mexico City, in a factory that made radiators for Caterpillar, and a Mexican himself. He would have a large family, like the one in real life, and he would stop at the cantina in the strip mall on his way home from work. He would bring radiators that he would steal in the after-hours when he would claim to be working overtime and sell them out behind the bar in the service alley.

He would tie the money up underneath his small car, on top of the leaf springs.

My mother would always have his dinner ready when he arrived home, sober, and ready to leave work behind and enjoy his family. I would never see my father drunk. He had made a standard for himself of that, but I could smell the cervesa on his breath, and I knew his tequila-dried lips. My mother never minded - he was so good-natured with us during his evenings at home - she knew he would sleep early, rise early, and be at work on time to greet his boss. She never knew about the late afternoon sales, though. She believed that his pay brought home was all that he made. And even though it was barely enough to put a dollar or two into the woven basket at church, she would not have thought to ask him if it was all he earned.

He would show me, when I became sixteen, three of the twenty-one places he hid his other money. There were three places for each of us seven children and were marked on a Mexico City street map using the letters and numbers on the edges to make the code for their exact location.

I wished this were true, standing there in the summer shade with my whole life left over after finishing that root beer Popsicle.

Sometimes when I awaken, I’m eleven years old again. Wanting to pretend that my covers are anchored into my bed and I’m pinned into it. I can lie there and listen to all of the goings-on in the house. My two feather pillows cradle my cheek and forehead and a feather quill pokes through into the skin on my jaw and I wiggle it to feel the sharpness in contrast to the soft warm flannel pillowcase. I can smell the smells of being human ground into the pillow as I swish my bare forearms and legs back and forth across the taut sheets.

I feel that if I could lay there until I grow up, there would be things waiting for me that I had dreamt of. There would be a home to return to that held me in it as though it were the most secure of sanctuaries. There would be someone - maybe a brother - who would be there to show me how well his life had turned out and who would show our home movies on a real Daylab home movie screen. The movies would be of me, performing for the camera, showing off my athletic prowess, and always introducing my mother and father as two of Delafield’s most upstanding parents and citizens.

The movies my darling brother would show, depicted me out of bed, alert, ready, moving, anticipating each action around me. For too soon would I be back in that bed underneath my sheets, flattened, secured like a wound forming a scab underneath a very tight Band-aid.