Key West. Our housed teemed with cockroaches, lizards and our kids’ friends,
Caribes, Cubans, Conchs, but even in “Paradise” bosses were unremitting
assholes.
We retired to the family farm, lived on a dirt road between fields of corn and
soybeans, swam in frigid Lake Michigan. I never suspected I would love
being a Midwestern farmer, but corrupt commissioners plunked an outdoor
turbine factory in our midst, called it a “wind farm,” as if that made it
agricultural. The spinning, the flutter, the subsonic vibration made us sick.
We sold the farm, beat an exit. Our kids had made a bed for us in Denver,
downtown shining to the east, mountains snow-covered to the west. I rescue
abused dogs and walk them in the park. Blacks and Mexicans approach and I
say “Friend... friend.” The walkers smile. The dog doesn’t growl. He knows a
treat’s coming if he’s a friend to all.
My ninety-year old father dreams of women, their long limbs in his bed, of
drinking tequila in a little Mexican town where he and his girl buy a photo of
Jesus whose eyes move from side to side. My father puts it on the dresser next
to the cigarette burns, and Jesus watches him and his lady hump for hours.
My ninety-year-old father dreams of a world without nuclear power, without
any power at all. He lives in the woods with his lady. They gather nuts and
berries and sometimes find a fish in a free-running stream. Sometimes he
takes his little green boat and rows to Japan, where the Pacific is not radiated
with nuclear runoff, but is clean and hums with the songs of the fishes. One
school of carp tries to make it as an a capella group, but they suck and they
know it. They laugh at themselves, almost choke with laughter. My father
laughs uncontrollably and falls out of the boat into the pleasantly warm water,
and awakes to find he’s peed the bed again.
3.