Does This Story Really Need a Title?
I remember this one Friday night when I was a kid. My father had worked all day in the Texas heat, but he agreed to take me to a movie in town just because I never asked for much, and because I liked movies. I wasn’t just a film buff, though. I was an idiot too. When my father went to the bathroom, I sneaked off with this girl I hardly knew. We had planned to meet there and make out. All day we had planned this.
We hid in one of the back rows and hunkered down; and just before the film started, my father came limping past. It wasn’t hard to tell my dad from other men. His left leg was shorter than his right. Even in darkness, there was a visible rhythm to the way that he walked. I know I should have been sympathetic, as do I wish I had gone to be with my father; but like I said, I was an idiot back then and, sometimes, my father used to beat me with a leather strap when he drank too much Pearl.
But this night, my father didn’t seem as angry as he seemed sad not to find me. He searched all around two or three rows of seats and called out my name a few times and then he said to the air, Did you disappear?
When the previews came on, I could see that my father was carrying popcorn, and two cokes with straws. He stood bathed in projected light with everyone else in the theatre anticipating the start of the movie, and the thought of all these strangers waiting for the crippled man with two cokes to sit made me feel guilty, as did it make me want to go to my father and say, Dad, I’m right here.
But I was holding that girl’s hand and somehow could not free myself to be with my father. Instead I slunk deeper into my rickety seat that had one broken arm to kiss that girl, and also to fondle her breasts. She was a lousy kisser. I’d kissed eight or nine girls by the time I was fifteen, and she was the absolute worst. Her breasts weren’t much either.
But still, I just sat as if paralyzed till the film ended, then I somehow escaped from that girl and her clammy hands to wait beside my father’s old truck. It was all rusted, the truck; the paint had peeled and the tires were bald. For a second I worried that that girl would discover me there and think less of me, but then I thought, Who the hell cares? Her chest is flatter than mine, and she can’t kiss worth a damn.
When my father finally came out, he didn’t ask where I’d been, although I was pretty sure he’d been disappointed to have to sit alone in the dark clutching stale popcorn and sweaty cokes. As I recall, he didn’t mention his disappointment, nor did he say anything about how he had wondered and searched. And that night we drove home in silence as we did so many times before I was old enough to drive myself wherever it was I wished to go.
The way things turned out, my father died a year or so later and we never went to another movie together.
I remember so many things.
Truth is, I have almost total recall. Memories lodge in my brain the way armadillos get trapped in the middle of oily dirt roads. Blinded eyes blink at a world that, more and more, makes less and less sense.
I remember far too many things.
And lately, every woman I encounter reminds me of one certain failure—of never telling my father I loved him.
Truth is, I remember every single thing that’s happened to me my entire life.
Just don’t ask me the name of that girl who was such a lousy kisser.