Yeah, But Nobody Hates Their Dad

I never in my life hated my father, even the time he and my mother left me stranded in my Aunt Dina and Uncle Roy’s trailer up in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, with my cousins, Travis and Sean and the new baby Lacy and three of my younger brothers and sisters. They didn’t come home all day or all night. But when Brent told me he hated his father, we got into a huge fight.

I met a guy, his name was Brent, and he had a dog bite on his nose, on the tip of his nose. No, he had a missing chunk out of the end of his nose, and I asked him how he lost it and he said, “A dog bit me.”

And I said, “How did that happen?”

And he said, “What d’ya mean? How did that happen? There was a dog, and he bit my face when I was eight, I went to the hospital—they stitched it up and after that a big chunk of my nose was missing.”

Apparently, he didn’t want to talk about it, but it didn’t make him ugly. It was an attractive dent. He had longish hair—brown. Guys with long brownish hair are generally as a rule, attractive, unless it’s dry longish brown hair, that’s scraggly, but his wasn’t. It was smooth and oily in a tender way and his eyes were brown too. I could tell he had an attractive body as he lay stretched out, passed out, on the floor.

How I met him was my roommate Susan and I were heading home from a party in one of the other dorms at the Towers, and we were walking by these other guys’ room, and Susan poked her head in because their door was wide open and she was flirting with them. How she was, she’d say, “What are you guys doing?”

And they acted like we were intruding, but then Susan said, “Well, your door’s hanging open.”

They must’ve sized us up pretty fast and decided we weren’t loose or pretty enough or something cuz we got the vibe right away we weren’t wanted. So Susan stole the bottle of Black Velvet on top of their mini fridge as we left, she slipped it inside her coat. I didn’t even see it happen. She was a pretty stealthy gal.

So we took the Black Velvet back to our dorm room and we heard some people partying next door so we went over. We’d gotten our Christian roommate to move out by writing, “A woman’s place is on a man’s face,” and making a little drawing of this on the white message board that we hung on our door. So we pretty much had that corner of the dorm sewed up. And next door these girls and two guys were partying, a guy named Dave and a guy named Brent. Brent had on a jean shirt and Dave was wearing a sweater with a stripe across the front, so I was instantly attracted to Brent with his cowboy boots and his silence, whereas Dave warmed up to me, and the girl Lori, whose room it was, was left in the lurch. Susan cracked the Black Velvet and I went to get the corn popper and by the time the popcorn was done and in a big metal bowl, half the bottle of BV was gone. And Brent was lying stretched out on the floor, hucking, and sleeping, acting like he was going to choke on his own vomit. So we woke him up and dragged him the four flights up to his floor.

Brent would come over to my dorm room sometimes, or call me on the phone and say, “Are you working at Baskin and Robbins tonight?”

And I’d say, “Yeah, come in, and I’ll give you some free ice cream,” which was risky because they weighed the vats. My manager had promoted me so I was supposed to be honest. I had to mop the floor at night, but I was a pretty efficient cleanly sort and I got a couple of dimes more an hour than anybody else. When it got late at night, I’d slip a couple of people’s ice cream cone pay into my pocket, Brent’d come and get me, and we’d go across the street to the bar to play pool and drink beer on a Saturday. I thrilled to that. I’d hide a nice shirt under my pink knit uniform and tuck the work shirt away in my purse and hope I didn’t smell like cream and sugar or the ammonia from washing up.

Whenever we were playing pool, Brent leaned back and watched me shoot, and when we were sitting in the booth he’d put his arm up around the back of the booth behind my shoulders. Not overly chummy, but definitely liking me. He teased me once that he had a Corvette back home painted candy apple blue, but I knew it was a lie.

On the way home one night, Brent was weaving next to me boot over boot and he said, “I hate my father,” and we had this huge fight about it, him saying stuff about how his dad left him and his mom for another woman and went to live over in Washington, D.C., and how his dad was some big shot politician and he never gave them any money to live on. I must’ve said something he didn’t like then because we started arguing and pretty soon he was running, and I chased after him back to the dorm, but I passed out when we got back to my room, and I don’t know if he left before or after I did that.

I knew what I said had some relation to my parents, my dad, but all I could think of was this time when I was maybe a freshman in high school. My mom and my dad took me and my two youngest brothers and my little sister up to Sioux Falls one Sunday to see my aunt and uncle’s new trailer. I’d been somewhere in that area before because my other uncle Tracy and his wife Vicki lived up there, too, and we’d been to see him once a long time ago, but I didn’t remember where their trailer was. I only remembered that Tracy had about four long fish tanks that took up a whole wall of his living room, and in them he had piranha and gold fish and one tank of fish was used to feed another.

Uncle Tracy was pretty nice, though, he was my mom’s youngest brother, he said, “Do you want to see me feed them,” and when I said, no, he chuckled and said, “Okay.”

Even when my older brothers who were along that time said, “Show us, show us,” he wouldn’t.

Aunt Dina and Uncle Roy’s trailer was a regular size trailer and I knew right away we weren’t really there to see their trailer, Mom and Dad said, “You watch the kids, we’re going out for a while.”

And when I said, “For how long?” I didn’t get a straight answer. But I wasn’t given a choice and the kids got hungry and there wasn’t any food in the cupboards or in the fridge. Nothing, no cereal, a little milk, but we had to save that for the baby—nothing. My folks had said they’d bring us back something to eat. In the afternoon, I got my cousin Travis to scrounge some money from his room, probably stolen from his folks, and I had about two dollars, a little less in change, and I said, “Okay, what are we going to do? Somebody has to stay here to watch Sean and Molly and the baby.”

Travis who was seven said, “There’s a gas station across the highway. I know where it is. We can get some chips there.” My brother Mark who was eight said he could go with Travis. I told Mark, “Okay, but don’t buy any candy,” but they came back with M&M’s and Snickers and one bag of cool Ranch Doritos. Mark said that’s all they had, and I split that between us and I used some of the milk to feed the baby. Then later when we were playing hide-and-go-seek, Sean was hiding in the kitchen cupboard, and found some raisins and marshmallows in bags inside the pans, so we ate that, too.

At first it was okay because it was daytime. The kids couldn’t ride bikes, though, because they lived next to a busy intersection; they didn’t have a baby pool to play in. I tried to get them to take naps but it was like a hot box in their rooms, and they didn’t have fans. Their rooms were wood panel and tiny. The TV didn’t work. It worked but it wasn’t hooked up to the antenna, so we only got one PBS channel. That night we played all kinds of games, huckle-buckle bean stalk and I Spy, all kinds of games that I made up out of my head. I was so tired and pissed. But finally I got the kids to bed. I couldn’t sleep and there wasn’t a thing to read in the trailer. The kids had thin blankets and it got cold that night even though it was summer. At about two in the morning, I started watching the clock.

Finally my folks and Aunt Dina and Uncle Roy came back and my aunt pulled out the hide-a-bed and kept insisting we stay. Where would I sleep? Between my parents? My parents were lying on the pull-out bed, but my dad kept saying, no we gotta’ go home. And finally, it was about three and he got us all up and in the car. My little sister and brothers were in the back seat and I sat up front between Mom and Dad and it was about an hour’s ride back home. My dad took the back highways and roads that we were used to because my grandma lived in between the city and our hometown, and so the roads felt familiar and easy and I didn’t think to be afraid. Whenever I sat up front by my dad, he always put his arm on the back of the seat behind me and hummed to the country western songs on the radio, or he had this song in his head, “I got an old silk hat,” that he used to trot out.

When Brent said his dad was a prick, I said, “Yeah, but, nobody hates their dad,” and I think that’s why he wouldn’t go out with me any more after that.