Riding with the Fat Man, Part I

***Hey all:
Since I'm at a writers' conference this week, I thought I'd share some nonblog writing.

This is part of a (believe it or not) short piece related to a larger memoir project I'm interested in. My thanks again to the members of The Typing Class for their feedback!

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The form the funeral home gave me for my father’s death notice listed three publications: The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Camden Courier Post, and The Gloucester County Times. No one read The Courier Post. Their telemarketers used to call doggedly at every dinner hour at both my parents’ houses. We generally offered a terse “we-get-the-inquirer” before hanging up.

I chose the Gloucester paper. My dad had worked for the Gloucester County Jail as the director of rehabilitation services. He taught convicts how to read, do basic math, and prepare for the GED. I hoped some of his “boys from the jail” would see the write-up.

As a child, I learned how to read and write from the partially used workbooks Dad brought home from the jail. My shaky letters sat on the same pages as his students’.

Although my father grew up in Philadelphia, his parents moved their family to the South Jersey suburbs when he was in his 20s. They chased a better life “across the river,” as we say. Sometimes people don’t realize that until only recently the segment of New Jersey between Philly and the Atlantic Ocean was mostly farmland. The folks who live there are modest, countrified. They like bacon and eggs for breakfast. They hunt and canoe in the Pine Barrens. They cheer for the Eagles (pronounced Iggles) and the Phillies although they’re never surprised when the Phillies don’t make the World Series. The women like when truckers beep their horns at them as they walk along Mantua Avenue. The kids belong to 4H, and the prom is a bigger deal for its attendees than the dead-end jobs that await them afterwards. This is the landscape of my father and his inmates.

There was never any question that I would plan the funeral. I was an only child, and my parents had been divorced for many years. My aunt had washed her hands of my father long ago. She’d done enough for him in life, she seemed to feel. And he was never grateful—he had acted as if her scrupulous attention was entirely his due.

I arranged a priest strictly for her sake. Dad had no use for religion; blind faith was alien and silly to him. The perfunctory service was modestly attended, and a group went to Charlie Brown’s Restaurant afterwards. People that I hadn’t seen in years surrounded me; I used to hug some of their knees. These former childhood giants, their faces grayish-white with age, told me what a wonderful and intelligent man Rick had been. The whole dining room looked golden and sepia to me, the same hues as my seventies toddlerhood, the same as when I had last encountered these faces. The dry white wine in my glass glowed in the table’s lantern light.

The previous year, I had spent a strained Thanksgiving with Dad at Charlie Brown’s. He doesn’t have anyone else, I had decided sheepishly, turning down my mother’s dinner invitation. We said little as we ate lukewarm turkey. Dad was strangely placid. It was the new medication he was taking for his bi-polar disorder, which was severe enough to put him in a hospital every couple of decades. Did I prefer him docile? Was this better?

David, my father’s best friend and a Christian missionary, waited until most of the plates were cleared and then took the empty chair to my left. He had a good anecdote about Rick that he wanted so share with me, he said. He’d already made me laugh that day when he told me how my father used to telephone him and pretend to be Billy Graham looking for a donation.

I had highlighted my father’s humor in my eulogy, along with his prodigious intellect. I wasn’t sure what else to say. Who wanted to hear about lithium? Slammed car doors? The surveillance and chronic mistrust of his daughter, whom he hadn’t wanted to begin with? Instead, I simply told the small crowd that Richard was a man more comfortable with the ideas of the world than the world itself.

David told me that he and my father had taken the Speedline into Philadelphia one evening for a concert. Two drug addicts boarded the train at one of the Camden stops. They were out of control, David said. I wasn’t sure what "out of control" really meant, but I didn’t ask. My father recognized one of them as someone from the jail. He began talking to him in a calm, friendly voice. In five minutes, he took what could have been a dangerous situation and defused it.

As I listened to David, I pushed wet lettuce around the bowl of my Caesar salad and wondered what my father had said. The inmates had called him the Fat Man--there was a gleam in my father's eye when he told me this one day when I was in high school. He seemed not to mind the name; he almost looked amused.

Your dad was a man of many gifts, David said. I sipped my wine and said, yes he was. The knowledge that I had not been privy to more of those gifts pricked me.

What had my dad said? He likely did not pretend not to know the kid—anonymity wasn’t a part of jailhouse life. But he probably didn’t go out of his way to bring up the circumstances of their relationship, either. No need to remind the spiller of the milk.

I suspected he wouldn’t have preached. There would have been no “You don’t have to do this to yourself…your parents must be so sad…you’re going to hurt yourself or someone else.” Dad was not a man for platitudes.

What if I had grown up to be one of those junkies? Dad had routinely dumped the contents of my 8th grade book bag onto the cushions of the couch in the den. He examined the bag's seams closely. He looked for drugs he never found.

What would I have wanted him to say if he stumbled upon an alternative version of me in a train car, a druggie sweating through a rough patch? I imagined feeling engulfed in a red-pink electric cloud, seeing funhouse faces, and worrying that at any second the whole car would explode into flames. My hands would have shaken, and the pores of my face would have seemed to expand. I would have asked myself why this was supposed to be fun. My teeming brain would have quickly abandoned that line of questioning and tried to retreat into itself, like a turtle.

But then I would have seen the Fat Man sitting nearby, his big belly hanging over his pants—the khaki pair he endlessly tried to hitch up. His blue eyes, the ones that always reminded me of a gas stove flame, would have kindled benignly. I might have temporarily confused him with Santa Claus and decided that the train was his sleigh. How cool that Santa wore glasses, like me.