This Is Where We Are

It is 6am in northeast Portland and my father is complaining about old people.

At eighty-one, my father complains about everything.

Tattoos, strangers, yogurt. Life annoys him.

The rest of the family has given up, preferring to stay out of his cross hairs.

This requires effort since he takes aim at everyone.

For decades, I stayed away, worn down from being insulted in the driveway.

Now I visit five or six times a year. Never for more than a day or two.

We know our limits.

I am an only child. He is alone. This is where we are.

“The way they drive,” he says as I make coffee. “They go too slow.”

My father drives ten miles an hour in a 1987 Ford pick-up truck. It has dual tanks and a gun rack. The rack is empty now but could easily be filled with a threat. To get in the vehicle, I have to hoist myself in and up, grunting like I am birthing a hernia.

My father slides into the driver’s seat without a struggle.

The steering wheel is molded out of oil and anger. The interior is flattened plaid, black bleeding into blue like a manufactured bruise. The dashboard is smooth. The cab is clean. My father puts on ski gloves because “the controls can get sticky."

Underneath the passenger’s seat is a sawed-off axe handle.

My father says it’s for people who ask too many questions.

When my father creeps through the street, drivers honk and swerve.

Strangers give him the finger. My father ignores the gesture.

When I tell him he should go faster—there is a minimum speed limit after all—he guns the truck through the intersection before pumping the brakes to slow back down to his preferred speed.

“Paid cash for this,” he says to anyone who compliments his property.

The truck is in pristine shape, not a dent, not a scratch. He cleans it from bumper to bumper every Wednesday. He washes the truck more than himself.

If I cut him—which I have thought about more often than not—he would bleed Turtle Wax and Armor-All. But when I remind him he should bathe more often, he snorts and says, "Why? My time on the stage is over."

This is a dig at me. I was the one on the stage, acting in New York.

My father thinks this was a failed effort. He does not like the arts, equating anything creative to “crap.” He says I was smart when I went to college then I got “tangled up in that art mess.”

Now I write. Luckily, my father does not read unless it is a mechanics manual.

He does not ask what I do or how I do it.

"You drive slow, too,” I say to him as I scoop the grounds.

He grunts, eyeing me like I took a shit in the seat.

As my father takes his insulin, I stare at the coffee maker. It is from the 80s and sounds like backed-up plumbing when it percolates.

Folgers shoots through the spout into a carafe that is only available on eBay.

Despite my offers to buy a new coffee maker or better coffee, my father refuses anything current. He is suspicious of anything new, including clothes.

“This outfit is better than when I bought it,” he says.

He is wearing his United Airlines mechanics jacket. He retired twenty-two years ago. The outerwear is in museum shape, spitefully preserved despite decades of daily use. The thermal shirt, however, should have been washed last week. The sweatpants would be refused by the homeless. His tennis shoes are a pity gift from a cousin who works at a sportswear giant near our house. I try not to think about the state of his boxers or his socks or the ski cap on his head that sits like someone threw it there by mistake.

It says “Yahoo” across the front.

Under the hat, there is no hair. My father has been bald since before I was born. This style started in the army when he shaved his head on the draft line before anyone official could retrieve the razor. They gave him kitchen duty but the action did not kill the attitude.

Shortly after boot camp, my father was promoted to drill sergeant, rewarded for his bark, barely punished for his bite. He then volunteered for military patrol where he served his country by hunting the haunted. Then he got bored with the battle.

He returned home angry, smooth head intact.

His eyebrows are the only things that give away his age. White and wiry, they are trying to break free from his black face.

“Where’s the coffee?” he barks.

I point at the pot.

From the kitchen window, I can see the garage. It is bigger than the house.

The tractor, the ’51 Buick, the go-cart and the truck fit comfortably inside.

On several floor-to-ceiling shelves, the oil and other lubricants face the same direction, in alphabetical order. My father has a system.

No dust, no dirt.

Here, everything has its place and nothing is broken.

The garden tools hang in designated spots, next to several Hazmat suits and three Kevlar vests. The welding tanks are bookended by industrial toolboxes.

My father could build an army here and hang his squad from the reinforced cathedral ceiling like a mobile of menace. The entire system is locked and coded as if a stranger could make it past the six-foot steel perimeter without being destroyed in the driveway.

This is where we are.