MY FATHER’S WALLET
When This he was died, my my inheritance.father owed the city of Phoenix $694 in unpaid utilities. A final notice from the city, dated June 8, 1988, informed him that he could face arrest if he failed to make a payment within two weeks. Dated June 20 — with just one day to go — a receipt for a money order from the Circle K where he worked shows he paid $10 toward his debt.
A handwritten note in capital letters says, “684 TO GO.”
The receipt had been stapled to the notice and folded inside the cheap wallet he wore in his pocket the night he killed himself a few weeks later.
And that wallet is just about all I have, and all I know, of him.
‘An accident’
This is what I know: One night, he had too much to drink. He came home, swore at my mother, pushed her into the wall.
There’s always this kind of night in these kinds of stories. This was in the summer of 1987. I was 5, my younger brother, 2. I remember it being dark, but you know how memory works.
Soon, he wore himself out and collapsed on the couch. We tiptoed past him, out the front door and out of his life.
My mother, just 25, didn’t know what to do. We moved in with her parents at the farm in Indiana where she grew up. We waited a week or two, until my grandmother asked: “You’re not thinking of going back to him, are you?”
My mother had been thinking that. She didn’t know what to do. So they divorced, and he drove away from us a few months later.
Back in Phoenix, he found that job at the Circle K. He met a red-haired woman, Molly. She wasn’t perfect, he told his sister, but she was kind. One night, he had too much to drink. He came home, swore at her.
After a few hours of this, according to the police report, he shouted, “I’ll show you how much I love you,” and he stomped down the hall, locked the bedroom door and pulled the trigger of an antique .22 that had been his father’s.
He died early the next morning of what the medical examiner described as a “self-inflicted gunshot wound of head.”
Back in Indiana, my mother tried to explain to us what had happened. She said our father had had “an accident.”
“What kind of accident?” I asked. “An accident with a gun,” she said. I would turn 6 a few days later. A birthday card that must have been on the way back across the country when he was rushed to the emergency room arrived at the farm.
Inside, he had written — in the same capital letters I see on that receipt — that he missed me and would see me soon.
The wallet
Father’s Day was always a funny thing. I don’t remember anyone in my family ever acknowledging what happened. Everyone knew, and no one said a word. We got together at the farm to eat and play outside. My cousins tricked me into eating their vegetables. My uncles drank beer.
My father wasn’t there, but he was, the memory of what he did a heap in each room, a blackout curtain that had slipped off the rod.
I moved to Houston about 20 years later. I’d been in therapy and on antidepressants for years, having come to assume I was just like him: aloof. Moody. Too afraid to connect with people, too proud to be braver.
It was as though I was in the hole, somehow. The debt of those unpaid utilities was my inheritance, and I wanted nothing to do with it.
But after years of silence, something in me slipped, and I couldn’t get enough. Molly and I became friends on Facebook. I drove across the country to see my father’s headstone. I headed to Tucson, Ariz., to have coffee with a man who played guitar with him in a band. I even tried to track down the medical examiner, who I had hoped could remember his body — out of however many others almost 30 years later.
And then my aunt mailed me his wallet. I would pull out that notice, that receipt stapled to it, and I’d see there was more to him than I had known. I’d pull out his union cards. A yellow Certificate of Alcohol Management Training.
A handwritten note, in those capital letters, with an affirmation: “SOMEONE TO LOVE YOU. SOMETHING TO DO. SOMETHING TO LOOK FORWARD TO.”
A coupon for an $8 haircut. A bank statement showing a balance of $4.70.
And a business card for Hidden City, his band, billing itself as “Inexpensive Live Music for your Successful Party or Gathering.”
Did he write that? Oh, the vulnerability of selfpromotion! And the sadness of describing your talent, before anything else, as “inexpensive.”
As close as I’ll get
Father’s Day is always going to be a funny thing. I am fascinated because these artifacts and anecdotes are as close as I’ll ever get to him. And I am furious, too. Still.
But I know he wasn’t completely one thing or completely another. He suffered, and he loved, and he tried, and he failed. Any father would want to know that his son sees him in the round, sees him as fully and deeply as he can.
I just wish I could tell him.