Neon green buzz from beyond, 9:51p.m. Mountain time, 11:51p.m. on the East Coast. It was Dad.
“Good Midwest rock from the ’70s, more to come.”
A fragmented text accompanied by a link to a song. I didn’t listen.
Moments later, another text, another song: “14 min. of 1974 bliss.”
Dad only texted me when he was drunk. Ever since I’d grown up and left the house some twenty years before—ever since the proliferation of smartphones and the internet—he would send along songs that he wanted me to hear: songs that had meant something to him, that he thought might mean something to me, too. “Can’t You See” by The Marshall Tucker Band. “Shine On” by Heartsfield. “Angel From Montgomery” by John Prine.
Every few months, this would happen. Texts would start rolling in after dark, each one exceedingly more incoherent and rambling than the last. The later it got, the more creative the punctuation—when the beer had turned into tequila poured straight from the garage freezer and he was ever more alone on the end of the line. I knew he was likely pulling a Marlboro cigarette from his second or third pack, sitting on the front porch beneath the palm tree whose roots were cracking the driveway. And he was riding through the annals of his memory, buzzed, or maybe a little past, and harboring some distilled, rattling shame—remorse, remembering how the music made him feel some time ago when he still had hair, was still the commander of his dreams.
I also knew he didn’t want me to actually reply, and I dared not, or risk interjecting myself into his nostalgic, little trip, and that was never what he wanted, anyway.
Back in the day, he would make me watch videos of Joni Mitchell at music festivals. “Horse Teeth,” he’d call her, but then he’d close his eyes and start strumming an imaginary acoustic guitar where he stood, swaying his head back and forth, hovering over me where I sat on the couch, onlooking, impatiently— seeking an emotionally validating response of some kind. And I’d just smile without showing my teeth.
“Poetry,” he’d add. “Come on, Dayney. You have to learn to play this one . . .”
Dad always loved music and he would use it as the nostalgic backdrop for his chemical dependencies every night after dinner. Longing to loiter among the cobwebs and dusty cardboard boxes, to become one with generations of inherited Christmas decorations, to play a game of recall with every saved Happy Meal toy. He’d provide some predictable excuse: “I’m going to organize the garage,” he’d announce. And then he’d slip away with his little BIC lighter to listen to his songs and to sip unsupervised from his amber bottles, always recycling-bin adjacent. He never organized anything, of course. Just shifted his tchotchkes from one shelf to the next, adding to the stains on his teeth, getting drunker.
In his garage of wonders, Dad kept his record player and crates of old vinyls. When he wasn’t around, I would sneak into his forbidden lair and sift through them—The Eagles, Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac. Atop a high shelf there were rows and rows of CDs, The Black Crows, The Dave Matthews Band, Sade—all held up by a bottle of French-Canadian cognac used as a bookend. Next to it was one of those heavy beer mugs you get from a restaurant that I’m sure he had stolen, and in it, there was a velvet purple bag with a yellow drawstring and yellow, embroidered cursive lettering. There were Crown Royal bags all over the house, used for all sorts of things, but this one contained rogue glass marbles collected over a lifetime. They pinged together with a kind of boing that felt almost psychedelic—they felt heavy in my hand like pirate’s loot. In a freckle- bound, buck-tooth, precocious moment of angst, with all the anger collected over my short, little lifetime, I could pick up the stolen baubles, stim and soothe—I could wander through his beloved garage and explore his ageless charms. A tiny wayfarer adrift in a nostalgic wonderland—I could go looking for my father.
Hung by the door in that garage, there was a polaroid of Dad in his younger years, his arm around a Dolly Parton impersonator—one of his kitchen salesman conventions, probably Vegas, 1993. His hoarding had always given me the sense that he’d believed he was better when he was younger, that the trappings of fatherhood didn’t suit him. He seemed to pine for the good ole days when his life had been defined by rusted cars and college parties. When pot was still contraband and elusive and life was just girlfriends and pool tables and cross-country road trips with a couple of dirtbags and his parents’ checkbook. I imagined that my mere existence somehow proved to him that the moment had slipped through his fingers, evidence that it was now too late for the life he thought he would live. It always seemed to me then, and still, even now, that Dad was just trying to relive an age before my brother, sister, and I were born, before we became mirrors he couldn’t bear to look in.
“Piano Fingers,” he’d recall. “My piano teacher always used to call me that.” But he didn’t remember any piano, anymore.
In the garage, there was no room for a car. There was also a box of magazines, a few from when Princess Diana was killed, one about the AIDs epidemic. On top of an old dresser, the middle drawer of which was entirely missing, sat a record player, one of those chintzy Black Friday deals that was designed to look like it was from the 1950s, but was actually made in China. Next to it, a garnet-stained wine glass, still a mouthful of drugstore Cabernet collecting fruit-fly kamikazes. Who knows how old it was—oil slick shimmered gold over the top. And a few of his favorite albums were on display. He really loved Moody Blues for a while there. And The Allman Brothers Band for Sunday mornings in the winter when the temperatures would drop from ninety degrees to eighty-two and we’d open the windows and let the cool-air smell waft into the house.
But in the evenings, it was often the same songs played on repeat.
“Dayney.” He’d stick his head through a small crack in the laundry room door and call to me where I was watching TV on the couch, “Do you have just five minutes? Can you just humor your dad? Can you just give me five short minutes?” he’d say. Stepping calamitously away from Dawson’s Creek, hoping to return before the commercial break was over, I had no choice but to get it over with.
He’d invite me outside, into the humid Florida twilight, where his lit cigarette incensed aromatically. A thin plume of smoke danced skyward toward the palm fronds that clapped in the warm wind, clunky white noise from the canopy above.
“Just listen to this, Dayney. Give your old man five minutes.”
And I did. Fourteen years old, still in my kid skin, knobby knees smack dab in the middle of thin shin bones and peach-fuzz thighs. Arms crossed, teeth tucked in, I listened reluctantly, but he kept interrupting the song, swimming silly in his Sunday night buzz, arguing with my imagined protestations and judgments. I never said anything, he was just defensive to win my attention.
God, I hate the Eagles, I thought.
“Yeah . . .” I started bobbing my head to the beat of “Hotel California” to appease his desperate pleas for my approval. “Yeah, Dad, it’s good. I like it!”
And then he would get really mad at me. “Forget it. You don’t get it.”
When I was sixteen, I got my first car. I’d worked the entire summer, rode my bike three miles, through the Ritz Carlton Golf Resort property in 100 percent Florida humidity, fountains and roundabouts and cobblestone paths, Spanish- tiled roofs. I would have to bring baby wipes and a fresh uniform to change in the bathroom beforehand, drenched in sweat and freckled with little gnats that stuck to my moist forehead, landed in my eyeballs and nostrils. I scanned groceries for customers at a grocery store, smelled deeply of the sweet, fresh-glazed donuts from the bakery during the early Saturday morning shift.
When I’d made about two grand, I asked Dad to take me shopping. He’d said no, but the next evening after I returned home from marching band practice, there was an old, burgundy Grand Am with a spoiler sitting in the driveway. A strawberry-haired man in a short sleeve button down shirt and tie, wrinkly khakis, stood next to Dad in front of the open garage. He unfolded his hands as if to say “Tah Dah!” as I approached, mouth agape. Dad had recruited the car salesman all the way to our house. They were of the same ilk, a brotherhood between hucksters, I guess.
The interior smelled like an ashtray, made my eyes burn when the air conditioner blasted me in the face, but otherwise, it was slick. Black-on-black fabric seats and dash. Even a cupholder ashtray insert.
“Try the radio,” Dad said from the passenger seat, door still widely ajar, right leg hanging out. There was a cassette tucked into the tape player. I popped the large round button to turn it on and was instantly cascaded with sound, crisp electric guitar and a building crowd growl, a metronome cymbal hi-hat. Dad turned the knob to the right, volume up, then the bass dropped BOOM BOOM, a squeally muppet voice called into the crowd something incoherent, and then, again the crowd called THUN-DER.
I felt it in my heart. BOOM BOOM. The seat vibrated beneath me. BOOM BOOM.
The neighbors started to loiter near their mailboxes, a concert on our driveway at 5:47 p.m. on a Tuesday night.
And I wasn’t even embarrassed.
That’s my dad, I thought. In that moment, watching him close his eyes and pound his fists into the tops of his thighs, quietly scream-miming the words to AC/DC, I think I finally saw him like he’d always seen himself. There you are.
“Wanna take it for a spin?” he said with a childlike excitement. And so we did. Peeled off into the night, windows rolled down. The stereo was perfect.
That year, Dad was laid off from his job selling kitchens just before the holidays. He seemed to transition seamlessly into the unemployed lifestyle. The crack and hiss of a nearly frozen Bud Light was audible inside the house at 9:00 a.m. on a Thursday. Already eighty-four degrees and 100 percent humidity, he was always outside in the garage, shuffling through his old albums.
“I’m going to organize the garage,” he’d say to us, and click the laundry-room door shut behind him. We all knew no organizing was getting done.
On Christmas Eve, his friend Warren, who once fell asleep in the driver’s seat of his car in a parking garage after taking too many OxyContins, brought him a glass skull full of clear tequila. They both turned up their noses at solid food that night, they weren’t hungry. Warren told me my skirt was “awfully short” and squeezed my waist in tight to his hip, drunkenly kissed me on the cheek and whispered in my ear that I was starting to look “just like your mama.” Scrunched his nose like a bunny. I could feel his breath and the stubble from his chin on my neck. I was seventeen. Andy Williams lilting about the “Holiday Season” in the background, an old Vinyl that used to belong to my grandparents conjured warm Christmas memories. But my grandparents weren’t visiting that year. My grandmother was alone in an old folks home an hour and a half away in Sarasota while Grandpa was in the hospital recovering from a fall.
That night, when it was still light enough for the setting sun to create silhouettes out the back sliding glass doors of the crawling hydrangeas and the thin-necked heron standing on one leg, my dad dropped a glass bottle of cocktail sauce on the pink tile floor. Shattered into a million pieces, red, clotty sauce exploded in a Jackson Pollock blood splatter on the white kitchen cabinets.
“Chris, what the hell?” My mom came cutting around the corner of the kitchen, clearly already upset about the night’s events.
“Oh, shut up. It’s fine.” He slammed the fridge door, his eyelids purple and hung low, his head tilted back as he seemed to struggle to catch her still figure in both eyes at the same time. He grabbed the back of the kitchen chair as his right foot fell out from underneath him. Warren had gone home, but Dad was still playing music in the garage, Perry Como crooning out into the darkness of the night on December 24. She stepped closer to him and he shoved her backward with his forearm.
There was a gasp and then, “Get your shit together,” she said pathetically, piercingly, and turned to stomp back to their bedroom, slamming the door behind her, and clicking the lock audibly. Left me sitting at the kitchen table among the Christmas cookies, Thumbprint Lemon that we’d rolled in chopped pecans, filled with raspberry jam. Nutter Butters that we’d dipped in white chocolate and decorated like little snowmen. Food now mostly picked through by our guests who’d visited earlier that afternoon. I wasn’t a little kid anymore.
Dad didn’t look me in the eye. I’d stopped chewing my food and became suddenly nauseous, embarrassed to be sweetly eating from the tray of treats. He slammed the chair to the ground and stormed off to the garage, turned up his music, but now, something that didn’t feel festive, something that was haunting and about getting high, probably Pink Floyd.
Sorrowfully swallowing the remnants of a toffee square, I picked up my keys and bolted from the laundry-room door, into the garage, past my father and into my Grand Am. The tires peeled away from the grass, leaving muddy track marks. Windows rolled down, I sobbed into the sleeve of my sweater as I drove across the deserted town toward the beach, headed for Port Royal Avenue. “Freebird” wailed into the heartache of the open, salty air. Little guitar rivets pew pewing to the beat of my breath, tightly erupting between fits of tears, safely tucked between the largo lay of a Southern crooner. The avenue was lined with red bows pinned to wreaths hung from gates at the end of long, windy driveways—million-dollar homes constellated with ponds and estuaries, elegant fountains and holly berries dangling from streetlights, lantern-laden walkways, red and green twinkle lights on yachts in the marina at the end of the road. I longed to be at one of their fancy Christmas parties. Would have given anything to not be a sad tourist in their festive kingdom. But I had nothing to give and “Freebird” was almost over; the moment would be lost to whatever song came next.
I drove around like that until I was certain my dad would be asleep. Arriving back home, I climbed into my bed in my day clothes. I pulled the blanket up over my nose and fell asleep in the fetal position, only to awake to the sound of dishes clinking at 6:30 a.m. the next morning, the smell of cinnamon bread baking and Bing Crosby echoing through the open air. Stepping out from my bedroom, Mom was on her knees scrubbing the cabinets with a sponge.
“Merry Christmas!” she said.
A year later, I left for college in Tallahassee to pursue a degree in music—vocal performance. I’d received a scholarship after my high school choir teacher coordinated a meeting with instructors from the jazz department. We met at a recording studio, a two-hour drive across Alligator Alley on a Saturday afternoon, where they asked me to scat and, remarkably, I did seamlessly with some unknowable instinct. Dad was happy to hear the news, but resolved to being aloof quite quickly. He only finished one year of college, before bailing out to smoke pot and drop acid on cross-country road trips with his skeevy buddies, sleep on couches, marry a pregnant twenty-one-year-old in Toronto and bring her home to Erie, PA.
Visiting over Thanksgiving, I would tell him about my performances, singing with a trio, an upright bass, even, auditioning for the opera, working lights at an Earth, Wind and Fire concert, and he would reply with stories about being a child prodigy pianist.
“I wish I didn’t give it up.”
It was when I went away to college and my mom got breast cancer, my sister became addicted to heroin, and my brother dropped out of school to deal drugs— Dad really fell deeply into the drinking, pills, pot. I wasn’t there. I was a six-hour drive up the interstate, alone in an apartment, drinking tequila poured straight from a mini-fridge and giving up on music, and myself too.
Over so many years, we spoke so infrequently. Any semblance of a relationship fell away in the absences of obligation and exposure. There was no habit of calling home to check in. Just the obligatory holiday visits that reminded me of so many holidays before.
These days he is a relic of my past, too. I want to remember him the evening he brought home the Grand Am, screeching to AC/DC and pounding his joyful fists on the dash. I want to remember him at the front of his mind, on a Tuesday before dinnertime, when he wanted to be with me, connect with me. Before the sunset, before the alcohol, before his thoughts became wet and murky and he gave up on himself and gave up on me.
I miss him. He isn’t dead. He is just an immovable statue now, a hard liver that has survived past his expiration date—a Jagermeister shot glass, tobacco- stained teeth, garden hose cleaned off the driveway where he’d puked at 6:45 p.m. on a Saturday. Wasn’t there for my mom when she had cancer. At the bar playing video game golf when my sister was overdosing in a hotel room on Bayshore Avenue.
He never went back to sales. Now he manages a storage unit out near the airport. Mostly tooling around the property on a forklift with a tall 7-Eleven coffee in one hand, the humidity makes him marinate in his stench, sick alcohol stench, Marlboro man, tar purging from his skin. His gut is growing, and there’s a hump where his back was once straight and proud—shaves his head smooth now, exposing the liver spots, melanomas, scabs that keep getting ripped open.
We live thousands of miles apart now, and I am long grown up. We don’t talk on the phone really, but sometimes when it’s too late in the evening for talking, anyway, he sends me songs to listen to—“Coyote” by Joni Mitchell. My phone dings, and I see it’s him, and I know where he is sitting, on the front porch behind a puff of smoke, his thick, cracked thumbs clumsily punching out a message from some better version of how things could have gone.
“Dayney, you would have been such a great country singer.”
No, regrets, Coyote.
Dayna Copeland writes experimental narrative nonfiction from the perspective of a person stuck somewhere between poverty and privilege. Dayna seeks to offer a window into the humanity of the female experience beyond the pursuit of partnership or child-bearing. A graduate of writing programs at Tin House, Yale and Florida State University, she writes about the woman’s pursuit of legacy, purpose, honor, and spirituality. She spent the last year caring for her son with cancer, editing for Identity Theory magazine and writing her memoir. She also teaches elementary art.
Twitter: @DaynaECopeland; Instagram: @DaynaCopeland
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