It has been many years since I played son to my father. Most of my life since the word Daddy left my lips. Though my father still lives, he is but a long-faded photograph, black and white, crudely cut, and curled at its edges.
I used to have a picture of him. One of those Olan Mills or Sears headshot jobs with the unnatural head tilt and just-off-color, faux-nature background. The kind that mothers everywhere buy by the billions in wallet size. I saved it in a white cardboard jewelry box lined at the bottom with a perfectly fitting square of sturdy cotton. Along with it lay the two-dollar bill my father gave me back when he gave me things and a few pieces of silver jewelry—a razor thin chain, a chunky lion-head ring—long tarnished to a dull, lifeless shade of black.
My father. A two-dollar bill. A few pieces of silver. Must be meaning in that. Why I kept that picture, I do not know. I am not the sentimental type. I am not sentimental about him. Likely a family trait passed down from his side because my mother is an empath. My mother has a heart.
My father’s picture followed me—through my various graduations, that first disastrous job in Bumfuck doing dipshit work for Kmart back when Kmart mattered, the equally unambitious second and third jobs in customer service I hated but found comfortably banal. Yet, just as I tugged at my boots, found my footing, moved toward the man I wanted to be, the picture disappeared, lost.
Must be meaning in that too. In this picture, my father looked handsome. Not phyne, like the high school girls called the light-skinned dudes who looked nothing like me, but handsome like Shaft or Apollo Creed. In my mind’s eye I still see him: a tiny, almost-Afro unworthy yet of a pick; his beard: full, neat, and close-cropped, a continent of black floating in his pinecone-colored face; his half-cocked almost smile, barely showing the teeth rarely shown in real life; his dark brown eyes, so often backlit by rage, the same ones that peer at me from my mirror. In the words of that time, he might’ve been described as dashing or debonair, though I never saw those parts of him for myself.
I do not believe my father a bad man, only a bad father, more specifically a bad father for me. At issue were different masculinities failing to find common ground. Whereas I responded to words, he favored the whip; I sought refinement, he demanded I boor; I angered slowly, he pushed me always to fight. So ill-suited were we as father and son that in time we each let the other go, to fade from view like cast-off balloons. An ugly fact the adult me is grateful for. For in my father’s shadow, I would surely have withered. We went on a trip once, just the two of us. To Wichita, Kansas, to see his mother. For me to meet my paternal grandmother for what would be the first and last time, though she kept in touch for many years after, long after he didn’t. I remember my heart pitter-pattering double-time as we strode side by side down the corridor to the airplane, anticipating my first-ever flight. I would’ve been five or six, young enough that I still looked up to him. Naive enough to believe I always would. My father stood tall and robust.
The toothy women still called stewardesses. The toothy pilot who handed me a pair of plastic wings you would’ve thought were solid gold by my awe and care for them. I kept those, too, for a long time, though not as long as the photo. Perhaps I am sentimental after all.
The only thing I remember of our visit: My father and I standing out- side on my grandmother’s porch. Standing close in a strong, tepid breeze. Me fascinated by how black the Kansas night looked compared to the DC night with its constant low glow. The rumble of an approaching storm. The smack of lightning that sent me cowering against my father’s leg, so solid and sure. What he said to comfort me: “It’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s only God playing football.”
I looked up and watched for the game. That picture of the two of us, there and then, is the one I’ve man- aged never to lose.
DeLon Howell lives and writes in Los Angeles, where he works in communications, occasionally participates in readings, and workshops with a trusted crew of talented writers. His work has appeared in Snapdragon: A Journal of Art & Healing, Stonecoast Review, Tahoma Literary Review, and Wanderlust Journal.
