My father has a fur parka and a plastic bucket hat. He has a monocle over one eye and a car shaped like a shoe. He has half a knee from the motorcycle accident that paid his way through college, and a girlfriend fifteen years younger than him. He has a lot of money, but he’ll swear to you that he’s broke. Of course, he also has a few bags of ketamine, peyote, and molly for an angry fix, and about five minutes to hide it all before this camper’s going to be inspected.
Since he’s at the steering wheel, I’m the one to hide his stash. I think if I were still in college, I’d be throwing up right now, but I’ve played this game with him before. My first thought is the toilet, but I can’t be sure that the baggies are totally airtight. There’s a chance I’ll ruin my dad’s high, and I don’t want to spend a weekend with him alone while he’s coming down. Fine. What else is there? I check all of the cabinets, but there’s not enough junk to conceal anything. A couple of top hats? Perhaps I could shove it in between them. “We’re up next, Penny,” he mentions, rolling down the window.
What else could I try? The fridge? There’s a jar of peanut butter, an old classic. I take a plastic spoon and scoop out a good half, then shove the dime bags right into the jar. Back in the fridge, and I’m in my chair by the time they’re at the door.
“You’re alright, kiddo. Can you get the door?”
I’m already apologizing to the festival security as they make their way through our mess and sweat, the egg yolks in the sink like coins of sunlight. The engine in the fridge whines, announcing itself.
I hold my breath. I hold my father’s breath. When they land on the fridge, I let them pause and run their fingers over packs of sweating deli meats and numerous bottles of wine. “Pretty packed this year, huh?” My dad comments, betraying nothing.
“Everyone’s been coming in early, guess the lineup’s pretty good.” One of the neon vests mentions. Pausing, “Hey, you can’t bring this in.” He handles a bottle of wine. “No glass.” “Can I keep the wine at least?” My father presses.
“Can’t bring glass in.” And suddenly my father is out of his seat, and emptying our water bottles to fill with wine. The festival junkie shuts the fridge. Looks my dad up and down. “I guess, man.” He mutters. “Happy Bonnaroo.”
Leaving the peanut butter jar untouched, they depart, and my father returns to his seat. We ramble on through the unbedded field.
Later, I’ll find him licking the peanut butter off of his fingers, and I’ll wonder where his stash went, wonder when it’ll reappear in his eyes and in his piss. But for now, the camper is still pulling itself along, a red needle threading itself into the horizon.
The first time I ever got high, I must’ve been eight. Back when my mom still let me spend weekends at Dad’s. I don’t remember much, just the few landmarks I passed on the way out of my body: the size of Lisa Vanderpump’s breasts bearing down on me from the flatscreen, and the pinwheel rainbow of the weed lollypop that sank me straight through my own skin. The way my father tells it, I’d gotten through the whole season of The Real Housewives and never moved an inch. I remember his shirtless, distended belly, and the feeling of his arms lifting me back into myself. It was the first time I ever noticed my father’s weight, or the way his skin fell over his bones like the rind of an old grapefruit. In those days, it was not often that I saw all fifty years of the man betraying himself.
In Manchester, Tennessee, I wake to the broken whine of a fading air conditioner.
After one day, the bathroom already smells like shit. There’s a layer of dust settled over my bed and my skin, though I haven’t even been outside yet. Festivals like these always try to bury you. Some people will rent nicer campers and try to keep themselves clean, but the secret is that you just have to lie in the dirt.
I turn on the showerhead and watch the pipes wake up, grumbling at the interruption. The water is lukewarm at best. I change into a bathing suit and stand in the tiny shower cavity. By the time I’m cooled down, I wander outside into the glaring heat and find my father cracking a watermelon on the dashboard, his attempts to fix the air conditioning abandoned with the power tools in the grass.
“In Taiwan, they stick the straw straight through the skin, and suck it all up.” He scrapes some of the pink meat out of the straw with his dirty fingers before passing it to me. “I saw it in a movie.”
“You’re supposed to blend up the insides first, I think.” I pull at the straw, and it pulls me back. “Dad, it’s completely pulverized in there.”
“Just try it.” I notice he’s set up two lawn chairs and a picnic blanket in the open grass. Passing a watermelon between us, my father and I settle into our mess.
“Do you remember my friend Peter, the librarian?”
“Have I met him?” I ask, passing the watermelon back to him. “It’s clogged.”
He pops the straw out and presses it back in. “He’s been to the house before. Queer guy, I think he might be trans.” I tense at his frankness. He doesn’t notice.
“Have you ever talked to him about it, Dad?”
He shrugs. “No, I just think so.”
“Oh.” I don’t know how to respond to him.
“Well, he’s here. Planning on swinging by later. You’ll like him, he’s known you since you were a shrimp. He lives in Fresno.”
“I’ve got no memory of him.”
“Did I ever tell you about the night we hosted the whole travelling caravan the week The Dead was playing in Atlanta?”
“Yeah, Dad, you love telling that story.”
“Oh. He was there. Stole a couple of bottles off of me.” He picks at the stitches on his cheek, where his carcinoma was removed a few months back. Slowly, he unravels the stitches. He’ll just resew it later, when he wants to be tedious and alone. It’s the way some people pick at their nails. My father has a body that persists through its gaps.
I focus on the cavity where his knee once was, the bisection of the soft curve of his skin, and the abrupt drop-off. A ball of cartilage moves up and down in the space as he stretches his leg. I watch it pendulum his body.
“I don’t blame him. He’s a good person.” He decides, as if weighing Peter the librarian’s trespasses against his own.
My mother was thirty-five when my parents got married. My dad was thirty-six. The way she tells it, they were walking over a bridge.
So, I guess we should get married…
She says he never even got on one knee. I look at her as she tells me this. “I pretended like I didn’t hear him, to see if he’d do it over.”
“Did he?”
“No.” She pauses. “You don’t understand your father,” she tells me. “We got married when we did because we were in medical school, and we didn’t want to split up for residency. We had our whole careers ahead of us.”
“Did you love him?”
She considers this, allowing her next words to settle in her throat.
“We weren’t young.”
The plastic scanner lights up green, and I’m ushered through a metal detector. By the time we make it into the festival, everyone is already drenched in sweat, the type that comes from blown pupils and no sleep. I’ve become fascinated by how grotesque this pleasure can be, their armpits greying the outsides of their shirts, the animal soup of a southern summer.
We shuffle through the crowds, but I’m never tall enough to see the artists perform. My father watches the girls, much younger than him, float by. Occasionally, people recognize him and wave. They call him The Doctor.
“Gummy?” My father digs around in the back of his harness.
“No thanks.”
“You know, this music is actually made to be experienced on drugs. It’s very sensory.” He says, matter-of-factly, as if giving a diagnosis. “That’s also why there are so many lights.” He pauses, rolling the pink gel over in his hand. “When your brain is disconnected, you start to feel from the ground up more. And they plan for that. Music like this is meant to come up through the ground.”
“I can still feel it sober, Dad. I feel it in my chest.”
“I want you to experience it the real way. Not through the air, through the ground. You’re more connected that way.”
“Maybe later.”
“Just hold onto it,” he insists, slipping the small thing into my palm.
The year, after his sister died of a brain tumor, I didn’t think my father was going to live. He’d already lost his mother and father, but this felt like a true orphanage. My mom called me home from New York, so I left my apartment and my job, and I returned to her house. For someone who claims not to love him, my mother talks about that man often. She had me ask him to coffee, but never thought about going herself. I arranged to meet him the following day at The Dancing Goat.
Dad had become a husk, the withered thing his sister had become months before. I could feel both her presence and her absence in the destruction of his body. I told him he wasn’t okay. He told me he was tired. He told me he was in the dirt with her.
Soon after, he disappeared for three days, and we thought that was it.
A year later, he’d tell us that he’d flown to Burning Man after hearing about the construction of the Temple of the Sun.
The way he tells it, he’d spent the weekend rolling around in the dust, trying to line up the gold filaments of the temple and the cast of the midday sun in its towers. A few tabs of acid, and he said he felt like the universe experiencing itself. He tells me he was his sister on her first and last day alive. He was the cavity in her brain stem. He was. He shows me an image of the photo he left of her to burn on the day the temple came down. He wanted her to be the biggest thing he could think of, so he made her dust. Still goes looking for her sometimes, in the sand of the Nevada desert.
The sun is going down now. I have not seen my father in years, but we’re here now, and I can feel a piece of his mind rolling around in the palm of my hand. Well, maybe I want to understand him. He urges me to. “I’m on antidepressants,” I tell him.
“Oh. That’s nice,” The Doctor replies. “I’m on Molly.”
I want to feel myself rooted in something bigger, connected to him and more. I know he’s high, and I can see it now, too. I watch his mind melt into a soft, round thing, with the rest of his body. Hours after I take the gummy, I feel myself slipping into him. I cannot help but regard him; he is older and close to death; he is as young as his last day alive. I watch him stretch and round, and I watch the gaps of his body fill themselves.
Buoyed by the music and the buzz, we pitch our shadows in the dirt together. There are things I wish he’d known earlier, when I was just a kid. But I cannot blame him for what I didn’t know I needed. I can’t bring myself to. I can’t hate the grapefruit rind of a man who just wanted to put his finger on the pulse.
“When you were just a kid, we’d go to these festivals, and you’d beg me to go up there.” He tells me, pointing to the Ferris Wheel. It’s brighter now, and I can’t tell if it’s the light or the drugs or both. It’s hypnotic, the type of pinwheel to sink me straight through my skin, except this time, I’m older, and I am no passenger.
“Can we go?” I ask. Somewhere, the crowd howls, and the music begins to pump once again, louder this time. I know the band is about to give their finale, though I can’t quite tell who is performing.
When the ride manager shuts us in, I begin to feel like part of the spectacle. The lights around me burn. I notice the shared heartbeat of a mounting song between my father and me. As the ride begins, we disconnect from the beat, settling into a comfortable flatline. We rise. Somewhere below us, the Cure is beginning the chorus of Just Like Heaven. Show me, show me, show me how you do that trick.
We’re silent at first, listening to a song that feels like an elegy up so high. “Someday, you will fall in love and get your heart broken, Penny, and you’re gonna find an album that will change your life.” It is the first thing he says to me.
“Where did that come from?”
“Well, this one was mine.” He replies. “The summer after college. I cheated on my girlfriend, and she left me. I must’ve listened to this album a thousand times. I loved Suzanne. I didn’t love her when I was with her, but I did after she left. Love is a trip, it’s a fucking ride, but it’s only after you get your heart broken that you start to understand what all those songs were about.” We’re at the very top, and suddenly, descending on The Cure again, a red and pink and orange moon of light in the Tennessee night.
“I know about love, Dad. You don’t have to explain it to me.”
I didn’t want to come out, but I wasn’t afraid anymore.
The one that makes me scream, she says.
“There was a girl I took you to dinner with. Red hair. She was my girlfriend at the time. We dated for a year, and I was in love with her.” I wonder if he even hears me. If he’ll even remember this. In the beat, we begin to rise again.
“How did you know you loved her?”
Show me how to do it,
“Because I think I did. Because I wanted to be a better person for her. I don’t know, how am I supposed to answer that? Did you ever feel that way about anyone?” I pause. Waiting for a response that won’t arrive.
And I promise you,
“With Suzanne. I just knew.” We’ll keep spinning until someone lets us off this ride. My dad, shaking with shame.
I promise you I’ll run away with you.
He looks at me and tells me what I already know.
“I cared deeply about your mom. She was my best friend. But sometimes love only happens once.”
He looks at me and tells me what he does not yet know.
The wheel descends, and I witness him shrinking, his body coming apart again. His hands stay wrapped around the metal bars long after we’re instructed to dismount.
