My father the pit bull: It was good to hear your voice, know that you had a good birthday—now let me reiterate the myriad ways in which you are a failed son and a failed person and rip your throat out.
Guilty, guilty, guilty: I suck at paperwork. I don’t open mail for months. In my mother’s study in Sacramento is a box of my unopened mail from the Portland years, 2001 to 2003.
Are these character flaws? And who is we? Above, he writes that he knows my mother will take exception to the notion that I am flawed, so he can’t be including her in his we. This is the global We, the world knows I am a failure, that I let my family down, that I don’t follow through, I am a bad citizen and a worse son and my father is here to teach me a lesson.
I’ve just turned thirty-six years old. Who the fuck does he think he’s talking to?
He addresses my financial situation in a rather snide way, but shouldn’t a father be pleased that his son is unencumbered by debt?
I like the part about publisher or Hollywood type. Another fine rhetorical flourish—I have somehow come to represent the world of wealth and fame, the world that debases family in the name of self.
I don’t know my cousin James well; in fact, I’ve met him only two or three times. He’s a nice fellow, with a pretty wife and a cute scrappy young son whose face is all freckles and smile and teeth. And he seems like a pretty understanding dude who wasn’t stressing over the fact that it took me a while to get the books back to him.
August 13 is the day after my birthday. My father and I have a habit of missing each other’s birthdays—sometimes by weeks, or days, or even months, but for some reason my father nailed it in 2006.
He’s been stalking me for months, he’s on top of me, he knows my birthday, he’ll nail the date this time, show me that he cares even though he knows—he knows he’s about to light the fuse of his epistolary cannon. If during one of our phone conversations I’d said the right thing, apologized for my indecent and selfish behavior, he might have folded the letter away in a drawer, or burned it—he’s giving me the chance to avoid this attack without telling me. If you turn around and apologize I won’t punch you in the back of your head. He knows I won’t say the right thing, he knows I’ll be the self-centered prick he’s come to consider me, and then he’ll have to light the cannon and wait, and wait, and wait for the sound of the explosion. He wants fury and he will get fury.
Oct 4, 2006
I enjoyed our conversation last night. Best visit we’ve had in a few years. Do you see us as having so little in common? You seemed in good spirits, more relaxed and upbeat than the last couple of years. I hope it is a sign that you are happier and more comfortable with life. But you’re still reluctant to share life experience and that underlying bitterness remains.
I don’t recall this conversation at all. But in fact my father and I have very little in common. We share no hobbies or recreational pursuits. He doesn’t read, he rarely sees movies, and he doesn’t cook. I have no idea what my father does with his time other than sit around his house and think about what a shit son he had the great misfortune of bringing into this world.
When he mentions my mood, relaxed and upbeat, I recognize that he cannot conceive of me in the world without his view of me in the world. He doesn’t understand that with friends and lovers I have been relaxed and upbeat for years, that in fact with my mother and sisters and the rest of my family I have been relaxed and upbeat for most of my life. My father thinks he still owns me.
Oct 8, 2006
I have sat on this much too long. The more I sit the longer it grows. It is well past time to shred or mail. So mail here it comes.
With Love,
Your Father
I didn’t call my father after reading the letter. I didn’t respond with a letter of my own. I didn’t know what to do, really. My father had shipped a letter bomb and it blew up in my face, the particles of sharp ink marred my face and hands, disrupted my spirit, unhinged me.
I called friends who had trouble with their fathers and they all confirmed for me that my father was a complete asshole, and that he hated me for some reasons I might never comprehend. Some went Oedipal, others went Great Santini; others took his side and said that when I became a father all of this would change (of course, they were fathers).
My therapist told me to write my father off, that we couldn’t choose our birth parents but that we could find other parents in the world. I’d already turned a few teachers and older friends into father stand-ins. And my therapist’s willingness to write my father off so casually caused me to take my father’s side, something I did fairly often when discussing the man with other people who might not take such a generous view of his verbal and sometimes physical abuse, his womanizing, his combat-deranged mind.
In late December 2006 I found an opportunity for a peace offering to my father: my publisher had sent me forty hardcover copies of my forthcoming novel. My father had complained so bitterly about how few copies I’d given him of Jarhead that I decided I’d make amends here: I’d send him ten copies; he could hand them out to his work and bar cronies. This time around I’d be the good son, the dutiful son. I’d not make my father look like a chump in front of his buddies.
I was in upstate New York at my winter rental, in Germantown. I drove to the post office and boxed up ten books, having signed a few of them, and having dedicated one to my father: DEAR FATHER, THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT, YOUR LOVING SON.
I didn’t know what support he’d given me, but it felt like the right thing to write, the kind of sentiment that would resonate. When it came time to address the box, I realized that I didn’t have my dad’s PO box information memorized. I knew his home address but he didn’t like receiving mail there. For some reason he felt that the government had more access to his private life if he received mail at home. More than once I’d forgotten his injunction about using his home address and gotten an earful. So I decided to call for his address. It would be the first time we’d spoken since I’d received his letter. I thought it best to not even mention it.
“Hey, Tone,” he shouted on his end of the line.
My father is one of those people who have decided that the louder you talk into a cell phone the better your reception.
“Hey, Dad,” I said. “I’ve got some copies here of my new book and wanted to send some out to you. I’ll send ten, so you can hand some off to your buddies. I need your PO box number.”
“Ah, hell, Tone. You don’t gotta do that. I already read that, um, that, what do you call it? The gallery? I got it from your mother.”
“Galley. Yeah, I know, but you got upset with me last time over how many books I sent out, so this time around I thought I’d send you some stock.”
“That’s all right,” he said. “I’m not really sure any of those guys would be interested. And I don’t need to read it again.”
I’d set myself up for this: the contrite son returns to the father for approval, possibly even for a joyous embrace, but receives instead a beating.
“OK then. Goodbye,” I said.
I hung my phone up without hearing his response. I stood in the small Germantown post office, burning with rage. It was a familiar feeling, my father denying me: this time praise, acceptance—he didn’t say that he liked or hated the book, simply that he’d read it and didn’t need any more copies hanging around, littering up his place. I wanted to burn the box of books. I wanted to burn the post office down. I wanted to burn all of Germantown, all of Columbia County—to scorch the entire United States, east to west, and my father there in Fairfield, California, on Meadowlark Lane.
It was a week before Christmas and I was alone upstate.
I sat in my BMW M3, the engine idling mean. I was a cliché: an angry man in a sick-fast car—zero to sixty in 4.3 seconds. My shifts weren’t expert enough for me to have hit a track time like that, but my shifts weren’t bad, and no matter what I did, I felt fast driving that car, and the speedometer said so, too.
For
sex, which might have calmed my rage at my father, I had a few options: both of them were in the city and neither of them was my girlfriend, she who was in Miami quite probably engaging in sex with someone other than me, her boyfriend.
I could drive to the city and be out at dinner with a beautiful one of those options by nine o’clock, or I could invite one of them up to the country, Amtrak to Rhinecliff—I’d done it before.
Or I could drive country roads like a madman and sleep alone.
I headed up 9G North, toward Hudson. I didn’t speed along this stretch, but occasionally I downshifted and jacked the rpms toward the red line, feeling the torque, feeling the tires chew into the road. The desolate months had begun to settle on upstate New York: frozen ground, brittle tree branches signaling the death of another autumn, the occasional pine straining green through the gray muck of it all. Darkness fell early these nights. I had only an hour or so to drive wild without headlights.
I booked across the Rip Van Winkle Bridge and ambled through Catskill, driving like everyone else, the parents on their way to retrieve a child from some practice or another, or a rehearsal, or detention. But my car was faster than most on the road.
Out of Catskill I turned onto 9W South and began to rip through the gears. From the left an asphalt truck abruptly pulled out in front of me and I gunned it around the guy, not looking for oncoming traffic, nor caring. The speed limit was forty-five and I was going ninety. The week before I’d hit 120 on this road, and I wanted at least that much again. I wanted more. The governor on the car would stop me at 133. What value did the car have if I didn’t run it out like that? None. Who wants to say I once owned this incredibly fast German sports car, and one time I went eighty-five in it? Only a fool.
The road ahead thinned to one lane, beneath a railroad overpass. I slowed down for the red. Between the stop line and the tight underpass lay about thirty yards of road. We went green. I gunned it, I ripped through the gears, and I shot through the short tunnel at forty-five, the traction holding deep on the slight right bend. In front of me was about two miles of mostly straight road, and I killed it, I chewed it up, the speedo climbed to ninety, and then 105, and then 120, and then 130, and then it hovered and ticked at 133; the world flew by, seasons changed, my heart hung at the edge of the world. I could die, I could kill myself with a flick of my wrist and it would look like a mistake, a daredevil young writer, war veteran, pushing all the limits at once and doing a header into a tree with his sixty-five-thousand-dollar car. But I took her down, slow, descending, 115, 105; let’s hold on here at a hundred for a moment, it feels good, it feels fine, brakes now, eighty, sixty-five, fifty; there we are at forty-five, the speed limit, the boredom experienced by every other man and woman behind the wheel of a minivan.
The quiet. I hated the quiet.
I drove back across the river to Tivoli. I’d decided that in fact I wanted to have sex with someone this night, a stranger. I thought, Bard grad student! Perfect. Smart, possibly a bit crunchy and certainly young.
I ate at the bar at the Mexican joint in town. Bad chicken something, so-so margaritas, at least a few, possibly many. Nothing happened in the girl department there, a stringy blonde tried to chat with me but stringy blondes are not my style.
A fake English pub down the street drew my attention. I parked behind the bar. I started with whiskey. I remember the bartender being a friendly young guy. At some point he stopped charging me. I talked to a few locals, and a few male undergrads killing time before their flights home for winter break. Word on the street was all the girls were gone. Tivoli: Land of the Hand.
I can’t tell you that I was wasted but neither can I tell you that I was sober. Certainly I’d had too much to operate my car completely safely. One of those families from the minivans? I might have taken them out: band instruments and soccer clothes tweaked in the jumble of metal and flesh. But I didn’t.
I drove faster than I should have on the country road leading to my place. I pulled into the gravel driveway, safe, but decided I needed a late-night snack. Some popcorn, perhaps.
I headed the three or so miles back to town. At the Stewart’s I bought chips and salsa and a pint of ice cream. I started for home. I had the sunroof open, the bitter cold air ripped through the car. I’d driven this road hundreds of times. I remembered the exhilaration of my late afternoon speed fest, and I kicked the speed up. Yes, a stupid move. The road, I knew this road, and about a mile before my house it made a kinky tight S, posted speed limit fifteen mph. I’d hit it at forty a few times without a problem, but also without a few margaritas and whiskeys coursing through my bloodstream. But this time I pushed fifty, and fifty was no good, the S in the road became an M and then a Z and then a Q.
The sound was deafening and people from three or four houses along the road emerged to witness the results of tonight’s match. Man and BMW versus Three Trees and a Telephone Pole.
Man and BMW lost.
I’d concussed myself against the now-shattered driver’s-side window. I smelled gasoline, and all I saw from the windshield was hood, the beautiful crumpled racing silver hood. I heard the noise of the onlookers, cheering me out of my car, the loser. The shattered window was still intact, but I broke it away with my upper arm and climbed from the car. Dizzy, I sat along the side of the road and waited for paramedics or police. The onlookers inquired about my condition and I told them that I was fine and that I could just walk the half mile home and have my car towed in the morning. It seemed like a good plan.
The paramedics arrived first. They checked me out and said I was free to go.
The cops were young and polite, early thirties. They asked me to blow into a Breathalyzer and I refused. The few lawyer friends I had said to always refuse, if you’ve had more than two drinks, refuse the Breathalyzer. In order to avoid paperwork the cops tried to convince me that blowing was a good idea.
“If you just blow, no matter what the reading, we’ll drop you off at home. Otherwise, we gotta pull you in front of a judge tonight, and the judge will not be happy, I assure you. And you will spend the night in jail.”
“I still refuse,” I said.
“OK, sir, have it your way.”
Somewhere along the Taconic State Parkway on the way to State Police Troop K headquarters, one of the cops said, “Hey, wait a minute. Swofford? Didn’t you write that book Jarhead ?”
I felt like a fool. “Yes,” I said, “I did.”
“I got a marine buddy. He hated that movie. I thought it was pretty good. My wife read the book. Nice to meet you.”
At the station a bit of hell had broken loose. A local kid had gotten drunk and somehow made it into his neighbor’s house, where he’d decided he’d eat some leftover pizza and watch a movie. The captain knew both families and was trying to decide how to proceed. Most people were of the mind to give the kid a break, bust him on some bullshit misdemeanor trespassing charge, but scare the shit out of him and teach him a lesson. I thought how I might like to get a bullshit misdemeanor charge and be taught a lesson. But it didn’t seem as if that was going to work out tonight.
The station had just taken shipment of an electronic fingerprinting device and my boys were having a bit of trouble operating the touch pad. While somebody got on the horn with IT, one cop said, “So how did you like the movie? I mean, that must have been weird, some pretty Hollywood kid playing you, your name and everything.”
Over the years since my first book had been turned into a film I’d had this question thousands of times. But never from a cop while waiting to be fingerprinted. But I didn’t flinch, and I gave my standard reply: “He’s a good actor. I think he nailed it. But my abs are tighter.”
The cop laughed, like he was supposed to, as thousands of other people had over the years.
And he was right. The judge did not appreciate being dragged from whatever she’d been dragged from in order to send me to jail for the night. The charge was driving under the influence, but they had no evidence, other than the
observations of the police, who told the judge that I’d been polite and cooperative throughout our evening together.
The orange jumpsuit fit snugly and the deputy taking my mug shot said, “So you’re the Jarhead guy? Nice to meet you. Who you gonna call, Mrs. Jarhead?”
I called Ava and asked her to post bail, which her father did the next morning around ten or so. The night in jail had been uneventful. No lunatics, no murderers, nothing exciting, just the same old jailhouse Bible and rubbery chow I used to be served in the Marines.
As the sheriff handed me my clothes and a check for the cash that had been in my wallet he said, “Goodbye, Jarhead. Hope to never see you again. Good luck.”
I took a cab to the wrecking yard where my car had been towed. I pulled my warm winter jacket and the box of books from the trunk. The car was totaled, crumpled down to economy size from sport coupe. I noticed my chips and salsa in the backseat, so I grabbed those, too, and headed home.
MY BROTHER TOLD me this story about our father. It happened in 1974, when my brother was twelve and I was four.
My father’s squadron had given him a going-away party before our family shipped off to Japan. He had a long drive home, from Sacramento to Vacaville, about fifty miles. He was drunk, and somewhere along the way the highway patrol red-lighted him, but my father didn’t pull over. He was driving a fast Jaguar XK-E, and he didn’t feel like stopping, so why stop?
My brother claimed to have been in the garage, working on his bike, when my father ripped around the corner followed closely by three CHP cruisers. My father slid the XK-E perfectly into the driveway and made a dash for the front door, at his heels the three cops, but my father slammed the door in their faces.
In my brother’s version, my mother talked to the police and told them that she would take care of her husband, and the police left.