Roy Sorrels Writing Coach

     I had become what every New Yorker secretly longs to be, a harmless, amusing eccentric.
     The first cards in my collection came from a three-card monte man on 14th Street in Lower Manhattan. Queen of hearts, queen of spades and queen of clubs. "Follow the red, follow the black," he chanted. "Find the red, Fred, you make some bread, Fred — choose the black, Jack, can't give no money back!" A lookout cried, "Cop!" and the man hurriedly pocketed the cash, kicked over his cardboard boxes and ran off. He left behind the three cards. I palmed them into my pocket.
   It was the beginning of my yearlong hunt for one full deck of found playing cards. I created the rules. I had to find the cards on the sidewalks or streets of the city of New York, any borough. I could take no more than three cards at a time.
     I loved my game. I brought my cards home and began to glue them together in a fan-shaped mandala on the wall over my desk. At first my friends were amused at me, on my hands and knees on sidewalks and streets at all hours, picking up cards. I asked around and nobody knew anybody who'd ever collected a deck of cards from the streets of New York. I had become what every New Yorker secretly longs to be, a harmless, amusing eccentric. But then my friends began to be annoyed. They asked why I was doing this, exactly. At first, I scrambled for an answer, but the truth was I didn't know.
     I was reading-matter-deprived on a recent flight, so I read every word in something called the SkyMall catalogue. Thing after thing was described in breathless cataloguese, with what exactly it did, what it was good for and why my life would be richer if I bought it. One of the devices on sale was an electronic doodad that, by satellite, could tell me where I was on the surface of the planet, within a hundred feet. Why, I wondered, did that make me feel eerily disconcerted? No more getting delightfully and creatively lost? No more wandering away from certainty?
     Aha! That was the answer to my friends' questions. I want to spend at least part of my time doing things that don't necessarily make sense. Perhaps it's my way of rebelling against a world in which everything must be useful. I need in my life something mysterious that can't easily be explained.
     Finally, after a full year, I had all but the three of clubs. I continued to find cards, plenty of them, but weeks passed and still no three of clubs. I became melancholy, desperate. I needed the three of clubs. The city was holding out on me; fate was toying with me.
     Then one day I was back on 14th Street. The same three-card monte man was juking and jiving. "Follow the red, not the black...find the red, Fred, you make some bread, Fred." I stopped 20 feet away from him and yelled "Cop!" He kicked over the boxes and ran.
     The three cards fell to the sidewalk, facedown. I walked to where they lay. Spades you lose, hearts you lose, but my man, my man, you got to choose. On my hands and knees, I turned over the cards.
     Everyone ignored me, just another guy kneeling on a New York sidewalk, crying and kissing, for his own sweet reasons, the three of clubs.

This memoir essay was published in The Gettysburg Review and cited as a “Notable Essay” in The Best American Essays of 2002.

The Other Father

The police prepared an investigation report of the death by gunshot, the suicide, of my father. It contains these words: “Separately received in a body bag with the deceased are brain, left eye and surrounding soft tissue, nose with attached upper lip and portion of upper gum, and various pieces of fractured skull, lacerated forehead, and individual teeth.” This is what was left on September 22, 1997, of the mythic monster, the bad father, the man who did not love me. This is the man I have complained about all these years, been frightened of, hated. The man who provided me with all the convenient excuses I needed: Well, I cannot really succeed because, well, my father, you know, just didn’t love me, just wouldn’t, just couldn’t. Well, I cannot be easy with money because he worried about it so much. I cannot sleep well because he could not sleep well.
     Determined, as I was, not to be a bad father, I was a bad father to my own sons.
     “Contact rifle wound beneath chin, with massive destruction of skull and brain.” The words appear under “Pathological Findings on the Island County Coroner Autopsy Report.
     What he did was this: he placed the muzzle of the rifle under his chin, pointing up toward the top of his head. It was a .30-.30 rifle, the one he had taken deer hunting year after year, a lever action rifle powerful enough to bring down a large animal at three hundred yards, with a muzzle velocity of over two thousand feet per second.
     His head literally exploded. He could not, of course, have heard the report of the rifle, although a neighbor, next trailer over, did. A “pop,” he said, drowned out mostly by the Monday Night Football pregame show.

THE BOY WALKS up the hill to the place where the bone lies in the sun. It lies between two yuccas, a knob at one end, the curve of the rest of it like a dagger.
He stands where he stood yesterday. He doesn’t look at the bone—to do that would bring on some catastrophe, something screaming down from the sky. Instead he looks up at a spot in the distance just above the mesa that holds up the paper sky.
The bone is there; he can trust that it is there, but he mustn’t look at it. Mustn’t, mustn’t, mustn’t.

THE MAN RAISED the rifle and aimed at the boy who stood in the flat place where the dry-wash bed was, in front of the house.
The boy would always remember it as though watching from high up and off to one side. He never remembered it from inside his own body, and he wondered why, always. It was a tight place where he was, the man telling him he must do this, and the woman telling him he must do that. This or that. He was paralyzed, couldn’t run even though he knew the man was shooting at him. Once, twice, whining across the canyon, gunshots kicking up dirt around his feet. Three times, and the man stopped firing. He went inside the house to scream at the woman.

HE FINDS two vertebrae still clinging together with a bit of gristle, about the size of the O he makes with his finger and thumb, and he brushes off the dirt and carries them up into the hills to the place where he has placed the bone. Carefully, but not looking at the bone, he places the vertebrae just below it, knob up and to the right, the curve of the bone down and to the left.
Then he stands and looks at the mesa. Crows drift over it, rips in the paper. They lie on the air, then whip it with their wings. He turns to go, to walk back down the hill, the bones fluttering across the edge of his vision.

HE SAT in the front seat of the Model A Ford, the bristly upholstery scratchy against the back of his neck and his bare arms, as his mother’s slender white hand gripped the head of the stick shift.
“What should I do?” she asked the boy. “Where should I go? How should I live my life?” He turned his head to look out the window. “You’re not listening,” the woman said. “You’re not helping me at all. Tell me, tell me. What? What?”
“Mommy,” he said. “Mommy.” She looked down at him with despair in her eyes, and tears, and disappointment. Why wouldn’t he help her? Why wouldn’t he tell her?

HE SITS motionless, his hand on his cheek, his shirt wet with sweat as he watches the snake slither out of its skin. The sun moves across the sky as the snake writes over the rocks, leaving behind a likeness of itself.
The boy picks up the snakeskin with his fingers spread out to support its fragility and carries it back up into the hills, to the place between the two yuccas. The dagger bone and the two vertebrae are there, white in the sun, with a little sand newly blown around them, as the boy places the snakeskin from the lower left tip of the bone in a curve down and away to the right. He does this without looking at the bone or the vertebrae, and then stands to gaze at the mesa. Dust from a tractor rises, drifts, disappears.

THE MAN WORKED three different shifts at the oil company and slept all hours.
The boy taught himself to walk without making a sound, heel and then toe touching down like an Indian stalking a cougar. He could place a glass upon the table without a sound, and he could open and close a door as though the door were made of nothing. He could walk right up to the man’s bed, inches away, and look down at his open mouth, at his hair wet with sweat across his forehead. He watched the television with the sound off and made up what the people were saying.

WHEN HE FINDS the skull of a coyote, he crouches over it, staring into the eyes, because once it is in place with the other bones, he can never look at it again.
Over and over in his mind, as years go by, turning it over and over like a dry bone, he tries to puzzle out the mystery of the gunshots, the day the man shot at him and missed. Something is wrong with the moment, like a crack in a jug, letting meaning dribble out. It is years later, far away on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, that a therapist suggests that perhaps the man wasn’t really shooting at the boy with the intention of hitting him, for he was far too good a shot for that, wasn’t he? He only meant to humiliate him, to scare him. Isn’t that a possibility? Only. He only meant to humiliate. And the boy, now a man, misses the strange comfort of believing that the man meant to kill him.

WHEN THE WHISPER of rain starts, the boy runs to the window and looks up at the sky. One drop of rain plops on the sand, then a million. The wash in front of the house growls now with water rushing down from the hills, swirling gray foam before it.
He steps silently from the house from habit, for the man is off at the oil fields, and the woman is brushing her hair, gazing into a mirror, wondering. He runs through the rain to the hill where the bones are.
They are gone, washed away in the water. Only the snakeskin remains, caught on a rock and stretching itself out, moving like a living snake in the rushing water. He holds it in his hands and looks up at the mesa, but the mesa is invisible now behind rain that blows across the black sky like silver whips.

HE KILLED HIMSELF at age 82. Willard Ray Sorrels, known as Bill, shot himself with a .30-.30 rifle, lever action, the one he took into the hills year after year in my childhood in search of a deer to shoot. Right around 6 P.M., his next-door neighbor said, because he heard the “pop” during the pregame show of Monday Night Football.
     Officer Bishop and Officer Tingstad, in the report they typed up, described the death scene as “horrific.” They put on rubber gloves, and Tingstad helped Bishop recover and place in the body bag “as many body parts as feasible from the scene surrounding the body.” The nose and upper lip.
     I remember that rifle as I read the investigation report. He once handed it to me on what must have been my tenth or eleventh birthday, with tears in his eyes, as a gift. I believe that, in his mind, this was a thing men did; they gave rifles to their sons. I had no desire to kill anything, and bit by bit it became his rifle again, and he kept it, as I know now, until the very end of his life.
     The investigators found the TV Guide in his house open to the evening of the day he shot himself, so perhaps he meant to postpone the act one more day. And the autopsy found canned peaches in his stomach, so he died alone but not hungry.
     His physician, a Dr. Knaack, had urged him to move into a nursing home because his heart was failing. But Bill told the doctor that if it ever came to that, he would kill himself with a gun. And he did.
     If I had been there that day, in the back hall of the mobile home in which he lived, would I have wrestled the gun from his hands and forced him into the nursing home he feared and dreaded? Would I have visited him in the nursing home and watched him, tied into a wheelchair, drooling on himself? Or would I have offered to pull the trigger for him, sparing the old man the effort? Of course, either action would have been murder of a sort, so—perhaps I would have—just—watched. Maybe. How the rifle shot would have roared in that narrow hallway. Did my anger burn that hot? Does the desire for revenge live that long?

“MIGHT AS WELL be a girl,” the man said as the boy struggled to open the lock. The boy’s breath caught in tears held back barely, his chest tightening.
     The lock was square laminated metal, and it was on one end of the chain that kept people from driving down the hill and stealing things. Rain had rusted the lock so that it was very hard to open, and the man never oiled it. He could force it open because his hands were bigger and stronger, but the boy couldn’t do it.
     “Here, little girl, let me do it,” the man said as he took the key out of the boy’s trembling hands. The lock screeched open with a little cry of pain, and the man drove the pickup down the hill.
     The man had a dream, and it was to own a house of his own, on his own land, built with his own hands. He wanted a house he could park his pickup in front of, that nobody could take away from him. On forty acres of desert with sagebrush and manzanitas and yuccas and cactus at the edge of government land, he was building it himself. They lived, the three of them, in an old house trailer, peeling gray paint, old when he bought it, shaky on blocks when the wind blew down the canyon. On payday he bought a sack of cement and a dozen blocks and some rebar, and on the weekend he laid a row of blocks. The house taunted them with its unfinished state, sitting there gray in the brown desert like a ruin, or like a slow-growing tumor on the sand.
     But neither ruin nor slow-growing tumor would have been his metaphor. For him there was indeed a dream, but with no imagery to it. Every concrete block was a fact, not an image, every teacupful of wet, gray cement he lifted and placed just so; every nail he hammered; every wire he pulled through conduit; every detail he drew with a big, flat carpenter’s pencil on whatever paper was at hand.
     In this house he would live with his family. The wind down the canyon would not rock it as did the house trailer. It would last forever; it would be a hedge against death. But he could not shape the dream in the boy’s mind or in the woman’s. They just did not see it, did not share it.
     They had no running water, no electricity, a toilet that was a metal oil drum, half-buried, behind some sage with a hole cut in it for a seat. A garden hose and icy spring water for a shower. Cold, star-sprinkled nights followed hot, dusty, desert days, with the echo of a train in the night going somewhere far off.
     On cold nights the boy had to keep fidgeting around when he sat on the oil-drum toilet to keep his bottom from freezing to the metal. One night he forgot to fidget because of the stars, and the boy froze his backside to the metal.
“Can’t even take a crap right,” the man said, rescuing the boy.
     The man’s dream was the house. The woman’s dream was to be around people once in awhile, for goodness sake, even if was only waitressing at Archie’s Café next to Archie’s Shell station down on the highway. The man wouldn’t let her do it. No wife of his.
     The boy had a dream too, having to do with words and stories, but it was as yet unformed as the eyeless things the man ripped out of the belly of a rabbit he shot one day, small pink things that would have been rabbits in their own good time if they were allowed to grow.

THE MAN was a good shot with the .22 rifle he used to kill rabbits and birds and snakes, and with the lever action Winchester .30-.30 he used to go after his deer every season.
     “Get your deer yet, Bill?” the other men would ask him. He always got his deer. Venison for the table, part of his dream, like the house, like the arthritic horse he kept in a corral and the turkeys he kept in a pen. The boy couldn’t eat the deer meat; he told the woman it made him sick to his stomach.
     “You spend half your life sick to your stomach,” the man said, laughing at his joke.
     The man tried to teach the boy to shoot.
     “You’re sighted for fifty yards,” he told him, handing him the .22 rifle. “Farther than that you shoot a hair high. Less, and aim low. Now you try it.”
     The boy put the rabbit in the sights of the .22. Brown fur ruffled in the warm breeze, ears perked up attentively, big black eyes.
     “Now squeeze, real easy,” the man whispered, his breath hot in the boy’s ear. “Don’t jerk it.”
     The boy squeezed the trigger and burst the silence of the valley, spurting dirt three feet shy of the rabbit. That day, and on days to come, the boy fired under the critical eye of the man and kicked up dirt too short, off to the left, too long. Finally the man gave up in disgust.
     One day when the man got in his pickup and drove up the hill to go to the highway and to work in the oil fields, the boy took the .22 out and walked into the sandy stretch of cactus in front of the house and placed an empty can on a rock.
     He paced back, fifty yards, raised the rifle, and pinged the can into a dance across the hot sand, nine hits out of ten shots.
     The lock got tougher to open. In a million tries, as he would remember it later, he never got it to open even once, and the boy knew what the man would say, knew the words, and that made it a million times worse when he said them.
     When the man was at work and the boy’s mother was in the trailer with her pale hand lying on an open movie magazine, dreaming of being a waitress down at Archie’s on the highway, the boy took the .30-.30 rifle out into the hills. The first time he pulled the trigger, it knocked him down. He thought his shoulder was broken.
     But when the numbness was gone, he fired it again, and this time it didn’t knock him down. It was harder to aim than the .22 because it was heavier, but the boy learned how to do it. He paced fifty yards, fired at a rock. He missed it again and again, but missed it less and less. Before too long, at a hundred yards he could blow apart a rock the size of a man’s head. He could do that.
     The man stopped the pickup in a cloud of dust a hundred yards or so from the locked chain that kept people out.
     “The hell you doing down here?” he said to the boy. “And what the hell you doing with my deer rifle?”
     The boy didn’t answer. He raised the rifle to his shoulder. The man didn’t say anything. The lock was a small piece of flicker in the sunlight as the boy laid it on his sights and let his breath out real easy and gently squeezed the trigger. The bullet whines across the silent desert, the lock blew apart, and the chain fell. Then the boy turned to the man, jacked another shell into the chamber, and raised the rifle and sighted the man’s head. A hawk, soaring high on the warm clear air, shrieked faintly.
     Then the boy lowered the rifle, and the man and the boy looked at each other for a while.
     “Get in,” the man said. “Drive you down to the house.”
     The boy leaned the rifle against the pickup and walked on out into the hills. The lock never did get replaced. The truth is, there was nothing down there worth stealing.

WILLARD R. SORRELS was born in 1914 to Stella Steele, who would not allow him to call her mother because she traveled the country in an old car searching for a new man. She told the men he was her little brother, just tagging along for the ride, disposable. Bill, go out and play, this gentleman and I have things to talk over.
     The week of the crash of ’29, Stella Steele found somebody to run off with. Bill was on his own at age fifteen, working odd jobs, at one time driving a truck for King Brothers Circus and mucking out the lion shit, and at show time squeezing into a spangly costume to be the dead weight on the end of a twirling-ladder act. Then the WPA, digging ditches and learning despair. He learned for certain that to borrow money to finish the house was to risk losing it all, and he had seen, in those wandering, hungry days, what losing it all could do to a man.
     He was bitterly disappointed that neither my mother nor I could catch his spirit of adventure. There was this sandy stretch of nothing, you see, of cactus and sage, a few rocks, an don this space, this piece of nothing, he set out to make something, create something that hadn’t been there before. He chose not to build in wood, and I believe it was because wood can burn, it can rot or warp, or even wear away in the wind. Interlocking concrete blocks, held together by rebar and cement he mixed with a shovel in a wheelbarrow. In his life, where nothing had been permanent, would be this house.
     Now, when physicists speak of parallel universes, I pray that there is one, an alternate universe just next to this one perhaps, where my father finished the house—a job fit for a man and a boy—helped by a son who had inherited his handiness with tools and a wife who smiled and brought lemonade to her two men. A snug old house, in which he died peacefully at a comfortable age.
     But in this universe that was not to be. My mother and I were two pockets of burning dissatisfaction.

I WANTED some kids to play with, a flat surface to ride a bike on. She wanted . . . oh, it is so hard to say exactly, but the ingredients would be what she indeed did get later, after she left my father and ran off with my seventh-grade math teacher, Mr. Powell, to whom I introduced her at a PTA meeting. Life in a city, or at least a bustling big town, is what she wanted, a job for a newspaper selling advertising, say, lots of friends, lots of talk, plenty of good sex. He had a big green Packard, Mr. Powell. That was the year, seventh grade at William S. Hart Junior-Senior High School in Newhall, California, in Mr. Powell’s class, that I got an A in math. The only year.

IT WAS 1948. My mother was thirty-four, and I was ten. My mother had finally defied my father to the point of taking a job down at Archie’s Café on the highway. Archie, when he wasn’t pumping gas, doubled as the short-order cook, wiping most of the grease and oil from his hands before cracking eggs and flipping hamburgers. My mom was the waitress.
     It was heaven for her. People came into the café, and she got to talk to them. “Good morning,” she would say with a smile, and “Will that be all?” Sometimes she even had a conversation with the old coots who lived in the hills and came in and nursed a coffee all afternoon, and the long-haul truckers. People liked her.
     One gray tumbleweed morning, a cloudy morning with rolling shadows, the sun just coming up and turning the sky pink, a big black car rolled up to Archie’s Café. Out of the car stepped a handsome, black-haired man wearing an elegant blue suit. It was Zachary Scott, the movie star.
     When they came into the café, my mom spoke to them, and in half an hour the movie star changed my mom’s life, and mine too. I saw him on the screen, of course, as I was growing up and since. In most of the movies he made—Born to be Bad comes to mind—he plays the man who causes the problems, not the one who solves them. Dark, suave good looks, dangerous, almost evil good looks. I know just how he must have appeared to my mom on that cold, gray morning at Archie’s Café.
     She watched him and his beautiful blonde companion walk into the café and sit at a table by the window. My mom was stunned. He was a movie star, but this was Archie’s Café, where she worked, and he shouldn’t be sitting at a table here like some truck driver. She walked over. “Good morning,” she said, and it sounded to her like a perfectly delivered line of dialogue from a movie.
     Zachary Scott smiled at her and ordered two cups of coffee. My mother watched them drinking their coffee and softly speaking secrets to each other. Later my mother smiled and said, “Will that be all?” He asked for the check. The two coffees came to twenty cents. Zachary Scott put two dimes on the table, and a tip—a one-dollar bill. My mother watched them walk out of the café, get into the big black car, and drive off to . . . to where?
     Where did people go who could get into a big shiny car and drive away from this place? What adventures did they have there and on the way there? If Zachary Scott could walk into Archie’s Café and drink coffee with a beautiful woman, and my mom could bring them that coffee . . . then what? What did this moment mean?
     My mom did not have a philosophic turn of mind, but it she had she might have seen it clearly as a door opening just a crack into another world, a bigger, brighter place. It did in fact make her start to dream, to wonder; it planted a seed in her heart and mind.
     Whether she understood it quite like that or not, it did, in fact, change her life and mine.
     A few months later she met Mr. Powell, the math teacher. Edmund Elton Powell from West Virginia. He had been a Marine in World War II. He was a tall, dark man who wore blue suits and drove a big shiny green Packard. After I introduced them at the PTA meeting, they began a torrid love affair that my mom must have felt came right out of a movie.
     The three of us ran off to Las Vegas for a six-week divorce. My father stayed on the forty acres, but he stopped working on the house, and it was never finished.
     My mom and I moved with Mr. Powell to Hermosa Beach, California, and she got a job selling newspaper advertising. She could listen to the tales of tawdry woe and inflated accomplishment from the owner of, say, Honest Jack’s Used Cars and charm the cigar-smoking, not-so-honest Jack into buying a full-page ad. She loved it and they loved her.
     For the rest of her life she never stopped talking about the dollar bill Zachary Scott gave her. She kept it in a photo album and showed it to people. She told the story over and over, and the neighbor ladies were quite nicely impressed.
     She was sick for a couple of years and had to quit her job. It was a slow cancer, and she took a long time dying, but she never stopped talking about that long-ago morning. A couple of days before she died, she opened the album and handed me the dollar bill. We cried together. I had the dollar bill in my pocket in the week hours of the morning when I drove to the hospital and heard from a nurse that my mom was dead.
     I left the hospital just before dawn, a cloudy morning with rolling shadows. I stopped in a café out on the highway. The waitress, young and sleepy but with a pretty smile, came over to my table by the window. “Good morning,” she said. I ordered a cup of coffee. Later she came by and said, “Will that be all?”
     When I got up to go, I left a quarter on the table for the coffee and, as a tip, the dollar bill Zachary Scott gave my mother. The sun was just turning the morning pink as I walked out the door. I glanced over my shoulder and saw the waitress smile down at the table.

MY FATHER’S HAPPIEST DAY, I believe, was the day he drove his brand-new, sky blue, 1949 Ford, the first new car he had ever owned, over the hill into our little canyon. He walked into the Ford dealership, took cash money out of his pocket, pulled off the rubber band that held it together, and laid it down on the table, the exact amount he knew the car cost. He warned the man not to try to sell him anything. He wanted that one over there, the blue one.
The house isn’t there anymore. I found the place recently, after fifty years away. Now there’s a prefab dwelling surrounded by kid’s bikes and toys. The semi-finished concrete block house has been bulldozed away. The oil-drum toilet is long gone. Other houses squat in the hills nearby, looking like houses built somewhere else in pieces and trucked here to be tacked together.
When I was a drama student at the University of Southern California, I acted in many plays. But I only ever invited my father to see one of them, when I was in the chorus of a production of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. He said he didn’t much care for it, and years later my therapist pointed out that this is the play about the son killing his father and sleeping with his mother, the one on which Freud based the Oedipus complex. Can you believe it, I didn’t think of that when I invited him to see it. Well, of course, I did think of it, in a dark place behind the scenery of my conscious mind.

NOW THERE IS NO FATHER. He is body bag, nose and lip, the subject of an investigation report that bears the number W97-169. Daddy, where are you now? Who can save me now from the possible? Who can keep me from flying, fully and without fear, from stepping off the cliff like the Fool in the Tarot?
     Did you ever feel that about someone in your life? That, as much as you complain about them, you white-knuckle them to your very heart because they are your safety? Because they save you from the whirling terror of the possible?
     I think I was mad all those years, but now that the man is dead, I have to suffer from another kind of madness. It is a tunnel that I must go into at full speed, the tunnel that will open out onto . . . me . . . myself in my true and glorious state. How strange that, in my sixties, this should be so. But we are who we are, and where we are, and we are when we are. I am now, and here.
     As a child this is what I did. I created small anxieties in my life—not doing my homework, keeping a library book out too long—to give myself something to worry about, to mask the big worry, the big anxiety—that I wanted, like Oedipus, to kill my father and sleep with my mother.

IN FACT, I did sleep with my mother.
     I slept with my mother because my father worked night shifts much of the time, and I would be invited off the little sofa in the trailer to slide into bed with my mother. We slept head to toe, and toe to head, and my pajama bottoms would creep up my legs, and my mom would pull them down, give them a brisk tug perhaps, but no, no, that is not the way I remember it. I remember that soft, warm flannel slowly slipping down my legs, and I have to say it is the most sensual thing I have ever felt. Years later, in puberty, I dreamt of having sex with my mother, dreams as seemingly real as this room, and I would wake wondering if it really happened. But now I know that things that happen in our heads and only in our heads do indeed really happen.
     So maybe the dream is a kind of truth, and my salvation. That we did have sex, my mother and I, and maybe this was real, maybe we really did do this, we really did have sexual intercourse, the kind that makes babies, and we made a baby, and the baby we made, you see . . . was me. And if that were truly the case, why then I would be my own father. I could eliminate that son of a bitch entirely because that is what happened anyway, sort of, really. I became my own father, fathered myself, eliminated him, or thought I did.
     One day when I was five or so, I meant to fart but shit in my pants. My mom was out somewhere, shopping or at the doctor’s, so I went to my father. It is my only recollection of his ever touching me, and he stripped me naked, and himself, and turned on the shower and pulled me in there. I was screaming for my mom, and hating myself for that, and he hated me for it as it was happening. I was washed clean.
     With my own sons, I always sort of hoped that one of them would come to me someday and say, “I meant to fart, and shit myself,” so I could joke about it, and say, “Hey, that happens, it happened to me once, don’t worry about it, let’s get you cleaned up and then go outside and toss a ball around and make jokes.” But that never happened.
     So who was that man who shot himself during the pregame show of Monday Night Football? It is a mystery. How could he disown me, how could he believe that I betrayed him if he wasn’t really my father, if I were my own father?
     If I were in fact my own father, would I have treated me better? Would I have loved me? Taught myself to tie knots and carve a whistle from a stick? Fix the car when it breaks down? Build a house one concrete block at a time without ever going into debt?
     In fact, I write stories and plays, and that pleases me, but it would not have pleased that other father, the one whose nose and upper lip and assorted loose teeth Officers Bishop and Tingstad so considerately picked up off the floor and put in the body bag.
     I remember one day when he really did seem proud of me. My chore that day was to take the house trash in a wheelbarrow across the canyon, maybe a hundred yards or so, to dump it in a ravine. Coming back with the empty wheelbarrow, I rolled over a large rattlesnake right in front of the house. Didn’t hurt it, just made the thing mad. I ran in, told my mom, and she said I would have to shoot it. I could bite the cat, or the dog, or us.
     For some reason there was only one bullet in the house, and I jacked it into the chamber of the .30-.30 deer rifle. The snake’s head moved back and forth, it was rattling, the dry sound of fear. One shot, I must not miss. I fired. And I blew the head off the snake. When my dad drove up to the house that afternoon, I stood there holding the snake, longer than I was tall, in one hand, for him to see, and I held the rifle in the other hand.

IT WAS THE RIFLE with which, forty-eight years later, he shot himself. I wonder if, when he held that rifle in his hands for that last time, if he thought of the snake I killed with it, or only of my betrayal in not being the boy or the man he wanted me to be?