Читать книгу The Punk and the Professor - Billy Lawrence - Страница 17

10

WHEN I WAS TEN years old, my father called one day and set up an appointment to come over and take me out for the first time. He apologized to my mother over the phone for all the years that had passed and blamed it on his work and not being able to find us. When he arrived an hour late he came up the stairs and blamed it on the traffic.

“I needed to drive on the sidewalks to get here. It’s busy around here.”

He had been used to the quieter way of life out east on the island, closer to where I had lived before my mother married Don. My father lived a mere couple of miles away all that time, but he was out driving trucks just like my mother’s father had done. Her father had died when she was around the age when my father had just started to come around, so I guess I couldn’t complain.

The man intrigued me. He was strange and wild— full of hyperbolic stories and loud laughs. The first day he took me for a drive and pointed to a shack on Sunrise Highway.

“Hey, we’re home,” he said and then laughed loud at the puzzled expression on my face.

He was tan like he had sat outside too long floating on a boat. He liked to fish so that’s where we went a lot of the time. He’d pick me up on Sundays and we’d go to a pier, a lake, or the beach. I liked being outside. But boy did he have lousy luck because we hardly ever caught fish. I didn’t mind because I didn’t see the point in hooking a fish out of the water just to throw it back. His bad luck was our good luck.

My father would drive us around a lot. His Marlboro smoke drifting out his driver side window. I liked the smell. We’d stop at video arcades and fast food places. We’d stop for snack breaks at gas stations or delis that usually consisted of a Kit Kat bar and a glass bottle of Coke. We went on errands and visited all the friends he managed to make around town. He liked to talk to people. To me, it seemed tiring. He had given up driving big trucks to manage a car wash because it kept him at home where he wouldn’t be so lonely like he was when he was out on the road. I liked driving around seeing different places, listening to the 80s music on the radio.

Some days he was late. A few times he just didn’t show up at all. I remember waking up early on Sunday and waiting around for several hours until I gave up. By noon I was out at my friend’s house or roaming the neighborhood trying to forget all about him. No phone call. No apology. No explanation. Weeks would pass and then he’d call my mother to set up another Sunday as if nothing had even happened. When I’d see him again, he’d pretend as if everything was normal. I guess I went right along with it.