If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.
-- James Baldwin,
The Price of the Ticket
I swig from the can of Budweiser. It runs down my throat like warm piss. My chest gleams with sweat The sun sparkling on the lake burns brilliant as a magnesium flare, and just as hot.
North Carolina, summer. Complete with humidity.
"You going to cast?" Dad asks. He lounges on a long, waist-high boulder, a perfect beach chair lying on the lake edge. Sleepy waves lap at its base. The air is still, thick as sweat fumes rising from a stinking armpit.
"Yeah, yeah." I grind the beer can down into the pebbles. I grab the shiny black fiberglass rod, check it, whip it back over my head. The hot day is briefly cool in my armpit's wet hairs.
I snap my wrist.
Thunk
. The line goes straight into the water about three feet in front of me.
Dad laughs. "Pretty good, son. You been practicing?"
I start reeling the botched cast in. "Yeah, yeah," I say. I'm a lousy fisherman. It's an old joke between me and Daddy. So much so that my lips are curled in a half-smile.
"Play with your rod some more, son," Daddy says. "Get some practice in." He yanks his cap low over his forehead, then stretches out over the long, flat stone. His eyes close. He's comfortable; a thick towel is wadded under his neck, and more are under his back.
Now I can safely stare at him.
Daddy's a big man. Commanding. Muscled, hairy. Only a few years ago he retired from the Army -- a day when his joy with mixed with the sadness of moving out of an old, familiar house. He'd worn Army full dress -- and the winged badge of a paratrooper, and bright ribbons won in Asian rice paddies when I was a baby (and before), and the patch of a Ranger, and the green beret that always made me sit a little straighter in the seat when I saw it on him. I watched the little ceremony with Mom and my little brother. I read his emotions that day like a blind man feeling impressions in paper.
He's changed. Now he wears cutoffs -- old fatigue pants, lots of button-up pockets bulging with lines, lures, bobbers, weights. They're frayed at the bottom. Instead of a beret it's a baseball cap, pulled low over his eyes against the glare.
But years of discipline which forged a hard body haven't been so easily cut away or tossed aside.
Sweat shimmers on biceps about as thick as my thighs. On sloping, corded shoulders. On nipples the size of quarters, visible under a carpet of thick, dark, wiry hair. Daddy's hair covers his chest like lawn grass. Descending over a belly hardly softened by retirement it vanishes beneath the snug waist of the cutoffs, reemerging to coat hard thighs, the long shins.
I sigh. Turn away. Cast again. This time the line arcs well out into the molten silver water. The lure raises a small splash as it slices into the lake.
I see his eyes open as the reel whirrs. Lips bend in a slight smile of amused satisfaction. Then his eyes close again.
There's a flash of warmth in me that spreads out from my heart. And there's a flash of heat in me that burns my loins.
Because my Dad is ten feet from me, sweat dripping from his muscles.
Because the patterns of his sweat-wet body hair make a moiré pattern which ripple hypnotically under the furnace sky, drawing my gaze towards Daddy's center.
Because that pattern draws my gaze towards his center.
Because that spot is covered by his just-a-bit-too-snug cutoffs.
Because my mind roams into illegal realms, where the illegality can cause enough fire to torch entire cities, entire countries.
Beneath those cutoffs the hair grows thick, I know -- thick, coarse, wiry round that big organ that one hot and sweaty night spewed me forth with 100 million brothers into my mother's womb. That big organ which is the fountain from which I sprang unformed and unwholesome. That cock which is my father.
I sigh, finish reeling the line. I ignore -- try to ignore -- the void in my ass.
Often I think evil thoughts.
In some dubious region between the triple peaks of reality, fantasy, and memory, Daddy gave a laughing, giggling toddler a bath. The toddler didn't care that Daddy was tired. Just hours before Daddy had walked down the jetway, exiting the DC-9 after a day-long trans-Pacific flight. His eyelids sagged; sleep like a monkey stood on his shoulder.
But time he had for me, his son, his eldest.
He was naked. He didn't even change out of his uniform -- just stripped it off, wanting to be with me but not wanting it soaked. I was a frenzied kid in the tub, fond of stirring the waters to a froth with ships and submarines engaged in protracted, violent battles. I was -- am -- the appetite for destruction. I stirred great tidal waves, overwhelming carriers, drowning the lip of the tub which was the shore of a tiny island with thousands of pathetic inhabitants --
Can't see anything of Daddy, being so low down in the tub, which perhaps is something he intends. But there were smiles, laughter, and washcloths, and Ivory soap, and Johnson's Baby Shampoo, and squeals. Daddy and me, naked and together.
Where does the real world begin? The wizard of imagination is insane, and often mixes memory with longing.
There's a slipperiness to this image, like soap dropped in the shower skittering away from fingertips. Maybe it's an echo of an early memory. Maybe its Freudian, or Jungian, or both. A story, a song, a painting, untrue as seen but true as experienced.
It comes to me, usually at night, just before I fall asleep. I never argue with it. I just let the experience roll over me, like his touch, over and over.
Is it true I tingled so when he touched me?
Reel the line it. Cast. Drop sweat. Flip long wet hair over my shoulders. Swig beer. The lazy summer cycle goes on.
Daddy doesn't speak much. He's dozing, or close to it. We came out here to get away from school, lawn-mowing, cleaning, responsibility -- he's tearing into this lazy day like a starving man into a roast. From time to time his hand moves off his belly, and in slow motion plucks his beer can from where he's tucked it between his thighs. Every once in a while beer spills down his chin. It collects in the hollow at the base of his neck, where it mixes with the sweat oozing from his body. He doesn't bother to wipe it, just letting it evaporate into the steamy air.
He asks me to get an icy Bud from the cooler twice. When I bring it to him he smiles at me, eyes half-closed with the laziness of the day. His hand rustles my hair; he acknowledges me through slitted eyes.
Which doesn't help me at all.
There's an uproar in my balls. My cock's alive in my shorts' cotton lining -- lengthening, thickening, stirring like a newly-roused cobra with the scent of prey on the tip of his tongue. Then shriveling, shrinking, like ice melting under the glare of the sun, nervous and scared.
My bladder's swimming with piss. But I'm afraid to pee because of what might happen if I haul out my cock near my Dad.
