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As an adult I hated him.  Until the nursing home.  On my rare visits there I call him dad.  First time since grade school.  His dementia makes that intimacy one-sided, a performance, a way of testing what he and I lost with our emotional estrangement after my first arrest at age eighteen and Never thought I’d see a son of mine in jail.

Dad … (to find mutual ground I take us decades back; I’m a kid) remember the Rock River?  Grandma’s.  The walk from the stone house through a field of butterflies.  Remember that summer day I almost drowned?  Remember how you saved me?”

His momentary focus on my face convinces me that a sunburst of recognition pierces the mental fog—I know this human, he belongs to my life.  But then he fists fabric at his pajama crotch and tugs, separating from his thighs the uncomfortable sogginess where he peed himself.

Sir, can you take me home?  I’m not supposed to be here.

*

After creating characters in novels and stories and plays—decades of this—I’ve chosen to use my fictional tools to create myself in a clothing of words.  Another way to lie: look how I’m dressed!  Immersed in memories I accept that I’m not fully alive.  When writing we’re exiles.  Life awaits outside the room.  But dead leaves are the loudest and it’s a windstorm of long gone stories around the cherrywood desk in my workroom, where the floorboards slope to the low, west window.  During daily stints at the desk I catch myself leaning a few degrees left to counteract the skewed floor.  No surprise that I’ve developed back problems to go along with the new terror of facing words on the screen that betray the secret my life has been for more than forty years.

The summer after high school, with my closest friends planning their first semester in college, what made sense to me was at night.  Alone.  In the dark.  Gloves on my hands and a penlight in my mouth.  For the next two years I made my living by being that forever-after felt presence—in your house or hotel room—that robbed you of your sense of security.  I can’t plead that I did it on impulse, or was high, or needed money desperately.  Crime was premeditated.  I’m as guilty as is possible to be.  The precision and close calls nourished my gut-knowledge that I’m on a moment-by-moment terminal adventure.  Because I could tell no one, crime isolated me as much as writing does today, both a communion with my dark possibilities.  My askew expertise.  People often say, But what exactly do you do all day?

My niece gave me marbles to use as worry beads.  Drop one and it rolls to the window.  West is the direction of pull at my age—days dying with me.  Sunset.  Dark.  Fingers pause above the keyboard as I mull over how much to confess.  As a writer I know that moment in the nursing home is heartbreaking.  Good start for any readers I may have.  As a son I feel nothing.

*

What do you mean enjoy life? he often asked me.  When I graduated from high school he forced me to buy a term-life policy from Prudential, the insurance company where he was an agent.  I couldn’t afford it, nor was it important to me to prepare future support for some fictional family of mine. 

You don’t care about your wife and children?

I don’t have a wife and children!

Someday you will!!

Not soon enough to spend money I don’t have on insurance I don’t need!!!

After throwing away more than a thousand dollars on premiums—how I grew to hate the lippy bilabial m’s in that word—I let the policy lapse.  Probably for ethical reasons he’d had a colleague set it up, to whom I sent a note instead of the next payment: Don’t need this, never did, let him know whenever, don’t care.  I trusted this guy to calculate the best time to break it to my father.  At least I wouldn’t be the one to tell him.

Which made me a punk. 

But damn, dad, all that money spent because you couldn’t see me, wouldn’t hear me, could not believe that I’m different than you.

Pointless saying anything in the dementia ward but I can’t help blurting out memories to relieve my panic.  Grandma’s, the Rock River, our dogs, that one and only camping trip he’d taken me on where the bear showed up.  As if loss wouldn’t register if we shared it.  The sound of my voice triggers a smile—Dad?—but it merely signified bewildered acceptance: this human keeps talking, no idea why.  Facing that sweetly empty smile I was looking at the perfect image of our relationship, which, put into words, comes out as the following formula: I never got you, you never got me.

*

My father in three easy lessons.

One: Right after they married he told my mother that his greatest ambition was to be a hobo.  And yet. 

Two: And yet though barely graduating from high school he willed himself to earn a living in jobs he hated.  Hating his jobs, he hated his life, and hating his life he had virtually no emotional connection to the four children.  He fulfilled his meager conception of fatherhood by feeding the bank account.  And yet.

Three: And yet one day he disappeared.  No luggage.  But mom was calm.  I was a baby at the time and so this is her story.  She handled my father’s opening serve easily and won the point and the match by waiting four days before leaving the thirteen-year-old in charge of the nine-year-old in charge of the five-year-old in charge of the baby, borrowing the neighbor’s car (in a very un-hobo move, my father had taken the family wheels) and driving to where she knew she’d find both the Nash Rambler and my father.

Stout Street dead ends at railroad tracks.  In that short block, there are eight houses.  When my father was a child, two of the houses were private residences, the others rentals.  Little Billy Brown lived in four of those six rentals, with his father rushing into whichever house the family happened to be starting dinner to announce it was time to go.  The always-accommodating empty boxes in the basement were filled, and Billy and his sister transported these to the next available rental on the block.

A couple decades later, mom pulls into the dead-end street, spots a house with a rental sign jabbed into the yard, which is also where the Rambler is parked, and finds her husband curled up on the front porch—a pretty good start on a hobo’s scruff of whiskers, a sack of bread and cheese next to his head.  As far as he’d ever get as a hobo.  Time to go home, Bill.

*

The last night of my criminal career.  As always, once I entered through the back door I went to the front door to unlock it.  I needed all possible exit routes in case someone came home or the cops had been alerted.  As I passed through the house a voice from the dark at the top of the stairs claimed to have a gun. 

I doubt it.  Highly unusual back then.  But I took off through the front door and was immediately out of range.  No shot came but as I tore through backyards I heard the sirens.

When I was twelve my friends and I would creep around the neighborhood at dusk, ring doorbells and dash.  Feeling we could outrun what we’d done was a thrill even though no one bothered to chase us—until one evening when we crept up to the back door of a house that two graduate students had rented.  They were ready and came tearing out the door within seconds.  They were faster; we were more agile.  It was a fair contest.  Instinctively we zigzagged randomly through yards.  If we saw a fence we went for it.  We were quicker at yanking ourselves over.  We found a hedge behind a small office building and hid.  The students gave up, yelling curses at us.  That was our last time ringing and running.  Not because we were afraid of the chase, but because we knew it could never again be as thrilling.

For me this night was similar.  But safety wouldn’t be a hedge a few streets away, and my pursuers this time wouldn’t give up.  The sirens stopped.  Blue light from squad cars pulsed in the bare branches and evergreens.  Other squad cars must be cruising the area.  No more than three backyards away I zeroed in on an unattached garage and inched the door open until I could crawl underneath.  Having made the choice that to hide in the danger zone was better than trying to avoid squad cars, I knew I’d be stuck for at least an hour.  Which, to be safe, meant two. 

I tingle in the smells of garages, basements, attics.  The air is different and the gloom amplifies aromas and makes me feel bodiless, like when bobbing in the ocean.  In that garage I felt enormous, filling up empty dark space.  I had no way of telling time.  I simply became a presence, breathing and enduring.  Probably the most meditative state I’ve ever achieved.

The first several times I thought to leave I waited.  Finally I raised the garage door no more than a millimeter per second.  It must have taken five minutes to gain room enough to slide under.  My clothes scratching the gritty concrete was the loudest sound I’d made in hours.  But the houses were dark, the streets empty, no police lights anywhere.  I walked the couple miles, past increasingly smaller homes, to my parents’ house, crept as slowly as possible to my room and went to bed.  The next morning I walked back to where we’d left my car.  The wonky noise of pulling the door open seemed suspicious and I expected people in nearby houses to call the cops.

The money was nice but the thrills were the reason.  To hold a secret while mingling with others, to gamble freedom every moment.  I decided that if I continued it would not be in the town where getting caught would damage my parents with the realization that they simply never knew their son.  On a rainy gloomy March afternoon, driving to my job at the grocery store, I pulled into the parking spot furthest from the doors.  I watched people going in and out.  Though it was early afternoon it was dark and I could see my co-workers through the big windows.  They were a kind of family by now, but I could leave without them feeling hurt.  With my real family I was already the black sheep and so my sudden absence wouldn’t have been a surprise.  With the rain rivering down the windshield, I made up my mind to head to LA to live the criminal life to the fullest.  The inside of the car was humid with the heat on high drying my soaking tennis shoes, the hard rain making checkmarks on the asphalt, winter never ending.  Balloons of feeling crushed me from the inside.  The tingle of deciding against all reason to commit to a life of criminality.  I could do it.  I would do it.  I’d drive away now and cross the country to the coast.  I would, I could. 

Seconds passed, then some more.  I turned off the ignition and went inside to grab my apron and start work.  Several minutes late, the manager reminded me.

It’s decades later, the last twenty-three years in the same house, daily in this room on the second floor, using words to expose and hide at the same time.  The thrill of being pursued is past.  Now I’m my own pursuer.  Who was that nineteen-year-old hiding in a stranger’s garage?  I’m fairly certain that had he not been a criminal, I would not be a writer.  Am I happy about that?  Should I think of him with gratitude?

*

A year later, after living in the cottage on the Rock River left vacant after my uncle died, I packed my car and stole a car stereo on my way out of town.  My rationale was that it used to be mine.  An acquaintance, to whom I owed $50, said he’d take it and give me the balance of my asking price of $125.  It must have slipped his mind, busy with school and all, so leaving that town for good I took the stereo back.  From his truck.  Late at night.

I was arrested two months later in the apartment I shared with a friend who later was executed when cheating drug dealers by keeping both the money and the product.  Early one baking summer morning the landlady let in the police.  She was terribly excited that she got to watch.  Two uniforms, shadowed by their plainclothes commander, handcuffed me while I lay naked in bed.  Then they uncuffed me so I could get dressed, all the while jabbering to hurry me.  The result was that I didn’t dig out my underwear before pulling on the pants and tee-shirt at the foot of the bed.  Then I was recuffed and led out to the squad car, the landlady eagerly jogging ahead to get the building door and then follow to catch every bit of the scene.  She got Law and Order years before it aired.  Forgoing underwear was a terrible mistake as the next phase of my life was spent in the jump suits of two different jails, the crotch-to-neck zippers of which rubbed unmercifully against my penis.  At my arraignment I stood bent forward to relieve the stinging abrasion.  The judge thought I was mocking him with a yes-sir bow.

Take him back to the cells.

I didn’t offer any explanation or defense for my crime.  My arrest struck me as karmic.  What I knew that the authorities did not was that I never owned that car stereo.  Well over a year before I stole it from a warehouse. 

I turned twenty-one in jail. 

*

Writing is failing, and I’ve willingly failed for decades.  In the internal story I tell myself, it took six years to transform from criminal to artist, my first story completed when I finally could afford college because of a Pell Grant.  That seems like justification, a claim that being a criminal was necessary to being a writer.  But what made me a criminal made me a writer.  In both you work alone, plans can change instantly, solutions are provisional, risk vital and failure devastating.  Impossibly alluring for some of us.  Giving into my impulse for crime I paid a price, but so did the rest of you.

When I was released from jail I dreaded seeing my family but I was determined to insist on what was unusual in our family, namely ask that we “talk about it.”  Whatever it was at various times that could be talked about, we never did.  It became monumental, a solid foundation for our lonely lives.  We seemed to operate with the intuition that to not talk about it meant we avoided the tricky nuance of a situation that requires words to define points of views, explanations that seem like excuses, and ultimate frustration that we could ever know one another.  My family never once asked me about my arrest.  I suspect they knew the car stereo was the least of my crimes and prying would not make them happy. 

Want to go get a hamburger or something? I asked my father when getting up the courage to visit the house.  To talk about it was implied.

Not especially hungry, he said. 

Fuck you, I didn’t say.  He’d known what I meant.  Our one chance to be open.  Instead he proved the essential difference between us, the reason I might as well have been speaking Urdu and he Finnish when we were in the same room.  Instead he leads me to the tiny room he uses as his office.  Going down the narrow hallway to stand in the doorway of that room always made me anxious.  He’s been making calls.  He won’t look at me and the way he won’t look at me while his forefinger swipes around and around the outside of the rotary dialing plate makes it certain the calls were about me.  He has to think….  Then, yes, he’s decided, he’s going to tell me the plan that will save my life.

Pretty certain I could get you on at Pru.

Important to remind ourselves that he hated his job, hated his life because of his job.  He was not gregarious, had little social ability, but willed himself to be a sincere and successful life insurance salesman, a believer, going out every evening groaning on calls to families getting up from dinner, putting kids to bed, swirling that first or fifth drink of the evening, and my father accepting cups of coffee knowing it would mean he wouldn’t sleep, learning names of kids he pretended to adore, hating that he laughed when babies drooled on his shirt, and then envisioning for the family that world when those kids had kids who had kids and the parents were photographs.  It was constant pain for him to be the signifier of our common certainty that we disappear.  But he considered it his duty to remind his fellow citizens that we’re not immortal.  Provide, provide.  Which became the sole requirement of him as a father:  making money so we had a house and food, he a car, and all could dream about that summer vacation next year.

He was offering his wayward son that same grinding life, decades of rage and pain covered over by a sincere belief in annuities each time he rang a doorbell.

Could get you on at Pru.

He never knew the extent of what I was up to at night in those years after high school, when I couldn’t afford to enroll in the local university, didn’t seem to have a job, had no bank account and lived by cash alone.  He only knew that I’d slipped the prison of convention and was dangerous.  Seemingly without means I never had to beg him for a loan.  How he would have loved to have that debt in his files.  He kept track of the money owed by my older brother, the darling in the family, on a lined index card.  Those numbers sat trapped under the marble pen holder with the shiny fake brass plate screwed into it that designated my father as insurance salesman of some year long past.  Hard financial decisions were made privately and in silence at that giant desk whose drawers squeaked and were redolent of wood smell, as if crammed with a thousand pencils.  As a kid I’d sit at that desk he’s at now, slide open a drawer for the whoosh of aroma and imagine what it was like to be an adult.  I’d lean elbows onto the desktop to effect that same creak from somewhere underneath in the joinings that sounded when he scribbled on a rate sheet.  I’d pick up the phone receiver that changed colors over the years from black, to green, to yellow, the receiver my father, who had to field calls every night, would put to his ear and answer, Mmmmello?  Every time.  Every damn time.  That was being an adult:  practice repetition to get through the day so as to have fewer decisions until your life becomes rote.  So much lost but you didn’t regret it because of the safety of every time.

That was something I’d never known as an adult, safety.  I had it as a child, in large measure because of my father.  In reverse order, safety is what he never had as a child but imprisoned him as an adult.

Get you on at Pru.

Behind him I saw that one of the screws holding the metal plate on the marble pen holder had been lost and two were loose in their slots; the plate no longer stayed positioned correctly. 

No thanks!

Such pain in his face.  Why was I stubbornly refusing the gift of a secure life?  Only later—too late to matter, in a nursing home where he was captive—do I tell him.  Again he’s seated.  Here too I’m standing over him.  I’ve delivered him to his room, with its solitary confinement cell’s narrowness.  He’s waiting patiently in the wheelchair for someone’s arms to haul his bones up and out.  Behind him now there is no clutter of a lifetime, no marble award, instead only the state-owned steel bed he will die in.

Far too late to repair anything between us I let him know at least one sure truth about me.  Want to know what I was doing instead of selling insurance, dad?  I was the outlaw you wanted to be.

The response is that serenely bewildered smile.  I don’t know why my parents left me here, he says.

*

The end seems late for a beginning but a confession is always that.  If only I’d timed it so my father could understand.  It would have made perfect his disappointment in me, maybe consoled him for the limited life he chose rather than the carelessness he envied in me, messing up my life and no insurance against that. 

I never once regretted the crimes I committed.  I can say—and mean it—that I feel bad that I hurt you my victims, but I’m not willing to erase your hurt by wishing I’d lived differently.  Nonsense anyway because this is me.  That bad man with no remorse, honoring without justification one of the many characters I allowed myself to play.  My father hated his life but he could be assured the world saw him as respectable.  Of me the world can never be certain.