My Father’s Keeper
Julie Gregory
Table of Contents
They are to be cherished and protected,
Even at the risk of your life. They know sadness but will overcome it. They know alienation For they see past and through this reality. They will Endure where others cannot. They will Survive where others cannot. They know love even when it is not shown to them. They spend their lives trying to communicate the love they know.
I was born on the day of Liberace, May 16th to be exact, The Day of Outrageous Flair. In the Big Blue Birthday book, Outrageous Flair is appropriately illustrated by a snapshot of Liberace himself soaking in a marbled bath as bottomless as deep dish apple pie, the round of the tub one white solid bubble. The showman and pianist was in his golden age, as plump and gaudy as Elvis in those final days of Vegas. Marinating in bubbles, his stout fingers spread by thick, jewelled rings, he flashes that champagne smile, beaming squarely at the camera from between two gilded swan neck faucets.
At the time that picture was snapped, I was a stick figure tweeny living in a trailer out in southern Ohio, on the back woods edge of a dead end country road that held as many secrets as it lacked street lights. My tub was shallow and rectangular and moulded of the same gold plastic as the trailer’s doorknobs. The bentnecked swans my mother had gold leafed were also plastic and hung slightly ajar on the bathroom’s wood panelling. The constant burning of bacon in the kitchen had infused our trailer’s hermetically sealed air with a sort of permanent tack that coated the curved backs of the swans and caught whatever floated through the bathroom, making a sort of three-dimensional dust. It gave the swans a hairy appearance—not unlike the very chest of Liberace himself.
My father’s baby blue polyester suit hung in the closet and his white Vegas-style loafers lounged beneath, their tight backs ready to snap around his heels and rub blisters. I can still see him wince as he hobbled along after only an hour in them. My mother’s cubic zirconia rings sat in an Avon dish on the back of the toilet, next to the Stick Up.
There was no cameraman and certainly no smiling.
As a young girl, I was taller than I was wide. Long, cool and lanky, I took my strides with the measured gait of an Arabian filly. It wasn’t something I tried for, it just happened. And when I walked the halls as a new Jr. High student, the senior boys called me highwater for the long legs that seemed destined to greatness. I should have been a ballerina, or a model, or at least a prima donna. But sometimes the stork drops you in the wrong place.
Because for all the feel and longing inside me to be a noble child of royal descent, even of the Liberace kind, there was no way around the blaring, honking reality of my daily life: I was shackled to a family of losers.
There was my dad with his Mork from Ork suspenders worn long after it was cool and his battery-operated bull horn that he snuck into football games. And Mom with her outdated fringed western gear making me couple skate with her to Peaches and Herb’s “Reunited” at the Make-A-Date Roller Skating Rink in Amanda, Ohio.
Thank God it was the next town over.
And I guess it wouldn’t have been so bad if my dad wasn’t ooga-ing his horn every time a junior in tight Jordache jeans walked in front of the bleachers. And the girls, with their sixth sense, would slow in their tracks for instinctual preening, pulling Goody combs from back pockets to feather long layers back along the sides of their heads, all the while tilting gently parted mouths in just such a way as to showcase their teeth. Then they’d dart glances up into the bleachers trying to catch the eye of their suitor.
I could have died.
And so could they when they spotted my dad; large, hairy, menacing, looking a cross between Jerry Garcia and Charles Manson in rainbow suspenders, wiggling his fat fingers, “Yoooo-hoooo,” at them like he would to a baby. They bolted and my dad would raise his megaphone and blitz the button for the Dukes of Hazzard’s car horn, blaring the confederate tune into the crisp fall night, adding his own “Charge!” at the end and springing to his feet. I wedged my body down into the foot bleachers and unfolded my turtleneck in triplicate up over my nose, hoping this alone would shield my identity.
And when I wasn’t saddled with him on game Fridays, I was stuck with Mom on the Saturdays, dragging me out under the swooning lights of the rink just so she wouldn’t have to couple skate alone. She was upping her chances to catch a wink from the married owner by getting out on the floor when it was least populated.
I held her sweaty hand and we coasted with locked knees around pitted wooden corners, while dancing polka dot lights spun me dizzy on the dark floor.
Reunited And It Feeels So Goood.
Trust me. No kid wants their 40-year-old mother asking them if her butt looks okay in the skating rink bathroom.
I was desperate. Desperate to get out of the hollow where I lived with the big