On a Wire

My grandfather drank a lot.

He and my grandmother were farmers, keeping alive a tradition that is hard, laboring, and disappearing in a world of mass-produced food. As a kid, I didn’t know much about, nor was I interested in, the backbreaking work that it entailed. All I remember are the visits, the darkened barn that I wasn’t permitted to enter without an adult, from which the cooing squawks of sitting hens could be heard; the peacock that had wandered onto the property one afternoon and now strutted around fluffing its regalia for whoever would stop for one admiring glance; the raccoon that had been trapped and now scratched around in a cage too small; the vegetable garden itself, from which grew the tastiest vegetables a kid could bite into; the gutted boxcar a mile and a half from the house; and, of course, the house, a darkened, rotting monolith that spooked me more than anything.

The farm was my grandmother’s responsibility. Every morning, she would rise to feed the animals and, in the summer months, tend the garden. I saw her work one summer that I spent there. My parents had driven two hours south from Fort Smith, Arkansas so that I could spend a week with my grandparents. In the morning she rose before I did, but soon after breakfast I trailed her as she tended to her chores.

My grandfather left early. He’d drive into town for the day, returning just before dusk, and when he did he swaggered in giddy, carefree.

He was a country musician. I never saw him perform, but remember seeing him in photos dressed in a vintage, red western shirt, surrounded by other men dressed the same. In the evenings, sometimes he’d fret cords while I strummed the strings of his guitar.

There are few things I remember about him. He was a man of poor health. He had asthma and an inhaler was usually within arm’s reach. He injected insulin into his gut. He also smoked. And he drank a lot.

If my grandmother was ever upset because of the roles she and my grandfather held, that she was the sole laborer, he the child at play, her protests were private, solemn. She was a plain-spoken woman, gruff, earthy, matter-of-fact.

I never heard her raise her voice. I never saw her angry. The one time I saw my father challenge my grandfather, a dispute that was provoked by too much drinking, she kept quiet, invisible.

My father was an engineer for the Union Pacific Railroad and was gone often. There was a stint when my grandfather would wander over to the house mid-afternoon and spend several hours talking with my mother. I was young, still in grade school, and their talk was the indecipherable caw of adults.

One afternoon, my grandfather left abruptly and in the evening, after my father returned home from being on the rails for several days, we drove the twenty minutes to my grandparents’ farm. I can’t say what had occurred in those moments before my grandfather left my mother that afternoon, what provoked my father to raise his voice, to challenge his own father, to lay his anger nakedly on the slab.

This, I know. My grandfather drank a lot. But there was something else, something more. My father’s anger showed me the bruised tiger in him. He brooded often, unsatisfied, unsatiated. Quick to anger, resentful, discontent. He slept around while away from home. He didn’t like having a family. He wasn’t satisfied living two lives.

My father didn’t drink often, but he resembled his own father in a number of other ways. That evening, he saw something in his father, my grandfather, that scared him. He saw his own weaknesses, his infidelities, his loneliness. He saw his own life stretched thin on a wire, swaggering in a drunken sway to defend himself.

Fire Breather

When I was fifteen, I smoked my first cigarette, a short-stubbed and already half-smoked Marlboro Light that my friend and I pulled from my parents’ ashtray and shared between the two of us. Never mind that it was stale and had probably been sitting in the ashtray for three or four days already. It was the act of breathing smoke, the first sensation of a chemically-enhanced tobacco burn on my lungs, that was appealing. This was also the same year that I first tried chewing tobacco. I was well on my way to supporting the state of North Carolina.

At that age I was underdeveloped, skinny as a sea slug and a foot shorter than most kids my age. I’d never been athletic, preferring the lazy dreck of post-school television consumption to spitting out the last few ounces of energy playing outdoors. This wasn’t the best time to start smoking. I wasn’t in any sort of shape for the habit. Not that’s there is a best time for that sort of thing.

The next cigarette, my friend had lifted from his mom. He had a whole pack of Marlboro Reds. “It was easy,” he said. “She buys a carton and never counts how many packs she has left.” His mom, like both of my parents, were heavy smokers, chuffing away at an easy one to two packs a day.

My life, up to that point, had been infused in a haze of cloudy, blue smoke. When I think back on my parents I see them as fire breathers, always smiling, their teeth a nicotine-yellow, and with plumes of smoke rolling from their mouths, noses, and ears.

Eventually, smoking became more than a habit. Everything I did was first measured against how much time it could potentially divorce me from my one true love, the Marlboro Man.

My fingers started to yellow.

I quit smoking when I was twenty-nine, just before I started dating who has since become my wife. It was Julia who got me running. I hated running then. Loathed it. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to lace up and go for a jog for two or three miles in the brisk, morning cold. Why would anyone want to do anything that hurt? But, alas, I had a soon-to-be-wife to impress, just enough self-loathing, and an obsessive-compulsive personality to appease.

This act of self-punishment continued for two years. I ran and every time I sent curses to every ugly-headed child I passed. At the end of a light jog, I was ready to kick my own teeth in. It was all part of the cleansing process. I was healing.

It was sometime in year three that I had a change of heart. I went for a six-mile run. There wasn’t a magic moment of trumpets and fireworks that it all became easier. At the end of the six-mile stretch my muscles still developed lactic acid. I was still a little winded and tired. But I didn’t mind. I simply said, “Eh, that’s not so bad.”

Maybe there’s a moral here. Maybe this is some sort of psychoanalytic parable. My father, the fire breather, was diagnosed with throat cancer last November. When he told me, I wasn’t surprised. He died just more than a month later after he started chemo and radiation. He was fifty-seven.

I’m scared as shit of dying young.