My papa’s waltz

We used to have this old reel-to-reel tape recorder, and when my father got drunk he’d put on Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” and ask me to dance. He had this sloppy smile on his face. I was 8 years old at the time, and that smile and his drunken sentimentality annoyed me. His palms felt rough and hard when he slipped them into mine and tried to lift me from my chair at the kitchen table. But I held onto the chipped green Formica edge or to one of the slick chrome legs. “Up, up,” he’d say. His breath smelled of whiskey, his collar sweat and sawdust--my father was a carpenter, a good one, a real finish man who charged people according to what he thought they could afford. “Let go,” he’d say. “Dance.” But I held tight.

A few years back, I wrote a novel that used this memory as its heart. I’ve mined the territory before--if not this particular moment, then something like it--and I’ve done it so often that I find myself confusing what actually happened with how I imagine it. In trying to sort between autobiography and fiction, or invention, and then trying to put the pieces together so that they made some kind of sense, I came to understand that the truth as it occurred was not of much use other than as, say, a catalyst for the story.

While I was figuring this out, I lost a couple of years writing a bad novel. The problem, at least one of them, was that I was being dishonest with myself in the worst, most shameful way. I was writing about people and events and places that I didn’t understand, and I wasn’t good enough for this not to show. I started another book, one that made me see past what I thought had actually occurred, to what should have according to my imagination; according to something called plot. The writer’s obsession, I learned, is that as storytellers we tell the same story over and over, but from different angles. The trick is disguising it so that it doesn’t seem the same. The trick is how well you keep doing it, not once or twice, but hundreds of times, page after page, with one real detail after another. The hardest part is to make it all appear seamless and vivid in the end, as if it had come naturally. Like magic. Like you didn’t have to think. Like it really couldn’t have happened any other way. This is what I did with my memories of my family’s breakdown.

I was in college when I encountered “My Papa’s Waltz,” Theodore Roethke’s short, dark poem about dancing with his drunken father. I don’t know for a fact if Roethke ever danced with his father, and I don’t believe that it matters. Of course, when I was 8 years old, I’d never heard of the poet. It wouldn’t have made a difference if I had. Reading was for sissies, especially poems, and like my old man, I considered myself a tough guy.

I could kick any kid’s ass in the neighborhood, and where we lived in the Westlake part of Los Angeles, I had some serious competition. My mother was in prison back then, and my father and I shared a one-room apartment on 9th Street, with a kitchenette and a hot plate, a window overlooking the warehouse next door and a Murphy bed that you had to push back into the wall each morning so you could get to the bathroom.

MacArthur Park was only a few blocks away, and I spent plenty of hot summer days around the lake there. This is where my father bought the reel-to-reel, off some older guy who needed a few bucks. It was a rough place and it’s no better now, with every other kid carrying a piece. The generation has changed. The clothes are different. But the pose is the same. Black kids still hang out on the benches and behind the bathrooms, glossy-eyed, wasted, and the cholos, called homies now, are on the other side of the park at the mouth of the tunnel that runs under the street.

I liked the tunnel. On the hottest days, when everybody was dragging, and when my eyes and throat burned from the smog, I stopped about halfway through the tunnel and sucked the cool air deep into my lungs. I liked to press my cheek against the stone and feel the vibrations of the cars and the trucks rumbling past on the street above. I thought about my mother. I thought about when she would be home. My old man didn’t like to talk about it, and I was left to wonder, to make up stories. To imagine. I planned the Great Escape in that tunnel and played it over and over in my head.

I’d need rope.

I’d need a pistol.

I would need a guard’s uniform and a pair of walkie-talkies, so that my father and I could coordinate our actions, working from the inside and out. The first two items were easily had; the rope I bought, a hundred feet of good nylon 500-pound test, and my father owned a German Luger. We’d steal her away to Mexico in my father’s Chevy stepside. The border was less than 200 miles away. Highway 5 was a straight shot. I figured we could make it in less than three hours. But there was a catch. Finding a guard’s uniform to fit an 8-year-old would take some doing.

It wasn’t funny, either.

Every detail had to work or I would fail.

Lives were at stake.

In that novel I wrote, a father plays a prominent role in a boy’s life. His mother had disappeared years before. The boy, the narrator, can’t recall knowing her, because she deserted him before he had the power of memory, and toward the end of the book he decides to pull up stakes and go looking for her.

In my own life, when I try to remember exactly what happened on that particular night when my father asked me to dance, I get confused. Maybe it wasn’t 1970 in that cramped apartment on 9th Street in Westlake. Maybe it was 1971 or 1972. Maybe I was 9 or 10 instead of 8, and maybe it wasn’t even in Los Angeles but East San Jose, because we’d lived there, too, around that time.

Why my mother was sent to prison doesn’t really matter, either, because she was never coming back, not the same woman anyway, and what I did know of her--before--was little more than imagined.

For dancing, I was too awkward, too timid and blind with anger. But when I write today, when I write now, when I write this, the drunken smile on my father’s face no longer annoys me. I let him take my hands and guide me across the cracked and yellowed linoleum floor in that kitchenette, with Patsy Cline playing on the old reel-to-reel tape recorder that was probably stolen. I feel the warm, harsh breath of his whisper in my ear, and I smell the whiskey. I smell the sawdust and sweat.

“Smile,” he says. “Dance. Your mama’s coming home tomorrow.”

Fiction. But, in fact, it doesn’t matter.

I let go of the table and dance with my father, and the song is always “Crazy.”