Excerpt: What Am I Going To Do Now?

“John, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but your dad passed away today.”

The words continued to echo in my ears. I mean, I knew it was a possibility after his heart transplant surgery, but I didn’t truly think about it - especially not now. It was June 1990, and I was at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC, attending American Legion Boys’ State. This was a pretty big honor for a rising high school senior, and my mind was focused on anything and everything other than my father lying in bed, hanging onto the handles of life with a relentless grip. He had let go, and I didn’t have the chance to say goodbye. Damn it.

The car ride home was long, quiet, and uncomfortable. My half-brother and his friend chattered away in the front seat, but I sat in the backseat – staring into the I-40 bleakness, out into the vast despair of the night. What am I going to do now?

“J, how’re you holding up?” Steve, my brother, asked, trying to understand how a chatterbox of epic proportions now felt silent in the backseat of his light blue Oldsmobile Cutlass.

“When did it happen?” I responded, without moving my eyes an inch from the darkness.

“Well, you know the hospital sent him home last week.” Steve inquired. “The doctors say he caught pneumonia while at home with Louise, and his body was too weak to handle it. He died sometime this morning.”

Louise. Even the mention of her name created a nauseous feeling in me like I’d never experienced. I never liked her, and I never could bring myself to tell Dad the truth. Now I never could.

I felt the tears falling across my cheeks, but my arms were numb. I’d never have a father with me again to wipe those tears. To tell me how proud he was of me. To watch my football games. To be there for me when and if I needed him.

The two-hour drive home in the dark seemed like three years. In that time, I felt ultimate sorrow, seething anger, and every other emotion fathomable, it seemed. My dad may not have been a perfect man, but he was the only father I had. Had. Damn, that word hurts.

This was the summer between my junior and senior years at Clayton High School, in Clayton, NC. I was the kind of student that some teachers loved to have in their class, and some hated. I questioned everything, not to be a jerk, but because I honestly wanted to know. Some thought I was a cocky jock who did it for attention, some thought I was a promising intellectual star with a knack for football. Yes, football players do have brains, contrary to popular belief.

Once we got home, I sat in my bedroom, staring at the walls as if they were a giant Magic-Eye optical illusion. I was trying to find the reason my father was taken from me. I couldn’t find an answer. I couldn’t pull one out of my ass – like I have been able to all my life. That was one of the gifts my father gave to me – the gift of gab, and the ability to sell ice to Eskimos. Some of my family would say that was a curse.

The feeling around my house was very weird and unusual. Everyone was upset for me, and I could tell that they genuinely cared about the pain I was feeling. However, my dad was not missed. My mom married my dad in 1971, and my two brothers and sisters were children from my mom’s previous marriage. The relationship between them and my father was tenuous at best. When my mom divorced my father in 1986 (my seventh grade year of middle school), I’m sure a party was held somewhere, and they didn’t invite me.

I walked through the house, seeing my mother crying, and I wondered if she was crying for him or me. Don’t get me wrong, Frances Wood is one of the nicest, most genuine souls a person could ever meet. However, my father was something different entirely.

“I love you, pumpkin,” Mom said, and grabbed me close to her. My house was filled with people, and wanted them all to go away. I didn’t tell them that, of course. This one event has already changed a boy who knows how to shut up but doesn’t normally do it, into a boy who wanted to scream obscenities at the world but couldn’t find a voice.