Cowboy Burrito

In an effort to provide subscribers with even more content for their hard earned dollar, I will be moving all of my writing here. I never log into substack anyway. Here is a story about the last dinner I had with my dad. Thanks fellas.

Jake

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I watched my father anxiously shift around in the booth of the restaurant as he asked my brother and I how we had been.  I watched him pull apart the paper napkins they wrap silverware in into little pieces. I watched his light blue eyes as they desperately searched for and then found each exit in the restaurant. I watched his gaze as it eventually met my own. I watched his vision harden, as if he knew I intended to do him harm. I didn’t. I watched his vision eventually soften; the result of an internal conversation I’ll never be privy to, one that was had between a man who meant well but never did much good, and a fractured part of his own psyche. “Your son is in on it. He’s gonna kill you. No he’s not idiot. He just ordered queso. There’s poison in the queso. Shut the fuck up.” I watched his critical, frantic eyes meet my brother’s.

I had thought about it. What if he snaps? What if he attacks you and your brother? Still think you can take your old man? He was always stronger. Higher tolerance for pain. You never really won one. Is it a hate crime to beat the shit out of a schizophrenic man in the middle of a Mexican restaurant? What if the schizophrenic man is racist? What if he’s your dad? Can you call that a wash? 

“I know it aint. Real.” He said. Stuttered. Paused. As if he had to think really hard about if he believed it or not. “But I can’t stop thinkin’ it. That I’m goin’ to Hell. That my whole life everyone has been trying to send me there. That you and your mother. And Meredith. You’re all a part of it. You wanna kill me, and if I die: I can stop the cycle of it. It won’t get passed on to either of ya.” 

“Oonnnnnnneeeeee fiesta grande platter with flour tortillas. One cowboy burrito with a side of sour cream. And one fajitas for, well, one! Haha. Anything else I can get you guys?” The waitress had a short bob of black hair and a mexican flag nose stud. Probably no older than twenty. She had her body weight on one leg while she rested the food tray on the other leg just above the knee. She had her arm draped over the side of the tray. She looked tired, but jokes are a part of the job. I appreciated her for that 

“We’re good.” I said. “Thank you.” He turned to her and stared intensely for a second. Critical again. More skeptical. Then quickly turned his eyes away. “They’ve poisoned the cowboy burrito. Kill everyone in here. No they haven’t. It’s a fuckin’ burrito. My son is taking me to dinner. Your son instructed the staff to poison the cowboy burrito. My son can barely hold down a job. I don’t think he orchestrated anything at all. If you eat the burrito you will die. Good”

“Of course. Let me know if you need anything! Y’all enjoy.” We sat there in the booth, not saying much. My dad held the burrito in his hands for a bit then began to eat. 

It was May. Late Spring. The sun was setting, and it was one of those sunsets you see in the parking lot of a Target and you think “fuck man we really fucked this place up bad.”  Summer came early as it does every year in Texas, so it was hot. The three of us stood out in the parking lot of the restaurant. My father was holding back tears. “I’m sorry. I’m trying.” He said. He pulled hard from his cigarette “It’s like last time. I don’t know what’s real. But it’s good to see you.” We hugged for what I wish now was much longer, and we got in the car back to his place, an RV in a swampy part of Texas City where the sea meets the salt marsh. It was dark, the street that connected the main road to the small piece of land where the RV sat connected to a smaller neighborhood that had no lights. When I dropped him off he stood at the entrance of the poorly welded gate that connected the dirt driveway to the main street and watched my brother and I drive away. Through the rearview mirror I could see his eyes and they were soft. Not skeptical, or critical, or scared, or panicked. They were kind and peaceful. Only really saw them that way after he’d had a few but before he’d had too many. “I think we just saw him for the last time. Like. I feel like I just said goodbye to a dead man.” It kind of just came out of my mouth. I still to this day don’t know why. “I get it. Yeah.” My brother said, as if he knew I didn’t mean to say it. “Medicine they have him on is real old school. Kinda makes you loopy.” I didn’t really believe that. “Yeah.” My brother didn’t either.

What do you do with a lifetime of hurt? Usually you give it to other people. You give it to other people every day and then something critical in your body fails and you die. My father gave away a lot of hurt. So, if I am being perfectly honest, it was quite surprising to me to be inundated with message after message after message of people sending their condolences and sharing their stories about my father. You would think that the Celebration of Life held for a lifelong abusive drug addict and alcoholic would be attended only by those who felt they had to be there. But no. My mother’s living room was so packed you had to meander around the room through a sea of “I’m Sorry’s” just to get from one end to the other. There were family friends, wives, husbands, my aunt, her children, her ex-husband. Pious people. “He’s with the Lord now, Jacob. He’s at peace.” Thank you, Mark. “He’s in a better place.” Thank you, Cheryl. Then there was the “Get-Along-Gang” as my mother called them. My father’s crackhead, alcoholic, and tweaker friends that had been summoned by the Death of one of their Own. Like some sort of ancient pantheon of aging Demigods. 

“Your dad dude. Ah shit. He had this move he’d do when we’d start kicking the shit out of each other. It was his favorite move.” My dad didn’t know fuck about fighting. He was just big as shit. So I was very excited to find out what “move” he knew. “He would pick Carl up by his waist and smash him into the concrete. WWF style. It worked every time, heh heh.” Not really a move. But the story was suddenly more believable. 

“Damn boy last time I saw you you were this high.” Mitchell gestured to his knees. “And I was about this high. Fuckin A’” Mitchell gestured to the ceiling. “We were all out at Galveston. I think your daddy had been fightin’ with your mother. He was piss drunk bitchin’ and throwin’ a fit. You kept bringin’ him little crabs you had found, and they were pinchin’ your fingers and you’d cry and cry.” They were actually bottle caps that my dad had tried to throw in the water. The wind had blown them towards the shoreline before they could hit the waves. I don’t remember why I wanted him to have them. I remember thinking he needed them. But I didn’t want to interrupt Mitchell’s story or correct him. I had always liked Mitchell the most out of all the shitheads my father ran with. He partied a lot but he loved his wife and his kids. 

We had all organically formed a circle in the living room. Seated on lawn chairs, couches, dining chairs, the floor. Everybody had something good to say about my father. His estranged childhood friend Ken was there. My father had kept a picture of them riding bikes together in the seventies in a scrap book. They were both about 10. My father’s dad had just passed. Ken never partied much, so I never met him before that moment. I would later find out my father hadn’t seen him in over a decade. He was a quiet, stoic, respectable southern man. Out of place in the motley crew of Metallica wannabes that had crowded my mother’s Christian home. “David was my best friend growing up. I am going to miss him very much.” He squeezed his wife’s hand, and those were the last words he spoke that evening.

The trajectory of a man’s life is laid out before him the day he is born. My father couldn’t sit still in 3rd grade. He would shoot spitballs at all the girls and snap rubber bands on his friends arm’s. My father couldn’t focus in the 8th grade. Math is a million miles away when you’re high for the first time, rewinding Rush’s “Subdivisions” over and over again thinking that one day some kid might do the same to your song. My father wasn’t cut out for the Army. A manic episode led him there and a second one landed him in Walter Reed. My father felt trapped when I was born, hooked on a life lived in extremes, bored with his working-class family life. My father found God, but in a desperate way. The kind of way where you’ve exhausted both yourself and all other options, and rehab’s too expensive. My father thought a second son would save him, and it did for a while. But sitting still was never his strong suit. My father couldn’t understand why the weekends got a little lonelier every year. An empty barstool once occupied. A car once filled with friends. My father didn’t understand why his favorite bar closed. Or why his second favorite bar burned down. My father couldn't understand why I stopped drinking with him, or why I rarely called. My father didn’t like how much my brother drank, and would lecture him half-drunk in the back of a smoky sports bar about the choices a man makes in his life. 

My father once got in the local newspaper for a painting he had done in the 4th grade. By the time he was 13, my father could listen to a song once, then play and sing it perfectly. My father would walk into your house on the worst day of your life and within minutes you would be holding your stomach, begging him to stop doing whatever he was doing, because you were sure you were going to pass out from laughing. My father would meet strangers at 9 PM and by 2 AM they were best friends. “People tell me their whole fuckin’ life story man.  I don’t know why. Always been that way.”