My father would take a bus from New York to New Jersey and arrive at the stop several blocks from our apartment at around ten in the morning. My older brother and I would be there to meet him. Then we’d go get burgers, sometimes go to a movie. Occasionally do some shopping if we needed something for school or clothing. After a couple of hours it would be over. He’d give each of us a few dollars, which we’d hand over to my mom when arriving back home, and say goodbye. Then hop on a bus to go back to New York. That was it. That was the whole arrangement.
I think he’d already moved out of our New York apartment before we left for Jersey without him. The visits started a couple of months after that and lasted maybe around six months. Then the visits stopped and there was essentially nothing until he moved back in with us for some reason a few months before I turned eleven.
For close to five years he was a ghost. No birthday cards or Christmas presents or acknowledgement of any kind.
I still don’t have a satisfying explanation for why he decided to move to Jersey. Maybe something fell apart on his end that made moving in with us the path of least resistance. My working theory, which I never seriously revised, was that his girlfriend had ended things and he no longer had anyone to cook for him and do his laundry. That might be uncharitable but it might also be exactly right.
He wasn’t a big man. Maybe five feet nine and around 160 pounds. None of that mattered when you’re seven years old and he’s one of the largest, most unpredictable presences in your world. I was terrified of him in the specific way you’re terrified of someone whose anger you can feel approaching before it actually arrives. He was easy to upset and hard to read. So I kept quiet and only spoke when spoken to and monitored the atmosphere constantly. The way you’d keep one eye on the sky when the weather seemed like it might turn.
What conversation there was at McDonald’s or Burger King or wherever he’d chosen to take us was minimal. He’d ask about school, maybe ask what my mother was up to. I’d answer in as few words as possible. My brother would do whatever my brother did, which was mostly make fun of me or position himself favorably. I’d eat my cheeseburger and fries and drink my soda and try not to draw attention to myself and wait for the visit to be over. Not because I was miserable exactly, but because the whole thing required a level of sustained vigilance on my part. You couldn’t relax. Relaxing meant missing something, some slight shift in his mood that needed to be accounted for before it became a problem.
There’s a specific memory I have of being at some movie and after about half an hour him turning to me and saying:
“You’ve seen enough, right?”
I didn’t understand the question at first. The movie wasn’t over. What do you mean?
“What more do you need to see?”
I understood then. He wanted to leave. I could see it starting, the low-level agitation underneath the question, and I made the calculation instantly. I agreed that I’d seen enough and we left. This is how things worked. You saw enough of things when he decided you’d seen enough of them, and you agreed, and that was that.
I never brought up going to another movie again after that.
The visit which might have been the last was different from the others. He showed up at the bus stop and something was wrong. He looked terrible. He was present but muted in a way that wasn’t normal for him, moving like someone who’d had a very bad night and was paying for it. At the time I thought he might be sick but I’ve thought about it many times since then and I’m fairly certain now that he was hungover. We went for burgers. Whatever sparse conversation that usually happened didn’t. After finishing our meal in silence and walking outside, he abruptly yelled at us to go home and walked grumpily to the bus stop to go back to New York. That was it. My brother turned to me and said I’d done something to piss him off, which was why he’d left. My brother said some version of this regularly regardless of circumstances. I hadn’t said or done anything except eat quietly. But I also didn’t argue because arguing with my brother was its own problem I wanted to avoid at that moment.
There was also a weekend at his New York apartment that I vaguely remember. His girlfriend at the time was there when we arrived but mostly absent after that, same as him. I might’ve actually considered calling the cops at some point to report him missing. His apartment was in a basement. No windows and no television. My brother and I spent most of the weekend sitting around doing nothing while he was somewhere else doing whatever he was doing, and then he appeared again on Sunday afternoon to walk us to the bus stop and that was the end of that.
I remember the claustrophobia of the place, the low ceilings and dead air. The complete absence of anything to do. This was where he lived and what he’d chosen, apparently.
The visits stopped at some point. I know my mother argued with him on the phone about it. Could hear her from wherever I was in the apartment, her voice taking on that particular register it had when she was angry and trying not to be. I never knew what he said on his end of those calls. At some point the calls stopped as well.
He eventually moved to New Jersey to live with us again and then got sick and died a couple of years later. Having a dad, if you can call it that, lasted about twelve years from start to finish and left almost no impression.
I was fine with the visits stopping. More than fine, really. Not having to wait at the bus stop to meet him on Saturday mornings meant not having to spend two hours carefully managing myself against the possibility of doing or saying something that would set him off. It was a relief. The Saturday thing had never been a Saturday thing so much as a sustained performance of being the kind of kid who didn’t cause problems, and I was glad for it to end.
What I actually remember of my father, the sensory residue that remained after everything else faded, is the cigarettes. He smoked constantly, relentlessly, as if stopping would kill him rather than the other way around.
After he moved in with us in Jersey, I remember waking up one day certain the apartment was on fire. Every window was closed and he’d been chain-smoking in the living room. The air was solid with it. That’s the image and that’s what stayed. Not the Saturday visits or the movie theater or the basement apartment in New York. Just the smoke, filling up every available space, making it impossible to breathe.
