It came without warning. We were living on Avenue J in Jeri's old 1950s mobile home. The dark green 1965 Chevy Super Sport pulled in. Jeri asked me if I would like to drive the 65 for a day or two. He had a lot of miles to go pick up Odette and the Dodge not only got 25 miles to the gallon, it had not yet surrendered to the Coastal Bend issues that all vehicles eventually surrendered to. The SS was fine, but he needed a car to travel in. I handed him my keys. I liked Jeri. Even if I didn't, a 1965 Super Sport? How often do you get to drive one of these for a day or two?
I loved driving the 65. I was at A Auto Supply the next day. Johnnie, my piano player friend stopped in her tracks to look at the car. She was good friends with Jeri and Odette. I went out to talk with her. This car really did get people's attention. It was amazing.
That evening Jeri and Odette came to get their car back and return mine. Mission accomplished. Jeri was on a new trajectory for work now, he had been working on residential construction, but that was not steady for them. He had some history working in the oil refineries. A friend who was in the oil business told him that there was a giant refinery about to be built in Costa Rica. They needed everyone they could get. Jeri had worked as an instrument fitter in the past. I was not employed and it was an opportunity to learn a trade. My answer was, absolutely!
I learned that we could be gone for six months to a year and during that time, we would bank crazy amounts of money and then return to the States. It was just what I needed and it sounded like a great adventure to me. I was not sure if Dad was crazy about me leaving for that long, but he wanted me to have the experience.
The more time that passed, the more I got familiar with Dad's, for lack of a better phrase, "cycles". I knew as early as age 8 that my father were two very different people. I loved them both. I found qualities in the quiet, sober, Dad who went to work, who camped on the couch on a Sunday afternoon and sipped grape Kool-aid watching football. He was so reserved, intelligent, and strong. This Dad also seemed to have more impatience than the alternate Dad. I always tread carefully around him. This Dad had the silent gunfighter way about him. There was a subliminal annoyance that he held, but it was so there. As children, my mother could run a couple of sentences at my sisters and me in a raised voice to make us do something we were supposed to do, which we would do begrudgingly. Let my father say, "Do it" in a low, barely audible tone, we were up, "Yes Dad" and we snapped to attention to the task. His quiet, low-key, annoyance always seemed to keep us riding the ridge of that. As I got older, I realized that Dad was not annoyed with us, or impatient with us. He ALWAYS loved us, always loved being with us. I was just too young to get it. There was something inside of him that he struggled with. It was something about himself that he did not like, and so he sought relief.
This is where the alternate Dad comes into the picture. After a couple of beers, he would loosen up, and it made him loving, funny, and social. He was naturally interesting, and conversations, no matter how old I was, were very invested. He made me feel important when we talked because he was genuinely interested.
He was also over the top. I recall Brooke's birthday party in 1974, he and his friend Larry brought an entire full-size brown paper grocery bag into the top of not-yet-inflated balloons. There had to be a few hundred of them. All of us kids spent the next few hours blowing up balloons till the room was waist-high. It was he who popped the first one, starting this wild party of kids popping balloons. There was more action in this living room than in a Chicago nightclub during a hit back in the twenties.
This Dad was easy to ask questions and to talk with. This Dad gave hugs, said "I love you" and seemed to completely lose the annoyance that plagued him when he did not have the aid of alcohol. Sometimes I missed this Dad, especially when I felt that I was annoying the other one. This dad was dynamic though. It was a journey through the levels of alcohol stages. In the beginning, you would see cracks in the quiet and sober Joe. Then, the next phase was probably my favorite, because, at this point, he was the best of both of them, which I truly believe was the person he really was. It was proof of why he needed it. This was where he wanted to be. The reality is though there is a certain fire that you cannot play with and not get burned and this is the dance that he lived with for most of his life.
When the perfect blend stage passed, things got fun and livened up the party. As a 19-year-old who also liked to drink, this was a pretty cool spot for me as well. We enjoyed many, and I mean many days and nights here. But there was another phase that I seemed incapable of meeting him on. It only happened a handful of times a year and I suspect these were brief visits that reverted back to the days when Dad's friends had told me that he changed from when I arrived.
He could stay up for a whole weekend and maintain a seriously strong buzz. This Joe was a third possibility. He was the one who rationalized anything, he was the most dangerous to himself. This is the one who I always thought would be his end, the one who scared me and made me feel that I would lose my Dad when he was still a young man. This was that Dad who became totally irreverent and would blast Uriah Heep at 3:00 AM on a Sunday morning. Uriah Heep was a British hard rock band formed in 1969 that obliterated the sound spectrum with electronic keyboards and guitars, and at 3 AM, pushing the stereo speakers way beyond their limit has a force to literally blow you 2 feet off your bed as if the Battle of Britain suddenly overtook you.
He would disappear and I would have no idea where he was. One weekend I did not see Dad around anywhere. After a brief tour of the island, it was clear the very noticeable 74 Chrysler was nowhere in Port Aransas. I drove out to Flour Bluff. Dad was there. It was clearly a binge weekend and had pulled an all-weekender. His stamina to do this amazed me. Here at 39 years old, he could just keep going indefinitely like this. It was an oddity, like it had to happen, like a pressure valve opening. It was very surreal. It was always like this was a visitor when it happened. I always knew that he would arrive again, I just never knew when. I finally coaxed him home with me and Jeri made sure the Chrysler made it home too.
My daily directionless life continued on. I continued writing songs and my book, but the gravity of the approaching winter was pulling me down and my refuge came in the form of the writing. As everything changed physically and climate-wise, I naively thought that when you live on a tropical island, winter simply would not exist, but I was wrong. The young and the wild beach people, college students, and surfers all disappeared. They were replaced by "Winter Texans" formerly known as snowbirds. They were the retired folks from Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and North Texas who stayed for the winter and drove 15 miles an hour in our 30-mile-an-hour town and 40 miles per hour on our 15-mile-per-hour beach. The island became quiet and smaller.
As the days passed I dreamed, of going to Costa Rica but I could tell it was getting farther away by the day. I just knew Costa Rica wasn’t going to happen.
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