My father’s heavy boot crunched down onto the cheap, plastic hood of the RC police car, shattering the red and blue lights, splintering the black and white body, and collapsing the top, sending it inward like a tiny white dwarf star, imploding, vibrating, and all seemed lost in my happy, young Christmas evening of make believe cops-and-robbers, where bad guys were captured and thrown in the back seat, and in a moment every single thing about my father’s heroic nature, with his big, black, velvety cowboy hat, embroidered leather boots with golden tips, and encased-in-amber scorpion bolo ties, his glinting gold tooth, his kid-like smile, and loud laughter, his pungent brut or snappy English leather colognes and his clean shaven face, flanked by two thick sideburns and much too bushy, bushy, bushy, bushy, bushy mustache, vanished, replaced by my sadness, my regret and my fear. He was drunk. Unapologetically so. He was a cheater, I came to eventually learn. He was a liar; I found out much later. He was unfair to my sister and mother, for my benefit as his sacred cow, excusing every indulgence of mischief, every flaw of character, every failing as an adolescent. In only seconds, whatever grace I had experienced unfairly or not as his only son, lay razed by Stetsons. It was enough, almost, to send me spiraling away from wanting to be any kind of Mexican, and while it wasn’t until I was in my early twenties that I actively ran away from my culture, desiring only American romantic partners because Mexican women were dirty, eating only gringo food like grilled cheese and omelets because my Mother cooking papas y carnitas, or bologna on the stove top where the red ring charrs, was old fashioned, and I wore preppy clothes because then and only then could I blend in and nobody would be the wiser – it was Mar-tin, not Mart-een.
And what I wouldn’t have given.
What I wouldn’t have given to stop myself from the embarrassment of walking away from my heritage, as ineffective as it was. What I wouldn’t have given to let my father know that while it looked like I blamed him for walking away due to his flaws as a role model, I left because I was immature and searched for identity, even though it was intrinsically, inexorably a part of me. What I wouldn’t have given to have more than just a two day reprieve in my father’s condition forty-six years later, when he woke up just after I received a call from my sister to “say goodbyes,” because Dad had gone to sleep and hadn’t awoken in two days and the hospice nurse who checked in on him was sure he’d become septic from a three-year Parkinson’s battle and she was surprised he hadn’t passed sooner anyway.
But dad woke up again, for a few days at least, and returned to his demanding ways. He demanded his ice cream be served in three bolas, and his chili soup hot, and his coffee, reheated four times with the right amount of cocoa and milk, not the wrong amount, menso. Dad woke up and was every bit as fiery, misguided, and judgmental as he always was, and even though he told all of us he wasn’t ready to go, he hadn’t died yet, we knew he was, we knew he would.
And what I wouldn’t have given to take it all back.
And what I wouldn’t have given to not care about Dad smashing my police car, not because it would erase everything that happened after, like having to come outside at a brisk one o’clock in the morning to coerce him into coming back inside while he guzzled the last few beers from bar hopping, or his affair that produced a love child with a woman Mom hated, but whom he still mentioned as una mujer hermosa on his deathbed, but because then I might be able to craft meaning about our relationship from different fabric, different textures, like people who look at a tortilla and see Jesus, or a building and see someone’s face–a more comforting pareidolia. Instead, I can only reflect on the incidents of the past by peering into a View Master at yellowing slides of memory, and piece together ideas of what I think we had out of broken car parts he eventually replaced with a cruddy, nineteen-dollar, silver remote control car from the Parade Magazine a year later.
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Martin Perez is a Mexican-American MFA student at Vermont College of Fine Arts and a previous Writing Fellow at St. Mary’s College of California’s MFA program, focused on creative nonfiction. He has a BA in creative writing from the University of Arizona and graduated summa cum laude. He currently lives in Tucson, Arizona.