From Can't You Get Along With Anyone? A Writer's Memoir, and a Tale of a Lost Surfer's Paradise by Allan C. Weisbecker

CHAPTER FIVE

 

The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life in between, in which the soul is in ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain.
--John Keats

 

My father died while I was taking care of Mom, struggling with my memoir, with my demented editor, and, by the way, not getting laid. (I hadn't gotten laid since either the Cat Woman Incident or the Panamanian Whorehouse Incident, depending on how you define getting laid.)

I talk about my father twice in In Search of Captain Zero, plusup front just after the dedication (which is For Mom) I quote from a poem he wrote, over an old black & white photo of him looking like a god.Then,right at the beginning of the text I describe a camping trip to the end of the road place called Montauk, on Long Island, New York, with my father when I was nine years old. I make the point that my father was responsible for my love of the sea, which in turn led me to surfing, which in turn changed everything.

I worshiped my father. I wanted to be just like him.

In Zero's epilogue I visit my father, who lived in New York just a couple of blocks from where I grew up, and whom I hadn't seen in several years. I describe how he'd become a recluse, living with thirty cats in a filthy house with instruments of torture and primitive warfare hanging all over the place. In a quiet, still-able-to-function way, he'd gone insane.

The way I found out my father had died was that the local police came knocking at Mom's door late one night – this was early January, 2000 – and told me. They'd tracked me down via my North Carolina driver's license. When I'd last visited my father – this was the time described in Zero's epilogue – I'd given his next door neighbor my phone number at Mom's in case anything happened. But the neighbor had lost it. He did remember that I was living in North Carolina. He told the police up there and they called the North Carolina police.

The way anyone ever knew that my father had died was that the mailman noticed he wasn't collecting his mail. The detective with whom I spoke when I went up to deal with all this told me that my father had likely died on New Year's Eve – the day before the turn of the millennium. When they broke in, the detective told me, the police found my father on the living room floor. Sprawled in the filth, I added mentally.

The detective started to go on about the circumstances of my father's death but I sensed where he was going and stopped him. I didn't want to hear it. I didn't want to hear how after a few days the cats had become crazed with hunger and had got to him. I didn't want to hear about the autopsy, which, I suspected, would say that my father had had a stroke; he'd had a couple of minor ones before. I didn't want to hear this, or the details of exactly how long the mail had been piling up, because it all might mean that my father had lain there paralyzed for days before he died and the cats had got to him while he was still alive.

My father kept everything; kept everything he ever bought, collected, was given; every photo he ever took (he was a serious amateur photographer for a few years) or was taken of him or anyone he knew; there were dozens of photo albums stacked up or lying around the house. He kept everything he ever wrote (he was a writer with a column at one time); everything I ever wrote since I was a kid-writer; postcards I'd sent from far-flung places while I was on surf trips or smuggling runs. Everything about the family going back 100 years right up to the present – there in the filth and clutter on the floor next to where my father died in the living room was the Christmas card I'd just sent him, although it was unopened.

My father's house was big, four-stories, four bedrooms, and was so crammed with junk that I had to break down one of the bedroom doors to get in; a pile of boxes of junk had toppled over in there and fallen against the door. I was greatly affected by some of the stuff I found; all kinds of memories came rushing back. For example, at the bottom of a box of framed newspaper articles about the defunct family business, I came across an old letter, four pages on paper that with the years had become brown and thin like parchment. Handwritten, beautifully so, almost like calligraphy, it looked like it should have been in a glass case at the Smithsonian. Thing was, though, there was so much stuff and at this point I was so tired and distraught that I almost didn't read the letter; I almost tossed it aside. What prompted me to read it was the date at the top, the year, 1948, which was the year I was born.

As I read, I got a strange feeling, a classic déjà vu, I suppose, although I hadn't actually seen the letter before. The letter was written by a man whose name was unfamiliar to me. He was writing from Nairobi, Kenya. Africa. 1948. Africa was still… Africa. The prose was wonderful. Simple sentences, yet very strong, vivid imagery. The writer was describing his life in Africa as a hunter, a white hunter, as the description used to go.

The tone of the letter was intimate, as if the writer and my father had been very close. Here and there, for emphasis, the writer would insert my father's name, Allan, the same as mine, which heightened the peculiar feeling I was experiencing.

The first specific recollection that surfaced as I was reading the letter was this: I was checking out a book from my old high school library. I was not yet in high school, though; I was much younger, seven or eight. The book was titled Hunter, and I remembered that the author's name was actually that, Hunter, John Hunter, I think. He was a white hunter in Africa. The book was his memoir.

The next thing as I sat there in the clutter of my father's house with this old letter in front of me was that I realized that I had read this book, Hunter, many times. I recalled checking it out of the library again and again. If you're old enough, you might remember that there used to be a 3 x 5 card tucked in the jacket of library books. When you checked out a book, you'd sign the card, which the librarian would then file, so she'd know who had the book. As I was reading this letter from Kenya, Africa, 1948, I got a mental picture of the 3 x 5 card that went with Hunter. Stacked up on the thin blue lines on the card were my signatures, in my childish scrawl. A dozen at least. Just mine. No one else had checked out the book.

Then I remembered that for some period of time when I was a kid I was obsessed with becoming a white hunter in Africa.

As I sat there with this old letter, something buried even deeper down surfaced. A story my father had told me when I was about ten years old. When my father was fighting in North Africa in World War II, he and a buddy made plans to come back to Africa when the war was over. To the real Africa, equatorial East Africa, to become white hunters. They corresponded when they came home, got specific about where they would go and how much money they'd need to get started as white hunters, and so forth. Then, in 1946, just as everything was coming together, my father met my mother. Fell in love. What my father told me when I was about ten years old, and which I was just now remembering, was that when he asked my mother to marry him, if she said no he was going to Africa with his war buddy, as planned.

She said Yes.

A part of me wishes she hadn't said yes, and that my father had gone to Africa. This notwithstanding that I would then never have been born. See, had this come to pass my father might still be alive. Or he might have died in some heroic way instead of on his living room floor in the filth, his body desecrated by his goddamn cats.

As life went, my father and mother were divorced in 1971 while I was in North Africa, surfing and smuggling hashish.

From Can't You Get Along With Anyone? A Writer's Memoir, and a Tale of a Lost Surfer's Paradise by Allan C. Weisbecker