Caramel Car Crash

Or The Time My Dad Thought I was Gay because of How I Pronounce Caramel

For a roughly three year period, my older sister got into a major car accident around every two to six months. I assume there were some fender benders, but I tended only to become aware of her accidents when they were on the scale of colliding head on with a city bus. Which, to be clear, she did.

As Ian Fleming once said, “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”

After she totaled her third vehicle, I noticed that she seemed to be needing a lot of financial assistance at exactly the same time that my dad’s fourth wife was driving him into bankruptcy. I’m not saying my sister did any of this on purpose or even consciously. From a God’s eye view, however, this was clearly some sort of financial tug-of-war by way of vehicular self-sacrifice. A stress test, wherein my sister risked both her life and the lives of strangers, to force my father to reveal his most deeply held values. In short, my sister wanted my father to choose her over his fourth wife.

I profited exactly nothing from this understanding.

After any such accident, my sister would call my dad in tears and tell him she had no idea how she was going to get to work at the nursing home. Or, in the first few instances, to Kentucky Fried Chicken. I assume some sort of emotional blackmail took place, after which my father unfailingly agreed to buy her a new car.

This where I entered the picture.

After hanging up with my sister, my father would then call me to deliver the news that we needed to go roof some more houses. I usually demurred that it would probably be better if my sister just stopped driving for a while before somebody got killed. Whatever was happening, for whatever reason it was happening, was incredibly dangerous. It had to stop. This understanding also profited me nothing.

All sorts of quiet and unspoken things played out during those conversations. I knew my dad was broke in part because of the money because he was still paying my mom child support. And mostly because his fourth wife was doing things like pulling the equity out of his house to go to Mexico. Which she did a lot. On the other side of town, I could still somehow hear the moths flying out of his empty pockets.

However vain, I also felt that I had a duty as the oldest boy to support the family. It didn’t even matter that my sister was three years my senior and already out of the house. I was a man. I wanted to be a man. For me, being a man meant that it was my job to provide by doing things that totally sucked and were completely unfair.

There were much uglier reasons as well. Reasons I had never articulated to myself and would not fully realize until decades later. Perhaps not even until writing this piece.

While my sister had reacted to my parent’s increasingly obnoxious behavior with her own obnoxious behavior, I had responded by emotionally separating myself from them. They had proven themselves to be unreliable, so I forced myself to never rely upon them. That still wasn’t enough, after a while.

I wanted to claw them out of my chest, as I thought they had clawed me out of theirs. I didn’t want to think of them as my parents. More than that, I didn’t even want them to think of themselves as my parents. To that end, I wanted them to rely on me.

If what my sister wanted was for my dad to wake up and choose her, what I desired was much more stupid. I wanted to win a moral game that neither my mother nor father knew we were playing. They had betrayed me and I wanted to live my life in such a way that they would be forced to confront that betrayal. If I had a field trip, I found a way to pay for it myself. If I ever needed anything, I figured out how to get it without their help. I don’t know if my mother really bought me groceries for the last few years of high school.

Conversely, if they needed anything, I went to every possible length to get it for them, especially if it caused me to suffer. When I worked odd jobs for my grandfather, I used the money to pay for their groceries. And while I loved my half-brother and half-sister, I also saw it as a sign of shame against my mother that she relied on me so much for their care. I don’t know if my mother or father thought it was kindness, but I felt it was the worst possible contempt. If they wanted to let their son behave as their parent, so be it. Each time it happened, they’d have that much less claim on me.

In my heart, I was spitting in their faces.

If they had ever once insisted they loved me, made some public gesture of care, I would told them they were not forgiven. It was a very cinematic and dramatic kind of thinking and I am deeply embarrassed to remember it now. And besides, no such day never came.

When I later cut all contact with my father for five years, he never even noticed. When he finally saw me again, at a wedding, his first words were to ask that I go and get a propane tank refilled. Which, stupidly, I did.

I saw roofing houses as my dad giving me a handshake deal to be dead even on the support he provided for my care. If he was willing to give me a symbolic way to not think of him as my provider, I was all too happy to take it. I’d gladly erase everything good he had ever done for me, no matter how small, until he was no longer my father but simply some guy that I knew. That was what I thought I wanted, when I was young and thought you could wish away all your hurts simply by being angry enough.

This is all a several paragraphs long way to explain that I always said yes when he asked me to go roofing. You needed all of those paragraphs, however, to understand the tension. The enormous fucking tension.

Picture two moose coming across one another in the wild. Between them is a barren field and a billion years of evolution tracing the shape of all the fiery rage of the universe. They shift their weight on their hooves, seeking advantage on the terrain, readying to pounce at the first sign of weakness. They twist their antlered-heads first one way then another as if to say “Look at my weapons, and judge if I can hurt you more than you can hurt me.” Two animals, vying for dominance. That was the energy every weekend at the crack of dawn, when my father would pick me up to go roofing.

We typically worked a minimum of sixteen hours a day in the summers and exchanged maybe a dozen words. Winter days were shorter, only because there was less daylight. I started by picking up the shingles he tore off above me with a flat-blade shovel. A whole roof’s worth of cedar shakes or three-tab asphalt shingles. Architectural style shingles were too new for anyone to need that kind of roof replaced, which was unfortunate as those always seem to come off cleaner. The community was poor, so sometimes he’d tear off three layers and I’d have to pick it all up and throw it into a trailer he’d borrowed. In later years, I’d haul them away to one landfill or another.

He taught me things, too, of course. How to cut a starter set, the shingles that create that off-set brick-like pattern. That way, as he worked along the edges, he wouldn’t have to pause and cut them himself. This was also the first time I used a skill saw, and I got a lot better at shape-rotating by trying to figure out how to cut whatever measurements he called out so that the OSB was always “rough-side up.”

I did most of those grunt jobs in junior high school, when his roofing was more occasional. Prior to my sister’s long streak of car accidents. By the time I was in high school, I was helping him tear the roof off, sheet, tar paper, and shingle. I was also hauling bundles of shingles up the ladder over my shoulder. It felt that I was pounding nails all goddamn day long. I can still get my wrist to click if I turn it the right way.

We did all of this in the most difficult manner possible. The dumbest possible way. In whatever manner required the greatest effort and highest physical discomfort. We weren’t Muslim, but as I later knew many Muslims, the best word I can find in all of my personal experience is haram. Forbidden. Unclean. Not only suspect but intrinsically suspicious.

None of this was ever said explicitly, but I grew to understand what was and wasn’t haram over the long months and years of roofing with my father.

Every nail had to be set by hand. Nail guns were haram. The pressure would never be right and the nails would always sink too deep or not deeply enough. This would make the roof uneven and encourage leaks. It didn’t matter if the crew roofing the house up the block was using a nail gun and that it seemed to go fine. They were haram.

We wore no fall gear, even on three story houses. Fall gear was haram. It made men careless. If falling meant that you would die or seriously hurt yourself, then you would behave better and not fall. It would only add needless complication and expense. In the ugliest place in my soul, I smiled when my father was careless with my life.

Fiberglass or aluminum extension ladders were an extravagance for wealthy people. Totally fucking haram. We used the wooden extension ladders given to him by my great uncle Jack, even though he’d left them outside in the rain all of the time and they were probably over a hundred years old. Before those ladders eventually did break you could grab them by the side and feel them compress under a gentle squeeze.

When it got hot —and I would submit that you’ve never actually been hot before unless you’ve put down black asphalt shingles in summer heat— we would run a hose on the roof. Not to keep us from being cooked alive on what was essentially as asphalt griddle, you understand. Any self-respecting man was indifferent to whether or not he was being cooked alive. We had to make sure that we didn’t mark up the tar in the shingles so the clients wouldn’t be upset.

This attitude also steered my life outside of roofing. I didn’t own a pair of eyeglasses until I was in junior high school, despite being unable to read the whiteboard in school from the first grade. Eyeglasses were also haram, a thing of mill superintendents and rich kids who spent too much time reading, and besides being able to see well would only make it so that I listened less. Eyeglasses would make my mind lazy and my memory lax. I didn’t need glasses to his thinking, and until my grandfather intervened I went without glasses.

There was a wisdom to this that I did not appreciate at the time.

The things we own, own us. The tools we use to shape the world, shape us in turn. My father was a rock in the river of blind progress. The world could change all it wanted and he would remain the same. His total inability to stand up to any woman was reversed on the rooftop. On the top of of a roof, he was adamant. In his day, men of character had not used such luxuries and that made them strong. I see, now, he wanted to make me strong in the only way he knew.

Fourteen and precocious, I kept asking all kinds of really gay questions to his perspective. Deeply homosexual, totally haram questions.

When I saw the roofing supply delivery truck go to a house up the block to deliver to a different company, and then put a conveyor belt on the roof, I literally gasped. Bundle by bundle, the shingles were unloaded and set right across the ridge line. No one had to pack anything up a ladder. The guys on the delivery truck even helped do the unloading. The emotional shock was roughly equal to when I later saw the Falcon 9 land back at the launchpad after delivering its payload to orbit. A whole new world opened up before my eyes.

The delivery didn’t take more than thirty minutes, contrasted to the endless hours we spent hauling bundles up a ladder. I couldn’t stop talking about it the whole day. The economics, a subject I’d just read about, baffled me. It must be extremely expensive or everyone would do it, including us. The big companies must make up the money based on economies of scale. That had to be it. I asked my father if he knew how much it cost.

“I don’t know. Like fifty bucks?”

This shocked me. I asked him why we didn’t do it then. It wasn’t that much money, even then. Not considering how long it took us to carry the shingles up ourselves. This was something on the order of a fraction of one percent of his total profit. In fact, the roofing company must already be pricing most of the cost into the purchase itself to do it so cheaply. We were already paying for it, in a roundabout way.

“Fifty bucks is fifty bucks,” he said.

In an extremely gay way, I refused to let it go. I’d read about something called the time value of money. I wanted to multiply it all out. Show him he was leaving money on the table. It took several hours for the two of us to haul all those bundles on the roof. If we did the delivery we might find time to do a whole other roof every seven or so roofs. His face grew angrier and angrier. This wasn’t like when my gay cousins dated men or had sex with men or talked about gay marriage at Thanksgiving and Christmas. That was, in his mind, something that reflected on the way they had been raised by his brothers. Not a fault in my cousins. Nothing but the plain and ordinary way of things. But what I was doing? What I did was deliberate. Intentional. I knew what was haram and what was not. What I did was profanity. I was confusing the natural order of things.

This all too self-aggrandizing, of course. The idea that the only reason my father found me strange was because I was too smart is the thought of a conceited child. No one sits under pressure for long periods of time without something breaking. Or at least something shifting. And make no mistake, I was under enormous pressure. We all were. What broke for me was my sense of humor. My mood at any given time swung somewhere between introspective Russian Literature and manic Robin Williams. I was also entirely too fucking precocious.

I am writing this as an almost forty year old man who can put on a tool-belt and draw forth my hammer like a gunslinger, twirling it through my fingers in a spinning arc before it settles in my palm. One fluid action that looks effortless and, with all humility, totally fucking awesome. If you saw me do it, you would cry “Behold! There goes a man!” Though I haven’t done it for some years, if I have to pound nails down for a re-sheet, it’s easy for me to hold a hammer in each hand and move at double speed. Over the years, I’ve trained myself to be as ambidextrous as a magician.

My father was there when I was a fourteen year old kid on a roof, trying to do these same tricks for the first time. So when he was with me, and I was trying to pull my hammer from my belt like a gunslinger’s six-shooter, he saw me fumble and drop it off the roof a frustratingly large number of times. Which slowed work down when I had to go down the ladder to get the hammer and then back up to resume work. When I tried to swing two hammers at once, he was there when I hit rafters more often than nails. And as hard as I insisted he pay the fifty dollar shingle delivery fee, he insisted that I stop fucking around and do things the normal way.

Like him, I refused.

At every step, I confounded him.

I not only read but wrote Fantasy novels. I had a giant three ring binder full of pages. I made up new alphabets and languages as a form of amusement. I was obsessed with swords. My walls were covered with drawings from my various worlds, mostly a bunch of dudes in armor with giant swords. I never wanted normal things for a kid to want like beer and cigarettes, but highlighters, so I could use them to draw magical, glowing swords. Instead of sports, I watched Quantum Leap, MacGyver, and Star Trek.

I showed no inclination to do normal things, like go to bonfires in the woods and get drunk. I had never had a pregnancy scare. I’d never even had sex. I wasn’t particularly worried about finding a girlfriend. I didn’t want to go to prom. I didn’t want to go to parties. I wanted to be left alone to read. And to write.

I owned about a thousand books before I graduated. Those were all over my room along with the drawings. Don’t ask me how I got them all. I hardly remember. Free book piles at libraries. Gifts. A few purchased per month, for a decade. One time, a younger cousin entered my bedroom and gasped, “It looks like a wizard lives here.”

What would you do if you came home from work one day and your son was building medieval siege weaponry in the front yard? Pretend you don’t have a laptop job and that you’re exhausted. How would you feel?

In contrast, my father once shoved a cop’s head in a toilet because he felt he was giving out too many speeding tickets. To him, an unremarkable story. It hardly seemed that we could actually be related. I would like to say there is no other similar relationship for you to reference in all of our culture’s media, nothing where the relationship of a father and son is imaged to be so different, but I have a toddler, and I have seen How to Train Your Dragon. I am but the Hiccup to my father’s Stoick the Vast.

Although he never told me before I got married, my father’s best friend, Dutch, informed me that for years my father worried to him that I was gay. And I can see it now so clearly. The way I told long, sprawling jokes with no other point than that they were long and sprawling. The way I did extra math homework, for fun. The way teachers left my name in their lesson plans when they were on vacation, instruction the substitute that I would be teaching class that day.

What did that look like to him?

What did that look like to a man who had been married four times, including two wives who were cousins?

There was also the female way that I could infer things from a look or a glance. Or how body language told me so much. Like when I saw my dad talking to my stepmother and saw her look at me. Only that, just a look. And a shrug. My dad’s back straightening a small degree. That was all. I couldn’t hear anything. I didn’t need to hear anything. I could see everything in it.

I knew that look and shrug meant, “Why are you paying him so much?”

And I knew the way his back straightened meant he was telling my stepmother that he was paying me all the money he was giving to my sister.

My father who would fight any man for any reason, had lied to my stepmother because he didn’t want her to be disappointed in him. He wanted to look like he was honoring his promise to give my sister no more money. And he wanted my sister to be happy with him for choosing her. His rage and his courage were only a mouse squeak before any woman who was displeased with him. The money he was giving to my sister, was in some sense smuggled. The smuggling was done by telling everyone that he was giving the money to me. He was telling everyone he was doing the right thing by me.

That was his way of balancing the scales of the universe. He would simply tell everyone he was a good father to me. My blood boiled. For all the kinds of very complicated and strange reasons I’ve described.

He had stolen my right to moral outrage from me. He had taken away the appearance of his burdening incompetence. He had made it look like he was doing something noble, teaching me a skill and how to value my work. He was telling other people that he was acting like a father to me. He was making the world think he was meeting his obligation to me.

Part of me wanted to go over and throw him from the ladder when I saw it shake upon his return. Instead, I crawled over to his section of the roof and made sure to meet his eyes before I hissed, “You’re a piece of shit.”

He gave no response but a half nod.

We will end with what I am now realizing is a theme. We will apply my adult perspective to an anecdote, and realize things weren’t quite exactly what I thought they were at the time they were happening.

Imagine your IQ is pushing 90 on a good day. You have a big sense of adventure. You’re action oriented. You like to be on the go. You wanted to be a helicopter pilot for the Army in Vietnam but you couldn’t pass any of the tests. You wind up working at a sawmill. You’re horrible at relationships because your mom was horrible to you, but eventually you stay married long enough to have a couple of kids. And somehow, one of them has an IQ that’s something like 50 points higher than yours and also he’s taller than you are by the time he’s in sixth grade and doesn’t like any of the same things you like. All sorts of modern concepts of parenting haven’t even been invented yet, and you live in the last area in the contiguous United States where that stuff is propagated.

You’d think your wife cheated except he looks just like you.

How good of a job do you think you would do in that circumstance?

Of course my father loved me. Just like, of course, he had no fucking idea of what to do with me.

We drove to a roof one day, some months after our brief confrontation, and happened to go past a coffee stand. He turned the truck around. Coffee stands were brand new, a market response to this crazy thing called Starbucks happening up in Seattle. His fourth marriage had finally up and died after his wife left him for the chief of police, and he was doing things to reinvent himself.

“Let me buy you a fucking coffee,” he said.

Except I knew that he meant, let me buy you a coffee so I can say I gave you something for this roofing job.

“I hate coffee,” I replied but meant no fucking way am I taking a goddamn thing from you.

“Come on,” he insisted, “some of this shit is like milkshakes. They’ve got car-mull in ‘em and everything!”

I sighed. I was so fucking tired of being angry. In a moment of weakness I nodded.

“I like care-uh-mel,” I muttered.

He tapped the brakes just before we arrived at the window to order.

“Car-mull,” he said, with a bewildered expression.

I pointed at the sign.

“C-A-R-A-M-E-L. Care-uh-mel.”

My father looked as if he had swallowed a poison whose only cure was time and suffering. Bad news, long feared, long delayed, had finally arrived. Confirmation, at long last, of his final and irrevocable failure. He could barely speak at the order window, and I think he almost started crying right there when he handed me my Frappuccino.

We didn’t talk at all for the rest of that sixteen hour day. We were well practiced at that point and didn’t need to speak to one another to coordinate. We went about our work, and when we were close to down I went back down the ladder to clean up the job site. He stayed up top to put on the ridge line.

I remember catching a glance of him briefly as I climbed down the ladder. He was pausing between each shingle, fighting tears, looking up at the sky, posing a strangely saintly figure as if seeking guidance from God.

I went about my work cleaning the job site so we could leave at a reasonable hour.

When I heard the ladder clink as he made his way down, I returned to help him load the ladder into the back of the truck and strap it down.

“Hey,” he said, fighting a quiver through his chest. His voice was tight. Almost breathless.

I wonder what he must have felt standing before me then. I have a son now. I am grown, almost as old as he was in that moment. What future had he seen for me that he was giving up in order to bring himself before me like that? What doors to his expectations was he closing? What pain had he felt that day?

Then all in a rush, he said, “I don’t fucking care if you’re a faggot or anything. You’re still my son and I still love you.”

And though I am not gay, and our problems were far from over, I felt my father’s love in that moment for the first time in years.