Though I was called a "daddy’s girl," that interpretation is short-on-substance. My presence from the earliest moments were never certain; in other words, my father did spend a great deal of time with me, and he did it because I happened to not be as boring as he had feared initially, since my impairment was obvious from the onset.
My father needed to be engrossed in whatever, whoever, was in his presence, or not at all. Therefore, the audition quality of my early days fortunately was lost on me since I was too new to the racket to pick up on how tenuous it was. Had I not made the cut quick enough it is likely I could have wound up at my grandmother’s more frequently, or, locked down with my mother forced to sit out her partnership with this cat named Charles who took no prisoners, but hooked you like a junkie on his adrenaline-gland-chewing persona. Storyteller and ribald sage, clever comic whose Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor could pop out of his Woodward and Bernstein and just as easily completely throw you with a John Lee Hooker blueness – a refrain of extemporaneous monologues of clear-cut essays as profound as they were shocking, or sad, and always funny either way. Funny that someone like this person had somehow managed to sneak through the filters, dodged the monitoring between life and death and birth. He wasn’t human or ghost or spirit and he wasn’t just "daddy" who this author became enchanted by and thus spends the spirit currency and raw time necessary to build such a creature and extol its material composition’s contours and the passages of his vascular psyche.
The point was, I was often his little road dog and as I began to talk back and he realized not only that he could influence my responses – because that would never have been enough – I had a mind of my own that could and did regard and evaluate in a specific way.
That was the sell, right there. He figured out that I was figuring out on my own terms, and that was not boring to him. Had I been a sponge of a spawn taking in anything and cowing to power and shrinking from the sheer weight and volume of him, I’d have been in Girl Scouts or some shit equitably occupying. What I’m saying is I got to hang with Big Chuck – and I dug it, and he dug me, so, we had fun. And when you hang out with somebody who understands fun in the way I’m referring to, not like, oh, he’s gonna let me eat two slices of cake instead of one when ma isn’t looking, hee hee, not oh honey, you can have the poodle and we’ll get you the best pageant gown this little town has ever seen.
No. That is not even fun. The fun I’m referring to is the fun that drove Walt Disney to create an entire World, and another Land, too – then a fucking Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. The fun I’m talking about is driven the way fanatics are who don’t have artistic vices and shit that stimulates the senses – like food grown by your grandfather farmer, and Nikons with enough goddam film and chemicals and paper to print as many fucking photos of whatever the fuck you took pictures of because you couldn’t stop and now can’t stop printing them out…
Fun that makes a pool something not merely a symbol of status, not a nice option to a home when the urge to take a dip strikes – no, the kind of fun that borders on over-usage, as in, the pool water is choppy and splashing over more than it is still – and it is as much a part of the house as the toilet. That’s how fun.
There’s a reason why I emphasize these variables and if you’ve come this far you get it as much as you need to therefore I can go ahead and explain this photo and the fact I do not recall its specificity should be not only irrelevant but understood for future reference.
As kids generally do, I paid little attention to the details when riding shotgun with my father on his beats in Southwest Georgia during the 70s and 80s when he was an investigative reporter, photojournalist and state editor for The Albany Herald.
Daughter notwithstanding, my role was not limited by my familial distinction. I was student, confidante, muse, his bartender, and mini-me, who learned by age 6 how to mix the best cocktails from the portable wet bar fashioned from the brown paper bags in the backseat floorboard and from the blue and white cooler next to it full of ice.
The handiwork of sandwich-making also increased my value (and skill set). Staple items such as sliced ham, a pimento loaf occasionally, a jar of mayo, and the then-socially acceptable white bread which would stick to the roof of the mouth in a pasty lump requiring substantial tongue and/or finger maneuvering to pry it free – these were prehistory standards gradually replaced by fast food and drive-thru ingenuousness.
Had my role remained that of car bartender/short-order chef I would have become presumably obsolete by progress. The 2-hour round-trip commute my father made daily, sometimes more than once, between our rural headquarters, made him a kind of before-his-time mobile technology, a maverick and outlaw, a heroic anti-star and a fearless sawed-off shotgun presence, outfitted and accessorized with big engine vehicles on heavy rotation, open-ended expense accounts at Dixie Theater, the photo supply shop his paper’s publishers let him have his way with with utter impunity, microcassette recorders (Lanier was the brand)…He was cutting edge with those microcassettes, and there were tiny cassettes everywhere, they littered our environment (and still do, though I’ve managed to corral them in certain areas of my museum-like existence)…He had several (4, 5?) black, iron Royal manual typewriters in his home office (his office at the Albany, Georgia newspaper was a mere formality, a place he would visit to satisfy the barest of requirements, I suppose, but I remember next to nothing about his desk – just the AP and UPI first place awards lining both sides of the walls in the entry corridors which I figured was normal and now realize must have been annoying to others who actually worked in the office, probably for decades, who had never so much as gotten an honorable mention for anything. There must’ve been unsung heroes in those ink-smelling newsrooms but they were shadows and corners and filing cabinets I passed or sensed.
The technology of a journalist in the 70s was confined to the manual machinery of the Royal typewriter, although the IBM olive green electric typewriter he sprung for special for my mother who served as his Girl Friday (catch-all being the operative phrase to say she did everything and anything he needed, wanted, required, and did it with apparent effortlessness). The only electric items he used were the battery operated recorders, but the extras, like his stealthy recording accoutrements, like the fat black "pen" which was actually a microphone which fit into his pocket and required a hole to be fashioned for the cord to feed out of sight to the secreted Lanier in his inside jacket pocket;. and the police scanner. That’s it, other than the batteries in the Nikon.
He did foray into computers when they became available, but I was privy to how wide open a journalist could be without anything but gasoline, batteries, and energy. And nerve, lots of that. Unmitigated nerve.
This kid, I wonder now who he was and why he was crying like ….like I cried when I’d gotten vaccinated (and ran out of the building to do a few laps before being apprehended and forced to submit). I probably was his age, but from the other side of the camera, life was not mine, it was theirs. Window shopping humanity, if you will, and though the experiences always left their imprint I’d still love to know every single detail.
There are literally hundreds, arguably thousands, of black and white, color, and transparencies in my possession but with each day grow farther from my reach. I will never look at every image I took, and that bothers me, yet that is neurosis shit. Let it go unless it gets important enough to make happen.
Description is that this little guy was getting a shot and he didn’t like it worth a damn and I was there to capture forever his moment of indignant horror. I wonder where he is now, if he remembers it, whether he’d recognize himself, and whether it would blow his mind to know that I had a 16 x 20 enlargement in a 20 x 24 frame which for its early years was on the wall in my father’s home office, and then later on every wall in which I inhabited after gaining my independence. Our walls were always galleries for mine, my father’s, and my mother’s, photographs. I became the family curator and was always in charge of hanging/displaying, while my mother and I did most of the darkroom work (mama was the color expert, while I preferred black and white.
That’s just how we rolled. Until the age of about 5 I usually stood up in the seat wearing my red sneakers and diaper, sucking my left thumb and leaning up against his shoulder bobbing my head to either the music or his sage advice for my future. I don’t remember at what point the monologues and diatribes turned into discourses and dialogues, but as a full-grown grown-up older now than he ever was then, I bet that must’ve been a hell of a thrill, and a true test of how well he’d been feeding my fertile mind he later admitted he "hoped to hell" would be "worth a damn," since he didn’t honestly like hanging out with me at first since I didn’t have much to "offer to the conversation,:" but then he started realizing that I seemed to know "what the hell was going on" in spite of my lack of language skills or experience "in the field."
We listened to music from an 8-track player as loud as it would go with the windows rolled down, the AC wide open (summer, winter, spring, fall), with him either singing like he was about to go on tour, or talking serious shit about serious shit – maybe one of his stories, or some cocksucking yellow-bellied scum-sucking sumbitch who was trying to kill him "this week" ("How many goddam times have I gotta tell these folks everything’s on the record unless they say it’s not? Some people ain’t got a lick of sense, baby – remember that shit."), or leveling with me about how I had to start writing seriously, get published as soon as possible, and how I was only as good as the product I was working on, since "what you ‘did’ don’t mean shit, it’s what you’re doing," because "when you’re green you’re growing and when you’re ripe, you’re rotten," which was often capped off with, or started with, "Life is an adventure or it is nothing," a quote which he reconfigured from Helen Keller at some point I think.
I also don’t recall why I wasn’t in school this day, since clearly it was a school day. Whatever the reason, I remember my father’s pensive, focused drive whenever he would insist I take photos wherever we wound up. He was probably hungover and hadn’t gotten amped up with enough caffeine or black beauties (which I didn’t find out until adulthood were as much a part of his daily grind as a half-gallon of vodka, good music, the best food, and freedom to do, say, and act how he wanted to whenever he wanted to).
Certain days he’d tell me what was going on, but, as is the case with this boy’s terrifying injection, my memory is lost to time. I was probably too busy inwardly planning how best to manipulate him into giving me some money to put in my Disney Trip fund I was obsessively dedicated to more every year).
My father, however, had a mission. Looking back, knowing as he did that I was a dedicated 4-H’er and that my participation in the annual District Project Achievement event held at Rock Eagle meant I would be requiring photos as part of my demonstration I’d have to do in front of other photography hopefuls from all over the state. Every year, enrolled in the photography division as a competitor, I would (frankly, with embarrassment – realizing my father was the equivalent of a round-the-bend stage mom hellbent on total domination) have a good dozen 16×20 black and white, and color, enlargements of my photographs (which I of course had also developed the film and printed the pics myself in our home darkroom and was sure to break that fact down for them). If i encountered the me from then I wonder how I would react? I hope I wasn’t as startlingly overbearing as I’m envisioning, that’s all I can say. But, hey, I was a kid, and I did have a string puller whose good intentions were good, just full-on-Kevin’s-mom, yo. Take it up with him. To the children who had to compete with your pinhole cameras and crude prints and barely strung together song-and-dance routine about photography, I apologize for being a little prick-in-training if I was. Undoubtedly they had talents which I did not.
Had I not one first place every single time it would have been clear there was no actual validity to the judging. I was unbeatable, and I was ashamed that I couldn’t help this fact (and wished I could blurt out that daddy made me do it like I did). I remember one time I got second and also remember the defiance on my district manager’s face, that set jaw and averted gaze as I forlornly sauntered off underneath the mini-fridge-sized Tamrac pro camera bag filled with my Nikon FM and five or six Nikkor lenses, SunPak flash, and every imaginable add-on, such as filters, shutter time-release cables, film of every ASA, color, format, not to mention the leather 30×24 leather portfolio case that came to my waist when resting on the ground, filled with the heavy matted seemingly- billboard-sized "body of work," as I was beginning to fully comprehend the meaning of…sulking, my bottom lip the size of a glazed donut. I just wanted to be pretty, which my father had insisted since birth to me that i was, would always be.
He knew I was a hideous and awkward chunky little fucker once I hit about 5, he had to have known I was a little mongrel – but by god he did not ever let on, sitting by my bedside at the damndest hours, just sit there in the dark. I was always a light sleeper so he usually woke me up but I never let on, played possum, feeling like a voyeur sometimes – but to his credit, what he whispered to me was better than anything Tony Robbins or for that matter even Jesus said. He definitely was coming from the place of perfect patriarchal intent, hoping to impart the wisdom and ideals he’d determined through trial, error, and discovery were what his little girl needed and I’m guessing wanted to imprint my unconscious mind in a way my conscious one might not grab, take. Subliminally feeding me like that thankfully was always done with responsibility, praise ye gatekeepers, gods, etc. The possibilities of humanity’s paths make the fact that nothing he ever said made me "feel funny," then or now, was and still is a big relief.
I was not molested and I don’t think I turned him on at all, nor I to him – and if I’m to use the available data and high numbers of molestation in this world from every demographic, irregardless of sexual orientation, religious creed or presumed virtue, I lucked the fuck up to not get poked or rubbed or leered at by my "daddy." What a drag that would be, so to those who must deal with that, sorry bout your luck, and just pour some brain bleach on it, think of Disney characters and don’t dig – run!
Fuck psychological warfare to mine the nuggets of wisely packed away experiences which didn’t feel good then and never will. One day we will shriek and recoil when coming across the history books, or Freudian texts, etc, et al. about goddam regressive therapy, even talk shows. Fuck Oprah and fuck getting raped by uncles when you thought he was a big sweet old being – with no more sexual connect to that bouncing little girl on that old bony hairy-leg fucker whose mind is not thinking about ice cream cones the same way she is.
I am bastardizing the description standard and you know what I think about that, I think, so how bout sticking to the program and know that this little kid is either out there somewhere, or dead and gone – and he’s a mystery I won’t solve and I’ll live.
