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We are going to a local gun shop today, where my father bought his arsenal of hunting weapons. He had an affinity for Weatherby rifles. Loud motherfuckers that made him deaf by the time he was 45. I think I did my own hearing damage but with rock n roll guitars and small practice rooms with lead guitarists who kept saying, “I’m sorry it’s so loud, but that’s the way I get my tone.”
But get this, my dad gave me a 224 Weatherby hunting rifle for one of my birthdays after he married SAM. And he took the money for it out of my college trust fund. The millionaire pilfering his own kid’s savings account. “Um, Dad? WTF?”
My kids don’t have college trust funds. My mom began to talk about that idea during the last ten years of her life, as she was packing her mental bags for heaven. When she died, however, the will directed the estate to my sister and myself. Yes, expressly to help with college, but no trust was formed. My comfortable repose at the moment, between jobs, is due to the diligence of my mom to preserve as much of the generational wealth as possible. I guess my son is furious. My ex-wife is furious. They were promised the money in some universe of their own minds. I will be able to erase my kids’ college debt, but I will not fund my son’s detours.
Today is the day my son has been asking about for two weeks. In all the hell he’s ginning up, he has a movie in his mind about McBride’s gun shop. “My dad was a legend in there,” I told him during the Sheels adventure in gun worship. “If I’d a gotten his guns, as he wanted, I’d have a rare guns case.” So, today, forty years after my father died, my son is fantasizing about old man McBride waxing poetic about the “rich doctor who fancied Weatherby and Browning.”
My dad’s wife, SAM, had a major malfunction about his biological kids. So, upon my father’s death, she vanished all the guns, Rolexes, clothes, mementos, everything, and refused her husband’s last wishes. She was like that. Rod got the guns and gold. Bob, a college golf kid my dad sponsored, got the Oyster Perpetual. I got nothing. My brother got the two fancy cars. The same 450 SL he traded with Charlie and a Jensen Interceptor III, I nearly crashed at 130 miles per hour as I was driving it back from Houston for my brother.
A day after my father’s death I went up to the house while SAM was out celebrating with Rod. My dad’s 300 Weatherby rifles were in hard cases under the master bed. I was too scared to take those. I grabbed two commemorative 30-30 Texas Ranger Winchester riles still in their decorative boxes. One for my brother and one for me. I never saw any of the prized shotguns, rifles, or pistols. Oh, I guess that’s not true. Months after his death, our new law firm put the request through the executor for the “guns” to be delivered to me.
She must’ve been laughing just like she did that last Christmas when my oldest sister gave my dad an air rifle. What was given to me as my father’s guns were three rifles, probably found in an on outdoor storage shed, a 22 that wouldn’t fire, a bb gun, and a non-descript 4-10 shotgun. They were rusty, dusty, and amounted to a pile of crap. Somewhere in the exchange I also ended up with the Ruger 44 Magnum Black Hawk.
I was scared to fire it. I sold it a few years later to McBride’s, where I am going today with my son. $500. I had no use for the weapon, but the cash came in handy. What I wanted was some of my dad’s clothes, ties, his boots, some monogrammed stuff. I got rusty Goodwill guns. I think I donated them on the way home.
“Touché, SAM.”
She would not enjoy the fruits of her labor and fortuitous marriage. Alcoholics are rarely happy. She sunk into anonymity and let the lawyers do their work carving out exceptions for the estate to give more money to her and her daughter.
My son is certain that McBride will light up at my father’s mention. I am probably to blame for that idea. It’s hard to imagine forgetting the swaggering young doctor who bought exotic weaponry and went on hunting vacations to shoot bear, and elk, and big horn sheep. I imagine he was a legend in the store. Not for being nice or tipping well, but for ordering two custom-fit “elephant rifles” on a whim. And his trophy heads never rivaled the volume of his friend and helicopter-rich John B., but my dad had the Boone and Crocket record for big horn sheep, that stood for ten years.
The wild game hunter was also a lush. He might come in at any time and resell items to buy new ones, trade for better blueing, all the stuff my son would cream over. Today, we’ll see if any of my father’s ghost remains in the mind of the retiring staff and Mr. McBride himself. We’ll see.
Last night my son texted that he’d found a desk on the street and needed a bigger car to move it to his new apartment. Any light is a light, so I went across town and we loaded the “sewing desk” into my car.
“This is Nana, dude,” I said. “If she could give you a signal from heaven, this would be it. It’s literally Nana’s sewing desk.”
We stopped for tacos on the way to his apartment. He was less hyped in general. The McBride’s thing was accelerating and mixing with optimism. Even as he showed me around his “shithole” apartment, he had momentum. It was probably the gun talk and fantasy about what today is going to be like, but I’ll take it.
As I was heading over, I lamented the time and the rain that were going to make the drive 45 minutes to get to him. “You don’t need to come,” he said. “It’s okay.”
“Already on my way.”
As young parents, my ex-wife and I dug into attachment parenting theory. And before she hardened over in defense of her fears, we shuffled along together learning how to feel about and feel with our new baby. The second child two years later, pulled us further into the fantastic bliss of parenting. Intoxicating. All we wanted to do was sit and play with the baby and then babies.
Going back to work, driving off on my daily commute while my lovely wife and children were still snuggled in the big bed, was a sadness I had to swallow . I started getting fat. I learned to use food as a tranquilizer. Ice cream is still an honored balm to sadness for me. I was raised by a Southern Belle trained in the arts of cooking and painting. The whole thing about the dark prince becoming infinitely more powerful and mad was not part of her finishing. My living sister and I both fight to find joy in exercise and healthy eating. I want Haagen Das she wants her afternoon double martini. Oh.
I tried not to wax poetic with my son last night as I was leaving his place. I tried not to offer unsolicited advice. I told him I loved him and believed in him even when he was struggling to do the same.
“You will make it through this period,” I said. The rain had cleared the air and made our short walk and talk bearable.
“Thank you, dad. It means a lot that you would come all this way to help me out.”
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