Testing, testing. Is this thing on?

There's been a Substack hiatus, but not a writing hiatus.

Even though I haven’t been active on here, I’ve still been writing. Sometimes, it’s just a paragraph a day, but I have been writing more than I have in years. I wanted to share an excerpt from the novel I’m writing that’s inspired by a visit to New York, when I first saw my father after years of no contact. And in that time, something happened to my father’s health that caused him to have difficulty walking. He probably had a stroke, but my father NEVER went to the doctor, but he blamed his severe limp on a faulty electric blanket. It was so shocking for me to see my father like this because he had always been so filled with vitality and he loved to walk miles and miles around the city and even though he was in his 50s he seemed like such an old man.

This is fiction and a rough draft taken from a scene when CeCe sees her father at Penn Station. When I wrote these words, I could still remember seeing my father greet me at the train station after such a long trip from Indiana feeling like not only did I not know this man, but I was dropped into another world of the Lower East Side in the early 1990s.

I walked up to the stairs to stand under the big sign with all of the train times, places like Albany, Montclair and Trenton shuffling around and trading places on the board. As soon as the destinations flipped to “boarding” there was a mad rush of people running to the gate. Everyone in the same station seemed to know where they were going or who they were going to meet. They were all moving so fast, just a blur of black and grey shapes whizzing by me. I knew they would push their right way through me if they could, I felt like a ghost. My mother told me not to make eye contact with anyone or smile if they looked my way, but she also said that I should be alert and pay attention to my surroundings. I found myself looking just past people’s ears, over their heads, and at their noses. I saw a grizzled man walking towards me with a black beret that sat on top of wiry gray curls. His beard was matted and his mustache covered his lips. He was pitching and rolling over his feet like a sailor trying to get his bearings on land after a long trip at sea. He had a carved wooden cane that he was using to smack people on the ankles as he pushed through the crowd. I saw a few people react to his shoves and open their mouths with a complaint beginning to form on their lips, but they must have decided it was more important to get to where they were going without a broken kneecap and they just kept it moving. I just knew this man was going to ask me for change or worse directions. I didn’t even know where the hell I was going and he was going to look to me to help him when I couldn’t even help myself. I tried to back away from him because I did not want to get whacked by his cane. The more I backed away, the closer he stumbled towards me. I tried to get absorbed into the crowd and hoped I would get carried off like flotsam and jetsam into the tunnels and on to the tracks below.

“Sorry I was a little late. Benny couldn’t find a parking spot,” he said. He reached out and tried to grab my hand, but I was able to pull away before he could touch me. He was so unsteady on his feet, he grabbed onto his cane with both hands so he wouldn’t fall and smiled at me. He had a broken smile with several missing teeth. What was left of a dental bridge, flapped as he spoke, the worn nubs of tobacco stained porcelain dangled from the metal wire. “You’re looking more and more like your mother,” the man said. As he spoke, glimpses of my father started to reveal themselves. His voice, gravelly and rough from years of smoking Camel’s unfiltered cigarettes and his eyes, always downturned and moody even when smiling. His hair was a little thinner and grey, but his unruly curls were familiar. Everything else was all wrong.

“Dad?” I whispered. He looked at me confused, like who else could it be? Who else would be waiting for me under the big board. “What happened to you?” I blurted. My father used to walk with me for hours throughout the city, moving quickly from one block to the next, in what seemed like one or two strides, his legs sharp and straight like scissors, cutting avenues in half with each step. He was a gazelle in denim, with his hair bouncing and fingers snapping to music on the street. In his teeth you would always find a toothpick, he would suck and crunch at the sliver of wood until it became a pulp mixed with tobacco that he spat out of the side of his mouth. Now there were barely any teeth left, just gums. And his legs, what had happened to his legs?

“You mean this?” he said. He waved his hands over the lower part of his body like a magician. “I went to bed late one night and when I woke up I couldn’t walk. Crazy, right? I think my electric blanket had a short or something and zapped me.”

“A blanket did this to you?” I asked. Some of my earliest memories of my father were seeing him get into fist fights with men, one wrong look or one wrong word, and you would find him rolling around underneath dining room tables or scrapping in between parked cars. The only injuries I could remember were a bruised lip, or a small cut under his eye. The welterweight champion of street fights had been defeated by a blanket?

“It was the blanket or this woman named Ursula cast a spell on me. It’s a long story,” he said.

“And your teeth?” I said. “Did the uncles come back?” I said.

“Those clowns? Sorry, I know they are your family. No, they didn’t do this. The teeth are definitely that witch’s Ursula’s fault, the legs, I’m not so sure about. I know one thing, I met her and my teeth started falling out one by one. She cursed me. C’mon Benny is waiting for us. He’s double parked.”

“Who is Benny? And who is Ursula?” I asked.

“Ursula is Ursula. And you know Benny,” he said. “We’re working on that magazine together, Sensitive Skin.”

“I haven’t seen or spoken to you in six years,” I said.

“Then you probably don’t know Benny and trust me, you don’t want to know Ursula,” he said and he shrugged. “Are you coming?” he asked.

I thought about the money I had buried deep in my bag and the money in the bottom of my shoe. If I hurried I could probably get a train ticket to D.C. that will get there a few hours after my grandmother. And if she says anything to me about taking a bite out of the Big Apple again, I will let her know that my father hasn’t had much luck in this place and now the only apples he can eat are apple sauce. If she had waited with me and seen my Dad in this state she would have grabbed me without a word and we would be out of here. She would track down my mother in Hawaii once we got back to her place and I could just hear her say, He’s a mess. How is he supposed to take care of CeCe? And I’d be listening on the other line with CoCo and Freddy crowded around me trying to eavesdrop and CoCo mouthing Tell her Grandma. I felt like I was in one of those choose your own adventure books and I could see the page in front of me, if you buy a train ticket to DC go to page 35, but if you decide to go with your Dad, turn the page. And I turned the page.

We walked slowly through the station, my father was shuffling through the crowds but he used that cane like Moses’ staff and we were able to make our way through. There were dozens of people lying on sheets of cardboard in the station, settled in for the night, their belongings strewn around them. My dad was careful not to hit them with his cane, but everyone else who got in his way was fair game. We finally got out of the station and walked towards the curb to find Benny. There were yellow cabs screeching and honking and the wind whipped through my black Salvation Army trench coat. I might as well have been wearing a plastic bag, my coat was no match for this cold. All I could think was my mother was in Hawaii with Frank and I was standing in a wind tunnel with my Dad.

“Where’s your winter coat? Your mother has you looking like The Little Match Girl,” he said. I wanted to say maybe if you paid child support I would have a better coat, but I wasn’t trying to get smacked by that cane. He had never hit me before, but he also never had a cane before. Also, my mom told me to bring a warmer coat and I refused because I feel like the big puffer coats make me look like a marshmallow. But if I had known about this wind, you could have slapped some chocolate and a graham cracker on me and I wouldn’t have cared.

“The Little Match Girl didn’t have a coat and that’s why she froze to death. This is a coat so I’ll live,” I said. “It’s the style,” I muttered under my breath. “Where is your friend?” I said.

“He must be circling the block. Fashion over function, I get it. You like wearing all black?” my father asked.

“Something like that,” I said.

“Cool. Cool. There’s Benny,” my Dad said.

A white car pulled up and a guy with a newsboy cap pulled low over his eyes jumped out and grabbed my father by the elbow and helped him into the back of the car. My father groaned as he flopped back on to the seat with his legs dangling out of the door. Benny tried to lift up my Dad’s legs and get him inside and I could hear my father yelp, “Watch it Benny!” Once he got him settled, he ran over and put my things in his trunk. The trunk didn’t have a proper lock, just a makeshift bungee cord that kept the trunk closed. The window in the passenger seat didn’t even have glass, just a sheet of plastic covering the hole where a window should be. I got in the back of the car next to my Dad and I could see a woman with long black hair was sitting in the front. The dashboard had loose wires coming out and the glove box was dangling open. Benny turned around and said to me, “This car was new six months ago, but the junkies keep breaking in and stealing stuff. They stole my radio three times. I used to replace it, but now I don’t even bother,” he said.

“Because you’re a junkie and you spend all your money on junk instead of a radio and now we can’t listen to any music,” my father said.

“But, I don’t steal,” Benny said.

“Not yet, just wait until those trust fund checks dry up. Must be nice,” my Dad said.

“You always bring up the checks, but you don’t seem to mind when I’m buying you drinks or driving you around,” Benny said.

“What else would you be doing if you weren’t hanging out with me?” my Dad said. “ You wouldn’t have the magazine. You would be nodding off in the corner that’s what you’d be doing. It’s a privilege to be in my presence and don’t you ever forget it,” he said.

“Let her settle in before you all start arguing. You don’t want to scare her,” the woman in the front said. I wanted to say Too late, I’m already terrified, but she still hadn’t turned out yet or introduced herself. She had a thick accent, it sounded French. I wondered if she was from Paris, if my grandmother was here, she would be asking her all about what’s it like over there. Who am I kidding? If my grandmother were here, we wouldn’t even be in this car. I looked out the window and it seemed to get darker and darker the further we went downtown. Storefronts were dark and boarded up. Streetlights on the corners were out. There were vacant lots with cars that were more raggedy than the one were driving in, their hoods open like gaping mouths.