Father's Day
My Dad is Bill Murray
by Bridgette Shade
Not Lost in Translation Bill Murray but Meatballs Bill Murray—my dad is always thirty-something. He is Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka. Gene Wilder in Haunted Honeymoon and Hopper, the sheriff on Stranger Things, whose name in real life doesn’t matter to me because it’s Hopper I love. My dad is a short white guy who smells like a can of Stroh’s and a soft pack of Winston’s.
I watch Stranger Things to see what life was like for other families in the 1980s. I watch to walk through their houses, to sit at their dinner tables. When I see their carpeting and their countertops, I can almost imagine they are memories. People on television rarely live in mobile homes—even Winona’s roof has a peak—except for Hopper in the first season. I watch him chain smoke in his truck and chug beer for breakfast, and I want to burrow inside his skin. In real life, Hopper is in his forties. In real life, he and I are the same age.
When I was eleven, my dad said he would help me build a motor for the science fair. He had moved out a year earlier, and we rarely saw him on weekends let alone week days, but he said he would be there, and I believed him because before he left, he sang and danced, cooked and joked. He combed my wet hair and blew it dry, light and heat radiating from his fingertips.
The day before the project was due, I ran home from the bus stop and waited outside. I stood then sat on the concrete pavers separating our driveway from our shed. Cars that did not belong to him must have driven past. Probably neighbors opened and closed their screen doors, but I only remember the empty sound a seashell pressed tight to your ear makes.
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My dad lives with a dialysis machine and a fourth or fifth wife. My dad died in 1993—the day I graduated from high school—right after he called from a bar at midnight to wish me a good life. My dad wrote me one letter from prison. I asked him once not to leave. Only once but he went anyway. I drove twenty hours to see him when my daughter was two. I left her behind, and when I found him, it was like all those dreams where I’m walking around my house, but it’s not really my house. When I turned forty, I mailed him a letter. It took me a week to open his reply. He said he loved me. He said he was sorry. He did not say I’m on my way.
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There was a Little House marathon on TV over Father’s Day weekend. Matthew Labyorteaux, the man, who, as a boy, played Albert, Charles Ingalls’ adopted son, paid tribute to Michael Landon in between commercial breaks. When describing his time on the set, Grown Up Albert said “We all wanted to make him proud,” and seeing his wavy hair again, so much like his television dad’s, made me wonder why I hadn’t recognized him as a sibling years ago (though Michael Landon’s character was too sober and selfless to be my dad). Even now, Albert and I are still in love with someone who plays our father on TV.
On the subject of being in love with someone who reminds us of our parents, the science is divided. Oedipus, Electra, various theories of attachment. Some studies seem eager to prove we want to marry our mothers, our fathers. Others are equally eager to dismiss any result that comes close to validating Freud or even Jung. Maybe we are drawn to people who look like our parents, or maybe we are just drawn to people who look like ourselves. Maybe we are looking for lost people. People we decided were dead. People who went to prison. People who hitched rides to Midwestern states known for having a legislative lazy eye when it comes to collecting child support. And we can’t reconcile the loss so we manufacture replacements. When the new veterinarian walks into the room, we don’t see him. We see the thirty-something short guy we’ve been searching for. He isn’t lost, after all. He’s talking to our dog. He’s crouching, bending easily with those thirty-something knees, telling us everything is going to be okay.
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My daughter is in love with vampires. “You have to be beautiful to be a vampire,” she says. Her father is beautiful, and so is she, though I am not sure she thinks so. Never having seen the film, I agreed to watch Twilight with her a few months into the pandemic. “It’s excellent,” she promised. The first time Edward, the high school vampire, encounters Bella, the new girl in town, he makes a show of covering his mouth and nose with his hand, as if her odor offends, as if he might vomit, before fleeing their classroom. We later learn that Bella does not reek of garlic or anything so cliché. Edward flees because his instinct to eat Bella overpowers him, and he covers his face, presumably, to hide his drool? His fangs? There is no explanation for this part of his actions. If I were Bella, I would want to know, but I am not in love with vampires. They are too thin. Too put together. And I don’t appreciate the message Edward’s impulse sends to my daughter or to anyone’s child. How can you tell when someone really loves you? They will want to kill you. They will have to fight the instinct to drain you of your blood, and if they fail, at least you will have died knowing you had been loved.
My grandfather is actually dead. At his funeral, the minister took a deep breath and said, “Gene was a difficult man.” His briefcase boasted a bumper sticker that read “Life is meant to be lived, not watched,” but he would fall asleep in our green recliner only to wake the second I switched the channel from sports to sitcom. We walked arm in arm around fairgrounds and ball parks, catching crumbs on our rounded bellies as we ate our way through the afternoon. He blamed me for the speeding tickets he earned. He refused to slow down, even when the passenger door of his Duster flung open on its own. Even when we were in the passing lane. Even when I was four: Jesus Christ, Gidget, shut the goddamn door. His hair was thick and wavy. He smelled of after shave, clean and loud. We stood over the kitchen sink in our underwear, picking ham from the bone. He was my father’s father, and one summer’s day, years after he’d died, when I was teaching the same old stories to yet another new group of students, when my dog was sick, my human relationships failing, when I was in charge but dangerously lost, I walked across the threshold into an empty classroom, and there he was. I couldn’t see him, but I didn’t need to. The smell was unmistakable.
I am not in love with ghosts. People on TV are alive forever, and desire is a funny thing. When I’m standing in line behind a man who jingles the change in his pocket, who slides his wallet onto the countertop and whistles while he counts his dollar bills, I have to stop myself from hooking his hairy arm through mine, from cuffing him to me. It is nearly impossible to distinguish between this kind of longing and the desire I feel for Hopper, to categorize in some tidy way what draws me to the kind of men I grew up watching, the men who left or stayed. In fairness to Edward, I understand the impulse to consume someone. The desire to possess and to be possessed. To not so much see as to feel a light so warm, so familiar, a light I have been leaning toward like a half-starved leaf all my life, and to want to swallow it.
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Six months into the pandemic, I watched Meatballs again. It’s supposed to be a comedy about an unkempt-in-a-sexy-way summer camp counselor. A guy who drinks too much and behaves badly most of the time. He cracks a joke that includes a rape. He pins a co-star to a couch. He walks into a diner, searching for a runaway. He orders some fries, pretends not to see the boy dunking a straw, staring at a bus schedule. The boy makes eye contact; the counselor reaches for a Swiss Army knife and the easy laugh. Sensitive music plays, and my dad says, “Look, if you have trouble, come to me. Tell me, and I’ll help you.”
I believe him, so I keep looking. But, secretly, even now, I’m still hoping to be found.