51/50: The Magical Adventures of a Single Life (6 page)

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Authors: Kristen McGuiness

BOOK: 51/50: The Magical Adventures of a Single Life
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Which is why, nearly three years and one crazy relapse later, I sit excitedly in the passenger seat of Siren’s car, waiting at LAX to pick up the woman who meant so much to me. We are driving up to Oxnard to stay with Louise’s oldest friends. Since the eighties, she has run with the same crowd, which still includes her friend Ivan, a former dope dealer, John Knight, a violent alcoholic/speed freak, and Teresa Tall, the quintessential restaurant-owning drunk. Within the space of two years, and all pretty close to their fortieth birthdays, they got sober and have been since.
 
When I first moved back to L.A., I was pretty much on my own. Sure, I had my old friends, but my old friends still stayed up until 10:00 a.m. in the morning, searching for their own lost fathers in unlimited booze and hazy talk. After my brief relapse with them, it just didn’t mesh so well with sober life. So instead, I borrowed Louise’s posse.
 
I turn around to where Louise sits in the backseat. “Someone I like is going to be there,” I tell her.
 
“Who?” she asks with her slight Texan lilt.
 
“Maybe you know him. Jimmy Voltage?”
 
She thinks. Her nose slides up a bit because she does that when she thinks. “I think I’ve heard of him. He’s some aging hipster from Silver Lake, right?”
 
I laugh, “Yeah, I guess. Except, he’s not
that
old.”
 
Jimmy Voltage is thirty-nine and an electrician, hence the nickname. He has been sober for three years and has a twenty-year-old son. Louise isn’t wrong. He is a bit of a hipster, with his glitter motorcycle helmet and a studded belt that actually has the word “Voltage” beaded on the back. He is tall, with haunting shoulders, an easy laugh and an even easier smile.
 
I met him the previous summer at a moustache party. Moustache parties were all the rage in hipsterland that season, though it meant we all had to try to look our best with glued-on facial hair. I arrived at the loft Jimmy Voltage was renting at the time, looking a bit like Chris Cornell from when he was in Soundgarden. We had seen each other on and off at meetings since then, but never really had the chance to talk. Until now. Because as I stand in the warm glow of my friends at the Oxnard house, I know the moment Jimmy Voltage walks into the room, looks at me and smiles, that is about to change.
 
I don’t typically go for the popular guy. I prefer the quirky loners and the class clowns and the curly-haired intellectuals, but something about Jimmy makes me forget all that. Over the next day, Jimmy’s increasingly flirtatious attentions are making me feel like the high school girl who has spent the better part of the year writing bad poetry in the back of the library only to come out and be swept away by the prom king.
 
Later that night, we all sit around the beach bonfire. Jimmy keeps taking photos of me with my friends. “Oh, that’s a good one,” he says as he looks at the picture on his digital camera and then leans over toward me so I can look. My hair falls against the “Banana” tattoo written across his wrist, and I know we can both feel that primordial surge rush up our arms and down our spines. That thing that I search for all on all dates, in all men. That experience that means very little in terms of compatibility or likelihood of success but is the number one reason people fall in love. That thing called chemistry.
 
Nothing happens that night because we’re both playing it cool and sober and really quite polite. The next morning, I wake up and go outside to smoke a cigarette. My phone rings, and I see it is my dad. He is currently serving out a one-year sentence from a parole break in 2006, and we confirm my visit for the following weekend. I tell him that I am at the beach, and I can hear the sadness in his silence. For years, we have spoken while I have been in exciting and adventurous locales across the world, and he has sat in the same public phone room with the hum of other inmates making similar calls. I hang up and breathe deep and join Jimmy where he sits in a lounge chair, staring out at the ocean. His smile is so warm and welcoming; I can tell he has been thinking about me too. It’s a cloudy, cool day in Oxnard, and with all of our turtlenecks and wide-legged jeans, it feels like a day straight from the seventies, when my father was still riding fences and not hanging up the pay phone in prison.
 
Jimmy and I sit smoking, staring out at the ocean. I’m not sure if it’s the fact that I am about to see my dad for the first time in three years, or if it’s that I love telling people the wild, surprising story of my father, but I want so badly to open up to Jimmy about it. I want to tell him that my dad hasn’t seen the ocean in twenty years; I want to tell him that I will be traveling many cold and snowy miles next weekend to get to his maximum security prison in Pennsylvania; I want to tell him that I think my dad would like him. Because Jimmy rides a motorcycle, and flies a helicopter, and is a capable man’s man, and would be just the type of Desperado I figure my dad would want for me.
 
Jimmy tells me that his dad was an alcoholic. And I tell him that mine is too. He tells me about watching him die from cirrhosis, and speaking at his funeral, and getting the chance to be the type of dad to his son that his father never was to him. I get up to put out my cigarette and as I walk back, I pass his chair. And I don’t know why I do, but I put my hands on his shoulders. He slides his own hands up my wrists. He smells my perfume, his face close against my palm. It has been such a long time since someone has touched me so softly and intimately. I stand there staring out at the gray waves with Jimmy’s face pressed against my skin, and I don’t want to move. Ever.
 
That night we all go out to dinner, and I sit with Jimmy. Though nothing has happened yet, I know something will. I can feel it in the way people are looking at us, in the light brush of his knee against mine, how he laughs at everything I say and watches me when I get up to go talk to Louise at the other end of the table. I need to get home as I have to work the next day. I am putting my bag in Siren’s car when Jimmy comes outside. He pulls me in for a great deep hug, and I look up into his warm, tan face, and he smiles down at me, and I cannot believe that this friendly weekend trip has ignited more romance than I have seen in years.
 
“Have you ever been to the Observatory?” Jimmy asks me.
 
When I was twelve years old, living in Dallas, the hottest video running on MTV at the time was Paula Abdul’s “Rush, Rush,” a
Rebel Without a Cause
-inspired mini-movie starring Keanu Reeves. And I remember looking at them as they pretended to be Natalie Wood and James Dean and wanting to go to the Griffith Park Observatory. Unfortunately, during the three years when I lived here before, the landmark was under renovation the whole time. Ever since I moved back, it has been up there waiting for me, taunting me every night when I drive home, and at this one perfect crest, I see the entire, famous thing.
 
“Would you like to go to the Observatory?” he asks.
 
“I would love to,” I say.
 
I think he is just going to hug me, but then his lips are against mine. His tongue lightly along my mouth, nervous systems flushing and popping, and I am melting into his arms. This is a kiss. And I go home that night more dreamy and beautiful than I have been in some time.
 
7
 
Date Seven: Pie Crust Promises
 
“Are you sure you want to do this?” my mom asks. My mom and I sit in a Budget Rent A Car on the Upper East Side in Manhattan. I don’t know why mom even bothers to ask. I doubt I have much choice. I know my dad is waiting for me.
 
When I was a kid, my grandmother always accused the men in our lives of making what Mary Poppins calls, “pie crust promises.” Easily made, easily broken. My father is the king of pie crust promises, and though I might have tried to emulate him in the past, today, I do not make such promises.
 
“Your car’s here,” the cranky woman behind the desk interrupts any sort of choice my mom thinks I might have. I look outside and there sits a Town & Country minivan.
 
“That’s my car?” I ask the woman.
 
My mom and I crack up. She jokes, “Well, I guess if your dad wants to escape, you’ve got the van.”
 
“Shit, I can take some of his friends too.”
 
It almost makes it all worth it. My mom and I get inside the minivan, and I turn around to my imaginary kids in the back, “Billy. Sarah. Quit it!”
 
My mom laughs, and then she stops. She squeezes my hand as I try to figure out the heater. “I love you, K.” She watches me, and I try not to add any more gravity to the moment as I put the car in gear. I look at her and smile, “I love you too, Mom.”
 
The night before, I was in Los Angeles with plans to go out with Jimmy Voltage. We had already seen each other a couple of times because whatever happened in Oxnard followed us safely home to L.A. I love traveling with a new crush in mind. It somehow makes all journeys sweeter. I don’t even notice the security lines, the weight of my bag, the delay in takeoff as I daydream about what it might look like to do this trip to New York with Jimmy one day.
 
Unfortunately, I am doing this trip with a vicious cold, which made me cancel my date with Jimmy the night before. His band was having a show, and I was going to play groupie for the first time ever.
 
Before he went to the show, Jimmy came over anyway. His arms. His eyes. The small scar above his brow. His hands. If there were few reasons to fall for this man, his hands could be enough. Strong, thick, tan, even his knuckles. He spread them across my body. I could feel the meat of his palm against my ribs. We talked and laughed and kissed. The time clicked by, but Jimmy was busy tracing the round of my belly. He looked up at me and smiled, “I guess this is how people miss shows.”
 
And it is. It’s how they miss so much. I walked him outside, I kissed him goodbye, and he left for his show. And I went inside to ready myself to see the man that quite literally started it all. The next day, I fly to New York and rent my minivan. I drop my mom at her apartment in Manhattan, and I drive three and half hours alone to the federal penitentiary in Allenwood, Pennsylvania. It’s a recently renovated facility in the middle of an old farming town. It looks like a fancy high school in a suburban neighborhood, but when I get to my father’s building, the innocuous sign which reads “Maximum Security” reminds me of where I am. I am processed by the guard, sent through two metal detectors, and then led through many gates, holding rooms, and hallways. The trip gets more surreal with every step.
 
Being here reminds me that as much as I tried to pretend I was just like my father, there is nothing about my life that speaks to this. I do not understand this world with its high small windows and endless walls. I do not belong walking behind this guard with his 9 mm and long baton hanging from his belt. And though I might have spent my whole life wishing and praying that my daddy would come home, I realize that this might have been more his style than the safe, suburban existence my mother worked so hard to give me.
 
The last time I saw my father was in Tallahassee in 2005. Before that, I had not seen him since I was ten years old. In 2003, my father was released from a Nevada prison after serving twenty-one years of his sixty-six year sentence. He was supposed to go into a halfway house in Florida. He never showed up. A year and a half later, they arrested him on escape charges. I had flown into Tallahassee on a Friday for his sentencing.
 
“DC Docket No. 03-0031. United States of America versus Daniel McGuiness.”
 
My father turned around to look at me. He wore an orange jumpsuit. His wrists and ankles were shackled. A pair of sunglasses hung from his shirt collar because at fifty-nine years old, on the day he is being sentenced in front of his twenty-seven-year-old daughter, my dad still had to look cool.
 
I testified on his behalf because I was the only non-criminal character witness he had left. “I have not seen my father in seventeen years. I want him to be a part of my life. I want a chance to have a normal relationship. Through letters and phone calls, he has helped to make me who I am today, and if a man’s worth is to be judged by anything, I believe it should be by the quality of his offspring.”
 
I am not kidding. I said that. In front of the judge. It’s a matter of public record. I am such an ass. And not only because I used the phrase, “the quality of his offspring,” but because the quality of my father’s offspring was not too stellar at the time. I tried to get in to visit my father that afternoon, but the sentencing had run too late, and the prison was closing. I was supposed to leave that night, but I booked a room at a local Comfort Inn and headed to the bar.
 
I started with two shots of Jaeger, and by the time I made it to my third beer, and fourth shot, I wanted some weed. I saw four gang-banging black dudes playing pool, and I figured they had to have a connection. As they left, I followed them to their car because this was how the tables were turned in my world. I lurched up to them in a Jaegered stupor, and they all froze, as though they were afraid of me.

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