Chapter Four: You Wouldn’t Hit A Guy With Glasses, Would You?

Shame never fixes what we inherit.

If you haven’t read the previous chapters of this serially released memoir, you’ll be scratching your head. Click below to begin at the right place.

But sharing that, I feel defensive for my grandfather. Don’t think too badly of him: he’d been pummeled by his own family stones. Bob was born in the retired oil town of Burkburnett, Texas to his mother “Putt,” and his father, “Jingles” Hayes. He was their only child and the offspring of a volatile marriage. Each poisoned the other with their vices–his, other women; hers, scotch.

Bob had terrible eyesight, but as my granny explained later, his father thought glasses would emasculate him so he didn’t let his son wear them. So from kindergarten to high school, Bob’s mother read to him every night out of his textbooks to help him keep up his grades. It was Bob, Putt, and Geometry or American History or Chemistry II, his forehead set in deep concentration, her voice rumbling on with the occasional pause and clink of ice against the whiskey glass she sipped. Was this mother-son solidarity, or was it shame and codependency and coddling all braided together?

Whatever it was, somehow it worked, and determined to be more than a meter reader for the Texas Company like his father, he set his heart on dentistry as a profession. This was quite the ambition since the Hayes’s were members of the working class poor. Affording that type of education was an impossibility.

But strangely, despite his myopia and astigmatism, Bob was an incredible athlete, good enough to earn a full scholarship to Texas Tech if he’d play basketball and football for the Raiders. Hell yes, he would. Anything to get out of that abandoned boomtown which felt and seemed like a graveyard, a dusty slab of land pocked with pyramidal oil derricks, tombs and sites of worship to an evasive underworld deity.

I can imagine him as he embarked on this college odyssey. On the appointed day, he packs his bag, kisses his folks goodbye, and lets his legs stretch out as he walks along the US 277. For the cars that pass by, he sticks out his thumb, confident he’ll catch a ride to Lubbock after hitchhiking a bit longer. As he walks along the asphalt he’s dreaming about catching the football to a crowded stadium and imagining the short skirts the cheer team is wearing on the sidelines. 

But his mind keeps serving him a memory of his mother several years ago. In it they’ve had a fight. She’s in her cups again, and she won’t keep quiet. It’s always the same story with her, the same accusation against his father and that woman. She’s a dog with a bone, and Jingles never sticks up for himself. Bob has had it, so he’s walking away from the house to cool off, and he looks behind him and sees her there, her hair still in sponge curlers, following him through the streets.

Mama, go home! he yells at her.

She keeps silent and keeps walking.

Get! he says, as if to a stray dog. She remains undeterred.

Then he turns on his heel and says, Mama, if you don’t dry out, I’m leaving this place for good.

And she stops and says in the same tender voice that read him his homework each night, Honey, I wish that would work.

***

He sure could cut a rug, my 92-year old granny says as we talk about this man she married not once but twice. 

It makes me flashback to when I’m nine or ten, out of school because of a low-grade fever. Mom’s dropped me off at my grandparents’ house while she runs errands, and I’m comfy and aimless, snooping around the house.

I come around the corner of the kitchen and see him, my grandpa, rooting around in the refrigerator. He’s wearing a canary yellow and black plaid shirt, his pants hiked high, his face ruddy from years of golfing without sunscreen. In the den, an “Unforgettable ‘50s” music commercial plays on the too-loud TV, and all of a sudden the fridge is his imaginary dance partner. He sticks out his long tongue to concentrate on his quick steps and I giggle as he moves. He winks and stops his footwork because that’s all he wanted–just a joyful reaction from me. 

When I ask why he was so fleet-footed, she shrugs, They had street dances every Saturday night when he was growing up. Not much else to do in that dried up town. 

In my mind I see it. Twenty or so neighbors are gathered outside the house where the best radio’s been rolled to the front door. It’s playing Big Band hits at max volume, and the tungsten filaments in the street lamps crackle and blink every other song. Bob jitterbugs with his mother along the earth’s dusty carcass, his father sitting on the curb, watching his son become a man. Was she leading or was he? Did their eyes meet? Did they smile? 

We all, in one form or another, dance for our parents. We dance with them, and we dance around them while they limp the same waltz with an Achilles’ heel. He’d been schooled in this art form, the one he passed down to my mother, and she’d try to pass to me. Maybe it’s only when we look back that we have the corrective lenses to see it and change it.