And Nobody Gets Hurt

My father was convinced that Clyde Barrow had a son.

It didn’t matter what computers told him. He couldn’t believe that a man who’d made his way into history books could fail to procreate. Whether or not the son would have been the product of the passion between Clyde and Bonnie Parker was not something my father gave a lot of thought to. This might be the result of him knowing that you would have an easier time proving that a woman never had a child, whereas with a man, it was always at least somewhat possible.

Late at night, parked behind a gas station or next to one of the trails we would walk in the northern parts of California, my father would recline my seat so I could sleep and tell me stories of curses and how to cure them. He had gotten into his head shortly after college that all his bad luck had to be the consequence of victimhood somewhere in his lineage. My father had gotten his degree from CalTech, but shortly thereafter, a plague descended on his well-being that looked sort of like a big dog and sort of like a room full of throw pillows. He couldn’t concentrate, which meant he couldn’t keep a job. He moved back in with my grandparents, who never materialized into human beings once the sixties offered them the chance to become caricatures of hippies. They sent their son to an astrologist to cure his schizophrenia and when the fifty-three year-old woman took a look at my suffering, twenty-three year-old father, she understood two things right away--

In another life, someone he cared about deeply was murdered during a bank robbery.

Also, she would need to become his lover in order to learn more.

The two of them spent the summer getting high in the woman’s bed while her ex-husband yelled outside her window that he still loved her.

“Libras,” she would say to my father, tickling his chest hair, “They all think they’re one of a kind.”

At the end of the summer, the astrologer told her paramour that he was once a woman named Elizabeth and that Elizabeth’s husband was a bank manager who was killed by Clyde Barrow. My father knew who Clyde Barrow was, because when he was younger, he would wait for his parents to trip on LSD in their bedroom, and then he would turn on the television and watch Tales from the Old West. He had always found the notion of Bonnie and Clyde rather sexy, and had once even fantasized about riding along in the backseat with them as they went from town to town terrorizing the locals. He pictured the three of them stopping alongside rivers to wash themselves; Bonnie helping my father take off his shirt, and Clyde remarking on what nice, solid calves he had.

It made perfect sense to him that he had a connection to half of the infamous duo, but it hurt him to know that the one-time object of his reverie was responsible for his mental anguish. He asked the astrologer how he could break the curse, and she told him that he’d need to find the reincarnation of Clyde and murder him. While most women like her were pacifists, my father’s lover believed that violence was often necessary to strike a more crucial balance.

They planned on working together that autumn to locate Clyde’s most recent self, but then the woman found herself pregnant. She swore she couldn’t use the more elusive parts of her mind or she might risk hurting the baby. At her age, it was a miracle to have conceived at all, especially since she had told my father she was forty-six. I arrived a month ahead of schedule, and once my mother started bleeding, she never stopped. My grandparents told my father that while they were thrilled to have a grandchild, their home needed to be tranquil and calm at all times, and an infant would not help to create that kind of environment. They gave him twenty-six dollars and wished him luck. There was some talk of visiting for the holidays, but my grandparents didn’t celebrate any holidays, because they believed most of them were capitalist schemes or war glorification.

My father’s primary concern should have been being a single dad with no home, but he saw his predicament as the direct outcome of the curse my dead mother had warned him about. He ruminated about how he could achieve revenge if he couldn’t find the modern carnation of Clyde. I’d be asleep in the back of my father’s Cavalier in a car seat he’d shoplifted from The Broadway, and he’d be resting his head against the steering wheel burping up Jack in the Box fixated on revenge. When he’d finally fall asleep, he’d dream of Clyde tying him to the railroad tracks. He’d cut each button off my father’s shirt and then slide the knife down towards his fly. My father would hear the train coming, and he’d open his eyes to hear the Caltrain carrying people who could work off to their offices. I would begin crying around six or seven, and my father would try to get me to eat a leftover french fry or some melted ice cream at the bottom of a Dairy Queen cup he found under the passenger seat.

His plan formed around the time I started speaking at age two. We were still living in the car, but my father would work off and on as a contractor or dishwasher. Once his affliction acted up, he’d get himself fired, and we’d drive an hour in any direction so we could entertain the illusion of a “fresh start.” All the while, he was thinking about Clyde. One afternoon while begging outside the Stonestown Galleria, he realized that he didn’t need to find Clyde in another form. An eye for an eye didn’t always mean the eye of the person who harmed you. There were moments where it meant the eye of somebody they loved. Elizabeth wasn’t the one who had been murdered by Clyde all those years ago; her husband was. That meant my father merely had to kill somebody Clyde would have loved.

A son.

The math supported his theory that Clyde could have a son who would still be alive, and shockingly rather young. By the late 80’s, Bonnie and Clyde were the stuff of legend, but they were gunned down in 1934. My father began to posit:

If Clyde had impregnated some woman the year he died, that child would be in his early fifties. He would be living a rather nice life. He probably lived somewhere close to us since those who were tied together by fate never all that far away from each other.

Now, why did my father single out the year Clyde died as the year he sired a child? Why did he assume he had a son and not a daughter? Why would he have stepped out on Bonnie?

There was no asking that. I was too young to be given any information about his musings. I merely had to tag along for the ride, because my father felt that having a young child with him would grant him access to places otherwise blocked off. His chronology wasn’t based in reality, but if reality had been a friend, none of this would have transpired anyway. We began to set out on the hunt for Clyde’s son. It was a journey not unlike one of Quixote’s, and I was the miniature Sancho Panza being taught that, yes, that is a giant. No, it’s not a windmill. Some parents manage to transfer their disorder through genetics or even nurturing, but for some reason, my mind was closed off to my father’s flights.

While he continued to dream of being tortured by Clyde each night, I dreamt of school field trips and bagged lunches. I saw these things briefly on televisions when we’d make our weekly shoplifting trips to KMart. My father would station me as a lookout in the electronics section, and I’d watch episodes of The Wonder Years and The Facts of Life while he skulked around the hunting department trying not to look conspicuous. Stealing food to feed your family would be forgivable, but he was more focused on stealing a knife he could use to stab the mysterious Son of Clyde. He wanted the death to be biblical in nature. While shooting would have been more apropos, my father couldn’t help but romanticize the knife. Once while passed out in the men’s restroom of a McDonald’s during a storm so bad we were too afraid to stay in our car, my father kept having a vision of Clyde with an Old Hickory clenched between his teeth like a magician. My father leaned forward to try and bite the knife out of Clyde’s mouth and into his own. Their lips touched. My father felt steel on his teeth, and then he woke up. I’d fallen asleep in the stall next to his, but some man had come in and he began yelling at me when he realized I was squatting. By then, I was almost nine. My father rushed out of his stall and punched the man right in his temple.

He fell to the ground and began to shake.

Endings are sometimes reached, sometimes decided upon.

Standing over the man lying on the ground dribbling drool out of his mouth, my father looked at me still trapped there in that stall. Urine was beginning to seep through the only pair of jeans I owned. How ridiculous to wet oneself while sitting on a toilet. It was then he decided that he’d accomplished his life’s mission. That man he had punched was Clyde Barrow’s son. It didn’t matter that the man was in his forties, not his fifties. Somewhere the math had failed my father, but what hadn’t failed my father? His mind, his parents, and even me. Why was I not ready when faced with the reason we were stuck in that restroom to begin with? Why didn’t I pull out the pocket knife my father had given me for my birthday the year before? Why hadn’t I stuck the man in his neck the way my father had taught me? Now there was no blood. There was no theater to any of it. A man was dead, but was it enough? Could the son of a great man be extinguished in such a way and offer up the ending to a curse?

I looked at the corpse lying on the terrazzo, and then up at my father, who had turned to stare in one of the bathroom mirrors. He had shoplifted a tie from a Nordstrom’s a month prior, and he was wrapping it around his neck. Never having seen him put on a tie, I thought maybe he was going to choke himself. Then came the loop, and the pull-through, and the adjustment. He had on a pair of gym shorts, sandals, a Def Leppard t-shirt that had chili stains on it.

And now a tie.

My father turned to me and said, “All right, let’s go.”

We had to leave.

We had to go back to the car.

We had to go out in the storm.

We didn’t have any other choice.