to. Not that my father looked incapable of holding his own: he was a little heavier than I remembered him ever being, but he moved easily and with great economy. He could have been an actor. The pair of them looked fit and healthy and lustrous. They looked like real, living people, a couple that had sex. Most of all they looked young. They looked so astonishingly young.
The scene lasted about another five minutes. Nothing in particular happened, except that I got to see my father playing pool, back when he’d have looked at me as I am now and seen an older man. And he could play. He could really play. When the bear man missed his shot and reeled back from the table, my father turned from the camera and bent over the green. He didn’t bother to go round to find the easiest shot: he just took the one in front of him and fired it off. It went down. He started moving then, prowling round the table, glancing with the intent nonchalance you see in people who expect to pot the balls, who’ve come to the table with that in mind. The next shot went home, too, rolled a foot down a cushion, and the one after that – as if the ball had been snapped back into the pocket on a piece of elastic. My mother cheered and slapped my father on the ass. He made an ambitious reversed double into the centre pocket and then sunk the black from halfway down the table, turning away before it was even down. Game over, man.
He winked at the bearlike guy, who rolled his eyes again. Just as the bear was used to the camera wielder being an asshole, he was clearly also accustomed to being trashed by my father at pool. This was business as usual. These were people who knew each other very well.
Nothing in particular happened, except that my mother began dancing with the blonde girl. Then she started doing a kind of side-to-side ragdoll thing, arms and legs turning in different directions, fingers clicking. I’d seen this done in films, on television, by professional dancers. But I’d never really seen it properly until I saw my mother doing it, rattling along to the music, mouth half-open and eyes half-shut.
You go girl, I found myself thinking. You really did go.
Nothing in particular happened, except while the bear was laboriously resetting the table I saw my father sit back on a stool and slug back a few swallows of beer. My mother – still dancing – winked at him, and he winked back, and I realized they weren’t quite as drunk as everyone else in the room. They were having a fine old time, but they had jobs and when Monday morning came they’d be able to do them. Come to think of it, my father must already have been a realtor, despite the weekend afghan and scraggy T-shirt. The extra few pounds actually kind of suited him. He had a breadth of shoulder that could accommodate the weight and look powerful rather than fat. Much more and he could have been heading for out-of-shape, but for the time being he merely looked like someone you’d be careful not to bang into if he was heading across the floor carrying a tray of beers. I could tell that the weight must have been a fairly recent acquisition, however, and that he wasn’t comfortable with it. Every now and then he rolled his shoulders back, ostensibly out of a desire to remove kinks from leaning down to rocket balls around the table. But also, I suspected, to make sure his shoulders were held square. Later he’d discovered jogging, and the gym, and never looked this way again. But on the tape of that evening I saw him do something: it was trivial, and innocuous, but as I sat in the hotel room in Dyersburg and watched it a small sound escaped from my mouth, like I’d been gently punched in the stomach.
As he lit a cigarette – and I’d never known that he’d once smoked – he absently lifted the patch of T-shirt lying over his midriff, and let it fall again – so it hung a little better over what was only a pretty small belly. I rewound, played it again. And then again, leaning forward, squinting against the grain in the background of the video. The movement was unmistakable. I’ve done it myself. In all the time I knew my father, I don’t think I ever saw him do something that naked, a thing so explicable and personal. It was the act of a man who was aware of his body, and a perceived flaw in it, even in the midst of a rocking evening. It was an adjustment he’d made before, but which was not yet habitual enough to be a tic. Even more than the T-shirt itself, the pitchers of beer and the vibrant good cheer, my mother’s dancing and the fact that my father could evidently once wield a pool cue with the best of them, that little movement made it inconceivable that they were now dead.
The table was finally set up for play again, and my father got up and prepared to break, squaring up like the cue ball was going to receive a whack it’d remember the rest of its spherical little life. The scene stopped abruptly right at that moment, as if a reel of film had run out.
Before I could hit pause again, it had cut directly to something else.
A different interior. A house. A living room. Dark, lit with candles. The picture quality was murky, the film stock not coping well with the low light. Music on quietly in the background, and this time I recognized it as coming from the soundtrack to Hair. A herd of wine bottles stood on the floor in varying states of emptiness, and there were several overflowing ashtrays.
My mother was half-reclining on a low couch, singing along, singing an early morning singing song. The bearguy’s head was more or less on her lap, and he was rolling a joint on his chest.
‘Put the sodomy one on again,’ he slurred. ‘Put it on.’
The camera panned smoothly to the side, showing another man lying facedown on the ground. The blonde girl was sitting behind him, tending a neat row of candles in saucers that had been laid on the guy’s back. He had evidently been comatose long enough to count as furniture, and my guess was he was the man who’d been operating the camera in the bar. The girl was inclining slowly and unpredictably from the waist, staying upright by pure force of will. Now there was less going on around her, it was obvious she was older than she had at first appeared. Not in her teens, but late twenties, maybe even thirty – and a little old to be part of this scene. I realized that if I was watching the very early ’70s, then my parents had to be around the same age.
Which meant that I’d already been born.
‘Put it on,’ the bear insisted, and the camera jerked back to him, swinging in close to his face. ‘Put it on.’
‘No,’ said a voice very close to the microphone, laughing, confirming that it was now my father who was running the camera. He was making a better job of it than passed-out man had done. ‘We’ve played that song like a million times.’
‘That’s cause it’s cool,’ the bear said, nodding vigorously. ‘It’s, like, what it says is … aw, shit.’ The camera pulled back to show that he’d dropped the joint. He looked bereft. ‘Shit. Now I got to start again. I been rolling that fucker all my life, man. I’ve been rolling it since before I was born. Fucking Thomas Jefferson started that fucker off, left it to me in his will. Said I could finish the joint or have Monticello. I said fuck the building, I want the spliff. All my life I’ve been rolling it, like a good and faithful servant. And now it’s gone.’
‘Gone,’ intoned the blonde girl. She started giggling.
Without missing a beat of ‘Good Morning Starshine’, my mother reached forward and took the gear from the bear’s fumbling paws. She held the paper expertly in one hand, levelled the tobacco with an index finger, reached for the dope.
‘Roll ’em, Beth,’ crowed the bear, much cheered by this turn of events. ‘Roll ’em, roll ’em, roll ’em.’ The camera zoomed in on the joint, then back out again. It was already nearly done.
By this stage my eyebrows were raised so high they were hovering over my head. My mother had just rolled a joint.
‘Put it on,’ the bear wheedled. ‘Put on the sodomy song. Come on Don, big Don man the Don, put it on Don, put it on.’ In the background my mother kept singing.
The
