American Horror Story

My daughter and I are binge-watching episodes of American Horror Story, the season of witches that have descended from Salem; pirokinesis, Council of Witchcraft, resurrecting the dead. The actor is wickedly worthy. I can’t think of her name. “Jessica Lange,” my daughter says so casual and matter-of-factly.

Jessica Lange is the supreme witch in this season. She was once in the palm of King Kong’s hand, in one of the remakes, I want to say. I’m learning to listen, which may take a lifetime. I’m digging this show, but it’s late and there’s school tomorrow. 

Kathy Bates’s character Delphine LaLaurie was a true-life New Orleans socialite and serial killer who made her mark brutalizing and killing slaves in her torture attic—a fitting part for the actor who is known best for some of her wicked and evil roles.

Madame Laveau, played by Angela Bassett is our Louisiana Creole voodoo queen. Laveau’s powers reportedly included healing the sick, extending altruistic gifts to the poor; she was an herbalist, midwife, and oversaw spiritual rites. Bassett mixes up some hellish potion of eternal life, persuades Kathy Bate’s character to drink it and then she buries her alive. This, at 12:30 a.m., is family television at its finest.

Some nights, after scary movies, I read downstairs outside my teenage daughter’s room. “Night. Love you,” she says when she does not hate me.

“Love you, too. Get some sleep.”

After a few minutes, I can hear her sniffle. I wait another ten and then ask her if she’s OK. She is a competitive dancer and her leg is hurting her bad, so I get some ice and hope the pain subsides. I’m all tough talk, “Get some rest. You’re a dancer. You’re going to be sore just like any athlete.” I know better than to sit and ask if there’s anything else wrong—social media, boyfriend drama. We are all trying to stay afloat. I have learned that if there is a problem, she will tell me. We all need to know someone is listening. She knows that we are here for her—her mother, her sister, me. I remind her I’m reading on the couch right outside her door. As hard as I try to lose myself in a book, I worry about her future. I flashback to the past. It’s in the job description.

•

It’s intermission at a competitive dance and cheer competition. We fathers sit in a high school commons area eating popcorn and some yellow goop we pumped onto our round, salty, wide-mouthed tortilla chips. It’s hard to quit eating this shit. When one father comes up for air, he says, “On discovering his father’s wallet was empty and his dad wasn’t going to run to an ATM, the teenage son said, ‘Get me some money! Now! My friends are waiting! What are we, broke?’” He finishes his anecdote and wipes some yellow cheese off the corner of his mouth with his thumb.

We are on guard. What can a father do? I can’t follow these girls everywhere. 

Thank god that wasn’t my kid, I think and then realize, we’ve all said terrible things to our parents, haven’t we? 

The dad keeps narrating, “And my youngest daughter, she’s on the verge of ‘Shut the fuck up, Bruh.’ Hilarious. Right?” 

“That’s not funny,” another dad says. 

“Listen to me,” Leon says. His kids even call him Leon. “My daughter has twenty-three hoodies. I counted. Twenty-three. And that’s the stuff that is in her closet folded or hanging up. Who knows what she gave away or what’s in her car. Did I miss the memo? You got a favorite team? Come on over. Leon has your hoodie. They’re all extra-large. I have twenty-three hoodies that we can all wear.”

“They wear the hoodies just as much during the summer as they do in the winter,” says the professor who read an article and thinks he’s an expert now. “Another interesting phenom of the youth of today.”

“Well, I used to wear. OK. I still wear two pairs of socks,” I say.

“What?” Leon questions.

“Because I wanna be prepared when I go to battle with the Cobra Kai.”

“Do you know if your daughter and wife weren’t here I’d kick your ass off this stool that is, what? Cemented to this table? Do they think someone’s going to steal the cafeteria? What horror show have these administrators been watching?” Leon almost screams with bits of chips falling out of his mouth. He leans in as far as his belly will allow him too and says, “Stop wearing two pairs of socks. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

•

The last couple of months my daughter has taken all of her angst, bottled it and thrown it out. It’s like she suddenly grew up and is studying for the ACT and talking about college. What the hell has happened to time? I’m forty-eight. And yes, I’m still using my fingers to count. I’m not above it. What is middle-age?

Anita Chaudhuri writes in The Guardian, “The Encyclopedia Britannica says it is between 40 and 60. Meanwhile, a 2018 YouGov survey reported that most Britons aged between 40 and 64 considered themselves middle-aged–but so did 44% of people aged between 65 and 69.” 

Oxford English Dictionary says forty-five to sixty-five. I don’t feel immortal but I’m in better shape than I was when I was twenty-eight. 

Watching my daughters get older is mind-boggling. I like to think I had something to do with this new person who is kind, somewhat respectful, who says thank you and I love you, who asked me to read outside her basement bedroom door because she’s afraid. Who isn’t? Does it ever end? 

We are all a bit frightened because a woman from this city was abducted and murdered by two complete strangers who were high on meth looking for a date at a local strip club. When it was closed they left and traveled to a nearby town that happened to have a strip club open and looked for a victim. The victim, a single, very kind woman, who helped her community, was in town for her weekly Sunday visit at her mothers. After leaving her mother’s home, she would religiously phone her mom when she arrived back in Yankton.

We are on guard. What can a father do? I can’t follow these girls everywhere. Both my daughters know the TV shows are all make-believe. They know the murder in this small city is real.

•

When she had just started high school, I was so beside myself, that I worried myself out of fourteen pounds and into a smaller belt. My anxiety apparently was doing God’s work. I bought the books, Parenting Teens with Love and Logic; Untangled; Have a New Teenager by Friday: From Mouthy and Moody to Respectful and Responsible in 5 Days. It’s hard watching your little girl transform into a fighter against every good thing she has, despising her family (her dad). She had some reasons, too. Who is perfect? I quit my bad habit of drinking. I am present now. I am trying to lead by example.

Daughter, I see you growing. I remember all the ink-stained pages of my spiral rock and roll notebooks at your age. They were full of helpless romantic song lyrics, and manifestos. I ached to get away from it all—to anywhere, except the solid house I lived in, with a concrete foundation.

How I burned to be free if only I’d had some money in my wallet and gas in my beater—a 1984 Ford Escort my Dad had bought and I refused to make payments on because the catalytic converter started on fire (likely because I pulled the emergency brake too many times at high speeds). How I burned, how I burned. Maybe I could run if only my guitar and Taekwondo lessons were paid in advance, and why couldn’t Denise Hillside stop making fun of my braces and show some interest in the man I was morphing into? Truth is, I was a spoiled only child. I slept well, although I was scared to death, of many things.

I remember it vividly, wanting to be my own one-man-band somewhere out there in the great wild—the spotlight all on me; sleeping with my bedroom window partially open in the winter. Roughing it. Preparing myself. Ready to be anywhere but home. If only I had all the necessary ingredients and maybe practiced my guitar instead of looking the part. If I had taken the trash out when asked, where would I be now?

•

I can hear the ice bag hit the floor. Her phone vibrates on her windowsill where she keeps it. This late, the neighborhood so quiet, you can hear the walls buzz. Do these little twerps ever stop snap-chatting? When I was her age, I had my own teen-line. I really have no room to talk.

Iowa. Nebraska. South Dakota. Is this really the Heartland? If so, please explain. My heart feels torn some days. 

I want to say, Kid, I will always be here for you. I do know this feeling—that seems, Jesus am I going to write it, as if it wasn’t really all that long ago. My high school memories flash before me on rerun every time she or her sister flips out, tells us a story or makes us proud. It’s so different now but I guess, so much the same. I’m in the corner of our basement, thinking of reading something funny. I’m hyper-vigilant—hard-wired. My eyes dart from a stack of books to where the drywall meets the ceiling. What am I looking for? I want to be a funny Dad. Can a dad be serious and funny? I am not her friend—nor at this age should I be. All the same, I would like to be someday. Snapshot. Snapshot. Flashback.

“Dad—I didn’t break my door down.”

“Thank you very much!” I say, standing furious and frag - men - ted in the hallway, my ten-year-old daughter’s broken bedroom doorframe on my left, and a six-year-old who likes her math homework on my right.

These perplexing subjects. There is the one, and the other, who will not complain if I borrow money from her piggy bank to tip the pizza guy. A half hour later my oldest daughter’s temper subsides. She says, “Sorry.” I say, too harshly, “Those words mean nothing to me.” I find a box of two-and-a-half-inch-long screws and drill the frame back together. Think, let her try breaking the door down now. Slam it shut over and over all you want.

The younger daughter is not always an angel. I try hard to block out the times she is not, celebrating instead other exaggerated moments I blissfully burn into my brain. Once I was driving and simultaneously rooting through the car’s console for more candy while she was fighting with her older sister for the last piece, and she threw a padlock at me with enough force to put a welt on my shoulder. No candy, of course. 

Putting away my DeWalt power drill, I try to sort through my convoluted feelings. You cannot compare these two beautiful creatures. So why would you? As an only child, I think I missed so much. I always wonder what it would be like to have a sibling. Now I see.

•

It’s 12:58 a.m. I can hear the fans running above me. The tick tick tick of our house settling. The South Dakota wind outside softly screaming—Mother Nature reminding us who is boss. The Jake brakes of the semis slowing through the city and then the accelerator gunning to get out. How did we wind up in South Dakota? A place we are all so ready to escape if it was not for a tenured job, another secure job, a good university community, a decent high school and great friends. This state is so red. The wind. It’s only worse in Wyoming and a lot of people commit suicide there. Will we ever feel like any physical place is home? My parents, so much family, spread all over this country.

How vulnerable do you think these girls feel? We have no idea. We didn’t grow up with social media—cameras and posts and tweets and eyes on us all the time—active shooter drills. We had tornado drills, we could still run and hide. How many of you have said out loud, I’m glad we didn’t have social media when I was growing up?

These kids are more engaged than I ever was. Use your voice girls—always use your voice and seek truth. How all of this must press in on them—children who are not adults, whose brains are not fully developed but who we (I’m just as guilty as you) expect so much more from than we could deliver at their age. In addition, after a time when high schools went online—anxiety and depression is at an all-time high. This is not a scary make-believe show they can switch off, tuck away and put to bed. This is not “Recreational Terror.” This is honest fear and concern.

Security. Place. Do we ever find it completely? Iowa. Nebraska. South Dakota. Is this really the Heartland? If so, please explain. My heart feels torn some days. It’s running on full throttle—beating too fast. There’s a special place in heaven for fathers with daughters.

Home. This imaginary suitcase of all of you, my family, my friends, which I schlep everywhere, no matter the load. Home, here in this heart, this head—here in these black words on white paper.

A Winter Storm Warning / 43 degrees.

Really? If you don’t like the weather wait an hour, it’ll change.

I walk up the stairs slowly, trying to step over any known creaks. I unplug the 3D anime Harry Styles lamp and skylight that shoots imaginary stars throughout our youngest daughter’s room. 

“Daaahhddd?” She calls out in the basement, like she does some nights when she can’t sleep. For the love, I think.

“I can’t sleep.”

I walk back down the stairs. 

“I’m right here. I’ll always be right here.”