“You’re going to see your father.” This statement was never presented opportunistically, as in, “you get to go see your father,” unless of course weighted by the presence of sarcasm or insincerity. It was usually up to me to determine how heavily weighted the sarcasm was. I never had an interpreter. It was usually up to me to determine in what mood the two of them spoke. How desperately was my father’s regret spilling into the room, through the coiled plastic of the landline? How unpleasantly did my mother receive the misguided advances? Now that I’m having a child, I won’t suspend him or her in misinformation.

I went to see my father in a lot of places. Some places were pleasant and came with new shoes. We visited these places during times of his gainful employment. Other places were crowded and made me nervous because my father had a propensity to fight with people. This instinct increased whenever he was worried about money. He comes from a place full of other men like him. Other men who also believe in the grand injustices of circumstance. Other men who would rather have been born into fortune. 

So, ah, are you in school?  Yes, Of course. Well, I’m not sure. Maybe your mother is putting you in some kind of anti-school program. What’s an anti-school program? I don’t know, man. I just thought to ask. I’m always the one to talk with you. Well, you could just ask me, “how is school going?” Right, right. Okay, so, how is it the school going? It’s going well. That’s it? Well, what other questions do you have? I don’t know, man. Just talk a little more. Say something worth hearing. You’re the same as your uncle. You look like him for this. His words are precious, like a gem stone. You wait and you wait for something to come out and you pray that it’s exciting. But if it weren’t for me, everyone would be bored. I’m always the entertainer. Cedric the Entertainer. You know I drove him one time? Oh yeah? Yeah. He’s a very nice guy. He gave me a one hundred dollar tip for LaGuardia. Bang!

During the periods of stability, we used to cruise the malls in my mother’s small town. He would comment on the lack of stimulation and make fun of the local dunces. He referred to all men in suburbia as “dorks,” and couldn’t ever believe in the capacity for this type of suffering. This is not the fortune into which he would prefer to have been born. Sometimes, when the weather didn’t support miniature golf, or the batting cages, we would just sit in any one of the myriad parking lots and watch. He would roast the men carrying grocery bags and the unkempt, tired nature of the women with hair styles a decade old. Immigrants who want for everything and are never satisfied, love to make fun of suburbanites. This is in contrast to immigrants who are happy to be wherever they are, so long as that place is not where they are from. There is of course the added confusion of his having gone to prison for so long and having spent so much time on a ship. I think water changes people.

Eventually, I would insist on going to a movie and he would criticize the idea with a comment on Hollywood’s insincerity. He wondered why there were no coffee shops in town and he made it clear that he hated Starbucks. I learned that anything perceived new age or that presents as contemporary and cool, would be offensive. He used to remind me that no matter how small or how suburban a town is in Europe, there’s always a coffee shop. In the town, his currency was his accent. Under these circumstances, we were usually left with only a few choices. He loved how much control it rendered and the uncertainty it stirred in others.

“Where are you from, Russia or something?” a woman behind a Dunkin' Donuts counter said.

“Montenegro.” My father replied, with a delectable delivery of equal parts pride and unease.

“You sound like a Russian bad man is all. You sure you ain’t from Russia?” she would reply.

“Yes, I’m sure.” my father would conclude.

I think in this final reply he would think for a moment about an alternate existence. One where he was born into prosperity and not communism. One where his son told him everything about school instead of being afraid to speak and of him having to pry the information out like a set of lost keys in the space next to the seat of his Mercedes. I think he wished that everything could be the exactly how it is and different at the same time.

“So do you want your latte to go?”

I felt so different in this town, that I wished I had an accent, too. I wished that how different I felt had a more obvious external signal to others. I always dwelled on how different I felt. He used to love making fun of suburban sentimentality and what were to him, the reverse gender roles of this alternate universe of existence. I never saw him cry until I was twenty and his sister died.

So, how is your mother? Is she still with this dick from Amsterdam? Yeah. They’ve been together for a long time now. Good, good. I’m really happy for her. You know, maybe you notice this to, but aren’t people from Netherlands — “Dutch People,”  — aren’t they weird? There’s something really bizarre about them. I never met a Dutch guy I really liked. They’re very sarcastic or something. I’m not saying your mother’s friend is like this. I'm just saying, from my experience they are bizarre. I don’t think John’s weird. He’s fine. He loves her I guess and they get a long. I never have to worry about them fighting. Because he’s kind of a weak guy, or what? Eh, I’m not sure. I think he’s fine. He was in the Marine Corps., but it’s just not his personality to fight, really. He’s one of those guys who would just leave the house. Ah ha. I knew it. I don’t know why, but after me, your mother loves these kinds of dorks.

I used to fear the visits when he didn’t have money. Or when he was between jobs. Or when the industry that he claimed to rule was crumbling because of something unexplainable and out of his control. The perk of his job was that he always had a nice car, but one that’s always violated by people who bother him. App users with their feet on the backs of the seats, drunk or stoned fools shouting into their cell phones, old men angrily huffing at the traffic causing them delays, young and tired mothers, old and sad widows, all passing through and spilling the contents of their lives onto the leather. He never drove the poor, however. I used to think the poor are good to one another, but my father would never drive the poor. He didn’t want his business to dissolve into a transportation service for the everyman. 

“You’re going to see your father. He’ll be here in about an hour. But I don’t want him picking you up at the house, so we’re going to meet over by the Price Chopper around seven-forty five.” my mother would say.

This type of delivery and this strategy for handoff would usually indicate that the conversation they had around this visit was particularly virulent, maybe even pernicious, but not to the extent to which my mother would ask him to turn around and drive back to the city, which she has done several times. In order to arrive to our town sharply at nine, my father would have had to have left the city no later than four thirty in the morning. This always impressed me. It signaled a sense of urgency in his wanting to see me. I sometimes wished that we could have just talked about that and his drive and the sights he found along the highway.

I got a fucking speeding ticket coming here. Oh, I’m sorry. Yeah, well, it’s not easy to get here. Your mother doesn’t let me stay at a house, so I have to leave extremely early to make the most of the day. Thanks. Yeah, well. It cost me a lot of money. Well, I don’t know what to say. You could take the train next time. Take the train. Take the train when I have beautiful Mercedes? This is a hundred fifty thousand dollar car and you want me to take the train? I just thought that — What’s wrong with you man? You just thought that what? What? You know, you just like all these dorks around here. Speak up. If you have an idea, just speak up. I’m trying to. What? I’m trying to! I hope I don’t get points on my license. You know points means that I would have come all the way back up to hell hole to fight the ticket and hope that this asshole idiot from this middle of nowhere scum of the earth town doesn’t show. And you know, that’s a whole day away from my business. I’m sorry. I’m here, though. Great, but you know. I’m not like these fat Americans on their salaries. I can’t just take a “sick day.” If I’m not driving some asshole, I’m not making the money. Do you understand? Yeah, It’s pretty simple. I’m sorry.

The parking lot in front of the Price Chopper was vast and always empty at this hour. As my mother and I pulled in, we located the only freshly washed car in sight and determined that this must have been his new Mercedes. My father always kept his cars extremely clean. Even when he drove a Lincoln. I used to love his cars. I felt like a person of great significance in each one. Especially when I sat in the rear. Across the parking lot, a man in a black suit and undone tie emerged from the only small bodega-type convenient store in town, located at the opposite end of the shopping center. I imagine they made money before the Price Chopper built up and became the main place in town for produce and groceries and socialization. 

This bodega-type store was owned by an Indian family and is just the type of shop my father would prefer over something more corporate, like CVS, or Duane Reade. Whenever we’re together, he loves showing off his prowess for determining ethnicities.

“Are you Bangladeshi, my friend?” he might say to a store clerk handing him his Marlboro Reds.

“Yes, my friend!” the clerk might say.

“You see? I told you.” He would say to me. Before offering something else to the clerk.

“I love Bangladeshi people. Always hard working,” he’d say.

“You have to be in this country.”

“You got that right!”

“And you? Where are you from, Russia?” the clerk would question.

“No, my friend, I’m from Yugoslavia.” Hoping the clerk might be more aware of ethnicities as he is.

“Ah, Yugoslavia, this is good people,” the clerk would opine.

My father used to love touting his provenance without exact specificity sometimes, as he thought Yugoslavia provided more of a social currency in front of some people, than say Montenegro might. Though not a country any longer, the value is derived from a period when Yugoslavia was a major geopolitical force and a place of great cultural wealth and diversity. (The latter is ultimately responsible for its demise). I like to think that the decision to buy cigarette at these types of store is out of some sort of immigrant camaraderie, but I think after going to prison for so long, he just has a distrust for corporate places like CVS or Duane Reade.

I bet your mother was very excited when she didn’t see me in the car. Uh, I don’t think so. Yeah, well, I was just buying the cigarettes. I sorry to smoke — I know you don’t like it — but I’m extremely stressed out. Your mother stressed me out with this shit. I’m driving like an asshole to see you and she won’t let me come to the house to pee, even. I have to pee behind this disgusting grocery store. By the way, I went in there last time. I can’t believe how many varieties of frozen chicken fingers there is, now. My god. In Montenegro, you couldn’t find one box of frozen food. Everything fresh and perfect and clean. Would you ever move back?

Once my mother left us and I watched through the windshield of his Mercedes a very curt discussion on timing and most likely money. Their body language wasn’t quite hostile, but suggested an urgency to be away from one another. One I lost sight of my mother, I would hear the ringing of a car with an open door and my father’s fall into the driver’s seat (it was very much a fall, not a sit). We would go through the obligatory five minutes of stationary conversation, during which I would ask, “can’t we drive somewhere and talk along the way?” But this request was never met. Instead, we remained stationary, a black Mercedes on black asphalt. Occasionally, another car would drive slowly past the automatic doors of the grocery store, inspecting the posted hours of operation, then continue on, never paying attention to the out of place Mercedes that seemed to melt into the glistening summer black top. 

I remember wanting to talk. I wanted to be garrulous and energetic. But it was early and the conversation would have had no context. And I could also see through the imperative to catch up. So the conversations remained mechanical and lifeless. Eventually, my father would concede out of boredom and we would begin our languid trek to kill time in this awful town. I began to feel the odiousness of the town to a greater degree when I was around him. I began to wonder how people could live in a place like this. And why there weren’t more people from Bangladesh, or from Yugoslavia.

Much of the day was often positioned around the presentation of some dramatic text or idea he was attempting to suppress. These presentations were usually reserved for the car, when other people weren’t around, or when he knew he couldn’t be recorded. To this day, I’ve never met anyone as paranoid as my father. His conspiracy theories are born out of the culture of victimization that he came from. because I never had an interpreter, it was always up to me to determine which of these, if any of these, presumptions about government’s intervention into our lives, or the cancerous bi-products deliberately placed in our foods and water sources was true and which ones seemed too contrived. As I got older, I found it more exciting to believe in them. I was more skeptical when I was younger.

You know, I think next year we’re moving back, you know that? No. How come? Well, you know, it’s very difficult here. It’s very hard. I don’t know. I miss my country. Although, I hate everybody there, but I miss it. If it were filled with a different type of people, it would be the greatest country in the world. But it’s filled with pieces of shit like my brother, your uncle. Such lazy people. Lazy and stupid. And jealous. Jealous of me. Jealous that I came here and made a fortune. Yeah. So, would you be there for good? Well, that’s the conversation. I mean, when I think about it… what’s keeping me here? I think like six months there and six months here, or maybe four months there and eight months here, or maybe two months here and four months there and the rest travel. But, what’s keeping me here? You? I hardly see you. Your mother hardly lets me see you. You know, when I was in prison and went away, okay you know about all of that, but I cried. I cried every day. She did this to me. No one else.

The weather began to turn. The anemic blue sky which usually held court over this town was beginning to be overtaken by an orange and a wind. And the prospect of driving the colossal distance back to the city became audacious for my father, despite much consideration. After our fourth restaurant and seventh appetizer, he decided to find a hotel in town and stay the night. I sat at the bar of a local chain and listened to him discuss rates and attempt negotiation over his cell phone. I’m sure they struggled to understand some of his pleas.

“I guess it’s no sense in trying to risk driving in this. I have to take someone very important to JFK in the morning, pick him up in Bronxville. But I can leave at like three am, or something like that.”

I found that certain things like waking up early and driving long distances seem banal to my father and not like the event as they seemed to me, or the ordeal they seemed to my mother. I think that after prison and operating a ship and lying and two families and losing your sister to a heedless car on the sidewalk and dealing with the suspension of identities between America and another world entirely, driving to New York at three in the morning seems ordinary. But I still I wondered if my father wished he were the very important person, being driven by some other immigrant’s leased vehicle. But then, I think that certain aspects of his job he found exciting. Like a heist scenario out of the Italian Job or Battle of Algiers. He loved putting emphasis onto undeserving situations. It inflated his purpose in the grand scheme of things. When I was younger, I spent a lot of time thinking about the grand scheme of things.

I accompanied him to the hotel and my mother wondered about our timing, I’m sure. I never asked my father about the calls he chose not to take. We drove down the quiet suburban streets and he smoked his Marlboro Reds. If I asked to roll the window down, he would assume I was joking and laugh. I suppose to him, the idea of rain pouring into the Mercedes and potentially damaging the interiors, in the insidious way that water is capable of such as in garages and basements and other interiors with porous materials, was of greater significance than the fleeting smell of cigarettes in the car. We pulled his freshly washed Mercedes under the car port of a cheap hotel, just outside of town. I left my new shoes in the trunk, but was frequently reminding myself about them so not forget when we finally returned to the parking lot in front of the Price Chopper. I wondered what my father was reminding himself about. The hotel was made of strange materials made to look modern and clean and premium, but were actually brittle and rushed and misplaced. In a nice hotel, the lobby feels reassuring and warm. But in this hotel, the lobby was more like an extension of the car port. There was no valet and the person who greeted us was named Chad. The hotel room was hollow and despite the yellow walls, the space was cold and decidedly like the outside. The only thing that was missing was the rain. Outside the window was the highway. My father even thought the highway was suburban and lame. He used to comment on how new it looked because people around here never leave their houses. He always referred to peoples’ homes as “houses.”

So, this is a great American hotel room. There is a chair there, a bed, a towel, a robe, a television, of course, and a desk to do work. Even in the worse places, they always assume that you have to work. That’s the thing about America. Look, I guess that’s why this country is this way and mine is the way it is. No one wants to work over there. Jews are the hardest working people ever. And we don’t have any Jews over there, really. Just lazy Europeans. You know, Jews work so hard because they suffered so much. That’s why I work hard. That’s what happens to people who suffer. People who never suffer never work hard, or at least it’s more rare. Your uncle never suffered. He just stayed there and — but didn’t he lose his sister, also? I guess you’re right. But I can’t figure him out anyway.

We used the time in this hotel room while the storm carried on outside to discuss things like my future. I told my father that I wanted to be a painter. That I’m not very good right now, but that I’ll learn the right way to do it and figure it out. He used to insist that I would go to a criminal justice college instead, like John Jay or something else. I told him I was too smart for John Jay and that the idea of being in a courtroom for the rest of my life, or under a green fluorescent drop ceiling like the ones in my school where I felt so different, was a depressing illustration of my future. He told me about a second or maybe third uncle of mine in Paris who is a painter.

“He has a different last name than us, but I think he’s living in Paris and is a painter.” he would say. 

“Is he successful? I never knew about this uncle.” I only asked about peoples’ successes around my parents. I otherwise never cared, really.

“I don’t know. Probably not, but this must be where you get this idea to be a painter from. Because you don’t look like me for this, and your mother is not an artist.” he would remind me.

He often wondered where my depressive qualities came from. Why I couldn’t summon the effort required to have a vapid, but energetic conversation about nothing. He used to say that if he ever acted around his father the way I acted around him that he would get hit. Though I could observe the tactic well enough, I still felt badly and wanted to talk with even greater urgency. I would try to reassure him by giving him examples of the many topics my friends and I would talk about. I used to tell him that I was very funny and that people thought I was funny and smart. I used to tell him that people were jealous of how funny and smart I was because I thought that would satisfy his curiosity. I didn’t yet know that I was an artist, or that telling stories and lying would was a mechanism I developed out of my erratic childhood. I certainly didn't have the confidence to describe myself as an artist. I wished he would have said something else during these moments. 

“I don’t know much about being an artist, but I know that you’re my son. And it’s going to hurt no matter what.” But instead, he was just confused and I was quiet.

The hotel room was quiet, save for the storm outside. He sat distracted by the thought of his impending drive and conflicted by the obligation of spend time with me. Sometimes this really felt like passing time. There’s a way that men from this part of the world sit. A hand is always on a corresponding thigh, with the thumb on the outside of the leg. The other hand, if not gripping a cigarette, is on the forehead. The pose is contemplative and bored at once. It’s anxious and prepared. My father sat like this while I examined the materiality of the hotel room. The more I evaluated the cheap fibrous wood and laminate, the less secure I felt in the idea that this building would remain standing should the storm grow.

“Okay, it’s about time to go. I can’t stand your mother calling us one more time. You can thank her. But we need to go now. This is unbearable. Plus, I need a cigarette. And there are no smoking rooms in these shit American hotels. And I’m going to stay here tonight, but I won’t be able to see you in the morning because I need to leave very early.” he harangued.
Before we left I took another look out of the window. I had never seen our small town, or the area just outside of it, from this perspective. The hotel room was meagerly elevated, but because there weren’t any buildings of competing height, I could see everything. And what I saw was nothing.

You know, your mother still loves me. She made the greatest mistake of her life when she left me. And now she’s suffering. You can tell. She’s with this Dutch guy, but he’s a dork. And he’s nothing like me. There is no one like me. If you become one third of who I am, than you’re a great man. I worked hard. And only God understands how hard I worked and how much I’ve suffered. Only God. You know how to be successful? You know how? You need to pray. Pray so loud that you mother’s neighbor, the ones a mile away, can you hear you. And then work hard. You haven't suffered as much as I have, so you’ll struggle with hard work, but I think you have this from me. You’ll be fine. Just pray that you are successful and God will listen.

“How was time with your father?” my mother would ask.

“Why won’t you let him stay in the house? It’s so big. You wouldn’t even have to see him.” 

“I’m not the enemy here. Do you understand? He’s the enemy. He’s chosen this life. He could have come up last night, but he likes to put on the show for you — that of being the hero.”

I understood her perspective. Every time. I really saw through the presentation that he would put forward. It’s so much easier to fall in love with a victim than it is a virtuous or noble person. I think we all have something in us that wants to help. But the victim can be insidious, like rain water. It stays with you, even when you’re dry. It makes little openings for other ideas, or in the case of the Mercedes, mold and bacteria, to fester.

The next morning I woke up at eight. I thought about how lazy this time was and how precious my words are. I’ve never been indolent at any point in my life, just tired, from time to time. When my friends woke up at ten, I offered that we go to the mall and look for a coffee shop, well knowing that we were too young to drink coffee and that the mall doesn’t have a coffee shop. It seemed like a very European thing to do though, and I knew they would be impressed.