In honor of Father’s Day, June 17, a few tales of fatherhood gone charmingly awry
Purple Hazed
Prince had one. Full-length and purple, studded at the shoulder with rivets to catch the light. Michael and Madonna wore theirs motorcycle-style, cinched at the waist, dripping chrome. I was a quiet teen, living in the South. My connection to glamour was having seen Purple Rain an unhealthy number of times, and stumbling into a talk-until-dawn encounter with Jesse Johnson from The Time. He had one, too — draped beautiful over his bare chest, while he tossed off salacious comments about songstress Tina Marie, whom he said, “had all kinds of booty going on.” Aside from standing in line for concert and movie tickets, my closest bridge to that glamour was having a father in Las Vegas. I asked him for one: my first birthday request since he’d journeyed West. I did not expect it would ever come until it did—all hopeless and wrong.
Instead of the semi-gloss of kidskin and studs, the full-length leather coat I’d pined for arrived sewn in patchwork sections, stiff and padded. My 90-pound frame was drenched in bolts of leather. It was less Vanity Six, more Trenchcoat Mafia. But I pictured him, the father I’d known only as shadow, going into a Tandy, telling the clerk he was looking for a certain something for his daughter, wrapping it up and sending it off. To picture him moving through a day at my behest, working to fulfill the dream I was dreaming of myself, after so long and over so long a distance, was so heavy — so deeply heavy — that I trimmed the sleeves and wore it anyway. Erica Vital-Lazare
Why Are the Eggs Gray, Dad?
One Saturday morning in my otherwise happy childhood, Dad scrambled a calf’s brain into our eggs. Now, I need to stipulate something here: The man could cook a breakfast. If you’d been around our place then, you’d have loved his gorp the way we did — gorp’s the family word for his improvisations with scrambled eggs and whatever else the fridge might yield, simmered into a hardy goop that didn’t just stick to your ribs, it dry-walled them.
So I was inclined to trust him on this calf’s brain thing … until that first bite, one of the seismic events of my youth. Mooshy, gross, its voluptuous organ-ness thick in my mouth, I could taste the fact that, more than just basic animal meat, this stuff had conducted a function within that animal’s body, which somehow made it 20 times worse. That it was inflicted on me by Dad made it worse yet. I’ve put some terrible things in my mouth in this life, but nothing compares to that.
I wish I could make its vileness forensically visceral for you, maybe with a scratch-and-lick patch, or a VR depiction of my flagellating taste buds. Alas, the only technology I have is metaphor: Imagine the Grim Reaper using your tongue as a bathroom hand towel. Yeah, like that.
When your cooking reminds children of their mortality, you’ve pushed your kitchen experimentation too far. It would take much virtuoso gorp, a ton of his perfectly grilled brisket, for Dad to regain the ground he lost that day. Thankfully, he was up to it. Scott Dickensheets
Slice of Life
My dad loved knives and all things knifey — kitchen knives, pocket knives, honing steels, whetstones. He was obsessed! One Saturday in 1979 he was in the garage, sharpening a knife on a contraption with two ceramic rods stuck like TV antennae in a wood base. He was rapidly whoosh-whooshing away until he slipped and fileted his left forearm, severing an artery. LOLOLOL! No, seriously, it was scary and hardcore — even more scary and hardcore because I’d previously thought of him as a godlike inviolate paragon of righteous dadness. Mom tied a tourniquet and a neighbor drove him to the hospital. I remember seeing the blood all over the garage floor and thinking, Wow, he’s human. Andrew Kiraly