I remember the first music.

Warm air escaping windows and seams out into winter while playing a phrase.  Piles of snow lodged against us. The slow hiss of life in an aluminium box.  Sheets greasy with menthol eucalyptus.  The melody of the furnace.  The humidifier aspirating the bottom note for my asthma. A cheap clock with glowing hands ticks the anchor to each bar in a trailer that whistled and sang according to season.

The wind always blows where I’m from.

Some of life’s best and strangest moments are right before you wake up.

A ridiculous symphony plays before my dream breaks and I am all the sudden here.

Sticky eyes like with glue.  Stuck shut so I’m afraid and confused.  They are snotty and I can’t wipe it all away.

I’m off the top bunk smearing at them and out of my bedroom with the urgency of pissing and it’s still cold and dark.  Tammy the sister dreaming and snoring her own tune from the bottom bunk.  The kitchen glows the narrow hall.  I teeter at the beige porcelain bowl with my gherkin in my fist.  Trickling.  The humidity of my fathers shit, shave and cigarette just keeps coming.

Out and barely left, he sits in the kitchen, coffee down front and wafting.  Hands huge.  Newspaper crackling.  Plastic lunch pail and concrete encrusted hard hat on the Formica.   Zippo flaming a wad of toilet paper for the toss into the ominous red hatch of furnace.

Cigarette smoke coiling.

The ritual is familiar.

I smell the newspaper he grips.

There is his sideburns.

He is giant.

Down that hatch and furnace hole is the devil and hell I think.

I am five years old.

Gas stove.  My Mother with a cast iron frying pan in a frayed robe.  Avon lotions.  Red hair.  She worries after how fierce he is. Freckles everywhere.  Potatoes, onions, peppers, fuel oil, bacon and eggs.  That and coffee.  It will sting my nose when I get home from school.

Delivered by the bus.

A barrel leaks amber in the ice and snow out back.  The dawn is purple.  Bruised clouds out the kitchen window.

The black cat is coming in the back door where his work boots are.

Her back foot bleeds. Her front toes are torn.  Chunk of ear missing.  She’s been in a fight. Midnight the cat.  She bleeds on the white snow looking to get inside. My father, in his heavy wool socks flannel and jeans calls her an old rip. He laces his boots ferocious and quick.

My mother tells him to be careful.  She always said that. She means what he’s done and what he just might do. Maybe not what might happen to him.

My dad showed me to fear the violence of men. The sound of another man hit hard is the sound of my father to me.  Breaking glass and snarls and bodies crashing to the floor.  Women shrieking.  The smack I would come to know on my own.  After hitting my first time.  After being hit the first time.  The whole movie of adult violence in my head still stars my father.  The entire testosterone fueled one act play that ends with him punching someone either before or after some amount of humiliation and intimidation.

My old man was a predator.

I learned to fish and swing a hammer.  I learned my way around a rifle.  The importance of integrity, honesty and a work ethic.

I saw his violence in the eyes of boys I knew and it scared the shit out of me.  He was fearless.  Different than brave.  Reckless. He didn’t care.  It didn’t matter whether it was his blood or not.  I saw the same thing in the eyes of his friends.

They didn’t give a shit.

Before I was born he lost an eye in a bar fight.

I was always afraid for him because I realized that as big as he was to me, he was so small.  He loved to pick a fight with the biggest bastard in the room.

I fought a boy once when I was very young.  Seven or eight years old.  He just kept hitting me. I lost badly. I had no stomach for it. The guilt of violence.  I was a pussy.

Until one day when I was in the sixth grade

He said said if there’s gonna be a fight you don’t hesitate.  You hit as hard as you can and as fast as you can.  So I did.  I talked myself into it.  I convinced myself.  As soon as that kid stepped off the bus, I hit him with everything I had.  He pulled my hair out. The curb and gutter was thick with it but his face was bleeding.

I kept hitting him and there was an audience.  I hadn’t really counted on that.  They cheered and groaned. It was sick and awful.

I kept swinging.  His bloody face still spooks me.  I hated it because I was not afraid during it.  Horrified before and after.  But not during.  I don’t remember how or why it ended.  My neck and shoulders were sore for a week from getting my hair pulled and tossed everywhere. I kept hitting him.  I hated him.  I imagined hot copper cables from my shoulders through my neck to the base of my head.  My knuckles were raw from punching his head and face whenever it bobbed in front of me.

I’ve never done anything like it since.

It might just be the worst thing I’ve ever done.  To agree to even do it. Because I had no problem with him. We weren’t enemies at all. I am casually acquainted with him to this day and he’s nothing but a sweet man.

I told my dad about it reluctantly.  I couldn’t say I won.  He volunteered marvelous energy to make sure  I did not become like him, the way he was.  There is always a way to walk away, always, he said.  You don’t have to do that.  You don’t have to be like me.  He was beside himself.  He was afraid for me.  He was fucking fierce and he knew I just wasn’t.

My Dad’s friends fought each other and bit each other’s fingers off and then laughed about it over whiskey and beer. I feared that insanity. When I was a little boy my father was a giant man. He tried his best to make a man of me and I believe was relieved when he realized that the one I’d become wasn’t in his image.

We all lived in a two bedroom, one bathroom, twenty by forty foot trailer with a kitchen, dining and living room.

We had a beautiful Zenith black and white console television with a built in Hi Fi stereo and that’s my first memory of the perfume of simmering vacuum tubes and Johnny Cash.  Marty Robbins.  Patsy Cline.

It was too warm in the summer and too chilly in the winter. We lived in this trailer with everything we needed at the very edge of a small town in the high desert.

We were rich as far as I could tell.

Drinks for my friends.

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