“An Open Letter To My Biological Father, A Bit Actor Whose Most Well Known Film Is Waterworld”

 Hello “Agent #1”, or “Joe Bill”, or “Stoner Guy”, or “Frank”,

I looked you up to see where you were living and I see you are still living in Los Angeles. How is it out there? Do you like it? Visiting Los Angeles was as close as I have gotten to a Christian Hell. You belong there.

Who am I to say such a thing? Do I crouch at the feet of Saint Peter? No, worse; I am your bastard child, the rotten, adulterine fruit that fell from your family tree. You’ve sown your oats in an unfavorable soil, you skirtchasing frog. Knock-knock! I am at your doorstep now; an elaborate gift basket of rancid pears.

Understand that I am far from pious. I know full well that many great artists bow to the commands of a god that most consider to be baseless and self-indulgent. I am twenty-four; I have been chokeslamming my brain with secular media for approximately twelve straight years. I am sure plenty of my favorite actors and authors and playwrights and filmmakers unceremoniously abandoned their pregnant loved ones in pursuit of their nontraditional dreams.

But the true story — your story — is as follows — you left my mom when she was pregnant. You claimed you were not cut out to be a father. You left for California, and shortly thereafter began your career as a bit actor — seeing more promise in an offer for the film Waterworld than you saw in raising an entire child.

Worse yet is that in mixed company, my mother tastefully refers to you as a “sperm donor”. The bungling of semantics drives me crazy, as donations are generally made with generous intent. And on purpose.

I imagine you at a weekly meeting in the rec room of a community center, tucking a few informative pamphlets into a complementary ACCIDENTAL FATHERS OF AMERICA FOUNDATION (AFOAF) tote bag. Standing at a podium in a conference hall in the Hilton by the airport, giving a dynamic speech punctuated by robust applause. Making benevolent eye contact with a panhandler as you leave him a warm surprise in his paper cup.

When you are recounting your past to a potential lover, or a new friend, or a bemused stranger, you could do worse at building an aura of mystery than “my biological father whom I have never met left to be an actor in films”. Punctuate that with an eyelash flutter and a sigh — pretty good so far.

But remember — this is a conversation, not a monologue. Now they have to serve the ball back to you:

“Wow! Which films?”

And the aura is shattered. This is the information age. There’s no lying — they’ll check IMDB. It doesn’t matter if your ancestors are gypsies anymore, because your dad played a small role alongside Jack Black in a film that sits stubbornly at the intersection of “grotesquely expensive” and “mediocre”.

My mom told a story recently about how she was walking home from the grocery store when I was around 1 year old. It was 90 degrees outside, and we were far from the house.

My mother — malnourished, exhausted, and barely an adult herself — had cut her heel open on a shopping cart, and her shoe kept filling up with blood. She set me and the grocery bags down in someone’s yard for a moment to regain her composure, and to tend to her freshly punctured extremity.

A split second later, an elderly woman exploded out of the front door of the house and screamed at her: “you had better not leave that fucking baby in my yard, I’m not taking care of that baby”. My mother, in a fit of righteous rage, screamed right back at her. I sat among the bags of frozen peas and canned soup, presumably screaming as well.

At perhaps the exact same time, you were just off the coast of Hawaii in a massive artificial seawater enclosure, enduring take after take on the set of a film about a man who tries to help a young woman and her child find a safe place to be while the whole world is drowning.

A bit about me: I have brown hair and brown eyes. I have eyebrows, brown as well. I have dense eyelashes. I have two false teeth. I have wide palms and short fingers. I like to write. I like to collect insects. I like to cook.

If you ever see me, I swear to god, you had better run. I will come at you with my fists clenched, I will swing them with not one iota of strength compromised — once for my mother, and once for me. You will see my blood. You will see yours. The world will go black.

I would also like to congratulate you on your great success in the 2002 film, The Adventures of Pluto Nash.

Sincerely,
Hali

“Roller coaster”

The man at the exit gate of the Batman roller coaster at Six Flags Great America is very upset because he dropped his cell phone and it landed on the ground underneath the tracks. The attendant is trying to explain to him that there is no way to get the phone back, because doing so would require them to temporarily cease operation, and could be highly dangerous. Also, it is likely that the phone is broken, as the height at which the man dropped his phone was very, very high. This is my own observation, not something the attendant said.

The interaction takes about five minutes. The man comes away from it red in the face, calling Six Flags Great America employees “thieves” and “fuckers”. The attendee is 19 or 20 years old. He seems unfazed, like he deals with this a few times a week.

“How much do you deal with that sort of thing?” I ask.

“Few times a week,” he says, taking a swig of his red Gatorade.

“What sorts of things do people drop?”

He wipes the sweat off of his forehead with a rag and pauses to think. “People are supposed to put all their stuff in the bins on the shelves before getting into the car. Mostly they do it, but sometimes you’ll get the guy who kept his phone in his pocket. Him.” He points his chin the direction the man from earlier walked away.

“Yeah.”

“And it’s our fault somehow. I get yelled at all the time.” He pauses. “But some people I feel bad for. A lot of people losing glasses.” He wipes the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. “One guy lost a prosthetic arm even.”

“Could you do anything about that?”

“No, all I could do was tell him to go to Lost and Found and file a claim,” he said. “That’s really all we can do. We can’t stop the roller coaster on account of one dude dropping his fake arm. Also, it’s dangerous to walk underneath the roller coaster. They tell you that in training like right away. I could get fired!”

I peer through the fence behind him. I count two pairs of 3D glasses, one rolled-up neon baseball hat, a lanyard, and in the distance, the man’s phone. Even from my somewhat distant vantage point, I can tell it’s broken — circled by a halo of black shrapnel.

“Guy has to buy a new phone,” the attendant says under his breath. “Nothing I can do. Whatever.”

“The Blessing of the pets”

In Worth, Illinois, a small town near the town in which I live, there is a dog blessing. I have always wanted to attend one.

I asked my father if my dog Pickles is Catholic, and he says that he is. I was going to bring him but plans fell through, so now I’m here alone.

A few lines of folding chairs are set up in the lawn of a large church. In front of the chairs is a large yellow cross, about the height of a two story house.

The mood of the event is pleasant. The dogs are half restless and half otherwise. Some roll in the grass. Some sit still as a bone, but deep in thought. A few remind me of dogs family friends had growing up that have since died. It makes me feel both happy and sad.

The priest approaches the folding table in front of the cross and begins his remarks. He gives thanks to the attendees, and he recites the following prayer.

“Oh god you have done all things wisely. In your goodness you have made us in your image and give us care over living things. Reach out with your right hand and grant that your bounty in the resources of this life may move us to eternal life of living things.

May God, who created the animals of this earth as a help to us, continue to protect and sustain us with the grace his blessing brings, now and forever.

A man approaches the priest and with a hand sweep, instructs all of the people to get up with their dogs and take their places in line for the blessing. Everyone rises from their folding chairs and gets in line.

The holy water is a brief splash on the heads of the dogs, and this is when some dogs go wild. They jump at the holy water wand, thrilled. Some are uncomfortable. Some don’t care much. None of them seem dismayed at their circumstances, and they shouldn’t. The priest seems very friendly with no other intention but sending the dogs to heaven.

Some of these people and their dogs have known this priest for a very long time. It is evident in their smiles. I am not sentimental but the love between them is striking. It takes my breath away. They know that if there is a better place, it is where their beloved friends will go. And perhaps they will see them there.

I wander the grounds after the event. I think about what will happen when my own dog passes away. I hope whatever is on the other side, he finds peace. I love him so much.

“THE LEANING TOWER OF NILES”

The Leaning Tower of Niles has me in tears. It is one of the funniest things I have ever seen. I feel mean laughing this hard at it. I feel a weird guilt because other people are there, and I can’t tell if it’s supposed to be funny or not. I laugh into my fist at an audible volume.

“The bells inside are from the 17th century,” someone says.

I look up and there’s a woman there. I have no idea where she came from.

“Sorry?”

“The bells inside are from the 17th century,” she says again. She is visibly angry. “It’s not as funny as you think. It’s not some stupid thing.”

I know a bit about the tower. The Leaning Tower of Niles is a half-size replica of The Leaning Tower of Pisa located in the suburb of Niles, IL. It’s the height of a small water tower. It wears a crown of a ring of Italian flags, and a big American flag in the center. It was built in 1934. It is next to a Target store.

“They’re 400 years old,” she says. She’s so mad that she’s spitting a little. I am getting scared.

“I’m sorry. It is just- “ I try to choose my words carefully, but mess up. “It looks funny. It is next to a Target store.”

“Did you choose where you were born?” She actually says this. Her glasses slip down her nose. I think it’s because she’s sweating.

“No, I didn’t.”

“People like you make me sick!”

“OK. Again, I am sorry. I think you may have misunderstood.”

She stares silently for about 10 seconds. It feels like she is turning my soul inside out with her mind, shaking all the pennies out of it. She turns on her heel and stomps away.

“bison”

In 1967, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory introduced five bison to their grounds. A rumor was spread among some locals that the bison served as an elaborate system of mammalian alarms to warn scientists if radiation had reached dangerously high levels — a “canary in a coal mine” type of situation, the bison calling and bleating when they felt an onset of nausea. This denotes a misunderstanding of radiation, a misunderstanding of bison, or perhaps a base understanding of both radiation and bison, but a misunderstanding of how the two function in relation to each other.

The area surrounding it was mostly populated by farmers and the wives of farmers. They grew corn, they kept dairy cows, they watched from their backyards the construction of a poured-concrete administrative building — the structure of which was inspired by the criss-cross of a DNA strand. Adjacent to that, a multicolored geodesic dome perched on a concrete block — an igloo for neutrinos to live.

Despite the sidelong glances and crackpot theories, people knew the construction of FermiLab was necessary in its own way. The decision to vote an entire township (Weston, IL) out of existence to make room for FermiLab was met with little resistance. The community quietly assimilated into Batavia, IL, and despite the murmurs of confusion and occasionally apprehensive talk, FermiLab was born.

In Illinois, especially in the suburbs, high school aged people drink in each other’s basements until they are old enough to move to Chicago. I did not drink at the time (and still don’t), and I didn’t have an interest in college, so I did not have much to do.

Friends fluctuated in and out of my life, moving away for college and coming back for the summer. I stayed the same, anchored in my parents’ basement.

Having nobody to spend time with, I got stranger and stranger, like a lost mushroom. I was at my worst in the 11th grade. My thoughts got increasingly abstract and I understood myself less and less. I never spent time around people. I wore all silver and sat in the parking lot of the gas station. I collected railroad spikes and listened to my shortwave radio.

My life turned around when I was given a car when I graduated. Having a car allowed me to perceive where I was as being more than the town surrounding my high school. I saw it as a system that I was able to explore.

I spent a lot of time driving around Illinois, driving towards and away from malls but never to malls, to diners and the departure gates at O’Hare airport. I felt something in me slowly turning over and falling away. The sense of stagnation I felt gradually evaporated.

When my parents separated when I was 19, half of my life got uprooted and replanted ten minutes from the entrance of FermiLab in my mom’s new house. I discovered it when I was going for a drive. I remembered taking a trip there in middle school. I have a picture of me in a classroom there, listening to a scientist talk about wildflowers in the area.

I can say with certainty that my life turned around when I rediscovered FermiLab. Its proximity to me was invigorating. The unknown structures excited me. Above all, it became the place I went to run.

I would listen to Beethoven and Gershwin and Stan Getz and stop to eat pretzels out of my backpack. I ran the 4.6 mile Tevatron ring, a now defunct circular particle accelerator that is marked by a massive concrete ring of pavement.

I became intimately familiar with the curves of the roads and the landmarks around the loop of the Tevatron. I ran so often that I was able to take stock of the scientist’s cars. I knew who was where on a given day — green Volvo at the auditorium at 3 PM every day (janitor?), white minivan with BABY ON BOARD sticker in front of the first house in the residential neighborhood for scientists (mother? father?).

One of the last warm days before I moved from my mom’s house to Chicago, I went for a final run at FermiLab. I walked there slowly, stopping at the family-owned gas station on the corner for a bottle of water and a package of peanuts.

They check for your ID when you walk through the gate. You have to tell them what you are doing there, even if it is just “taking a walk” or “taking my dog for a walk” or what have you. They either say “OK,” and they wave you through, or they glance at your photo, and then at you, and then at your photo again, hand your ID back and say “OK”, and wave you through.

It’s a bright and clear day. The sky is wide and blue. My jogging shorts ripple in a strong wind that sparkles with anticipation. The security guard smiles at me and my ID, and asks what I’m doing. “I’m going for a run,” I say. We both laugh. I don’t think we’re sure why. I feel incredible.

The Midwest has a way of turning things into magic. The world I grew up in was devoid of what most people would consider culture, but I know better. It’s there. It’s in strip malls late at night. Churches off the highway with big LED crosses that glow into the early morning. Malls that are getting tired of bustling, empty movie theaters that are too big for the town they’re in, 24 hour diners staffed by tired mothers with pies on platters dusted with glittering sugar. It’s at rest stops on the way to St. Louis or Indianapolis, ticking away all the time with no attendants in sight.

FermiLab is that principle amplified by a thousand. It’s a place that does what is necessary but on a massive scale. It’s the biggest diner in the world, staffed by dipoles and power lines and booster rings and geodesic spheres. It’s the harbinger of the fate of mankind, nestled quietly between a Wal-Mart and a Target.

I don’t warm up today. I bolt so furiously forward that I almost trip. I run past the clusters of technicolor houses where the on-site scientists live, the little concrete whatnots of a grander purpose than I can ever fathom. I run past a man in a jumpsuit holding a white clipboard — I wonder what he’s up to? He stares at the dials at the base of a dipole.

I run past the field I drove to and screamed in when I learned my grandfather died. I run past a terraformed pond stocked with fish that I joked about once with my dad having psychic powers and the ability to fly. I run past the field I got my car stuck in, past the little garden I took a 4th grade field trip to.

I stop and hunch over and breathe jagged breaths in front of the bison. The mother bison looks up at the noise I make. A baby bison at her feet looks up at her mom looking up. Then, they are looking at me both. The neutrino dome regards us all quietly.

I get a text from my mom asking me to pick up some milk from the grocery store near her house. “Sure,” I say. “Be home soon.”

I give everything a last look. Five minutes to the grocery store, and five minutes to my mom. There’s no final goodbye to a place ten minutes from your mother’s bed. I turn to the gates. I run towards them without ceremony.

“DUGA-3”

At the Illinois state fair I ran my fingers along the spine of a piglet. It felt like knuckles. I imagined tug-of-war, hands gripping around a rope, pulsing and straining tightly, trying to win. The piglet’s spine felt like that. I shoved this thought down because it seemed like a grotesque thing to think.

I imagined the consequence of running your finger down the spine of the hands of several people playing tug-of-war. It would likely be met with resistance and irritation. The piglet displayed both resistance and irritation towards me, grunting and doing a little spin into a corner.

I also saw a sheep held by two leather straps while two men sheared the front end and back end. The critter bleated once but otherwise seemed fine. I felt bad for it for only a second. It probably felt good to get his wool coat removed in the summertime.

I watched this for a while but my concentration was broken by a little fucker of a kid who threw a balled up paper at me. His parents were too drunk to say anything. The day was too nice to get into some kind of genuine conflict about it, and I’m glad now that I just let it go.

It was Daniel and I’s first serious trip as a couple. It was going perfectly. He was and is my best friend. He was and is a person I do not really keep anything from because I do not feel like I need to. I gestured to the kid and Daniel said “fucker”. We laughed together. It really was a perfect day.

In our first house in Chicago on the corner of Clark and Fullerton, I used my shortwave radio a lot. I climbed out the window, leaning out halfway, and laced the external antenna wire around what I presume was a leftover bit of fire escape. Then, I would sit in my beater nightgown (it was my shitty nightgown that I ate in) and I’d smoke and listen to the world.

I got interested in shortwave radio because of my grandfather. He would sit at our dining room table when I was a kid with his Hallicrafters radio and show me what China and England and New Zealand and Arizona and Nebraska had to say. It was often preachers yelling, but sometimes it was numbers stations — spy transmissions that were coded. “Uno, dos, dos, dos, uno, uno tres, uno” would be an example of a Spanish numbers station, in a measured female voice.

It was exciting to me and the radio remained my friend throughout my entire life. I got lonely often, but would turn on my radio and felt not so lonely anymore. I often ducked out of particularly dismal high school parties to ride my bike home and listen to my Sony radio, even looping the wrist strap around the handlebars of my bike and going for a ride near the dam by my dad’s while the radio played. I would sit on the dam and listen to a man in the desert yell bible verses. I would cry because I felt awful.

I kept radio from people. It was a hobby I was very guarded about because I felt like it was a world I could turn to when I felt bad and I did not want people in on the secret, talking about what I listened to in ways that I felt to be incorrect or silly. They were my friends.

The DUGA-3 array is a Russian radar system that was part of the Soviet early warning network. It’s near Chernobyl and you can’t miss it — a massive grid reaching towards the sky. DUGA-3 was known in the West, especially the states, as the “Russian Woodpecker”. This is because it habitually created KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCK broadcasts that would stampede frequencies anywhere near it — utility transmissions, legitimate radio broadcasts such as BBC, and most of all amateur radio broadcasts.

This caused it to earn the resentment of many radio hobbyists who were trying either to broadcast or to listen to other stations. Since the purpose of it was thought to be Soviet mind control, I assume resentment of Soviets came with it, but that’s not something I can make an educated comment on.

My first experience with the Russian Woodpecker was with my shortwave radio when Daniel was asleep. I had tuned it to what I presumed was an empty station, just white noise. I was straddling consciousness and a dream when the loudest thing I have ever heard in my life exploded into the room, causing me to get so scared I sat up and gag audibly. Daniel did not wake up. I still have no idea how or why.

I grabbed my radio and turned it off and walked to the bathroom and shut the door. I could not imagine for a second why a station that had been broadcasting white noise for months suddenly exploded at me. I turned the volume knob all the way down so it wouldn’t deafen me, and then turned the radio back on.

There it was again — a sound like a hammer against a panel of wood. I was fixated. It felt like a dream. I tried tuning the station ten stations in both directions, and you could still hear the frequency — it got less and less loud the further you got, but it was still there, broadcasting from some big empty grid in abandoned Russia.

I would often tread softly to the bathroom at night and listen to the frequency. Since you could not tell when exactly it was going to broadcast, there did not seem to be a timeline that was reliable enough to create a schedule. I would have to turn the volume down very low and closely listen for the woodpecker to start tapping.

It was just me and the woodpecker in the bathroom late at night. It felt like having a lover. I put the radio in the empty bathtub to hear how it reverberated off the porcelain. I put the radio hanging out the window so the frequency would bounce off the brick of my apartment building and down into the alley. I wrapped it in towels to hear it try to force its way through the fiber and into the room.

I developed a relationship with it. When I got nervous about anything I knew that eventually it would tap on my door and I’d let it inside. The visits began to feel deliberate. I began to feel like I was hiding something from Daniel, which I started to feel badly about.

On the way home from the state fair, Daniel and I got out to look at some smokestacks near Springfield. I asked him if we could stop and see and he said yes. We both like looking at industrial parks off the highway, and he understand the awe I expressed about the smokestacks, something I never talked about with anyone else.

We stood and watched the smokestacks make clouds. I looked at Daniel with everything I had while his back was turned. He sensed it and looked back at me and held his hand out for me to hold. It was a moment of profound love.

I grabbed on tightly and our hands looked like the piglet’s spine from earlier. I told him this and he looked down and said, “hey, they sure do”. I told him I had something to play for him when we got home. I asked him if he wanted to listen to my radio.