But to be fair, my dad had thought of Forest Lawn as some sort of modern American measuring stick of success, like having your dead body handled by them was equivalent to scoring the winning touchdown in some cracker All-American football fantasy where everyone suns themselves and laughs the day away as they picnic in the bleachers with Coca-Cola and Fritos, bologna on Wonder Bread with Miracle Whip sandwiches, and apple pie with processed American cheese desserts. Or maybe I underestimated my father (it wouldn’t have been the first time); maybe he had realized how campy the place was, and he saw being incinerated there as the ultimate way to thumb his nose at death. Either way, Forest Lawn was indigestibly plastic.
I wish I could convey the nitty-gritty of that bizarre experience—of what exactly it was like to go to Disneyland to pick up my dead father—but I don’t remember much. Honestly, I’m not sure if I cruised through all green lights as I drove there, or if school-bound kids and doughnut-munching crossing guards flooded the crosswalks. And how were Forest Lawn’s office interiors decorated? Beats me. What did I do once I was inside? Who did I talk to? Well, I imagine I had to sign for my father’s ashes. But I’m really not sure. There was probably someone who tried to comfort me in that staleempathetic way professional death-tenders do, but that’s just a guess. And as for paying, my dad had taken care of that before he died, so no money changed hands that day. What I do remember is being back in my car with a box of ashes on the passenger seat next to me.
I was instantly numb. Terrified. And about to explode. All at the same time.
Ashes, ashes, we all fall down …
Fucked up and clichéd as it was, that stupid kids’ song surged forward from some deep vortex in my brain. And it wouldn’t stop. Hardly an innocent children’s rhyme, I remembered learning somewhere that the annoying little song was actually about the bubonic plague.
Ashes, ashes, we all fall down …
if infected bodies weren’t cremated, the plague would spread.
Pocket full of posies
… people carried nosegays to ward off the stink of death that filled the streets. Fuck. I wanted the song to stop. Worst part was, the first line started looping over and over in my thoughts.
Ashes, ashes; Ashes, ashes; Ashes, ashes
… maybe we really would all fall down. So not cool. I felt so disrespectful. And I was going insane from the repetition.
Still parked and desperate for distraction, I opened the glove box and grabbed a birthday gift mixtape this skater Betty girl from work had given me. We’d worked some of the same shifts at Aron’s and her name was Chloe and she was sexy and sweet in a scraggly your-best-buddy’s-little-sister-hits-puberty sort of way. We’d kind of made out a few times in the back room, nothing serious, but she’d most definitely been crushing on me. Evidence: Not only did she make me a mixtape, but she’d gone so far as to cover said tape’s plastic case in a thick layer of red (like Valentine’s red, like
I love you
red) glitter. Embedded in the glitter were ugly little beads shaped like hearts and stars. She must have smeared a whole bottle of Elmer’s glue on the case and then dumped an entire Michaels craft store on the damned thing. Small handfuls of the red stuff coated my lap and hands as I retrieved the tape. I popped the tape in the deck and tossed the case to the passenger floor mat, where it landed with a ruby
poof
.
Engine on. Music started up. Five melancholy guitar strings were plucked. Again. And again. Cymbal crashed. A steady somber drumbeat joined in. Five-string refrain. Low bass reverberated deep in my rib cage. I backed out of my Forest Lawn parking space. And then, coasting past the pissing cherubs, past the ridiculously tall wrought iron and crested gates, turning left onto Glendale Avenue:
It’s a long time coming, it’s a long way down, it’s long division,
crack and divide.This is a parting, some separation, we lay in pieces, cracked to
survive …
Fugazi. One of my favorite bands. “Long Division.” Not necessarily one of my favorite songs, but only because it always left me wanting more. I didn’t like wanting more of anything from anyone. But I did. I wanted more of the song. And I wanted my dad to not be dead. It ended too soon.
There was a long gap of silence on the mixtape. A clicking sound. More silence. Too much damned silence. The box of ashes on the passenger seat was so criminally small. It just sat there, an inconspicuous little black cardboard box, not making a peep, but so totally filling me with noise. Even though he’d thought to take care of every other detail, my dad hadn’t ever told me what I was actually supposed to
do
with his ashes once I had them. Maybe he figured he’d be lucid on his deathbed and planned to tell me then, not a minute sooner than he needed to. Maybe it was just his one strange form of denial, like if he didn’t talk about the cremation he’d never actually die. Regardless, I had no clue what I was supposed to do with the ashes. Fuck, what was I supposed to do, period? Something heavy swelled in my chest. I could feel the pulse in my neck. I wanted to scream. My head ached like a demon. There was a steady hot unfamiliar pulse pushing from behind my eyes. Finally, another song started. The music was so loud it became distorted static and hurt my eardrums. I pulled onto the 5 Interstate southbound.
Entirely paranoid that my dad’s ash-box lid might somehow pop off, that the interior plastic bag would tear and particles of my father would fly away into the smog, I kept all the windows rolled up and didn’t turn on the air. It was mid-June. In Southern California. Sweat stung my eyes. Head to foot I was a soggy uncomfortable mess. My hands kept slipping off the steering wheel. My entire body was tense, and I swear I could feel the individual molecules of my body buzz. Anxiety? Frustration? Anger? Pain? Whatever it was, it was too much. I clenched my jaw and tapped beats with my left foot. My right knee hit the keychain hanging down from the ignition each time I shifted. Keys rattled. My apartment keys. Deadbolt and lower lock. Car keys. Door and ignition. Keys to my dad’s house. Front and back door. And the one strange saw-tooth key with the paper label. That key was extra long and kept jabbing my leg.
Morning rush-hour traffic was at its worst. At one point on the 405 south, where the stinking asparagus fields fill the air with noxious fumes, each lane came to a near-complete stop for almost half an hour. Ready to jump out of my skin, tempted to open my door and run into the fields in search of sprinklers—I swear, if I’d gone in the fields and found a source of cold water, I would have stripped down to my Skivvies and lay in the cold mud and just given up and died—I read the label attached to the safe deposit key my dad had given me for my birthday.
Wells Fargo Bank. City of Orange. Old Towne Circle.
The paper label turned limp from my humid touch, and the ink smeared. Just looking at my dad’s shaky handwriting on that label, I knew there was no chance in hell the safe deposit box would contain a storybook happy ending.
An hour later, entirely unfamiliar with protocol, I stood in line at Wells Fargo and waited for a teller. When I was finally called to a window, I said, “I have a safe deposit box.”
Shit, I sounded slow.
“And do you have a key?” the teller asked.
I pried it off my keychain and handed it to him.
“I’ll also need photo identification,” he said.
Great. There was nothing more fun than some O.C. conservative dude in a cheap tie and Dockers asking to see my driver’s license. Trying to play it cool, like nothing out of the ordinary was about to hit, I reached for my wallet and handed him my license.
As he stared at it, his thick face pinched into a confused mess of wrinkles. He looked up at me. Then back at my license. The photo had been taken when I was sixteen and far less of a man. The name on that little laminated plastic card read:
Francisca Guerrero. Sex: F.
“Excuse me a minute,” the teller said.
He came back with, guessing from the stuffy polyester suit, a manager.
“Social security, please.”
I gave the numbers. Boss man checked it against something in a manila file folder. He shrugged his shoulders and handed me my license, but not the key.
“Meet me over there,” he said, and pointed to a smokedglass door at the other end of the room.
I did as told, and he led me past the locked door and to a row of closetlike rooms. He opened the door closest to us and waved his hand into the small room like some sort of valet.
“Have a seat,” he said.
It felt like 1910 in there. Everything—the walls, the heavy desk chair, the low narrow shelf, the square cups filled with pencils and rubber bands—was carpentered out of expensive and antique-looking dark wood. The size of the space was somewhere between a phone booth and a handicap-accessible public bathroom stall. You’d think with all the nice wood furnishings that it would have been a pleasant place to chill. But it wasn’t. In fact, I think the air in there had been preserved from the same early–twentieth century period when the room was constructed. Unable to sit there any longer than I had to, I stood in the doorway and waited for the manager to come back.
Several minutes later, he returned with a small metal safe deposit box. He handed me the box, sniffed toward the shelf inside the room to indicate that—although who knew what
I
might want to do—that’s where normal people put such things. Then he gave me my key.
“Close the door for privacy,” he said and left.
I stepped back into the room and pulled the door shut behind me. That part was easy enough. Metal box on the wood shelf in front of me, I tried to take a deep breath. I felt like I might start hyperventilating. I hadn’t ever really considered myself claustrophobic, but I was starting to think maybe I was. Sitting in that dimly lit and narrow space—the air stiff and totally silent, heavy wood surrounding me in close proximity at every angle—was truly like being entombed. Happy Belated Birthday to me. Thanks, Dad.
I unlocked the metal box. Hinged lid lifted, there it was, my birthday gift.
A bundle of letters.
Fading ink and yellowed paper, some of the letters were accompanied by stamped envelopes postmarked
Orange, California
or
New Haven, Connecticut.
Others, scratched out on scrap pieces of paper, appeared never to have been mailed. The handwriting was familiar (my father’s, my mother’s); the words and sentiments were not.
Francisco, sweet love, meet me at the plaza fountain tonight, please
. And:
Darling Paco, you are my everything
. Then:
You have made me the happiest woman in the world
. Another, this one from my father:
It’s true what you say—Paquita does have my eyes. But she has her mother’s brilliance
… Letter after letter offered up blissfully-in-love compliments and hopes for a long life together from two people I’d known to share only sadness, resentment, and anger.
Numb, I decided to approach the letters as artifacts of a sort. I played archivist and examined primary-document evidence of the long-extinct society I’d stumbled upon:
A coffee stain here and there. Lipstick kiss signatures. One letter smelled of sandalwood and was marked with a large perfumed oil spot that bled out and blurred its accompanying ink message. Many were signed with hearts and curlycue-headed squiggle happy faces like the ones my kindergarten teacher used to draw on handouts I’d completed with particular excellence. One envelope contained a clipping of long black hair braided and tied with green ribbon at either end. Blue ink. Black ink. Some written in red fountain pen. Near the middle of the stack I found two movie stubs for
Five Easy Pieces
—7:30 p.m., November 2, 1970, Orange Theatre (the plaza theater that had been converted into an evangelical church for as long as I could remember)—paper clipped to the top corner of an envelope addressed to a plump pink heart and the letter
F
.
None of the letters were dated past 1974. This was little surprise—my parents officially split in 1975. By 1974, I imagined only threats and legal documents were exchanged. I half-wished my dad had included those papers in the time capsule. Without them I felt like I was floating in some alternate universe. I’m not sure how many hours passed in that room, but a security guard knocked at one point.
“Everything all right in there?”
Bastard. No, everything was not all right. The foundation of everything I knew was crumbling. Air particles were separating and falling heavy all around me.
“Everything’s fine. Thank you.”
I listened to the security guard’s heavy shoes retreat down the long linoleum hallway. And instantly I wondered why I’d sent him away. I didn’t want to be alone with the letters. What was I supposed to do now that I’d seen them? What had my father intended? Why had he left them to me? I wished the box had been full of money instead. Or jewelry. Diamonds. Something I could pawn. Not only did this daydream fill me with greedy shame, it was also just plain unrealistic. Because even though my father had worked his way up to a supervisor position at the medical research lab before he got sick, he’d never had any extra dough to stash. There were living expenses, a mortgage on his house, and, until I was eighteen, my mother had sucked him dry of any remaining money by demanding he pay child support. It was so fucking ridiculous—she was beyond rich, she’d never needed his money, she wouldn’t let him see me, but she made sure he paid child support. “It’s the principle of the matter,” she’d said. Bullshit. It was vendetta.
My darling Francisco, I will love you forever.
How was it that my mother had written these words? My whole life she’d been cold and distant at best, outright vicious most of the time. Had I somehow misunderstood? Was that what my dad wanted me to know?
I gently stacked the letters in the order I’d found them and put them back in the box. They’d be safe there. I didn’t trust myself with them. And I didn’t want their weight in my possession—but, of course, it already was.
I found the security guard. He called the manager. The manager took the box from me and situated it back in its place. Jagged long key looped back on my keychain, I was released. I got in my car. Turned on the ignition. Music blasted. Bikini Kill. Tobi Vail’s atonal loveliness: