How to Shut Down a Storyteller

Warning! This post contains:

• scholarship-worthy butt puns (circa 1970)

• one (1) ZZ Top, fully wireless, and

• a medicine man the law couldn’t cure

Reader discretion is advised. So is calling your father.

My dad’s in the hospital. Doc says all his energy is fighting infection, which explains the faraway look.

I sit and wonder what lies behind his emerald eyes as he stares into space.

If he could talk, he’d tell me. Maybe he’s watching his life flash by, telling himself stories to appease the pain.

He always wanted to write.

His papa wanted him to preach.

His English teacher took matters into her own hands and submitted his work to a colleague at the University of Miami.

One of his stories earned him a scholarship, even room and board. The colleague said my dad could live with her if he wanted.

He doesn’t remember the plot to his life last week, let alone a short story from a lifetime ago. It was called Buttons. My dad told me the premise once, before dementia began redacting chapters. I remember him describing the main character – how he’d sew secret messages on the bottoms of people who had earned his contempt. No joke. Or rather, it was precisely a joke, just told really slowly with needle and thread. He’d slip into their rooms, steal their trousers, then “write” a very special message just for them. These words of wisdom were quite literally the name of the story: Buttons or “butt ons.”

My father was ahead of his time – a writer’s writer, writing scholarship-worthy puns before bad dad jokes were a requirement for having kids.

He forgets how, but the colleague in Miami was somehow tied to A Patch of Blue. The film captured one of Sidney Poitier’s greatest performances. His character, Gordon Ralfe, falls in love with a blind white girl sitting in a park. He helps her navigate the parts of life that her parents had given up on. The film caused controversy before it was even released. Censors forced filmmakers to cut an interracial kiss to comply with segregationist laws.

The world wasn’t ready for A Patch of Blue.

My dad turned down the scholarship – had to cut it to comply with family standards of the time. The University of Miami was known to be a party school, so his passion was out of the picture. He was forced to go to Cincinnati Bible College instead.

The world wasn’t ready for my dad either.

It took him one semester to flunk out.

One semester to realize his father was bluffing.

That he would never be disowned.

That he could have chosen to live his own damned life all along.

In his story, Buttons were words written on the assholes of assholes — meant to be sat on. I’m sure the irony of his words being squashed does not escape his faraway look.

Before I was born, he gave it another shot. He was the photographer for our small-town newspaper in the middle of Nowhere, Ohio.

His proudest byline was the interview he did with ZZ Top before a big show in Dayton – featured on a full-page spread in the entertainment section.

His piece covered the debut of a new wireless system that revolutionized rock ’n roll. Billy Gibbons’ raw guitar signal was beamed offstage to the mixing board, where the audio was split into multiple tracks. Sound engineers became performers—adding effects, layering, panning, reshaping sound in real time. The wall of sound became a polyphonic tapestry you could “see” with your ears.

The piece was cutting-edge. It was the future of rock ’n roll.

And for that, he was fired.

His manager loved the piece, but the owner, who lived 1,000 miles away in Texas, caught wind of it and canned him – no questions asked. He said the God-fearing people of Nowhere didn’t like rock ‘n roll.

So he said, “Fuck it,” and turned to a life of crime.

That’s when society told my dad that helping malnourished cancer patients develop an appetite was against the law. He didn’t listen this time. He decided to live his own damned life and paid for that too. He went to jail for moving marijuana.

Antibiotics finally killed the infection. Dad’s talking again, telling stories back home with Pebbles cuddled up by his side, playing his guitar softly, staring into space. The gummies are settling in. His fingerpicking sounds like the years loosening their grip.

What lies behind his emerald eyes?

Stories. Always.

I read him several from my memoir — from our memoir.

Our lives flashed by.

A father shut down his son.

The newspaper shut down its journalist.

The law shut down the medicine man.

Dementia is trying to shut down another storyteller.

But he passed the baton.

He “sewed” a button on my trousers that said, “Finish my story!”

So I wrote what he never got to write.

For that, I dedicate my book to the man who gave me the words, who taught me how to craft songs, play guitar… to play baseball, football, goofball. He was really good at goofball.

Coincidentally, his last paid writing gig was where I got my first job as a paperboy.