The Execution of Noa P. Singleton (10 page)

“Well done, then, Caleb,” I said. “Is that the proper response? You turned your life around … then what? You called me? Congratulations. You did it. You’re, what, a businessman now or just an alcoholic who owns a bar? Because that’s an effective strategy for reform.”

His brows swam together, constructing a moat of protective lines. Sarcasm clearly hadn’t made its way down the evolutionary track just yet in Dive Bar, Bar Dive. I wanted to say I was sorry, but I wasn’t.

“I just want to know you,” he said. “That’s why I called. That’s all. I want to know my daughter. I made a lot of mistakes, and now I want to fix them. It’s not a unique story. It’s just mine.”

“You’ve had twenty-three years to know me.”

“I fucked up all twenty-three of those, I know,” he pleaded. “But maybe the next twenty-three can be better? The next fifty, even.”

I swallowed the nerves at the base of my throat to make a clear pathway. “Fuck you.”

“I deserve that,” he said, almost hinting for salvation.

“Yes, you do.”

I sort of felt better after it came out, like it was waiting for the right time to arrive. Profanity can be that way—either gratuitous or magical. For me, at that moment, it was probably a combination of both, and I know my father felt the same way.

“Good,” he replied. “Now that that’s over, can we just spend time together? Get to know each other.”

I didn’t reply. I didn’t stay still, but I didn’t stand, either, trying to contemplate my next step, when he leaned forward in submission, chest first, his two hands placed together in prayer.

“Thank you, Noa.”

I squinted my eyes. “I’m sorry?”

He smiled and again softened his voice. “Thank you.”

“For—?”

“For coming here,” he said. “For not hanging up on me the way I hung up on you. For not leaving yet.”

“Don’t thank me yet for that one. My right leg here is just about to lead the way from this table.”

He swallowed a smile that was just beginning to take form. “You know what I mean.”

I hate to attribute charm to my father, but there was no other word at the moment that fit. He smiled, and the scar stretched along with it like a flattened rainbow.

I looked back to the lone patron, but it was just my father and me. The light was no longer piercing the window and instead was glimmering against the cement outside, reminding me that it was dangerously close to fifty-five minutes inside the bar.

“I really have to go,” I told him. I was actually a bit proud of myself for completing the task under time.

“Look Noa,” he said, changing the subject. His voice cracked. “You should know it’s not completely my fault that I wasn’t around for you.”

“I find that a little hard to believe.”

He focused, curious. “I can’t blame your mother for not talking about me, if she didn’t talk about me. Did she?”

I didn’t respond.

“I mean, who would want to raise her daughter knowing that the father was an alcoholic and would always be an ex-con?” he laughed to himself. “At that time, I’d probably keep me away from my child, too.”

A coarse tip to his shaky forefinger ran around the lip of the water bottle. He was nervous, true; that was not something to be debated, but it was almost an hour that I’d spent inside the bar, and at that point in my life, I followed my own dictum, despite my father’s superficial lament. I stood from the table. He rose to meet me.

“Please, Noa,” he pleaded. “Stay a little bit longer. Let me get you something to drink. To eat.” He smiled. “To punch?”

A half grin slipped from my chest, but I was already on my feet with my bag over my shoulder, and I could feel the second hand of my watch pulling me toward the door. I would not stay past one hour.

“Another time,” I said.

A
T FIRST, WE MET BIMONTHLY: ONCE AT HIS DIVE BAR
, B
AR
Dive, in North Philadelphia, and the next at a restaurant of his choosing in Center City. Having consumed most of his meals at Bar Dive, the prospect of even tasting the hors d’oeuvres on Restaurant Row brought him to Center City more than I would have liked. Usually when it was my turn to visit, I took the subway in the daytime to him, but only when a faint hint of daylight still skimmed the sky in ornaments of coral and indigo, and only the bus in the evening once those ornaments were no longer. Over those few early visits when we were just starting to learn each other’s habits, I grew accustomed to riding the bus home late at night. The crack addicts, prostitutes, and night students from Temple were the only people riding anyway. We quickly grew to recognize one another’s scent. We knew to stay away from one another, to clump together when a new face boarded, when the local multiple personality jumped in, throwing punches in the air as she walked by. (Her name was Clara. And other times Claude.) Sometimes my father would be waiting for me near the bus stop. Sometimes he wouldn’t. Sometimes he was early. And sometimes we talked until the only recourse was the bus home.

I refused to invite him up to my apartment when he came my way. My studio on Fortieth and Baltimore was becoming more and more colonized with rodents and I could actually hear my neighbor’s orgasm at precisely 11:35 in the evening every Friday night. My father
didn’t need his long-lost child’s veneer of prosperity to become such a pauperized image, so I continued to insist upon innocuous safe havens in Center City, Rittenhouse Square, and more culinary hideouts on Restaurant Row. I knew he wouldn’t complain, at least not at first. We ended up limited to a small section of Philadelphia, since he specifically insisted upon rummaging around the golden entrails of Rittenhouse.

After two months, our bimonthly meetings soon evolved into weekly meetings, still split evenly between our respective home grounds and still revolving around his cathartic dumps. One week we were in his neck of the woods and the next in mine.
Tit for tat
, he would say. I told him that’s not exactly what tit for tat means, but he didn’t care.

His past gushed toward me in words and waves of anecdotes. Some I believed; others came across as too strange to be real. Mostly, he seemed less interested in getting to know me than in preserving his own history within the vaulted memory of another.

My father, I soon learned, was born in the City of Brotherly Love in 1960 to an alcoholic father and a hardworking cliché of a secretary mother. Addiction begets addiction, my father said to me, repeatedly, so by the time he was seventeen, he was driving down the Pacific Coast Highway in California, looking for an outlet from his father’s pattern of abuse. No sooner than a month after he arrived, he was arrested for lifting a button-down shirt he took a fancy to at a Macy’s in Santa Barbara a week after his eighteenth birthday. He didn’t have money for it, and at the time, he was able to talk the DA down to probation (without the aid of a lawyer) with the exclusive employment of one Jean Valjean justification, switching up the basic human need for sustenance with the basic human need for clothes—name brand and chromatic, with animal insignia and upturned collars. Pretty soon, the shirt turned into sports cars, jewelry, and even a monthlong flirtation with the illegal transport of Mexicans in large windowless vans across the border.

It was during his year in Los Angeles after the Santa Barbara
incident that he met and knocked up my mother and shortly thereafter was caught stealing a Jaguar off a used car lot. This, of course, led to the first of many charges of grand theft auto, thus beginning his polygamist marriage with a handful of state penal codes.

Once she found out about his first prison sentence, his mother never welcomed him home to Philadelphia. Unfazed by her apathy, on he traipsed, driving from state to state, occasionally getting locked up along the way, sometimes for short jail stints when the local police department didn’t look beyond the instant arrest (Kansas, I’m speaking to you) and other times for longer sentences for something as simple as a bar brawl, purely because of his storied rap sheet (Ohio, for example).

Between his sentences in California, Kansas, and Kentucky, a court-ordered stint in rehab in West Virginia, and after the final leg in Ohio, he was on the road to recovery, self-discovery, and sobriety in Philadelphia. Somewhere in that time, his mother died, and he inherited enough money that he could break his father’s pattern of dependence, and it was around that time he learned about me. Or rather, he remembered that he left my teenaged mother, alone and pregnant, seventeen or eighteen years earlier.

From photos, from handcrafted letters, from Internet searches, he felt born again. Literally, the undertow of a religious conversion penetrated him like a reverse exorcism, and for him, all his mistakes were suddenly nil. He had a purpose in life. Righting a wrong, correcting a former injustice of paternity, placing all chance of finally finishing Steps Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, and Twelve in the body and soul of one Noa P. Singleton and becoming her confidant, her friend, her father. But he wasn’t ready yet. He needed to make something of himself first, so he purchased Dive Bar, shortly thereafter quasi-palindroming it, and spent the next few years becoming the ex-alcoholic businessman he was the day I met him. Always with a bottle of water, a sweaty upper lip, and a palatable desperation for forgiveness.

His revisionist candor was remarkable, and for that, I carried a
modicum of respect for him. It wasn’t like he was hiding behind his record. Instead, he owned it, waving it proudly as his coat of arms to hang in front of Bar Dive. He would tell me in his bar with a handful of customers around that he won the Winfield Correctional Facility’s boxing tournament of 1993 by a fierce left hook. And he would never try to whisper—even in five-star restaurants on Walnut Street—that he had suffered from alcoholism for over a decade. And that he had dropped out of high school to explore the country. And that he felt a quadrant of remorse for leaving his own mother alone while he found himself exploring these great united states on the defendant’s side of the table in Kansas City, Missouri; Cincinnati, Ohio; Abilene, Texas; Louisville, Kentucky; and, of course, Los Angeles, California. I was fairly certain that he was dropping a few cities off the list and even more certain that there had to be additional charges in there beyond what he’d told me, but it didn’t bother me. If he was able to recount the embarrassment of leaving his mother, I was certainly far from a lone victim in his biography. What matters now, he told me one day, is that I’ve found you.

And I actually started to agree.

Quite clearly, though, our playing fields weren’t exactly even. For two people attempting reconciliation after a lifetime of absence, our arrangement was centered around his need to purge errors of his own past, as if doing so would make us a rehabilitated nuclear family. He knew nothing about me, apart from the fact that I was a substitute science teacher for the Philadelphia Public School System and ran three miles twice, sometimes three times, a week, and, after a handful of months, it was no longer working for him.

We were strolling through Rittenhouse Square eating ice cream on one of the visits allegedly on my home turf, when he chose to bring this flaw to my attention. A string quartet from the Curtis Institute of Music was playing Bach in the gazebo. He was licking a chocolate waffle cone of Cookies ’N Cream, and it was dripping all over his hands and sticking to the corners of his mouth rather humorously, given the context. A sooty drop of vanilla fell to his chin and
he removed it with his tongue, long and lean as an amusement park slide, cleaning off the frozen remains. He first looked up to the high-rise apartment buildings surrounding us, almost with longing, before returning his gaze to me.

“Are you embarrassed by me?” he finally asked.

Of course I was.

“No,” I said, biting my cheeks. I threw away the bottom inch of my wafer cone in a nearby trashcan.

“It’s okay,” he said sweetly. “I know you are. You don’t have to pretend.” He folded his arms together on his chest. “It’s just that I’m the one talking all the time.”

“I’m glad you noticed that, at least,” I said.

“That’s not how it’s supposed to work, though,” he urged. “We’re both supposed to talk.”

“I hate to tell you, Caleb, but you sort of set a precedent I can’t really change now. Rules are rules.”

“Noa …”

I walked toward the fountain.

“I want to be a part of your life,” he said, quickly following.

I forced a laugh. “What exactly do you think this is?”

We both sat on the ledge. It was wet, I remember that much, but I also remember that it didn’t bother me sitting on the lip of the fountain, with a baby’s breath of water spraying us from behind. I actually enjoyed the dainty massage soaking into the small of my back.

My father placed an arm around me. After twenty-three years, there was no need for him to walk into my life with the same oeuvre as, say, Marlene Dixon would a few months down the line. But I also realized he wouldn’t relent. Silent in the current that was his verbal catharsis, part of me knew it was bound to change directions at some point.

“Okay.” I surrendered, looking over toward the quartet strumming in the wooden gazebo. One tornado and they’d all be gone—instruments, wooden platform, people. “I’ll tell you more about me if you first tell me two little factoids about yourself that have nothing to
do with Bar Dive or Dive Bar or your petty thievery across the continental United States or your six hundred and thirteen steps toward self improvement or boxing or Kentucky,” I said, waving two little fingers of peace. The Curtis Institute students were still playing Bach in the background. “Two things for one. Tit for tat,” I added. “
That’s
how it works.”

The string quartet nearly drowned us. The apparition of those four different instruments still sits above me in my cell today. Their wooden limbs and ebony slopes, their horsehaired manes and rosined strings somehow, put together with calm and order and calculation, made music. Nowhere else can four disparate sounds live together in such delicacy of balance. It is the loudest thing I can remember about that conversation. Invisible streams of remorse and regret drip from my dry eyes when I think about it and when I think about him. I fold my hands over my heart, feeling the beat of those four musicians, tapping the floor to keep the beat, making their own metronome of quarter notes, eighth notes, half notes.