the king is dead! long live the king!
RIP Richard William King Jr (May 27, 1964-January 27, 2024)
I was preparing for a highly anticipated date when I received the news. I stared at the text for a few seconds.
What should I do?
I decide I am going to proceed with my evening and not mention it to anybody.
Then I realize that is crazy.
I shift into a composed problem solving mode. I text her that my dad died and I can no longer make our date. She is of course kind and understanding. I call Olivia. I text Gabby and Max. I make an Instagram story which feels insane and tasteless but it is efficient to get the news across in one fell swoop. I order groceries. I think about anything else I need to get done before this sets in. I put on a documentary about the Duggar family. I can’t leave the couch.
●●●
Austin is dead unless you go to Barton Springs on a week day during the winter. Then you see it is very much alive and weird as advertised.
There are hippies and geriatrics and biohackers and houseless all lounging, swimming, and sauntering around harmoniously.
I make my way to a spot up a hill on the north side of the pool.
Down below, a man with a sitar and what looks like a Roman terracotta water jug starts to explain something about the planets to a passerby. A man with a prosthetic leg walks up and talks with the man with the sitar for a long time.
I enter the pool in efforts to cold plunge the dead estranged dad out of me. My nerves are pacified briefly. I think for a moment that the worst of it is over. Ha!
●●●
At some point that night, I muster up the strength to brush my teeth. I do a thorough job. I sit back down on the couch. A beat. I get up and brush my teeth again. I don’t know why.
●●●
After my mother died I received a letter from a friend in Chicago, a former Maryknoll priest, who precisely intuited what I felt. The death of a parent, he wrote, “despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought had gone to ground long ago.”
—Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
●●●
Complicated grief feels like coming down from acid. I can’t explain.
●●●
On the morning of the third day, I wake up inconsolably angry. The last time I felt this angry was when Scott died. I pick a fight with my mother who I sparingly talk to. I call her later to apologize for coming in so hot but that I meant everything I said. She was kind and understanding. She decoded my rage, knowing it meant My god you better patch things up with me before you die too.
●●●
I return to Barton Springs.
The man with the sitar is here again and is blowing a digeridoo into the water. A topless woman with a mermaid tail sits on the side of the pool. The man with the prosthetic leg is also here and talks with the mermaid for a little too long before laying down on the grass next to a taxidermy mallard he brought.
●●●
I loved my father deeply.
He was like no one I ever met. The best way I can describe him is like he was a character in a Hunter S. Thompson novel.
He was a hedonist that lived off the grid and abided by nobody’s rules but his own. He was allergic to emotion unless he was hammered, then he would sob and tell me things that haunt me to this day.
He introduced me to dancing to disco and smoking cigars and shooting guns and drinking water (growing up my mother did not care if we drank water as she thought it tasted like rocks.) He tried to show me smoking weed out of a soda can but I told him that he shouldn’t smoke weed out of a soda can.
I have his sense of humor and loud voice and body hair and social intelligence and love of entertaining others. I also have his bitchiness and obstinance.
I have his name and his face now that I have transitioned. He died not knowing these parts of me.
●●●
I romanticized my father throughout my adolescence and early adulthood. When I quit drinking, the reality of my relationship with him settled in. He was my favorite drinking buddy and without the alcohol there was not much left to our dynamic except decades of pain I worked hard to minimize.
I wrote him a letter saying so and that unless he was willing to work with me to fix our relationship, I could not be in contact with him.
He did not respond. He told my aunt he thought my therapist was brainwashing me into writing the letter, that the words I carefully chose over hours and hours did not sound like me. It was an insulting response that indicated how little he knew me. Regardless, I could not help but feel compassion for him. I believe it was easier for him to believe this than to confront the brutal truth that I might actually really feel the way I felt.
He knew he was dying when he received the letter and let our relationship die along with him. It is a choice I did not make but one I must learn to make peace with for the rest of my life.
●●●
There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.
―Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas