Since he commuted from Austin to wherever his rig was working at the time (during my childhood, most frequently in the Gulf of Mexico), we never met anyone else who worked on rigs, let alone their families. The closest I came to confirming the existence of my dad’s coworkers was answering occasional phone calls to the house from guys with names like Bigfoot and ’Bama, who shouted into the receiver and with whom my dad held long, laughing conversations in which he used phrases like “that stupid sonuvabitch.” I wouldn’t have been able to articulate the distinctions between blue-collar work and white-collar work then, or known what to make of the fact that my dad’s collar was actually bright orange, but I knew enough to get angry and defensive when my friends balked at our strange, movable holiday plans or the possibility that my dad was missing my birthday for the third year in a row, and I learned to wrap my missing him into a tight ball and never mention it.
Around this time, I learned to forge my parents’ signatures. It was less an act of delinquency than a parlor trick I thought might one day come in handy. My mother’s signature required speed and a loose handling of the pen, a momentum and half focus probably necessary for keeping one eye on the kids in the checkout line and the other on the mounting total and its meaning for the bank account. My father’s signature was more challenging, a squat, angular carving whose pressure drove a trough into the paper and whose slashing final s looped back and crossed a t six letters back. To do it, I had to bear down with my upper arm and grip the pen in my fist like I was trying to strangle it.
I remember this because it was my first real insight into my father’s character at a time when I was desperate to find him, to understand why he left all the time and who he was when he was gone. I looked in his side of my parents’ closet, in its dark, leather-reeking neatness. He took up about a third as much space as my mother, whose bright, soft, flowing fabrics poked out at all angles and smelled like lavender. I looked in the one drawer where he kept his spare rig coveralls, tightly rolled in neat bundles, the fire-retardant ones with “STARNES” stitched across the back of the shoulders in reflective tape so he could be seen at night, or in a gale, something for a searchlight to pick up if he went over the side. Everywhere I looked, I saw my mom, a loose, pervasive presence, covering our world from corner to corner. My dad, tightly compartmentalized, a coiled spring, the driving force ruling the calendar, was much harder to find.
The year of the P-82 was when I began to notice my father’s depression, but as a kid, my ability to understand what I was seeing was limited. I was used to him taking long naps in the first few days of being home, but when I caught him staring at the wall above the television during his baseball games, and saw that runs and errors were accumulating on both sides without comment or reaction from him, I knew something was wrong. When he was “in a funk,” as my mother called it, there were no games of catch in the front yard, no trivia questions at dinner, and he seemed irritable, much more likely to snap at me and my brother for making too much noise. It was hard to pin down exactly what was going on because it didn’t look like what I pictured as “sad”—it was more like hearing an odd whine in a motor whose sound I usually didn’t register. It spooked me. I remember coming up to him lying on his side on the couch one evening, thinking I would wake him for dinner, and finding that his eyes were open, and that when I spoke he didn’t answer. He didn’t even blink.
Visiting the P-82 was a complicated kind of vindication. It was physical proof that rigs existed, and it was something real to scowl at for having taken him away from us, but it was also impressive in its sheer mass, in the power of its silent machinery and the perilous heights of its creaking derrick. To hear my dad explain it, when the rig was fully operational, you had to know exactly what you were doing and where you were headed at any particular moment to avoid the very real possibility of being whacked in the back by a giant swinging piece of pipe or crushed in a massive set of tongs.
We had to reach out from the side of the dock and grab hold of a metal ladder attached to one of the pylons and climb to reach the first deck, and I remember being exhilarated at the possibility of falling into the scummy dock water. I asked my dad if I could chip off one of the pink and lavender barnacles crusted to the side of the column and he said if I could see myself chipping off barnacles all day with a long-handled scraper, I might make a decent roustabout. The rest of our short tour involved a lot of climbing, a lot of peering over massive drop-offs at giant machinery, and the sickening vertigo that comes from watching the water under the grating at our feet. We finished up by looking at Dad’s quarters, a small, metal-walled, fluorescent-lit room with a twin bed and some dented metal cabinets. He surveyed the room with a kind of tired scowl and wouldn’t come past the doorway.
“This is where you slept?” I asked, suddenly feeling really sorry for him. The drilling floor wasn’t far away. There was no way this room would ever be quiet when the rig was operational.
“For the little time that I got for sleeping?” Dad said. “Yeah, this was it.”
“But . . . what about all your stuff? Did you ever . . .” The words were drying up in my mouth as I realized how silly they sounded. “Did you ever decorate the place? Like, hang up pictures?”