1988, my mother is in the kitchen, on the phone with her best friend Betsy, and I am in the living room eavesdropping. I am thirteen years old but I am a city kid, so I think I’m all grown up and deserve to know what’s going on in my house.
She’s talking about my father, of course. He’s a jazz musician—he can play any instrument, he’s amazing—and a part-time sous chef on the dinner shift, and his unpredictable schedule seems to be troubling my mother. “I can’t keep an eye on him all the time,” she tells Betsy. “What am I supposed to do, follow him?” He’s been in and out of the house a lot lately. One day he was supposed to walk me to school but we all discovered at once that he hadn’t come home the night before and then my mother was late to work and was teary-eyed and angry and held my hand too tightly and her eye makeup looked like shit and everything was a mess. “I have to work all day,” she says. My mother has a job with an activist group. She is an organizer. The only thing she can’t organize is my father. “Wherever he goes is where he goes.” My brother has gone on tour with his own band and my mother is miserable and school is deadly except for my art classes and I am worried about my father. So I decide, all on my own, to follow my father. I will get to the bottom of this.
I wake up the next morning and dress in all black, secret spy style. My mother eyes me and asks if I’m depressed, and I say, “No, I’m just cool.” I eat oatmeal, gather my books in my backpack, sling it over my shoulder. My father walks me to school, holding my hand, and we gingerly dodge the piles of garbage on the street. It’s cold, but no snow yet, next week maybe. He’s distracted, but he smiles at me, hugs me goodbye, tells me to be the best me I can be. I walk inside, hovering in the doorway. I watch him leave. No one at my crowded school notices or cares when I walk back outside. This seems normal. This feels right. I am keeping an eye on him. It’s the most exciting thing I’ve ever done in my life. It is illicit and illegal and I could get in trouble for it. I love it.
He is wearing fluorescent-orange sunglasses, which he bought on St. Marks last summer along with three other pairs, one for me, one for my mother, one for my brother. I picked pink, my mother picked purple, and my brother picked black, because he really is cool. My father is also wearing headphones. He lights a cigarette. He’s off in his own little world. The day is his until his dinner shift.
I follow him to the 86th Street station, stopping once as he gets a coffee to go from a street vendor. The subway platform is packed, the perfect place for a girl to hide and watch her father. We take the C train downtown. He’s nodding his head slowly, he’s smiling to himself. There’s my father, happy, alone with his music. And this makes me happy, too. I like seeing him this way. But also because I feel like I’m learning a secret to life.
He gets off at West 4th, and so do I, following him to a townhouse on a small side street. He buzzes. He’s in. I cruise by. I peer through the doorway. I keep walking. I anchor myself at the corner. I wait a half hour, and he doesn’t come out. I wait another half hour. During this time I have an argument with myself about the pros and cons of buzzing the doorbell myself. I’ll get in trouble for skipping school. Or what if I see something I don’t want to see and then I can’t unsee it? But what if my father is in trouble? What if I could help him? Also I am thirteen and my mind is impatient and curious and I am getting cold and I have to pee. I cross the street, and buzz.
I wait another five minutes, I buzz the door again. I hear someone yell, “Christ.” Finally a man shuffles down the hallway in a bathrobe and striped silk pajamas. He is dusty-looking, pale, with an enormous frame, so he seems fat, or big anyway, but there’s not a lot of meat on this man: he looks hungry. Yet he has these really great things about him, like he has a gorgeous head of cinnamon-colored hair, and also his eyes are the most perfect green eyes I have ever seen, the green seems to be crystallized, and he is holding me with them, I am his, I am in his eyes. Then he shields them from the white winter light behind me. “What do you want?” he says. “You selling Girl Scout cookies or something?” He rubs his stomach. “Actually, wow, I would absolutely eat some thin mints right now.”
It is then that I recognize his voice: he is the costar of an animated movie trilogy I watched when I was a kid. He played a mischievous talking cat, the sidekick of a heroic talking dog. It was a very simple story: they had adventures all over the world. I don’t know the actor’s face as well as his voice because the rest of his movies are for adults, although I did see him on last year’s Academy Awards show, which I watched with my family, a bowl of popcorn between us, and everyone got along that night, my father clear-eyed and present, my mother sated. He had clapped for this man when his name was announced and we all stared at my father and he said, “What? I love that movie.” And now here he is. Standing right in front of me.
“I’m looking for my daddy,” I say, slipping out of grown-up land. I say his name. “Is he here? I saw him come in here.”
“Ah, crap,” says the actor. “OK. All right. Crap.” He peers outside, looks in both directions. “Well, come in, don’t stand out there.” I step inside the house. Everything around me is glossy dark wood. “But stay here.” He holds his index finger near my face, like I’m a dog. “Stay.” He walks down the hallway into what looks like a kitchen in the distance and then moves to the left, out of view.
There is a bookshelf with framed pictures of the actor and other people, some of whom are famous. There is a picture of him on a boat with three other men, and they are all sunburned, and there is an ice bucket filled with champagne in front of them. There is a picture from another era, the 1940s maybe, and it is of a young, pretty, stern-looking woman, her hair in precise, upswept curls. There is a stuffed animal version of the cat character he played, with a cigarette burn in its eye. I float the idea of stealing something from this man, which has never occurred to me before in my life, but all bets are off, my mind is melting. I’m ready to both break and enforce every law that exists.