The Relative State of Georgia

So I've started to write a bit about my relationship with my father. As cliché as this sounds for a topic, I realize there are just issues personal to the writer that have to be sounded out. It's a possibility that my father even knows of the existence of my blog and he reads it. Anyway here's an essay/monologue that might be included in my men and violence monologue series that my friend Brady Moss has agreed to perform. This is an early draft. Enjoy.

My Father, Georgia

Let me tell you the story of a book. I was fourteen when I bought my first copy of The Great Gatsby. I knew it only by reputation. I think I liked the name. I was from the Great Lakes State. My family came from Great Britain. Got my first kiss at a place called Great Skate. The Great Gatsby. I believed in patterns. Anyway, it was an old and ratty paperback. Yellow edge pages. On the cover was the original painting by Frank Cugat of the haunting woman’s face over the glaring brightness of Coney Island. The green streak of a tear on her face. If you smelled the pages, it had that distinct mustiness of books. Like dust. Like crumbled bones of trees. I had a journal then. I wrote that’s what time smelled like.

This was the book I brought with me flying into the humidity of a Georgia autumn. Georgia. Where my Mom had left my Dad. He stayed like she’d cut all the bridges on the way up to Michigan. He didn’t come see me because he was stuck there. He was too important to leave. He was Georgia. Interchangeable. The state had just seemed to take on him for me. I pictured it as big and full of chuckles. A kingdom fit for an exiled father. It was the first time I’d seen him in years and I agreed to spend a week with him. He said “Deep Sea Fishing”. I asked him if it was in Georgia. He said, “No, Florida. We’ll drive down there together.” It struck me as sort of betrayal to Georgia. It struck me that he could leave the state.

I don’t have the book anymore. Reading it actually destroyed it. Due to some weathering or water damage, the binding couldn’t hold the pages. So every time I turned a page, it came off in my hand. And then I would throw it away as if it never existed. The book felt mystical. It was disappearing. I was absorbing it. When I finished and there was nothing left of my accomplishment, it felt as if Mr. Fitzgerald wrote it just for me.

Nick, the narrator, is a simple straightforward person who observes more than participates in life. He becomes entangled in the rekindled love affair between Jay Gatsby and married Daisy Buchanan. I was particularly drawn to Gatsby. A man in love with a memory of a southern girl. A man who remade himself and became exactly the person he believed that she would want.

My dad and I drove down to Florida. He was my dreams made flesh. Long hair and full thick beard. His fingertips and nails black from fixing stuff. He’d basically constructed the truck we were driving in. Just willed it into existence out of a pile of metal and parts. He was exactly the way I’d thought he would be. This great paragon of manhood. He had embraced the primitive man, gone back to some cave inside himself and found the true male. He was a hunter. He loved guns. He once cleaned a deer in the shower of his dorm. He carried a knife on his person at all times. His arms and chest were thick with muscles. He said he had to grow a beard because his hair grew so fast he has to shave twice a day. That’s how much testosterone he was given. He couldn’t stop the hair.

When the conversation lagged, I read. I shoved the pages down beside the seat and I forgot them later. Sometimes the wind from the open windows would catch the page and send it sailing over the Spanish Moss of the Georgia landscape. I bet the rain and mold took the pages right back into the forest. In the beginning of the book, Nick sees Gatsby trying to lure Daisy back. Gatsby wants her exactly as she is. Except not married to Tom and in love with him. Nick paints the plight of Gatsby in a sad but hopeful tone. I rooted for Jay Gatsby. I wanted him to get Daisy, capture her wild southern beauty and make it part of his life.

The boat was perfect. Me and my Dad out in the deep clear blue. We strung the lines with chunks of squid. We pulled up huge fish. 26 inches, 40 inches! We drank cans of Coke and crushed them. He with his giant hands, me with some help from my feet. We laughed at rain and kept fishing anyway. We were great explorers on the Isle of Man. I felt all the shackles of the gentle raising of my Mother falling away. I stopped thinking of petty concerns like school and hygiene. I knew this was my genetic destiny. To grow a beard, move to Georgia and live in a wonderland of fishing and hunting and metal work. I reveled in the horrible teenage moustache I grew. We didn’t put on shirts all week. I could feel the southern sun activating the long dormant hair follicles of my chest.

At night I’d read about Gatsby, Nick, and Daisy. I started to realize it wasn’t going to go well. Gatsby was kidding himself, he was delusional. Daisy would never leave her husband Tom. Gatsby had done everything for her. Moved next to her, spent time with her, wooed her with everything that he knew Daisy liked. And still she was devoted to Tom, this awful man who felt no allegiance to women and spread his seed wherever he wanted. I felt furious and cheated. Like the book had let me down. I remember reading the part where Gatsby brings Daisy and Nick up to his bedroom. Gatsby takes out dozens of brightly colored shirts and tosses them into the air. Daisy is crying because of the opulence, the beautiful superficial view of Gatsby’s shirts floating in the air. And Nick just watches the absurdity of it all. When I finished that page I let the ocean bury it.

It was about the fourth day into our trip I noticed the stink. Dead fish and unwashed man. I started to think of the guns, the trips he told me about, I wondered at the expense of this trip. Why he never paid child support. Realizations that all of our conversations centered around his interests. I started to hear the snide things he’d been saying about my mom. We barely talked about me. He never explained why he’d never written. Or why he’d stopped sending things for my birthday. He never said anything about his other child, my sister. I realized that my Dad’s interests, his existence, stretched as far as Georgia and no farther.

That’s when I realized I identified more with Nick than Gatsby. Nick’s detached observations, Nick’s belief in truth. When the Coney Island world Gatsby built falls apart, Nick saves himself with a steady foot in reality. When Gatsby dies in the end, he’s deluded that he’ll still win Daisy back. You could say he died in his imagination. Or that reality kills him. Years later, my father had a nervous breakdown and never left his mind again. I thought I was Gatsby. My dad was.

I finished the book on the flight back somewhere over Georgia. I handed the last pages to the stewardess.