Modern Men Make a Family

My Mother didn’t know what swatting was when we pulled into the driveway behind the Hazmat van. She kept asking the same question. 

“A teenager did this? For fun?” 

Before I could answer, two men in yellow suits came through the front door, carrying a plastic evidence bag with a hard white ball inside. It looked like a snowball made by somebody careful. My Father was naked on the living room carpet, his flaccid dick old and tired. Just dead weight between his legs. This wasn’t swatting. 

“We were listening to Yaeji,” Martika told the cop in the gas mask. She was a fine caregiver, and the only one my Mother could afford to hire away from the Polish retirement home. Martika wiped tears across her sharp eastern European jawline and said my Father must’ve thought the baggie was from her. “For fun.” 

The cop nodded. He looked diabetic. 

I knew my Father used to do cocaine at the Hacienda in Manchester in the late eighties. Once he saw a guy get shot outside the club. He told me about it in fourth grade while driving me to soccer practice. 

“Don’t do murders,” he said. 

The yellow-suited men grabbed my Mother when she tried shoving past them. “Who even sends anthrax anymore?” I asked. 

At the wake, my Father’s old bohemian friends screened clips from a documentary he made about endometriosis around 2001. It played at regional festivals nobody cared about. Apparently women in the Vassar College Class of 1981 Facebook group hated it. They said men shouldn’t make films about women’s pain. My Mother fought with them online for weeks. Eventually, she wanted me to help. 

“I’m only on Instagram,” I lied. “I blocked Dad because he kept posting photos of J. Edgar.” That was our dog. A scruffy terrier. 

During the eulogy I said that Dad loved J. Edgar so much, and that “she was generally more beloved than the disgraced FBI director.” A few people laughed. 

My Mother didn’t speak during the service. She sat still beside Aunt NiNi and Aunt Shirley like a mob wife who knew the risks of the man she married. At one point she leaned toward them and said, “There’s still more death coming.” 

They ignored her. Old women know better than to acknowledge stuff like that.

Later, one of my Father’s former students put another DVD into the player. He was younger than me but already had the swollen red eyes of a serious drinker. People in the back of the funeral home whispered that this was the unfinished film rumored to be my Father’s masterpiece. I remember thinking, Dad’s like Orson Welles. His work lives on. 

Near the end of the film Aunt NiNi screamed. Everybody turned. My Mother was standing in the projector light, holding J. Edgar against her chest. The dog looked limp and prop-like. 

“I fed her poinsettias until she threw up,” my Mother said. “Then I fed her more.” Nobody moved. She looked at her sisters. 

“I told you.” 

Seven years later I finished my Father’s documentary about assisted suicide clinics in western Canada. I dedicated it to my Mother, Tony Wilson, and Jack Kevorkian. 

Nobody liked it. 

It’s still the only thing I’ve ever made.