{Excerpted from the essay My Father Was a Traveling Salesman, by Jennifer H. Schaller, forthcoming in SR 55/56.}
I still see my father in the movies but it’s no longer the heartfelt father/daughter films and shows. A few years ago, my boyfriend and now husband, Karl, and I were watching the movie Blow. The movie is based on a true story. Johnny Depp plays a drug trafficker who can’t get his life together. He has a daughter. He makes her promises he can’t keep. He was arrested and sentenced to life. From prison, he wrote his daughter and begged her to write or see him. She never did.
I cried at the end of Blow. My tears had been backed up for years, like water pressure on a plugged drain. The plug finally broke. Blow was like Draino for my sadness. I sat on Karl’s couch, gushing tears but I leaned forward, pushing my hair in front of my face. I scurried to the bathroom, hoping Karl wouldn’t notice I was crying. He knew my dad had been to prison, but he didn’t know how it affected me. Karl began watching the deleted scenes of the movie.
Even when my father was in prison, I held out hope that he would one day become the parent I dreamed of. But we’ve never connected or reconnected. My father was eventually re-sentenced after having a retrial and ended up spending six years in prison. At the time I watched Blow, my father had been out of prison for three years and I had only seen him once.
Five minutes passed. Ten minutes passed. I couldn’t pull myself together. Karl knocked on the door and asked if I was okay. I mumbled yes. He asked me to unlock the door. I told him no. He asked again. He had a bachelor pad bathroom with a dirty tub and dusty floor. I was sitting on a crusty bathroom rug. I dried my eyes and unlocked the door. He walked in and asked me if I was okay. I said yes. He told my I was lying. I told him that the movie was so painfully like my own life that it hurt to watch. I looked past Karl and into the mirror. My nose was more swollen than I’d ever seen it. I wondered if that would be the last time I cried over my father.
