The following is an excerpt from the story Father of Mine:
My father died on a summer night in August. That was seventeen years ago. I had been out drinking in a neighborhood bar on the corner of 57th Street and Tenth Avenue. I was twenty-three and beginning to like bars and had never much liked my father. The Mets were on the tube that night. They had a guy named John Milner playing first base for them. The Little Hammer, he was called in the papers, suggesting that if he ever got his thing together he could
be a big hammer like Hank Aaron, only from the left side. The Little Hammer hit a home run that night. I was in my apartment a few minutes when the phone rang. It was my sister calling. My younger sister. “Daddy’s dead,” she said.
Said isn’t the right word. “Daddy’s dead,” she sobbed. She repeated the fact a few times.
“O.K. O.K.,” I finally said, but she wouldn’t stop. I felt like I was fending her off.
“Mommy is worried that you won’t go to the funeral. Promise her that you will.”
“Look. Enough,” I snapped, and cut the conversation there.The cab driver was a woman with a duck’s ass haircut. She wore a purple tank top. Her armpits were hairy and her shoulders were pimpled. The hack license said her name was Hilda Gomez. I looked at it after I had given her the address and she had put the car in gear without acknowledging me. Up on Broadway, in the eighties, there had been an accident. A VW had gone up on the island and struck a tree. The front of it was smashed and the driver was still inside. Hilda rubbernecked as long as she could, before the cars behind us honked her along. “That’s one dead driver,” she laughed, breaking her silence, and sucked on her eyetooth.
Download this story as a pdf: Father of Mine