Nothing to See Here

Fear

When I learned my father had died the fear drained out of me. I was a pimply fifteen-year-old and couldn't wait to reach sixteen, get my license, hit the road. I planned to escape my life by stealing my father's car and driving toward the horizon. As long as my unknown destination was far away it didn't matter where the adventure ended. But my father saved me the trouble because fifteen was the year he left for work in the sullen cold one morning and never came home.

Some things about my father didn't scare me. He smelled of machinery and oxidation, with dark lines of grit permanently implanted beneath his fingernails. Sharp stubble covered his face even after he shaved, his razor a useless prop. His course, black hair was abandoning ship, leaving his scalp shining beneath the thin. He departed for work each day in darkness and returned exhausted to spend most of his downtime watching TV and sipping whiskey from smudged tumblers. He sometimes smiled, but never gave a clue as to the trigger. More often than not he mumbled.

But most memories of my father involved fear. He blamed my existence for depriving his. He told me to speak up and shut up in the same breath and demanded I take it like a man even though I wasn't. Tears offended and infuriated him. He wanted to give me something to cry about and hit me harder. Sometimes I could escape his fury unaided, but usually my mother would step in and divert his attention, a sacrificial distraction. I would hide from him in the basement or bushes in the backyard or sometimes in our neighbor's shed, but I couldn't hide from the fear.

Often I entertained fantasies of sneaking into his bedroom at night with a rusty screwdriver while he snored and jabbing his temple, or dropping rat poison into his ice cubes. I imagined I was a black belt in some unknown martial art and could break all his fingers and tear his ears off. I saw myself hitting him in the nose until blood stained the carpet. He made me want to do these things I didn't want to do. Fear makes us somebody else.

Two months after he disappeared my mom got a phone call from a police officer in Texas, and we learned that my father had been stabbed in a dive bar in Houston. They had no leads in catching the killer, not that I cared. I was glad he was dead, relieved, the oppressive burden of fear lifted. The crushing mass of his abuse contained a gravity so heavy I felt paralyzed and knowing he would never come home was a pardon from crimes I hadn't committed. But without that anchor I began floating away, untethered, ungrounded.

The fear had been everything, and without it my life felt empty, devoid of something I thought I didn't want. I spent years trying to rediscover the intense rush of true fear. I tried base jumping. I surfed trains. I ran across lanes of freeway traffic searching for fear on the other side, but it was never enough. I became a stuntman, the one crazy enough to do stunts no one else considered. I declined parachutes and safety harnesses. Fearless, untouchable, a lost soul bereft of the throbbing blood pressure, the mental acuity, the hyper beating heart, the instant and complete experience of my entire life at that moment when death seemed inevitable. My tolerance to feel fear maxed out, numb to all potential for such accelerated moments of singular purpose, an adrenaline junkie immune to my drug of choice.

It wasn't until I hit my own son years later that I finally found fear again.