I Love You and I'm Leaving You Anyway (2 page)

MY THIRD EX-HUSBAND CALLED
me today.

He wants to see me. “Why?” I say, genuinely curious. It’s been just over two years since I last
had sex with
saw Paul. That’s when we gamely tried to paste our marriage back together in time to celebrate our one-year wedding anniversary. In bed.

We failed at the reconciliation. The bed part, as always, worked out great.

Since then, we’ve spoken on the phone from time to time, and lately he’s been calling more often. But he’s never asked to see me. Until right this second.

“I’ve been thinking…” He pauses, unsure if he’s really going to say what he’s about to say. “I was wondering—” He stops short. “It would be kind of like a before-and-after thing. You could see me before. And after. For comparison purposes.”

I should mention that Paul’s getting electroconvulsive therapy next week.

“If it works”—he means the electroconvulsive therapy—“would you maybe…” He stops once more. There’s something really vulnerable in his voice. Something I haven’t heard in a long time. Like,
since we were married and manic depression took over his life, driving him all kinds of lying, cheating crazy.

“I was wondering if maybe you would…like me again?” He says “like” in the fifth-grader sense of the word, as in
boy-girl
like. “I know I blew it.”

It’s not as though I’ve been waiting to hear a mea culpa all this time, but this, I must admit, feels like a very nice start to one. Still, this man—this adorable, brilliant, sexy man—has got mental problems. Don’t, as they say, get it twisted.

“Oh, Paul,” I sigh doubtfully. “I don’t know.”

“Please, I really want to see you.” He’s almost begging, and what woman doesn’t find that kind of irresistible?

I take a long, deep breath. What do you say when your ex-husband asks you on a date to coffee?

SOMETHING’S DEFINITELY GOING ON.
Because that’s the second plot-twisting phone call I’ve gotten recently from a key man in my life. The first was a week ago.

I am walking out the door to work, when the phone starts to ring. I know better than to answer it (when I get distracted leaving the house I usually end up forgetting something important, like my kid), but I pick it up anyway, because for me a ringing phone has always had a Wonka-bar quality to it, like,
You never know, it might be something really, really cool, like a great job offer or a new man or a million dollars or
…So I press the “on” button.

“Hello?”

Pause. Beat. Beat. Institutional recorded voice:
“This call is from a federal prison.”

Oh, shit
. It’s not a million dollars.

It’s my dad, who’s serving twenty-three years for conspiracy to distribute cocaine. He calls me every two weeks, like clockwork, and
we talk mostly about what I’m doing in my life. We already know what he’s doing in his. Sitting there.

“This call is from—”

“FREDDIE
.” He says his name so perfectly, like he’s just arrived at, say, Hyde or Villa or Beatrice Inn (or whichever “It” club you prefer) with two totally hot chicks and he knows he’s on the list.

“—an inmate at a federal prison. To decline this call, hang up. To block all future calls from this inmate, press ‘7.’ To accept this call, press—”

Don’t think I haven’t got a recurring morbid fantasy about accidentally pressing “7” and never again getting another phone call from my dad. But that would leave letter writing as the only available means of communication, and if that happened, he might as well be doing time on the International Space Station. Because I am the worst letter writer in the history of jailed fathers. In the fourteen years my dad has been incarcerated this time around I have managed to send exactly three letters. (In my defense, each contained a picture of my son.) And I call myself a writer! I am somehow sure Nelson Mandela’s kids coughed up more than three letters in fourteen years. Of course,
their
dad was a hero. Mine was a pimp.

I press
FIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVE
. Good and long to make sure Automated Prison Recording Barbie hears me. Then I wait. There’s always a weird moment where I’m not sure which of us—Freddie or me—is going to speak first, which leads to some awkward “you-go-no-you-go” overlap. I’ve learned to just be silent and let him speak first.

“Hey, baby!”

Freddie always says hello like this. With a certain forced brightness that makes me feel obligated to sound happy in return. Sometimes I don’t feel like sounding happy. And I don’t bother to try to hide it. This is a relatively new development. For years I urged myself to sound cheerful. Then one day I overheard a friend on the phone with her mother and realized that normal adult children are annoyed
when their parents call. And all I really, really want to be is normal.

But nothing about this is normal. Our phone calls are timed, fifteen minutes apiece, to the second. I think the inmates buy some kind of phone card, but exactly how it works is one of those federal-prison mysteries you just don’t bother to inquire about when you only have a quarter of an hour two times a month in which to conduct an entire father-daughter relationship. There’s a necessity to get straight to whatever talking points you’re in the mood to get to.

“I watched the show again last night,” Freddie offers.

This makes me feel all warm toward my dad. I was a journalist for a long time, but now I’m a television writer and he has been faithfully watching the show I write for, every week. I recognize this as a dad-in-prison act of love. There is a separate scale for what constitutes an act of love for a dad in prison, because dads in prison can’t do normal things like carve the Thanksgiving turkey or fix your leaky faucet or give you money for a down payment on a house. In this case, simply watching my show qualifies, because I know he must have had to pull some serious strings to commandeer one of the communal televisions every Monday night, especially since the show does not fall into a felon-friendly genre. I imagine he had to give away a lot of cigarettes. And he doesn’t even smoke.

“Well, what did you think?” I’m only asking for the sake of conversation.

But Freddie breaks it down, and he doesn’t spare my feelings. “The ending was good, but you lost half of us before you got there.”

Ouch. Really? I’m visualizing the inmates getting up in droves, preferring to go back to their cells (!) rather than find out what happens to Dan and Katie at the end of the episode. Obviously, this is not a good sign. Genre notwithstanding, you want them to be loving your shit at the federal penitentiary. Because if the captive audience isn’t interested, how are you going to hang on to the regular Americans? The ones with the Internet and Halo 3?

“This call is from a federal prison.”

There’s Barbie with the two-minute warning. Already?! This always happens. Just as I get over my mild dad-in-prison petulance and am really starting to enjoy his company, the call is almost over. “Now listen,” he says, “we’re running out of time. I got something to talk to you about. Guess what today is?”

My mind goes blank.
What day could today possibly be? A holiday? No. His birthday? No.
Our birthdays are exactly two weeks apart, and they had just passed. (We are Virgos together, which must explain something.) No one has died, that I know of, and besides, he would have led with that.

“I give up. What is today?”

“October twentieth,” he says.

I plug October 20 into my mental search engine, but even after .091 seconds, nothing comes up. “I give. Tell me.”

“It’s my release date!” Freddie’s excited, exultant even. He slaps his hands together and chortles—a big, giant, James Brown–like shout of
HAH!
“I’m coming home, baby! October twentieth, 2012. Five years from today!”

Mind you, my dad has been “getting out” since he got in, back when I was three. Usually any minute now. I have learned over the years to just say “Yeah, yeah” and go on with my life. But this time is different, I can tell. For starters, he gave me a date. A specific one.

This has a surprising effect on me. Kind of like the time I got my nose pierced. My mind thought,
Okay, cool, that was easy,
but the moment I tried to stand up my body was like
JEEBUS PRICE, SOMEONE JUST PUNCHED A HOLE IN ME WITH A NEEDLE THE SIZE OF THE ONES IN A SEWING MACHINE!
My insides are spinning and racing and rolling in all kinds of directions like a bucket full of marbles thrown on a cement floor. It’s one thing to have your dad in federal prison. It sucks, yes, but at least you know where he is, and you know he can only drive you crazy long-distance, and if you really really must, you know you can always press “7” to refuse all future calls.

But he just said that in five years—no, in four years, 364 days,
23 hours, and 59 minutes (and counting)—prison officials will give him a set of clothes, and $200, and a box packed with those three measly pictures I managed to send him, and they will lead him down a hall, and usher him through some doors, and then, finally, they will open the last door and he will walk through it. He will have served eighteen years. He will be seventy-six years old. And he will be a free man.

And all I can think is this:
I wonder where he’s going to live
?

SO THAT’S WHAT I’M THINKING
about while I’m sitting in this café, waiting for Paul to arrive. How I’m not ready for my dad to get out. How even though Paul is from an affluent family, is white, and went to Harvard, he’s a lot like my dad. Too much like my dad. Exactly like my dad? Yes, exactly like my dad. They both loved me and left me anyway. Then, once they were gone, they refused to let me go.

The two of them are the continuum of men in my life: from the very beginning until the very end, until…

Now.

As the minutes tick by, I consider that I don’t exactly know what I’m doing here waiting for Paul. On one level it’s simple: He asked to see me. I said yes. On another, more mysterious plane, there’s something bigger going on. It’s an intuitive flash—like when you’ve lost something, and you suddenly realize where you might have left it, even if it makes no sense to look there. It’s the precise opposite of what I usually do when I lose something, which is to look over and over in the same place, the place I think
it has to be
, even though I already know it’s not there, because I’ve searched that spot seven times already. When it comes to men, that describes me perfectly. Someone looking over and over in the same place for something that isn’t there. But, sitting in this coffee place, waiting for my third ex-husband to arrive, thinking about my dad coming home, it hits me all at once—

I think I know where to look now.

BY PRETTY MUCH ANY CONVENTIONAL standard,
my dad was bad. (And badass.) Terrible even.

For starters, he was a pimp.

A fur-coat-wearing, El Dorado–driving, sharkskin-suit-clad, pinky-ring-sporting, mustache-smoothing P.I.M.P., straight out of a blaxploitation picture. Eventually, he promoted himself to drug dealer, and there he also fit the stereotype, becoming a large-scale, conspiracy-heading, recidivist heroin and coke dealer just like on
Starsky and Hutch,
or maybe cooler, like in
Goodfellas,
if they were black. It sounds awful, right? Deplorable. Appalling. Immoral.

You dislike him already. I understand.

But here’s the thing about my dad. If you didn’t know anything about him, and I brought him over to your house for dinner, you would like him. You just would! First of all, he would be exceedingly polite. “Pleasure to make your acquaintance,” he would say upon meeting you. And he would say it in this mellifluous, almost singsong voice that would strike you as remarkably kindhearted and agreeable. That would cause you to take a closer look at his face, and you would notice the pleasing symmetry of his features, the sparkle in his eyes, and his overall warmth. He would offer to help you in the
kitchen, and you would accept. You’d discover that he’s a great cook, and so easy to talk to! You would feel that he liked you, and you would be correct. You’d feel like this was a particularly good hair day.

After dinner, he’d help clear the table and just start doing the dishes. Without even being asked! The two of you would tootle around the kitchen, cleaning up, and he’d ask you about the man in your life. If there wasn’t one, he’d say something about how “a beautiful and charming young lady such as yourself” won’t be single for long, and you’d believe him. Mostly because it’s true! You are beautiful and charming. We all are. Freddie knows that.

At the end of the evening, as we were walking out the door, he’d say, “Thank you,” with genuine gratitude, and off he would go, leaving you to think to yourself,
What a nice man
…You’d be so dazzled, you’d call me the next day to tell me how much you liked him. Just like I knew you would.

This is the fascinating dichotomy of my dad. It is what made him such a great dad. And, of course, what made him such a great pimp.

I NEVER WANTED GUYS WITH “GAME”
—the kind of smooth talkers who obviously know their way around a woman, or five. Quite the contrary. I spent the vast majority of my life with men at the other end of the continuum. Dating nice guys. Really nice guys.

Ultra Nice Guys.

Until age twenty-five, I was like someone who grew up with two fat parents and knows she will likely spend the rest of her life on a diet. Deep down, I knew that if I took even
the first bite
of Bad Boy, I would never want vegan pizza again. So I didn’t.

I just said no.

This wasn’t as difficult as it might sound, because I had two things working in my favor: I was afraid of sex (and of men in general); I was also extremely insecure. Which was kind of perfect really, since
super-sexy guys naturally want sex (a frightening fact if you’re scared of sex), and they almost always want it
now
(an even scarier reality if you’re insecure). What’s more, sexy guys don’t make any commitments (a truly intolerable condition if you’re still dealing with a lot of posttraumatic stress surrounding your years in foster care). The combination made them totally repulsive to me.

So, I dated Ultra Nice Guys instead. UNGs are a whole tribe of men who are generally just as they seem: they’re polite, they open your car door, and they don’t pressure you for sex. They commit after a certain period of dating (usually thirty or sixty days, about as long as one is allowed to let an invoice languish before it is considered past due), they take you home to meet their (totally nice) families, they have steady jobs and good credit. They like their mother but they don’t feel
responsible
for her and (probably as a result) they don’t use women as a drug, because they’re not out there trying to reclaim the power over women they didn’t have as a boy.

They drive defensively.

There is only one problem with these men: they are boring. Scratch that. It’s not that they are boring, it’s just that they aren’t exciting. I used to think that if excitement was a coin, the flip side would be boredom. Now, almost thirty years of dating later, I’ve decided the flip side of excitement is intimacy. Without all those “exciting” ups and downs, two people can actually build a stable relationship and eventually experience closeness. Something my subconscious was determined never to let happen to me.

There is this Jungian thing I learned, where if you look at a woman’s choice of mate (or even date) you will see the male version of herself. And if you look at a man’s partner, you will see his inner female.

Take a quick look around—it’s a pretty G-D interesting theory, right?

I have two Inner Males—the pastor and the pimp. And for a long time, it was confusing as hell, dawg. Seventy-five percent of me is an upper-middle-class white boy—a commitment-oriented intellectual
who got an IRA with his first job and thinks strip clubs are lame and slutty girls are just that: slutty.

The other 25 percent of me is really, really horny.

My UNG side would put together a relationship, a home, and a future. Then my inner pimp would trade it all away for one night in Bangkok. Or even Portland, Oregon.

Which explains how Paul, bless his heart, was my perfect match. We each had a side of ourselves that wanted desperately to make a home. And we each had a side that would not, or could not, allow that to happen. But more on that in a moment.

I NEVER
REALLY
KNEW MY DAD
until I visited the place where he was born—a no-stoplight town in rural Alabama called Midway, two highways from anywhere, with maybe a few hundred people, almost all of them black.

I had always imagined the Deep South as this perspiring, mythic place of plantations, Spanish moss, and houses up on cinder blocks. A place where two slices of white bread are always served with dinner. Not long before my fortieth birthday, while on a solo visit to Atlanta, I decided to find out for myself.

I hop in a rental car and make the two-hour drive.

I find the town without too much trouble. I take the left turn off the county road and then, typical of me, suddenly realize I had absolutely no plan for Finding My People.

Up ahead there are four guys sitting on lawn chairs, stuff spread out on the ground for a yard sale.
A fine place to start,
I figure. I come to a stop right in front of the driveway and get out of my car. The four men, who I now see are drinking Budweisers, are wearing expressions like something out of the movie
Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
They’re Richard Dreyfuss. I’m the alien.

Not quite sure what to say, I just launch into my introduction.

“Hi, my name is Tracy McMillan, and my dad is from this town
originally, and I was over visiting in Atlanta and I just decided to just drive down here and check it out.” I take a breath, aware that I am probably coming off like a sorority girl, and a white one at that.

One of the men, in his late forties maybe, looks at me a long spell. Then he turns to the guy next to him and they exchange a glance that says something like
Are you seeing what I’m seeing?
They are still thinking about how to respond when a large eighties Oldsmobile four-door sedan—the kind of thing a Los Angeles hipster would drool over—pulls up. Two more guys, waistlines courtesy of too many trans fats and not enough leafy greens, get out. “We saw
her,
” the Oldsmobile driver drawls, gesturing toward me, “and decided to stop.” Apparently, it doesn’t take much to be newsworthy in Midway. Big hair, skinny arms, and premium denim will do it.

I turn to the two new guys and repeat my pitch. “Hi, my name is Tracy McMillan and I’m visiting from Los Angeles, and my dad is from this town. I wanted to come and check it out.” They, too, look at each other. Then they look at the other four guys. I see that the main older dude has changed his expression slightly, to something like
Amusing, isn’t she?

“What did you say your name was?” Oldsmobile queries. Slowly.

“Tracy McMillan.” At this point, I can tell these guys think I am just about the funniest thing that’s happened all year. I start to play along. Big smile. Tilted head. Exaggerated arm gestures. I can get a pretty good airhead thing going on when I want to.

The lawn chair guy points at Oldsmobile guy. “He’s a
Mack
-Millan.” I love how he says “Mc” like it has an “a” in it.

“I sure am,” says Oldsmobile. “Who’d you say your daddy was?”

“Freddie McMillan. I think he left here when he was about eight and moved to Birmingham. His mother was named Thelma?”

“Is he white or black?” asks one of the until-now-silent lawn chair brothers.

This question surprises me. I have light skin and features some have sworn were Greek (or whatever) but my hair is pure Soul Sister.
“Black!” I answer indignantly. I can only guess that at this moment my German farmer side is shining pretty bright.

Oldsmobile sizes me up. “I’ll take you to meet my mama.”

One would think I would be circumspect about following a man I have known less than ninety seconds to some unknown location, but—unless I am intensely sexually attracted to a guy—my People Assessment System (standard equipment for every foster child) is absolutely foolproof. (Actually, it’s foolproof all the time. If I am intensely sexually attracted to a guy, I can be 100 percent certain having sex with him would be a bad idea.) Since I am not at all sexually attracted to Oldsmobile, I have no hesitation about following him to meet his mother. I get in my car and trail him a mile down the road.

Oldsmobile’s mom turns out to have a vague recollection of my grandmother. “But you should really talk to my sister,” she advises me. “She know ever’body around here.”

I’m totally interested in talking to anyone who knows everybody, so I get back in my car and caravan to the next house. I’m amazed that Oldsmobile has so much patience for this, but then again, I am pretty much the gossip of the day.

A few minutes later I’m standing in the kitchen of the sister, who apparently functions as a sort of town memory bank. She knows a bunch of my relatives, people whom I’ve never met but have heard of. Then she shows me a picture of her dad, a McMillan, who has sloping shoulders
identical
to my dad’s, and I have them, too. Who needs a DNA swab? Sometimes things are just obvious.

I spend an hour with this woman and her son, Oldsmobile (I don’t remember his name, or hers). She serves me a warm-ish Coke, and I sit in her dim but orderly living room and look at her family pictures. It is a strange and lovely afternoon. After a while, I leave, feeling a little bit guilty that I am going back to the Big City, leaving them (decades) behind.

Not until I am almost halfway back to Atlanta, after eating ribs
off a plastic plate with slices of white bread at a roadside barbecue joint and blasting soul oldies on the radio, soaking in the “realness” of the true South, did I have a deeper revelation.

My dad was born in that place.

How he somehow had a child—me—who, in only one generation, found her way into the world of journalism, film, television, private schools, and pool houses was a testament to something essential about my dad.

And that something about him is something about me, too.

FREDDIE WAS BORN IN 1935,
the sixth or seventh of nine children. His dad was a traveling preacher named Booker who went around to neighboring towns and counties, spreading the word of God. I suspect, too, that, being a McMillan, he had a little extra something special for the lady believers.

At some point Booker abandoned the family. Details are sketchy, but I think that’s when my dad moved away. The other story goes that my grandmother Thelma was accused of stealing jewelry from a white lady she washed clothes for, got raped and/or beaten in retaliation, and that’s when they left. However it happened, Thelma and the kids lived in Birmingham until the early 1950s, when one by one, they all migrated north to the tough industrial town of Gary, Indiana, outside of Chicago. Aside from steel mills and high crime, Gary became famous as the hometown of the Jackson 5. Then, as now, Gary was a black city.

Sometime in the 1950s, my grandmother’s sister, Aunt (pronounced “Ain’t”) Sallie, moved with her husband to Minneapolis, for a job in a flour mill or something like that. Aunt Sallie soon reported back to all the Indiana family members how fantastic Minnesota was. Sure, it was cold, but it wasn’t
that
much worse than Chicago, and the quality of life and relative lack of racism made it a
whole
lot better. She urged the family, one and all, to relocate to the Upper Midwest.

My dad and his posse came first.

There were four of them, still calling each other by their childhood nicknames: Cadillac, Big Dog, Shugger, and Far-Out Freddie. They’d been friends since they were kids shooting marbles and dice back in Birmingham. In those days, the Upper Midwest was to a hustler what China is to Philip Morris: one ginormous untapped market, just waiting to be exploited properly. They all worked loosely together, running cons, kiting checks, and dealing small-time marijuana.

And pimping.

Because there was one thing above all else that made Minneapolis unlike any other city in America for a black man in the mid-1950s: white women.

Not just any old white women. These were white women from Scandinavian and northern European backgrounds, relatively liberal and open-minded—for Americans, that is—and raised in a culture where “Socialist” is just another word for a first-generation Swede. A culture where people don’t really give a great big hoot what you do, since you’re inside a good five months of the year anyway.