Just friend, just daddy

 

(Dapper Daddy and just friend)

My father left Ilocos Sur in the Phillippines for Hawaii when he was 14 years old, obtaining forged documents to make it appear that he was old enough to join his older brothers as workers on a pineapple plantation.  He followed other Filipinos who made their way to the United States, hoping to find better opportunities away from a home country that offered nothing but poverty.  

None of us really know much about my father, as he was already in his late forties by the time he married my mother.  He was not forthcoming with information of his life, other than to tell us that at 12, he once rescued five people that were drowning in a river filled with rushing water.  Unfortunately, this was followed by other tall tales of super human feats.  Rather than believe any of the stories, I simply credited my father with having a fertile imagination.

There were times, however, when I just believed that my father lived in a fantasy world, where none of us were allowed to enter without his permission.  He spent his days outdoors, away from us without a word as to his activities.   When my mother was home, he would stay away to escape the stream of verbal abuse that would come his way.  Peace for him would only come when my mother was at work, when my father would sit in front of television and watch his shows.

There were so many oddball things about my father, though, and it gave me the impression that perhaps his super hero stories were not entirely a figment of his imagination.  My friend Diane once gave me a parakeet as a birthday present, and my father poured his affections into that little bird.  He would come home from work and stick his finger into the bird cage to stroke the parakeet’s belly.  While watching television in the living room, the parakeet would fly out and patiently sit on my father’s shoulder.  If my mother entered the room, the parakeet would dive bomb her, flying in circles above her head and flapping his wings violently near her ear until she screamed and ran out of the room.

I believe my father taught the parakeet to do that.

My father used to also empty his wallet in the $1 album rack at Woolworth, and he would come home with his arms filled with records he would never listen to.  We had a huge selection of albums from the stars of the Grand Ole Opry, along with soundtracks from obscure movies such as “Maya”.  The gem of the collection was a compilation of movie love themes sung by Richard Chamberlain, whose voice was so amusingly terrible that I would sometimes play a selection over the air at KUSF.

He also stood in line and received his free bag of groceries distributed by the SLA (Symbionese Liberation Army), part of the revolutionary group’s ransom demand after kidnaping heiress Patty Hearst.  They were pretty nice bags of groceries, filled with a variety of food that seemed like a nice diversion from the free government cheese, powdered milk and bread that my father would usually bring home after one of his outdoor excursions.  I think he just liked standing in long lines, especially if there was a food bonus at the end.

The reality was that he was a janitor at the old Joseph Magnin, and his income was insufficient to support a growing family of four.  He was berated for his inability to find solid work, but I doubt my father ever planned on getting married and having children, especially while in his late 40s.

He had tucked his photo albums in the back of the closet which I would peruse when nobody was home, and it was an homage to his bachelor days where he spent working as a merchant marine.  From looking at the albums, my father’s life was spent sailing from port to port meeting women and taking studio portraits.  There were so many photos of different women in these albums which must have upset my mother, because my father scrawled “just friends” under each photo.

There are also other studio photos of my father posing with his brothers, close family members who fell away once he settled down in San Francisco.  His family was clustered down in Watsonville, then slowly dispersed to other regions until there was only one brother that my father could find by the time he was in his sixties.

He would only return to the Phillippines when he was 67, stealing items that were still being used by one of us in the house and slipping them into balikbayan boxes to bring to his family.  My sister and I brought him to the airport, where he met up with his other gentlemen friends who were also making a pilgrimage back to their native country.  As my sister screamed “YOU CAN’T DO THAT, DADDY!” in the middle of the terminal, my father walked through the metal detector with a giant saw in his hand.  The next five or so minutes were spent watching him emptying his pockets of baubles while rings were put into tiny bins, as one beep would follow another in his attempt to pass the security check.

Unfortunately, his trip back to the motherland triggered a myriad of long ignored health issues, and my father’s life of wandering downtown was replaced with trips to the hospital as he battled through uncontrollable diabetes, loss of vision and a massive heart attack.  Through his journey through one medical disaster to the next, however, my father’s mind seemed to be steeped in that fantasy world that never allowed him acknowledge his own failing health.

Eventually, his road to recovery came through the Filipino Senior Citizen’s club on 6th and Mission, where he would go disco dancing and gambling every day of the week.  He would dress in the nice clothes he ordered like a maniac through the Blair catalogue, matching colors and looking every bit of dazzling 1940’s cool as he stepped out of the house and onto the MUNI, only to return home with his pockets filled with romantic greeting cards from his many dance partners.

Although he was older, there was still the constant sparring with my mother.  Their argument over the television once erupted into a fistfight, and I only walked away shaking my head at the absurdity of their marriage.  Through daily threats of divorce and declarations of hatred, my parents had managed to stay together, a tenuous union bound together by guilt and obligation.  I believe my father loved my mother, or at least was too scared of her to think otherwise.

When my mother once chain vomited in the kitchen and required a late night hospital visit, my sister, father and I rushed her in a tiny burgundy Toyota Corolla to the emergency room at Children’s Hospital. We all had our fears about my stury little mother, whose only health issue occurred ten years earlier when she had stomach cancer.  As we nervously waited in the sterile hospital room, with CNN blaring through the tiny wall television, my father sat back and blurted, “…you have a sister somewhere in Okinawa…”

My sister and I stared at each other, horrified at this little piece of information that escaped the mouth of the man who long kept his own life a secret from us.  I could never get names or dates or concrete information on incidences from his past without some sort of super hero story.  Yet here was one singular truth that seemed to bring to life all those hidden photo albums of late nights with mysterious women and the past of man I had long suspected once existed, but had reduced to an odd ball of a character who just liked to walk to the old Sears Roebuck on Geary street to have a giant dot matrix portrait of his smiling face printed for us to see.

We discussed the possibilities of looking for our long lost half-sister, although part of me would rather close that chapter of my father’s life.  With several photo albums filled with so many different girlfriends, I am loathe to discover that I have over twenty SPAM loving, wrestling watching half-siblings running around on this planet whose daily mantra to their poor children would be, “Giants lose!”

Yes, my father was a Dodgers fan.  Horrible.

Happy Father’s Day, Zack.  I hardly knew you.