Day 20

When I was growing up in Houston in the ’80s, crime in the city was at its peak.  Women were found hacked to death in their own bathtubs, their dismembered limbs at times nowhere to be found, at least not until search warrants were issued at the homes of Dahmer copycats.  Gacy copycats were on the rise also; small children, mostly boys, were plucked from shopping mall video arcades and later found suffocated to death, the new young breed of coked-up field reporters visibly disappointed when the HPD homicide vets would rather sob on camera than give up any of the gruesome details.  Crack ushered in a new level of violence still, the already disenfranchised fourth and fifth wards of the city described in a leaked speech draft from the Reagan inner sanctum as “The poison factory with pipelines to our suburbs.”  Crime had indeed become so rampant, so malicious, that Houston now boasted its own version of the popular television show “Cops”; the show’s opening rap song, punctuated by a sputtering chainsaw and machine gun fire, was devoid of any lyrical content beyond a quick, menacing repetition of the show’s title, “City Under Siege,” and this had become the city’s theme, although the theme did not elicit fear so much as a newfangled sort of sexiness—that dangerous “Miami Vice” sort of sexiness that is today taken for granted as a cultural imperative.

Like the creators of serial killer trading cards, my father profited considerably from this new wave chic, and his rather seamless transition into the criminal defense elite, a law school daydream that persisted even after entrenchment in the indistinguishable yellow page ranks of career ambulance chasers, seemed like a natural enough progression; before he divorced my mother, anyway, and began drinking even more heavily (as a way of coming down from the coke, alleged my mother’s attorney); before I had to look the other way when his yellow 911 cabriolet came screaming up Memorial Boulevard, usually with this big-breasted bottle blonde from the sophomore class at Memorial High School, at whom I glared so intensely when I walked the aisle for my diploma that she’d fled the auditorium by the time I returned to my chair, unfairly implying that she was an accomplice to my father’s death, even though the cardiac arrest occurred just minutes after he and his team successfully acquitted one of the city’s most prolific serial killers—two grueling years of hammering the prosecution, my father newly sober and terribly disillusioned, incapable of even remotely tolerating the invariable string of new murders, whose controversial photographs were splattered across the front page of the Houston Chronicle, which had one week prior devoted an entire page to my father’s obituary.

From the time my father graduated law school, a framed courtroom drawing of Clarence Darrow remained somewhere visible in his office, usually up on the wall behind his desk, and just as I had to look away from my father when his ridiculous yellow Porsche revved and swerved up the Boulevard, I would imagine my father could no longer look squarely at the rendering of the man to whom he aspired without feeling the pain of an irrevocable loss; and as I knelt before the towering granite of his headstone, an imposing mass of rock hidden away in a far corner of the cemetery under the afternoon shade of a dying pecan tree, I finally, uncontrollably, cried.

It was unclear to me if I had at last allowed myself to at last mourn properly, my emotions no longer callused and abstracted by alcohol and drugs, or if I had begun to acknowledge that I shared with my father not only the virtues on which my alcohol soaked party anecdotes were based, but that I shared his defects, as well—perhaps all of them and more—because my situation had become so dire, and my career and wife and son and everything else back in California had become so much more sentimental than reality should have permitted, and for the first time in over a decade I wanted a drink.